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Introduction: The French Revolution Reconsidered
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13463 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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9 / 1987 |
529 Words |
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In the September issue the Modern Thought section includes several pieces devoted to the French Revolution. Seymour Drescher's study of Alexis de Tocqueville as an analyst of the Revolution and Bernard Mitjavile's extended interview with Pierre Chaunu, together with the accompanying sidebars, illustrate the debate still associated with France's great national upheaval. The discussions of the Revolution underscore three key points. First, the French Revolution has become in the popular mind and among scholars, inextricably tied with later social and political upheavals, most importantly the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Second, the growing disenchantment with Soviet communism, evident far more within the French intellectual community than among American academics, has engendered in France a growing distaste for its own revolutionary heritage, seen as coextensive with repression and violence. The Revolution from 1789 on is shown in the writings of Pierre Chaunu and Francois Furet as carrying the seeds of tyranny. The persecution of Catholics and the general use of terror against declared enemies of the state, which became prevalent by 1793, are treated as tendencies of the Revolution already present from the outset.
Third, the new antirevolutionary historiography, unlike antirevolutionary polemics of the last century, has not originated from the old Right but from among anglophile defenders of political liberty. Up until the post-World War II period, Frenchmen who denounced the Revolution were predominantly monarchists or members of the Catholic Right. The attack on the Revolution was symptomatic of an anti-modernist outlook that often went hand in hand with hostility to capitalism, parliamentary government, and the brutal disestablishment of the church in early twentieth-century France. The new critical historiography of the Revolution (as many Marxists are aware) proceeds from a classical liberal perspective. The appeal to Tocqueville by Chaunu and Furet is significant in this regard. Tocqueville was among the first to stress the connection (not discontinuity) between the old regime and the Revolution, and the link between the two that Tocqueville showed, as Drescher points out, was the expansion of centralized political control over the French people. What Louis XIV began, Robespierre and Napoleon brought to completion: a modern state that controlled its subjects while claiming to liberate them from older social authorities.
It is fitting that, like Tocqueville, today's liberal critics of the Revolution admire England's unwritten constitution and the work of our Founding Fathers. Walter Bagehot, writing in the late 1860s, judged the American and British regimes to be fundamentally different but equally
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