Civilization: The West and the Rest (28 page)

At first the French Revolution was the British Civil War, with only the Puritanism lost in translation. The summoning of the Estates General gave malcontents within the aristocracy an opportunity to vent their spleen, with the comte de Mirabeau and marquis de Lafayette in the vanguard. As in England, the lower house developed a will of its own. On 17 June 1789 the Third Estate (Commons) proclaimed itself a ‘National Assembly’. Three days later, in the famous Tennis Court Oath, its members swore not to be dissolved until France had a new constitution. Thus far it was the Long Parliament in French. But when it came to devising the new ground rules of French political life, the revolutionaries adopted some recognizably American language. At first glance, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 27 August 1789 would have raised few eyebrows in Philadelphia:

  2. The natural and imprescriptible rights of man … are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression …

10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views …

17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof …
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So why, beginning with a searing speech on 1 February 1790, did Edmund Burke react so violently against this revolution? Here he is in full flow:

The French [have] rebel[ed] against a mild and lawful monarch with more fury, outrage, and insult than ever any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to concession … their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities … They have found their punishment in their success: laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet
the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence; and, to crown all, the paper securities of new, precarious, tottering power … held out as a currency for the support of an empire.
¹⁴

If Burke had written those words in 1793, there would be no great mystery. But to have foreseen the true character of the French Revolution within a year of its outbreak was extraordinary. What had he spotted? The answer is Rousseau.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book
The Social Contract
(1762) was among the most dangerous books Western civilization ever produced. Man, Rousseau argued, is a ‘noble savage’ who is reluctant to submit to authority. The only legitimate authority to which he can submit is the sovereignty of ‘the People’ and the ‘General Will’. According to Rousseau, that General Will must be supreme. Magistrates and legislators must bow down before it. There can be no ‘sectional associations’. There can be no Christianity, which after all implies a separation of powers (the spiritual from the temporal). Freedom is a good thing, no doubt. But for Rousseau virtue is more important. The General Will should be virtue in action.
¹⁵
Turning back to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the modern reader can begin to see what appalled Burke:

  6. Law is the expression of the general will …

10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views,
provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law
…

17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof
except where public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it
… [emphasis added]

It was these caveats that Burke mistrusted. The primacy Rousseau gave to ‘the public order’ and ‘public necessity’ struck him as deeply sinister. The General Will was, to Burke’s mind, a less reliable selector of a ruler than the hereditary principle, since rulers chosen that way were more likely to respect ‘ancient liberties’, which Burke preferred to the new, singular and abstract ‘freedom’. The Third Estate, he argued, would
inevitably be corrupted by power (and by the ‘monied interest’), unlike an aristocracy, which enjoyed the independence that private wealth confers. Burke also grasped the significance of the expropriation of Church lands in November 1789 – one of the first truly revolutionary acts – and the dangers of printing paper money (the assignats) with nothing more than confiscated Church land as backing. The real social contract, he argued, was not Rousseau’s pact between the noble savage and the General Will, but a ‘partnership’ between the present generation and future generations. With astonishing prescience, Burke warned against the utopianism of ‘the professors’: ‘At the end of every vista’, he wrote in the greatest prophecy of the era, ‘you see nothing but the gallows.’
^*
The assault on traditional institutions, he warned, would end in a ‘mischievous and ignoble oligarchy’ and, ultimately, military dictatorship.
¹⁶
In all of this, Burke was to be proved right.

The constitution of September 1791 upheld the inviolability of property rights, the inviolability of ‘the King of the French’, the inviolability of the right of association and the inviolability of the freedom of worship. Within two years all four had been violated, beginning with the Church’s property rights. The right of free association followed with the abolition of the monastic orders, guilds and trade unions (though not of political factions, which flourished). And in August 1792 the King’s privileged status was violated when he was arrested following the storming of the Tuileries. To be sure, Louis XVI brought it upon himself with the royal family’s fatally botched flight to Varennes, a vain attempt to escape from Paris (disguised as the entourage of a Russian baroness) to the royalist citadel of Montmédy near the north-eastern border. With the election of a new and democratic National Convention in September 1792, the likelihood of a regicide increased still further. But the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793 had very different consequences from the execution of Charles I. In the English Revolution, killing the King had been the finale of a civil war. In the French Revolution it was merely the overture, as power passed via the Jacobin Society of Friends of the
Constitution to the Insurrectionary Commune and on to the National Convention’s Committees of Surveillance and of Public Safety. Not for the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrages. On 10 November 1793 the worship of God was prohibited and the cult of Reason instituted, the first political religion of the modern age, complete with icons, rites – and martyrs.

The French Revolution had in fact been violent from the outset.
¹⁷
The storming of the hated Bastille prison on 14 July 1789 was celebrated with the decapitations of the marquis de Launay (the governor of the Bastille) and Jacques de Flesselles (provost of the merchants of Paris). Just over a week later, the King’s Secretary of State Joseph-François Foullon de Doué and his son-in-law Berthier de Sauvigny were also murdered. When the revolutionary mob attacked the royal family at Versailles the following October, around a hundred people were killed. Seventeen-ninety-one saw the Day of the Daggers and the massacre on the Champs de Mars. In September 1792 around 1,400 royalist prisoners were executed following counter-revolutionary demonstrations in Brittany, Vendée and Dauphiné. Yet something more was needed to produce the carnage of the Terror, the first demonstration in the modern age of the grim truth that revolutions devour their own children.

