The French Revolution | A Collective Insanity
People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790 —
The revolutionary leader Robespierre rose to address the assembly. Having just completed his overthrow of the royal government, he now stood at the summit of power in France. His Jacobin followers knew that a new day of radical democracy and equality had dawned. They grew quiet as he held up his hand then began to speak. Robespierre spoke of his plans for France, of the enemies that still lurked in the shadows of French society. His voice rose as he reached his peroration, a message of hope for the people and a warning to those who would challenge him. He spoke six immortal words that would define his rule and then led his followers as they repeated them. Soon the masses outside the Pavillon de Flore were chanting them alongside their leaders. "Liberté, égalité, fraternité ou la mort!" "Liberty, equality, brotherhood, or death!"
The great upheaval in France during the years 1789-1815 is one of the defining moments in world history. Both Europe and the wider world saw political systems upended, the spread of new ideas and revolutionary sentiments, and conflict between faith and reason that continues to this day. As the people of Europe heard of the dramatic events taking place in the New World, most believed that the American Revolution would not impact their lives. They could not foresee that its ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would spark ideological turmoil and shape the rest of their lives—and those of their children. French soldiers who fought alongside the Americans returned home with tales of glory and victory over the British, and they began to spread the ideas they had learned while overseas. Principles like equality before God, republicanism, democracy, political liberty, and freedom of conscience quickly took hold in France during the 1780s. More than any other event chronicled in Western history, the French Revolution created the modern world.
The Constitutional Phase, 1789-1792
By 1789, the Kingdom of France faced a debt crisis caused by more than a century of economic mismanagement. The country's treasury had been trained by the wars of the Bourbon dynasty's kings, the construction and maintenance of Versailles, and Louis XVI's intervention in America's War of Independence. The government, known as the Ancien Régime ("old rule"), imposed ever-increasing taxes on specific groups in the population, and the Catholic Church took even more money from them in tithes required by law. The peasants saw their leaders' opulent palaces and lavish lifestyles, and their resentment grew every year. King Louis XVI likely did not understand what was going on outside the walls of Versailles, though historians still debate this. Sycophants who flattered the king filled his government, and men who tried to ease the people's suffering often found themselves dismissed from office.
France's fundamental problem was, naturally, in the numbers. Its society comprised three "estates" or groups: the clergy, the nobles, and the commoners—both peasant and bourgeoisie ("middle class"). Together, the clergy and nobles made up only 2% of the population but held more than 90% of the nation's private wealth in their hands. However, French tax policy exempted both of these groups. Papal edict forbade collecting taxes on Church property, and the kings of France needed to keep the nobles in line and thus did not tax their assets. Thus, the 98% of Frenchmen in the Third Estate owned only 10% of the nation's wealth but paid 100% of its taxes. No system like this could last for long.
The council of state finally convinced King Louis XVI to summon the Estates General, France's representative body, to find a solution to the economic crisis. When it met at Versailles in May 1789, the king gave each estate one vote, and the Third Estate was thus outnumbered even though it spoke for the vast majority of Louis' subjects. Each new tax plan which the Third Estate put before the Estates General received the commoners' support, but the First and Second estates refused to accept any new taxes on their property or assets. A leader in the Third Estate, Abbé Joseph Emmanuel Sieyès, published a pamphlet that urged the people of France to demand real change in the country. He implied but did not outright say that a revolution might take place if the First and Second estates refused to accept genuine reform.
On June 20, 1789, King Louis ordered the Third Estate's delegates to go home. He had grown tired of their constant clamor for new taxes on his friends in the clergy and nobility. Sieyès and the other leaders in the Third Estate refused to follow this order and instead moved to a nearby tennis court to continue their meetings. Later that day, they proclaimed the creation of a National Assembly that would speak for all Frenchmen and swore in the "Tennis Court Oath" that they would continue to work until they had created a new constitution for France. Ever the shrewd politician despite his ignorance of the people's suffering, King Louis then ordered the First and Second estates to join the commoners and restrain their revolutionary sentiments.
Within a few weeks, the National Assembly had moved into Paris and created a new constitution to present to the king. Then, Louis made a mistake; he dismissed his pro-reform finance minister for suggesting that the royal family adhere to a budget to conserve funds. When the assembly protested, the king sent soldiers to their meeting hall. He claimed they were there to protect the delegates, but the people of Paris only saw armed men marching through the streets. A riot ensued on July 14th, and Parisians broke into the Bastille, a medieval fortress-turned-prison in the city center, to get weapons and defend their leaders. The mob freed the seven inmates within the Bastille's walls, murdered the warden and other guards, and paraded their severed heads on pikes through the streets. The storming of the Bastille became the most potent symbol of revolutionary violence in France. Interestingly, it is still celebrated today on Bastille Day as the French equivalent to the American Independence Day.
