The French Revolution

Editor's Note: Here's a 3,000-word caption for people who like to read really long history posts.

 

This is an old picture of a statue of Louis XVI, King of France, that I took about five years ago in Louisville, Kentucky. The statue has a funny history. It was commissioned in 1820 by the only surviving child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but there's never been a lot of demand for a statue of Louis XVI, so nobody knew what to do with it. It kind of floated around for while before landing in a warehouse in the French city of Montpellier, where it sat for more than a century. In 1967, Montpellier's mayor dug it out of storage and gave it to Louisville, because of all the possible Louises throughout history -- many of whom did great things -- Louisville decided to name itself after this Louis, the guy who'd gone and gotten his head chopped off in the French Revolution. This made it ironic when the statue got vandalized during all the protests over George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the summer of 2020, forcing the city to remove the statue in order to prevent its destruction. That hand got chopped off, but Louis kept his head this time.

 

(Fun Fact: Louis Alphonse de Bourbon, the current supposed heir to the House of Bourbon and legitimist pretender to the throne of France, went on Twitter when all this happened begging for the people of Louisville to leave the statue alone. Historical irony flowed like rain.)

 

I post this because I got into an internet argument the other day with one of those disaffected young people of the Bernie Bro variety who idolizes the French Revolution. Somebody in the thread had suggested protest marches that follow the rules and get permits don't accomplish anything, and that if you want to get anything done, you have to make a big mess. Some other young person joined in, saying, "French kids learn about the liberating effects of Madame Guillotine." You hear this sort of thing a lot from certain sectors of the protest population, that everything would work out better if protestors just said "screw the system" and started chopping off heads like the French in 1792. My typical reply to this is to say something along the lines of "French kids should probably learn that the liberating effects of Madame Guillotine were instrumental to the installation of Napoleon as Emperor and the 15 years of war that followed it." This, of course, tends to throw the kids off, because their knowledge of the French Revolution starts and ends with rich people getting their heads chopped off, and then all of the sudden you get to Emmanuel Macron and a bunch of people in cool yellow vests. American schools are horrible at teaching history, especially foreign history, so the kids grow up barely knowing the French Revolution was even a thing, with no idea just how many steps you had to go through to get from Louis XVI to anything vaguely resembling democracy. All anyone knows about the French Revolution is that there was cake.

 

So here, friends, just for the Hell of it is my lightning fast (but still too long) distillation of the French Revolution and all the century of conservative reaction that followed, put down into a single post.

 

The Ancient Regime

 

The big thing to know about France in the second half of the 18th century is that the country was a medieval mess and had been for hundreds of years. On the foreign stage, France was pretty good at fighting wars and had become one of the great world powers. But at home, everything was a jumbled, barely unified Byzantine mass of conflicting laws and regulations and tax structures left over from the days of Charlemagne, and the end result was that a few very rich noble types kept getting richer while the great horde of everyone else fell further and further into poverty. And this is the mess Louis XVI stepped into when he inherited the throne at the age of 19 after the death of his grandfather, Louis XV, in 1774.

 

By all historical accounts, young Louis was a nice guy who probably meant well but was a bit of a doofus and a waffler. He might have been interested in modernizing the country if anybody had suggested it to him (he wasn't going to come up with that on his own), but his advisers had other ideas. These guys were still mad at England over the outcome of the last big war, when France got tossed off North America, and they had a plan to get England's goat. "All those stupid English colonies are really ticked off over tea,” the advisers said. "If we slipped those guys a few bucks, they might break away, and then the English would be the ones getting tossed off North America." So Louis ignored the crippling debt plaguing France from, like, the last hundred years of war and sunk a load of cash into the American Revolution. But then the thing blew up, and France got sucked into war with England for real, and the costs kept piling up higher and higher. A couple of years of bad weather in the mid-1780s led to crop failures that made the financial situation even worse, and by the start of 1789, people were starving in the streets. Something had to be done about this, and everybody but Louis seemed to know it.

