Positive Liberty

This is the third in a series of posts that Rowe and I have been making on the eighteenth century’s two great revolutions–the French and the American. Be warned: It’s quite long, and I will probably be revising it throughout the day.

Recommended Reading: Several people have asked me what books I recommend on the French Revolution. It’s a crowded field, and it’s easy to get lost in the forest popular but superficial works. I’m going to recommend a few landmark texts here to help guide the interested reader. Note that the versions I give are in English; French-language recommendations are available on request.

One of the classics on the subject is Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution, which I am now rereading. I highly recommend it to everyone who is already somewhat familiar with the events of the time. If you are not familiar with the events, William Doyle’s The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction will get you up to speed. The most popular recent account is Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, which covers almost everything of importance. I have some difficulties with the tone of the book, and many academics have pointed out a number of errors in the text, but it is a good starting point nonetheless toward understanding the current synthesis in French Revolution studies–while also explaining the events in detail. On the other hand, reading Doyle and Tocqueville together will give you almost everything of theoretical value in Schama–but with fewer words to read, and with more of Tocqueville’s supremely thought-provoking digressions.

One final useful account for the layman is Georges Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution, which has been of great significance to me both in my thinking about the Revolution and in my overall philosophy of history. This is a bit of a paradox, because Lefebvre’s account is one of the classics of Marxist historiography, while I am not at all a Marxist. Even the field of French Revolution studies has moved significantly away from Marxism in the last few decades. What follows will explain the paradox while giving some important background on economic conditions in 18th-century France.

The Death and Utility of Marxist Accounts: Lefebvre’s account has long been a standard among Marxist interpretations of the French Revolution. Those interpretations have now been more or less discredited among professional historians. Yet the Marxist paradigm did a great deal of good for the profession, and in this section I’d like to explain what I see as its strengths and its weaknesses.

Briefly, the Marxist account of the French Revolution held that a rising bourgeois class, made up of individuals whose chief wealth and ambitions lay in the realm of trade, capital, and industrial production, came into conflict with the last remnants of a feudal economic system headed by the nobility and based ultimately on the land. During the Revolution, this rising new class attempted to destroy the power of the nobility and to set up a regime more amenable to its own capitalistic interests.

Professional historians have some fairly solid empirical reasons to reject this view of the Revolution (The Marxist view is apparently still taught sometimes in high schools, but then, it’s amazing what antiquated histories one can find in the high school curriculum).

First, an analysis of the individuals who led the Revolution reveals that relatively few of them were actually capitalists in any sense whatsoever. Many of the most ardent revolutionaries were nobles, and those who were not often nonetheless aspired to nobility in the years just prior to the Revolution. They added the noble particle “de” to their names; they attempted to win the favor of current nobles, and they sought to buy titles of nobility from the government (about which more below).

Second, examinations of the cahiers de doléances, the “notebooks” of grievances that were assembled prior to the meeting of the Estates General in 1789, reveal contradictory and often decidedly uncapitalist complaints about the Old Regime. Few if any advocated dropping all internal trade barriers, modernizing the banking and credit system, or a proper reform of the hideously corrupt taxation schemes. As someone who prides himself on his free-market bona fides, I can assure you that these would be the very first reforms I would have attempted in the Old Regime.

So if, in an attempt to shore up the Marxist paradigm, we admit that perhaps the revolutionaries were ideological proto-capitalists–despite their social and professional aspirations, then to sustain the Marxist thesis we must also admit that they were ideological proto-capitalists despite their self-avowed goals.

A Short Course on 18th-Century French Finance (or, How to Succeed by Bilking the Government): A third strike against the Marxist paradigm is that it has been found rather conclusively that the ambitions of wealthy 18th-century Frenchmen were generally not oriented toward opening factories, engaging in trade, or investing in modern types of securities (many of which were actually illegal).

Even among those who did not make the Revolution, proper capitalists were few indeed. Thus dies the hypothesis that while the revolutionaries may not personally have been capitalists, they nonetheless carried water for those who were. Real capitalists were eccentrics and oddities, and certainly not a rising social class capable of working an event like the French Revolution.

The well-to-do generally reviled factories, commerce, and securities, which are among the hallmarks of a capitalist system as we would see it. It has been demonstrated more or less conclusively that even those who did engage in capitalistic activities generally hoped to make a profit from them only in the near term–and then to take that profit and invest it in land, titles of nobility, and governmental offices. These could be purchased in one of the most perverse and corrupt markets ever known.