The violence in Paris showed King Louis and his nobles that they could not oppose the National Assembly openly, and they accepted all reforms proposed by the revolutionary government. The Constitution of 1791 abolished all feudal rights and privileges, deprived the nobility of their best lands and distributed them to the public, and ended the dîme or mandated tithe to the Catholic Church. It also passed a law known as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which forced all French clergymen to swear allegiance to the government in Paris rather than the pope in Rome. Many priests and nobles chose to depart France for sympathetic countries in central Europe. These émigrés then plotted to overthrow the National Assembly. King Louis denounced these traitors publicly, but in private, he worked to support their efforts.
The king hoped eventually to regain some of his absolute power, and he did his best to play the new political factions which were emerging in the Assembly against each other. His supporters in the government, the monarchiens ("royal democrats"), worked to turn France into a constitutional monarchy based on the model of Great Britain, while the French republicans divided into two groups. The nationalist Girondins planned to follow the example of America's revolutionaries and establish a constitutional republic. Against the Girondins stood a collection of radicals who called themselves Montagnards. They hoped to transform France into an egalitarian democracy with no distinctions of class or creed.
As Louis saw more of his power stripped away by the Girondin and Montagnard factions, he knew he had to act quickly if he wished to regain his position in France. On the night of June 20, 1791, he departed the Tuileries Palace in Paris with his wife, Marie Antoinette, and their children. He hoped to reach the Austrian Netherlands and seek sanctuary in the court of Emperor Josef II, his brother-in-law. However, the royal family's attempt to disguise themselves failed for two reasons. First, they brought many of their possessions with them in a long train of carriages that was easy to spot, and second, a young boy recognized the king's face from a coin in his pocket in the village of Varennes. Revolutionary guards seized the royal family and returned them to the Tuileries, where the king and queen were placed under house arrest. The flight to Varennes prompted the various groups in the Assembly to set aside their differences and form a new government. By the end of the year, Louis accepted his new role as a constitutional monarch with almost no power. He was a mere figurehead, and that was just the way the French people liked it.
The Radical Phase, 1792-1795
If one were to ask a French assemblyman in January 1792 about the future of the revolution, he would have undoubtedly replied, "C'est fini!" ("It's over"). Unfortunately for that person, and the millions who lived in France, the revolution had only just begun. The Girondins who controlled the National Assembly did not address the profound social inequality that had contributed to the revolution's outbreak, so more trouble was inevitable. On August 10, 1792, a mob of Jacobins, the most radical members of the Montagnards, stormed the Tuileries Palace and seized King Louis and Queen Marie. They declared the Bourbon monarchy to be abolished and arrested the moderate Montagnards, the Girondins, and the monarchiens in the Assembly. A month later, the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre proclaimed the new National Convention to be the government of a new French First Republic.
The Jacobins planned to "turn the page" in France by eliminating every aspect of society with roots in the past. They created a new revolutionary calendar with 1792 as Year One; stripped the clergy and nobles of their remaining rights, privileges, and property; and pillaged and desecrated all French churches before turning them into temples of the "Cult of Reason." The Jacobins even changed how French men and women dressed and spoke. France had been "democratized," and anyone who showed the slightest hint of superiority became an enemy of the state. To safeguard this new democracy, the Jacobins set up the Committee of Public Safety and charged it with maintaining terror among the population. As Robespierre put it, "Government's goal is to promote virtue in society, but virtue without terror is destructive. Terror will keep the people virtuous and compliant."
A chief complaint among revolutionaries in France was the Church's supremacy and abuse of power. When the Jacobins destroyed all remaining vestiges of history during the "Reign of Terror," their leaders forced devout Frenchmen to worship Reason as their new god. The Cult of Reason valued the human mind above all else, and it venerated "that which enhances the spirit." This vague term led some cultists to revere artistic creation or the love of one's family, but others embraced sexual promiscuity and moral depravity as their deities. The Cult of Reason became the ultimate expression of the Jacobins' desire to remove any influences of the past and the lessons of history from French society. The results were lavish festivals and free food for all, but also the destruction of priceless treasures and rampant immorality across the country.
The Reign of Terror was the culmination of Enlightenment humanism that rejected any concept of the divine or a source of morality beyond human society. For the Jacobins, there was no God to give mankind a sense of right and wrong, so they became gods among men and dispensed their version of morality with what they called "the national razor," the guillotine. Anyone deemed to be "counterrevolutionary" by their words or deeds—whether holding too much land or being too skilled at a job—was brought before the Committee for Public Safety. Their trials were mockeries of justice, and the sentence of death was almost universal. At least twenty thousand citizens of the republic perished under the guillotine's blade, and some estimates put that number closer to a hundred thousand. One of the first counterrevolutionaries to be guillotined was "Citizen Capet," the former King Louis XVI, who died in the Place de la Révolution in the center of Paris. The "Widow Capet," Queen Marie Antoinette, followed her husband in death soon after.
