HY 150 BISK
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC REVOLUTION
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/hy150biskcapitalism.htm
The crucial goal of all my courses is to create an environment where you, as
the student, can begin to feel comfortable taking responsibility for your own
education
McNeill
THE HUMAN COMMUNITY
CHAPTER 20:
THE DEMOCRATIC AND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS 1776 to 1850
INTRODUCTION
Emergence of Europe’s New Regime (507)
The American Revolution (508)
France Supports the Revolution (509)
American Constitutional Government (509)
The Impact of the American Revolution (509)
The French Revolution (510)
The Meeting of the Estates-General (511)
Revolt of the Third Estate (511)
The National Assembly (511)
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (512)
Financial Problems (513)
The Constitution of 1791 (514)
The Radical Phase: The Convention (515)
The Reign of Terror (515)
Reaction and Consolidation (517)
Napoleonic Rule (518)
Nationalist Resistance to French Rule (518)
Napoleon’s Coronation (519)
The Congress of Vienna (522)
The French Revolution Overseas (522)
Revolution Versus Reaction in Europe (523)
The Industrial Revolution (526)
Invention of Steam Engines (527)
Labor in the Machine Age (528)
Early Adjustments to Industrial Life (529)
The Napoleonic Wars and the British Economy (529)
The Wars and the French Economy (530)
Other Parts of Europe (530)
Postwar Industrial Progress (531)
Some Key Inventions and Breakthroughs (532)
Rural Conservation (533)
Cultural and Intellectual Developments (533)
Conclusion (534)
Bibliography (535)
Special Feature: Breakthroughs in the Use of Energy and Fuel (536)
EPILOGUE: PART III THE STATE OF THE WORLD 1850
Europe’s Irresistible Inventions (540)
Leading Role in Europe (541)
World Cosmopolitanism (541)
MERCANTILISM AND CAPITALISM
I. MERCANTILISM
A. THEORY
Mercantilism was central to the early
modern effort to build strong, efficient political units. The mercantilists
aimed to make their nation as self-sustaining as possible, as independent as
possible of needing to import goods from other nations, which were rivals and
potential enemies. The mercantilists held that production within a nation should
provide all the necessities of life for a hardworking population, and provide
the power needed to fight and win wars. They believed that these goals required
planning and control from above. Wealth in this world is finite so if one nation
becomes rich, it must be at the expense of another. The mercantilists measured
wealth by the amount of precious metals in one’s treasury; the way to get those
precious metals is through exporting more goods than one imports thus draining
precious metals from one’s competitors.
The mercantilists believed that these goals required planning and control from
above. They wished to sweep away such medieval remnants as the manor and the
guild that sapped the energies needed for an expanding economy. The
mercantilists would channel the national economic effort by protective tariffs,
government subsidies, grants of monopolies, government-run industries, and by
scientific and applied research as directed by the government.
B. COLONIES
The mercantilists viewed overseas possessions as an important part of the
nation that should be run from the homeland by a strong government. Colonies
should provide necessities, so that the mother country need not import them from
competitors. In return, the mother country would supply industrial goods to the
colonies and have a monopoly over colonial trade. France and Spain, and the less
absolutist governments of England and Holland followed this mercantilist
approach.
C. FRANCE AND COLBERT
The great French practitioner of mercantilism was Colbert who became controller
general early in the reign of Louis XIV. He was influential in all matters
affecting the French economy, and under him France came to have the strongest
economy on the continent—second only to England in the world. England had
introduced new methods of power machinery and concentrated on large-scale
production of inexpensive goods, while France clung to the policies set by
Colbert, favoring relatively small-scale production of luxuries and other
consumer goods. But the difference between French and English industry was also
a difference in the focus of national energies. France spent an exceptional
proportion of its national product in an unfruitful effort to dominate through
the force of arms both Europe and the known overseas world.
II. LAISSEZ-FAIRE ECONOMICS
A. PHYSIOCRATS
The Physiocrats expected that they would discover natural economic laws,
"susceptible of a demonstration as severe and incontestable as those of geometry
and algebra." And to arrive at such laws, the nation should recognize that land
is the only source of wealth and that agriculture increases wealth. The new
Physiocratic idea of natural wealth clashed with the mercantilist doctrine of
equating money, or bullion, with wealth. The mercantilists excessively stressed
the accumulation of specie. They tried to regulate commerce when they should
free it from controls. They make goods more expensive by levying tariffs and
other indirect taxes, when they should collect only a single direct tax on the
net income from land. "Laissez-faire, laissez passer", the Physiocrats urged,
"live and let live". Let nature take its course. They repudiated the controlled
mercantilist economy and enunciated the classical or liberal doctrine of a free
economy: the state ought not to disturb the free play of natural economic
forces. Most of all, it ought not to interfere with private property, so
necessary to produce agricultural wealth.
B. ADAM SMITH, 1727-90
1. Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations, 1776
The Scotsman Adam Smith formulated classic laissez-faire economics. Smith
vigorously attacked mercantilism, arguing that it was wrong to restrict imports
by tariffs intended to protect home industries. Like the Physiocrats, Smith
credited the wealth of nations to the production of goods, but he took a less
agrarian view. For Smith, production depended less on the soil than on the labor
of farmers, artisans, and mill hands. Like the Physiocrats, he minimized the
role of the state. He claimed that people who were freely competing for their
own wealth would enrich all of society as if guided by "an invisible hand", that
is, by nature or the market system. Government should act mainly as a passive
policeman.
2. The Social Argument
Smith’s social argument was elegant and comforting. It was true that humanity
consisted of essentially sovereign individuals in self-interested competition
with one another. He argued that these activities, when left to operate
unchecked, produced a natural social order. It also produced the most rapid
possible increase in the wealth of nations, that is, the capitalist class
ownership of the means of production benefited all. The economically unequal
society that resulted inevitably from the operations of human nature was
compatible with the natural equality of all men and justice. For, quite apart
from securing to even the poorest a better life than he would otherwise have
had, the most equal of all relationships, the exchange of equivalents in the
market, formed the foundation of this "unequal society." Progress was natural to
capitalism. Remove the artificial obstacles to the economy and progress must
inevitably take place.
C. ECONOMIC LIBERTY
The mercantilists had raised the state over the individual and had declared
ceaseless trade warfare among nations. Adam Smith and the Physiocrats, reversing
the emphasis, proclaimed both economic liberty for the individual and free trade
among nations to be natural laws. The laissez-faire program of the Enlightenment
marked a revolutionary change in economic thought. It did not, however,
revolutionize the economic policies of the great powers, which remained
stubbornly mercantilist.
III. THE CLASSICAL ECONOMISTS
A. THOMAS MALTHUS, 1766-1834
Faced with the widening cleavage, both real and psychological, between rich and
poor, 19th century liberals at first held to the doctrine of laissez-faire. From
The Economist, May 1848: Suffering and evil are nature’s admonitions;
they cannot be got rid of; and the impatient attempts of benevolence to banish
them from the world by legislation . . . have always been productive of more
evil than good.
