Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So we're at the bottom of the hour. We can go ahead and start this while we wait for people to file in. I'm Scott Schiff with the Atlas Society. We're pleased to have Atlas Society senior scholar Stephen Hicks with us today on the French Revolution for conservatives and liberals. And after Stephen's opening comments, we'll take questions from you. So please request to speak if you have a question, and we'll try to get to as many of you as possible. Stephen, great topic.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Thanks, Scott. Thanks again for hosting. Yeah, French Revolution is one of those landmark events in European history, in world history.
I think it's fair to say that what the American Revolution stands for in the American cultural, and political, psychological, spiritual space, the French Revolution stands in the European psychological, cultural and political space. They're two great modern revolutions, and they have shaped the institutions and the thinking of people. But as with all great revolutions, they are extraordinarily controversial, both over what happened historically, but also for all of the value issues. There are those who think that the modern world is somewhat analogous to a mistake. So both of these revolutions are seen suspiciously as transforming a good old order into something new and disquieting.
Others, though, who are quite happy that we have gotten past the bad old days and we're into the modern world nonetheless, see the French Revolution and the American Revolution as a study. In contrast, in some cases, similar causes, but also, in some cases, the causes are quite different. But also one of the big standout issues is that while the American Revolution was by and large seen as successful, it was a new country was started, it had a doctrine of rights, a series of institutions. It did have to fight a war to achieve its independence. When that was over, though, there was a peaceful transition to the new country, a new constitution, the military leader stepped down, and we had a successful modern democratic republic that emerged. By contrast, the French Revolution, initially it seemed like it was being inspired by many of the same ideals.
It had some successes early on, but also spun out of control with the guillotine being busy, mass confiscated, confiscations of property, people beheaded, people assassinated, civil war, outbreak of war, internal disruption. And then within eight to ten years after the French Revolution has begun, the whole country is exhausted, it's bankrupt, it's culturally despondent, it's still fighting wars. And out of all of that emerges Napoleon Bonaparte. And the country basically has become, by 10 years later, a military dictatorship. So it was then a seeming failure. So what were the causes of these revolutions? And today we're going to be focusing on the French Revolution.
And there's also an interesting current issue, because since the American Revolution was a successful revolution by the standards of most people now, what historians will do is they will go back and try to learn the lessons. But also those who are interested in the value issues associated with the American Revolution, since it is a successful revolution, they will want to try to take credit for their cause. And so, while most liberals and conservatives of our time will agree on the basic outlines of what the American Revolution was all about, the liberal libertarians want to see it and interpret it in a more liberal, libertarian way in order to get credit for their current political philosophy. And conservatives who admire the American Revolution will want to interpret it in a more conservative way so as to see it as supporting their current political approach as well. What happens with the French Revolution is the inverse of that, where it becomes a blame storming session, so to speak. Since the French Revolution descended into a reign of terror, civil war, lots of international war, and culminated in a military dictatorship, figuring out the causes is halfway toward figuring out whom to blame. And so what we find in our contemporary times is people will then identify or emphasize the causes of the French Revolution in a way that supports their current ideology. So, for example, those on the conservative side of the divide, let's just set aside for now how we're doing, defined conservative, but so to be people who are opposed to socialism, opposed to any strong form of free market libertarianism, some hierarchy, some order, some friendliness, or outright advocacy of religion, and so forth. They will typically then blame the French Revolution on the Enlightenment and then add to that their interpretation of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment means too much equality, too much liberty, too much emphasis on reason, not enough reverence for tradition, for authority, for religion, for hierarchy, trying to change things too quickly and so forth. And so there's been a long line of very prominent conservative commentators on the French Revolution, such that the lesson for our times is that we don't want to be too revolutionary because that will take us down the French Revolution path, which was a disaster.
And then by and large, people on the left, the far left, we still find there are people in our generation who name themselves after the most bloodthirsty of the French revolutionaries, the Jacobins, under Maximilien, Robespierre, Murat, Saint Just. I don't know how familiar these names are or so on, collectively known as the Jacobins. And they were the most left of the left wing French revolutionaries. And what they will then typically argue is that the Jacobins in the reign of terror and the violence did not go far enough, unfortunately, because the conservative nature of French institutions and French culture was too much for it to overcome. And then Napoleon, as an opportunist, stole the revolution away from it, from its true course. Now, I'm neither a conservative nor am I a modern Jacobin. That is to say, I'm not a left wing socialist of these times as well. And I don't think either of those interpretations or blames is correct, even though.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: David, I hear you. I'm trying. I'm. I just want to see. Stephen is back.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: I am here. I'm assuming you're not hearing me, though.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: No, I can hear you now. That's great.
