"The Oxford History of the French Revolution" IV Vox Populi

I often feel that an inescapable part of the debate in today's day and age is: "Just how much democracy do we really want?."

"Do we really want those people to be in charge?"

"You know, those idiots vote.  And there are a lot of them."

Okay, so I grant you, that's more of the informal conversations people will have between each other, but even among the more politically attuned and high-minded, the essence of the debate isn't much different.  Have you paid a visit to Jesusland?  Or are you a member of the 47%?

Truthfully, that angle is boring.  All nations are heterogeneous mixtures of people with all sorts of whacko views sprinkled liberally around, and considering the healthy dosage of jerks, it's stupidly easy to find evidence of the other side's perfidy.

What does interest me is that any given country is a leavened loaf of fanatics, partisans, idiots, and blowhards; but also a lot of regular, middle-of-the-road folks of every class and race.  How do you calibrate the balance between giving a voice to the people and insulating our institutions from popular whim?  Can democracy always successfully balance competing factions? Continuity and stability clearly matter - just look at California.

In that vein, one passage in this book really jumped out at me.  Revolutionary France was in turmoil after the execution of the king, and the National Convention was basically at the mercy of the sans-culottes, the Parisian working class.  The sans-culottes (also sansculottes) and their allies in the Convention were demanding the guillotine for all opponents of the Republic, and they were quick to use their sheer numbers to literally threaten the Convention to doing their bidding.  This naturally had bad consequences, as the rest of the country started rising in revolt, demanding "Federalism" and objecting strenuously to the "radical" tyranny of Paris:

"...[W]hat the 'Federalists appear to have resented if anything even more than the grip of the sansculottes on elected deputies was the range of emergency measures any government would have felt to take to cope with the downturn in French fortunes that spring.  Conscription, enhanced police powers, market controls, and forced loans, actual or threatened, [My note: all popular sansculotte measures] were now coming on top of years of upheaval tolerated only because of the promise of calmer times to come...but the disappearance over the summer of 1792 of the distinction between active and other citizens* seemed to place the power to exercise authority enhanced by authority in the hands of those with least to lose." (p. 242)

And that's the thing.  The "'blood-drinkers'" of the Paris sections were so embittered against the old regime, that their lust for vengeance against old enemies, and the supplication of the government to the mob meant that the French leaders pursued a policy of exacting their pound of flesh from the propertied beyond any reason.  Let alone, addressing the nation's and the Revolution's real problems.

The rise of Robespierre and the subsequent Reign of Terror that took place between 1793-1794 can be traced in part to the increasing power of the sansculottes, and their government by mob rule.  The Parisian mob, hungry, impoverished, embittered, and newly-aware of their own power did not hesitate to use it to get the government to enact a program they believed beneficial to them.  The demonstrations on September 4, 1793 show exactly how this worked:

"Chaumette, at the head of thousands of sansculottes, denounced the shortages, the failure to implement existing laws to deal with them, and those who caused them: 'Legislators, the immense gathering of citizens come together yesterday and this morning...has formed   but one wish:...Our subsistence, and to get it, apply the law!"....The Convention voted to do it on the spot-although it did not authorize the guillotines on wheels which Chaumette thought every detachment....ought to have....It was all carried by acclamation, amid scenes, in Barère's words, of delirium.  Terror, he observed, was now the order of the day." (p. 251)

Reading this, I find myself trying to understand what can be understood from these episodes.  The Revolution started off as a bourgeois affair - even the men who stormed the Bastille were culled from the bourgeoisie.  The men who populated the Estates-General, the National Assembly, and the National Convention were almost all to a man highly educated.  Visionaries, even.  Check out this mind-bending quote from Jean-Paul Marat, elected to the National Convention and a famous scientist and rabble-rouser:

"Don’t be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there’s no poverty to be seen because the poverty’s been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don’t be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there’s no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they’ll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."

For good measure, let me emphasize that he said that in the 1790's! 

And yet, four years in, the mob had seized control.   How did this happen?  How did it not happen in America?  The answer lies in the structure of the population of France itself.

Representative democracy tends to work best (i.e. be most stable) in small, culturally homogenous, and egalitarian societies.  Prior to the 20th century, there were exceptions like England, but this was generally the rule.  This description in a lot of ways could be applied to Revolutionary America.  Yet, none of those adjectives described Revolutionary France at all.  When major segments of the population becomes isolated and oppressed by the ruling classes, electoral politics, when it finally does arrive, becomes an exercise in using the leverage of numbers to exact justice, economic and social, against former oppressors.  We see this time and time again.


As an American, what these episodes say to me is that fearing growing inequality is one thing.  Fearing the growing perception that the game is rigged is more dangerous, because coupled with the increasing numbers of entrenched poor, may be more wise, as the combination has shown itself to be explosive.  Revolutionary, even.  In that sense, we should perhaps look at the Tea Party and the Occupy movement as shots across the bow.  To freely paraphrase from Milan Kundera:  while we are in the midst of the sunset of the dissolution from our American empire, we should be wary that everything becomes illuminated by the aura of nostalgia for better times; yes, even the guillotine.**


* "Active" citizens were simply those who were eligible to vote, usually based on property or wealth requirements.
** The original quote is:
"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."
 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

"The Oxford History of the French Revolution" III - Le Déluge Arrive

"Après moi, le déluge" - Attributed to Louis XV*

Been about a week and a half since I last posted, apologies.  This book has proven a bit more dense than the previous books, so a bit more time was required to get to the real meat of the history.

Let me start with an opening salvo: the radicals were right.   Not just right on the merits, but they were right to be outraged.  Right to demand action.  And right to try and take down the monarchy.  L'audace* was not a bad place to start. 

