I can't say much about historical materialism I think the question is fairly simple. Among laymen it seems to get a lot of respect but among historians it seems to be viewed as a something that contributed to historical analysis but is something we've moved past.
on the French Revolution in particular I have some writings from Marx that I think work to show what I'm asking about.
The revolution of 1789 (at least in Europe) had as its prototype only the [English] revolution of 1648; the revolution of 1648 only the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain. Both revolutions were a century in advance of their prototypes not only in time but also in content.
In both revolutions the bourgeoisie was the class that really headed the movement. The proletariat and the non-bourgeois strata of the middle class had either not yet any interests separate from those of the bourgeoisie or they did not constitute independent classes or class sub-divisions. Therefore, where they opposed the bourgeoisie, as they did in France in 1793 and 1794, they fought only for the attainment of the aims of the bourgeoisie, even if not in the manner of the bourgeoisie. All French terrorism was nothing but a plebeian way of dealing with the enemies of the bourgeoisie, absolutism, feudalism and philistinism.
The revolutions of 1648 and 1789 were not English and French revolutions, they were revolutions of a European type. They did not represent the victory of a particular class of society over the old political order; they proclaimed the political order of the new European society. The bourgeoisie was victorious in these revolutions, but the victory of the bourgeoisie was at the same time the victory of a new social order, the victory of bourgeois ownership over feudal ownership, of nationality over provincialism, of competition over the guild, of the division of land over primogeniture, of the rule of the landowner over the domination of the owner by the land, of enlightenment over superstition, of the family over the family name, of industry over heroic idleness, of bourgeois law over medieval privileges.
I'm aware that marx wasn't the first or only one to present this type of history but I thought these writings showed what I was talking about
Its a neat explanation of the French revolution that gives a cause for its happening that is easy to wrap my head around and seems to make sense. Which is why I can't help being so suspicious about it. How is this "class conflict" version of history viewed when applied to the French Revolution? The three estates make it especially easy to look at it this way.
You are right to be suspicious; these days no one who adheres to this explanation of the French Revolution would be taken seriously in the academy. It's too simplistic and one-dimensional. Modern scholarship tries to take account of the complexity of an event like the Revolution. I'd start looking at the so-called revisionist scholarship of the last generation--Keith Michael Baker approaching the subject from the perspective of the history of ideas; Dale K. Van Kley's work on religion; Lynn Hunt's psychoanalytic and feminist work; Olwen Hufton's work on gender; Patrice Higonnet, contextualizing Jacobin ideology in the social networks of its actors, etc.