Positive Liberty

In his most recent post, Rowe brings up the French Revolution. (Obviously?) I couldn’t help but make a few comments. I will probably revise what I have written below in the coming days, as I threw it all together in about an hour or so.

Rowe begins,

An oft-repeated claim comparing the American and French Revolutions goes something along the lines of “the French Revolution was based on the Enlightenment, while America’s was based on Christianity,” or another variation is, “the American Revolution holds that rights come from God, while the French believed rights come from the people or government only.” Admittedly, I know more about the American Revolution than the French (so perhaps Kuznicki will chime in), but my research tells me these claims are wrong, that both the American and French Revolutions were based on the same Enlightenment principles, which were relatively novel for the time (”the new science of man”).

I would agree with all of this, albeit with two very important caveats.

First, “the” Enlightenment is a terribly difficult thing to pin down. For example, many people often forget that Rousseau and Voltaire disagreed on virtually everything of importance. Many also forget that both had serious, sometimes acrimonious disagreements with Diderot and d’Holbach (if, that is, anyone remembers d’Holbach at all). Voltaire also disagreed strongly with the members of the Comédie-Française, who were nonetheless said to belong to the same philosophical camp–and they even disagreed about theatrical aesthetics, of all things.

These are only a few of the major Enlightenment figures from but a single country; historians also identify distinct strains of thought that might now be called the Scottish Enlightenment, the German Enlightenment, the American Enlightenment, and many others.

On questions of politics, science, ethics, and even mathematics, the thinkers of the Enlightenment disagreed with one another. Nor were their political loyalties ever precisely where we would like them to have been; nor again were they necessarily opposed to all that the Old Regime had to offer. Malesherbes was a royal censor–a deplorable job–yet he used his position to tacitly permit the printing of many of the Enlightenment’s greatest works. Many of the philosophers of the Enlightenment were on friendly terms with individuals whom we would consider only enlightened despots at best–but who were certainly despotic: Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Joseph II of Austria, even at times the despots of France itself.

Nor did the Enlighteners who lived to the Revolution receive particularly good treatment from the phenomenon that “they” supposedly had created. Lavoisier, one of the great French scientists of the eighteenth century, and a figure of “the” Enlightenment if ever there was one… was also a tax collector under the Old Regime. Even his strong liberalizing and rationalizing tendencies were not enough to save him, and he went to the guillotine during the Terror. The marquis de Condorcet, also a man of the Enlightenment, did not go to the guillotine–but only because he died in prison while awaiting a near-certain execution.

Before leaving the Enlightenment to say a few words about the Revolution, I’d also like to point out that our identification of “the” Enlightenment comes somewhat after the fact. If these figures had been asked to identify themselves as part of an intellectual movement, they would almost never have called themselves Enlighteners or adherents of the Enlightenment. Both of these terms were comparatively rare for most of the eighteenth century. Overwhelmingly, they would have used the word philosophes–philosophers–to indicate their shared intellectual stance. Their party–their “sect,” was the philosophical one, to borrow a religious term that many of them likewise had borrowed.

Even the scientists among them would still have called themselves philosophes, as the term scientist had not been invented yet: Lavoisier, Condorcet, and company would have called themselves “natural philosophers.” This in itself should remind us to tread carefully when dealing with the past.

What gave the philosophical sect any coherence to contemporaries was the way that these thinkers positioned themselves in the intellectual conflicts of the time: The philosophes included all those who were willing to make radical critiques of the established church–and of the often-unsavory methods that that church often employed. (Religious dissidents who critiqued the Church from within, such as the Jansenists, did not make radical but rather immanent critiques of the Church. “Crush the infamy,” Voltaire’s famous phrase, was as disagreeable to the Jansenists as it was to the Pope.)

In other words, to say that the philosophy of the Enlightenment influenced the French or American Revolutions is to beg the question of influence almost entirely. The Enlighteners were an opposition group, but to oppose is not the same as to propose. It is true, then, but it is not especially helpful, to say that these two Revolutions both came from the Enlightenment.

