Hello and welcome to Revolutions.
So today, we are going to talk about the great specter haunting Europe. No, not communism. No one’s even heard of communism yet. I’m talking about the French Revolution. The French Revolution loomed over the middle of the 19th century and cast an inescapable shadow across the whole continent. And in 1848, what one thought about the French Revolution spoke volumes about your politics. When someone mentions the Revolution, do you recoil in disgust? Do you hem and haw and say, oh, there were some good things and some bad things? Do you lament the tragedy of its failure? Defiantly insist that it was a job left undone?
Everyone with an interest in politics from Lisbon to Moscow had an opinion about the French Revolution. And with this latest French Revolution in February 1848 being the first eruption of the volcano, what one thought about the original French Revolution was going to say a lot about how you responded to news of the fall of the July Monarchy. Do you want to stop the spread of this Revolution? Do you want to go mount a barricade? Do you want to pull back? Do you want to push forward?
Everyone involved had the original French Revolution on their minds in 1848, as they each individually tried to figure out what to do next.
So to get started with this, you may have noticed by now that by the late 1840s, there were quite a few popular histories of the French Revolution floating around out there. And these serve not just as influential entries into the burgeoning historiography of the French Revolution, but they also served as vehicles for contemporary political commentary and criticism.
So we’ve already introduced and discussed a few of the major works over the course of this podcast. Adolphe Thiers had launched his public career in the 1820s with a 10 volume history of the Revolution that drew a distinction between the good Revolution of 1789 and the bad Revolution of 1792. He was in fact the originator of that thesis.
Then Thiers’ occasional ally, but usually rival, François Guizot, had followed this up with his own commentaries on the Revolution in his General History of France that came out over the course of the 1830s. Guizot’s work clearly cautioned against indulging the forces of reform too much, because there was a straight line between the Estates General and the guillotine.
Then as the July Monarchy progressed and liberal centrists like Guizot and Thiers moved into government, the most popular histories moved to the left. The Republican Revolution of August 10, 1792 stopped being framed as the moment things went from good to bad, but the moment when things went from good to great. The First Republic started to be celebrated, not denounced. Alphonse de Lamartine’s History of the Girondins, that came out in 1847, celebrated the Republic and its virtuous founders, who were then tragically consumed by forces beyond their control. Lamartine even offered the first real defense of the extreme measures taken during the crisis days of 1793. His critics accused him of gilding the guillotine.
I’ve also mentioned so far two other histories that came out at around that same time, so right on the eve of 1848. The first was from the historian Jules Michelet, who offered a nakedly pro-Republican and anti-clerical assessment of the Revolution. The only bad thing about the First Republic was that it had been betrayed. Michelet’s lectures were so pro-Republican and anti-clerical that he was booted from his chair at the university in December 1847, which, as we discussed, primed the pump for the student radicals to mount the barricades just a few months later..
Finally, as I mentioned last week, there was the socialist Louis Blanc, who was in the middle of publishing his own history of the French Revolution when 1848 blew up. Blanc’s history staked out a position in heretofore practically unknown territory, offering a sympathetic portrayal of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals. No longer obscure and degenerate criminals, but heroic martyrs 50 years ahead of their time.
So on the eve of 1848, the French Revolution was a popular topic of discussion and a handy vehicle to smuggle in none too subtle criticisms of the existing regimes. Now, even today the French Revolution is occasionally deployed in the service of contemporary political commentary. But with the whole thing now well over 200 years in the rearview mirror, it doesn’t have quite the immediate vitality that it did in 1848. And one of the big reasons the French Revolution loomed so large in 1848 was that the French Revolution was not yet ancient history. It was not a distant event in the murky mists of the past. It existed within living memory.
On January 1st, 1848, it had been just 58 and a half years since the fall of the Bastille. That is not very long. So think about it like this. This episode is going to publish in 2017. For us, that means that the fall of the Bastille would have happened in 1958. The reign of terror would have begun in 1962. Napoleon would have taken over in 1968. And his wars that swept Europe would have lasted into the 1980s. In this framework, Waterloo would have happened in 1984, just 33 years ago.
