An Englishman not filled with
esteem and admiration at the sublime
manner in which one of the most IMPORTANT REVOLUTION the world has ever seen is
now effecting, must be dead to every sense of virtue and of freedom; not one of
my countrymen who has had the good
fortune to witness the transactions of the last three days in this great
city, but will testify that my language is not hyperbolical.
The Morning Post (21 July 1789) on the fall of the Bastille
Soon the enlightened nations
will put on trial those who have hitherto ruled over them. The kings shall flee
into the deserts, into the company of the wild beasts whom they resemble; and
nature shall resume her rights.
Saint-Just. Sur la Constitution de la France, Discours
prononcé à la Convention 24 avril 1793
I
If the Economy of the
nineteenth century World was formed mainly under the influence of the British
Industrial Revolution, its Politics and Ideology were formed mainly by the
French. Britain provided the model for its railways and factories, the economic
explosive which cracked open the traditional economic and social structures of
the non-European World; but France made its Revolutions and gave them their
ideas, to the point where a tricolour of some kind became the emblem of
virtually every emerging Nation, and European (or indeed World) Politics between
1789 and 1917 were largely the struggle for and against the Principles of 1789, or the even more
incendiary ones of 1793. France provided the Vocabulary and the issues
of Liberal and Radical-democratic politics for most of the World. France
provided the first great example, the Concept and the Vocabulary of
Nationalism. France provided the Codes of Law, the model of scientific and
technical Organisation, the metric system of measurement for most Countries.
The Ideology of the modern World first penetrated the ancient Civilisations
which had hitherto resisted European Ideas through French influence. This was
the work of the French Revolution. *
[* This difference between the
British and French influences should not be pushed too far. Neither centre of
the Dual Revolution confined its influence to any special field of human
activity, and the two were complementary rather than competitive. However, even
when both converged most clearly – as in socialism,
which was almost simultaneously invented and named in both Countries – they
converged from somewhat different directions.]
The later eighteenth century,
as we have seen, was an age of Crisis for the old régimes of Europe and their
economic systems, and its last decades were filled with political agitations
sometimes reaching the point of revolt, of colonial movements for autonomy
sometimes reaching that of secession: not only in the USA (1776-83), but also
in Ireland (1782-4), in Belgium and Liège (1787-90), in Holland (1783-7), in
Geneva, even – it has been argued – in England (1779). So striking is this
clustering of political unrest that some recent historians have spoken of an
‘Age of Democratic Revolution’ of which the French was only one, though the
most dramatic and far-reaching. (1)
Insofar as the crisis of the
old régime was not purely a French phenomenon, there is some weight in such
observations. Just so it may be argued that the Russian Revolution of 1917
(which occupies a position of analogous importance in our century) was merely
the most dramatic of a whole cluster of similar movements, such as those which
– some years before 1917 – finally ended the age-old Turkish and Chinese
Empires. Yet this is to miss the point. The French Revolution may not have been
an isolated phenomenon, but it was far more fundamental than any of the other
contemporary ones and its consequences were therefore far more profound. In the
first place, it occurred in the most powerful and populous State of Europe
(leaving Russia apart). In 1789 something like one European out of every five
was a Frenchman. In the second place it was, alone of all the Revolutions which
preceded and followed it, a mass social
Revolution, and immeasurably more radical than any comparable unheaval. It is no accident
that the American revolutionaries, and the British ‘Jacobins’ who migrated to
France because of their political sympathies, found themselves moderates in
France. Tom Paine was an extremist in Britain and America; but in Paris he
was among the most moderate of the Girondins. The results of the American
Revolutions were, broadly speaking, Countries carrying on much as before, only
minus the political Control of the British, Spaniards and Portuguese. The result of the
French Revolution was that the age of Balzac replaced the age of Mme Dubarry.
In the third place, alone of
all the contemporary Revolutions, the French was ecumenical. Its Armies set out
to revolutionise the World; its Ideas actually did so. The American Revolution
has remained a crucial event in American History, but (except for the Countries
directly involved in and by it) it has left few major traces elsewhere. The
French Revolution is a landmark in all Countries. Its repercussions rather than
those of the American Revolution, occasioned the risings which led to the
liberation of Latin America after 1808. Its direct influence radiated as far as
Bengal, where Ram Mohan Roy was inspired by it to found the first Hindu Reform
Movement and the ancestor of modern Indian Nationalism. (When he visited
England in 1830, he insisted on travelling in a French ship to demonstrate his
enthusiasm for its Principles.) It was, as has been said, ‘the first great
Movement of Ideas in Western Christendom that had any real effect on the World
of Islam’, (2) and that almost immediately. By the middle of the nineteenth
century the Turkish word ‘vatan’, hitherto merely describing a man’s place of
birth or residence, had begun to turn under its influence into something like
‘patrie’; the term ‘liberty’, before 1800 primarily a legal term denoting the
opposite to ‘slavery’, had begun to acquire a new political content. Its
indirect influence is universal, for it provided the pattern for all subsequent
revolutionary Movements, its lessons (interpreted according to taste) being
incorporated into modern Socialism and Communism. *
[* This is not to underestimate
the influence of the American Revolution. It undoubtedly helped to stimulate
the French, and in a narrower sense provided constitutional Models – in
Competition and sometimes Alternation with the French – for various Latin
America States, and inspiration for democratic-radical Movements from time to
time.]
The French Revolution thus
remains the Revolution of its Time,
and not merely one, though the most prominent, of its Kind. And its origins
must therefore be sought not merely in the general Conditions of Europe, but in
the specific Situation of France. Its peculiarity is perhaps best illustrated
in international terms. Throughout the eighteenth century France was the major
international economic rival of Britain. Her Foreign Trade, which multiplied
fourfold between 1720 and 1780, caused Anxiety; her Colonial System was in
certain Areas (such as the West Indies) more dynamic than the British. Yet
France waas not a Power like Britain, whose Foreign Policy was already
determined substantially by the Interests of capitalist Expansion. She was the
most powerful and in many ways the most typical of the old aristocratic Absolute
Monarchies of Europe. In other words, the conflict between the official
framework and the vested Interests of the old
régime and the rising new Social Forces was more acute in France than
elsewhere.
The new forces knew fairly
precisely what they wanted. Turgot,
the physiocrat economist, stood for an efficient Exploitation of the
Land, for Free Enterprise and Trade, for a standardised, efficient
Administration of a single homogenous national Territory, and the Abolition of
all restrictions and social Inequalities which stood in the way of the
development of national Resources and rational, equitable Administration and
Taxation. Yet his attempt to apply succh a programme as the first minister of Louis XVII in 1774-6
failed lamentably, and the failure is characteristic. Reforms of this
character, in modest doses, were not incompatible with or unwelcome to Absolute
Monarchies. On the contrary, since they strengthened their hand, they were, as we have seen, widely
propagated at this time among the so-called ‘enlightened Despots’. But in most
of the Countries of ‘enlightened Despotism’ such Reforms were either
inapplicable, and therefore mere theoretical flourishes, or unlikely to change
the general character of their political and social structure; or else they
failed in the face of the resistance of the local Aristocracies and other
vested Interests, leaving the Country to relapse into a somewhat tidied-up
version of its former State. In France they failed more rapidly than elsewhere,
for the resistance of the vested Interests was more effective. But the results
of this Failure were more catastrophic for the Monarchy; and the forces of
Bourgeois change were far too strong to relapse into inactivity. They merely
transformed their Hopes from an enlightened Monarchy to the People or ‘the
Nation’.
