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.)

Tim Price on parallels to the French Revolution

Some suggest that the most appropriate analogue for the current global crisis – the spread of a pandemic that has resulted in some catastrophic mis-steps by multiple governments – is the Great Depression of the 1930s...  But perhaps an altogether darker and more substantial comparative reset is that of the French Revolution itself. 

Some historians, perhaps most notably those of a Marxist bent, regard the French Revolution as the most significant event in the history of the modern world. The Revolution replaced a monarchy with a republic, reshaped the social order and the role of the aristocracy and the Church, ushered in a period of extraordinary outbursts of violence, and ultimately led to a dictatorship under Napoleon – who would then export many of its principles, by force, to much of western Europe. 

Like so many revolutions, this one was in large part triggered by finance.

~ Tim Price, "Children of the Revolution," Price Value Partners, March 22, 2021

Will and Ariel Durant on the French Revolution "eating its children"

The slate seemed clear; all groups that had challenged the Committee of Public Safety had been eliminated or suppressed.  The Girondins were dead or dispersed; the sansculottes had been divided and silenced; the clubs - excepting the Jacobin - had been closed; the press and the theater were under strict censorship; the Convention, cowed, left all major decisions to the committee.  Under their tutelage, and instructed by its other committees, the Convention passed laws against hoarders and speculators, proclaimed free, universal education, abolished slavery in the French colonies, and established a welfare state with social security, unemployment benefits, medical aid for the poor, and relief for the old.  These measures were in large part frustrated by war and chaos, but they remained as ideas to inspire succeeding generations.

~ Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, "The Revolution Eats Its Children," pp. 78-79



Interpretation by Phil Duffy:

In the first four chapters of The Age of Napoleon, the Durants describe the multi-stage French Revolution.  The first stage deposed the king and the Catholic Church in favor of rule by the Girondins, the political group representing the rising commercial class (the bourgeoisie).  Then the Revolution became radicalized with the street mob of Paris (the sansculottes) gaining control.  They were represented in the legislative body (the Convention) by members of the Jacobin club, including the infamous Maximilien Robespierre of A Tale of Two Cities fame.  By eliminating his enemies with the guillotine, Robespierre, heading the powerful Committee of Public Safety, had emerged as the dictator of France.  But emerging victorious in a revolution only forces the winner to govern effectively.  Like most politicians, Robespierre was long on promises and short on delivery.  His fellow revolutionaries realized that Robespierre was in a position to eliminate all of them, so they sent him to the guillotine in a preemptive strike designed to protect their lives, concluding the radical stage of the French Revolution.

Wars and the chaos of revolution crippled the French economy during this period.  It destroyed the wealth that would have been necessary to pursue the utopian socialist dream first expressed in the French Revolution.  But the French Revolution impressed Karl Marx a half century later as he wrote The Manifesto of the Communist Party

Georges Jacques Danton on revolutions

In revolutions, authority remains with the greatest scoundrels.

~ Georges Jacques Danton, intellectual leader of the French Revolution

Charles Dickens on the French Revolution

It was the best of times, it was the worst of time, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities