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"We don't want to be like the leader in the French Revolution who said There go my people, I must find out where they are going so I can lead them."
John F. Kennedy
Yes, one last blog entry about the French Revolution. I basically had to after having run into a quite fascinating, and highly provocative, article on this subject: The Revolutionary Colossus by Samantha Wesner.
A fifth straight blog entry about the French Revolution? Really?
Yup.
Sorry, but it is a major event in history, and changed the world. At least, the world was never the same afterwards. Until recent decades, in fact, it was the most written about historical event in history, and that is saying something. Perhaps one clear sign of it's significance - and apparent lasting potency, for that matter - is that it remains controversial to this day. When I was younger, and on my way to France for the celebrations of the French Revolution Bicentennial in the summer of 1989, I basically understood a sanitized, "safe" version of this explosive chapter in history. Only when I went to college and delved in a bit deeper did I truly come to appreciate just how potent the French Revolution actually was. It could be argued that all three major modern forms of Western political thinking - modern democracy and capitalism, socialism and communism, and totalitarianism and fascism - were given birth during this era.
Also, it proved to be the most chaotic event in history, at least to that point. Nothing like it had ever happened before. And it would be a long, long time before anything remotely like it would happen again. Arguably, at least not until the Paris Commune almost a century later, although that was more limited in scale. Perhaps the Russian Revolution, which occurred a century and change after the French Revolution, was the closest event which bares any real comparison.
Perhaps that is why it remains controversial right to the present day. In fact, many who identify as conservatives by Western standards tend to absolutely detest this chapter in history. It seems to me that too often, they either gloss over the abuses of the ancien régime and the feudal way of doing things which existed before, or even ignore it completely, and then blame the revolutionaries for the obvious bloodshed and chaos that ensued all over France during the revolution. I would argue that this event was inevitable. If it had not happened specifically in France at that time and place in history, then it would have happened somewhere else in the world. Something like this was bound to happen, because the feudal system needed to die, and it was bound to die a painful death.
Frankly, an argument can be made that the painful episodes of the revolution can be likened to the labor pains of a new world being born, as corny as that sounds. It was not like the old, feudal mindset was simply going to give up all of their power and privileges, and the abuses that these imposed on the overwhelming majority of the population, just like that. Since they remained willfully blind to these abuses, which they were of course responsible for, they received the inevitable payback, which was the business end of retribution and a desire for revenge. It was not like they were see reason and scale back their privileges, and the necessary excesses and abuses required to maintain those same privileges. Hence, a revolution was necessary, even if some criticize it.
Yet, it remains controversial and highly criticized. These conservative critics of the revolution, however, tend to only see all of this as a threat. Thus, they often open themselves up, rightly or wrongly, to criticism of being blind and death to those clear abuses of the old feudal order. The kings of France prior to the revolution had absolute power, and they enjoyed it to extremes. In fact, Louis XVI had bankrupted his country, which is why he called Estates General, in order to impose taxes which, predictably, would fall hardest on the vast majority of the French population, which had little say in the matter, and had little responsibility in what had caused France's crushing debts and the near economic collapse that France faced. They had not caused it, but were now clearly expected to pay the debts which the King had piled up. And it was not like he was willing to scale back on the excesses of his lifestyle at the court in Versailles.
But never mind all of that. Conservative critics simply look at what happened afterwards. They rarely seem to acknowledge that maybe the privileged elites of France were basically almost asking for it. In this article, Samantha Wesner sums up the conservative fears of the French Revolution quite succinctly:
To the conservative imagination, revolution was not only monstrous but cannibalistic — a Thermidorian variation on “The People, King-Eater”. As Edmund Burke wrote in his Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790, revolution was “a species of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it”.4 French Thermidorian prints reflected this verdict in their own way. In Les Formes acerbes, a human figure stands on a pile of corpses. With a stance befitting a would-be Colossus, he drinks steaming blood, fresh from the guillotine, as if to transform himself into something more than human by the drink. The figure is Joseph le Bon, a Jacobin representative sent from Paris to the provinces during The Terror to bring rebels in the north of France to heel. Furies and leopards stand by, “worthy companions of this Cannibal”, ready to devour the remains of Le Bon’s victims. Terror is written in the gestures and faces of the group to the left, as they supplicate the Convention. Like Gillray, the print depicts another perversion of sovereignty, this time in the figure of the Cannibal representative, a human being who makes himself monstrous.
This same article by Wesner also had an interpretation of Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein - long now one of my favorite books, incidentally - which I had admittedly never quite heard before, but which was quite fascinating and has some real merits:
Mary Shelley’s own youth took place against the backdrop of a violent decade of European warfare, as Napoleon Bonaparte traversed the continent, the self-proclaimed representative of French freedom and liberty. Shelley’s birth in 1797 caused the death of her mother, and coincided with the coup that transformed what was left of French revolutionary democracy into dictatorship. Critics have read Shelley’s story as a parable of the dual nature of the revolutionary moment: the scientific, rational Frankenstein and the lonely, love-lorn, murderous creature, trapped in a struggle to the death.6 As scientist-representatives brought to life a revolutionary Colossus, so Frankenstein, driven by a feverish, misguided impulsion, brought to life a “hideous progeny”.7 The result is a killing spree of innocents as creature and creator crisscross the continent. And like Darwin’s giant, the revolutionary Colossi, and the Thermidorian monsters, Frankenstein’s creature is unnamed.