Nevertheless, such a
generalisation does not take us far towards an understanding of why the
Revolution broke out when it did, and why it took the remarkable road it did.
For this it is most useful to consider the so-called ‘feudal reaction’ which
actually provided the spark to explode the powder-barrel of France.
The 400,000 or so persons who,
among the twenty-three million Frenchmen, formed the Nobility, the unquestioned ‘first order’ of the
Nation, though not so absolutely safeguarded against the intrusion of lesser
orders as in Prussia and elsewhere, were secure enough. They enjoyed
considerable Priviledges, including Exemption from several Taxes (but not from
as many as the better-organised Clergy), and the Right to Receive Feudal dues.
Politically their Situation was less brilliant. Absolute Monarchy, while entirely aristocratic and
even feudal in its ethos, had
deprived the nobles of political independence and responsibility and cut down
their old representative Institutions – Estates and Parlements – so far as possible. The fact continued to rankle among
the higher Aristocracy and among the more recent noblesse de robe created by the Kings for various purposes, mostly
Finance and Administration; an
ennobled Government Middle class which expressed the double Discontent
of Aristocrats and Bourgeois so far as it could through the surviving
Law-courts and Estates. Economically the Nobles’ worries were by no means
negligible. Fighters rather than earners by Birth and Tradition – Nobles were
even formally debarred from exercising a Tade or Profession – they depended on
the Income of their Estates, or, if they belonged to the favoured Minority of
large of court Nobles, on wealthy Marriages, Court Pensions, Gifts and Sinecures.
But the Expenses of noble status were large and rising, their Incomes – since
they were rarely businesslike Managers of their Wealth, if they managed it at
all – fell. Inflation tended to reduce the Value of fixed Revenues such as
Rents.
It was therefore natural that the
Nobles should use their one main asset, the acknowledged Priviledges of the
Order. Throughout the eighteenth century, in France as in many other Countries,
they encroached steadily upon the official Posts which the Absolute Monarchy
had preferred to fill with technically competent and politically harmless
Middle Class men. By the
1780s four quarterings of Nobility were needed even to buy a Commission
in the Army, all bishops were Nobles and even the keystone of Royal
Administration, the Intendancies, has been largely recaptured by them.
Consequently the Nobility not merely exasperated the feelings of the Middle
Class by their successful Competition for official Posts they also undermined
the State itself by an increasing tendency to take over provincial and central
Administration. Similarly they – and especially the poorer provincial Gentlemen
who had few other Resources – attempted to counteract the decline in their
Income by squeezing the utmost out of their very considerable Feudal Rights to
exact Money (or more rarely Service) from the Peasantry. An entire Profession, the feudists, came into Existence to revive obsolete Rights of
this kind or to maximise the yield of exisiting ones. Its most celebrated
member, Gracchus Babeuf, was to become the leader of the first Communist Revolt
in modern History in 1796. Consequently the Nobility exasperated not only the
Middle Class but also the Peasantry.
The position of this vast
Class, comprising perhaps 80 per cent of all Frenchmen, was far from brilliant.
They were indeed in general free, and often Landowners. In actual quantity
Noble Estates covered only one-fifth of the Land, clerical Estates perhaps
another 6 per cent with regional variations. (3) Thus in the diocese of
Montpellier the Peasants already owned 38 to 40 per cent of the Land, the
Bourgeoisie 18 to 19, the Nobles 15 to 16, the Clergy 3 to 4, while one-fifth
was Common Land. (4) In fact, however, the great Majority were landless or with
insufficient holdings, a deficiency increased by the prevailing technical
Backwardness; and the general land-hunger was intensified by the rise in
Population. Feudal Dues, Tithes and Taxes took a large and rising Proportion of
the Peasant’s Income, and Inflation reduced the Value of the Remainder. For
only the Minority of Peasants who had a constant Surplus for Sale benfited from
the rising Prices; the rest, in one way or another, suffered from them,
especially in times of Bad Harvest, when Famine Prices rules. There is little
doubt that in the twenty years preceding the Revolution the Situation of the
Peasants grew worse for these Reasons.
The financial troubles of the
Monarchy brought matters to a head. The administrative and fiscal Structure of
the Kingdom was grossly obsolete, and, as we have seen, the attempt to remedy this by the Reforms of 1774-[7]6
failed, defeated by the resistance of vested Interests headed by the Parlements. Then France became
involved in the American War of Independence. Victory over England was gained
at the cost of final Bankruptcy, and thus the American Revolution can claim to
be the direct Cause of the French. Various Expedients were tried with
diminishing Success, but nothing short of a fundamental Reform, which mobilised
the real and considerable taxable Capacity of the Country could cope with a
Situation in which Expenditure outran Revenue by at least 20 per cent, and no
effective Economies were possible. For though the extravagance of Versailles
has often been blamed for the Crisis, Court Expenditure only amounted to 6 per
cent of the total in 1788. War, Navy and Diplomacy made up one-quarter, the
Service of the existing Debt one-half. War and Debt – the American War and its
Debt – broke the back of the Monarchy.
The Government’s Crisis gave
the Aristocracy and the Parlements
their chance. They refused to pay without an extension of their priviledges.
The first breach in the front of Absolutism was a hand-picked but nevertheless
rebellious ‘assembly of notables’ called in 1787 to grant the Government’s
demands. The second, and decisive, was the desperate Decision to call the
States-General – the old feudal Assembly of the realm, buried since 1614. The
Revolution thus began as an aristocratic Attempt to recapture the State. This
attempt miscalculated for two Reasons: it underestimated the independent
intentions of the ‘Third Estate’ – the fictional entity deemed to represent all
who were neither Nobles nor Clergy, but in fact dominated by the Middle Class –
and it overlooked the profound economic and social Crisis into which it thre
its political demands.
The French Revolution was not
made or led by a formed Party or Movement in the modern sense, nor by men
attempting to carry out a systematic programme. It hardly even threw up
‘Leaders’ of the Kind to which twentieth century Revolutions have accustomed
us, until the post-revolutionary figure of Napoleon. Nevertheless a striking
consensus of general Ideas among a fairly coherent social Group gave the
Revolutionary Movement effective unity. The Group was the ‘Bourgeoisie’;
its Ideas were those of Classical Liberalism, as formulated by the
‘philosophers’ and ‘economists’ and propagated by Freemasonry and in informal
Associations. To this extent ‘the philosophers’ can be justly made
responsible for the Revolution. It would have occurrred without them; but they
probably made the difference between a mere breakdown of an old régime and the
effective and rapid substitution of a new one.