As terror descended upon France, the émigrés appealed to other European monarchs to put an end to the revolution. When King Louis fell to the guillotine's blade, the leaders of Europe recoiled in horror and wondered if they, too, might be swept away if the tides of revolution washed over their lands. In April, the British forged an alliance with the Netherlands, Austria, Prussia, the smaller German states, Spain, and Sardinia, and this coalition then declared war on France, beginning the Wars of the French Revolution. For the next nine years, the British fought continuously for the cause of monarchy and a return to tradition against one revolutionary government in Paris after another. France called upon its citizens to defend the revolution, and millions answered the call. The "nation at arms," in which a country mobilized its full resources for war, became the hallmark of modern warfare beginning with these conflicts.
It is a fundamental truth of revolutions that they are often undone from within, and this was true of the Jacobin Reign of Terror. Resentment built across France as Robespierre and the Jacobins guillotined thousands and turned the country into their vision of a radical democracy. By 1794, France was losing the war, and public sentiment was turning against the Jacobins. In July, a mob led by Paul Barras stormed Robespierre's office in Paris and dragged him off to prison. The Committee of Public Safety then sentenced him to death, and the guillotine claimed Robespierre. Barras and the Jacobins then agreed to permit the Girondins back into the National Convention so they could unite against a revolt by noblemen in western France. The situation stabilized for a time, and the revolutionary armies defeated those of Prussia and Austria in central Germany. However, by 1795 the country had grown tired of war and terror. In October, there was another riot in Paris. It failed thanks to an artillery company stationed near the government quarter, which gave the rebels a "whiff of grapeshot," but the damage was done. The National Convention met for the last time on November 2nd and dissolved itself. Five men, including Barras and Abbé Sieyès, formed the Directory, the third government of the revolutionary First Republic.
The Oligarchic Phase, 1795-1799
The Directory managed to return France to a measure of stability within its first year. The revolutionary armies defeated its foreign enemies—except for Britain, which stubbornly refused all attempts to make peace—and suppressed the rebellions in western France. However, few in France trusted the government, and the directors did little to earn that trust. They repeatedly disregarded the Constitution of 1795, which they had publicly pledged to honor, and their agents rigged local elections to ensure no opposition came from the provinces. The most corrupt official within the Directory was Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, a man of limitless appetites who accepted bribes from officials, foreign and domestic alike, in exchange for political favors or new policies. Even worse, the government refused to pay pensions to war veterans, many of whom had returned from the battlefield marred and disabled. As had happened in England more than a century before, many Frenchmen looked for a strong leader who could restore true stability and prosperity to the country. Few such men existed, and those who did were often away on campaign against France's many enemies.
War in Europe continued as the British found new allies in Italy and the Near East. The revolutionary army fought constantly in northern Italy, winning a great victory at Mantua in 1797 and conquering the upper half of the peninsula. When Britain used Ottoman Turkish ports in Egypt as a base from which to raid French shipping in the Mediterranean, the Directory sent an army across the seas to conquer that ancient realm. The results were mixed; France managed to secure control of the land in Egypt, but the Royal Navy's supremacy at sea meant that it could not reinforce or exploit this new acquisition.
In March 1799, Austria declared war on France for a second time. As the revolutionary armies were either recovering from the campaigns in Italy or far-off Egypt, the Directory imposed harsh measures to raise new recruits and funds to defend the country. Once again, the old pattern reemerged; there was a riot in Paris, and the government fell. This time, Abbé Sieyès abandoned his belief in popular government and reached out to a hero in the French army. Breaking with his former ally Barras, who was pushed aside and then exiled, the cleric offered the general his support if he came to Paris with his army. The plan worked, and on November 9, 1799, Sieyès proclaimed Napoleon Bonaparte to be the "first consul of France." The country had come full-circle, from autocratic Ancien Régime to constitutional republic, then through the Jacobin terror and the malaise of the Directory. Now, one man ruled the nation once again.
Learning from History
A full catalog of lessons from the French Revolution would fill many volumes and will likely be the subject of most of my discussion with Joe, which I hope you'll listen to. So for now, I'd like to close with a long commentary on the revolution by Edmund Burke, a member of the British Parliament who watched the descent into collective insanity across the English Channel. He provided what I believe were the most prescient insights ever written about the French Revolution.
Your [revolutionaries] chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had every thing to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising every thing that belonged to you…If the last generations of your country appeared without much lustre in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestry. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born servile wretches, until the emancipating year 1789.…By following wise examples you would have given new examples of wisdom to the world. You would have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation.…You would have had a free constitution; a potent monarchy; a disciplined army; a reformed and venerated clergy; a mitigated but spirited nobility, to lead your virtue.…By following these false lights, France has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal blessings!…France, when she let loose the reins of regal authority, doubled the licence, of a ferocious dissoluteness in manners, and of an insolent irreligion in opinions and practices; and has extended through all ranks of life.
