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Digesting the Revolution: A Tocquevillean Perspective
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16013 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1989 |
7,710 Words |
| Author
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Seymour Drescher
Seymour Drescher has published a number of books on
Tocqueville, among them Tocqueville and England (Harvard,
1964) and an annotated translation of the correspondence
between Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont. |
How is one to understand the great French Revolution that erupted two centuries ago and whose bicentennial is being celebrated this year? A good initial vantage point would be the centenary ceremonies of 1889. The Festival of the French Revolution was officially opened in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on May 5, the anniversary of the convening of the Estates-General by Louis XVI. The commencement day had been chosen with extreme deliberation as the last, and indeed, only, moment in 1789 before the king, clergy, nobility, and Third Estate began the disputes that were to tear apart the traditional order of their nation.
Yet the celebratory moment, designed to emphasize the least common denominator of unity, was fraught with overtones of division and bitterness. The ambassadors of all of Europe's great powers, Russia, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, and Italy, left Paris in order to be absent from the proceedings at Versailles. How, asked the London Times of May 4, 1889, could the representatives of the sovereigns of these nations join in celebrating an event that ultimately proved fatal to Louis XVI and his queen? And how could the centenary of the Revolution not evoke its climax in the Reign of Terror? However muted, the centenary could only highlight the isolation of France's republican system in a Europe of crowned heads of state.
For most observes, the great Hall of Mirrors also evoked memories of France's supreme moment of national humiliation. Just eighteen years before, a victorious Prussian army of occupation had gathered there to hail the proclamation of a new German empire, forcing France to surrender her centuries-old position as the greatest power on the Continent. The newspapers of 1889 were full of comparative statistics indicating the relative military inferiority of the French republic.
Other echoes of national malaise reverberated through France in 1889. General Boulanger had just sent France into deep crisis by holding the republic up to ridicule for lacking the political will to seek recovery of national pride and the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine lost to Germany. Boulanger's popularity remained so threatening that the republic prohibited the display of his bust at the International Fair being held to celebrate France's national revival and economic progress. The opening of the fair in Paris was separated from the Revolutionary festivities so as to minimize both domestic and foreign complications. The fair itself was rigorously focused on the present and the future. Reminders of France's complicated past were overshadowed by the abstract steel matrix of the Eiffel Tower, hovering
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