It was Charles James Fox, leader of the British Whig party, who first proclaimed of the French Revolution: “How much the greatest event that has happened in the history of the world, and how much the best.” With the benefit of hindsight, we may well disagree on both counts, but there is no denying the indelible mark that it has left on humanity.
The Revolution is fixed forever in our collective memory as a series of gruesome tableaux: the storming of the Bastille; the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; the assassination of Marat in his bath by Charlotte Corday; Danton, Robespierre, and the Committee of Public Safety; the tumbrils, the tricoteuses, and above all, the guillotine. Every political uprising since 1789 has striven, with greater or lesser success, to avoid re-enacting the primal revolutionary fate of devouring its own children.
Hence, the story must be retold for each generation, in the light of contemporary experience. In John Hardman’s new account, The French Revolution: A Political History, two centuries of historiography are distilled into a concise, compelling, and vividly reimagined narrative. He is, of course, standing on the shoulders of giants. In the mid-nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville and Jules Michelet set the standard—both are still cited by Hardman—while Thomas Carlyle’s monumental epic anticipated modern cinematic treatments.
In the twentieth century, the shadow of communism fell over the scholarship of the French Revolution, setting in stone the Marxist fixation on the class struggle and the triumph of the bourgeoisie. It was not until the waning of the Soviet Union that contrarian voices could make themselves heard above a French consensus that tended to ascribe a kind of historical inevitability to what had become the mythical foundation of the republic. After the fall of the Berlin Wall—an event as cataclysmic in its way as the fall of the Bastille—it became possible again to discuss the pathology of violence bequeathed by the Revolution and, more generally, the contingency of its course.
The stale Marxist orthodoxy that impersonal forces, not individuals, make history was challenged, in particular by François Furet (1927–97), who saw the Revolution less as a class struggle than a battle of ideas. As a disillusioned Communist himself, he was acutely aware of the totalitarian implications of the revolutionary tradition and its baleful effect on the French intelligentsia. His books dismantled their uncritical reception of the Revolution, and in The Passing of an Illusion, his late study of communism, he directly addressed the sinister legacy of the Terror.
Nearly two and a half centuries after the French Revolution, it is high time to consider just how radical was the transformation it wrought.
“The French Jacobins of 1793, who were supposed to inaugurate the reign of the bourgeoisie, provide the first massive example of bourgeois who detest bourgeois in the name of bourgeois principles,” he wrote. “If they were so admired and imitated by the European Left in the following century, it was because they had lent an unforgettable form to the destruction of the bourgeois spirit.”
In Roads to Modernity, Gertrude Himmelfarb famously compared the British, French, and American enlightenments. She argued that the French emphasis on “the ideology of reason” helped explain why the overthrow of the monarchy generated such intolerant, bloody, and irreconcilable conflicts, while the American focus on the practical politics of liberty led to a very different kind of revolution.
Indeed, Anglo-American historians of the Revolution have tended to favour a more empirical approach than the French themselves. When I was at Oxford in the 1970s, the acknowledged master of this field was Richard Cobb, for whom no detail of “the people’s armies” and the sans culottes was too insignificant. His was a “history from below” shorn of the usual Marxist theory, but imbued with an experimental quality that owed much to the novelist, poet, and publisher Raymond Queneau. A Cobb lecture, even on occasions when he was sober, was as likely to veer off into colourful autobiography as the minutiae of revolutionary politics.
Building on Cobb’s documentary erudition and literary flair, but with an emphasis on high politics, John Hardman has produced a superb synthesis that will bring the Revolution alive for general readers. He seeks answers to the question of how an enterprise that began with paeans to the new dawn from poets such as William Wordsworth could culminate in the terrible judgement of Madame de Staël, the daughter of Necker, one of Louis XVI’s last ministers, and who would later become one of Europe’s leading female celebrities. In October 1793, at the height of the Terror, she declared: “Hell stalks the earth.”
In our time, when democracy and republicanism have been taken for granted for perhaps too long, it is worth remembering that the overwhelming majority of the French population in 1789 had no expectation of or desire for either. At most, they would have hoped for constitutional government. By this, they meant that the king’s prerogatives should be limited, the power and profligacy of the court checked, and the burden of taxation controlled and more fairly distributed by at least indirectly representative institutions.
What actually happened, however, was of course quite different. As in the case of the so-called “Long Parliament” in the English Civil War, the Estates-General summoned by the King to raise taxes and air grievances became a Frankenstein’s monster. First it morphed into a vehicle for the third estate to dispense with the first two, the nobility and clergy. Then it reconstituted itself as the National Assembly. Having turned against the monarchy, under the influence of the Jacobin Club, and declared France a republic, the Assembly renamed itself the National Convention. Having by now transformed France into an elective dictatorship, this sanguinary crew did not just ignore dissent across much of the country—it sent armies to massacre the insurgents.
What the Revolution did contribute to the history of democracy was a distinction that has lasted to the present day: that between Left and Right. The radical “patriotic” party sat to the left of the Assembly’s president, while the conservative monarchiens (monarchists) sat to his right. As the revolution evolved, the names, ideologies, and social composition of the two parties changed too—but the binary structure of politics remained. Now known as the Montagne (mountain) because their deputies occupied the highest seats in the Convention, the Left confronted the Right, now consisting of the moderate Girondins. What the Revolution utterly failed to embrace was the British notion (also adopted by the newly independent American colonists) of a “loyal opposition.” Any division in what Rousseau had called the “general will” of the people was deemed by his disciple Robespierre to be treasonous.