[00:07:47] Speaker C: I can hear you. I. I can hear you too, Stephen. That's fine.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: Okay. All right. So should I plunge back in?
[00:07:54] Speaker A: Yes, please. Thank you.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Okay. All right. So just a potted history of the French Revolution. It went through three phases or five phases, depending on what you want to. Want to emphas emphasize standardly, the French Revolution is dated from 1789, but it's important to point out that a lot was happening in 1986, 1786, 87, 88. In the lead up to the French Revolution official Starting date in 1789, France was a monarchy. It was a weak monarchy, though, and it also had a monarch that was a nice guy and to some extent willing to reform. Unfortunately for France had also been plagued by a series of terrible harvests and the economy was in a bad state. And the aristocracy was somewhat marginalized. In the previous century and a half of French history, as monarchy grew in power, had then spotted an opportunity to get back a lot of its feudal privileges and feudal powers that it had lost over the course of the previous century. So they exerted a great deal of pressure on the monarchy to call for a kind of national parliament that's called the Estates General, where according to French feudalism, there's the clergy as a class, there's the nobility as a class, and there's what's called the Third Estate, which is basically everybody else together and the representative.
The idea, monarchy and power would be redistributed more, more equitably, and certain liberties would be granted and so forth. So the king agreed. The Estates General was assembled in 1789, and by and large, the most prominent force here was in fact the aristocrats, forcing this for feudal power grabbing reasons. Now, lots of other people there had been a lot of Enlightenment thinking and a lot of what we might call counter Enlightenment thinking. So thinkers like Voltaire, very prominent, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Very prominent, any number of other filas, very prominent, coffee house culture and salon culture, very strong. And so there was a great expectation then, among many people from many walks of life in French society, that the reforms would in effect take France into a more. A more modern era. Some sort of constitutional monarchy would emerge from this now, from 1789, fairly quickly, though the aristocrats don't have very much power or they lose control over the proceedings. And one of the reasons for that is that many members of the aristocracy were more Enlightenment and more modern in their thinking. They weren't old traditional aristocratic figures. And the same thing is true in the clergy. There were many within the clergy who were sympathetic to the Third Estate, sympathetic to Rousseau, sympathetic to Voltaire, sympathetic to modernizing kinds of ideals. So fairly quickly, and this is why the revolution dates from 1789, power over what was happening devolved through the third estate, especially, as well as many people in the second estate, that's the aristocracy and some from the clergy, the First Estate, who were much more aggressive about France, into the modern era. And what happened then in 1789, was the development of a new Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that was signed off on by the. There was over 1200 delegates in total at this. At this assembly. And this document, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, is essentially a liberal document in the way that we now think of classical liberal. It was inspired in large part by the American Declaration of Independence.
It was inspired by followers of Voltaire who were followers of the Voltairians, of Lockean political philosophy to a significant extent. Other classics had figured prominently as well.
And the primary author of this document was the Marquis de Lafayette, who was an Enlightenment liberal. He was an aristocrat. He was someone who as a younger man had been inspired by the American Revolution, had gone over to America two times, I believe, to help them fight the war, bring some military expertise and resources, worked directly with George Washington and so his heroin, the intellectual and political leadership.
So it's a 17 point.
Remain free and equal in rights. So that's the first clause. Free rights and equal rights. Second, the aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and inalienable rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and.
And resistance to oppression. We jump down to Article 4. What do we mean by liberty? Liberty consists of the power to do whatever is not injurious to others. Thus, the enjoyment of the natural rights of every man has for its limits only those that assure other members of society enjoy the enjoyment of those Same rights, et cetera, et cetera. And every citizen is equal in their rights. Every citizen can participate in the process. There are explicit restrictions on what the judiciary can do. You can't be accused or detained except according to laws that have already been laid down. And then how the prosecution is going to go is also to be, to be, to be laid down. Everybody has absolute free speech and freedom of the press, freedom of communication, freedom of religion. You can believe whatever you want as long as you're not disturbing the public order.