These were the classical economists, the architects of "the dismal science". The
most famous were Malthus and David Ricardo. Educated for the ministry, Malthus
became perhaps the first professional economist in history. He taught the
employees of the East India Company at a training school in England. In 1798, he
published his Essay on Population, a dramatic warning that the human
species would breed itself into starvation. In the essay, Malthus expressed a
series of natural laws:
The power of
population is indefinitely greater than the power in earth to produce
subsistence for man.
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometric ratio. Subsistence only
increases in an arithmetical ratio. . . . Through the animal and vegetable
kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse
and liberal hands. She has been comparatively sparing in the room and the
nourishment necessary to rear them. . . . Necessity, that imperious,
all-pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. Among
plants and animals, its effects are waste of seed, sickness, and premature
death. Among mankind, misery and vice.
Misery and vice would spread because the
unchecked increase in human numbers would lower the demand for labor and
therefore lower the wages of labor. (Law of Supply and Demand) The reduction of
the human birth rate was the only hope that this prophet of gloom held out to
suffering humanity. Moral restraint, that is, chastity until late marriage would
achieve the birth-rate reduction.
B. DAVID RICARDO, 1772-1823
Ricardo too was a prophet of gloom. He credited economic activity to three main
forces:
rent, paid to the owners of great natural resources like farmland and mines;
profit, accruing to enterprising individuals who exploit these resources
wages, paid to the workers who performed the actual labor
Of the three, rent is the most important in the long run. Farms and mines would
become depleted and exhausted, but their produce would continue in great demand.
Rent, accordingly, would consume an ever larger share of the economic pie. While
Ricardo did not subscribe to the Mercantilist belief that the economic pie if
firmly fixed, he did predict eventual stagnation. Whereas Smith had cheerfully
predicted an increasing division of labor accompanied by steadily rising wages,
Ricardo brought labor and wages under the Malthusian formula:
The market price of labor is the price which is really paid for it, from the natural operation of the proportion of the supply to the demand; labor is dear when it is scarce, and cheap when it is plentiful. . . . It is when the market price of labor exceeds its natural price, that the condition of the laborer is flourishing and happy. . . . When, however, the number of laborers is increased, wages again fall to their natural price, and indeed. . . sometimes fall below it.
Ricardo’s disciples hardened this principle
into the Iron Law of Wages. This law bound workers to an unending cycle of high
wages and large families, followed by an increase in the labor supply, a
corresponding increase in competition for jobs, and an inevitable slump in
wages. The slump would lead workers to have fewer children, followed by a
resulting shortage of labor and rising wages; then the whole cycle would being
again. Ricardo himself, however, regarded the cycle not as an Iron Law, but
simply as a probability.
C. EVALUATION
What separated the classical economists of the early 19th century from their
18th century predecessors was their pessimism. Like the philosophes, they did
not doubt that natural laws were superior to human laws and that laissez-faire
was the best policy. Unlike them, however, they no longer viewed nature as the
creation of the beneficent God of the deists. To these adherents of the dismal
science, nature was at best a force indifferent to humanity’s fate, and at worst
malevolent.
Yet, modern capitalism proved the classical economists wrong. The size of the
economic pie expanded far beyond Ricardo’s expectations, as did the portions
allotted to rent, to profit, and to wages. Malthus did not foresee that
scientific advances would make agricultural output expand at nearly a geometric
ratio. He did not foresee that contraception and emigration could sometimes
avert the dangers of increasing birthrates.
Although the classical economists did not take enough account of the vast
changes wrought by the agricultural and industrial revolutions, their
laissez-faire liberalism won particular favor with the new industrial magnates.
Perhaps, that suffering and evil were nature’s admonitions disturbed the
captains of industry. It consoled the rich that the poor deserved to be poor
because they had indulged their appetites to excess, and that whatever was, was
right, or at least ordained by nature. Working-class leaders attacked classical
economic doctrines as without heart or conscience, and as rationalizations of
the economic interests of the rich.
AMERICAN REPUBLICANISM IN THE MODERN AGE
I. REPUBLICANISM AS AN IDEOLOGY
A. POWER AND LIBERTY
Until the 20th century republicanism was the Western World’s most radical
ideology, and in many ways it remains so even today. It is a comprehensive
theory of human nature, of human society, and of government.
1. Monarchists and dictators argue that putting power in the hands of a few
individuals at the top is necessary to keep society from tearing itself
apart—this happens, they say, because the common people are ignorant, greedy,
and violent.
2. Republicans insist that power corrupts. No just society is possible unless
the power of authorities is under the control of the people it governs. Power is
a force inherently at war with liberty.
B. DIVIDED POWERS
Therefore, sovereignty—that is, final authority—has to be taken out of the hands
of monarchs and put into the hands of the people at large. They are naturally
wiser and better because wealth and control over others have not corrupted them.
They, in turn, have to erect governments with horizontally divided powers
(legislative, executive, and judicial), each of which balances and checks the
others. This calls for a written constitution that clearly states the structure
and functions of government and protects the rights of the individual citizen
from invasion by government. By regular elections and wide suffrage, the people
can preserve not simply a theoretical but an actual supervision over those in
authority.
Further, because government is always untrustworthy, most of what it does has to
be carried out by strictly local governments closely watched and controlled by
their citizens. Thus, a vertical separation of powers (federal, state, local)
also should exist. (The Calvinist origin of the idea of the division of powers.)
C. LIBERTY
All of this aims at freeing the individual to live the fullest possible life, to
realize most completely his potential. The sturdy, self-reliant individual: This
is what republicanism in America is all about.
II. THE FOUR MODES OF REPUBLICANISM
Republicanism is a national ideology, broad and inclusive. Therefore, Americans
disagree among themselves as to what particular aspects of it they emphasize.
A. LIBERTARIANS
For many Americans, and especially white Southerners, republicanism have above
all to protect liberty; that is, it has to ensure that people are free to run
their lives and use their property as they see fit.
B. EGALITARIANS
Many, especially minorities (historically Germans, Roman Catholics, and Jews;
today women and racial minorities), believe that republicanism’s primary
emphasis ought to be on equality. Republicanism’s real objective is to ensure
that government at all levels treats every person equally. Everyone should have
an equal chance to get ahead in life. Everyone should receive equal respect as
a human being. And everyone should have an equal right to worship and live
according to their own beliefs and morals.
From these two perspectives, no one should receive special privileges, either
economic or cultural. The government should keep hands off just about
everything; that is, both cultural and economic laissez-faire should rule.
Thousands of American farmers, with urban minority groups (who tend to be the
poorer people) feel that the wealthy and powerful are always conspiring to
exploit the rest of the people. They need no help, in the form of protective
tariffs or other aids, from government. Thus, libertarian and egalitarian
republicans agreed on essentials. As disciples of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew
Jackson, they had come together since the 1830s to form the Democratic Party,
the party of out-groups.
The exception to this are African-Americans who, especially in the South, only
after the 1960s moved en masse from the party of Lincoln to the
Democrats, the party of slavery and secession. Blacks were outside the system;
as they moved into the system they became Democrats; as they rise they will
become Republicans. As Blacks moved into the Democratic Party, Southern
Whites—themselves also formerly scorned—decamped and moved into the Republican
Party. Richard Nixon’s "Southern Strategy" has come to pass—witness the election
of 2000. These white males took their libertarian philosophy into the Republican
Party. The question is, When will these libertarian ideals be swamped by
moralistic and nationalistic republicanism? Think about Attorney General John
Ashcroft and the Office of Homeland Security.