The most Left-wing Jacobins or Montagnards, who formed Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, now unleashed the Terror against their fellow revolutionaries, the Girondins. In the bloodbath that followed, any separation of powers between the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary was dissolved. By killing all its rivals, removing all accountability, and concentrating all power in its own hands, the Left ultimately paved the way for a young general from Corsica, Napoleon Bonaparte, to mount a coup d’état in 1799.
What of liberté, egalité, fraternité: the three principles that were the rallying cry of the Revolution? Fraternity, the much vaunted brotherhood of man, was sacrificed at the first whiff of grapeshot. Robespierre and his lieutenants showed no mercy to those who opposed him. When the citizens of Lyons resisted, they were shot en masse. “Lyon n’est plus” (“Lyons no longer exists”) was his chilling epitaph. Louis XVI was allowed to die with some dignity, but Marie Antoinette was dispatched in the most humiliating fashion.
Hardman makes the acute observation that most of the deputies in the original third estate, and hence the Assembly and Convention, had some kind of legal qualification. At first they took refuge in procedure; later, when it came to putting the king and queen on trial, they had to improvise the rules. No written evidence was admitted at the trial of Marie Antoinette, for example. They might justify the deposing of monarchs and aristocrats in the name of egalité, but before the Revolutionary Tribunal, there was no more equality before the law than anywhere else. By the end, the revolutionaries had whittled down the legal niceties to the bare minimum: when Robespierre fell, he was merely declared an outlaw and promptly executed without even a show trial. Hardman concludes: “The tragedy of the French Revolution is that the rule of lawyers failed to bring about the rule of law.”
John Hardman’s elegant, erudite and evocative French Revolution: A Political History explains how the France we know emerged from the grand guignol of the guillotine.
If the Revolution failed to establish the rule of law, what about the citizens’ promised liberty? The “sea-green incorruptible”—as Carlyle dubbed Robespierre on account of his zealous reputation and ghastly complexion—had no more compassion for his comrades than for his enemies. “Whoever trembles is guilty,” he told the Convention in order to silence a speaker defending his friend and rival Danton. Imprisoned alongside Thomas Paine, Danton told him (he spoke better English than Paine did French): “I tried in vain to do what you did for the liberty and happiness of your people [i.e. the Americans].” In reality, the Revolution was a disaster for both liberty and happiness. The France of the Enlightenment, which had sown the seeds of freedom, was brought to an untimely end. What emerged instead was a police state, which continued to extend its powers even under the successors of Robespierre: the “men of Thermidor,” the Directory, and Bonaparte.
No figure comes better out of Hardman’s pages than Danton, the only one of the leading revolutionaries who displayed genuine moral courage and political sense. But he was under no illusions about the havoc he and his fellow Jacobins had wrought. “I am leaving things in a terrible mess. No one understands the art of government,” he lamented on the eve of his death. “Things might stagger on for a bit if I left my balls to Robespierre.” The man who eventually inherited the mantle of virility was, of course, Napoleon.
Nearly two and a half centuries after the French Revolution, it is high time to consider just how radical the transformation it wrought was. Hardman focuses on its impact on France rather than on Europe and beyond. Boldly, he makes use of counterfactuals to explain how events might easily have taken a different turn. As the author of a definitive biography of Louis XVI, he explains both why the monarch and his consort made their key decisions, such as fleeing Paris in 1791, and how they might have avoided not only their own dismal fate but that of France. Hardman even proposes a speech that the depressive and taciturn king might have given to the Convention in 1793 if he had not, as so often, taken refuge in silence.
Whatever his other faults, Louis was not vindictive: he accepted that “one can never govern a people against its inclinations” and begged his son not to avenge his death. Despite the old adage that the Bourbons had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, after the restoration in 1814, the regicides were not executed (as they had been in England in 1660) but merely banished.
In his conclusion, Hardman agrees with Boissy d’Anglas, one of the presidents of the Convention, that France consumed six centuries in six years. If the deputies gathering in 1789 had been transported in time back to the fourteenth century, they would have found the governing institutions familiar enough. But if they had travelled forward just seventy years, “they would have found themselves in an unknown land.” As Tocqueville observed in his great work L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution française, published in 1856, “the radical Revolution … has obscured everything which it has not destroyed”.
This unrecognisable post-revolutionary France was ruled not by a Bourbon but a Bonaparte, Napoleon III. It was, however, dominated not by the emperor but by a new ruling class, immortalised by the rising artists of the Impressionist movement. As Louis had foreseen, by uniting the old rights of birth and status with the newer ones of property and wealth, the upper bourgeoisie and the nobility had become the “notables.” Richer, better educated, and more numerous than the aristocracy of the ancien régime, they would survive every vicissitude. For better or worse, these notables, the bastard offspring of the Revolution, are still running the country today. John Hardman’s elegant, erudite, and evocative French Revolution: A Political History explains how the France we know emerged from the grand guignol of the guillotine.