And let's see, and then the 16th one done would close. Since property is a sacred and inviolable right, no one may deprive thereof unless the legally established necessity requires it, et cetera, et cetera. So what we have then is essentially what we would now call a classic liberal. John Lockheed Thomas Jeffersonian. And then since the primary author was Lafayette, a Lafayette doctrine. And this was passed by a large majority in the the national assembly. And the French Revolution is underway now. At the same time, there's lots of unrest in the street. There's a certain amount of rioting going on. And these liberals, as I am describing them, are not the only faction. There still are aristocrats who are much more in favor of the old way of doing things, who are trying to exert some power. But there also are other factions that are followers of Rousseau. They are what we would now call leftists. And in some cases they were quite far leftist. And they also are agitating and trying to exert their powers in various ways as well. But nonetheless, there is this liberal phase of the revolution for the next two years, until 1791, the third phase of the Revolution, typically from 1792 to 1794. What has happened here is that that style aristocrats have basically lost all of their influence. And many of the liberals, including Lafayette, I should also mention Condorcet, the Marquis de Condorcet, a great advocate for the abolition of slavery, a great advocate for extending these equal liberty rights to women as well. They had been marginalized for not being radical enough. And also they were not particularly effective political players themselves. There's always a rough and tumble element to the political process. All of the wheeling and dealing and the certain amount of backstabbing that goes on, and they were not playing it very well. So there was a series of elections toward the end of 1791, 1792 and so on. And what happened with each of these elections was that the revolution moved to the left and the factions that were followers of Jean Jacques Rousseau, mostly explicitly who were Opposed to law, opposed to Voltaire, opposed to Lafayette. These were the ones who had been successfully marginalizing Lafayette, Condorcet and the others came to power. And they came to power largely through their ideology, a willingness to be more ruthless. But also in the Third Estate, there were a huge number, you know, many millions of peasants and manual workers who had suffered, suffered terribly under feudalism, and were in this decade also suffering rather terribly due to the poor crops and the terrible trade balance that was going on in France at the time. So the groups that came to be called the Girondins and the Jacobins, and this was originally people on the left, pretty far left, but they had split into a left and really far left group called the Girondins and the Jacobins. The Girondins first came to power, but they were then outmaneuvered by the Jacobins. So by the time we get to 1792, 1793, the old aristocrats are totally without influence. The Liberals are totally without influence. And the Jacobins are quite ruthless at this point. They are quite willing to do nasty things, backstabbing of the worst possible kind, resorting to assassination when they come to power. As followers of Rousseau, they believe in a strong collectivism. They don't believe in individual rights, essentially. They tear up the original Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen for being too liberty focused, for being too individual focused. And they enact explicitly what they call the Rousseauian general will. And that the general will is manifest in them the Council of Three at the top, who are wielding all of the power. And the most notable name there is Robespierre. It's at this point where the King is executed. A little bit later, the Queen is executed. All of the Church's property had been confiscated.
There was a mass conscription of hundreds of thousands of human beings because the Girondin and then especially the Jacobins, wanted to prosecute international wars against Austria, Netherlands, in France. And they successively declared war against them to protect the revolution as they. As they saw it, their forced conscription, they thought it was, you know, for the collective good of the. Of the state, sparked a civil war. So France then plunged into civil war at the same time it was fighting international wars. And this is when the guillotine especially gets heated up. And basically anybody who's an aristocrat, anybody who is a member of the clergy who has not clearly made their allegiance to the new regime explicit, they are executed. The liberals are forced out and into exile, and they have to go into hiding. And even the Girondins, who are just the more Moderate left. Many of them are executed. For example, there had been a younger woman named Olympe de Guja who was a liberal. And back in 1791, the same year, sorry, shortly after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen had been published, she had published what is sometimes called the very first feminist manifesto in history, arguing that it should be extended to women.
And she was kind of classically liberal, as we would think of it, or moderately left, somewhere in the middle there, but she was executed and so forth. And so the whole thing then descended into terrorism, or for two years now. That's the first three phases.
