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Reflections on the Revolution in France
I was reading my Burke, as one does, and it occurred to me to wonder: What would the world look like today if the French Revolution had never happened? Burke, of course, imagines it would all have been quite better:
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 shamed despotism from the earth, by showing that freedom was not only reconcilable, but, as, when well disciplined, it is, auxiliary to law. You would have had an unoppressive, but a productive revenue. You would have had a flourishing commerce to feed it. 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, not to overlay it; you would have had a liberal order of commons, to emulate and to recruit that nobility; you would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions,—in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove, and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an humble state as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid, but not more happy.
But is it so? Counterfactual history is hard to do, but imagine that the French Revolution had been stillborn. What would the world look like today?
Published in General
I like liberty and fraternity but equality is hard to define. I don’t think they have to be contradictory, do they? I suppose the way equality is being used today makes it problematic. Equality before the law sounds about right but other forms that involve the government involved in that determination does seem to be where things go wrong.
Leftists can go after any word, though — nothing is safe in the post modern world.
I forgot to say how good it is to have you back, Claire. Thanks for returning. Please say hi to your wonderful and funny and delightful father.
What a delightful writing style you have always had — makes me want to read anything you write about.
I don’t keep my Brumaire by my bedside — it stinks too much. Marx’s sweat seemed to seep into everything he touched.
Marx’s dysfunctions stem from the labor theory of value and a hatred for his immediate family. He spun his hatred for power imbalance in his family into all of history. If the French Revolution hadn’t offered him an opportunity for flawed analysis he would’ve found something else. The Labor theory of value was what made Marxism attractive not the prospect of populist success offered by the revolution.
Mr She is fond of saying that, if you keep moving further and further to the Right, you’ll eventually go so far that you end up meeting up with the Left, coming round from the other way, and vice-versa. And that there’s very little difference between the two at that point. That was exactly the point I took from your comment and the very illuminating article you linked to.
I cannot really conjecture an answer to the main question posed in the post, but it causes much distress to see the American colonies’ Declaration of Independence and subsequent conflict to confirm that separation from Britain to be thought a revolution in the same sense as the revolution in France, or in Russia more than a century later. The men who gathered in Philadelphia and produced the Declaration were, as Russell Kirk described them, members of a natural aristocracy with extensive governing experience, as were most of those who framed the Constitution. On the contrary, the French revolutionaries had little governing experience or knowledge, other than the theories of their philosophers, the best of whom (Baron de Montesquieu) was ignored by his countrymen. I always try to avoid the use of the term ‘Revolution’ when referencing the American ‘War for Independence’, to avoid comparisons to the insanity to occur in France later.
I’m always suspicious of the press and Europeans characterizing anyone as “right-wing” or “conservative” among the governing elite over there. I’ve been wondering how Le Pen supposedly qualifies as a right-winger. Apparently it has to do with her antisemitism? Which is almost wholly the terrain of Islamists and the Left the world over. The Left is forever projecting its own vices onto conservatives. Given her economic policies, it sounds to me like Le Pen is an antisemitic leftist — but, I repeat myself.
History is more chaotic than a double pendulum. The future, even in retrospect, is not computable.
How much was Marx’s worldview affected by the French Revolution and how much was formed by Hegel? Hegel posited a perfect administrative state (led by philosopher kings or philosopher administrators or similar phantasmic creatures) which would lead men to an earthly paradise.
Hegel rejected separation of powers, and specialization of responsibilities (built into English common law and the American Constitution) in favor of an unspecialized all-powerful administrative state. Marx borrowed from that.
In a sense, both Hegel’s administrative state and Marxism reject the specialization of Adam Smith, returning to an earlier, generalist view of the world, one that fit better with the world of the middle ages than with the modern era.
Again, these trends were present in Continental Europe before the French Revolution began. In a sense, the French Revolution is a Continental phenomena, one that fits better with the administrative ideals than with the American Revolutionary ideals (or English jurisprudence). The French revolutionaries were closer in spirit to Europe’s “modernizing” enlightened despots (Frederick the Great, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great) than they were to George Washington or Benjamin Franklin.
Seawriter
If there had been no French Revolution, with the images of a bare breasted Liberte, there would be no Page Three Girls.
Where would our culture be without Bikini Models and Page 3 Girls, not to mention Bond Girls.
Levity about French Soft-Core Pornographers aside, I have no idea what the world would be like if there had been no French Revolution.
We are where we are because of where we have been. We can decide where to go based on what we have done in the past.
The most important lesson of the French Revolution is that behind the most ardent of Idealists are Power Hungry Liars using the Idealists to mask their intent. Sometimes the Liars are able to play at being Idealists long enough to advance their interests. And sometimes the Idealists don’t realize they are becoming Power Hungry Liars.
Not sometimes. Always.