Since the time of Franklin Roosevelt and especially Lyndon Johnson, there has
been some reversal of devotion to laissez-faire economic between Democrats and
Republicans, although this statement needs to be qualified in significant ways.
C. NATIONALISTS
For many Americans, especially the elite and the moneyed but by no means limited
to them, republicanism’s true purpose is to create conditions in which
imaginative, enterprising individuals can get ahead, free of feudalism’s or
socialism’s restrictions, and live abundantly. These people believe in a strong
national government to support developing the nation’s resources and promote a
vigorous, enterprising economy. These followers of Alexander Hamilton formed the
Federalist Party, then the Whig Party, and in the 1850s, the modern Republican
Party. They had their home base among Yankee, New England Americans and their
descendants who spread throughout the upper mid-West. Today, we often find them
in the growing regions of the Sun Belt and the Far West. These are hardworking,
self-disciplined, efficiency-oriented people.
D. MORALISTS
These have strong roots among the pious, puritanical Yankees and rural southern
fundamentalists, who believe that the goal of republicanism is to train the
people in true religion and true morality. They have a strong sense of team
spirit, believing that all Americans should live according to commonly shared
values (their own). An active government intervening in private moral behavior
(drink, sex, dress, Sunday observance) is to them an essential instrument of
God’s work. Pluralism (cultural laissez-faire) is their enemy; homogeneity in
life style, their objective. For them, a partnership with nationalist
republicans within the Federalist-Whig-Republican party tradition is natural.
III. THE REPUBLIC IN THE 1970s AND 1980s
In the Gilded Age of 100 years ago, Americans still lived in a republic that
bore most of the ideal characteristics conceived 100 years before, though
Revolutionary-era republicans would find it surprisingly active, centralized,
and costly. In the bicentennial year of 1976, the external form of the American
republic was still essentially as set down in the constitution of 1789. Gilded
Age visitors, however, would be overwhelmed by how immense the operations of the
government of the United States of America had become by the 1970s.
It is wealthy, arrogant, huge, and omnipresent. The federal government employees
directly or indirectly some 10 percent of America’s workers and federal, state,
and local governments employ directly or indirectly 25 percent of all workers.
Beyond federal, state, and local governmental agencies, there are no fewer than
23,000 special district governments operating in the USA for fire, recreation,
water, sanitation, and more, and they are growing at a rate of 12 percent per
year..
A. COMPLEXITY OF GOVERNMENT
1. NEW LAWS AND ATTITUDES
On average in the 1970s, the Congress added about 200 new laws every year, and
federal agencies added about 7,000 regulations having the force of law. All
legislative bodies throughout the USA added 600 new laws every day. The small
and limited government of 100 years ago has disappeared. The search for order,
begun in the late 19th century. This with the drive to build a more egalitarian
nation by supervising private business, taking care of the unfortunate, and
working toward racial and sexual equality, produced a vast and centralized
regulatory machine. Bureaucracy flourishes in public and private lives today.
Born in the Gilded Age in the effort to make the railroad system efficient, it
proliferated throughout the social system.
2. BUREAUCRACY
Vague and remote but nonetheless everywhere, bureaucracy presents contradictory
aspects. Rigid, impersonal, self-serving, and self-perpetuating, bureaucracies
are also responsible for creating a society in which there is regularity of
operation, predictability, orderliness, even-handed treatment, carefully made
decisions, a diffusion of power, and a concern for the public interest. Capable
of creating an irreversible momentum in one direction and resistant to change in
ways that frustrate congressmen and presidents, the bureaucracies also provide a
steady accumulation of knowledge and management by experts who are not subject
to public whim.
B. THE DEMOCRATIC OUTLOOK
The basic ideological positions of the two major parties have persisted for two
centuries. Thomas Jefferson would recognize his party. His ideology of equality
and personal liberty attracted the minority groups of his own day. Those who
feel excluded by the host WASP culture still cluster in the Democratic Party.
They still resist campaigns to use government to supervise private moral
behavior. Democrats still conceive of themselves as the party of the poor and
middling incomes, opposing the rich and powerful. Democrats lean toward helping
the consumer against the merchant, producer, and financier. Though clearly not a
radical, anti-capitalist organization, as in Jefferson’s time, Democrats today
instinctively believe that businessmen and bankers conspire to exploit the
public.
Although still Jeffersonian and Jacksonian in its aims and fears, the Democratic
Party in its drive to control powerful business enterprise has left far behind
Jefferson’s laissez-faire methods, save in cultural issues. Since Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s time its commitment has been to build a more egalitarian country
through a strong, centralized authority (Progressivism, socialism, World War I
experience).
C. THE REPUBLICAN OUTLOOK
Republicans today, as they have been for generations, are the voice of the
entrepreneur, the aggressive and self-reliant individual who labors to enrich
himself and therefore, without necessarily intending it, society. Until the
1930s, Republicans spoke for a strong, interventionist government. They liked
the ancient Yankee and puritan notion of a vigorous, elitist central authority
looking out for the common welfare and struggling to make a cohesive community
out of a huge country by encouraging economic development and cultural
uniformity.
Republican economic ideology today remains that of Alexander Hamilton, Henry
Clay, and James G. Blaine. That is, if government does anything at all about
the economy, it should be to help the businessman, to encourage and unleash him,
for he creates jobs and opportunities, and develops the country. From the 1920s
to today, the first task of all Republican regimes taking over the executive
branch is to put people friendly to unrestrained freedom of enterprise in
charge. These people takeover the complex of independent regulatory commissions
and powerful government departments that the Democrats insist on building in
Washington.
D. CULTURAL ALIGNMENTS IN POLITICS
1. REPUBLICANS AND PATRIOTISM
Republicans instinctively venerate another venerable conviction: that they are
the host culture, the home base of true Americanism, true patriotism.
Eventually, as the Yankee core community expanded to take in peoples who were
formerly its enemies—the Scotch-Irish, Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians—it
became simply white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, that is, WASP. The characteristic
Republican paranoia has been to suspect that radicals and immoral people,
sheltered by the Democrats, are conspiring to subvert the nation. Thus
government should not only root out security risks, it must also supervise the
private moral lives of individuals.
2. CHANGE IN THE ETHNIC-GROUP LINEUP
But in last 100 years, there has been change in the cast of characters on both
sides of the partisan line. Most notably, the Democrats who had been the racist,
anti-black party, now have fully absorbed black Americans into their ranks, and
in the 1960s had even pushed through bold national reforms to carry through the
Second Reconstruction. One result was a massive decamping to the Republicans of
the minorities who had formerly claimed the Democrats’ attentions: the Catholics
of European lineage, the white Southerners, and to a lesser extent the Jews.
These groups also turned to the GOP because they were feeling increasingly less
like outsiders. To vote Republican in American politics has always been a
cultural statement, a declaration that one is a member of the club—the
well-educated, the established, the respected, the able, and the managerial: to
be an American.