The country is exhausted. There's a period which France continues to fight international wars. Robespierre, Marat, Saint Just are variously assassinated or executed. And then there is a new regime called the Director that's in power for a certain number of years. And Napoleon is working his way up the ranks due to his military prowess. And then he seizes power in 1799. And then some versions of the French Revolution will say that Napoleon is the culmination of the French Revolution and represents the fifth phase. So that's a very short potted history of the French Revolution, but I hope it's enough just to start putting some issues on the table. So if we are going to blame the, or sign blame for the French Revolution or try to figure out what went wrong, what should we say?
And there's any number of issues that then get put on the table. One standard view is to say, well, the French were fine to try to bring France into the modern world, but they did things too quickly. So there's a rate of change argument. You can't change too much in a society too quickly. If you try to do so, things are going to spin out of control. And so that's what, that's what happened in this case. Another explanation will say that the problem with the French Revolution, one of the things that differentiates it from the American Revolution, is that this revolution unleashed the Third Estate. And there was no, really a parallel in America to a third Estate as to say, working people, farmers, farmers and peasants and so forth, who for many centuries had suffered, had been at the bottom of the bottom of the hierarchy and suffered all sorts of indignities at the, at the hands of both the clergy, but especially the aristocracy. And, you know, so all of that resentment had built up and the economy was terrible and people are hungry. And so as soon as the aristocracy and the monarchy seemed weak, then the third estate, you know, that outnumbers them by 50 to 1 or 100 they want revenge. And so it's political emotionalism that gets out of control. And you can't let, so to speak, the uneducated peasants have too much liberty too quickly, otherwise you're setting yourself up for failure. So it's a more sociological explanation, social psychological explanation. Another thing, another possible explanation that has a certain amount of prominence is to say that it's not either of those, but that the great disaster of the French Revolution was that while the majority sentiment and the majority thinking in the early stages of the French Revolution was liberal in the healthy sense, that they wanted to have a Lockean or a Jeffersonian regime, and so that they had the right ideas and the right philosophy, just as the Americans across the ocean had the right ideas. But what the French did not have among their liberals were effective politicians. They didn't have a James Madison, they didn't have George Washington, they didn't have Thomas Jefferson and so forth. Instead, what they had was someone like Lafayette and someone like Corden, Condorcet and a half a dozen other very well meaning, well thinking people, but people who are just not very good at doing practical politics. And so they lost, unfortunately, the game of power politics. And so the lesson then is it's not enough to have the right ideas, you also have to have the right practical politics. Another standard explanation, and this is now moving more to the explicitly to the religious conservatism, is to say that the problem with the French Revolution was that it was atheistic and that this is then to say the Enlightenment was of course, highly critical of much of traditional religion, and so it wanted to reform the various religious institutions or and it wanted to reform the religious ideology, perhaps in the direction of Deism. There were lots of Enlightenment thinkers who were explicitly agnostic, and there were a few who were explicitly atheistic. But this criticism then is to say that if you start to mess around with religion as a social glue, as a moral foundation for a society, you take that away, then what happens is the natural badness of human beings is going to come out. There's going to be all kinds of immorality that's going to come out. People are not going to feel constrained and things are going to spin out of control. So it's not just that the third estate, the peasants and the workers and so forth, wanted revenge. It was more that they were not fit for liberty, given that the religious bonds had been taken away that had been keeping them in line for many centuries. A related variation is to say that the problem with the French Revolution was not so much that it gave that it was atheistic or not religious enough, but that it was too liberal. It gives people freedom. And whether you are religious or not, you can't give give most people in society too much freedom, or you can't give them too much freedom too quickly. That freedom has to be, has to be learned. There has to be a cultural basis of people being moral and decent and tolerant and civil. And that takes some generations to build up. And so in effect, the French Revolution was trying with all these high liberal ideas to say that we can give the third estate and basically give everybody liberty and everything is going to be fine. But really liberalism too quickly, if it does, if it doesn't happen over the course of some generations, it's just going to lead to anarchism. And so it's the liberalism that's the problem. Others will fault the equality aspect. To say that everybody should have equal rights, well, that means that you're not going to respect the proper hierarchy. There should be a moral hierarchy in society, an expertise hierarchy in society, a political hierarchy in societies. There are some people who are better people intellectually, morally and so forth. And if we just basically pretend that everybody is morally equal and should have the same rights, then that's going to lead to disrespect for the kind of people who should have the power to be able to get various things done.