In its most general form the Ideology of 1789
was the masonic one expressed with such innocent sublimity in Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791), one of the earliest of the great
propagandist works of Art of an Age whose highest artistic achievements so
often belonged to Propaganda. More specifically, the demands of the bourgeois
of 1789 are laid down in the
famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens of that year. This document is a
Manifesto against the hierarchical Society of Noble Priviledge, but not one in
favour of democratic or egalitarian Society. ‘Men are born and live free and
equal under the Laws,’ said its first article; but it also provides for the
existence of social Distinctions, if ‘only on grounds of common utility’.
Private Property was a Natural Right, sacred, inalienable and inviolable. Men
were equal before the Law and Careers were equally open to Talent; but if the
Race started without handicaps, it was equally assumed that the runners would
not finish together. The declaration laid
down (as against the Noble Hierarchy or Absolutism) that ‘all Citizens have a
Right to Co-operate in the Formation of the Law’; but ‘either personally or through their
Representatives’. And the Representative
Assembly which it envisaged as the fundamental organ of Government was not
necessarily a democratically elected one, nor the régime it implied one which
eliminated Kings. A Constitutional Monarchy based on a propertied Oligarchy
expressing itself through a Representative Assembly was more congenial to most
Bourgeois Liberals than the Democratic Republic which might have seemed a more
logical expression of their theoretical aspirations; though there were some who
did not hesitate to advocate this also. But on the whole the classical Liberal bourgeois
of 1789 (and the Liberal of 1789-1848) was not a democrat but a believer
in Constitutionalism, a secular Government by Tax-payers and Property-owners.
Nevertheless officially such a
régime would express not simply his Class Interests, but the General Will of
‘the People’, which was in turn (a significant identification) ‘the French
Nation’. The
King was no longer Louis, by the Grace of God, King of France and Navarre, but
Louis, by the Grace of God and the Constitutional Law of the State, King of the
French. ‘The source of all Sovereignty,’ said the Declaration, ‘resides
essentially in the Nation.’ And the Nation, as Abbé Sieyès put it, recognised
no Interest on Earth above its own, and accepted no Law or Authority other than
its own – neither that of Humanity at large nor of other Nations. No
doubt the French Nation, and its subsequent imitators, did not initially
conceive of its Interests clashing with those of other Peoples, but on the
contrary saw itself as inaugurating, or taking part in, a movement of the
general Liberation of Peoples from Tyranny. But in fact national Rivalry (for instance
that of French Businessmen with British Businessmen) and national Subordination
(for instance that of conquered or liberated Nations to the Interests of la grande nation) were implicit in the
Nationalism to which the Bourgeois of 1789 gave its first official expression.
‘The People’ identified with ‘the Nation’ was a revolutionary Concept; more
revolutionary than the Bourgeois-liberal Programme which purported to express
it. But it was also a double-edged one.
Since the peasants and labouring Poor were
illiterate, politically modest or immature and the process of Election
indirect, 610 men, mostly of this stamp, were elected to represent the Third
Estate. Most were lawyers who played an important economic Role in provincial
France; about a hundred were Capitalists and Businessmen. The Middle Class had
fought bitterly and successfully to win a Representation as large as that of
the Nobility and Clergy combined, a moderate ambition for a Group officially
representing 95 per cent of the People. They now fought with equal Determination
for the Right to Exploit their potential.
The Third Estate succeeded, in
the face of the united resistance of the King and the priviledged Orders,
because it represented not merely the views of an educated and militant
Minority, but of far more powerful Forces: the labouring Poor of the Cities,
and especially of Paris, and shortly, also, the revolutionary Peasantry. For
what turned a limited Reform agaitation into a Revolution was the fact that the
calling of the States-General coincided with a profound economic and social
Crisis. The later 1780s had been, for a complexity of reasons, a period of
great Difficulties for virtually all branches of the French Economy. A bad Harvest in 1788 (and
1789) and a very difficult winter made this crisis acute. Bad harvests
hurt the Peasantry, for while they meant that large producers could sell Grain
at Famine prices, the majority of Men on their insufficient holdings might well
have to eat up their Seed-corn, or buy Food at such Prices, especially in
months immediately preceding the new Harvest (i.e. May-July). They obviously
hurt the Urban poor,
whose Cost of Living – Bread the staple Food – might well double. It hurt them
all the more as the improverishment of the countryside reduced the Market for
manufactures and therefore also produced an industrial Depression. The Country poor were
therefore desperate and restless with Riot and Banditry; the Urban poor were
doubly desparate as Work ceased at the very moment that the Cost of Living
soared. Under normal Circumstances little more than blind-rioting might have
occurred. But in 1788 and 1789 a major convulsion in the Kingdom, a Campaign of
Propaganda and Election, gave the People’s desperation a political perspective.
They introduced the tremendous and earth-shaking idea of liberation from Gentry and Oppression. A riotous People stood
behind the deputies of the Third Estate.
Counter-revolution turned a
potential mass rising into an actual one. Doubtless it was only natural that
the old régime should have fought back, if necessary with Armed Force; though
the Army was no longer wholly reliable. (Only unrealistic dreamers can suggest
that Louis XVI might have accepted Defeat and immediately turned himself to a
Constitutional Monarch, even if he had been a less negligible and stupid man
than he was, married to a less chicken-brained and irresponsible woman, and
prepared to listen to less disastrous advisers.) In fact Counter-revolution mobilised
the Paris masses, already hungry, suspicious and militant. The most sensational
result of their mobilisation was the capture of the Bastille, a State prison symbolising Royal
authority, where the revolutionaries expected to find Arms. In times of Revolution
nothing is more powerful than the fall of Symbols. The capture of the
Bastille, which has rightly made July 14th into the French national day, ratified the fall of
Despotism and was hailed all over the World as the beginning of Liberation.
Even the austere philosopher Immanuel Kant of Koenisberg, it is said, whose
habits were so regular that the citizens of that town set their watches by him,
posponed the hour of this afternoon stroll when he received the News, thus
convincing Koenisberg that a World-shaking event had indeed happened. What is
more to the point, the fall of the Bastille spread the Revolution to the
provincial Towns and the Countryside.
Peasant Revolutions are vast,
shapeless, anonymous, but irresistible Movements. What turned an epidemic of
Peasant unrest into a irreversible Convulsion was a combination of provincial
Townrisings and a wave of Mass panic, spreading obscurely but rapidly across vast
stretches of the Country: the
so-called Grande Peur of late July
and early August 1789. Within three weeks of July 14th the social
structure of French rural feudalism and the State machine of royal France lay
in fragments. All that remained of State power was a scattering of doubtfully
reliable Regiments, a National Assembly without coercive force, and a
multiplicity of municipal or provincial Middle Class administration which soon
set up Bourgeois armed ‘National Guards’ on the model of Paris. Middle Class
and Aristocracy immediately accepted the inevitable: all feudal Priviledges
were officially abolished though, when the political situation had settled, a
stiff Price for their Redemption was fixed. Feudalism was not finally abolished
until 1793. By the end
of August the Revolution had also acquired its formal manifesto, the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Conversely, the King resisted
with his usual stupidity, and section of the Middle Class revolutionaries, frightened by the
social implications of the mass Upheaval, began to think that the Time for
Conservatism had come.
