A History of the World (59 page)

It used to be thought that Bennelong returned home to live a sad life, rejected by his own people and drinking himself to death in Sydney; rejected too by colonists who had abandoned any notion of the noble savage for racist contempt. The true story seems to be less extreme, though no less poignant. Bennelong continued as an adviser to the British, and learned English well enough to write to the Phillips family in Britain. He also maintained a powerful aboriginal position and became the clan leader of some hundred people. ‘Honour fights’, involving spears being thrown at men who had to hold their ground with shields, were an important part of aboriginal life and Bennelong often took part. He remarried and had a son, and ended up a respected elder. But as the colonists took more land and relations with the native people deteriorated, the notion of some kind of peaceful coexistence or friendship collapsed.

Bennelong died, aged fifty, perhaps partly from too much alcohol, but admired by his own people. The
Sydney Gazette
, however, speaking for the colonists, called him in its obituary not a ‘noble savage’ as Captain Phillips or the young Joseph Banks might have put it, but rather ‘a thorough savage, not to be warped from the form and character that nature gave him’. The Enlightenment’s admiration for hunter-gatherer
people living without clothes or hypocrisy had not taken long to warp itself into colonialist contempt.

Colonization was in the end about force, not friendship. The naked people so admired by Cook for their honesty had been forced off their land because Britain needed somewhere to put her thieves, many of whose families had also been ousted from the land they had lived in for generations. Industrialization and colonization involved multiple migrations and expulsions. In Australia, some aboriginals turned to open revolt. One of them, Pemulwuy, had made a final stand in 1797: he was shot seven times and captured. He escaped, with a manacle on his leg, and was killed in 1802. His severed head was sent to the collection of that great lover of Australia, Sir Joseph Banks.

Australia is only one of the more dramatic instances of a story that was being repeated in the Americas, in Africa and in the Far East as well. Among its victims would be Enlightenment optimism.

The Revolution

They gathered, a citizen army of patriots, declaring themselves for liberty – ‘an inalienable right . . . derived truly from the people’ – and using a fresh word in European politics. Remembering Athens, they called themselves ‘democrats’, and announced that the land belonged not to the hated aristocrats or the monarch but to the people.

Wearing ribbons and carrying muskets, they called on the ordinary folk to ‘arm yourselves, assemble together and take charge of the affairs of the land’. First one city, then another, fell to this revolutionary uprising. This, however, was not Paris in 1789 but the Netherlands four years earlier, where rebels had declared a new written constitution, and their ‘Free Corps’ had seized Utrecht, then Amsterdam itself. Just as would soon happen in France, symbols became all-important: the then rulers were the House of Orange, so the colour orange was banned; even carrots had to be displayed with their green leaves, or not at all. The Dutch, however, were a small people, and when they annoyed the Prussian king by arresting a relative, his army invaded and easily snuffed out this unsettling display of democratic idealism.

Snuffing out the French Revolution would be a little harder. When the Bourbon monarchy finally collapsed, embroiled in debt and
politically hamstrung, France was the greatest nation in Europe. She was the centre of ideas and fashion. French was the international language of diplomacy and polite society. Her armies were huge and her navy, not yet humiliated by Nelson, seemed awesome. Paris claimed to be the capital of civilization; and to many, still barely aware of China or Japan, this seemed a statement of the obvious. So the impact of the French Revolution – the biggest event in European politics since the fall of the Western Roman Empire – was always going to be felt by the rest of the continent. It proved to be even more important than that. Along with the industrial revolution, it was one of two concurrent changes on the European stage that unquestionably altered the history of humankind.

