Following is an essay I wrote for World History this past spring semester. Bear in mind this was written for the benefit of a Liberal Arts professor; couple that with the fact that I just generally had fun writing this, it's a rather flowery paper. I genuinely enjoyed the research; unfortunately, the footnotes I had generously scattered throughout did not translate to Blogger, so you'll have to guess about which information comes from where. Hope you all will find some of the information beneficial.
The question before us is one disputed by historians, would-be philosophers and socio-political theorists alike. It deals with a national revolution, and the positive consequences - or lack thereof - that resulted from the catastrophic upheaval of one governmental system, a period of terror, and finally the evolution of a new government that was not, in the end, so terribly unlike the first. The revolution referred to is none other than the French Revolution of 1789; the question: what were the positive consequences of said revolution? This essay will argue that there were in fact no positive consequences promulgated that justified revolution; while select Revolutionary ideas, such as the Metric system of measurement, have since been employed usefully, certainly nine years of tumult was unnecessary to their invention.
The French Revolution was initially heralded with joy by most in the newly born United States. The American people, so lately indebted to the French for the securement of their own liberty, were appropriately enthused to learn the French were following suit. According to one William Maclay, the fall of the Bastille, and the bloody chaos precipitated thereby, were merely the necessary pains that accompanied the beginning of every new life. “France seems travailing in the birth of freedom,” he wrote. “Her throes and pangs of labor are violent. God give her a happy delivery! Royalty, nobility and vile pageantry . . . seem like to be demolished with their kindred Bastille, which is said to be laid in ashes.” In England, the Constitutional and Revolution Societies of London conferred their “solemn public seal of sanction” upon the overthrow of the Ancien Regime.
But there were those who viewed the Revolution with concern. It seemed to them as though the Revolution had begun in a rather spontaneous, almost “seat of the pants” manner, with nobody really in control of anything and mostly unordered chaos prevailing. The first news of it was, as historian David McCullough says, “a bolt out of the blue, catching everyone by surprise.” “Everyone” even includes the newly organized French National Assembly, which was nominally the head of efforts to press for monarchial reform and popular liberty. Indeed, the storming of the Bastille was far from an organized, glorious assault launched upon the bastions of aristocracy to initiate revolution; it was more the natural consequence of a wildly excited mob - “in which capitalists who wanted to defend their money were mixed with gaol-birds who were only waiting for the opportunity to rob them of it” - suddenly finding itself in possession of some thirty thousand hastily manufactured pikes and thirty thousand hastily appropriated muskets. One self-proclaimed “conqueror of the Bastille” affirmed that the mob acted without authority or command when he glowingly described the “prodigies of valor” displayed by “this leaderless multitude of persons.”
It was this very ungoverned mob action that sounded a warning note. John Adams of the United States, himself a former revolutionary, hoped sincerely “The French Revolution will . . . produce effects in favor of liberty, equity, and humanity as extensive as this whole globe and as lasting as all time;” but he had “learned by awful experience to rejoice with trembling,” for it was in just such tumultuous upheavals as the one in France that “the most fiery spirits and flighty geniuses frequently obtained more influence than men of sense and judgement; and the weakest man may carry foolish measures in opposition to wise ones proposed by the ablest.”
In England, Irish statesman Edmund Burke had made a name for himself defending the American Revolution in Parliament, but the method fixed upon by the French for ushering in their own liberty struck him as singularly ineffective. “In one summer they have done their business . . . they have completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy, their church, their nobility, their law, their revenue, their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts, and their manufacturers.” More importantly, the French had “destroyed all balances and counterpoises which serve to fix a state and give it steady direction, and then they melted down the whole into one incongruous mass of mob and democracy [emphasis added].”
If the actions of the mob sounded a warning note, the form taken by the newly established Revolutionary government set clanging a whole host of alarm bells for both Adams and Burke. According to David McCullough, Adams could not avoid predicting “a tragic outcome, in that a single legislative assembly, as chosen by the French, could only mean ‘great and lasting calamities.’” Before the Revolution was even underway, Adams had voiced concern over the political philosophies of the French philosophe Turgot, who espoused “collecting all authority into one center, that of the nation,” in a perfect democracy and single legislative body. As far as Adams could read his history, no perfect democracy had yet existed; from his own experience he knew the utter impracticality of trusting the whole people to decide much of anything - even on the small scale of a village, let alone a nation of thirty million inhabitants. Edmund Burke agreed: “I do not know under what description to class the present ruling authority in France. It affects to be a pure democracy, though I think it in a direct train of becoming shortly a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy.” Burke conceded that under the right conditions, and in the right place, a pure democracy might be necessary, even desirable. But like Adams, he saw no place in history that gave evidence of a successful democracy, even of a “pure” one. “If I recollect rightly, Aristotle observes, that a democracy has many striking points of resemblance with a tyranny.”
Thus we see the early concerns for the direction of the Revolutionary movement. Have not they been justified? In the utter debauchery of The Terror, do we not see plainly evidenced the tyrannical reign of a select few over a bloodbath? It is truly ironic when a revolution in the name of liberty for all proceeds to stamp out with diligent malignancy the liberty of all but a few. By 1793, France ceased to be a democracy; she now claimed Republican status, though of a definition perhaps never before voiced. According to Saint-Just, one of the most powerful men in Revolutionary France during the initial Terror, “That which constitutes a republic, is the destruction of all that is opposed to it.” Precisely as John Adams and Edmund Burke had feared, tyranny was quickly rearing its ugly head. The infamous Robespierre, when requesting temporary dictatorship, affirmed Saint-Just by declaring, “The principle of the republican government is virtue, and the means required to establish virtue is terror.”
