Ancien Régime: Final Thoughts II
Tocqueville has offered many insights into the origins and legacy of the French Revolution. In conclusion, perhaps, we should consider three of his main points.
I He rejects the interpretation that the FR was the culmination of a conspiracy to destroy Christianity and/or the Catholic Church;
II He sees the FR as a continuation of the Ancien Régime's centralization of France and thinks that centralization weakened and undermined all local administration, making it impossible for local communities to govern themselves;
III He regards egalitarian democracy as a rabid force which, if left unchecked by any principles of merit, protection of property, or regard for liberty, will become tyrannical. He is thus a moderate democratic republican and thinks that basically classical liberal principles can be used to tame the beast.
In the next week or two, I am happy to give my views and am putting out a call for your opinions.
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If I may offer some thoughts on III.
Egalitarian democracy's historical influence is best understood as that of an ideological hammer wielded by the newly ascendent commercial elites rather than as a serious political proposition meant to stand on its own merits (which it is not...). In the name of egalitarianism one can crush all pre-existing hierarchies to created indifferentiated mass men who, far from being self-regulating autonomous beings, are in fact the ideal subjects of the new ruling class. The Chapelier Law banning the right to strike and the existence of trade guilds was a telling sign of the Revolution's ultimate direction.
From this perspective, the most influential French Revolutionary regime was not the Terror but the Thermidorean Reaction which followed. In the following 200 years of Western history during which the ideas of the French Revolution became increasingly dominant, the phenomenon of grubby politicians playing to vested commercial interests has been far more prevalent and far more powerful than that of half-mad but incorruptible revolutionary agitators.
In a way, De Tocqueville's belief that classical liberal principles could tame the beast of democracy was well-founded. Edward Bernays and the public relations industry are proof that this "beast" can be dominated by a small elite through lies. It is just that the result has still not been terribly edifying.
The most unforgettable point of Tocqueville is that the tyranny and power of government comes not from the speech it suppresses, but the kind of speech it just allows to remain, under which people can rant and rave as much about society, in order that they get a little consolation for their slavery. This makes their enslavement easier.
Of course, this was just one very small point in a book with many many thoughts. But for me, it explains a lot about the modern world.
Point II was the most interesting to me, and seemed sort of like Gibbon's thesis on how Christianity spread so fast in the late Roman Empire --thanks to the roads, i.e. using something already there. And it seems to explain a lot about --or seems to suggest to me an explanation for a lot of the infighting that went on afterwards, even among the leaders, and then the Terror; Paris was the whole ball of wax and there was and had to be one right way of doing things for the whole country. Also, it seems to explain a lot about how, and why, things work and don't work the way they do here now in the US.
(It's as if France had their "Managerial Revolution" 400 years ago!)
Also, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how this history might relate, if at all, to the current French personality? For instance, in a two-minute summary explanation of why the French are the way they are today in comparison and in contrast to other Europeans, is the Ancien Régime’s centralization of France and continuation of that centralization through the FR important? More than WWI or 1968? I'm guessing yes to the former, and maybe to the latter, but my next thoughts just sound like stereotyping and my sample size is ridiculously small.
He rejects the interpretation that the FR was the culmination of a conspiracy to destroy Christianity and/or the Catholic Church;
Some of my Royalist friends will jeer me for this but I tend to agree. It was an attempt to return to normalcy that was thwarted by the develish spirit and tremendous energy of mob violence. The attempt at reform spiraled into revolution, destruction, death and ultimately the new Emporer. All the predictions of the wise men came to nothing and all the desires of damned fools came to fruition.
Tocqueville may have changed his views towards the end of his life:
“Tocqueville was perplexed by this whole phenomenon when late in life he turned his attention to the history of the French Revolution. A year before his death, he confided to a friend: ‘There is something special about the sickness of the French Revolution which I sense without being able to describe it or analyze its causes. It is a virus of a new and unfamiliar kind. The world has known violent revolution: but the boundless, violent, radical, perplexed, bold,
almost insance but still strong and successful personality of these
revolutionaries appears to me to have no parallel in the great social upheavals of the past. From whence comes this new race? Who created it? Who made it so successful? Who kept it alive? Because we still have the same men confronting us, although the circumstances differ, and they have left a progeny in the whole civilized world. My spirit flags from the effort to gain a clear picture of this object and to find the means of describing it fairly. Independently of everything that is comprehensible in the French Revolution, in its spirit and in its deeds, there is something that remains inexplicable. I sense where the unknown is to be found but no matter how hard I try, I
cannot lift the veil that conceals it. I feel it through a strange body which prevents me from really touching or seeing it…’"
Source: Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1899-1919, London: Collins Harvil, 1990. pp. 129-130, 131-132. Quoted in CHRISTIAN POWER IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION: From the First French Revolution to the American Civil War, 1789-1861, p. 38 (Vladimir Moss, 2010)
I thank Jonathan Gress-Wright for this contribution. I wonder if he would care to elaborate a bit.