The revolution in Paris left a legacy that is even harder to weigh. It gave the world the notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’. It introduced ‘human rights’ in the modern sense into political talk, and influenced the constitutions of countries all over the globe. Even at the time those who were enraptured by it, and those who were terrified by it, understood it as a turning-point in history, the beginning of a new age. It also demonstrated how short is the route from abstract ideals to bloody repression, for this was the first revolution to eat its children – hungrily, publicly and quickly. Its initial impact on the rest of Europe was not to bring the freedom that the likes of Beethoven and Wordsworth hoped for, but to plunge the continent yet again into war, starvation and repression. In 1972, the Chinese Communist leader Zhou Enlai is said to have replied to the American diplomat Henry Kissinger, who had asked about the impact of the French Revolution, simply, ‘Too early to say.’ Perhaps, forty years on, that is no longer quite true.

Almost everything about the French Revolution is argued about, except when it started. It began when Louis XVI summoned an archaic body called ‘the Estates General’ on Sunday, 5 May 1789. This body was intended to represent the three different interest groups in France – nobility and clergy, and the ‘third estate’, which represented everyone else, from wealthy businessmen to peasants. As we have seen, the absolutist Bourbons had managed without it. Louis hoped this protoParliament would help him raise taxes, particularly from the aristocracy. France was suffering a now familiar crisis in which soaring debt and a too-narrow tax base meant the old way of ruling had
become unsustainable – something that happened with the Chinese Ming and Qing dynasties and the British Stuart one too.

In France, despite the theory of royal absolutism, the great landowners, the clergy and the most powerful commercial concerns enjoyed immunity from most taxes and, indeed, from other legal constraints. There was a thick web of hallowed agreements which someone, somehow, had to cut through, if the French crown was not to become bankrupt. The position had been dramatically worsened by the decision to aid and fund the American rebels against Britain’s George III. This had helped soothe France’s hurt pride for the loss of her Indian and Canadian territories to the British, but it had turned the long-running debt problem from a malady into a mortal crisis. At the same time, a series of bad summers and rising inflation were making life for the rural poor, which had never been easy, almost intolerable. Louis and his ministers had to find a dramatic answer. But summoning the Estates General, which had been dormant for 175 years, would prove a little too dramatic. Louis ought to have remembered his English history, and the parallel gamble of Charles I when he needed money from the London parliament.

On 17 June, the ‘third estate’ of non-aristocratic and non-clerical representatives (mostly lawyers, officials, merchants and journalists) overwhelmed the other two estates by insisting the body met as one, and declared itself the National Assembly. Unable or unwilling to suppress this insurgent new institution, Louis found public order was beginning to break down in the capital. On 13 July the revolutionaries tore down the customs posts around Paris, which represented royal authority. The following day, the 14th, they stormed another (though mostly empty) symbol of the
ancien régime
, the fortress and prison of the Bastille. A tide of violence tore through the french crown, as abbeys were attacked, rich aristocrats assaulted and nuns and priests murdered. Some cities declared themselves self-governing.

But power had decisively shifted. The Convention, making up new rules as it went along, now rewrote the constitution of France. To start with, it seemed as if the king could be accommodated in the new order. The revolutionaries destroyed the old system of French provinces and turned them into modern departments; took over Church lands for the state; declared all men equal before the law; ended censorship and torture; cancelled noble privileges and the legal
apparatus of serfdom; and began to build a properly representative government system. This was a cascade of change never seen before in history. On 26 August the Assembly issued a ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ whose promises of freedom, liberty and due process rang out across Europe, delighting the young and optimistic and causing courtiers everywhere to fret. The cowed Louis XVI was obliged to attend a mass with the leaders of this revolution, to celebrate its remarkable achievements. The world marvelled.

At each successive stage, however, the pressures of war, hunger and fear drove the different bodies riding the revolution to more extreme positions. The Legislative Assembly, which replaced the National Constituent Assembly after elections in September 1791, was further to the left, but was then itself swamped by the declaration of a republican National Convention. During 1792–5, this fell under the control of an extremist group calling themselves ‘Jacobins’. The revolution seemed in peril, hemmed in as it was by Prussian and Austrian enemies; and abroad, at war with the British. The Paris mob, the
sansculottes
or ragged-legged poor, both intimidated and were manipulated by a new phenomenon – popular demagogues, cousins of the radical leaders of the late Roman republic.