E. PARTY DIFFERENCES IN FOREIGN POLICY
Before the 1890s, the United States practically had no foreign policy, but since
then the two parties have fixed differing approaches to it. Republicans lean
toward the nationalist side and the Democrats toward the internationalist side.
While Republican administrations tend to go it alone in world affairs, pulling
back from multilateralism, Democrats stress building an ever-widening circle of
friends with whom they can uphold a joint policy toward world events.
Republicans insist the world is a dangerous place requiring the protection of
strong military forces, and Democrats urge cooperation, coexistence, and
reduction of arms. As 100 years ago, today there is a foreign policy elite
composed of newspaper editors, magazine publishers, scholars, bankers, and
corporation presidents. They believe the USA must be a power in world affairs.
This group led the United States into Vietnam just as it had the Spanish
American War.
Post 9/11 Example
The ideas emerging from the Republicans and Democrats after September 11, 2001
show that these differences continue.
After the attack, the Bush administration quickly articulated a new vision of
national security as the habits of the Cold War no longer are appropriate. He
has organized this vision around four straightforward points:
1. Preemption—America cannot wait for the terrorists to strike, but rather must
hit them first based on intelligence findings.
2. “Coalitions of the willing” and the good fighting evil under unambiguous
American moral, political, and military leadership.
3. The unfettered use of American military power, which itself lies on the
assumption that the threat America faces is mainly a military-type threat.
4. “America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our
people.”
Democrats do not disagree with two of Bush’s
key underlying assumptions:
1. American power is indispensable in providing the framework for global order.
2. The United States faces radically new security threats not from established
great powers, but from illiberal states, backward societies, and aggrieved
peoples.
Seeing more complexity and ambiguity, Democrats part company with the Republican
administration in four basic ways:
1. The “war of terrorism” is not an adequate or unifying mission of foreign
policy. Terrorism is a tactic and so to declare war on terrorism is akin to
Franklin Roosevelt’s declaring war of blitzkrieg. The Bush administration’s
“theological approach” to terrorism—a struggle between good and evil—is too
abstract, politically unsustainable, and inevitably leads to scare-mongering.
2. An adequate approach to terrorism must focus on the historical and political
context which creates violence. America needs a careful political strategy to
weaken the complex political and cultural forces that cause terrorism, and
America needs to undercut those forces.
3. Moral authority is America’s most prized asset, and the Bush administration’s
arrogation of the unilateral right to define threats and use force undermines
that authority. America’s global military credibility has never been higher, yet
its global political credibility has never been lower. Washington must exercise
consensual leadership to achieve legitimacy if America is to enhance its power.
4. American national security depends on international security, and so the
country’s security rests increasingly in the hands of others. Events in the
post-Cold War world have severed the old link between national sovereignty and
national security. In this new era the USA must be willing to work with other
democracies to reduce the convulsive and percolating strife that lies behind
today global violence and terrorism. America must use its moment of unrivaled
military power to build an increasingly formalized global community of shared
interest that can provide a long-term basis for global peace and security.
America will never be able to defend the security of its people without the help
of others.
F. WHAT OF LIBERTY?
Is a large government as we now have, consonant with liberty? Americans over
several generations have redefined the term. They recast liberty to mean not
simply freedom from governmental interference in private affairs, but freedom
from person-to-person oppression, from exploitation by the wealthy and powerful.
It means being freed from ignorance, prejudice, poverty, and fraud in the
marketplace, high-handedness by great corporations, bad water, unchecked taking
of profits by monopolies, unsafe products, and polluted air. What is "private"
has also been redefined, for example, parents can no longer abuse their children
with impunity. In a modernizing, increasingly complex economy and society, the
meaning of liberty has necessarily grown more complicated, and its protection
more difficult.
G. DISTRUST OF POWER ENDURES
The ancient republican distrust of power endures; witness the Watergate and
Iran-Contra scandals and the proliferation of citizen-action groups. Americans
continue to be extraordinarily prickly at usurpations of power. The whole
phenomenon puzzles most of the rest of the world.
H. THE QUESTION OF NATIONAL VIRTUE
One nagging question. American republicanism released people to enrich
themselves largely without restraint, and this, more than anything else, made
ex-president John Adams worry about the future of the United States. Are we a
sick, craven society over-indulging in our unprecedented and ill-distributed
wealth (and ability to borrow talent and money from more productive foreigners)?
Or are we, to use the phrase that Ronald Reagan borrowed from an early puritan
preacher, "the shinning light on the hill" for the rest of the world?
THE FRENCH AND NAPOLEONIC REVOLUTIONS
AND THEIR IMPACT ON EUROPE AND THE AMERICAS, 1789-1825
The great upheaval that the French nation
experienced in the late eighteenth century clearly exhibits all the phases of a
familiar revolutionary cycle. When the French Revolution began, its leaders had
relatively moderate aims. They overthrew a bankrupt and obsolete Old Regime and
tried to organize a constitutional monarchy that would secure individual rights.
Under pressures produced by a foolhardy war with Austria and Prussia and by
ill-considered domestic reforms, the new regime collapsed. The revolutionary
movement then passed into the hands of a radical faction, the Jacobins. They
applied drastic remedies, including systematic terror, to promote an egalitarian
social agenda, and to set up a republic and to overcome its domestic and foreign
enemies. As Jacobin violence grasped its objectives, it became both unnecessary
and unpopular among middle-class Frenchmen. A conservative reaction ended that
radical phase. The succeeding government known as the Directory continued to be
anti-royalist, but it pursued anti-democratic policies. Paying scant attention
to popular opinion, it relied heavily on force to keep its power and seemed
incapable to providing peace and security to France. Exploiting widespread
dissatisfaction with the Directory, a popular, successful general, Napoleon
Bonaparte, seized power and brought the revolution to an end. Napoleon’s new
social and political system incorporated some of its most noteworthy
achievements.
Besides reconstructing France, Napoleon spread the values of the French
Revolution across much of the European continent. This had important
repercussions despite the fall of his empire. Inadvertently, Napoleon’s
conquests also helped ignite nationalist movements in Europe, most notably in
Germany. Moreover, the impact of his foreign policies and military adventures
even reverberated across the Atlantic. For example, his overthrow of the Spanish
Bourbon monarchy in 1808 encouraged widespread revolts against Spanish rule in
Latin America.
Defeated by a coalition of powers in 1814, Napoleon suffered exile briefly on
the island of Elba while the victorious allies met at Vienna to restructure
Europe. His escape from Elba and brief return to power in 1815 did not derail
their negotiations, which resulted in a settlement that compares favorably to
the Versailles settlement that followed the First World War. No wars between
major powers disrupted the Vienna settlement of 1815 until the Crimean War of
the 1850s. Also, no European-wide upheavals (on the scale of the Napoleonic
wars) developed until World War I broke out in 1914.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF TOTALITARIANISM
MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE, 1758-1794
A. DISASTER THREATENS FRANCE AND ITS REVOLUTION
In the spring of 1793, revolutionary
turmoil and military invasion ravaged France. Within the Convention, the
Mountain joined with sans-culottes activists in the Paris government to engineer
a popular uprising that forced the Convention to arrest 31 Girondist deputies
for treason on June 2. All power passed to the Mountain.