In brief, the main shape of French and all subsequent
Bourgeois-revolutionary Politics were by now clearly visible. This dramatic
dialectical dance was to dominate the future Generations. Time and again we
shall see moderate
Middle Class reformers mobilising the Masses
against die-hard Resistance or Counter-revolution. We shall see the Masses
pushing beyond the Moderates’ aims to their own social Revolutions, and the Moderates in turn
splitting into a Conservative group henceforth making common cause with the
Reactionaries, and a Left wing group determined to pursue the rest of the as yet
unachieved Moderate aims with the help of the Masses, even at the risk of
losing Control over them. And so on through Repetitions and and Variations of
the pattern of Resistance – Mass mobilisation – shift to the Left – split-among-moderates-and-shift-to-the-right
– until either the bulk of the Middle Class passed
into the henceforth Conservative camp, or was defeated by social Revolution. In most subsequent
bourgeois Revolutions the moderate Liberals were to pull back, or transfer into
the Conservative camp, at a very early stage. Indeed in the nineteenth century we
increasingly find (most notably in Germany) that they became unwilling to begin
Revolution at all, for Fear of its incalculable Consequences, preferring a
compromise with King and Aristocracy. The peculiarity of the French Revolution is that one section of the
Liberal middle class was prepared to remain revolutionary up to and indeed
beyond the brink of anti-bourgeois Revolution: these were the Jacobins, whose
name came to stand for ‘radical revolution’ everywhere.
Why? Partly, of course, because
the French Bourgeoisie had not yet, like subsequent Liberals, the awful Memory
of the French Revolution to be frightened of. After 1794 it would be clear to Moderates that
the Jacobin régime had driven the Revolution too far for Bourgeois comfort and
prospects, just as it would be clear to revolutionaries that ‘the sun of 1793’,
if it were to rise again, would have to shine on a non-bourgeois Society.
Again, the Jacobins could afford Radicalism because in their time no Class
existed which could provide a coherent social alternative to theirs. Such a
Class only arose in the course of the Industrial Revolution, with the
‘proletariat’ or, more precisely, with the Ideologies and Movements based on
it. In the French Revolution the Working Class – and even this is a misnomer
for the aggregate of hired, but mostly non-industrial, wage-earners – as yet
played no significant independent part. They hungered, they rioted, perhaps
they dreamed; but for practical purposes they followed non-proletarian leaders.
The Peasantry never provides a political alternative to anyone; merely, as
occasion dictates, an almost irresistible force or an almost immovable object.
The only alternative to Bourgeois radicalism (if we except small bodies of
ideologues or militants powerless when deprived of Mass support) were the ‘Sansculottes’, a
shapeless, mostly urban Movement of the labouring Poor, small craftsmen,
shopkeeprs, artisans, tiny entrepreneurs and the like. The Sansculottes
were organised, notably in the ‘sections’ of Paris and the local political
Clubs, and provided the main striking-force of the Revolution – the actual
demonstrators, rioters, constructors of Barricades. Through journalists like
Marat and Hébert, through local spokesmen, they also formulated a policy,
behind which lay a vaguely defined and contradictory social ideal, combining
respect for (small) private property with hostility to the rich,
government-guaranteed Work, Wages and Social Security for the Poor man, an
extreme, egalitarian and libertarian Democracy, localised and direct. In fact
the Sansculottes were one branch of that universal and important political
trend which sought to express the interests of the great mass of ‘little men’
who existed between the poles of the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘proletarian’, often
perhaps rather nearer the latter than the former because they were, after all,
mostly poor. We can
observe it in the United States (as Jeffersonianism and Jacksonian democracy,
or Populism) in Britain (as ‘radicalism’), in France (as the ancestors of the
future ‘republicans’ and radical-socialists), in Italy (as Mazzinians and
Garibaldians), and elsewhere. Mostly it tended to settle down,
in post-revolutionary ages, as a left-wing of middle-class Liberalism, but one
loth to abandon the ancient Principle that there are no Enemies on the Left,
and ready, in times of Crisis, to rebel against ‘the wall of money’ or ‘the
economic royalists’ or ‘the cross of gold crucifying mankind’. But Sansculottism
provided no real alternative either. Its ideal, a golden past of villagers and
small craftsmen or a golden future of small farmers and artisans undisturbed by
bankers and millionaires, was unrealisable. History moved dead against them.
The most they could do – and this they achieved in 1793-4 – was to erect
roadblocks in its path, which have hampered French economic growth from that day
almost to this. In fact Sansculottism was so helpless a phenomenon that its
very name is largely forgotten, or remembered only as a synonym of Jacobinism,
which provided it with leadership in the Year II.
II
Between 1789 and 1791 the victorious moderate
Bourgeoisie, acting through what had now become the Constituent Assembly, set
about the gigantic Rationalisation and Reform of France which was its object.
Most of the lasting institutional achievements of the Revolution date from this
period, as do its most striking international Results, the metric system and
the Pioneer emancipation of the Jews. Economically the perspectives of the Constituent
Assembly were entirely Liberal: its policy for the Peasantry was the enclosure
of Common lands and the encouragement of rural Entrepreneurs, for the
Working-class, the banning of Trade Unions, for the small Crafts, the abolition
of Guilds and Corporations. It gave little concrete satisfaction to the
Common People, except, from 1790, by means of the secularisation and sale of
Church Lands (as well as those of the emigrant nobility) which had the triple
advantage of weakening Clericalism, strengthening the provincial and Peasant
entrepreneur, and giving many Peasants a measurable return for their
revolutionary activity. The
Constitution of 1791 fended off excessive Democracy by a system of Constitutional
Monarchy based on an admittedly rather wide Property-franchise of ‘active
citizens’. The passive, it was hoped, would live up to their name.
In fact, this did not happen.
On the one hand, the Monarchy, though now strongly supported by a powerful Ex-revolutionary
bourgeois faction, could not resign itself to the new régime. The Court dreamed
of and intrigued for a crusade of royal cousins to expel the governing rabble
of commoners and restore God’s anointed, the most Catholic King of France, to
his rightful place. The
Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), a misconceived attempt to
destroy, not the Church, but the Roman absolutist allegiance of the Church, drove
the majority of the Clergy and of their faithful into opposition, and helped to
drive the King into the desperate, and as it hoped suicidal, attempt to flee
the Country. He was recaptured at Varennes (June 1791) and henceforth Republicanism became a mass
force; for traditional Kings who abandon their Peoples lose the Right to
Loyalty. On the other hand, the uncontrolled Free Enterprise economy of the
Moderates accentuated the flunctuations in the level of Food-prices, and
consequently the militancy of the urban Poor, especially in Paris. The Price of
Bread registered the political temperature of Paris with the accuracy of a
thermometer; and the Paris masses were the decisive revolutionary force: not
for nothing was the new French tricolour constructed by combining the old Royal
white with the red-and-blud colours of Paris.