And then finally, the last few are the ones that conservative critics will typically emphasize. Another one that I would put typically comes from the more liberal, individualistic perspective is to say that really the French Revolution was fine.
It's true that the liberals were not particularly effective at the day to day politicking. They had the right ideals. But that the real poison in the French Revolution was the collectivism, or to put it in philosophical philosopher terms, it was the Rousseauian element that in the beginning part of the French Revolution there were followers of Rousseau, but they were more in the minority. But they were very effective at playing the political game.
And part and parcel of their political ideology is the collectivism. Once they did assume power, they don't care about individual rights. They don't see people as individuals. They really believe that they are the embodiment of the general will and that they have the authority and the power to do whatever is necessary to make the nation bend to its will. And once you have that kind of political ideology in power, it's necessarily going to end up in disaster.
So with that, let me draw to a close. That's a little bit of a history of the various Stages some identification of the kinds of causes of the French Revolution that are put out there and then a series of explanatory blame hypotheses that are put forward to try to explain why the French Revolution went so bad. So let's turn things open to general discussion.
[00:30:36] Speaker A: Great, thanks for that. And you can request to speak if you have questions.
One thing that I was asking in the beginning, I don't know if you could hear me, but that Louis XVI supported American independence, you know, probably for cynical reasons to counter Britain. I mean, shouldn't have seen that that was going to backfire on the monarchy to have a successful. I guess he maybe thought they were going to have a kingdom or.
[00:31:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I think he certainly had mixed motives. There were always tensions between Britain and France. So anything that causes problems for Britain from the French perspective is good news for France. But at the same time, Louis XVI want to overstate this, but he had received a more modern education and he was at least a semi sympathetic to Enlightenment ideals. And in fact, you know, whether it was writing on the wall and he was going along with it to say we do need to modernize France, what we're doing right now is not working, or whether it was also.
It was that, but also some sympathy for the ideals that he does believe that any sort of despotic church state feudalism is just wrong. And so I think in his heart of hearts. Now, I'm not an expert on Louis XVI in particular, but my sense from what I do know about him was that he thought the American Revolution would come out in some sort of. Of constitutional regime and it would still be friendly to Britain once the dust settled and that Britain would have a kind of constitutional monarchy and that France could do the same sort of thing, just evolve its way into the modern world.
And so some sort of hybrid Enlightenment traditional monarchy would emerge. And that's what he really believed.
[00:32:48] Speaker A: Great.
I don't know if you had a question, David, but I have a bunch more. We welcome you to have questions.
One, go ahead.
[00:33:00] Speaker C: I do have a question, Stephen. You mentioned that the Third Estate, which had had very little freedom before, or respect for their rights, you know, became a mob that was very bloodthirsty. And I'm wondering, the American Revolution benefited from the English background, going back to the Magna Carta of, you know, constitutional rules, controls on the monarchy, individual rights, the Glorious Revolution of the late 17th century, early, I mean, late 1600s. And was that a significant difference in your view as to why the American Revolution had very good results and the French was a disaster.
[00:34:03] Speaker B: You cut out for me partway through. But I think, yes, I think that's a huge, huge portion of it. I think that's one of the lines that both current liberal historians or political analysts of the American Revolution and conservatives will agree on, that the American Revolution did benefit by not simply having a political ideology that you might call Lockeanism, but also a long political culture and social culture where kind of ordinary people who were not part of the landed gentry or any part of the aristocracy, kind of just ordinary English people and then British people, as things developed, had some dignity and there were more explicit limitations on the power of the monarchy for longer period of time and that the French did not have that. So and then when we're having our debates about the American Revolution, it becomes then a fine judgment call to say how much of the success of the American Revolution turned on that long British history being the cultural soil, so to speak, and how much of it was more overt political philosophy.
That was what that was motivating. And clearly both were operative. But which was the more decisive factor? And the more you emphasize the long British history, the more it becomes an evolution with a sharp punctuation in the American Revolution and the more you emphasize the ideology and the sharpness of the break and de. Emphasize the long cultural history, the more it becomes a, it becomes a revolution. The other factor is that the Americans colonists were immigrants and they were very self conscious of being immigrants in a new place and building a new country.