Robespierre and others from the Mountain joined the recently formed Committee of
Public Safety, to which the Convention had given dictatorial power to deal with
the national emergency. These developments in Paris triggered revolt in leading
provincial cities, where moderates denounced Paris and demanded a decentralized
government. A peasant revolt spread, and the Republic’s armies were driven back
on all fronts. By July 1793, the central government controlled only the areas
around Paris and the eastern frontier. Defeat appeared imminent.
B. MODERN DICTATORSHIP AND TOTAL WAR
A year later, in July 1794, the situation had been completely reversed, and the
anti-French First Coalition was falling apart. This remarkable change of fortune
was due to the revolutionary government’s success in harnessing, for the first
time in history, the explosive forces of a planned economy, revolutionary
terror, and modern nationalism in a Total War effort.
1. PLANNED
ECONOMY
a. Wage and Price Controls
Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety advanced with implacable
resolution on several fronts in 1793 and 1794. In an effort to save
revolutionary France, they collaborated with the fiercely patriotic and
democratic sans-culottes. They established, as best they could, a planned
economy with egalitarian social overtones. Rather than let the supply and demand
of a market economy determine prices, the government decreed the maximum
allowable prices, fixed in paper assignats, for a host of key products. Though
the state was too weak to enforce all its price regulations, it did:
1. Fix the price of bread in Paris at levels the poor could afford.
2. Introduced rationing and ration cards to make sure that all shared fairly the
limited supplies of bread.
3. Quality was controlled. Bakers, for example, could make only the "bread of
equality"—brown bread made of a mixture of all available flours. White bread and
pastries (remember Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake") were outlawed as
frivolous luxuries. The poor of Paris may not have eaten well, but at least they
ate.
b. Production and Supply Controls
The poor also worked, mainly to produce arms and munitions for the war effort.
The government told craftsmen and small manufacturers what to produce and when
to deliver. The government nationalized many small workshops and requisitioned
raw materials and grain from the peasants. Sometimes planning and control did
not go beyond orders to meet the latest emergency:
Ten thousand soldiers lack shoes. You will take the shoes of all the
aristocrats in Strasbourg and deliver them ready for transport to headquarters
at 10 am tomorrow.
Failures to control and coordinate were failures of means and not of desire:
seldom if ever before had a government attempted to manage an economy so
thoroughly. The second revolution and the ascendancy of the sans-culottes had
produced an embryonic emergency socialism, which was to have great influence on
the subsequent development of socialist ideology.
2. REVOLUTIONARY TERROR
a. Extent
While radical economic measures supplied the poor with bread and the armies with
weapons, a Reign of Terror (1793-94) was solidifying the home front. Special
revolutionary courts, responsible only to Robespierre’s Committee of Public
Safety, tried rebels and "enemies of the nation" for political crimes. Drawing
on popular, sans-culottes support centered in the local Jacobin Clubs, these
local courts ignored normal legal procedures and judged severely. Some 40,000
French men and women were executed or died in prison. Another 300,000 suspects
crowded the prisons and often brushed close to death in revolutionary courts.
b. Characterization
Robespierre’ Reign of Terror was one of the most controversial phases of the
French Revolution. Most historians now believe that the Reign of Terror was not
directed against any single class. Rather, it was a political weapon directed
impartially against all who might oppose the revolutionary government. For many
Europeans of the time, however, the Reign of Terror and its symbol, the
guillotine, represented a terrifying perversion of the generous ideals that had
existed in 1789. It strengthened the belief that France had foolishly replaced a
weak king with a bloody dictatorship.
3. NATIONALISM
a. Unification of Classes
The most decisive element in the French Republic’s victory over the First
Coalition was its ability to continue drawing on the explosive power of
patriotic dedication to a national state and a national mission. This is the
essence of modern nationalism. With a common language and a common tradition,
newly reinforced by the ideas of popular sovereignty and democracy, common
loyalty stirred the French people. The shared danger of foreign foes and
internal rebels unified all classes in a heroic defense of the nation.
b. The Home Front at War
In such circumstances, war was no longer the gentlemanly game of the 18th
century, but a life-and-death struggle between good and evil worthy of total
mobilization. Everyone had to participate in the national effort. According to a
famous decree of August 23, 1793:
The young men shall go to battle and the married men shall forge arms. The
women shall make tents and clothes, and shall serve in the hospitals; children
shall tear rags into lint. The old men will be guided to the public places of
the cities to kindle the courage of the young warriors and to preach the unity
of the Republic and the hatred of kings.
Like the wars of religion in the 17th century or the wars of race and ideology
in the 20th, war in 1793 was a crusade.
c. Mass Warfare
Because all unmarried young men were subject to the draft, the French armed
forces swelled to one million men in 14 armies. A force of this size was
unprecedented in the history of European warfare. The soldiers were led by
young, impetuous generals, who had often risen rapidly from the ranks and
personified the opportunities the Revolution seemed to offer gifted sons of the
people. These generals used mass attacks at bayonet point by highly motivated
forces to overwhelm the enemy. By the spring of 1794, French armies were
victorious on all fronts. The Republic was saved
Adapted from
The French Revolution in the Minds of Men
Maurice Cranston
The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 1989, 48-55.
The French Revolution as Model
0n July 14, 1989—Bastille
Day—political and cultural leaders of every ideological persuasion assembled in
Paris to celebrate the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Was there
something strange about their unanimous applause? All subsequent major
revolutions, such as those that took place in Russia and China, remain
controversial today. But it was the French Revolution that served as the direct
or indirect model for these later upheavals. Bastille Day now passes for an
innocuous occasion which anyone, Marxist or monarchist, can join in celebrating.
Questions
Was this proof only of the anaesthetizing power of time, that two centuries
could turn the French Revolution into a museum piece, an exhibition acceptable
to all viewers, even to a descendent of the old Bourbon monarchs? Or is there
something about the French Revolution itself that, from its beginning, sets it
apart from later revolutions?
The French Revolution and Myth
The tricouleur, the Marseillaise, the monumental paintings of
David—all celebrate a series of connected events, alternately joyous and grim,
which make up the real, historical French Revolution. But there is another
French Revolution, one that emerged only after the tumultuous days were over.
Later partisans inflated and distorted the Revolution's events and deeds. This
is the French Revolution as myth, and it is in many ways the more important of
the two.
It is so, one could argue, because the myth, and not the reality, inspired
the scores of revolutions that were to come. The actors of the French
Revolution, announcing their principles on behalf of all mankind, clearly
intended their deeds to have a mythic dimension. They wanted to inspire others
to follow their example. Consider the Declaration of the Rights of Man, passed
in August 1789. At no point does it refer to the specific conditions or laws of
France. Instead, it speaks in grand universals, as if it were the voice of
mankind itself. Replete with terms like citizen, liberty, the sacred rights of
man, the common good, the document provides the lexicon for all future
revolutions.