Causality and revolution. My second caveat to Rowe’s statement above concerns causation in history. I have often tried to impress on my students that any large, complex, and important event in history will inevitably have multiple causes and draw upon multiple sources of influence. The French Revolution is no exception; indeed, it is the primary data point that has convinced me of this view of history.

Many conservatives still espouse the theory that Rowe cites above for the origins of the French Revolution. So far as I can tell, it even seems to be taught in many American high schools. It runs something like this: “France, exhausted by fasting under the monarchy, made drunk by the bad drug of the Social Contract, and countless other adulterated or fiery beverages, is suddenly struck with paralysis of the brain.”

The words come from Hippolyte Taine, a conservative French historian of the nineteenth century. Here and throughout his work, Taine conceived of the Enlightenment as a poison; he argued that France had imbibed this poison throughout the eighteenth century, and that it finally had its effect during the years of the Revolution.

As we have seen above, however, the Enlightenment was no unified thing; while philosophers may guide the fate of mankind more than any other type of intellectual, they do not have this sort of proximate, mechanical control. They are kings who rule slowly.

Moreover, while Taine and other conservatives may have had good reason to find Rousseau’s Social Contract a poison, what about the rest of the Enlightenment? What about Montesquieu, for instance, who argued for the moderation of criminal sentencing and for limits on the power of government? What about Condorcet, who made important contributions in both mathematics and political theory (…and name me one person who has done both today…)? What about Voltaire, who spent a great deal of his brilliance writing against torture and slavery? Are we to conclude that these writings too were poison?

Another answer to Taine’s way of thinking, one that I’ve always found particularly effective, runs as follows; Positive Liberty regulars and fans of Mark Twain will recognize it immediately:

There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’ if we would remember it and consider it; the one wrought in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood… our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak, whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror, which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

If anything caused the French Revolution, it was the manifest injustice of the Old Regime, not the people like Montesquieu or Voltaire who tried to reform it.

“Ah,” says the die-hard revolutionary, “to make an omelet, first you must break some eggs?”

But no, that’s not quite it either. What I mean to say is that, as Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed, the most dangerous moment for a bad regime is when it tries to reform itself. Revolutionary violence is not justified by the grand new future that the Revolution will produce, but it is sometimes precipitated by the violence that came just before it.

A Boundless Faith: Another aspect of the French Revolution that is often misunderstood among Americans is that from the outset, many of the most high-profile revolutionaries held an almost boundless faith in the power of a strong centralized government.

We may find it incredible, but almost to the very last man, they believed almost unquestioningly that they, personally, represented the very best interests of all of France. The representatives of the nation could do anything; their power knew virtually no bounds at all–and to suggest any check on the power of the state was tantamount to disloyalty.

Where today we understand that a representative of a given state is almost always going to act on a range of different interests, some high and others low (and indeed, we admit that he probably should), to the political class of the French Revolution, this way of thinking was anathema. There could be only one public interest, and to suggest that there might be conflicts among the representatives of a large and complex polity was unthinkable. “The French constitution,” said one representative, “is graven upon the hearts of all true patriots.” It was therefore unnecessary, he argued, for France ever to have a written constitution. What could that ever be, except an impediment to virtue?

To form a government the American way, we throw together a bunch of selfish, narrow-minded partisans. We put them in a very nice building that flatters their pretensions, and we let them fight with one another, hoping that they will exhaust themselves in the process, or that, at any rate, the system will be arranged such that that their worst tendencies will cancel each other out. We muddle through.

But the French of 1789 aimed for much more than that. They hoped to fully regenerate the entire French nation, to re-engineer everything, to start, as Rowe aptly notes, at the Year One, and to begin everything over again. While both the American and the French experiments acted on the philosophy of the eighteenth century, the French held a boundless faith in the ability of government to remake social institutions, while the Americans were never even fully convinced that those same institutions had to be remade in the first place. Both tendencies can emphatically be found in the amorphous thing we call the Enlightenment.

