In the penultimate chapter of his book The Enlightenment, Ritchie Robertson turns to the subject of revolutions, specifically the American and French revolutions. Robertson writes that these revolutions “might be seen as the climax of this book. Both, after all, famously invoked the ideal of human happiness.” [p. 706]
But, and with Robertson there is often a well-considered “but,” “[a]ctors in both were imbued with ideals associated with the Enlightenment, but not always those one might expect. . . . The relation between ideas and political events is in any case not straightforward. . . . Political events need to be explained first and foremost in political, rather than intellectual terms.” [p. 706]
Of the American revolution, one might say that the revolutionaries were at bottom part of the same club as their antagonists. “Society in the American colonies was dominated by an elite of highly educated lawyers and landowners. . . . [it] was not only an enlightened undertaking, but also a very British affair. . . . Like the Glorious Revolution of 1688, it aimed to restore an order which, it said, had been violated by the government’s encroachment on the rights of citizens.” [p. 707]
As such, in the dominant strand of thought, “the Founding Fathers were animated by a belief in individual natural rights; they regarded government as simply an instrument to secure legal and property rights; and they thought that a well-planned government could channel self-interest and acquisitiveness and make these passions work to the advantage of society as a whole.” [pp. 708-9] Robertson notes that, though John Locke has often been cited, he was actually “regarded as a minor contributor to the natural law tradition, whose leading representatives were [Hugo] Grotius and [Samuel von] Pufendorf. . . . Recently, however, Locke has made a comeback . . .”. [p. 709] Dunno, maybe because his name is easier to pronounce?
“Americans were [also seen as] a politically mature people, capable of governing themselves . . . . as [Thomas] Jefferson observed, America had been settled not as a government-sponsored project, but by individuals.” [p. 710] Jefferson, in fact, for a while “hoped for a continued union between America and great Britain, under the king, on terms which acknowledged America’s substantive independence [but] British military intervention” put paid to that. [p. 710] Enter Thomas Paine who, in Common Sense, “called for complete independence.” The Declaration of Independence soon followed.
Its battle won, “[t]he new nation had to now find a way of governing itself. For that purpose it had to draw up a constitution.” [p. 714] Robertson asks, then speaks to, the 64 trillion dollar question: “Could the power of reason liberate people from the accidents of history? In addressing this question, the framers of the American constitution confronted a perennial and perhaps insoluble tension within democracy. If, following the principle of popular sovereignty, one grants popular assemblies the power to determine directly the policy of the government, one also runs the risk of encouraging unwise, short-sighted and perhaps malicious decisions.” [p. 712]
“These problems raised strong feelings in the eighteenth century, and still do.” Robertson cites historian Jonathan Israel as taking “the side of the ‘radical democrats’, contrasting them with the ‘aristocratic’ view that the power of the people should be restrained.” Robertson counters that “one might, with more detachment, regard this tension—between the voters at large, who may abuse their power, and the governing class who may equally abuse theirs—as endemic to democracy.” [p. 713]
As another contemporary commentator has noted, “democracy, by its very nature, has two faces: a ‘redemptive’ face, which offers ‘the promise of a better world through actions by the sovereign people’; and a ‘pragmatic’ face concerned with the efficient workings of institutions. You cannot have government without institutions, dull as they may seem; but the institutions of democracy will lose legitimacy if they are not periodically renewed by popular and even populist enthusiasm.” [p. 883, Margaret Canovan, n. 40]
So, the debate was on! Paine “railed against the separation of powers in the British constitution . . . . [John] Adams considered Paine ‘very ignorant in the Science of Government’ . . . . [and] argued for a bicameral legislature in which the upper chamber would be a ‘mediator between the two extreme branches of the legislature, that which represents the people, and that which is vested with the executive power’.” [p. 714]
“Paine argued that in a society of equals nobody would be tempted to depart from virtue by seeking superiority over others . . . . The authors of the Federalist Papers were less sanguine.” [p. 715] Alexander Hamilton warned, “To presume a want of motives or such contests as an argument against their existence would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.” [p. 715]
“[I]t was widely agreed that any republic must fail if it made unrealistic demands on the virtue of its citizens . . . . Everything depended . . . on framing a constitution that would encourage and reward virtue, rather than taking its presence for granted. Since a modern republic could not be a direct democracy, like the ancient Greek city-states . . . a mechanism must be found to select the best: ‘to depute power from the many to a few of the most wise and good’.” [p. 715]
The founders also worried about factions: “Individuals might combine to promote their joint interests, thus creating factions, which had long formed an insoluble problem for republican theory. . . . A representative democracy . . . faced the further danger that if a faction obtained majority support, it might tyrannize the minority.” [p. 716] They thought, though, that “[i]n a large republic extending over a continent, no faction could become very large, and factions could neutralize one another.” [p. 716]
The Enlightener Friedrich Schiller gave the American revolution high marks: “It succeeded because the populace that carried it out was already politically mature. In this it differed from most revolutions, including the French Revolution, which, he believed, degenerated into rule by terror because the people were not prepared for their historic opportunity.” [p. 717]
I will refrain from engaging in presentism and let readers be the judge of how the American system of government is faring.