The outbreak of War brought
matters to a head; that is to say it led to the Second Revolution of 1792, the Jacobin Republic of
the Year II, and eventually to Napoleon. In other words it turned the
History of the French Revolution into the History of Europe.
Two forces pushed France into a
general War: the extreme Right and the moderate Left. For the King, the French
nobility and the growing aristocratic and ecclesiastical Emigration, camped in
various West German cities, it was evident that only foreign intervention could
restore the old régime. * Such intervention was not too easily organised, given
the complexities of the international situation, and the relative political
tranquility of other Countries. However, it was increasingly evident to Nobles and
divinely appointed Rulers elsewhere that the restoration of Louis XVI’s power
was not merely an act of Class solidarity, but an important safeguard against
the spread of the appalling Ideas propagated from France. Consequently the
forces for the reconquest of France gathered abroad.
* [Something like 300,000
Frenchmen emigrated between 1789 and 1795.]
At the same time the Liberals themselves, most
notably the Group of politicians clustering round the deputies from the
mercantile Gironde department, were a bellicose Force. This was partly
because every genuine Revolution tends to be ecumenical. For Frenchmen, as for
their numerous sympathisers abroad, the liberation of France was merely the
first installment of the universal triumph of Liberty; an attitude which led
easily to the conviction that it was the duty of the fatherland of Revolution
to liberate all Peoples groaning under Oppression and Tyranny. There was a genuinely
exalted and generous passion to spread Freedom among the revolutionaries,
Moderate and Extreme; a genuine inability to separate the cause of the French
nation from that of all enslaved Humanity. Both the French and all other
revolutionary movements were to accept this view, or to adapt it, henceforth
until at least 1848. All plans for European liberation until 1848 hinged on a
joint rising of Peoples under the leadership of the French to overthrow
European reaction; and after 1830 other movements of national and liberal
revolt, such as the Italian or Polish, also tended to see their own Nations in
some sense as Messiahs destined by their own Freedom to initiate everyone
else’s.
On the other hand, considered
less idealistically, War would also help to solve the numerous domestic
Problems. It was tempting and obvious to ascribe the difficulties of the new
régime to the plots of émigrés and foreign Tyrants, and to divert popular
discontents against these. More specifically, the devaluation of the Currency
and other troubles could only be remedied if the Threat of Intervention were
dispersed. They and their ideologist might reflect, with a glance at the record
of Britain, that economic supremacy was the child of systematic aggressiveness.
(The eighteenth century was not one in which the successful Businessman was at
all wedded to Peace.) Moreover, as was soon to appear, War could be made to
produce Profit. For all these reasons they majority of the new Legislative
Assembly, except for a small Right wing and a small Left wing under
Robespierre, preached War. For these reasons also, when War came, the conquests
of the Revolution were to combine Liberation, Exploitation and political
Diversion.
War was declared in April 1792. Defeat, which the
People (plausibly enough) ascribed to Royal sabotage and Treason, brought
radicalisation. In
August-September the Monarchy was overthrown, the Republic one and
indivisible established, a new age in human History proclaimed with the
institution of the Year
I of the revolutionary calendar, by the armed action of the Sansculotte
masses of Paris. The iron and heroic age of the French Revolution began among
the Massacres of the political prisoners, the elections to the National
Convention – probably the most remarkable Assembly in the History of
Parliamentarism – and the call for total resistance to the invaders. The King
was imprisoned, the foreign Invasion halted by an undramatic artillery duel at
Valmy.
Revolutionary Wars impose their
own Logic. The dominant party in the new Convention were the Girondins,
bellicose abroad and moderate at home, a body of parliamentary orators of charm
and brilliance representing Big Business, the provincial Bourgeoisie and much
intellectual distinction. Their policy was utterly impossible. For only states waging
limited Campaigns with established regular Forces could hope to keep War and
Domestic Affairs in watertight compartments, as the ladies and gentlemen in
Jane Austen’s novels were just then doing in Britain. The Revolution waged
neither a limited campaign nor had it established Forces: for its War
oscillated between the maximum victory of World revolution and the maximum
Defeat which meant total Counter-revolution, and its Army – what was left of
the old French army – was ineffective and unreliable. Dumouriez, the Republic’s
leading general, was shortly to desert to the enemy. Only unprecedented and
revolutionary methods could win in such a War, even if Victory were to mean
merely the defeat of Foreign Intervention. In fact, such Methods were found. In
the course of its Crisis the young French Republic discovered or invented total
War: the total mobilisation of a Nation’s resource through Conscription,
Rationing and a rigidly controlled War Economy, and virtual Abolition, at home
or abroad, of the distinction between Soldiers and Civilians. How appalling the
implications of this discovery are has only become clear in our own historic
epoch. Since the
Revolutionary War of 1792-4 remained an exceptional episode, most
nineteenth-century observers could make no sense of it, except to observe
(until in the fatness of later Victorian times even this was forgotten) that
Wars lead to Revolutions, and Revolutions win otherwise unwinnable Wars. Only
today can we see how much about the Jacobin Republic and the ‘Terror’ of 1793-4
makes sense in no other terms than those of a modern total War Effort.
The Sansculottes welcome a
revolutionary War Government, not only because they rightly argued that
Counter-revolution and Foreign Intervention could only thus be defeated, but
also because its Methods mobilised the People and brought Social Justice
nearer. (They overlooked the fact that no effective modern War Effort is
compatible with the decentralised voluntarist direct Democracy which they
cherished.) The Gironde, on the other hand, was afraid of the political
Consequences of the combination of the mass Revolution and War which they
unleashed. Nor were they equipped for competition with the Left. They did not
want to try or execute the King, but had to compete with their rivals, ‘the
Mountain’ (the Jacobins), for this symbol of revolutionary zeal; the Mountain
gained prestige, not they. On the other hand, they did want to extend the War
into a general ideological crusade of Liberation and a direct challenge to the
great economic rival, Britain. They succeeded in this object. By March 1793 France
was at War with most of Europe, and had begun Foreign Annexations (legitimised
by the newly-invented Doctrine of France’s right to her ‘natural frontiers’).
But the expansion of the War, all the more as it went badly, only strengthened the
hands of the Left, which alone could win it. Retreating and outmanoeuvred, the
Gironde was finally driven to ill-judged attacks against the Left, which were
soon to turn into organised provincial Revolt against Paris. A rapid coup by the
Sansculottes overthrew it on 2 June 1793. the Jacobin Republic had come.
