Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The French Revolution is one of the most important – perhaps still the historical event of all time. Many books have been written about it, but I loved your comment, in your presidential address to the American Historical Association that “every great interpreter of the French Revolution – and there have been many such – has found the event ultimately mystifying”.
I think in this regard it may just be a handy exemplar of historical events generally. What’s so striking about the French Revolution is that events unfold over a sufficiently long period of time that people can get a sense of how it is that events unfold in an unpredictable fashion. People study it, in part, because it is a kind of laboratory model of the really striking event and it takes place over years, instead of being condensed in time the way more recent revolutions, perhaps, are.
Many people have tried to explain why the French Revolution is the way it is. What they discover is that the more they find out about it, the more they have questions. It’s very difficult to penetrate how it is things spiral in a direction you don’t expect. And as much as one tries to tie that down with rational explanations – social causes, demographic causes, economic causes, political causes, ideological causes – there is a way in which the experience that goes on in an event is very hard to completely explain. It is actually true of all events, it’s just that we don’t usually spend that much time thinking about every single event in our life. But if we did, I suspect we’d have the same sense of, “Wow. How did that happen in that way?”
Most of the great interpreters did not end their writing about the revolution and say, “Oh yeah! I really figured it out.” They said to themselves, and in print, that there is something about it that’s just extremely hard to get at, try as you might. Edmund Burke, in 1790, is already expressing this kind of wonderment: It’s so incredible what’s happening, I’m thinking about it, I’m trying to figure it out, and there’s still some way in which I just can’t believe it.
Looking back from our non-monarchical era of government, it’s hard to appreciate the enormity of an event where you end up beheading the king.
A king had been beheaded before, as we know, in England. But there was a way in which, in the French case, they celebrate having done it. There’s immediate writing about why this is making a point. In the English case, it was more, “We had to do it, because of the circumstances.” It isn’t connected to any re-imagining of the entire political order.
Let’s go through the books you’ve chosen. Your first choice is by one of the greatest interpreters of the revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville. He was actually born in 1805, after the revolution, but he did a lot of archival research. Tell me about his book, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution.
What is so great about Tocqueville is that he looks at archives and studies the events, but he applies to it an amazing synthetic and analytical intelligence. It’s the same intelligence that he applied to American society, which he visited in the 1830s. What’s striking is that he is able to develop broad analytical categories that relate the French Revolution to the direction of modern society as a whole, which he sees as the destruction of the aristocracy and the coming of democracy. But he adds a twist that will remain influential to this day, which is that he points to the weakness of democracy as a form of government. It has an internal, inherent tendency to lead to despotism unless there are certain conditions that prevent that from happening. This is an incredibly brilliant perception. He comes to it, in part, because he is involved in the 1848 revolution, and he’s unbelievably disappointed by the rise of Louis Napoleon [Napoleon’s nephew, who became Emperor Napoleon III in 1852]. He was born in the Napoleonic period, and he says, “How can this be? We have these revolutions in the name of liberty and we end up with a despotic, authoritarian ruler.” It’s a problem we still grapple with today. Why do revolutions in the name of democracy – we see them happening at this very moment – end up having a problem institutionalising themselves as true democracies?
Do we have any answers?
The Tocquevillean answer is still an incredibly important answer, which is that you are more likely to end up as a democracy if you have institutions that support a democratic political life. It’s a tragedy and a paradox. You make a revolution because you don’t have the institutions that support a democratic political life. You do it in order to get a democratic political life, but you don’t have the infrastructure in place to make that possible. So the question becomes how do you get from the desire to the reality of democratic political life? What Tocqueville loves about the United States is that they have this infrastructure already, because of the forms of local representative government that had already developed before they broke from Great Britain. But he’s leaving us with a problem that we still have to confront. Should we not want people to have democracy if they don’t have the institutions already? If they’re not already democratic can we really say that to people in the world: “I’m sorry you don’t have democratic institutions, therefore you’re not really able to have democracy.” Of course we can’t. So we have to figure out how you make this transition. My own personal critique of Tocqueville is that he is too negative about what goes on during the revolution. What goes on during the revolution is, in my view, an incredible upsurge of new kinds of democratic institutions. It’s just they don’t have time to totally take root.
So, like many historians, Tocqueville’s book is a comment on his own times?
Yes, but he is able to stand back. What’s amazing is that he is actually a minister in the 1848 government. It’s not that he’s just kind of around. He’s actively involved, and yet he’s able to deliver this analytical tour de force. After the events unravel in the way they unravel, he is able to stand back and say, “What is going on? What explains how this could possibly happen? Why does this keep happening in French society?” What’s incredible about Tocqueville – and I’m not particularly sympathetic with his political point of view, necessarily – is his intelligence in grasping these fundamental categories and explaining them in the most amazingly penetrating, limpid and fascinating prose. He gives you these turns of phrase – you actually can’t believe it when you’re reading it. You just think, “Wow. That is such a great way of saying it.”
In terms of his specific arguments, he talks a lot about the continuities between the Ancien Régime and the post-1789 world, especially in terms of centralisation of government. Is that an important part of the book?
It’s absolutely crucial and probably the single most important thing that he is arguing. I’m actually not convinced he is right about it, but it’s a very powerful analysis. He basically says that countries develop a style of governing and that it’s extremely difficult to get away from that style of governing. For example, in interpretations of the Russian Revolution there’s a complete division between those who feel that communism took over the basic characteristics of Tsarist rule – which was incredibly centralised and authoritarian, and relied on the secret service – and those who believe that Marxism completely changed everything. This kind of division of opinion exists for all the major revolutions, in part because of the influence of this Tocquevillean analysis, which is that you have a style of ruling, and it’s very hard to change it.
The other thing that jumped out at me as I was reading it is that Tocqueville seems to rather like Louis XVI. He refers to him as “this kindly and unfortunate prince”.
Yes, he really doesn’t like Louis XIV, but he really likes Louis XVI. Historical opinion is now in fact much kinder to Louis XVI. Louis XVI tried to reform, he tried to be a good king. He didn’t have any mistresses, he wasn’t wasting a lot of money buying baubles for members of his court. He was trying to be the new-style king, but in a situation in which it turned out to be impossible for him to push that through as a project.
So do historians agree with Tocqueville’s analysis that “nothing is more dangerous to a regime than when it tries to reform itself”?
So much in Tocqueville has had such an enormous influence on social scientific thinking about social and political movements. So yes, amongst them, is what’s called the revolution of “rising expectations”. He points to the fact that it’s not a France that’s in misery, it’s a France that’s getting better and better off. This is the problem. People have higher expectations and then they’re more disappointed. Tocqueville just had all these incredibly brilliant insights about how this worked, and part of it was because, frankly, he didn’t write in the historical mode. He wrote in a sociological mode. So he could say: “I don’t need to tell you what happened in 1789, I’m just going to tell you what it meant.”
Lynn Hunt is a leading historian of the French Revolution. She is Distinguished Professor of History and holds the Eugen Weber Endowed Chair in Modern European History at UCLA. She served as President of the American Historical Association in 2002. Her most recent book is Inventing Human Rights: A History
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