Of the French revolution, in 1834, Georg Büchner wrote:
“I’ve been studying the history of the French Revolution. I felt as though utterly crushed by the hideous fatalism of history. I find in human nature a terrible sameness, in human circumstances an ineluctable violence vouchsafed to all and none. Individuals but froth on the waves, greatness a mere coincidence, the master of geniuses a dance of puppets, a ridiculous struggle against an iron law that can at best be recognized, but never mastered.” [p. 718]
Robertson offers the gloss that “[a]mong the most striking features of the French Revolution is the sheer headlong pace of events. It is as though an explosion, long prepared, suddenly ignited and set off an unstoppable chain reaction.” [p. 718] An “economic crisis highlighted the extreme social disparities” [and] “[e]ndemic poverty was exacerbated in 1788 by catastrophic weather.” [p. 718] “Real hardships were magnified by imaginary terrors, which, in a largely illiterate society, were spread by rumours.’” [p. 718]
Once the revolutionaries had secured victory, sweeping reforms “followed in rapid succession. . . . each reform made possible another that was yet more sweeping and made the dynamic of reform ever more difficult to arrest.” [pp. 719-20] To his own question, ‘Could France have become a constitutional monarchy, like Britain?’” Robertson posits “one obstacle is the instability generated by reforms tumbling over each other in such haste.” [p. 720]
Robertson also asks whether France might “have become a modern democratic republic without passing through the Terror and the subsequent dictatorships . . .”. [p. 720] As a corollary, he asks “Are the sans-culottes to be seen as the politically conscious people, or as dangerous urban mobs?” [p. 721] He responds in part that “[i]n French working-class culture violence was common . . . . Belief in conspiracies . . . was endemic . . . . Given these predispositions . . . crowd attacks on royal palaces . . . were to be expected once an angry and hungry people had been mobilized . . .”. [p. 721]
“Violence was further encouraged by inflammatory journalists, particularly Marat.” [p. 721] The protests and violence were not always organic: “one cannot accept without some qualification the views of nineteenth-century historians and psychologists who saw the Revolution as a deplorable example of the raw energies of the mob: the crowd’s violence was often manipulated.” [pp. 721-2]
“By spring 1793 the [National] Convention was divided between the radical Montagnards . . . and the relatively moderate Girondins, with the former in the ascendant. The institutions of the Terror were rapidly created. . . . The Law of Suspects, passed in September 1793, mandated the arrest of any suspicious person, and encouraged denunciation. Suspicious behaviour might include addressing someone . . . as vous instead of tu . . . . In this atmosphere of furious distrust, political opponents were demonized as traitors, and the verb ‘exterminate’ came into common use . . . . Denunciation became a means of survival: you had to denounce your enemies before they could denounce you.” [p. 723]
That was only the beginning. “The Terror reached its climax in the Law of 22 Prairial . . . which imposed the death penalty for innumerable vaguely defined offences against the Revolution, such as ‘calumniating patriotism’, ‘disseminat[ing] false news’, and seeking ‘to impair the energy and the purity of revolutionary and republican principles’ . . . . The number of executions shot up . . .”. [p. 724]
Robertson marks out the Terror as “something unprecedented.” [p. 724] Among other things, “[b]etween March 1793 and August 1794, at least half a million people suffered imprisonment. Crowded cells and bad sanitation caused many further deaths. . . . Many insurgents, besides those drowned in the Loire [at Nantes], were executed out of hand.” [p. 725]
“Since 1790 the journalist Marat had been calling for increasing numbers of executions, even for massacres. After his assassination on 13 July 1793 had made him into a saint of the Revolution, activists told the Convention that November: ‘Never forget the sublime words of the prophet Marat: Sacrifice 200,000 heads, and you will save a million’. Hence the ratchet effect of the Terror: each death made the next easier, while the growing atmosphere of paranoia made it seem more necessary. At the same time, in contrast to the notorious purges of twentieth-century tyrannies, one has the impression that no one was in charge.” [p. 725]