A generation of historians in thrall to the ideas of Karl Marx (see
Chapter 5
) sought the answer in class conflict, attributing the Revolution to bad harvests, the rising price of bread and the grievances of the sans-culottes, the nearest thing the
ancien régime
had to a proletariat. But Marxist interpretations foundered on the abundant evidence that the bourgeoisie did not wage class war on the aristocracy. Rather, it was an elite of ‘notables’, some bourgeois, some aristocrats, who together made the Revolution. A far subtler interpretation had already been offered by an aristocratic intellectual named Alexis de Tocqueville whose two major works,
Democracy in America
(1835) and
The Old Regime and the Revolution
(1856), offer an unrivalled answer to the question: why was France not America? There were, Tocqueville argues, five fundamental differences between the two societies, and therefore between the two revolutions they produced. First, France was increasingly centralized, whereas America was a
naturally federal state, with a lively provincial associational life and civil society. Second, the French tended to elevate the general will above the letter of the law, a tendency resisted by America’s powerful legal profession. Third, the French revolutionaries attacked religion and the Church that upheld it, whereas American sectarianism provided a bulwark against the pretensions of secular authorities. (Tocqueville was a religious sceptic but he grasped sooner than most the social value of religion.) Fourth, the French ceded too much power to irresponsible intellectuals, whereas in America practical men reigned supreme. Finally, and most important to Tocqueville, the French put equality above liberty. In sum, they chose Rousseau over Locke.

In chapter XIII of
Democracy in America
, Tocqueville hit the nail squarely on the head:

The citizen of the United States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he only claims its assistance when he is quite unable to shift without it … In America the liberty of association for political purposes is unbounded … There are no countries in which associations are more needed, to prevent the despotism of faction or the arbitrary power of a prince, than those which are democratically constituted.
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The comparative weakness of French civil society was therefore a large part of the reason why French republics tended to violate individual liberties and to degenerate into autocracies. But Tocqueville added a sixth point, almost as an afterthought:

In France the passion for war is so intense that there is no undertaking so mad, or so injurious to the welfare of the State, that a man does not consider himself honoured in defending it, at the risk of his life.
¹⁹

Here, surely, was the biggest difference between the two revolutions. Both had to wage war to survive. But the war the French revolutionaries had to fight was both larger and longer. This made all the difference.

From the moment in July 1791 when the Holy Roman Emperor
Leopold II called on his fellow monarchs to come to Louis XVI’s aid – a call answered first by Frederick the Great’s heir, Frederick William II – the French Revolution was obliged to fight for its life. The declarations of war on Austria (April 1792) and Britain, Holland and Spain (February 1793) unleashed a conflagration that was far larger and longer than the American War of Independence. According to the US Department of Defense, 4,435 Patriots lost their lives in defence of the United States up to and including the Battle of Yorktown; 6,188 were wounded. The figures for the War of 1812 were respectively 2,260 and 4,505.
²⁰
British casualties were somewhat less. Even if a large proportion of the wounded perished and a significant number of soldiers and civilians succumbed to disease or hardship caused by war, this was still a small conflict. Some of the most celebrated battles – Brandywine or Yorktown itself – were mere skirmishes by European standards; total US combat deaths at the latter were just eighty-eight. The death toll for the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was vastly larger – by one estimate, total battlefield mortality on all sides between 1792 and 1815 was 3.5 million. A conservative calculation is that twenty times as many Frenchmen as Americans lost their lives in defending their revolution. And this does not include the victims of internal repression. An estimated 17,000 French men and women were executed after due process, between 12,000 and 40,000 went to the guillotine or gallows without a trial, and somewhere between 80,000 and 300,000 perished in the suppression of the royalist rebellion in the Vendée.
²¹
The French Revolution was also far more economically disruptive than the American. The Americans had inflation followed by stabilization; the French had hyperinflation, culminating in the complete collapse of the assignat paper currency. The entire male population was mobilized for war. Prices and wages were controlled. The market economy broke down.

It is against this background that the radicalization of the French Revolution – the fulfilment of Burke’s prophecy – needs to be understood. From April 1793, when power became concentrated in the Committee of Public Safety, Paris was a madhouse. First the faction of the Jacobin Club known as the Girondists (their more extreme rivals were the Montagnards) were arrested and, on 31 October, executed. Then the followers of Georges-Jacques Danton followed them to the
scaffold (6 April 1794). Finally, it was the turn of the dominant figure on the Committee of Public Safety, the high priest of Rousseau’s cult of republican virtue, Maximilien Robespierre, who fittingly was made to face the falling blade. Throughout this
danse macabre
, the musical accompaniment of which was the still startlingly bloodthirsty Marseillaise,
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the most deadly accusation to be levelled at an ‘enemy of the people’ was that of treason. Military setbacks propelled the paranoid turn. As Burke had foreseen, for he knew his classical political theory, such a democracy must inevitably be supplanted by an oligarchy and finally by the tyranny of a general. In the space of a decade, the Convention was replaced by the Directory (October 1795), the Directory by the First Consul (November 1799) and the title of first consul by that of emperor (December 1804). What had begun with Rousseau ended as a remake of the fall of the Roman Republic.