And so there are certainly psychological cultural differences to the mix there. Whereas if you go then back to France, the Third estate is they're not people who are thinking of themselves as creating a new country, thinking of themselves as French people, but they are still living and breathing their centuries and centuries of history. And many of the, you know, they're not immigrants, they're, they're not particularly literate, many of them. Instead they just have a long list of grievances. And so when those grievances are given some space, some air, it can become toxic fairly quickly. So I hope I'm being fair to your questions. The short answer is yes, thank you, Stephen.
[00:36:55] Speaker C: You are being totally fair and very informative. Thanks.
[00:37:01] Speaker A: Great, thanks a lot. We've got Jason. Jason, thanks for joining us.
[00:37:05] Speaker D: Yeah, hey, thanks for the topic. This is really good stuff.
I'm wondering, I'm thinking back to Greek history where they kind of had the genesis of everybody's endowed by their creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And I know that that was kind of passed into the Romans through tutors.
And I know that at the time of the founding of the United States and the American Revolution that there was a large renaissance of Greco Roman ideas and digging into that and we see it in the early architecture of the state.
[00:37:47] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:37:48] Speaker D: How might that have differed with the. Because I know, I mean you have Washington being handed the opportunity to have a crown and him rejecting it versus Napoleon seeming to seek that out. What might of their education have looked like the difference was in France is that, is that. Does that get into Catholicism or was there more state oriented aristocracy type education that he might have had?
[00:38:18] Speaker B: Yeah. So our. Is your question about the kind of education that the. The revolutionaries would have had using Washington?
[00:38:31] Speaker D: It really seems like the. The American Revolutionary was. Was primed towards the. The philosophic the philosophy of you know, the. These are rights are. Are God given. There's something supernatural in that these rights that people have. And it seems like in. In the French Revolution, which is kind of a contemporary that it. That seems missing. So I do wonder about the education. Can you kind of fill in the blanks on that?
[00:38:57] Speaker B: Yes. There's two kinds of education you're talking or I hear you saying, one is about going back to the Greeks and Romans and reflecting on that history, letting that inform your contemporary contemporary now being 1700s education of the people who are going to become political revolutions, revolutionaries and then the other being the place of religion, whether you are conceiving of the rights as being God given or whether they are natural rights. So the person's religious education as well. Now my answer to that is that there is a huge difference between the Americans and the French. Both of the intellectuals and many of the revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic were very well read and well steeped in the history, but they are drawing upon very different aspects of the history. So let's take the Greeks and Romans in the first place. So it's kind of a commonplace to say that the American revolutionaries. So Jefferson, Madison, Washington and the others, Washington to a lesser extent, he was less intellectual of them. But they read the Greeks and the Romans and so they were full of quotations from Aristotle and Cicero and Plato. And they were well aware of the history of how democratic institutions had risen in Greece and then declined. Republican institutions in Rome had waxed and then waned and so on. And so they were drawing on that explicitly and then asking the question, can we learn from the mistakes of those two experiments in democratic republics and have a brand new democratic republican that fixed them?
And I would say the names that are the most standouts are going to be people like.
Excuse me, I need to clear my throat.
Certainly. Yeah, certainly Cicero, certainly Aristotle, Plato, Thucydides.
And they all were then great admirers of the accomplishments of Athens.
Yeah. Not only in terms of its politics, its military success, its economy, its accomplishments in the art, but also the same in Rome. Now to switch to France.
There's a huge divide in French intellectual thinking that's not conservative in the 1700s. And the two important strains. This is much too short form, but are those who were followed Voltaire and those who followed Rousseau. And Voltaire was almost explicitly a follower of the English model. He had spent some time in England in exile, where he studied how the English were doing everything. He read and loved John Locke, he read and loved Francis Bacon, he read and loved Isaac Newton. And so he is in a sense bringing to France Lockean ideals, just as those Lockean ideals went over to America. And so he ended up reading the same sort, same sort of people. And so that's why many of the French Enlightenment thinkers who were in this Voltairian sense were admiring of the English model and then admiring the same thing that the Americans were admiring from the original Greek thinking and the original Greek experimenting and the Roman thinking and the Roman experimenting. Now, the other important faction though in France is the Rousseau faction.