If we look only at the question of the anti-Catholic spirit, AT does draw attention to the infidelity of the upper classes, who had been poisoned by 100 years or more of ironic sniping at the Church. Despite attempts to salvage his regime, the reign of Louis XV is a train wreck in slow motion, and not least of the problems, beginning with the regency, is the irresponsible immorality of the aristocracy. Perhaps one needs to sift out the economic/tax questions and the decadence and tyranny of the regime, two factors that do not to my mind fully explain the rapidity with which the educated classes accepted both republicanism (even if in the form of constitutional monarchy) and an enlightened alternative to religion.
In this connection, I have been pondering the life and poetry of the poet André Chénier. Born in the Ottoman Empire to a French father and part-Greek mother, Chénier was brought up to revere the Greek classics, which he studied from very early on; he was also a social climber who, with his brothers, had papers forged to misrepresent him as an aristocrat thus eligible to be an army officer. As a child of the Enlightenment he despised conventional morality without being a complete beast like Sade or Laclos; he admired the English system of constitutional monarchy and a fuzzy class system, that did not prevent a duke's younger brother from making money in business. When push finally came to shove, though he favored the early stages of revolution, he drew the line at regicide, theft, mass rape and murder, and he despised the guttersnipes who took power. This revulsion is particularly strange in a man who was a friend of the evil David and the adolescent-minded Desmoulins. I do not believe however that he repented of his Enlightened philosophy or hedonism.
Everything avalanched on me lately, with storms, and other things I needed to do but couldn't do until after the storms were over, so I couldn't finish reading the book. Therefore I'm not in a position to offer good comments, but I'll give one observation:
The economic and social over-centralisation of the old regime reminds me in a way of Ptolemaic Egypt, where the economic life of the entire country was controlled by the kings. All other things considered, it may have made Roman conquest of Egypt inevitable once the two came into conflict. Likewise, the over centralisation of the old regime, resulting in the equally centralised revolutionary regime, must have been a factor in the eventual economic and population disadvantage France would come to face in regard to Wilhelmine Germany, and even later,the Third Reich. I think of inspector Clouseau writing a ticket to some poor street vendor for selling balloons without a licence.
In short, Napoleon was a bright star for a short while, but France was doomed to eventual defeat by these policies. Revolution was needed, but not the one they wound up with. Of course this doesn't take into account the general moral decline of the upper classes, but that may also be connected to the centralised nature of the regime, as it is in modern America.
From that perspective, America was doomed after 1865, Russia after 1917, Europe after 1945.
Given the confusing backwards and forwards steps taken during and after the French Revolution, was monarchy ever considered a more "progressive" alternative to republicanism?
Did anyone ever think, "Republicanism is the old dinosaur stuff and on its way out. Monarchy is the real deal"? Contrary to it being the other way round, as is usually seen?
#8,
Napoleon I?
The quote was meant to suggest that Tocqueville may have perceived a spiritual or diabolical element in the Revolution. This concept of the Revolution is typical of traditional conservatives, whether Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, but it seems to be at odds with the more liberal or progressive interpretation that emphasizes impersonal historical forces.
You summarized one of T's points as follows: the Revolution was "a continuation of the Ancien Régime’s centralization of France and thinks that centralization weakened and undermined all local administration, making it impossible for local communities to govern themselves". I thought that this approach contrasted with the more spiritually oriented conception that T expressed in that letter I cited. Was T writing all this around the same time? Perhaps he went back and forth owing to ideological uncertainty: the liberal element of his thought wanted to see the Revolution as the natural outcome of predictable social, political and economic forces, while the conservative element of his thought took more account of the conflict between Divine Providence and Satanic rebellion.
Yes, that was more or less what I thought you had in mind. I think AT tended to underrate the demonic inspiration and actions of the Revolution, partly because his mind was of the French sociological bent and partly because he had lost his faith in his adolescence. Like other conservatively inclined liberals, however, he was deeply disturbed by the social and moral breakdown. Taine appears nearly to have lost his reason in contemplating the Revolution's destructiveness, but neither, I think, fully appreciated the spiritual background because mentally they were formed, if not by Rousseau, at least by Diderot and Voltaire.