The English and American Revolutions as Conservative Revolutions
By contrast, the earlier revolutionary models that stirred the French in
1789 to act—the English Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776
had been essentially political events limited in scope and conservative in
objectives. The English revolutionists claimed to restore the liberty that the
despotic James II had destroyed; the American revolutionaries made the kindred
claim that they were only defending their rights against tyrannical measures
introduced by George III. Neither revolution sought to change society:
Radical Objectives of the French Revolution
The French Revolution, however, sought to do exactly that. Indeed, to many
of the more zealous French revolutionaries, the central aim was the creation of
a “new man.” Or at least they sought to liberate pristine man, in all his
natural goodness and simplicity, from the cruel and corrupting prison of the
traditional social order.
Romanticism and Revolution
It is easy to see how this grandiose vision of the Revolution’s purpose went
hand-in-hand with the emergence of Romanticism. The great romantic poets and
philosophers encouraged people throughout the West to believe that imagination
could triumph over custom and tradition, that everything was possible given a
will to achieve it. In the early 1790s, the young William Wordsworth expressed
the common enthusiasm for the seemingly brave and limitless new world of the
Revolution: France standing on the top of golden hours, and human nature
seeming born again.
Influences of the Enlightenment and Romanticism
Here we encounter one of the many differences between reality and myth. The
reality of the French Revolution, as Tocqueville maintained, was prepared by the
rationalist philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment by
Voltaire, Diderot, Helvétius, d’Alembert, and Holbach no less than by Rousseau.
Romantic poets such as Byron, Victor Hugo, and Hölderlin in the nineteenth
century perpetuated its myths. Byron in his poetry witness to that romanticized
revolutionary idealism, fighting and then dying as he did to help the Greeks
throw off the Turkish yoke and set up a free state of their own.
Glamour of the Revolution
The grandeur of its lofty aims made the French Revolution all the more
attractive to succeeding generations of revolutionaries, real and would-be; the
violence added theatrical glamour. The guillotine—itself an invention of
gruesome fascination—together with the exalted status of its victims, many of
them royal, noble, or political celebrities, made the Terror as thrilling as it
was alarming. Professional soldiers did not fight the wars that broke out in
1793, when France declared war on Great Britain, Holland, and Spain. Instead,
conscripts fought them, and these ordinary men expected to "know what they
fought for and love what they know." They thought these wars were wars of
liberation. It hardly mattered that Napoleon turned out to be an imperialist
conqueror no better than Alexander or Caesar. He was still a people’s
emperor.
Popular Support for Legitimacy
If historians of the French Revolution are unanimous about any one point, it
is this: the Revolution brought the people into French political life. To say
that it introduced "democracy" would be to say too much. Although the Revolution
instituted popular suffrage in varying degrees, it did not set up a fully
democratic system. But people came to see popular support as the only legitimate
basis for legitimating the national government. Even the new despotism of
Napoleon had to rest on a plebiscitary authority. These plebiscites, which
allowed voters only to ratify decisions already made, denied popular sovereignty
in fact while paying tribute to it in theory. (The vote for the Constitution
which made Napoleon emperor in 1804—3,500,000 for versus 2,500 against—hardly
suggests a vigorous democracy.)
But if Napoleon’s government was not democratic, it was obviously populistic.
The people did not rule themselves, but they approved of the man who ruled them.
Only the intervention of foreign armies brought the end of Napoleon’s empire in
1815, which was also in a sense the end of the historical French Revolution.
Those foreign armies could place a king on the throne of France, as they did
with Louis XVIII in 1815, but they could not restore the principle of royal
sovereignty in the hearts of the French people. They simply put a lid on forces
that would break out in another revolution 15 years later, this time not only in
France but also in other parts of the Western world.
The French Revolution had turned the French into a republican people. Even
when they chose a king—Louis-Philippe—to lead that revolution of 1830, he was
more of a republican prince than a royal sovereign in the traditional mold.
Louis-Philippe, the "Citizen King," had to recognize, as part of his office,
"the sovereignty of the nation." And what kind of sovereign is it, one may ask,
who has to submit to the sovereignty of the nation? The answer must clearly be,
one who is king neither by grace of God nor birth nor lawful inheritance but
only through the will of the people, who are thus his electors and not his
subjects.
Rousseau and Popular Sovereignty
The "sovereignty of the nation" was a new and powerful idea, a revolutionary
idea, in the 19th century. At the philosophical level, it is usually
ascribed, with some justification, to the teaching of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
whom Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and many lesser commentators
considered the ideologue of the French Revolution. What Rousseau did was to
separate the concept of sovereignty from the concept of government. He said the
people should keep sovereignty in their own hands, He urged the people to
entrust government to carefully chosen elites, their moral and intellectual
superiors. Rousseau held that neither heredity kings nor aristocrats could be
considered superiors of this kind. Rousseau was uncompromisingly republican. To
him a republic could be based only on the collective will of citizens who
contracted to live together under laws that they themselves enacted. "My
argument," Rousseau wrote in The Social Contrast "is that
sovereignty, being nothing other than the exercise of the general will, can
never be alienated. The sovereign, which is simply a collective being, cannot
be represented by anyone but itself—power may be delegated, but the will cannot
be."
The sheer size of France, however, with a population in 1789 of some 26
million people, precluded the transformation of the French kingdom into the sort
of direct democracy that Rousseau—a native Swiss—envisaged. Still, the Americans
had very recently proved that a nation need not be as small as a city-state for
a republican constitution to work. And as an inspiration to the average
Frenchman, the American Revolution was no less important than the writings of
Rousseau.
The American, French, and Spanish American Revolutions
The American Revolution thus became a model for France, despite its
conservative elements. Moreover, the American Revolution later served as a model
for others largely because its principles were "translated" and universalized by
the French Revolution. In Latin America, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies
could not directly follow the American example and indict their monarchs for
unlawfully violating their rights; Spain and Portugal, unlike England,
recognized no such rights. But following the example of the French Revolution,
Latin Americans like Simón Bolivar and José de San Martin were able to appeal to
abstract or universal principles. To describe Bolivia’s new constitution in
1826, Simón Bolivar used the same universal and idealistic catchwords which the
French had patented 37 years before: "In this constitution," Bolivar announced,
"you will find united all the guarantees of permanency and liberty, of
equality and order." If the South American republics sometimes ran short on
republican liberty and equality, the concept of royal or imperial sovereignty
was nonetheless banished forever from American shores. The short reign of
Maximilian of Austria as Emperor of Mexico 1864-1867 provided a brief and
melancholy epilogue to such ideas of sovereignty in the New World.
Metternich and Reaction
Even in the Old World, royal and aristocratic governments were on the
defensive. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna, under Prince Metternich of Austria’s
guidance, tried to erase the memory of the Revolution and restore Europe to what
it had been before 1789. Yet only five years after the Congress, Metternich
wrote to the Russian tsar, Alexander I admitting, "The governments, having
lost their balance, are frightened, intimidated, and thrown into confusion."
