Quote by Régine Pernoud

“Marx’s Manifesto, pub­lished in 1847, reflects the state of historical science of the period. It fixes the thirteenth century as the beginning of the “battle against feudal absolutism” and attributes to the bourgeoisie “an essentially revolutionary role” in history. Did the bourgeoisie not uproot the countryside from a “state of torpor and latent barbarism”? These are all propositions that are today [1977] unacceptable for the historian; those who continue to perpetuate such errors of vocabulary, which are intellectually necessary if one wants to maintain at any price the feudalism-bourgeoisie-proletariat, prolong an am­biguity just as erroneous as the continued use of the term "Gothic ” during the era of Marx. In other words, the Marxist historians, who speak of feudalism destroyed by the French revolution, make one think of those ecclesiastics who see in the Second Vatican Council the "end of the Constantinian period” — as if nothing had happened, in more than sixteen hundred years, between Constantine and Vatican II.”

Quote by Régine Pernoud