A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution Jeremy D. Popkin 2019
A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution by Jeremy D. Popkin | Goodreads
After
my introduction into the French Revolution via Madame de Stael, I tracked down
a title that could give me a more general overview of the events French
Revolution. This edition was published recently, which I find important.
Reexamination of records, memoirs, and publications by fresh eyes is what
history is. What lessons do we take from the past? Which lessons are relevant
to the era we’re living in.
The failure of aristocratic Europe. I’ll often go into the exploration of a new subject with my preconceived notions of what I’ll find. I want to see institutions I disapprove of crumble and fail under the weight of their own hubris and incompetence. The France of Louis XVI was an absolute monarchy in the strictest sense of the word. In strict I mean that it was a dysfunctional concept in a world growing and changing quickly. In England, the Reformation and the English Civil War had resulted in the establishment of Parliament and enfranchisement of some of the population. An upper and lower house that established a forum for a ‘democracy’ to take place, but the landed aristocracy was still firmly in control. The existence of class and a division of society based on birth wasn't questioned. It was how much privilege each class could exercise over each other. In the case of Great Britian, the powerful bourgeois class had established a need for a voice and the aristocracy relinquished. It was the turn of France to evolve or perish.
At the start of the revolution, French society was
structured into three estates:
the Nobles, The Clergy and the Third Estate. The Third Estate included
the artisans, the itinerant labor, and the peasants that worked agriculture. The
first two had privilege, the third paid for it and in return received permission
for their continued existence. It was a typical feudal structure with the
tenant farming peasants and the absentee lord with the Catholic Church acting
as the binding force between the two. The cities were growing, developing
markets and shops with all the demands of a sophisticated society and the wealth
of the bourgeois class exploded. They were the mercantile, production and professional
class. The world was generating vast amounts of wealth and from this wealth and
globalism grew the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment. The more I understand it, the less
impressed I am with its profoundness. These great thinkers and writers laid out
the basis for our modern democracies, economies and culture. As I read through
some of their writings and analysis, I’m struck with how superfluous it is. All
this profound thought is either stuff you should have learned in kindergarten
or is demonstrably wrong. For me, the message is that what’s wrong with society
can’t be solved with violence or religion but with vibes. All you need is love.
I think. I also think the Enlightenment was just an obvious outcome of the
Protestant Reformation. Central to that message was there shouldn’t be institutions
between an individual and God’s salvation. Central to the Enlightenment was there
needn’t be a God between an individual and their personal salvation. Both
statements are a refutation of a legitimacy of rule based upon divine right. The
French Catholic Church had remained the central and state religion after the Reformation
but relations between the Pope and the King remained problematic.
I will concede that the Industrial Revolution was founded
on Enlightenment ideas. Modernity would not have been possible without the evolution
of philosophy that rejected the superstition of religion and substituted the
individual’s experience of reality. At the time of the Revolution, this “reality”
was experienced through feelings and perceptions and other thought experiments
that concluded that individuals needed to have a say in their destiny. People
gathered socially in clubs and cafés exchanging ideas and diagnosing society’s
ills. Like minded people chartered societies dedicated to addressing the issues.
They had debates, introduced proposals and then published their conclusions. Publishing
their conclusions so everyone could read it. I mean literacy was a thing and
while I hesitate to claim that it had reached majority in the population, it
was storming the gates. Information was disseminated to a public that could
consume it, understand it, and assess how it affected their lives directly. The
people needed a voice and a say in their lives and examples were moving forward
with success throughout Europe. They asked for reform of the absolutism of the
monarchy and modelled these reforms on what had occurred in England. The
intransigence of the nobles to concede any of their privilege is mind boggling.
Add several bad harvests, food shortages, a near bankrupt government, a
completely inept and ineffectual Monarchal rule topped off by a population of
25 million having to read about it daily and you have a fair description of the
situation as revolution approached.
The French Revolution was inevitable in its need to bring
some kind of institutional reform to the French government. It was impossible
for things to remain as they were. The scale of the violence and bloodshed that
followed was a basic failure of communication. This idea of reform and
inclusion was proposed and advocated by that newly minted bourgeois class of professionals
that sat in the ministries, financed the kingdom’s debts, and held the political
patronage positions. They had achieved personal wealth and power and now wished
to have that achievement recognized and rewarded. As the Bastille was stormed and
the Monarchy fell, these intellectuals recognized that it the mob was demanding
all men and women are created equal. Equal representation for all the people
and universal suffrage. They would form a National Assembly and write a
constitution. And remove the church from government (they’re always taking it
on the chin). Assemblies gathered and proclamations were made. Crowds gathered
and militias formed. Violence and death rolled across the land. The aristocracy
was dispatched. Control was had by the revolutionaries and the mob waited. Nothing
happened. Or nothing happened fast enough. And then another bad harvest. And
then the food ran out. And the guys that had taken charge didn’t have a plan. They
had a National Assembly and were debating the issues. They had some emergency-temporary-dictator-revolving-something
security administration that was trying to implement the decries and
instructions but, in the end, it was just a more violence and mess. I won’t dwell
on the progression of events or the examples of barbarity, well known.
Communication was the problem. The intellectual elites who
had provided the ideological basis for this notion of personal freedom and
democratic representation hadn’t been specific enough in whom they were including
as people that needed this representation. Their efforts at reform of the aristocracy
was an effort at inclusion not an assault on the principle of exclusion. It was
not an effort to destroy a class system of privilege; it was an effort to have
this new bourgeois extended the same rights and privileges as the nobles (the Catholics
still had to go). The guilds, artisans and shopkeepers, were not to be
included. There was an admission that all men were created equal, but some were
more equal than others.
After ten years of debate, several versions of a
constitution were produced, but none were fully implemented, I think. It had narrowed
significantly from the starting egalitarian idealism. Property owners were to
be enfranchised; they had a motive for good government. Non property owners were
not. Slavery was off the table, because, ya know, slave owners. The peasants
would be represented although not released from their feudal responsibilities
or dues, the vassal lord needed compensation for the loss incurred for land
redistribution. It was a mess, and this was the compromise after ten years of bloodshed
and terror. The politicians, provocateurs, and propagandists that had ignited “the
mob” had no idea of how to deliver on the promises. There's really no good way
to summarize any of it. The glaring problem was that there wasn't a great deal
of consideration given to the opinion of the peasants. The majority of the
population were the farm workers and peasants that was the agricultural and
economic backbone of France. It was decided for them that they were to have a
voice in the new nation but not a say. There were also the problems of slavery
and women, these portions of the revolution were quietly shelved.
The book was a review of the events of the French
Revolution. It wasn't really any kind analysis of why the revolution happened
or a critique of the decisions that made the revolution eventually fail. The
author has created a summation of the events of the Revolution. All the
players, the circumstances and the events that caused the mob in Paris to
attack the Bastille that started the Revolution, through the declaration of
Napoleon as dictator and the end of the First Republic. I did not know that the
Revolution had been a failure. I did not know that Napoleon was some kind of
anti-hero savior. At the end of the book I had to step back and reexamine not
only my expectations of the book but of the French Revolution in general. I'm
struck with how much naivete I approached it with. There was a desire to find
radical and lasting change in one of the democratic revolutions of the past. To
find an example where the people destroyed the ruling class and lived happily
ever after.
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