Seawriter
I recently read The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle, and just finished Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Unfortunately, my formal education did not cover the French Revolution, and sensing its centrality to the formation of the modern world, I am trying to get educated. Off topic, but I have a few questions: First, considering the Revolution’s Terror, destructiveness, and resulting military dictatorship, why is it celebrated in France? It seems like modern China celebrating its Cultural Revolution, doesn’t it? Second, why do my lefty friends persist in warning me that the 1% are setting the ground for one here (and secretly hoping for one as well)? Why do they think it work out well for them? And finally, how can the American educational system ignore this piece of history? Thanks.
I think some of what the French Revolution set in motion was always part of human nature. I think the savagery of the revolution in Corcyra in book 3 of Thucydides.
What has been on mind though, is how some people can look at the terrible things that came out of the Revolution and strive to achieve some of the revolutionary goals without the descent in slaughter? The Reign of Terror is less a cautionary tale than a how-to.
Because the events set in train by the Revolution created a series of events making France the world’s greatest power. Yes, it was a brief reign. But it marked the only time France was close to becoming “King of the World.” Not even the Sun King got as close as Napoleon.
Imagine Al Bundy pining for his moments of greatness on the high school football field. Expand that to a nation that today is figuratively selling women’s shoes instead of conquering the gridiron.
Seawriter.
As science began unraveling the mysteries of the physical world, and the human race became infatuated with its own intellectual brilliance, it was inevitable that we would come to imagine ourselves clever enough to engineer a completely new society that would finally solve the problems of tyranny, injustice and poverty. But it takes far more wisdom to understand why we’ll never be that clever. Had utopian revolution not been born in France, it would have emerged sooner or later somewhere else. It is a stage of history that cannot be bypassed, because the human race cannot acquire that wisdom without experiencing the utopian failure.
Yet the history of that failure is matched by our resistance to learning its lessons. Getting to the other side of utopianism appears to be a multi-century project that we’re somewhere in the middle of. Each utopian iteration looks sufficiently different from the last that its partisans think “This time we’ll succeed,” yet the differences are superficial.
So perhaps we should be grateful that the French Revolution happened as early as it did, to begin this painful learning process. Too bad we won’t be around to see the end of it.
Gee, I was hoping that Barack Obama is young enough that he might see the beginning of the end of it.
How do you come by your notions of the timeline on this?
Just paraphrasing here, but the Left we will always have with us. The utopian conceit seems to be a human failing. I don’t think we’ll ever learn — at least not collectively, ironically.
American revolutionaries received that assistance from Louis XVI. High cost of this assistance led to economic woes that added to his unpopularity and eventually the FrenchRevolution. Franco-American relations under Napoleon were generally lukewarm at best. Major point of contention was trade, which suffered because of Napoleon’s attempt to embargo trade between Britain and Europe.
Napoleon was no liberal, but he did not put down the Revolution. It was already destroying itself by the time he become Consul. Progressive? Hard to say; more of a modernizer who nevertheless looked back on grand institutions of the past for inspiration and models.
No doubt.
The French Revolution was the first mass utopian revolution. It went sour. It was more than a century before the Bolshevik Revolution tried again, which spawned a century of Communist revolutions that still aren’t quite over. They all thought they wouldn’t make the same mistakes as the Jacobins, but they did, and the bloom is now off the Socialist rose. Now I sense that the worldwide Left is coming to a boil again over a different set of issues, but still based on the same utopian delusion. I think it will take another century, or at least many decades, for this one to fall apart. They may yet think up another utopian dream or two before the idea that utopianism itself is the problem.
But of course, that’s just a wild guess, worth the paper it’s printed on.
Well, Paul, I worry you may be right — as I think over what you say. We do seem to be in for a long hard slog here. If you think of the complete control that the left has over all the vital institutions of this country — it’s truly worrisome that it will take a long time for this to work itself out and self destruct. But, as I said elsewhere tonight:
What gives me a smidgin of hope is that utopianism, as a mass movement, wasn’t always with us in the past. The French Revolution really was its birth.
What gives me another smidgin of hope is that there were people like Edmund Burke who really understood why the first utopian revolution was doomed, and how functioning human cultures really worked, even without the benefit of Adam Smith’s description of the working of economic markets, or Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. We’ve accumulated a lot of knowledge since then.
The way intellectuals gushed about Socialism a century ago seems utterly juvenile today. The Socialist impulse still exists, but in severely chastened form. Hence the turn to other issues, like environmentalism or the abolition of gender. But after experiencing the failures of five or six different kinds of utopianism, perhaps people will see the big picture. However, that’s going to be a long, drawn out process.
Nah. Utopian revolutions have been around forever. Many of the peasant uprisings in medieval Germany (or more accurately the Germanies) were utopian in origin. The Peasant Revolt in Britain during the Hundred Years War was utopian. You can read about it in Froissart. (When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?) For that matter, the Fronde (in France in the mid-1600s) was to a degree utopian.
Seawriter