Responses to the French Revolution

A government of the nature of that set up at our very door has never been hitherto seen, or even imagined in Europe…France, since her revolution, is under the sway of a sect, whose leaders have deliberately, at one stroke, demolished the whole body of that jurisprudence which France had pretty nearly in common with other civilized countries…Its foundation is laid in regicide, in Jacobinism, and in atheism, and it has joined to those principles a body of systematic manners, which secures their operation. …

I call a commonwealth regicide, which lays it down as a fixed law of nature, and a fundamental right of man, that all government, not being a democracy, is a usurpation. That all kings, as such, are usurpers; and for being kings may and ought to be put to death, with their wives, families and adherents. That commonwealth which acts uniformly upon those principles… – this I call regicide by establishment. 

Jacobinism is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property. When private men form themselves into associations for the purpose of destroying the pre-existing laws and institutions of their country; when they secure to themselves an army, by dividing amongst the people of no property the estates of the ancient and lawful proprietors, when a state recognizes those acts; when it does not make confiscations for crimes, but makes crimes for confiscations; when it has its principal strength, and all its resources, in such a violation of property … – I call this Jacobinism by establishment. 

I call it atheism by establishment, when any state, as such, shall not acknowledge the existence of God as a moral governor of the world; … – when it shall abolish the Christian religion by a regular decree; – when it shall persecute with a cold, unrelenting, steady cruelty, by every mode of confiscation, imprisonment, exile, and death, all its ministers; – when it shall generally shut up or pull down churches; when the few buildings which remain of this kind shall be opened only for the purpose of making a profane apotheosis of monsters, whose vices and crimes have no parallel amongst men…When, in the place of that religion of social benevolence, and of individual self-denial, in mockery of all religion, they institute impious, blasphemous, indecent theatric rites, in honor of their vitiated, perverted reason, and erect altars to the personification of their own corrupted and bloody republic; …when wearied out with incessant martyrdom, and the cries of a people hungering and thirsting for religion, they permit it, only as a tolerated evil – I call this atheism by establishment. 

When to these establishments of regicide, of Jacobinism, and of atheism, you add the correspondent system of manners, no doubt can be left on the mind of a thinking man concerning their determined hostility to the human race.

It might safely be said that never in human history, or at least never prior to 1799, had so much been achieved by one people in such a short span of time! Yet, lest the uninformed naïvely assume that between 1789 and 1799 some divine force had transformed France from a purgatory into a paradise, the foregoing impressive list of apparent achievements must be balanced against the actual accomplishments. In other words, how much of what was done progressed beyond the “paper” state, how much failed in the effort? And, it must be admitted, here the opponents of the Revolution find much of their material for criticism. A few significant examples will suffice as evidence.

 Politically, constitutionalism had been accepted, but the constitution of 1799 was a farce; declarations of rights had been made three times, but each time they had been more form than substance, and in 1799 they were omitted entirely; democracy had never been really tried; 1799 inaugurated a dictatorship; the liberties of the subject had been flagrantly violated during the Terror; in 1799 it appeared that equality and security were preferable to liberty; and protection of property had been of little help to the clergy or the émigrés.

 Economically, "free" land was a reality only for those who possessed the wherewithal to purchase it; agricultural reforms were still in the future; workers lacked the right to organize and to strike; and the fiscal and financial situation left by the Directory was worse than that facing the Estates General – stability was still lacking.

 Socially, the bourgeoisie had supplanted the clergy and nobles, but the common man still awaited his due; class consciousness persisted, and privilege was still sought; many of the social reforms proposed never passed outside the legislative halls; and socialism was a dead issue.

 Religiously, France was still Catholic, and neither the Revolution nor its attempt at a synthetic faith had altered the situation; anti-Protestantism and anti-Semitism were by no means obliterated; and the revolutionary legislation affecting the Church had produced a schism which remained for Napoleon to heal.

 Finally, despite a brief taste of the several freedoms, France was entering upon a period in which censorship was to keep news of Trafalgar [a major French military defeat] from the columns of the Moniteur [the state-run newspaper in France], and education was to become little more than Bonapartist propaganda; in fact, the educational projects of the Revolution remained, for the most part, decently interred in statute books.

