• ALPHONSE AULARD– Aulard’s writings promoted democratic republicanism and had no sympathy for the monarchy. According to Aulard, the despotic abuses of the Ancien Regime justified the violent uprising of 1789. He admired the courage of the Constituent Assembly deputies but felt that the Constitution of 1791 was a flawed document that allowed the monarchy too much power. He praised the efforts of Georges Danton and other militarist activists, which culminated in the insurrection of 10 August 1792 and the declaration of France’s first democratic republic. For Aulard, the establishment of a republic under the National Convention marked the zenith of the Revolution.
• ALBERT MATHIEZ– Albert Mathiez challenged the views of his teacher, Aulard. Influenced both by the victory of Bolshevism in Russia and the legacy of French socialist leader, Jean Jaures, Mathiez wrote that the French Revolution came about due to a class conflict in which the prospering bourgeoisie triumphed over both the established nobility and the emerging proletariat. Mathiez rejected Aulard’s beloved Danton as a corrupt bourgeois politician and defended Robespierres’s efforts to save France through the Terror. In Mathiez’s view, Robespierre was not a dictator but a democratic politician responding to popular pressure from Parisian workers. His defense of the Terror was passionate and had a great influence on a generation of historians from Europe and the United States. Mathiez’s successors – Lefebvre, Soboul and Vovelle, closely followed the master.
• GEORGES LEFEBVRE– George Lefebvre in his book ‘The Coming of the French Revolution’ puts forward the view that the French Revolution stemmed from the bourgeoisie’s rise, which eventually led to the overthrow of the aristocratic ruling class in France. Lefebvre divided the revolution in 4 stages – 1) the Revolt of the Nobles or the Aristocratic Revolution 2) the victory of the Bourgeoisie or the Bourgeois Revolution 3) The mobilization of the urban masses or the Popular Revolution 4) the Peasant Revolution. All the classes united to rid the country of absolutism. Following WWII, Lefebvre’s work became the leading work of the Marxist school of thought on the French Revolution and held the field for almost 20 years. 
• ALBERT SOBOUL– Soboul maintained that the French Revolution could be understood as a class struggle, in which the bourgeoisie backed by the force of the masses, gained power from the aristocracy, overthrew the old order and restructured the state to fit its own interests. The masses involved themselves in the revolution and their actions proved to be decisive in taking down the Old Regime and assuring the victory of the bourgeoisie.
• MICHEL VOVELLE– Vovelle believed that the revolution began in the provinces and subsequently spread around France. He said that the revolution defined itself as it went along and in doing so, followed the belief of writers such as Lefebvre and Mathiez, who argued that the French Revolution was inevitable. 

Most scholars accepted the Marxist theory of class conflict. However the argument of the Marxist school began to be questioned which led to an enormous transformation in the scholarship on the French Revolution. It was marked by the almost total collapse of the orthodox Marxist interpretation and a range of sharp attacks on virtually all of its major points and approaches leading to a complete collapse of the Marxist paradigm.

• ALFRED COBBAN– Alfred Cobban, the British historian who began revisionism, questioned whether the French Revolution was led by a rising bourgeoisie. He noted that only 13 percent of the leaders of the Third Estate were from the world of commerce – merchants, manufacturers or financiers and thus this revolution was not made by a capitalist bourgeoisie. Rather, Cobban argued that the greatest number of leaders came from the ranks of local, petty public officials such as administrators, prosecutors, judges and the like. He said that the French Revolution was one of notables and not of capitalists. Cobban also felt that the Ancien Regime was so beset with structural problems and contradictions that nothing short of revolution would reform the country. However, the revolution was not all about senseless violence as the construction of a liberal political order would have been impossible without the clashes of 1789 and the achievements of the Constituent Assembly. 
• GEORGE TAYLOR– Taylor added much empirical ammunition to the revisionist view.  Just as Cobban disagreed with the role of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, Taylor demonstrated how the investment patterns by the bourgeois and noble families were remarkably similar. He attacked the belief that the bourgeoisie led the French Revolution because he pointed out that the bourgeoisie and the nobility were economically indistinguishable. George Taylor suggested that the best way to understand the revolution involved the envisioning of it as a political contest for power. However most historians didn’t agree with Taylor and avoided the view that the revolution began purely for political purposes.  