III
When the educated laymen thinks
of the French Revolution it is the Events of 1789 but especially the Jacobin Republic of the
Year II which chiefly comes to his mind. The prim Robespierre, the huge and whoring Danton, the icy revolutionary elegance
of Saint-Just, the gross
Marat, Committee of Public Safety, revolutionary Tribunal and Guillotine are
the images which we see most clearly. The very names of the Moderate revolutionaries who come between
Mirabeau and Lafayette in 1789 and the Jacobin leaders in 1793, have
lapsed from all but the memory of historians. The Girondins are remembered only
as a Group, and perhaps for the politically negligible but romantic women
attached to them – Mme. Roland or Charlotte Corday. Who, outside the expert
field, knows even the names of Brissot, Vergniaud, Guadet and the rest? Conservatives have
created a lasting image of The Terror, Dictatorship and hysterical Bloodlust
unchained, though by twentieth century standards, and indeed by the standards
of conservative repressions of social Revolution such as the Massacres after the Paris Commune of 1871,
its mass killings were relatively modest, 17,000 official Executions in fourteen months.
Revolutionaries, especially in France, have seen it as the first People’s
Republic, the inspiration of all subsequent Revolt. For all it was an era not
to be measured by everyday human criteria.
That is true. But for the solid
Middle Class Frenchmen who stood behind the Terror, it was neither pathological
nor apocalyptic, but first and foremost the only effective Method of preserving
their Country. This the Jacobin Republic did, and its achievement was
superhuman. In June 1793
sixty out of the eighty departments of France were in revolt against Paris; the
armies of the German princes were invading France from the north and east; the
British attacked from the south and west: the Country was helpless and
bankrupt. Fourteen
months later all France was under firm control, the invaders had been
expelled, the French Armies in turn occupied Belgium and were about to enter on
twenty years of almost unbroken and efortless Military triumph. Yet by March 1794 the
Army three times large as before was run at half the cost of March 1793, and
the value of the French currency (or rather of the paper assignats which had largely replaced it) was kept approximately
stable, in marked contrast to both past and future. No wonder Jeanbon St.
André, the Jacobin member of the Committee of Public Safety who, though a firm
Republican, later became one of Napoleon’s most efficient Prefects, looked at
imperial France with contempt as it staggered under the Defeats of 1812-3. The Republic of
the Year II had coped with worse Crises, and with fewer Resources.
* [‘Do you know what kind of
government (was victorious)? ... A government of the Convention. A government
of passionate Jacobins in red bonnets, wearing rough woollen cloth, wooden
shoes, who lived on simple bread and bad beer and went to sleep on mattresses
laid on the floor of their meeting-halls, when they were too tired to wake and
deliberate further That is the kind of men who saved France. I was one of them,
gentlemen. And here, as in the apartments of the Emperor which I am about to
enter, I glory in the fact.’ Quoted J. Savant, Les Prefets de Napoléon (1958),
111-2.]
For such men, as indeed for the
Majority of the National Convention which at bottom retained control throughout
this heroic Period, the choice was simple: either The Terror with all its
defects from the Middle Class point of view, or the Destruction of the
Revolution, the disintegration of the national State, and probably – was there
not the example of Poland? – the disappearance of the Country. Very likely, but
for the despearte Crisis of France, many among them would have preferred a less
iron régime and certainly a less firmly controlled Economy: the fall of
Robespierre led to an epidemic of economic Decontrol and corrupt Racketeering
which, incidentally culminated in galloping Inflation and the national Bankruptcy of 1797. But
even from the narrowest point of view, the prospects of the French middle class
depended on those of a unified strong centralised national State. And anyway,
could the Revolution which had virtually created the term ‘nation’ and
‘patriotism’ in their modern sense, abandon the ‘grande nation’?
The first task of the Jacobin
régime was to mobilise the mass support against the dissidence of the Gironde
and the provincial notables, and to retain the already mobilised mass support
of the Paris Sansculottes, some of whose demands for a revolutionary War-effort
– general conscription (the ‘levée en masse’), terror against the ‘traitors’
and general price-control (the ‘maximum’) – in any case coincided with Jacobin
common sense, though their other demands were to prove troublesome. A somewhat
radicalised new Constitution, hitherto delayed by the Gironde, was proclaimed.
According to this noble but academic document the People were offered Universal
Suffrage, the Right of Insurrection, Work or Maintenance, and – most
significant of all – the official statement that the Happiness of All was the
aim of Government and the People’s rights were to be not merely available but
operative. It was the first genuinely democratic Constitution proclaimed by a
modern State. More concretely, the Jacobins abolished all remaining Feudal
rights without indemnity, improved the Small buyer’s chance to purchase the
forfeited Land of emigrés, and – some months later – abolished Slavery in the
French colonies, in order to encourage the Negroes of San Domingo to fight for
the Republic against the English. These measures Domingo to fight for
the Republic against the English. These measures had the most far-reaching
Results. In American they helped to create the first independent revolutionary
leader of stature in Toussaint-Louverture. * In France they established that
impregnable citadel of small and middle Peasant proprietors, small Craftsmen
and Shopkeepers, economically retrogressive but passionately devoted to
Revolution and Republic, which has dominated the Country’s life ever since. The
capitalist transformation of Agriculture and Small enterprise, the essential
condition for rapid economic Development, was slowed to a crawl; and with it the
speed of urbanisation, the expansion of the home Market, the multiplication of
Working-class and, incidentally, the ulterior advance of Proletarian
revolution. Both Big business and the Labour movement were long doomed to
remain minority Phenomena in France, islands surrounded by a sea of corner
Grocers, Peasant small-holders and Café proprietors. (cf. below Chapter IX).
[* The failure of Napoleonic
France to recapture Haiti was one of the main reasons for liquidating the
entire remaining American Empire, which was sold by the Louisiana Purchase
(1803) to the USA. Thus a further Consequence of spreading Jacobinism to
America was to make the USA a continent-wide Power.]
The centre of the new Government,
representing as it did an alliance of Jacobin and Sansculotte, therefore
shifted perceptibly to the Left. This was reflected in the reconstructed
Committee of Public Safety, which rapidly became the effective War-cabinet of
France. It lost Danton, a powerful, dissolute, probably corrupt, but immensely talented
revolutionary more moderate than he looked (he had been a minister in the last
royal Administration) and gained Maximilien Robespierre, who became its most
influential membre. Few historians have been dispassionate about this dandyish,
thin-blooded, fanatical lawyer with his somewhat excessive sense of private
Monopoly in Virtue, because he still incarnates the
terrible and glorious Year
II about which no man is neutral. He was not an agreeable
individual; even those who think he was right nowadays tend to prefer the
shining mathematical rigour of that architect of Spartan paradises, the young
Saint-Just. He was not a great man and often a narrow one. But he is the only individual
thrown up by the Revolution (other than Napoleon) about whom a Cult has grown
up. This is because for him, as for History, the Jacobin Republic was not a
war-winning device but an ideal: the terrible and glorious reign of Justice and
Virtue when all Good citizens were equal in the sight of the Nation and the
People smote the traitors. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (cf. below pp. 247-8) and the crystalline conviction
of Rightness gave him his strength. He had no formal dictatorial Powers or even
Office, being merely one membre of the Committee of Public Safety, which was in
turn merely one Sub-committee – the most powerful, though never all-powerful –
oof the Convention. His Power was that of the People – the Paris masses; his
Terror theirs. When they abandoned him he fell.
