|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Bertrand de Jouvenel and the French Revolution
| Article
# : |
16021 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1989 |
3,182 Words |
| Author
: |
Chris Woltermann
Chris Woltermann is an independent securities trader living in
Springfield, Ohio. He has a doctorate in political science
from Purdue University and has studied at the University of
Cape Town, South Africa. |
How should we characterize the later stages of the French Revolution? Did the rise of Napoleonic despotism violate the ideals that the early revolutionaries had proclaimed? Or, rather, did the Revolution evince its own integrity, a strange logic according to which autocracy merely culminated such principles as popular sovereignty and universal liberty?
We may give these questions a sharper cast by juxtaposing two famous statements from the revolutionary era. Napoleon, having achieved nearly absolute rule as first consul, asserted: "The Revolution is closed; its principles are fixed in my person. The government in being is the representative of the sovereign people. There can be no opposition to the sovereign." In contrast, the Declaration of Rights of 1793 included the provision: "The law should protect public and individual liberty against oppression by those who rule." Our questions, then, recur with greater force: Did the Revolution betray its principles? Or did it, as Napoleon argued, fulfill them?
An affirmative reply to the latter question was provided by such nineteenth-century liberal critics as Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Constant, Hippolyte Taine, and Odilon Barrot. In our time, the foremost successor to their tradition is the French writer Bertrand de Jouvenel. During this year, the bicentennial of the Revolution's beginning, his work is worthy of renewed attention.
De Jouvenel's great study, Du Pouvoir: Histoire Naturelle de sa Croissance, (On Power: A Natural History of its Growth) reflects his nonexistential encounter with power during the 1930s and '40s. As a nobleman of both Catholic and Jewish ancestry, he fled France to escape Nazi persecution. As a refugee in Switzerland, he anguished over the problem of how modern governments, buttressed by the fine phrases of the Enlightenment, could be so much more powerful, arbitrary, and oppressive than the weak monarchies of the Middle Ages. To address his grief, he wrote his history of the growth of power, with "power" understood as "l'ensemble des elements gouvernementaux," or what English speakers know as the central governmental authority. Du Pouvoir is both profound scholarship and a highly personal testimony. It remains a touchstone for all who value the reality of liberty over false liberal promises.
To appreciate de Jouvenel's thought, one must grasp his antipathy to Marxist historical analysis. Contrary to Marx, he contends that power is more than an instrument by which one class dominates others. It is also, and equally importantly, the assailant of
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
