Six on The French Revolution: Lessons of the French Revolution; French Revolution - Storming the Bastille; Tearing Up History; The French revolutionary origins of national self-determination; Charlotte Corday: The Assassin Who 'Killed One Man To Save
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"Other than the American Revolution, the French Revolution is the political event of modernity with the longest-lasting influence. Both revolutions created new regimes (although only America’s lasted) and advanced political ideals that still resonate around the world. It is not a surprise that famous politicians of recent times still assess an upheaval that occurred 200 years ago in a different nation than their own: “It resulted in a lot of headless corpses and a tyrant” was Margaret Thatcher’s verdict on its 200th birthday. Zhou Enlai was less certain, suggesting that even after 175 years, it was “too soon to tell” about the revolution’s ultimate significance.
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Louis XVI was not unintelligent, but his entire education and routine left him unfit to understand his nation, let alone deal shrewdly with a political cataclysm. His lessons as a youngster focused on the glorious past of his ancestors, and his routine as an adult confined his experience, giving him few opportunities to meet with people outside fawning courtiers. It is thus not surprising that Bourbons like Louis “learned nothing and forgot nothing” in Talleyrand’s well-known jibe. Incredibly, Louis XVI journeyed outside the environs of Paris only once before his failed attempt to escape abroad in 1791.
In contrast, Menetra traveled around much of France. While he was not well-educated, he was literate and skilled in creating social (not to mention sexual) networks wherever he went. The country, Popkin implies, was full of Menetras. Their collective power and intelligence overmatched a monarchy that had few reliable sources of information and a self-understanding that was at least a century out of date.
Nevertheless, I believe Popkin could have done more with his framing device by briefly juxtaposing Menetra with a skilled and propertied artisan of the American colonies just prior to their Revolution. The important contrast there is that for all his worldliness Menetra had no experience of popular government. Even those colonists who did not vote heard through newspapers about their colonial assemblies, and many Americans of Menetra’s class actually participated in governance. The representative assemblies of colonial America before its revolution thus sharply contrast with the complete absence of any popular input into government in France.
To be sure, the French monarchy was not absolutist. The most important restraints on its power were thirteen “parlements” that sat throughout the country. These were not legislatures, however, but judges, often holding hereditary office. While they sometimes opposed the King, they were nobles themselves, not republican schoolmasters educating their countrymen in the exercise of popular responsibility. When in 1789 the King summoned an Estates General, a legislative assembly composed of the three classes of nobles, religious officials, and commoners, it was the first time it had met since 1612!
As a result, people like Menetra had no sense of the give-and-take of representative government, and no appreciation of pluralism. The absence of this tradition helps explain why the Revolution, from the taking of the Bastille on, was again and again propelled by popular uprisings when part of the population either became incensed at some turn of events or was manipulated to support a faction in the National Assembly, the body that rapidly succeeded the Estates General when the commoners declared themselves a unicameral assembly. Americans were skilled at compromise because of their long experience of representation in the colonies, but the French relied on direct and violent action, being wholly unschooled in any institution of representative government.
Edmund Burke observed that French philosphes abetted the violence of the Revolution because their abstract theories did not grow organically from political experience. But France had not even fledgling democratic experience on which their political philosophers could draw. As Bernard Bailyn makes clear in his great book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,
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"Before she was executed, Charlotte Corday allegedly said, “I killed one man to save 100,000.” Ironically, thousands of royalists and Girondins would soon meet a fate similar to Corday in reprisals for his death.
Furthermore, it was Marat that became a martyr figure in France after the high-profile murder — not Corday. In addition, many women were hesitant to show support for Corday’s beliefs after the assassination — especially since they thought her actions hurt their ongoing struggle for equality.
By September 1793, the Reign of Terror — a period of purges, repressions, and beheadings — began, led by Maximilien Robespierre. So Corday’s actions certainly didn’t curb violence. If anything, perhaps the assassination inspired even more bloodshed."
The French Revolution: Tearing Up History - Full BBC Documentary
"What was so revolutionary about the French Revolution? The question might seem impertinent at a time like this, when all the world is congratulating France on the two hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the destruction of feudalism, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. But the bicentennial fuss has little to do with what actually happened two centuries ago.
Historians have long pointed out that the Bastille was almost empty on July 14, 1789. Many of them argue that feudalism had already ceased to exist by the time it was abolished, and few would deny that the rights of man were swallowed up in the Terror only five years after they were first proclaimed. Does a sober view of the Revolution reveal nothing but misplaced violence and hollow proclamations—nothing more than a “myth,” to use a term favored by the late Alfred Cobban, a skeptical English historian who had no use for guillotines and slogans?
One might reply that myths can move mountains. They can acquire a rock-like reality as solid as the Eiffel Tower, which the French built to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the Revolution in 1889. France will spend millions in 1989, erecting buildings, creating centers, producing concrete contemporary expressions of the force that burst loose on the world two hundred years ago. But what was it?
Although the spirit of ’89 is no easier to fix in words than in mortar and brick, it could be characterized as energy—a will to build a new world from the ruins of the regime that fell apart in the summer of 1789. That energy permeated everything during the French Revolution. It transformed life, not only for the activists trying to channel it in directions of their own choosing but for ordinary persons going about their daily business."
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