The tragedy of Robespierre and
the Jacobin Republic was that they were themselves obliged to alienate this
support. The régime was an alliance between Middle Class and Labouing masses;
but for the Middle class
Jacobins, Sansculotte concessions were tolerable only because, and as
far as, they attached the masses to the régime without terrifying
Property-owners; and within the alliance the Middle class Jacobins were
decisive. Moreover, the very needs of the War obliged any Government to centralise
and discipline, at the expense of the free, local, direct Democracy of club and
section, the causal voluntarist Militia, the free argumentative Elections on
which the Sansculottes thrived. The process which, during the Spanish Civil War
of 1936-9, strengthened Communists at the expense of Anarchists, strengthened
Jacobins of Saint-Just’s stamp at the expense of Sansculottes of Hébert’s. By 1794 Government and
Politics were monolithic and run in harness by direct Agents of Committee or
Convention – through delegates en mission
– and a large body of Jacobin officers and officials in conjunction with local
party Organisations. Lastly, the economic needs of the War alienated popular
support. In the Towns Price-control and Rationing benefited the Masses; but the
corresponding Wage-freeze hurt them. In the Countryside the systematic
requisitioning of Food (which the urban Sansculottes had been the first to
advocate) alienated the Peasantry.
The masses therefore retired
into discontent or into a puzzled and resentful passivity, especially after the Trial and Execution of the
Hébertists, the most vocal spokesmen of the Sansculotterie. Meanwhile
more moderate supporters were alarmed by the attack on the Right wing
opposition, now headed by Danton. This faction had provided a refuge for
numerous Racketeers, Speculators, Black market Operators and other corrupt
though Capital-accumulating opponents, all the more readily as Danton himself
embodied the a-moral, Falstaffian, free-loving and free-spending which always
emerges initially in social Revolutions until overpowered by the hard
Puritanism that invariably comes to dominate them. The Dantons of history are always defeated by
the Robespierres (or by those who pretend to behave like Robespierres) because
hard narrow dedication can succeed where Bohemianism cannot. However, if
Robespierre won Moderate support for eliminating Corruption, which was after
all in the interests of the War-effort, the further restrictions on Freedom and
Money-making were more disconcerting to the Businessman. Finally, no large body
of opinion like the somewhat fanciful ideological excursions of the period –
the systematic dechristianisation Campaigns (due to Sansculotte zeal) and
Robespierre’s new civic Religion of the Supreme Being, complete with
Ceremonies, which attempted to counteract the Atheists and carry out the
precepts of the divine Jean-Jacques. And the steady hiss of the Guillotine
reminded all politicians that no one was really safe.
By April 1794, both Right and Left had gone to the
Guillotine and the Robespierrists were therefore politically isolated.
When, late in June 1794,
the new Armies of the Republic proved their firmness by decisively defeating
the Austrians at Fleurus and occupying Belgium, the end was at hand. On the Ninth Thermidor by the
revolutionary calendar (27 July 1794) the Convention overthrew
Robespierre. The next
day he, Saint-Just and Couthon were executed, and so a few days later were eighty-seven
membres of the revolutionary Paris Commune.
IV
Thermidor is the end of the heroic and remembered
phase of the Revolution: the Phase of ragged Sanculottes and correct
red-bonneted Citizens who saw themselves as Brutus and Cato, of the
grandiloquent classical and generous, but also of the moral phrases: ‘Lyon n’est
plus’, ‘Ten thousand soldiers lack shoes. You will take the shoes of all the
aristocrats in Strasbourg and deliver them ready for transport to headquarters
by tomorrow ten a.m.’ (8) It was not a comfortable phase to live through, for
most men were hungry and many afraid; but it was a phenomenon as awful and
irreversible as the first nuclear wxplosion, and all History has been
permanently changed by it. And the energy it generated was sufficient to sweep
away the Armies of the old régimes of Europe like straw.
The problem which faced the
French Middle class for the remainder of what is technically described as the Revolutionary Period
(1794-9) was how to achieve political stability and economic advance on
the basis of the
original liberal programme of 1789-91. It has never solved this problem
adequately from that day to this, though from 1870 on it was to discover a
workable formula for most times in the Parliamentary Republic. The rapid
alternations of régime – Directory
(1795-9), Consulate (1799-1804), Empire (1804-14), restored Bourbon Monarchy
(1815-30), Constitutional Monarchy (1830-48), Republic (1848-51), and Empire
(1852-70) – were all attempts to maintain a bourgeois Society while
avoiding the double danger of the Jacobin democratic republic and the old
régime.
The great weakness of the
Thermidorians was that they enjoyed no political support but at most
toleration, squeezed as they were between a revived aristocratic reaction and
the Jacobin-Sansculotte Paris poor who soon regretted the fall of Robespierre. In 1795 they devised an
elaborate constitution of Checks and Balances to safegaurd themselves against
both, and periodic shifts to Right and Left maintained them precariously in
balance; but increasingly they had to rely on the Army to disperse the
opposition. It was a situation curiously similar to the Fourth Republic, and
its conclusion was similar; the Rule of a General. But the Directory depended
on the Army for more than the
suppression of periodic Coups and Plots (various ones in 1795, Babeuf’s conspiracy in 1796, Fructidor in 1797, Floréal in 1798, Prairial in 1799). * Inactivity was
the only safe guarantee of Power for a weak and unpopular régime, but
initiative and expansion was what the Middle Class needed. The Army solved this
apparently insoluble problem. It conquered; it paid for itself; more than this,
its Loot and Conquests paid for the Government. Was it surprising that
eventually the most intelligent and able of the Army leaders, Napoleon
Bonaparte, should have decided that the Army could dispense altogether with the
feeble civilian régime?
[* The names are those of months in the revolutionary
calendar.]
