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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
It might have delayed it, but there still would have been Marxism, which really bore fruit in Russia, because of the social conditions there.
The effects of the French Revolution did go beyond France’s borders in large part because Napoleon’s rise was a direct result of it, so it had the effect of redrawing Europe’s borders.
But I don’t think it’s lack would have significantly effected the trend towards collectivism we saw in the twentieth century.
Unfortunately, I believe “collectivism” is the Devil inside all of us. I imagine the foul sentiments of the French Revolution would have sprung up elsewhere at a slightly later date. The fight against the Left will never end.
Does he say why it wouldn’t have taken place? If the Bourbons had straightened up and flown right instead of spending the highway budget on parquet floors in Versailles perhaps there would have been no French Revolution, but they really didn’t seem inclined to amend their ways in the slightest.
The French Revolution proves the truth of the last sentence cited above: the order of civil life is as crucial for the poor as for the rich. Lose civil order, and it goes bad for everyone.
The uniqueness of the American Revolution was that America (at the time) enjoyed a stable social order which didn’t come from government. The British crown, powerful as it was, really wasn’t a day-to-day participant in American life. And so, when it came time to get rid of the crown, America didn’t lose social order in the process.
Most revolutions don ‘t have that same separation. In revolutionary France, especially, the king was the state. When they got rid of the king, social order went out with the bathwater.
Which argues for the prudence of the conservative model; there’s the government and there’s society, and we limit government so that society can fill its more important role.
These days, we talk about “too big to fail” about banks. But when we don’t limit government, government becomes too big to fail. The America but not the French Revolution succeeded because our government wasn’t too big to fail.
Claire,
I like Burke but in this he is hallucinating. All of the things he says would be true if the French were English but not surprisingly they are French. I think we should talk of what France is doing right now.
Sarkozy seemed as proactive a leader as France could have expected. However, when he wished to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 as people were living a good 10 years longer the country broke down into rioting in the streets. Even Burke would realize from this that the French are French and they are different. With a real tax rate over 50% they proceeded to elect an amazingly lame socialist and double down on exactly the vain expectations Burke was talking about.
Now comes the real question. Can Le Pen lead France away from economic suicide? Here is a question that you Claire are so well qualified to answer. Could Le Pen be the French Mrs. Thatcher?
Regards,
Jim
I suspect we’d all be having our Big Macs with Freedom Fries.
Absolutely not. I have no idea why American conservatives think Le Pen’s philosophy has anything whatsoever to do with their ideals. I don’t know if you read French, but read the FN economic platform. Economically, she’s to the left of the French socialist party–the FN calls for the further nationalisation of energy, banking transport, health and education, and proposes massive protectionist tariffs to protect the French economy from any kind of global competition. Here’s a short but fair summary in English. Between that and the vile anti-Semitism (and anti-Americanism) that surrounds the FN like a sulphurous vapor, I see no point of comparison whatsoever between her and Thatcher.
JG, That French mentality may have been a legacy of the revolution.
AS, Right question, but perhaps the wrong answer.
Sans revolution, France may have been in a better position to learn from and imitate Anglosphere democracy and capitalism. There could have been a chain reaction leading to an improved Russia.
Also, one of the unique things about Russian communism was that three coincidences kept it alive at key times when it should have been killed. First, was the war-weariness of the rest of the world immediate post WWI cutting support for the anti-communist forces. Second was the growth of Nazism which divided the potential anti-communist world in the 1930’s. Third was that a very humane US was the country that developed the bomb.
No Revolution = no Napoleon.
No Napoleon =
1. Less unified German nation with Prussia being less influential,
2. No Louisiana Purchase,
3. Holy Roman Empire holding on a bit longer,
4. Probable delay of the Risorgiomento,
5. Probable delay in Independence movements in South America,
6. Probable liberalization of Spain by mid-19th century,
7. Rapprochement of UK and the United States by the 1830’s, to name a few.
I’d prefer to be governed by Burke than by Voltaire.
This will be a popular topic well beyond Ricochet in a few months, thanks to a best-selling historical-fiction video game series (produced by Ubisoft in France, no less) which is focused on the French Revolution next:
Without Napoleon, would American Revolutionaries had received French naval assistance and won our own independence?
Would modern liberals remember Napoleon fondly if he had not put down the revolution they so admire? After all, didn’t Napoleon institute public education and other progressive milestones?
Sans Napoleon, there still could have been a conflict between France and the US and/or UK over Louisiana.
Socialism is built on a foundation of envy (aka equality), and a favorite tactic of demagogues because it appeals so easily to base human emotions. You will notice that Mosaic Law commands its adherents not to covet, which is pretty much the same thing as envy. Burke is quite correct in his recognition that liberty can only exist where the populace maintains a code of behavior based on personal virtue. Confucius and Aurelius were explicitly moral philosophers who recommended that virtue be cultivated in the attitude of being content with one’s lot in life.
The French Revolution is but the repetition of a pattern. The English Levelers provided an early antecedent for socialism in what we would describe today as an appeal to class warfare. Part of the antidote, it seems to me, would be to educate a body politic to elect its leaders based on personal virtue. I’m not sure if Jefferson mentioned personal virtue as the characteristic of a natural aristocracy, but the idea seems to make sense.
I’m sure we’d have found another way to kill ourselves -it seems to be our lot in life -but that doesn’t relieve the French Revolution of its sins. Louis consented to a Constitutional Monarchy and a quite good constitution, whether he intended to live up to it, we’ll never know because the Jacobins never gave him the chance. France could’ve been great.