Sixty years later, Frenchman Frederic Bastiat would scathingly write,
“At what a tremendous height above the rest of mankind does Robespierre here place himself! . . . he himself will remake mankind, and by means of terror . . . he wants a dictatorship in order that he may use terror to force upon the country his own principles of morality . . . [and] not until he, Robespierre, shall have accomplished these miracles, as he so rightly calls them, will he permit the law to reign again.”
The practical outcome of such views would be the senseless butchery - it can hardly be called murder - of thousands of French people, many of whom were the same poor commoners to whom the Revolution was supposed, originally, to provide succor. Their crime? Possibly, in a fit of exasperation, they spoke negatively of the Assembly, or the Revolution itself. Perhaps, while literally starving, they complained about the high price of bread - or were simply not publicly enthusiastic about said price. Maybe they wished aloud that it were not quite so necessary to send so many to the guillotine. Any one of the above was cause enough to be reported, and packed away to prison. Under such conditions, the prisons became astonishingly full astonishingly quick; the most effective manner of dealing with the situation was simply to convict the prisoners, execute them, and continue the institution of good morals and Republicanism. According to historian Pierre Gaxotte, “Fish wives were condemned to death for showing want of respect to the members of popular society, and firemen because they had put out a fire during the siege . . . On the 4th of December . . . sixty-four young men, bound together two by two, were stood between two parallel ditches which had been dug to serve as their graves. Facing them were the cannon of the Revolutionary Army . . . the gunners fired, and the condemned men fell in heaps, like a crop that had grown too heavy. Most of them were only wounded, and the soldiers finished them off with their swords. Next day there was a fresh massacre, but this time the executioners had larger ideas, for two hundred and nine inhabitants of Lyons were dragged to the fatal spot . . . those whom the grapeshot had spared were smashed to pieces with pickaxes or hatchets.”
Such was the virtue imposed by the Revolutionaries! By the end of the century, it would be their undoing, as both Robespierre and Saint-Just died as they had condemned so many others to die: by that uniquely Revolutionary killing device, the guillotine. France had passed through fire, sword, and blood, and yet what had been accomplished? “In the course of ten years,” writes French historian Pierre Gaxotte, “the Revolution had falsified all calculations and disappointed all hopes. The benefits which had been expected of it were an ordered and stable government, sound finance, wise laws, peace abroad and tranquility at home. Instead of which there had been anarchy, war, communism, the Terror, insolvency, famine and two or three bankruptcies.” At the beginning of it all, John Adams had questioned, “Will the struggle in Europe be anything other than a change in impostors?” One might well argue that this was exactly the sum total of what occurred; a monarchy was exchanged for anarchy, then despotism; one flawed way of thinking cashiered for another equally as flawed. When Napoleon seized the reigns of governance, the Revolution had come full circle: it had begun by toppling the rule of a single man in the name of rule by the people, and it now ended by declaring a single man ruler in the name of the people.
Frederic Bastiat wrote in the 1840s: “Frenchmen have led all other Europeans in obtaining their rights - or, more accurately, their political demands. Yet this fact has in no respect prevented us from being the most governed, the most regulated, the most imposed upon, the most harnessed, and the most exploited people in Europe. France also leads all other nations as the one where revolutions are constantly to be anticipated.”
This seems hardly a description of a prosperous and bountiful land shepherded by “an ordered and stable government.” Rather, it describes a land that has yet to recover an even political keel, and is in recurring danger of yet more fighting, yet more bloodshed. Not surprisingly, France has had no less than eleven constitutions since 1793 - an indication of instability if ever one existed.
So what were the consequences of the Revolution? It tolled the death knell of the Ancien Regime; it introduced, as Pierre Gaxotte said, communism, and must certainly be reckoned a precursor to the socialist philosophies of the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1909, on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, Prince Petr Kropotkin would write, “What we learn from the study of the Great [French] Revolution is that it was the source of all the present communist, anarchist and socialist conceptions.” One man has said it thus: “If the French Revolution was the end of monarchy and aristocratic privilege . . . it was also the beginnings of modern totalitarian government and large-scale executions of ‘enemies of the People’ by impersonal government entities.”
I believe it well safe to say, there were no positive consequences of the French Revolution.
Bibliography:
Bastiat, Frederic. The Law. Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 2001.
Burke, Edmund, and Thomas Paine. Reflections On The Revolution In France and The Rights Of Man. Garden City: Dolphin Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1961.
Gaxotte, Pierre. Translated by Walter Alison Phillips, Litt.D. The French Revolution. London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932.
Keversau, ‘A Conqueror of the Bastille Speaks’, Exploring the French Revolution,
http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/searchfr.php? function=find&keyword=bastille&x=0&y=0# (accessed 30 January 2009).
McCullough, David. John Adams. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
Rich Geib’s Universe. The French Revolution.
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/ french/french.html (accessed 30 January 2009).