This revolutionary Army was the
most formidable child of the Jacobin Republic. From a ‘levée en masse’ of
revolutionary Citizens it soon turned into a force of professional fighters,
for there was no Call-up between 1793 and 1798, and those who had no taste or
talent for soldiering deserted en masse. It therefore retained the
characteristics of the Revolution and acquired those of the vested interest;
the typical Bonapartist mixture. The Revolution gave it its unprecedented
military superiority, which Napoleon’s superb generalship was to exploit. It
always remained something of an improvised levy, in which barely trained
recruits picked up training and morale from old sweats, formal
barrack-discipline was negligible, soldiers were treated as men and the
absolute role of Promotion by merit (which meant distinction in Battle)
produced a simple Hierarchy of courage. This and the sense of arrogant
revolutionary mission mad the French army independent of the Resources on which
more orthodox Forces depended. It never acquired an effective Supply system, for
it lived off the Country. It was never backed by an Armaments industry faintly
adequate to its nominal Needs; but it won its battles so quickly that it needed
few Arms: in 1806
the great machine of the Prussian army crumbled before an Army in which an entire
Corps fired a mere 1,400 Cannon shot. Generals could rely on unlimited
offensive Courage and a fair amount of local initiative. Admittedly it also had
the weakness of its origins. Apart from Napoleon and a very few others, its
Generalship and Staff-work was poor, for the revolutionary General or
Napoleonic marshal was mot likely a tough sergeant-major or company-officer type
promoted for Bravery and Leadership rather than Brains: the heroic but very
stupid Marshal Ney was only too typical. Napoleon won Battles; his Marshals
alone tended to lose them. Its sketchy supply system sufficed in the rich and
lootable Countries where it had been developed: Belgium, North Italy, Germany.
In the waste spaces of Poland and Russia, as we shall see, it collapsed. Its
total absence of sanity services multiplied Casualties: between 1800 and 1815 Napoleon lost 40
per cent of his Forces (though about one-third of this through Desertion); but
between 90 and 98 per cent of these losses were men who died not in battle but
of wounds, sickness, exhaustion and cold. In brief, it was an Army which
conquered all Europe in short sharp bursts not only because it could, but
because it had to.
On the other hand the Army was
a Career like any other of the many the Bourgeois Revolution had opened to
Talent; and those who succeeded in it had a vested Interest in internal
Stability like any other Bourgeois. That is what made the Army, in spite of its
built-in Jacobinism, a pillar of the post-Thermidorian government, and its
leader Bonaparte a suitable Person to conclude the bourgeois Revolution and
begin the bourgeois régime. Napoleon Bonaparte himself, though of gentlemanly
birth by the standards of his barbarous island-home of Corsica, was himself a
typical careerist of this kind. Born in 1769 he made his way slowly in the Artillery, one of
the few branches of the Royal army in which technical competence was
indispensable, ambitious, discontented and revolutionary. Under the Revolution, and
especially under the Jacobin dictatorship which he supported strongly,
he was recognised by a local commissar on a crucial front – a fellow Corsican
incidentally, which can hardly have harmed his prospects- as a Soldier of
splendid gifts and promise. The Year II made him a General. He survived the fall of
Robespierre, and a gift for cultivating useful connections in Paris
helped him forward after this difficult moment. He seised his oppotunities in the Italian Campaign of 1796 which
made him the unchallenged first soldier of the Republic, who acted virtually in
independence of the civilian Authorities. Power was half-thrust upon him, half
grasped by him when the
foreign Invasions of 1799 revealed the Directory’s feebleness and his
own indispensability. He became First Consul; then Consul for life; then Emperor.
And with his arrival, as by a Miracle, the insoluble problems of the Directory
became soluble. Within a few years France had a Civil Code, a concordat with
the Church and even, most striking symbol of bourgeois Stability, a National
Bank. And the World had its first secular Myth.
Older readers or those in old-fashioned Countries will know
the Napoleonic Myth as it existed throughout the Century when no Middle-class
Cabinet was complete without his Bust, and pamphleteering wits could argue,
even for a joke, that he was not a Man but a Sun-god. The extraordinary
Power of this Myth can be adequately explained neither by Napoleonic Victories
nor by Napoleonic propaganda, nor even by Napoleon’s own undoubted Genius. As a
man he was unquestionably very brilliant, versatile, intelligent and
imaginative, though Power made him rather nasty. As a General he had no equal;
as a Ruler he was superbly efficient planner, chief and executive and
sufficient of an all-round intellectual to understand and supervise what his
subordinates were doing. As an individual he appears to have radiated a sense
of Greatness; but most of those who testify to his __________ – like Goethe –
saw him at the peak of his Fame, when the Myth already enveloped him. He was,
without any question, a very great man and – perhaps with the exception of
Lenin – his picture is the one which most reasonably educated men would, even
today, recognise most readily in the portrait gallery of History, if only by
the triple trade-mark of the small size, the hair brushed forward over the
forehead and the hand pushed into the half-open waistcoat. It is perhaps
pointless to measure him against twentieth-century candidates for Greatness.
For the Napoleonic Myth is
based less on Napoleon’s merits than on the facts, then unique, of his Career. The
great known World-shakers of the past had begun as Kings like Alexander or
Patricians like Julius Caesar; but Napoleon was the ‘little corporal’ who rose
to rule a Continent by sheer personal Talent. (This was not strictly true, but
his rise was sufficiently meteoric and high to make the description
reasonable.) Every young intellectual who devoured books, as the young
Bonaparte had done, wrote bad Poems and Novels, and adored Rousseau could
henceforth see the sky as his limit, laurels surrounding his monogram. Every
Businessman henceforth had a name for his ambition: to be – the clichés
themselves say so – a ‘Napoleon of finance’ or industry. All common men were
thrilled by the sight, then unique, of a common man who became greater than
those born to wear crowns. Napoleon gave Ambition a personal name at the moment
when the double Revolution had opened the World to men of ambition. Yet he was
more. He was the civilised man of the eighteenth century, rationalist, inquisitive,
enlightened, but with sufficient of the disciple of Rousseau about him to be
also the romantic man of the nineteenth. He was the man of the Revolution, and
the man who brought Stability. In a word, he was the figure every man who broke
with Tradition could identify himself with in his dreams.
For the French he was also
something much simpler; the most successful Ruler in their long History. He
triumphed gloriously abroad; but at home he also established or re-established
the Apparatus of French institutions as they exist to this day. Admittedly
most – perhaps all – his ideas wee anticipated by Revolution and Directory; his
personal contribution was to make them rather more conservative, hierarchical
and authoritarian. But his predecessors anticipated: he carried out. The great
lucid monuments of French law, the Codes which became models of the entire
non-Anglo-Saxon bourgeois world, were Napoleonic. The hiarchy of officials,
from the prefects down, of courts, of university and schools, was his. The great
‘careers’ of French public life, Army, Civil service, Education, Law still have
their Napoleonic shapes. He brought Stability and Prosperity to all except the
quarter-of-a-million Frenchmen who did not return from his Wars; and even to
their relatives he brought Glory. No doubt the British saw themselves fighting
for Liberty against Tyranny; but in 1815 most Englishmen were probably poorer
and worse off than they had been in 1800, while most Frenchmen were almost
certainly better off; nor had any except the still negligible Wage-labourers
lost the substantial economic Benefits of the Revolution. There is little
mystery about the persistence of Bonapartism as an Ideology of non-political
Frenchmen, especially the richer Peasantry, after his fall. It took a second and smaller
Napoleon to dissipate it between 1851 and 1870.
He had destroyed
only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the Dream of Equality, Liberty and
Fraternity, and of the People rising in its majesty to shake off Oppression. It
was a more powerful Myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his
Memory, which inspired the Revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his
own Country.
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