I was thinking this morning that we in the United States have been going through a slow-motion and tranquilized version of the FR, and the one most obvious point of comparison is the low quality of the people in charge of our institutions--the politicians, the clergy, the professors, the writers, the pop culture artistes. In the Summer of 1790 André Chénier published an article on the enemies of France in which he warned not against the aristocrats who had gone abroad but against the demagogues whose lack of ability made them clearly unfit to be a party leader. What were their motives, he asked, and concluded, greed and a propensity to evil. He was not thinking of his friend Desmoulins or even Danton, a friend of his brother, but untalented scum like the dramatis Collot d'Herbois who would go on to be a terrorist.
Dr. Fleming,
I have often wondered about tragic plays that seem to illustrate once the devil has been loosed, death and destruction must run its course before order or tranquility can be recovered. I know with Shakespeare's tragedies this thesis could be defended and illustrated, and I have heard Claude Polin wonder aloud about this theme with the French Revolution, but what about the Greek tragedies?
What strikes me most is how the normal balance of power between monarch and nobles was overturned so slowly yet so completely. Normally, the balance may tilt one way or the other, and this may cause wars, but it usually gets righted, as in Byzantium. England managed to come up with a stable balance post-Magna Carta which endured until the 19th century. The Holy Roman Emperors were thwarted in centralising power away from the nobles, thus Germany wound up a collection of hundreds of petty states, in an empire in name only. Only in France do you see such a long term centralisation of power under the monarch, with the nobles becoming only figureheads.
This situation was bound to lead to civil war. That it happened is not exceptional. Nor was it exceptional that once the revolution broke out, it was taken over by a group (or groups) who were not leaders of the revolution at first. Such things happen.
What was different was the type of scum who took it over, the ideologue lunatics. That was new and unique at the time. Never before had anyone like this ever come to control so much power. And it is that type of lunatic that has made the modern world, bad as it is.
While driving home from work, I was thinking about the remarkable timing if all this. That class of lunatics came in to existence during the last couple generations before the revolution, and then the revolution happened just at the right time to benefit them and their mad schemes. I couldn't help but think of something demonic at work underneath it all.
Perhaps if you fail to destroy Christendom from without, with armies of a false prophet, you might to try to destroy it from within instead. You just need the right kind of lost souls to do it.
The two movements, centrifugal and centripetal, are always at work. It was the turbulence and lack of loyalty in the French nobility that inspired French kings and their ministers with the quite legitimate desire to put down the regional magnates. Study the 100 years war and see how often the Dukes of Burgundy, FLanders, etc sided with England and the horrors that this caused. Part of the horrors of the Reformation in France was the tendency of each side, beginning with the Huguenots, to court alien powers and establish regional independence. The last big movement was the Fronde, in the minority of Louis XIV, and though I have always had some sympathy for the Frondeurs, many of the leaders--most, indeed--can be viewed as nothing better than disloyal thugs out for personal power, wealth, and glory. The misfortune of France was that Richelieu and Mazarin were such geniuses that they did their work too well.
Alas, the East Romans did not get it right, and too often the provincial nobility gained so much power that they ate up all the rural estates, aggrandized themselves, and impoverished everyone else. The most successful emperors were tough guys who put the nobles back in their place.
It's a small thing, perhaps, but the French Revolution began as an uprising of the nobles and rich bourgeois who wanted to increase the power of the parlements. They stood in the way of every attempt to balance the budget and reform the economic system. They backed the Jansenists not because they had any interest in theology but to use them as a wedge against the king and his ministers. People like Mirabeau, Lafayette, and Philippe Egalité adored the English system and were willing to trade off some of their privileges if it meant dragging down the king. I wonder what the moronic and degenerate Philippe--Grand Master of French Freemasons--was thinking as he waited for the blade to fall. He did die with dignity. Told to take off his shoes before having his head taken off, he said, "You can do it afterwards. Just get on with it."
There is no permanent solution. States that over-centralize become so top-heavy they cannot function; states that under-centralize lose coherence and fall victims to better organized neighbors. The Dutch were constantly being conquered. The best approach is something like the ROman empire's confederation of city states, but in the end they over-centralized in response to the crisis of barbarian invasions
This afternoon, I'll try to find time to take up the challenge to Tocqueville's thesis put forward by a prominent village historian, Peter Jones, though I have not finished his book on Liberty and Locality in Revolutionary France.
Since we are discussing the dissolution of civil power, I would appreciate it if anyone here could give me their views on the recent publication by Oxford University Press: The Last Pagans of Rome by Alan Cameron. I saw where Professor Peter Brown gave it a rather favorable review and I tend to respect his judgement but was wondering if any Chronicles readers have read the book.
Dr. Fleming, threads like this are very much like attending colleges lectures. I hope they continue. Could I request a series on Hilaire Belloc and especially "The Great Heresies"(which I have just read) and "The Servile State".