France under the Bourbon monarchy was, plainly put, a mess.  As a painting, it'd be a vintage Jackson Pollock.  And like a Jackson Pollock, good luck to the casual historian of making heads or tails of that nonsense.

In theory, absolute monarchies governed their nations like private fiefdoms.  The king was a benevolent pater familias patriae, tending to his nation the way a good father would tend to his family and his lands.  In practice, this was less tidy English manor and garden, and more like the Hoarders approach to governing.  From the time of the Charlemagne to the eve of the Revolution, the borders of France had grown, shrunk, and regrown as wars, dynastic marriages, and strategic annexations had slowly congealed to form the Kingdom of France.  And like all great hoarders, France just hated to modify or throw out any little thing about its newly found treasures.  (Preciouses?)  The cumulative effect over a millennium was that there was an absolutely mind-blowing lack of uniformity from region to region.  In addition to international borders, there internal customs unions.  Some regions had noble parliaments; some did not.

"Apart from royal edicts on certain general issues, the king's domains were subject to no law and no administrative practice common to them all without exception.  Southern provinces regulated their affairs by written, Roman law; but even there, in isolated regions like the Pyrenees, local customs were more important.  In northern France, they were all important....  This meant that the law relating to marriage, inheritance, and tenure of property could differ in important respects from one district to another. Every district, too, had its own range of weights and measures, and the same term often meant different values in different places.  In these circumstances fraud, or fear of it, bedeviled all exchanges..." (p. 4) 

This did have the effect of occasionally freeing up the hand of a region to exploit opportunities. By the 1780's, France had developed a small but growing class of industrialists and bourgeois who were to play a critical role in upending the old order.


Even more insidious than this was the proliferation of privilege.  A good deed done for an old king of France done there, and another done here, and said family or region or estate was exempt from one tax or another.   By the 1780's, this array of exemptions and privileges was dizzying:

What then made nobility so desirable?  Obviously there was the glamor, distinction, and recognition that noble status had always brought.  Then there was a range of privileges which all nobles enjoyed... Privilege was the hallmark of a country without uniform laws or institutions...  Nobles took precedence on public occasions... They were not subject to the corvée [the system of unpaid, mandatory labor], billeting of troops, or conscription into the militia... They escaped much of the weight of the gabelle, the hated, extortionate, salt monopoly...(p. 27)

The combination was, frankly, toxic.  The brew of idiosyncratically-ruled regions and inherited exemptions for individuals meant that by the 1780's, France had a small but entrenched minority of the population with a deeply personal stake in the continuation of not just the system of monarchy, but the Bourbon monarchy itself.  Worse, is that this meant that the glass ceiling of France that stood in the way of the successful bourgeois and the positions of ultimate power were effectively blood and the royal whim.  Some tiny fraction of the non-ennobled nouveau riche were able to acquire political power through the purchase of "venal offices", but only at tremendous expense.  This had the effect of embittering the ascendent bourgeois, who not only had to watch people eminently poorer, less-educated, dumber, but with the pedigree a thoroughbred would wicker in envy of, be granted the best military commissions, the best positions at court, and not have to pay the often heavy taxes imposed by the king.  The gap these privileges exposed between the entitled and the Third Estate was so glaring, that even on the eve of the Revolution, many nobles were agreeing to give up their fiscal privileges.
 
The first five chapters, while ostensibly a background in pre-Revolutionary France, fascinated me.  Among many other things, one of the best reasons to study history is that it is a chronicle of one, long experiment of human beings trying different things, and often failing.   The ancien régime is a case-study of everything that can possibly go wrong with absolute monarchy and then some.  Most of the people lived in abject poverty, one bad harvest away from starvation.  The nobility was a mix of poor, threadbare landowners clinging to old titles, and a lucky few ensconced at court, paying often ruinous sums to stay abreast of the latest fashions at Versailles.  The bourgeoisie was squeezed in the middle. Wealthier than the peasants, but deprived of any formal representation and significant legal rights, the bourgeoisie burned with resentment against their titled, often poorer, betters.

To boot, because the king could direct war policy as an extension of his person and his reputation, France was deeply indebted, after having come to the aid of the Americans in the Revolutionary War.  Why did France overextend itself to help a bunch of Yankee colonialists?  To avenge the loss of French North America in the Seven Years War.  Not that we contemporary Americans can relate to being over our heads in debt due to spending too much money liberating a foreign people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.  Or anything.

I am, admittedly, a man more of a David Brooks-style temperment (if not his politics), so I find conceding to any kind of radicalism galling, by instinct.  Normally, I suspect that greatest fault made by contemporary liberals and conservatives on a crusade to "change Washington" is to be heedless of the Folly of Chesterton's Fence, the idea that when coming upon an obstructive fence in the road, the first instinct of a reformer will be to demand the removal of the fence instead of asking why it got there.  In France, this had long since surpassed a case of dealing with Chesterton's Fence.  Chesterton's fence had spread like kudzu, turning the whole country into a hopeless labyrinth of white pickets. The Jacobins, coming across this maze in the road, were right to size it up, and to remove the Louis XVI-sized plug in the levee, and hope that the deluge would wash it all away.

At least, at first...


* Some debate about who said it, but Merriam-Webster's acknowledges Louis XV.

** A quote by the moderate Jacobin Georges Danton, inveighing his fellow deputies to stand strong at the height of the crises of 1793, "Pour les vaincre, messieurs, il nous faut de l'audace, encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace et la Patrie sera sauvée!". Translation: "To beat them, gentlemen, if we are bold, bolder still, forever bold, then France is saved!" (p. 191)