Old Regimes Could No Longer Govern As They Once Had
The French Revolution had permanently destroyed the mystique on which
traditional regimes were based. No king could indisputably claim that he ruled
by divine right; nor could lords and bishops assume that their own interests and
the national interests coincided. After the French Revolution, commoners, the
hitherto silent majority of ordinary underprivileged people asserted the right
to have opinions of their own—and to make them known. Once the French Revolution
had taken the "universal principles" of liberty, democracy, and the rights of
men from philosophers’ treatises and had put on the agenda of political action,
no regime which set itself against those ideals could be secure.
Explanation of the Revolution by the Left—The Need to Complete the Revolution
In old history textbooks, one can still find the interpretation of the
French Revolution first advanced by Jules Michelet and Jean Jaurès and other
left-wing historians who explained the Revolution as one abolishing feudalism
and advancing bourgeois capitalist society. While few historians still view the
Revolution this way, the Michelet interpretation was widespread during the 19th
century, and its currency prompted many an aspiring Robespierre to "complete"
the revolution.
Completing the revolution meant overthrowing the bourgeoisie in favor of the
working class, just as the bourgeoisie had supposedly overthrown the feudal
aristocracy in 1789. The convulsive year of 1848 was marked in Europe by several
revolutions that attempted to complete the work of 1789. Their leaders all
looked back to the French Revolution for their "historic justification."
Tocqueville remarked of these revolutionaries that their "imitation [of 1789]
was so manifest that it concealed the terrible originality of the facts; I
continually had the impression they were engaged in play-acting the French
Revolution far more than continuing it."
The Century of Revolutions: The Revolutionary Model
If the 19th century was, as many historians describe it, the
"century of revolutions," it was so largely because the French Revolution had
provided the model. As it turns out, the existence of a proper model has proved
to be a more decisive prod to revolution than economic crisis, political unrest,
or even the agitations of young revolutionaries.
Indeed, the role of professional revolutionaries seems negligible in
preparing most revolutions. Revolutionaries often watched and analyzed the
political and social disintegration around them, but they were seldom in a
position to direct it. Usually, as Hannah Arendt observed, "revolution broke out
and liberated, as it were, the professional revolutionists from wherever they
happened to be—from jail, or from the coffee house, or from the library."
Tocqueville similarly observed that the revolutionaries of 1848 “were as
astonished at their triumph as were the vanquished at their defeat."
Disturbances, which during the 18th century would hardly have proven so
incendiary, ignited one revolution after another during the 19th
century. They did so because now there existed a revolutionary model for
responding to crises. During the 1790s, revolutionaries outside of France such
as Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti and Wolfe Tone in Ireland tried simply to
import the French Revolution, with its ideals of nationalism, equality, and
republicanism, and adapt it to local conditions. And well into the 19th
century, more revolutionaries continued to focus their eyes not on the future
but on the past—on what the French during the 1790s had done in roughly similar
circumstances.
Contradictory Meanings of the French Revolution
To be sure, the French Revolution possess different and even contradictory
meanings, differences that reflect the various stages of the historical
Revolution. The ideals and leaders of each stage inspired a particular type of
later revolutionary.
1. The revolutionary men of 1789-91, including the Marquis de Lafayette,
inspired liberal and aristocratic revolutionaries. Their ideal was a
quasi-British constitutional monarchy and suffrage based on property
qualifications. The revolutionaries of 1830-32 realized this liberal vision in
France and Belgium.
2. The Girondins and moderate Jacobins of 1792-93 became the model of
lower-middle-class intellectual revolutionaries whose political goal was a
democratic republic and usually some form of a "welfare state." The French
Revolution of 1848, with its emphasis on universal manhood suffrage, and the
state’s duty to provide jobs for all citizens, initially embodied their vision
of society.
3. A third type of revolutionary, the extremists of 1793-94 such as
Robespierre and Gracchus Babeuf, inspired later working-class and socialist
revolutionaries.
Karl Marx’s Analysis
A reactionary such as Prince Metternich would hardly have distinguished
among these three types of revolutionaries. However, a later observer, Karl
Marx, did. Because the nationalist revolutions of his time ignored the
socialist-radical strain of the French Revolution, he came to deplore its
influence on later revolutionaries.
Marx, who by 1848 was already active in communist politics; condemned what
he considered the confusion of understanding in most of these revolutionary
movements. An emotional yearning to reenact the dramas of 1789-1815 seemed to
him to stand in the way of a successful revolutionary strategy. In a letter to a
friend in September, 1870, Marx wrote: "The tragedy of the French, and of the
working class as a whole, is that they are trapped in their memories of
momentous events. We need to see an end, once and for all, to this reactionary
cult of the past."
Lenin’s Analysis
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had no such reservations. He passed up no rhetorical
opportunity to present his Russian Bolsheviks as the heirs of the French
revolutionary tradition and the Russian Revolution of 1917 as a reenactment of
France’s Revolution of 1789. Lenin went so far as to call his Bolshevik faction,
"the Jacobins of contemporary Social Democracy."
It is not difficult to understand Lenin’s motives. Throughout the 19th
century, most of the successful revolutions in Europe and Latin America had been
nationalist revolutions. (Indeed, when the revolutionary German liberals of 1848
issued their Declaration of Rights, they ascribed those rights to German Volk as
a whole and not to private persons.) But the example of the French Revolution
suggested that a revolution could be more than just a matter of nationalism.
Taking the example of the French Revolution under the fanatical Robespierre, one
could argue, as Lenin did, that the true goal of revolution was to alter the way
people lived together, socially, and economically.
Yet, as we know, Lenin looked back on a century when attempts at radical
social revolutions had been ultimately and uniformly abortive. The French
Revolution of 1848, which removed the "liberal" King Louis-Philippe, briefly
gave greater power to the working class. During its most promising days, the
anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) even accepted a seat in the
legislative chamber. But the coup d’état of Napoleon III in 1851 soon ended all
this. The communist movement, which Marx described as a specter haunting Europe,
produced no more tangible results than most specters do. Before World War I,
Marx was notably less influential as a theoretician than were the champions of
"revolutionary socialism" such as Proudhon and Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864).
They persuaded the workers that reform and democratic processes would better
served their interests than would revolution.
Effect of World War I
It was World War I that put revolutionary socialism back on the agenda. The
"war to end all wars" gave Lenin the opportunity to persuade the world that he
could repeat the French Revolution as a communist revolution in, of all places,
Russia. Not only did the upheavals of war play into his hands but the ideology
and propaganda adopted by the Allied powers in World War I did so as well. When
their early military campaigns went badly, the Allies attempted to make the war
more popular, and the enormous casualties more tolerable, by declaring their
cause to be a war for "liberty." In the name of liberty, Great Britain, France,
and the United States encouraged the subject nations of the German, Austrian and
Turkish empires to throw off the imperial yoke.
But in championing national liberty, the Allies were guilty of hypocrisy.
Neither Great Britain nor France intended to permit nationalist revolutions
within their own empires or those of any neutral power. But Lenin was able to
catch them in the trap of their own contradictions.
Bolshevik Revolution and Radical Revolutions of the 20th Century
Lenin declared to the world that the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 was
a reenactment of the French Revolution. He thus attached to his regime all
those strong, if mixed, emotions which the French Revolution had kindled in the
outside world from 1789 on. In symbolic way, both large and small—such as naming
one of their first naval ships Marat, after the French revolutionary
leader—the early Soviets underscored their connection with the earlier
revolution. A war-weary world saw the efforts of the Allied powers to send in
troops to save Tsarist Russia from the Bolsheviks as a reactionary,
counter-revolutionary "White Terror," and public opinion soon put an end to that
intervention.
