Scott Trask on the French Revolution

Through 1788 and into 1789 the gods seemed to be conspiring to bring on a popular revolution.  A spring drought was followed by a devastating hail storm in July.  Crops were ruined.  There followed one of the coldest winters in French history. Grain prices skyrocketed.  Even in the best of times, an artisan or factor might spend 40 percent of his income on bread.  By the end of the year, 80 percent was not unusual.  “It was the connection of anger with hunger that made the Revolution possible,” observed Schama.  It was also envy that drove the Revolution to its violent excesses and destructive reform. 

Take the Reveillon riots of April 1789.  Reveillon was a successful Parisian wall-paper manufacturer.  He was not a noble but a self-made man who had begun as an apprentice paper worker but now owned a factory that employed 400 well-paid operatives.  He exported his finished products to England (no mean feat). The key to his success was technical innovation, machinery, the concentration of labor, and the integration of industrial processes, but for all these the artisans of his district saw him as a threat to their jobs.  When he spoke out in favor of the deregulation of bread distribution at an electoral meeting, an angry crowded marched on his factory, wrecked it, and ransacked his home. 

From thenceforth, the Paris mob would be the power behind the Revolution.  Economic science would not fare well. According to Jean Baptiste Say, “The moment there was any question in the National Assembly of commerce or finances, violent invectives could be heard against the economists.” That is what happens when political power is handed over to pseudo-intellectuals, lawyers, and the mob.

The exponents of the rationalistic Enlightenment had stood for a constitutional monarchy, a liberal economic and legal order, scientific progress, and a competent administration. According to Schama, “They were heirs to the reforming ethos of Louis XVI’s reign, and authentic predictors of the ‘new notability’ to emerge after the Revolution had run its course. Their language was reasonable and their tempers cool. What they had in mind was a nation vested, through its representatives, with the power to strip away the obstructions to modernity. Such a state . . . would not wage war on the France of the 1780s but consummate its promise.” 

If only the French elites could have agreed on a course of reform along these lines, there would have been no Terror, no Napoleon, no centralizing, statist revolution. And it was the pressing financial crisis, brought on by deficit spending to fund a global empire that in the end frustrated the kind of evolutionary political and economic liberalization that is the true road of civilized progress.

~ H.A. Scott Trask, "What Brought on the French Revolution?," Mises Daily, February 4, 2022

(Originally published April 9, 2004.)