So, what of the French revolution’s relationship to the Enlightenment? Robertson posits that “the Revolution as a political event had an energy of its own, sustained by . . . crucial turning-points . . . . It was not the creation of Enlightenment intellectuals.” [p. 725] “On the other hand, the measures proposed by the revolutionaries, and the ideas animating them, were often inspired by Enlightenment debates . . . . [though] “the mainstream Enlightenment . . . had much less appeal . . . than the teachings and personal example of Rousseau . . .”. [pp. 725-6] Indeed, “under the ascendancy of Robespierre and the Jacobins, the mainstream Enlightenment was often denounced.” [p. 726]
Robertson believes that “[t]he importance of ideas in the French Revolution may have been exaggerated. . . . The French Revolution was a political event, with its own dynamism, no matter what intellectual theories may have inspired some of its actors. People did not need the Enlightenment to imbue them with a desire for freedom from the often crushing injustice of the old regime. And as events speeded up, they seem in retrospect to have been shaped increasingly by the friend-enemy dichotomy.” [pp. 730-1]
Returning to comparisons between the two revolutions, Robertson asks why the American revolution “did not lead to a Terror.” [p. 733] He cites several reasons: geography meant that “[i]t was . . . possible to throw off their antagonists permanently”; “America had no capital” [or] “a city remotely resembling Paris in which a politicized urban crowd could sway the course of events.” [p. 733] Also, while “America had wealthy landowners” [it had] “no hereditary aristocracy and no powerful established Church . . .”. [p. 733] Robertson hastens to add that “it is hardly encouraging to think that the American Revolution was saved . . . by an accident of geography . . . . Far from heralding an age of growing liberty, the French Revolution seems rather to anticipate the twentieth-century revolutions that started with high . . . hopes and turned into tyrannies even worse than the regimes they replaced . . .”. [p. 735]
Robertson turns to Immanuel Kant to find hope. While “[t]he actual course of the French Revolution may dismay us . . . we should take heart from the sympathy it called forth. For that sympathy was not just here and now, but was directed towards an ideal . . . . Thus, Kant gives a theoretical justification for the belief in humanity’s progress . . .”. [p. 735] I have to say that, as a source for optimism, this seems a wee bit strained.
Robertson next makes a sojourn to England, where, while “there was plenty of enlightened thinking, there was—in contrast to Scotland—no Enlightenment in the sense of a coherent group of thinkers . . .”. [p. 735] After tracing how this changed somewhat late in the eighteenth century, Robertson closes the chapter with brief summaries of “some Enlightenment legacies,” including liberalism, patriotism and nationalism, world peace, and human rights.
On liberalism, Robertson notes that “we have inherited from the Enlightenment two contrasting forms . . .”. [p. 745] “’Classical liberalism’ insists on the freedom of individuals to pursue their own well-being and take responsibility for their own lives. It urges that government should be kept to the minimum necessary to maintain the rule of law. Regarding private property as sacrosanct, it disapproves of redistribution through taxation. It does not attach importance to social justice . . .”. [p. 746] Robertson also notes that “[m]ore radical present-day versions, often called ‘neo-liberalism’, regard the payment of taxes as an unjust invasion of private property and a check on private enterprise.” [p. 746]
But there is another form of liberalism as well, “sympathetic to what we now call the ‘welfare state’.” [p. 746] “In modern liberalism, it is the state’s duty to provide for its citizens’ welfare and to support their aspirations to personal fulfillment. Although modern liberals reject socialist conceptions of the overriding importance of material equality, they consider it the state’s duty to promote welfare by redistributive taxation, public services available to all . . . and measures to save the disadvantaged not only from destitution but from the humiliation of severe poverty. Only if the state assumes such a role . . . can its citizens form a community, rather than a mere aggregation of unconnected individuals.” [p. 746]
I find I’m not convinced about the strength of a connection between the Enlightenment and modern liberalism, but I’m glad he included, and clearly summarized, both types.