• FRANCOIS FURET– Furet attacked the Marxist revolutionary catechism but unlike other revisionist historians, he returned to political and intellectual theories for the French Revolution. By studying more carefully the meaning of revolutionary rhetoric, Furet ignited new interest in the cultural history of the revolution and the relationship of the Enlightenment to the French Revolution was resurrected into a burning issue for debate and controversy. Though conservative in his attitude towards the revolutionary era, Furet argued that the democratic ideas of certain enlightened philosophers such as Rousseau became the heart and soul of the French Revolution. Democracy here did not mean governing by consent but the power of a national state to defeat those who opposed its will. Furet wrote that the revolution embraced a radical ideology of popular sovereignty so that any abuse of power could be excused so long as it was achieved in the name of the people. Thus, he argued that the trajectory of the revolution from its first day was towards the state using democratic ideology in a despotic manner and that process culminated in the Terror, which was the pinnacle of revolutionary democracy and dictatorship. Furet interpreted the early years of the revolution as a prologue to the Terror and he viewed the Napoleonic Empire as its epilogue. For Furet, the Terror was not an accidental phase of the revolution but rather emblematic of the entire revolution. He also argued that the revolution was radical from the start and its early achievements were only a mirage. Over a period of time, Furet became arguably the most important historian in the world of the French Revolution which furthered the demise of Marxist historiography. 
• KEITH MICHAEL BAKER – Baker was one of Furet’s earliest and strongest supporters and did a lot to revitalize the intellectual history of the French Revolution. He traced how certain Rousseauian strands of the Enlightenment political ideology mutated into revolutionary Jacobinism.  The influence of Rousseau upon the French Revolution has been among the most heated debates in 18th century studies and no one has discusses this problem with more sensitivity and erudition than Baker. Rousseau had set forth his theory of the general will in his book ‘The Social Contract’. According to Baker, the French Revolution’s free fall into Rousseauian democracy as well as the Terror was not the product of 1792-93 when the nation was at war, but was the result of deliberate decisions made by the National Assembly in the summer of 1789 in a way in which political power and violence had been reconceptualised. Baker argued that by accepting Rousseau’s theory of general will as the basis for rejecting the absolute veto in 1789, the Constituent Assembly was opting for the Terror. Like Furet, Baker placed the Terror squarely at the centre of the revolutionary process and it was not some detour away from political norms or the Revolution’s true goal. It was the outcome of the Constituent Assembly’s repeated adoption of Rousseauian political principles. 
• JACOB TALMON – Jacob Talmon’s intellectual history, which had much in common with the newer approach of Furet, argued that the French state became a totalitarian democracy during the Terror. He traced the idea of totalitarian democracy to certain key Enlightenment figures such as Rousseau through Sieyes to Robespierre. Like Furet, Talmon associated Rousseauian democratic ideas with a collectivism that quickly turned oppressive and in short saw the Terror as the essence of the French Revolution. However, Talmon’s method was primitive in comparison to that of Furet and Baker and tended to distort Enlightenment ideology. Thus his view was only extended by the most extreme historians writing today.

• LYNN HUNT – Hunt discussed the hostility directed toward aristocratic and revolutionary women who entered the political sphere. In a study from the 1980s, Hunt explored why the Jacobins replaced Marianne with Hercules as the anthropomorphic symbol of the French nation. In an article on Marie Antoinette, who was seen as a symbol of the relations between women and the public sphere in the 18th century, Hunt demonstrates how attitudes towards the French queen reveal much about the ways in which French revolutionary leaders hoped to shape sexual roles in the new republic. 
• JOAN LANDES – Joan Landes who shifted the lines of research from women to gender, argued that the crucial factor for women in the French revolution was not their participation but rather their formal exclusion from political life altogether. Women were not simply forgotten or ignored by the new leaders of the Revolution but instead there was a more pervasive gendering of the public sphere. According to Landes, the lines between public men participating in civic life and domesticated women caring for family and children alone were more purposively drawn by the Jacobins than ever before. Landes blames this on Rousseau as his reformulation of political culture included a devastating critique of gender roles under the Old Regime which divided gender more rigidly than had ever been the case for the French aristocracy. However Landes argued that the new bourgeois political sphere was in many ways more regressive than what women had experienced in the Old Regime and the new republic showed far less toleration for public women. Therefore from Landes, historians learned that the omission of women from the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizens, was not a prejudicial oversight but rather they were excluded because the Republic had been conceived as an exclusively masculine public sphere. 
• SIMON SCHAMA – The best example of the appropriation of feminist history for Neo-Conservative purposes is found in Simon Schama’s Citizens, which arguably incorporated more recent scholarship on women than any other recent general history. Using Hunt’s research on Marie Antoinette, Schama depicted the 1793 trial of the Queen as merely one facet of the stormiest phase of sexual politics in the French Revolution.