And Jean Jacques Rousseau also was an extraordinarily well read man in the history. He would go back and read the Roman figures and go back and read what was going on in Greek, but he admired different figures in those eras. For example, when you read Rousseau, there's the great contrast between Athens and Sparta. And Athens was much more democratic and cosmopolitan and philosophical and artistic and so forth, the glories of Athens. But Sparta was much more militaristic, much more hierarchical, much more dictatorial. And as it is now an adjective, it lived a much more Spartan life. It was much more communal, where everybody is living for the good of Sparta. Sparta conceived as a fighting regime and one his highest glory is to die for. To die for Sparta. And what you find in Rousseau, when Rousseau says, we don't want to have, you know, kind of feudalism anymore, we need to go back and learn from the great classics. What he means is not the Athenians, whom he saw as decadent and not the Roman republicans of the later faiths whom we also saw as decadent, but as the more Spartan, militaristic, hierarchical, collectivistic Spartans. And so what he wants to do then is update the Spartan model. And it Is then Rousseau, to the extent he became enormously influential on the French revolutionaries, explicitly. So in the case of Robespierre, Saint Joust, Marat and others, they all said that they are disciples of Rousseau that took the French Revolution in a very different direction. Now, that's only half of an answer because you also mentioned the religion. Religion is complicated in the 1700s, hundreds just because there are people who are theistic, there are those who are deistic, agnostic and a few atheists kicking around. But what you find is this is a decisive difference, is that in the American Revolution everyone is not everyone, but pretty much everyone very strong. That religion has to be separated from politics. And so that's why the First Amendment, the first clause of the First Amendment says, you know, Congress can't pass any laws with respect to religious matters. So it's complete separation of church and state.
The state is for the limited number of political purposes. Religion is a private matter to be done as individuals decide to do it. And again, that's a very Lockean doctrine. So the state then, so to speak, stays out of political matters. What became decisive in the French Revolution was that while the first fate phase of the French Revolution, what I was calling the liberal phase in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, it does state exactly that, that religion is a private matter and people are to have complete liberty of conscience and complete liberty of association on religious matters and they can't be prosecuted or persecuted for religious matters. But all of that changes when the Jacobins come to power because Robespierre is following Rousseau. And Rousseau was not a true traditional theist, but he believed in God. He thought that the Deists like, like Voltaire were wrong, that he thought anybody who was agnostic and atheist was just a depraved human being, that religion was absolutely essential to the state, that there should be not a separation of church and state, but an integration of church and state, that there should be an official state religion, and that that state religion should be enforced even to the point that if any citizen, knowing what the state religion is and what it requires of him, says that he's not going to follow that or he doesn't believe that that person could in principle be executed.
So that doctrine and that approach to taking religion and modernizing it and making it a part of the official state apparatus. Apparatus is also a tragic outcome of what I think of as the third phase of the French Revolution when the liberals had been ousted and the Rousseauian Jacobins had taken over. So again, a huge topic. And that's Just a few words that I hope are in the direction of your complicated question.
[00:47:34] Speaker D: Yeah, thank you.
That was amazing. And shed some light on some stuff I've wondered about. So thank you for that. And man, what, what, what a commentary on what a base of an education can do to a culture throughout all of Europe or all of North America.
[00:47:53] Speaker B: Gosh, yeah, for sure.
[00:47:56] Speaker A: So with the, the way that the French Revolution inspired, you know, revolutions in 1848 and even Karl Marx, I mean, to the. I'm one who was called socialism a religion, could you call the French Revolution its kind of genesis story?
[00:48:17] Speaker B: Sorry, are you asking about the Marxist inspiration and other forms of socialism, or are you emphasizing the socialism as religion.
[00:48:26] Speaker A: Theme more that the French Revolution was the beginning, almost a precursor to socialism?
[00:48:34] Speaker B: Yes, I think that's, that's true.
So the word socialism had not yet been coined.
That comes in the next generation.
So what you have to do is say that they are clearly the Jacobins following Rousseau. They're opposed to individualism and they talk only about society. They do talk explicitly about the collective, about the nation as the proper being and not the individual.
They do see rights as conferred by the nation, not something that inheres in the individual.
And they do say that the state can use individuals economically for military purposes, so conscription for agricultural purposes, for industrial purposes, for military purposes and so on. All of that is explicit. It's just not called socialism at that point. It's given various other sorts of labels as well.