To close this section, Robertson points to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “thorough-going attempt to shrink the state, anticipating modern neo-liberalism . . .”. [p. 748] Here’s how Robertson puts it:
“In a Humboldtian utopia . . . citizens would bring to a modern complex society the energy and resourcefulness usually confined to settlers on a distant frontier, but without the violence characteristic of frontiersmen. . . . The cloud hanging over this utopia, however, is its economic system, which Humboldt says nothing about . . . . Presumably, the free market would reign unimpeded. So the quality of institutions might be in conflict with their profitability. There would be no sense of citizenship or civic responsibility. The exaltation of the individual would surely eventually destroy the community.” [p. 749]
Of patriotism and nationalism, Robertson notes that “[i]n the early to mid-eighteenth century, the love of one’s country acquired the name ‘patriotism’ . . . . It had diverse implications and carried with it considerable ambivalence. When one’s own country was contrasted with others, patriotism easily shaded into nationalism: the boastful, aggressive, even downright xenophobic exaltation of the alleged individuality of one’s own country over others.” [p. 750]
On world peace, Robertson cites Rousseau for the proposition that, “although individuals were naturally well disposed toward one another, matters became quite different once they were organized into states, for the relation between states was intrinsically one of enmity.” [p. 758] Robertson then counters with Kant, “[o]ne of Rousseau’s most creative readers . . .”. [p. 758] “When Kant published his treatise, early in a phase of European warfare that would last for some twenty-five years, it seemed hopelessly irrelevant. Yet . . . its ideas underlie not only the interwar League of Nations but also the flawed but considerably more successful United Nations . . .”. [p. 761]
The concept of human rights, in the view of Robertson, “is among our most valuable debts to the Enlightenment.” [p. 762] Robertson is at pains to note, however, that “[d]ignity and universality were not yet part of human rights as understood in those ringing declarations of the late Enlightenment. When Olympe de Gouges demanded rights for women, she was not only executed but vilified as a ‘woman-man’ who had neglected her domestic duties . . .”. [pp. 767-8]
Robertson is both realist and optimist: “human rights are a genuine ideal, and now that the ideal exists, it focuses the efforts of dedicated people to bring it closer to reality. The reality of human rights lies far in the future, and the effort to ensure that human rights are observed in the present is an uphill struggle with no end in sight—but the ideal of human rights gives us a goal towards which we can try to make progress.” [p. 768]
Robertson closes his survey of the Enlightenment with a discussion of “The Battle over the Enlightenment.” He begins, “[a]lthough its aim, as this book has argued, was the betterment of human life, the Enlightenment has attracted a remarkable amount of hostility. In the eighteenth century, attacks came from conservative quarters. In the twentieth century, more surprisingly, the Enlightenment came under attack also from the left.” [p. 769]
He continues, “[i]n the opinion of its most eloquent present-day denouncers, the Enlightenment . . . has attacked human diversity, reducing the variety of human cultures to a merely marginal and decorative existence, and insisting that human beings are primarily a homogeneous mass of citizens defined by equal rights which make them interchangeable. . . . In response to these indictments, one might initially point out that ‘the Enlightenment project’ is a phrase beloved of philosophers but regarded sceptically by historians.” [pp. 769-70]
Robertson concludes, “[i]n its blanket condemnation, it is far removed from the sort of fine-grained presentation of the Enlightenment that I have attempted in this book. Indeed, in reducing a rich and complex historical period, and a diverse body of thought, to a single model, it imposes on the Enlightenment just that reductive homogenization which the critique claims that the Enlightenment imposed on the world.” [p. 770]
He ends his magisterial study on a note of generosity and hope:
“At the moment of writing, liberal ideals are under threat, and democracy, it has been said, is undergoing a ‘mid-life crisis’. The refinement of democratic institutions—a process with no end in sight—illustrates how enlightened ideas are always subject to self-correction. By the same token, even the most treasured ideas of the present day are open to constructive criticism. In this sense, those critics who polemicize against the values ascribed to the Enlightenment perform a valuable function occasionally by identifying actual flaws, more often by stimulating others to defend the Enlightenment. The critiques made by sceptical philosophers assist the process of enlightenment. Even if not enlightened, by engaging in the process of critical reasoning, they can themselves be enlightening.” [p. 780]
To accompany you on your journey through this post, here is Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony (1788).
Prufrock's Dilemma 
An interesting comparison between 2 revolutions. Now I always believed that the word revolution was bandied about but not properly applied. In France the so called revolution quickly turned into a civil war. What happened in Paris was unique in other regions of France many supported the Monarchy like in the Vendée. Also though popular views see the 14 July as Bastille Day and the beginning of change, the reality is very different. Napoleon use to say that had he been in the shoes of Louis XVI, he would have used the army and cannons to quell riots. He did in fact a few years later and put an end to the so called revolution. Then he becomes Emperor and you will have a monarchy in France until 1870. So what revolution are we talking about.
As the the USA, never mentioned is the 75,000 American colonist who crossed into Canada as Loyalists fleeing atrocities against them. As for the landowners and business people who led the revolution many did so to grab land and enrich themselves, they were not true democrats and also the land grab West destroyed the native people. So again not a revolution based on so called Freedom but mostly about money and power. A very flawed uprising and today the USA are about to become a failed State.
Hi, Laurent: you provide an interesting perspective. I think countries generally mythologize their beginnings, where the truth is rather a more mixed bag. Robertson’s book is excellent, BTW, well worth a read. I certainly haven’t done it justice, but it has been an interesting project for me and full of food for thought.
I agree that every country has its own myth on creation, Canada is no exception. Officially for Government purpose 1 July 1867 is called Canada Day, in reality Canada started back in 1608 with the foundation of the City of Quebec but politicians chose otherwise. But we are stuck with it now.