The Revolution and Terror in France
When the American Revolutionary War was waged, it was unpopular both in England and America. The war was won—astonishingly—by the upstart colonists; and suddenly America was on its own, as the “United States,” embarking on one of the most revolutionary governments of all time, a democracy. It cannot be exaggerated how experimental this new nation seemed to the Europeans. America was an unprecedented ideal and many observers predicted failure and chaos. It also cannot be exaggerated how much Europeans distrusted the very concept of “democracy,” or rule of the “mob.” “Government by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln said later, was a horrifying concept in Europe. And with good reason, from the perspective of the sober middle class, the “dangerous” classes were to be feared. In France, only a few years after the formation of the United States of America, another Revolution occurred in 1789. This one was bloody and violent. The French Revolution was a civil war, a war between the classes, as much as it was a revolution against a King. The American Revolution was one aspiring nation against an oppressive parent nation, but the French went war with themselves. The reasons for the French Revolution were quite different from the causes of the American Revolution. Although inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, the French Revolution began, not with the middle classes, but with the lower classes. The sans coulottes, or the proletariat, had suffered under the heel of the aristocracy. The lower classes, the peasants, were tired, overworked, and hungry and spontaneously rose up to protest their hardships. The proletariat was not inspired by ideas of their “natural rights;” they were hungry. When the ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers filtered down to them, these modern ideas were rejected by the lower classes, who felt threatened by modernity and its attack on a traditional way of life.
Although it may seem counter-intuitive, it was the well-educated aristocrats who supported the Revolution, acting from a moral and philosophical point of view. Those of the upper class who were wealthy and prospering from new economic opportunities had everything to gain from establishing a constitutional monarchy on the lines of England. Although the heroes of the American Revolution, Washington and Lafayette, were greatly admired in France, the ultimate model for the French Revolutionaries was Britain, which had a constitutional monarchy and an established aristocracy. America was too democratic for French needs. By 1788, France was in a crisis of confidence in the rulers, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette who seemed incompetent, indifferent, and positively incontinent when it came to spending money. But it was not the extravagant Marie Antoinette and her famous diamond necklace, which bankrupted France. The French monarch actually cost the French people half of what the British monarchy cost the English. Ironically, the nation’s financial troubles stemmed from its alliance with the American colonies in the War of Independence. The saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” could have been applied to the unhappy French royal family after America became independent. Not that the French were supporting democracy, the French were fighting England for continental and international dominance. All the French wanted to do was to slow the dominance of the British Empire but the law of unintended consequences came into effect: the nation was bankrupt and there were severe food shortages.
The French had gone into debt to finance the Seven Years’ War with England and the desire for revenge had propelled them into another war, using America as their pawn. The war fought for American independence, told from the French perspective, is unrecognizable to an American. The competent French won the war for the incompetent Americans, but great cost. The difficulty of recovering financially after a costly war is still with us today. For example, it took America some twenty years to recover from the expense of the Vietnam War, hence the prosperity of the 1990s. France was a largely feudal nation faced with the coming of modern capitalism but still lacking the modern financial instruments to solve their problems. Then, as now, no one wanted to be taxed to pay for the war, even a war that was so full of celebrated and adored heroes, such as Benjamin Franklin. The war had to be paid for and the King was persuaded to call representatives of the people together to work out a workable tax system to pay for the war. The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau had taken such a hold on the imagination of the ruling class that the King was forced to bend to the logic of “natural law” and “natural rights.” Louis XVI genuinely wanted to be the kind of good ruler demanded by the Enlightenment and called together the Estates General, a representative body with a medieval ancestry. The Estates General, which had not been called since 1616, consisted of the First Estate, the nobles, the Second Estate, the clergy, and the Third Estate, the middle class. The representatives were supposed to solve the problems of France by raising taxes but the men who gathered together began to imagine a new system of government entirely. Rather than helping the King, they eventually deposed the monarchy.
The word of the hour was “citizen,” which also meant patriot or someone who served the patrie or nation, not the King. Originally intended to be an inclusive term, it would later be an excluding term. While the aristocrats limited their revolutionary gestures to divesting themselves of their titles (not their lands or wealth) and privileges, the sans coulottes (who did not wear breeches and hose) desperately needed help. It is one thing to be unhappy with your rulers; it is another thing entirely to be hungry with no prospects for change. The French Revolution began in 1789, the same year the Americans were writing a Constitution, opening dramatically on July 14 with the storming of the Bastille, an infamous but largely empty prison. The Revolution was an unstable entity, driven by mob anger, which led to the Terror of 1793-95. The transfer of power ended with the execution of the King and Queen and a large portion of the aristocratic class. Indeed, many of those titled men who had so passionately supported the Revolution lost their heads to a new invention, the guillotine, because, as aristocrats, they could never be “citizens.”
The French were unfortunate in their leaders, or rather, their lack of real leadership. This revolution thrust up rabble-rousers and demagogues, ambitious and unscrupulous men, all determined to ride the wave of revolution into greater power. In the end, they all wound up victims of the very rage they had stirred up. Although the notorious Committee of Safety was in charge, no one was in control. There were only those who aroused the mod, like Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-Paul Marat, Georges Jacques Danton, and Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Juste. The result was that the Revolution ran wild as the lower classes vented their anger on the aristocrats, during the years known as the Terror from 1793 to 1795. The instrument of Terror was the Committee of Safety, where the major leaders of the Revolution, Robespierre, Danton, and Sainte-Juste, took away all of the rights won by the early years of the Revolution and reinstalled all of the oppressive practices of the monarchy. Added to surveillance, spying and denunciation were massacres, mass executions and near genocide of a single class. In the end the leaders of the mob all went to that instrument of a human and “democratic” death, the guillotine. The power vacuum left behind was to be filled by a new leader, who brought order out of chaos by protecting the French from the European armies, which were advancing towards the country to put an end to the savage rebellion.
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