I have not read this, and in fact did not know that it was out. Cameron is a good scholar who specializes in late antiquity. I read his first book, on Claudian, when it came out in 70 and there is every reason to believe this will be good. Peter Brown is generally very good, writes well for an academic, but some of his writing on Christianity tends to be a bit subversive. I do not know if he counts as one of the "best" but he sometimes appear to lack conviction. Perhaps it is only that scholarship encourages the skeptical attitude. I've ordered a review copy from Oxford and if that does not come will buy a second hand copy.
Dr. Fleming,
Thank you. I look forward to your review of the book and will probably read it, or not, based on your recommendation.
Speaking of thanks, I am grateful to Derek Leaberry for sending me the clipping from the Washington Examiner about the chief. Every time I read a piece about some interesting young person, I wonder how much the lily of their background has been gilded. What a wonderful family this young chef appears to have come from! They sound vaguely familiar.
On a not quite entirely unrelated topic, I wonder if Mr. Leaberry thinks Chronicles should do an informal event in the DC area, such as we have done in places like San Antonio, Houston, Kansas City. Each one is different, but we set up a reception somewhere, to which we invite subscribers who can also invite potential subscribers. People buy their own drinks (and preferably mine too) and I and sometimes a colleague pontificate for perhaps 15 minutes and then have discussion over drinks. A small group sometimes goes out to dinner afterwards. Where we have generous supporters, they often pick up the tab for travel and hotel, and where we do not, we take care of it ourselves. I used to go to Washington all the time, often as the guest of you the taxpayers when I served on a variety of committees for the infamous Education Department. In recent years, a refugee from the conservative movement and all its works, I only go there less than once a year, but we do have a fair number of readers as well as the brain who is directing out circulation development.
Dr. Fleming,
If it is the Derek Leaberry I know in D.C., the reception would include an entire cast of characters from across the country that you would very much enjoy. I think he actually lives in Maryland but I could be wrong.
I'm sorry to be getting into this so late. I have long felt that all modern revolutions were really revolutions against traditional religion, which is among other reasons, why the American was not a revolution. The French revolutionaries were not only vicious in persecuting the Church, they also gave Hitler a model for what to do with the Jews. Think about it; whether it was the Bolsheviks, who murdered more Christians in two years than the Nazis managed to do to Jews in five years or so, and who reduced the number of priests to less than 3000 by the time that our leaders allied with them in the Great Patriotic War; or Castro or Ho Chi Minh. The first enemy was religion. Mao made war on Confucius, knowing that he had to get rid of what had made China decent. Real revolutions are never political. They use political means to achieve what they think of as moral ends.
Speaking of ancient regimes and their fall, I kind of liked this article from a Chronicles editor and former confederate, who Dr. Fleming once claimed was a drummer boy for Nathan Bedford Forest and his Brigade, but I do not know.
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/fugitive-agrarians/
Thanks to Robert @22 for that link; a most remarkable article!
Although a Washington get-together for Chronicles afficianados of the Death Star sometimes known as the "Capital of the Free World" would be welcomed, I must say that most of my "entire cast of characters" do things like wreck my house, misplace my tools, capture wild animals, dig up sections of my backyard and irritate neigbors who wish that my Queen Anne's County home was an Eastern Shore version of Bethesda or Arlington . Think of me more as a Scott Richert of the Chesapeake without Richert's writing skills. To my great delight, I will be rockfishing with my other "cast of characters" this Saturday.
You are a good man Mr. Leaberry. The person I misplaced you for admitted to posting under the pen name, Obadiah Wildblood, but never Derek Leaberry. My apology and best wishes to you and your "cast of characters" with the rockfishing this weekend.
An informal DC event would be welcomed by me. I'm sorry I missed the JRC here a few years ago. Dr. Fleming, I will gladly cover your bar tab!
Robert, thanks for linking the magnificent article. "I'll Take My Stand" is a neglected treasure that I recently read for the first time. I was fortunate enough to take a creative writing class from one of the final living links to the Agrarian group, Walter Sullivan, who wrote extensively about them, including a memoir of Allen Tate.
Robert @22 - I, too, liked the article by Professor Landess that you linked to. I thought it was the best article in an above average issue of TAC. Professor Landess has one contribution in Volume 1 and two in Volume 2 of Chronicles of the South. He also has an enjoyable story in the May issue of Chronicles about an attractive married woman (I started to write "babe") who lived in a garage apartment when he was young. It brought back memories of my youth.
Dr. Landess is one of those rare wise men who is too old to lie and too bright for darkness. I had the pleasure of dinner with him, his dear wife and some felllow Okies in Charleston last fall at the JRC meeting. I doubt I will ever forget it.