As in Les Abominables, Theodore Von Holst’s 1831 frontispiece to Frankenstein sets two figures, creator and monster, together in the frame. But here, there is no evil conniving, only shock and creeping horror. Both creator and creature appear almost innocently stunned by what has happened, Frankenstein looking down at his monstrous offspring as he beats a hasty retreat, the creature looking blankly shocked to be alive, in contrast with the skeleton lying supine between his legs.
Wow! That's pretty thought-provoking, is it not?
Makes me want to pick up Frankenstein and read it yet again, despite having read it numerous times already. This time, reading the book while keeping this description in mind.
Anyway, I digress...
Now don't get me wrong: I am not trying to justify the obvious abuses and crimes of the revolutionary chaos and bloodshed, or myself conveniently turning a blind eye to it. Far from it. I recognize that the bloodshed went way too far. That it produced chaos, and that once this monster, if you will, was initially released, it made even more extreme violence not only possible, but probably inevitable. It was a vicious cycle, and once the people of France found themselves in the midst of this violence, it seemed like they did not know how to end it. And as the quote by John F. Kennedy which quite fascinated me when younger, and which I only came to comprehend more fully the more familiar I got with this event, the so-called leaders of the French Revolution really had no real answers. They themselves seemed not to provide any real vision or leadership, but merely responses to events which in fact were well out of their control and spiraling into chaos and bloodshed, quite often consuming these leaders themselves.
Indeed, Edmund Burke was proven right. The chaos and spiraling of violence in France at the time would inevitably lead to a dictatorial strongman figure who provided the people with what they by then wanted the most: some sort of order. That is exactly what happened, with Napoleon ultimately marking the end of the revolution, at least according to most people (although some people including Napoleon himself, felt that he was a continuation, or perhaps the culmination, of the revolution itself).
Still, I maintain that it was inevitable. And that meant that some of the excesses at least had their roots in the excesses against the abuses against the peasantry before the outbreak of the revolution. It just seems that when you look at history, it often feels like an endless tug of war. And in this case, the tug back proved to resemble violent throes in retaliation for crimes committed freely against them for far too long. And I maintain that something like the French Revolution was inevitable. In fact, it is almost shocking that something like it had not happened well before this.
Another thing which I learned about through this article were the 1791 writings about the French Revolution by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of legendary English scientist Charles Darwin. Keep in mind that he wrote this piece well before the worst excesses of the revolution, particularly the Terror. Yet, he views only the excesses of the revolution, and expresses his obvious view that they have clearly already gone too far. Like with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Darwin also likened the revolution to an out of control monster.
Wesner sums all of these comparisons with terrible monsters up thus in her article:
Placing the revolutionary Colossi in a genealogy that stretches from Darwin’s Bastille giant through to Frankenstein’s horrific creature invites us to consider the particular emotional register within which each appears. The exercise reveals an inverse relationship between size and degree of horror. In Darwin, the giant is grand and glorious, the size of the earth itself; in Fouché he is scarier and smaller, traversing the republic on a ruthless exterminating mission. In Thermidorian prints and in British caricature, he is a hollow aberration of a body politic, or a would-be Colossus who instead becomes a monstrous cannibal as he drinks the blood of the guillotine. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, the creature is somewhat larger than a man, and downright horrifying, doubly so because we sympathize with him. And there is something else in the shift from Darwin’s titanic giant, awakened by patriot-flame, to Shelley’s creature, jolted into life by a scientist in the grip of a feverish, misguided, creative impulsion. If for Darwin, revolution could be allegorized to the electrified awakening of an embodied Third Estate, then Frankenstein allegorizes a revolution stripped of both its epic scale and its promise. Our attention shifts from the patriot-flame and the Colossus to the “modern Prometheus” of Shelley’s subtitle, who gave fire to mankind and lived to regret it.
One side note: I was kind of cheating by inserting that quote by John F. Kennedy about the French Revolution. You see, I grew up partially in my grandparent's house, and they had a lot of books and magazine from different eras, including the Camelot era of Kennedy. One of those books was "The Thousand Days: Kennedy as President" by Arthur Schlesinger and published by Citadel Press, which was mostly a picture book with a summary and some memorable quotes by Kennedy. This was one of those quotes, although in that book, it suggested that he said "leaders" of the French Revolution, in the plural, and not singular. However, the only quote I could find from him like that was in the singular. And that means that he was actually talking about one guy, literally. That guy's name was Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, who was one of the leaders of another French Revolution (there were actually a series of them following the big one) and who indeed did say something to the effect of, "There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader." Yet, I never knew that when growing up, so I had assumed (wrongly) that Kennedy had been talking about the leaders (plural) of the French Revolution, when he had actually been talking about one leader of another French Revolution. Still, it felt like it was relevant of the French Revolution as well, since the leaders sometimes just went with a crowd already headed somewhere or up to something. Thus, I used the quote here, even though it probably, technically, is not historically accurate. Just wanted to clear the air on that particular point.
The Revolutionary Colossus by Samantha Wesner, December 10, 2020:
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/revolutionary-colossus/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3jlOPoHVMAs9IRBrYv-FRJAIC1b5xo16wUncHL6H3XVGxSwgW-TBsZYvg_aem_KfEi74VsFHCZWvIirYX9ng
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