By Steve Price
Once upon a time, the newly crowned King of France, Louis XVI and his wife Marie rode through the streets of Paris, basking in the promise of the new monarch’s reign-to-be. Among the head of a company of well-wishers to greet the new king and queen was a young lawyer of some esteem was tasked with reading verse to the regents in tribute to their arrival. The king, paying only the barest of lip service to the poem read aloud by the young man, thanked him for the honor before ordering the carriage to continue on its way. Years later, that promising young lawyer – Maximilien Robespierre – would stand at the head of a radical revolutionary movement that would slay the king and queen, plunge one of the world’s most powerful empires into tyrannical terror and forever alter the course of western civilization.
Understanding the French Revolution
The death and beheading of Louis and his wife Marie Antoinette at the guillotine during the French Revolution is a well-known yarn of history, told and retold countless times in film and literature. The horrors of the Revolution loosed upon France in the aftermath of their execution is equally famous for its barbarity, its carnage and its wanton bloodletting. But it would be inappropriate to condemn the purveyors of the Revolution and the ‘National Razor’ as sheer madmen; sadistic as they may seem to modern eyes, there was in every sense of the word a method to the madness. The French Revolution is as much a cautionary tale for future generations as it is a story for the history books, revealing the dangers of zealotry and radicalism of ideology that plague even modern societies.
The French Revolution, boiled down to its most simplistic cause, was rooted in the systemic inequalities found within French society during the height of the regencies of the House of Bourbon. The king was an absolute monarch in all but name, wielding unrivaled power that he shared with the nobility and the clerical establishment in the heavily Catholic French nation. The nobility were exempt from paying taxes, placing undue onus on the peasantry and lower castes of French society to prop up the massive empire. France was locked at this time in its never-ending conflict with mortal enemy Great Britain (a factor which would heavily influence France’s aid and eventual allyship with the United States during the American Revolution, leaving their coffers empty as a result). Poor wheat harvests in the 1780s further put a strain on a society already beginning to crackle with ideas of reform.
In an effort to quell the growing unrest in the country, the king called for a convention known as the Estates-General in 1789 to solve the country’s growing economic and agricultural problems. The Estates-General was divided – much as French society was – between three different Estates: the First (the clergy), the Second (the nobility) and the Third (the remaining population). With the First and Second Estates unequivocally opposed to the lower Third, an impasse arose which drove the lower classes of French society to form their own legislative body, the National Assembly at a tennis court near the meeting of the Estates-General. It was the first time that the common people of France had stood up to their king and the ruling clergy and nobility, marking the beginning of the Revolution and the eventual overthrow of the king.
Revolutions are not unique in history; almost every society experiences a revolution in some form or fashion over the course of its existence. What makes the French Revolution unique is the speed at which the movement for personal and political freedoms devolved into chaos and tyranny by majority. After an ill-fated attempt to flee the country, the king and queen were ultimately sentenced to death as traitors to the Revolution and were beheaded at the guillotine. Different political factions within the new French Republic began jockeying for position, with radical elements turning on more moderate members. France soon found itself at war with Austria and facing internal conflicts and counter-revolutionary movements, which led Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety to begin arrested hundreds of thousands of French citizens in the name of the Republic and the Revolution. Tens of thousands would meet their end at the guillotine; thousands more would die in prison without a trial.
These massacres accompanied a period of upheaval known as the dechristianization of France, where members of the Revolution began adopting radical policies against the Catholic Church. Basilicas and cathedrals across the country were sacked and defaced; belfries and statues were desecrated, and laws were passed that put bounties on the heads of some members of the clergy and anyone that gave aid or shelter to them. The new French government changed its calendar in an effort to establish a new method of timekeeping in keeping with the spirit of the Revolution, and new public cults were established that were intended to replace the traditional forms of public worship in France with state-sponsored religions.
Ten years after the Tennis Court Oath and the beginning of the French Revolution, the country would revert back to the control of an autocrat when Napoleon Bonaparte became the First Consul – and later Emperor – of France. The Revolution was too bloody, too radical, too tyrannical for the French to accept. Even Maximilien Robespierre, by many accounts one of the chief architects of the Revolution and of the state-sponsored Reign of Terror would meet his end at the guillotine when the beast he had unleashed turned on him. The French Revolution had been founded on very real concerns: the undue financial burden placed on the lower classes, agricultural problems. But the spirit of reform that had yielded positive change and social justice soon gave way to radical zealotry, yielding in their stead horror and calamity.
Modern Lessons from Historical Terror
What lesson then should we in the twenty-first century draw forth from the cautionary tale of the French Revolution? Perhaps it is wise to approach historical studies as famous author John Green famously states, noting that “the truth resists simplicity.” History is neither black or white, but varying shades of gray from which we draw both the good and the bad. We should bring ourselves to a point where we neither deify the past nor wholly condemn, but to explore historical figures and their tales through a modern lens, understanding where they were and where we are, as much to give thanks for how far we have come as anything. Yet we also bear the warning of letting our passion for change blind us to the importance of conserving that which should be preserved. Even the darkest chapters of our history, while not worthy of our honor or our celebration, have a story to tell, and woe unto them who forget, for those that do often find a way to repeat the same mistakes of the past