Without the Jacobins, there is no Reign of Terror, no Thermidor Reaction, no General War, no Napoleon, no wars of National Liberation. Nationalism would have taken on a completely different meaning -more akin to the Patriotism of the US. European Colonialism would have looked completely different, more universalist and less exploitive (still exploitive, but not the wholesale rape of Africa and Asia). There would be no Franco-Prussian War, and if WWI happened, it would have looked more like the 7 years war rather than the giant multi-fronted mess it was. No Bolsheviks, Russia -even in Revolution -becomes another Constitutional Monarchy, no WWII -absent potent anti-communism, the Nazis find no support in Germany. Imperial Japan faces a united Europe and is nipped quickly. No Cold War. No Korea. No Vietnam.
Okay, I’ll say it: Sabrdance – “nipped?” Really?
[Sorry! :) I don’t have the historical or intellectual chops for this conversation, but I can add a facetious comment almost any time.]
Claire,
I had no idea! (However, I asked the right person.) The French are completely through the looking glass into wonderland. Default doesn’t just lie with Argentina. The French motto should be we have met the enemy and they are us. Hollande’s program is to tell them exactly what want to hear and then run to Andrea Merkel to get a loan to keep from going under.
Instead of imagining what France would have been without the Revolution, wouldn’t it be more interesting to imagine what France would be like with say only a 40% tax rate and a rational attitude to social welfare.
Now I’m hallucinating.
Regards,
Jim
Cuisine would have been altered irrevocably.
Ann Coulter sees a direct line back through time to the French Revolution as being continuous with Communism and Progressives of today. I think she’s right but would add that it really was a zeitgeist that had its own momentum for that era. We were lucky with our revolution and I think KC is correct above in pointing out how different we were as a country. Unfortunately, the success of the American revolution fooled some Frenchmen into thinking it was the revolution itself that gave us what we had and not that the revolution was the midwife to the healthy child already gestating.
No, it was the French monarchy (with prodding by Benjamin Franklin) that supported our independence. Napoleon comes after.
Also see Tocqueville: The Old Regime and the French Revolution. It’s been a while since I read it, but one thing he points out is that the bureaucratic nature of French government long predated the Revolution.
The French motto: liberty, equality, fraternity. Completely contradictory and impossible. The American motto: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Not contradictory, possible. This is perhaps the underlying reason for how lucky our revolution was in comparison to theirs; would you agree Larry?
Napoleon’s reign was well after the the American Revolution. Louis XVI was the monarch that reigned during the war. He had not lost his head yet. Napoleon was around 14 when the American Revolutionary War ended, and began his military career when he was twenty-five.
He did reign during the Louisiana purchase, and the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States (well most of it). I don’t think he had much of a direct effect on that war. I don’t know how distracted the British were with Napoleon (probably a lot), and how that factored into the United States’s decision to go to war against Britain, and how it effected the outcome (the still nascent U.S. almost lost that war).
I am currently reading The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the 19th Century, by Jürgen Osterhammel. A magisterial work, it is over 900 pages. I am about halfway through. He covers the revolutions of the 19th Century and their precursors in the 18th (American and French) comprehensively.
Based on that book, as well as what I have read and written earlier, I have to conclude given the American Revolution a subsequent French Revolution was inevitable. It did not have to be the Reign of Terror, but the ancien regime was on its way out.
However, the worst excesses of the French Revolution and subsequent Marxist and absolutist governments following it were less the product of that revolution than they were baked in the European cake, due to the legal system prevalent everywhere on Europe except Britain. Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? makes it pretty clear the continental legal system, which avoids enumerated power and centralizes power in an administrative state create the excesses we associate with the French Revolution, Marxism and European “isms.”
Hamburger’s book is important and should be read widely. Please read my review of it to see why.
Seawriter
It’s difficult to answer this question because the nature of the French Revolution was so very repugnant- the slaughter of monarchy and clergy and the imprisonment of one of the world’s greatest heroes, Lafayette, and the torture of his immediate family. (In fact, I’ve never forgiven Jefferson for his enthusiastic support of the Jacobins.)
By comparison, the American Revolution was a ‘war of words’- documents, declarations and constitutions.
I wonder how these marked differences reflect upon the nature of the two countries.
Ah, that’s the connection I was half-remembering. Thanks for the correction.
This is a tough question. I can’t imagine, even counterfactually, that the French Monarchy could have continued as it was–so the question is what kind of change would have happened.
Had it been more like the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, it’s conceivable that France could have ended up transitioning to a constitutional monarch a la Britain. That, in turn, would likely have kept the Napoleonic wars from happening, or made war between France and Britain very different.
In the longer term, the industrial revolution would still have occurred, urbanization would have occurred, and Marx would still have been Marx. Nineteenth century French history would have been dramatically different, but the bigger arcs of history would, I believe, have been much the same.
In literature, we would have been robbed of War and Peace, A Tale of Two Cities, and The Scarlet Pimpernel.
Would Victor Hugo have written Les Miserables, or something completely different? To think we could have been spared those wretched musicals..
Mr Obama tried such a thing in America, but it kinda failed.
Kinda – all that are missing are the Guillotines, with peasants next to ’em, knitting. BTW, whatever happened to those American peasants with pitchforks? Oh, yes, they are collecting food stamps.
Meanwhile, in France, in the next incarnation, the Revolution failed under Mr Hollande – Socialism always does, according to Mrs Thatcher.