 Yet this situation was by no means abnormal. It should neither encourage the counter-revolutionary nor discourage the revolutionary. As fundamental change, the Revolution inevitably worked through a three-fold process: disestablishment (of outmoded old institutions); innovation (through badly needed new institutions); and compromise (by adaptation of existing institutions to the necessities of the moment). The original objectives – which, for convenience, may perhaps best be summed up as liberty, equality, and order –could be achieved in no other way. What appears to be failure is nothing more than proof that in such movements the forces of reaction are strong, and the ambitions of men usually far exceed the ability of those same men to put their plans to practical use.

It would be wrong to assume that because women had come into the Revolution in 1789 asking for bread and liberty and had come out in 1795 with starvation and restriction of their movements, they had gained nothing. They won laws protecting their rights in marriage, property, and education. True, women were denied political rights in the French Revolution (as were the majority of men when the Convention scrapped the democratic constitution of 1793) but nowhere else at the time did women share political rights with men.

Although women were a cohesive group during the Revolution, they responded mainly to the needs of their class and were never an autonomous force. The ideology of the revolutionary authorities who distrusted women's political movements derived seemingly from Rousseau, but actually from the facts of their lives: France's small-scale, home-based economy needed middle- and working-class women to contribute their special skills and labor to their families. Women were not yet a large, independent group in the working class.

In the early days of the French Revolution, women from the middle classes (as can be seen from cahiers written by them) welcomed the restoration of their natural rights as wives and mothers to participate in society as men’s "natural companions." Women of the urban poor – wage earners, artisans of women's crafts, owners of small enterprises, such as the market women – agitated for bread rather than for women's rights. There is, however, evidence that "respectable" middle-class women joined them. Although these movements crossed class lines, which were perhaps not rigidly fixed, they did not cross sex lines. When men participated, as they did in the October Days of 1789, they came as armed escorts or separate detachments.

As the Revolution entered its more radical phase, as economic crisis followed war and civil strife, the polarization between the rich and the poor sharpened the older struggle between aristocrat and patriot. During the last days of the National Convention, the women who surged into the hall crying "Bread and the Constitution of 1793" truly represented the poor, whom the upper classes and their women now feared. The bread riots belonged to the women of the poor, who incited their men to insurrection, but the insurrection belonged to both of them, the sans-culottes and their women.

Yet, the Revolution had called upon women to make great sacrifices and they did; in consequence, women became a revolutionary force unprecedented in history. The men in power feared women who challenged the Revolution's failure to guarantee bread for the poor. So feared were the women of the French Revolution that they became legendary - they became Mme. Defarge [a character in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities who rouses rabbles] later to those who feared revolution itself.

A new elite of the upper middle class, men of wealth and talent, rose to power in the four years of the Directory following the dissolution in 1795 of the National Convention. Their women had no political rights but emerged as influential ladies of the salon, such as the brilliant writer Mme. de Staë, and Mme. Tallien, former wife of an aristocrat and now derisively called "Our Lady of Thermidor," as a symbol of the reaction. One of these ladies, Josephine de Beauharnais, the widow of a general, became the mistress of one of the Directors before she married the young Napoleon Bonaparte, who soon afterward became general of the armies in Italy.

Outside of Paris, away from the glamour of these women, middle-class morality prevailed. Napoleon subscribed to this morality. When he became emperor in 1804, he wrote laws into his code to strengthen the authority of the husband and father of the family as a safeguard for private property. Women lost whatever rights they had gained in the Revolution, for now they had to obey their husbands unconditionally. Napoleon left women the right to divorce (for Napoleon to use against Josephine when she failed to provide him an heir), but this right was taken from them after 1815 by the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.

What could not be taken from women was their memory of victories during the French Revolution: their march to Versailles in the October Days, their petitions to the legislature, their club meetings, their processions, their insurrections. Their defeats served as lessons for next time. "We are simple women," a women was reported to have said at a club meeting in the days of the uprising of the Paris Commune in May 1871, nearly a century later, "but not made of weaker stuff than our grandmothers of '93. Let us not cause their shades to blush for us, but be up and doing, as they would be were they living now."