 

And so, after a bunch prodding from all the nobles and the people in the streets of Paris, Louis and his advisors decided to call up the Estates General to come up with a solution. This was an ancient assembly, a kind of weak-tea legislative body made up of representatives from the three “estates” -- the three classes -- of the French population: the clergy, the nobles, and the common folk. The Estates General had been a big thing in medieval France, but it hadn’t convened since 1614, and nobody was sure exactly how it was supposed to work. But nothing else was working, and everyone figured this was better than nothing, so all the classes elected their representatives and sent them to Paris.

 

After a month or two of fighting about how much power each class should have, the Third Estate (the commoners) dramatically walked out and started their own legislative body, then invited members of the other two estates to join in, but only as equals. The other estates went along with it, and the legislative body (which called itself the National Assembly for a little while) settled into a kind of moderate-liberal reformist move with the occasional outburst of what at the time was far-left radicalism. They had a couple of fever-dream late-night votes where everybody tried to one-up everyone else, resulting in craziness like the abolition of feudalism and the elimination of noble titles and the nationalization of the Catholic Church and confiscation of all church property (which is how the French government came to own Notre Dame). They swung wildly between the reaffirmation of absolute monarchy and the establishment of a pure egalitarian republic, and sometimes people on each side of the issue got really mad. In July of 1789, the anti-monarchist mobs in the Paris streets got mad and stormed the Bastille, an ancient prison that had become a symbol of the worst abuses of monarchical power (even though it hadn’t been used much by the monarchy for a century and was at that moment housing just six people who all probably needed to be in prison). Louis spent the whole thing angry about all the power he was going to have to give up – though even he thought some of that might be a good idea – and wavering between tepid support and harsh crackdowns on revolutionary fervor. At one point in October of 1789, a mob of Parisian women angry over food shortages marched 20 miles to the Palace of Versailles, and Louis and his family wound up carted back to Paris and locked up in the Tuileries Palace for safe keeping.

 

But ultimately, it worked out to a kind of nice deal. The re-org lasted a year or so, with the end result being a moderate liberal Legislative Assembly run by benevolent rich folk like the former Marquis de Lafayette (now just Gilbert du Motier) that had veto power over the King. And if history had been satisfied with itself, that would have been that. The French Revolution would have been over.

 

The Terror

 

But history still had some tricks up its sleeve, and the people in the streets of Paris still weren’t happy. A lot of them thought the reforms were weak sauce, and that France still had a long way to go before they would feel anything like true freedom. Agitation increased in the streets over the next year or so. At the same time, a group of far-left agitators -- the guys known as Jacobins, after the name of the political clubs they'd been running for a year or two -- managed a slow-motion take-over of the Legislative Assembly, and they started pushing for more and more extremist reforms. Then they started calling for people’s heads. Louis and Marie Antoinette saw where all this was going, and they tried to make a break for it in June of 1791, but they got caught well short of the border. After that, they were taken as prisoners and charged with treason. The Jacobins in the Legislative Assembly declared the monarchy was dead, and they killed the monarch and his entire family just to drive the point home. Louis's head landed in the basket on January 21, 1793, and the First Republic was born in his place. (They were just calling it the Republic for the moment, because they didn't know about the other two.)

 

And then they started with the thing that gets so many of the protest set excited today. They started cutting off people’s heads in the phase of the revolution known as the Reign of Terror. That’s not an after-market label. That’s what the Jacobins called it themselves, because terror was the goal. One unadvertised aspect of the revolution was that it really was in many ways just a Paris phenomenon, and people in other parts of the country didn’t want any part of it. The Jacobins -- led by a real self-deluded nutball named Maximilian Robespierre – decided they needed to stamp all that out. So they started literally cutting the heads off the opposition. And yes, that meant killing off a bunch of former nobles and landlords and rich people. But it also meant hunting down and killing your old buddy Jacques from down the street who didn’t get teary-eyed enough when the guys at the bar started singing “La Marseillaise.” All the moderate liberals who’d been in the Legislative Assembly wound up killed if they couldn’t escape, but so did a lot of people in the streets who were deemed less than ideally patriotic. It took almost nothing to trigger an arrest and show-trial leading to a guillotine. The smallest statement of disagreement, the merest whisper of vague dissent could do it.