It has been documented that land, titles, and offices actually paid a lower rate of return than most shipping or factory enterprises. But they carried with them the promise that the buyer might directly or eventually gain nobility, a status that brought rewards of its own.

Above all, nobles were immune from nearly all forms of taxation. Such nobility could often be attained by buying just one government office of the proper type. The result for the monarchy was a short-term infusion of cash–but a long-term drain on the treasury. This drain happened for two reasons: First, the wealth of the officeholder could no longer be taxed. Second, the newly ennobled officeholder could no longer engage in any form of commerce. Under Old Regime law, nobles who engaged in commerce lost all of their privileges, including the immunity from taxation.

This tax immunity locked away the wealth of France in unproductive land and in meaningless titles; while England and America industrialized during the eighteenth century, France did so on a far smaller scale owing to the perverse incentives that the trade in offices produced.

If ever a system were designed to run itself into the ground–and to make its citizens less inclined toward capitalism–this was it. The results were exactly as you would expect: As the Old Regime progressed, and as the trade in offices expanded, the French government found itself ever deeper in debt, and the best and most productive of its citizens were converted into hereditary bureaucrats. Offices such as the notorious Secrétaire du roi often had no real responsibilities whatsoever and were in effect nothing more than government securities: One purchased the office of Secrétaire du roi not to write the king’s letters or transact his business, but merely to escape taxation. In truth, the office was more like a government bond that never matured, with the amount of return depending not on the initial investment but rather on the amount of one’s personal fortune. And since one’s personal fortune could no longer be made through commerce, nobles turned increasingly to extraction, rent-seeking, soliciting bribes, gambling, and other forms of unproductive accumulation of wealth.

(As a side note, just as the bourgeoisie of the Marxist interpretation has turned out to be decidedly uncapitalistic, so too the trade in offices reveals the Old Regime to have been much less feudal than one might imagine. It was a complicated and disorganized bureaucracy whose sole purpose seems to have been to extract wealth from the citizenry while maintaining the surface appearance of feudalism. The extracted wealth generally went toward fighting the Bourbon dynasty’s many wars and toward lavish luxuries for a privileged few. Those who repeat that “war is the health of the state” sometimes do not appreciate how often war is also the death of the state.)

In 1789, the whole system came tumbling down, an event that stunned contemporaries but that should surprise no one who has any background in neoclassical economics. The Frenchmen of the era may be excused for their surprise, however: Adam Smith’s work The Wealth of Nations was only thirteen years old and its significance was not yet fully appreciated. And the greatest French economist, Claude-Frédéric Bastiat, would only be born in 1801.

What about Marxism? Now where does this put the Marxist historical paradigm? One thing that can be said for the thesis of the rising bourgeoisie is that it set forth useful empirical questions for historians to answer. That the answers themselves were not what an earlier generation once predicted does not matter–The result is that we have still learned tremendously about the eighteenth century. In looking for this mostly absent class of individuals, we have learned a great deal about the economic practices and values of the eighteenth century.

Another benefit of the Marxist paradigm is how it has taught historians to look for multiple causes in history. Lefebvre was one of the most sophisticated of the Marxists, and he recognized some small measure of the difficulties that later historians have uncovered more fully. His narration of the French Revolution actually divided the event into four revolutions, each happening nearly simultaneously as the old system collapsed. First, there was a movement for reform among the nobility, aided tremendously by the calling of the Estates General. Second, there came a peasants’ revolt, one more or less of the type that had been seen repeatedly in France since the medieval era. Third, there was a revolt by the bourgeoisie, of the classically Marxist type. And fourth, the urban poor staged revolutionary actions of their own, aiming not at the creation of a bourgeois state, but at–you guessed it–a fully socialist one, a development that anticipated modern socialist revolutions. Marxists generally found that this last revolt was premature, however, as conditions were not yet right for a socialist revolution. Still, there they were, a reminder to the capitalists of what was to come.