(Given the brutality of the Old Regime, were the French correct that these institutions had to be completely remade? Well… Yes, but see my citation of Tocqueville above. A spontaneous order that coalesces around brutality is still a spontaneous order, and trying to uproot it is still going have difficult consequences.)

To many of those who made the French Revolution, there was no problem that their government could not solve–and if anything went awry, it could not ever have been the fault of human nature, nor of deficient human knowledge, nor even of sheer economic ignorance–while to us, the degree of economic ignorance was pretty astonishing in 1789.

Treason, they concluded, treason must be why the gold disappeared when the Convention printed worthless paper money. Treason caused people to stay away from the securities issued by the fledgling government. Treason made the bread more expensive in time of war; treason caused hoarding when the government instituted price controls. Treason was the origin of all difficulties in the market, as it was the source of all dissent in politics, and only patriotism could make things go right again in either sphere.

An economist would laugh at this stuff today. But it is absolutely what they believed. If you want to find the poison that made the French Revolution so deadly, here it is: the pathological inability to accommodate human diversity in economic or political interests.

I see that I have neglected religion, which is odd for me. The notion that the French Revolution was irreligious can only come from gross ignorance of the event itself. One of the most important early actions of the National Assembly was to nationalize the Catholic Church, which it accomplished on July 12, 1790, in an act known as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.

Nothing at all like the Civil Constitution ever existed in the United States; no American government would ever have dared to intervene so directly into religious affairs. The only remotely similar event in England was the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533. Without a doubt, the Civil Constitution is the clearest example of the intense belief of the French revolutionaries that all parts of society could be remade at once.

The Civil Constitution brought the French Revolution’s boundless faith in the power of government to bear on questions of religion. After previous acts had nationalized all Church property and forbidden monastic vows, the Civil Constitution now declared all ordained clergy to be government functionaries, subject to election by the citizens. It administratively severed the French Catholic Church from Rome. Old bishoprics were abolished; new ones were created. A loyalty oath was required of all priests serving in any capacity.

Louis XVI was unable to accept the Civil Constitution; though he ultimately acquiesced to the measures, their implementation prompted him to flee the country–unsuccessfully, as we all know. Severing the French Church from Rome infuriated many in the clergy; the loyalty oath added insult to injury. More than any other single act, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy brought on the counterrevolution. It was a classic case of governmental overreach that finally met its inevitable end.

Later writers would look to the Civil Constitution and to the dechristianizing phase of the Revolution as evidence that the Revolution’s leaders were opposed to religion, that they were atheists or even worse. This was emphatically not the case. Even those who mocked Christ, but who prayed to the Supreme Being, seem to have been sincere in their faith–both to things spiritual and to the boundless power of government to remake the individual.

While to me the Civil Constitution represents a gross offense against the freedom of religion, the charge of atheism rings false. The purpose of the Civil Constitution (and even of the later Cult of the Supreme Being) was never to abolish religion, but to reform it–because, after all, the government now has the power to reform virtually anything.

A bit of a conclusion: Where does all of this put us? It’s probably clear by now that I disagree with Fukuyama when he says,

Now you could substitute the American Revolution for [the French Revolution] because, I think in that kind of ideological sense, those two revolutions were equivalent. I mean, they were both revolutions to create what I earlier defined as a liberal democracy as a political system based on popular sovereignty with guarantees of individual rights.

The French and American Revolutions are not at all equivalent to my mind. Both do indeed represent the idea that political systems should be based on popular sovereignty with guarantees of individual rights, but all the same, they sit at opposite poles from one another: Where one had boundless faith in the transformative, almost mystical power of government, the other was borne of mistrust and resignation regarding that same power. For the French Revolution, the point of government often seems to have been merely to enact the infallible, inexorable will of the people in all facets of life, with ironclad certainty that, so long as it truly was the will of the people, nothing could ever go wrong; for the American Revolution, the only good government was one that recognized its own inherent limits–but such creature was heretofore unknown in practice, and therefore truly revolutionary, even despite all its modesty.

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