 

And this wasn’t just a Paris thing. The Jacobins sent committees out into the countryside to hunt down pockets of dissent and kill the less-than-zealous. One of the favorite techniques was to take a couple of hundred people-- mostly common folk, small-town merchants or poor country farmers who’d been picked up on one charge or another -- and tie them up in the hold of a barge. Then they’d haul the barge to the middle of a river and sink it, drowning them all. The Jacobins liked to call these “republican baths.” Ultimately – though numbers are a little hard to come by – the Reign of Terror is known to have killed about 16,000 people, though some historians suggest the actual number might be as high as 50,000. Only about 3,000 of these were in Paris, and only a small proportion of those were actually the rich former nobles so many in today’s protest set likes imagining itself cheering on to the guillotine. The vast majority were poor or merchant class people in the countryside who had committed the crime of not going along blindly with what a bunch of guys in Paris had to say.

 

This kind of thing is never sustainable, though, and eventually people had enough of the killing. Despite all the murder, the Jacobins hadn’t really solved the hunger problem, and they kept trying to distract people with patriotic wars against Austria and Britain and a few counter-revolutionary corners of their own country. Finally, one day in June of 1794, a few conservative-leaning survivors stood up to Robespierre in the Legislative Assembly, and it all came undone. The people of Paris rose up once more, only this time it was the counter-revolutionaries who’d been threatened with the guillotine just a few times too many. Robespierre and his Jacobin buddies wound up following all the thousands they’d sent to death. The radical Jacobin dream had barely lasted a year.

 

The Reaction

 

And here, I think, is where the true lesson of the French Revolution lies. Because everybody ends the story with Louis’s head in a basket, thinking some vague kind of freedom-loving, progressive France emerged from the chaos. But that’s really not what happened.

 

What happened was that France wound up in the grip of conservative reactionaries, who stamped out whatever civil liberties the revolution might have brought and reversed most of the social gains. These conservatives took a lesson from the Jacobin plan to distract the nation with endless war, and a young and charismatic artillery man used those wars to quickly rise up the ranks and into the government itself. In late 1799, that artillery man, Napoléon Bonaparte, executed a coup and took over the government as First Consul. Which, really, was just another word for King. Five years later in 1805, he declared himself Emperor and committed the entirety of France to a decade-long project designed to subjugate all of Europe under his absolute power.

 

“Say, Clint,” you might be saying. “Didn’t Napoléon get beat at Waterloo and sent off to die on an island somewhere? That’s what Abba told me. Didn’t France get freedom then?”

 

Not by a long shot, friends. I mean, yeah, the rest of Europe finally got together and beat Napoleon … twice. But once they shipped Napoléon off to exile, they reinstated the Bourbon monarchy. That’s right, people. The ultimate end of the French Revolution was to put France right back where it started with the ascendency in 1814 of Louis XVI’s brother, who would be called King Louis XVIII. (Louis XVII was the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who was never crowned king because he died in a Jacobin prison at the age of 10.) Louis XVIII remained king for almost ten years until his death in 1824, when he was succeeded by Charles X, another brother of Louis. Charles X firmly believed in the divine right of kings and the elimination of any and all civil rights, which led to a very bad five years for any remaining freedom-loving French. He was finally toppled in a mostly bloodless revolution in 1830, but the French replaced him with yet another king. This time, it was a cousin, the former Duke de Orleans who styled himself Louis Philippe, King of the French. Louis Philippe reigned until yet another revolution deposed him in 1848, and the Second Republic was born. But that republic only lasted a few years before Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoléon’s, got himself elected President and declared himself Emperor Napoléon III. And there’s no telling how long he would have lasted if he hadn’t gotten himself into a big fight with Prussia that wound up with him being deposed in 1870. After that, France was finally … finally … able to give up monarchy for good and establish the Third Republic, the current government of France. It only took the French Revolution 81 years after the Fall of the Bastille to catch on.

 

And that’s the thing people have to be wary of when they call for revolution. Revolution doesn’t usually turn out the way the revolutionaries think it will. Far more often than not, it results in a more authoritarian regime than the one that was there to begin with. In the case of France, the textbook revolution all revolutionary people look up to, the result was a succession of civil oppression and authoritarian crackdowns and kings on top of kings on top of emperors for more than eight decades. You start chopping off heads, and it’s going to come back to bite you. And probably your grandchildren.

Done