After 1917, the Soviet Union’s self-image became less that of a
revolutionary regime and more that of a well-established socialist empire. This
transition unexpectedly enabled its adherents at last to obey Marx’s injunction
to abolish the cult of the revolutionary past and to fix their eyes on the
present. The idea of revolution thus passed from the left to the ultra-left, to
Stalin and Trotsky and, later, to Mao Zedong and his Cultural Revolution in
China.
Yet even during the extreme phase of the Cultural Revolution, Mao still
evinced his debt to the French Revolution, a debt which he shares with the later
"Third World’ revolutionaries. Whenever revolutionary leaders from Ho Chi Minh
and Frantz Fanon to Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega, speak of a new man, or of
restructuring a whole society, or of creating a new human order, they are
echoing the ideas and assumptions first sounded during the French Revolution.
Cultural Revolution
In fact, Robespierre set afoot in France a "cultural revolution." If he had
lived, he would have tried to bring it to completion. As a disciple of Rousseau,
he believed that existing culture had corrupted modern man in all classes of
society, and that an entirely new culture was necessary if men were to recover
their natural goodness. Robespierre introduced new religious institutions—the
cult of the Supreme Being, worship of Truth at the altar of Reason, and the new
patriotic festivals to replace religious holidays—and he intended all to be part
of a cultural revolution. Robespierre did not believe that political, social,
and economic changes alone, however radical, would enable men to achieve their
full humanity.
Defeat of the Radical Revolution in France
But while the ideals and the language of the cultural revolution sound
nobler than those of the political revolution, such elevation of thought seems
only to authorize greater cruelty in action. Robespierre’s domination of the
French Revolution lasted for only a short period, from April 1793 until July
1794, when he himself died under the same guillotine he had used to execute his
former friends and supposed enemies. Moderation was restored to the French
Revolution after his execution by the least idealistic of its participants—a
cynical Talleyrand, pusillanimous Sieyès, and a crudely ambitious Napoleon.
Likewise, the Chinese admirers of Richard Nixon restored moderation to the
Chinese Revolution. Yet while moderation returned to the real historical French
Revolution, later revolutionaries often conveniently ignored the inevitability
of the return to "normalcy."
The Effect of the Revolution on France—The Triumph of Bureaucracy
And what of France itself? At first glance, all the major subsequent "dates"
of French history seem to be in a revolutionary tradition or at least of
revolutionary magnitude. These include 1830 (Louis-Philippe); 1848 (the Second
Republic); 1852 (the Second Empire); 1871 (the Third Republic); 1940 (the Vichy
French State); 1945 (the Fourth Republic); 1958 (the Fifth Republic). Yet these
headline dates, all suggesting recurrent tumult, may be misleading: France has
not been wracked by major upheavals nor by social earthquakes that left the
structure of society unrecognizable, as Russia and China were after their
revolutions. Continuity may be the most striking feature in French life. Robert
and Barbara Anderson’s Bus Stop to Paris (1965) showed how a village not
more than 10 miles from Paris remained unaffected year after year by all the
great rumblings in the capital. Are we dealing with a revolution whose myth is
out of proportion to the facts?
Tocqueville offers an answer: The major change effected by the Bourbon kings
during the 17th and 18th centuries was the increasing
centralization of France and the creation of a strong bureaucracy to administer
it. This bureaucracy, in effect, ruled France then and has continued to rule it
through every social upheaval and behind every facade of constitutional change.
This bureaucracy has provided stability and continuity through the ups and downs
of political fortune. The French Revolution and Napoleon, far from making an
abrupt break with the past, continued and even hastened the tendency toward
bureaucratic centralization.
Tocqueville suggested the French Revolution had never happened, that events
not only looked theatrical but were theatrical. The French could afford to have
as many revolutions as they pleased, because no matter what laws they enacted,
or what persons they placed in their legislative and executive offices, the same
civil servants remained in command.
The Revolutionary Myth
How many revolutions can the historian cite as having left the people better
off at the end than they were at the beginning? Unfortunately, the discrepancy
between its myth and its reality may have made the French Revolution a deceptive
model for other nations to imitate. The myth treated society like a neutral,
ahistorical protoplasm from which old corrupt institutions could be extracted
and into which new rules for human interaction could be inserted at will. The
reality was that France, with its unusually strong state bureaucracy, could
withstand the shocks and traumas of radical constitutional upheaval.
In modern history, revolution often seems a luxury that only privileged
peoples such as the French and the Americans and the English can afford. Less
fortunate peoples, from the Russians in 1918 to the Cambodians in 1975, on whom
the burden of the established regimes weighed more cruelly, have often enacted
their revolutions with catastrophic results. It is perhaps one of the harsher
ironies of history that, since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the more a
country appears to need a revolution, the less likely it will be able to
accomplish one successfully.
For more on Liberal Capitalism, the French Revolution, the Revolutionary
Wars,
and the Napoleonic Period see:
Sources for General History
http://www.vwc.edu/wwwpages/dgraf/ and
http://www.vwc.edu/wwwpages/~dgraf/
Professor Daniel Graf. Contains excellent maps and links to many primary source
documents. Look through index for the 18th Century.
Facsimiles of French Revolutionary Pamphlets
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/homes/mark/fr_rev.html
Napoleonic Correspondence
http://www.wtj.com/pl/pages/napoln2.htm
In French and English.
Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia
http://www.interknowledge.com/russia/rushis05.htm
Official Site of the Russian National Tourist Office. In June of 1812, Napoleon
began his fatal Russian campaign, a landmark in the history of the destructive
potential of warfare.
JOURNAL 4 QUESTIONS
After reading the material above; McNeill,
The Human Community: The Democratic and Industrial Revolutions; and "The
French Revolution in the Minds of Men;" please answer the following questions in
your journal.
1. Briefly compare and contrast the ideas of the mercantilists, the Physiocrats,
Adam Smith, and the Classical Economists (Ricardo and Malthus).
2. What are the four modes of American Republicanism? Describe them. Think about
your own political ideology and (sub-) conscious political and social
assumptions. Where do you fit in the scheme described above on American
Republicanism? Briefly Explain. Where have American ideals fallen short?
3. Referring to “The French Revolution in the Minds of Men,” describe the
various views/myths regarding the French Revolution. How do these myths conform
to reality.
4. The slogan of the French Revolutionaries was "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality."
What are the meanings of these words, and what contradictions can you find in
trying to create a society based on all three of the words at once?
5. What is the idea of "popular sovereignty" and how did the French Revolution
develop it? How does the idea of "popular sovereignty" support democracy and
totalitarian dictatorship? How do the ideas of Rousseau support democracy and
totalitarian dictatorship? Define and describe the term, "Jacobin totalitarian
dictatorship."
6. Describe the course of
capitalist, bourgeois industrialization in England and elsewhere. How did industrialization
affect the way people lived and earned their livings?
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