Among all of Lefebvre’s observations, the idea of the multiple Revolutions has probably been the most enduring. Many different groups attempted to direct the French Revolution toward ends that frequently conflicted with one another; these groups certainly included the nobility, the peasantry, the urban poor, and even the middle class (who must not, of course, be confused with the Marxist bourgeoisie or proto-capitalist class, for the reasons given above). This idea of Lefebvre’s is both Marxist and on the cusp of escaping Marxism: While it still holds that socioeconomic factors determine how large classes of people will act in society, it also postulates that these classes do not necessarily follow one another in social supremacy, nor do they necessarily always act according to the scripts that are given them. It paves the way toward understandings that see socioeconomic class as just one of the factors that motivate human action, and this is how almost all historians view the world today.

Dechristianization: Dechristianization is one aspect of the French Revolution that I touched on only lightly in my previous post. I’d like to address it a bit more fully here.

Tocqueville understood dechristianization better I think than anyone in the nineteenth century, and his view is still substantially correct today:

The philosophical conncetions of the eighteenth century have rightly been regarded as one of the chief causes of the Revolution and it is undeniable that our eighteenth-century philosophers were fundamentally anti-religious. But it should be noted that in this philosophy there were two quite distinct and separable trends of thought.

One of them embodied the new (or resuscitated) opinions regarding the nature of human society and the underlying principles of civil and political jurisprudence; the belief, for example, that all men are born equal in its corollary, the abolition of all privileges of class, caste, and profession…

But… our eighteenth-century philosophers [also] attacked the Church with a studious ferocity; they declaimed against its clergy, its hierarchy, institutions, and dogmas, and, driving their attack home, sought to demolish the very foundations of Christian belief. [But] it was far less as a religious faith than as a political institution that Christianity provoked these violent attacks. The Church was hated not because its priests claimed to regulate the affairs of the other world but because they were landed proprietors, lords of manors, tithe owners, and played a leading part in secular affairs…

This is spot-on accurate as far as I can see. Voltaire heaped scorn on the Catholic Church because it was wealthy, powerful, often cruel, and did much to advance the injustices of the day. Notably, he praised religious denominations and civil regimes that did not share in these abuses: He had good words for anabaptists and Quakers, for instance, and he admired the civil toleration found in England.

But the French Church was hopelessly entangled with the state; bishops were almost inevitably from noble families, whether they possessed any personal piety or not (Loménie de Brienne was a notorious atheist; Talleyrand, a notorious philanderer). The king, not the pope, was responsible for their selection, and he used this power to reward the younger sons of noble families that had served him particularly well.

The Catholic Church was also the largest single landholder in all of France, and it enjoyed financial privileges much like those of the nobility. Because of the exemption from taxes, because churchmen did not marry, and because Church wealth was held to endure from generation to generation, the Church often seemed poised to swallow up all the land in the kingdom–even while it extolled the virtues of poverty and humility.

To be a Frenchman for much of the Old Regime, it was positively required that you be a Catholic; those who were not Catholics faced severe civil penalties. Those who had a quite fervent Catholicism could still face civil persecution if they deviated from the official line. Even the atheists and the philanderers did not face troubles of this type, provided only that they were well-connected. The Church was not merely a faith in the Old Regime; it was also a grossly hypocritical system of persecution and of state-sanctioned wealth extraction.

The Tiger by the Tail: As I noted in my previous post, unlike the American Revolution, the French Revolution attempted a vast project of social engineering. Yet two things may be said in defense of the French efforts in this area. First, theirs was the first Revolution of a type that had never been tried before, and thus they were almost certainly ignorant of the enormous unintended consequences of many of their social experiments. Second, some of their interventions may well have been necessary evils.

Many of the above ideas were touched on in a long conversation that I had with Sandefur at the Cato Institute symposium this week. The question soon emerged between us: How on earth could anyone have reformed the Old Regime without the sort of massive social engineering that libertarians also mistrust? It may well be that there are no good answers to these questions, and that the Terror was inevitable given all that had come before it.

What, for example, is to be done with the ill-gotten gains of the nobility and the clergy, when these make up the vast majority of the nation’s wealth? If this wealth were left to dissipate on its own under a system of liberalized markets, it might never actually do so–and it would very likely be channeled toward creating a counter-Revolutionary government that was designed to re-install all of the old privileges that the clergy and nobility had formerly enjoyed. Yet we can’t just auction off the properties, as literally no one else would have the wealth to buy them. And, as we all know, land reform on the Chinese model was a horrific disaster. In the final analysis, a classical liberal interpretation of the French Revolution may have to conclude that there simply were no good options to pursue, and that even the most decent of revolutionaries–people like Grégoire and Condorcet–were swept along on a tide that they were essentially unable to control.

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