German threats to exact bloody revenge if the king was threatened had the opposite effect to that intended, sparking further extreme violence. In September 1792, priests, aristocrats and others merely suspected of being against the revolution, were murdered in Paris’s prisons, and Louis was finally deposed. He was already a captive in the old Tuileries palace in the centre of the capital, after very nearly escaping from France the previous June. He had been spotted and arrested at Varennes, not far from the eastern border. His trial in the winter of 1792 was a passionately argued and public affair. On 33 charges, the deputies voted overwhelmingly for his guilt, with only a few dozen abstentions and no votes against. The vote to put him to death was, however, very close. But close was enough: on 21 January 1793 Louis was executed, having pardoned his enemies, his voice drowned out by drums. His Austrian Habsburg wife Marie Antoinette, who had been a particular hate figure of the Paris mob, was guillotined in October; and their child, aged ten, briefly and only theoretically Louis XVII, died in the hands of unsympathetic foster-parents.

Though the fate of the royal family shocked foreign observers, the
greater drama was the bloody fate of the revolution itself. The Convention, which had clustered the Jacobins on the left and the moderate Girondists on the right, continued to be a theatrical arena for speeches, but real power moved to the smaller Committee of Public Safety, run first by Georges Danton and later by Maximilien Robespierre. This, in turn, then fell mostly under the control of the Jacobin Club. The club was perhaps only around 3,000-strong at its height, and far fewer than that had real influence. An inner clique controlled a slightly larger committee, which in turn controlled the front organization. This was very like the way in which Communist revolutionaries in the twentieth century, behind the charade of Party Congresses and parliaments, would set up small inner groups inside ‘politburos’– dolls within dolls within dolls. And as with later revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam and Cambodia, the ruling clique became obsessed by security, treachery and the need for ideological ‘purity’ – the latter a particular obsession of the green-eyed, chilly and mesmeric former lawyer, Robespierre.

Again, as with later revolutions, great faith was placed in the power of symbols. The French revolutionaries declared a new religion, the worship of a Supreme Being, and set up altars to ‘Reason’ in vandalized churches. They also ended the old system of counting money in twenties, tens and dozens (which survived in Britain until the 1970s) and created a decimal replacement. The same ‘rational’ reform was introduced for measurements of distance and, most radically, for a changed calendar. This had twelve months of thirty days each, named after the harvest, mist, frost, snow, rain, wind, seeds, flowers, haymaking, reaping, heat and fruits, and started a new count for the years: year one was 1792. Not only was the familiar world of kings, priests and landowners gone; so too were all the familiar landmarks in money, time and space. Not even Lenin went so far.

This guillotine blade, having severed past from present, ensured there could be no reconciliation. The Jacobins killed nothing like as many people as did later revolutionaries. It has been estimated that forty-five thousand people died in ‘the Terror’, by public execution or in mob violence; regional fighting beyond Paris saw roadside executions, summary hangings and mass drownings in hulks. The death toll runs into hundreds of thousands if civil war and famine are included right across France; but this was not the liquidation of an entire class,
at least physically. At the time, France had around 250,000 male aristocrats: the carnage barely starts to compare to the millions killed by the Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communists.

Yet in the smaller world of eighteenth-century France the Terror was terrifying enough. Numbers are never the whole story; the details that stick in the imagination matter, too. Paris was by modern standards a small place, and the new killing-machine stood very publicly at its centre. More humane than botched hangings or hacking with an axe it may have been, but it offered a spectacularly bloody and public form of popular vengeance. Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin popularized and propagandized for the head-severing device; he did not actually invent it. Indeed, he was against capital punishment, and particularly against it being used as a public spectacle. (Nor, as many people suppose, did he die by means of the device himself; he lived on long after the revolution, and died of natural causes in 1814.)