How Important was the French Revolution?
Best of times or worst of times, how did the ‘greatest event that has happened in the history of man’ – as per Benjamin Disraeli – change the course of what followed?
‘Its participants adhered to the modern doctrine of historical progress’
Dan Edelstein is Author of The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin (Princeton University Press)
Commenting on the importance of the French Revolution in 1972, the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai famously quipped that it was ‘too early to say’. As it turns out, Zhou thought the question was about the more recent 1968 uprising. But the quote has long captured the difficulty of assessing the legacy of 1789.
Depending on one’s vantage point, the meaning of the French Revolution varies. The First Republic succumbed to an imperial takeover, as did the Second. But the third time was the charm, and, with the exception of the Vichy government, France has remained a republic since 1870.
Politically, its legacy is even more complex. Many liberals in the 19th century clung to the ‘principles’ of 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in particular. But socialists have similarly claimed descendance from the French revolutionaries, particularly the radicals of 1793.
Geography also determines one’s impressions of the Revolution. In countries with a history of constitutional government, such as the United Kingdom or the young United States, its impact was fairly limited. But for most continental states and their colonial holdings, the Revolution (through its military campaigns) overthrew their old regimes, too. Often regarded as an autocrat in France, Napoleon ended press censorship, abolished guilds, and instituted constitutions across Europe.
So is the legacy of the French Revolution just the sum of its parts? Or does something connect these various aftershocks? I argue that its importance rests on the fact that it was the first ‘modern’ revolution, in the sense that its participants adhered to the modern doctrine of historical progress. Unlike their American counterparts (in 1776), or their English precursors (in 1688-89), the French believed that their revolution would usher in a new age of reason and justice. As it turns out, they did not agree on what this new age would consist of – hence the bloody arguments between moderates and radicals, and later liberals and socialists. But all agreed that the future would differ greatly from the past, and revolutionaries down to Zhou Enlai and beyond persisted in this belief.
‘Academic history continues to scratch away at the historical specifics’
David Andress is Professor of Modern History at the University of Portsmouth
In the years since its bicentenary in 1989, the French Revolution has undergone a strange, perhaps irreversible mutation. Where once, in the writings of specialists, and of generalists like Eric Hobsbawm, the Revolution stood as an unquestioned foundation for the development of modern society, now it echoes the words of the pioneer revolutionary feminist Olympe de Gouges (1748-93), who declared herself to have ‘only paradoxes to offer’.
Those paradoxes are manifold – de Gouges herself represents a striking wave of women who took to revolutionary politics, and more broadly to published writing, freed from overbearing censorship, with enthusiasm. But the Revolution was to strike off her head, condemn all female public participation as unnatural, and spend its later years backtracking angrily on its early provision of divorce for abused and neglected spouses.
The male population summoned in 1789 to state their grievances in writing – the famed cahiers de doléances – did so in extraordinary detail, but saw their specific concerns and real perspectives increasingly submerged under an imaginary ideal ‘people’. One that happened to believe exactly what cliques of Parisian politicians wanted them to believe. Those cliques, meanwhile, have been seen as lost in a tangle of half-formed ideas, their minds clotted with conviction of their own virtue, blind to the trudge to the guillotine they were leading.
Beyond the French ‘hexagon’, recent decades have birthed a quite distinct and radical perspective in which France is the periphery to a new revolutionary centre in the Caribbean, where the challenge of an independent ex-slave state, Haiti, threatened to overturn, both violently and conceptually, the whole order of the Atlantic world.
But, however academic history continues to scratch away at the historical specifics of the French Revolution, now is a moment above all to remember that it does matter. Joseph Goebbels went on record as wanting to ‘erase 1789 from history’. To the Nazis, the French Revolution was everything that their fascism opposed. If they had succeeded, we would have no universal human rights to continue to fight for, against their resurgent heirs across the globe.
‘Its legacy is overshadowed by the legalised policy of harsh justice’
Marisa Linton is Professor Emerita of History at Kingston University
The French Revolution shattered the old order of autocratic kings, backed by a privileged nobility. Its repercussions spread far beyond France, extending to the Caribbean, where enslaved people in Saint Domingue (now Haiti) seized the moment to rise up against their oppressors.
The revolutionaries enacted countless new laws, founded on principles of liberty and equality, enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. They decreed freedom of speech and religious toleration, legislated for popular sovereignty and the right to vote, abolished venality and institutionalised corruption, freed the peasantry from the burden of feudal dues, brought in divorce for men and women, and equal inheritance rights for sisters and brothers. But the realisation of the new laws fell short of the ideal. Many proved contentious, and some (such as the law to end slavery in the colonies) were reneged on by Napoleon, or retracted by the restored monarchy in 1815. When prominent revolutionaries launched a war with Western European powers in 1792 they precipitated a conflict that intensified the Revolution, brought about the overthrow of the monarchy, and lasted a generation. The leading revolutionary, Maximilien Robespierre, had been ignored when he opposed the declaration of war with the prescient statement: ‘No one welcomes armed liberators.’ Militarisation paved the way for Napoleon’s coup d’état.
The Revolution’s legacy is overshadowed by the legalised policy of harsh justice in 1793-94, devised by the National Convention (the new republic’s national assembly) to meet the threat of external and internal war. This time of crisis became known retrospectively as ‘the Terror’. Extreme methods were adopted, provoking conflict between revolutionary leaders, who were themselves ‘subject to terror’. Eventually Robespierre, by then the most high-profile member of the Committee of Public Safety, was arrested and hustled off to execution without trial, along with many of his supporters. The men who overthrew Robespierre were as much responsible for the policy of terror as he had been, but were able to exculpate themselves by attributing the traumatic consequences of ‘the Terror’ to the contrivance of one man. The myth of Robespierre as the mastermind behind a ‘reign of terror’ lingers to this day.
‘It turned France into a great laboratory’
Malcolm Crook is Emeritus Professor of French history at Keele University
The duration and depth of the Revolution, through the 1790s, turned France into a great laboratory in which attempts to establish its founding principle, the sovereignty of the people, offered a fascinating, if sometimes violent, spectacle that informed political debate for the next century and beyond. Its inception was not the officially celebrated 14 July (to mark the storming of the Bastille), but 17 June 1789, when rebellious deputies at an Estates-General, convened by the king, created a National Assembly and declared themselves representatives of the French people.
They did not employ the term ‘democracy’, which was then regarded as a form of direct popular rule, impossible to exercise in a huge country like France, but, whereas public office was previously a matter of ownership or appointment, they instituted elections across the board. Not only would thousands of posts be filled by election, but the great majority of adult males became eligible to participate in them, and millions did so. The term ‘universal suffrage’ was not coined until 1799, but from the outset some sought to extend the vote to all men, a few others (unsuccessfully) to women.
Aware of the ‘democratic deficit’ in this representative system, there were attempts to insert a ‘deliberative’ element into the electoral process, which was conducted in assemblies (using a secret paper ballot), where discussion was permitted and resolutions passed. The republican constitutions of 1793 and 1795 were both accepted by an electorate comprising all adult males, who could comment, as well as vote, on the documents presented to them.
Not surprisingly, in a context of bitter divisions later exacerbated by war and civil war, this huge experiment did not run smoothly and participation was faltering. Yet when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in 1799, a fresh constitution was again put to a popular vote, while some elections were retained. He demonstrated how the sovereignty of the people, on which he based his regime, could be manipulated to bolster executive authority. This lesson has not been lost on today’s authoritarian rulers, yet one vital legacy of the French Revolution remains the continuing quest for a more representative democracy.
