François Furet, who passed away twenty years ago this year, was a central figure in late twentieth-century intellectual life. Historian of the French Revolution, he challenged the social interpretation that presented the uprising as an expression of class struggle, a symptom of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Instead, Furet’s political interpretation portrayed the revolution as the triumph of a Manichaean ideology that almost inevitably led to the violence that followed.

Furet first advanced this perspective in Interpreting the French Revolution (1978), which mobilized the then-ascendant French critique of totalitarianism to paint the event as proto-totalitarian and thereby discredit the revolutionary tradition. In the bicentennial year of 1989, he elaborated this version of events in a narrative history and critical dictionary. His interpretation largely prevailed in the French media and among the public, even as many historians remained critical of it. Haunted by his youthful engagement with revolutionary politics, Furet’s last major project was a quasi-autobiographical history of the communist “illusion,” which sought to explain the ideology’s appeal.

The guiding thread of Furet’s oeuvre in his last twenty years was his effort to bring an end to the revolutionary tradition in France. He worked to facilitate a centrist, liberal turn in French politics and intellectual life. Intellectually, he advocated in favor of a rehabilitation of nineteenth-century French liberal thinkers, most notably Alexis de Tocqueville, who, he thought, could illuminate the path forward.