So yes, this is the first, first modern socialism. And it is true that Marx was inspired by the French Revolution. And what he means by that is the, not the first half of the French Revolution, but the second or third half of the French Revolution. And many of them want to say that there were points during the French Revolution where rare various communes. Babouf was another, another name worth looking up there. He's sometimes cited as the first communist.
And he wasn't quite a Jacobin, he wasn't quite a Girondin. But another variation as well that was saying we need to abolish all private property and establish a kind of commune. And they tried that in limited ways for a short period of time as well. So yes, most of the. The versions of socialism that are historically informed after the French Revolution do see the French Revolution as their great rallying club.
[00:51:04] Speaker A: And is part of the significance that it was France, one of the most powerful countries that. I mean, basically, even though Republican army was able to fight off the royalist forces even before Napoleon.
[00:51:20] Speaker B: Yes, during the Civil War era. And Other. Yes. Aspects of that. Oh yes.
So the. Yeah, it gets very messy very quickly because there are royalist forces and those who quite early want to say that once the revolution is no longer liberal and it's becoming fratricidal that we've gone too far.
We gave the liberals a chance and they failed. So all we can really try to do is go back to the way things were before 1789. And that means allying ourselves with the royalist forces.
And so it would be a social coalition and an ideological coalition under a royalist cause. But then at the same time you got huge numbers of people who don't want to go back and they are now called Republicans or sans poulots. They're not going to wear the fancy decorations on the clothing anymore.
It's just huge numbers of them. We're not necessarily particularly ideological. They are just going to make sure that we're not going to go back and whatever the way forward is, it's going to have to be messy, but we'll do so. And so that was enormously energizing upon millions. So yes, they were able to hold off and eventually even defeat the royalist force.
[00:53:00] Speaker A: You brought up the theme of giving freedom too quickly. And I, you know, just, I know before the French and Indian War they, they had a policy of benign neglect of Britain. Just wanted America to grow in something. And it was almost like the early days of the Internet. And was that maybe a theme of why they'd had more, more time to be free and it didn't have to get so radical? And they did. It was a little more tabula rasa as well, without the existing cultural forces?
[00:53:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's, that's, that's an important part that has to, has to work out with your abstract political philosophy is human beings are not just abstract premises carried around in their heads. We are all of that is embodied in an individual psychology. And then we're trying to do all of this socially. So a lot of the social psychology has to come into play as well. And so when we talk about liberal ideals, we do default to kind of an idealized abstraction of an adult who has a certain education, has a certain level of emotional maturity as part of that education is in a position to be self responsible and in a position to, you know, have basic respect for other people. And all of those are the individual preconditions, but also cultural preconditions for a liberal society. And those things don't happen automatically, they don't happen by magic. And I think it's true that they take time to develop in the individual and it takes time for them to develop as a cultural ethos and for all sorts of institutions to be developed that encourage the kinds of things that a liberal society needs to have in place. So I think it is an open question if you are talking about a totally debased people, totally uneducated people, whether you just say, well, let's just give them freedom and they can make a go of it, I don't know the answer to that question. Whether they do need to have a certain level of education and what that level of education is before all of the freedom can be granted. If we just start from an individual, we're all pretty comfortable, I think, with the idea that a baby that is born is a human being and has certain basic human rights. But it takes a while before we take all of the training wheels off.
In many cases, it takes years for that baby to grow up, to learn what it needs to know, to develop the, the intellectual stock of knowledge, the physical skills, the emotional toughness and just overall maturity before we can say as parents, okay, you are now able to go off without any paternalism and live your life as a totally free agent.
And for a society to work, there has to be a critical mass of such individuals in place. So if it is the case that you have a culture where people are uneducated, they are intolerant, maybe they're filled up with religious hatreds and they have certain other kinds of attitudes that are strongly illiberal, it is true that if suddenly they are put in a position of total freedom, they will go after each other in various nasty ways and they might just destroy each other before they come to a live and let live policy.
So I think of that as a big open question where abstract political philosophy needs to work with psychology and social psychology to work out what the minimal conditions for a culture of liberty to support a politics of liberty.
[00:57:42] Speaker A: That's great. Well, we have reached time. I want to thank everyone so much for joining us.
Stephen, thank you so much for doing this. If you've enjoyed this or any of our other materials, please consider making a tax deductible donation@atlas society.org sorry we ran out of time, David and Anastasia, but we'll look forward to seeing you at the next one. Take care.