So those culottes everyone had stopped wearing were not pieces of impossibly ancient fashion from some costume period drama. They were basically bell bottoms.
This means that in 1848, there were plenty of old duffers still kicking around who did not have to read about the Revolution in history books. They had lived through it. And not just as children watching from a window, so, I mean, really lived through it. King Louis-Philippe is himself an obvious example.
Chancellor Metternich had been serving in Belgium as a young clerk in the Habsburg diplomatic corps when Belgium became the front line of the Revolutionary Wars in the early 1790s. Austrian Field Marshal Radetzky, who is about to become the principal nemesis of the forces of Italian risorgimento, had joined the Austrian army way back in 1785.
And then finally, on that list of names for the French provisional government that I did not want to get lost in last week, well, one of them was Jacques-Charles Dupont de l’Eure, an aging dean of the liberal opposition who had been born way, way back in 1767. He had begun his legal career in Normandy before the Revolution began, and he launched his political career as a committed Republican during the days of the Directory.
Now, the attitudes of these guys were not shaped by histories of the Revolution. They had been shaped by the Revolution. But as is always the case, the fact of having lived through an event does not create some common takeaway. Metternich became a conservative absolutist who dreamed of restoring the good old days of 1788. Louis Philippe was a constitutional monarchist, but who nonetheless feared further reform because he feared the return of the guillotine.
Dupont de l’Eure was an avowed Republican who had never given up hope that one day the Revolution would come back. They had all been stamped by the Revolution, just in different ways.
But that said, while these old duffers were still around, most of the guys who participated in the Revolutions of 1848 were in their 30s and 40s. So they had all been born after the Revolution had broken out, and grew up in its Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic wake. They did have to learn about it in history books, or from stories they heard from their parents and older relatives. And from those books and relatives, they learned the answers to questions like, was the Revolution a good thing that had been betrayed? A bad thing that never should have started? Who were the villains? Who were the heroes? Did it go too far? Had it not gone far enough?
The answers often depended on your family’s socioeconomic standing both before and after the Revolution. And of course, we must also keep in mind that these memories and assessments of the French Revolution were passed down everywhere in Europe. And for those outside France, the inescapable further consideration was that the fall of the Bastille had eventually turned France into a war machine hell-bent on global conquest.
So in France, it was debated whether 1789 necessarily led to the Reign of Terror. Outside of France, it was wondered whether 1789 had necessarily led to decades of pan-European war. The men who would fight for control of Europe in 1848 all had the French Revolution on their minds as they decided whether to embrace revolutionary fever or reject it.
So at one end of the spectrum, we have those who looked back at the French Revolution with nothing but horror and disgust, and who believe that above all and no matter what the cost, Europe must be kept free of the menace of revolution. But this category of anti-revolutionaries divided up into three broad groups who agreed on practically nothing but the fact that revolution was abhorrent.
First, and most obviously, we have the conservative absolutists who returned to power after the Congress of Vienna. The chief leading light of this group was Metternich, and the specter of the French Revolution haunted no man so much as Metternich. Men like Metternich were so opposed to revolution that they were even opposed to reform. King Louis XVI had invited reform in 1789, and look what had happened to him.
So across Europe in 1848, there were conservative writers and members of the clergy and major landowners who believed that you could not even let three guys meet for a drink or they’d start plotting revolution. You certainly couldn’t have a free press. You had to be stubborn, unfair, and ruthless. It was simply too dangerous to be anything less. And this extended to things even as seemingly banal as allowing a kingdom to have a nominal constitution. Because in the conservative mind, once you granted the premise that rights came up from the people, rather than down from God through the King, you could just kiss the whole thing goodbye.
These conservatives still pine for the days before 1789, and they hated the memory of even the most moderate French revolutionaries, whose seemingly innocent and earnest appeals for reform had simply been the thin end of the wedge.
But absolutist conservatives were not the only ones who recoiled at the memory of the French Revolution, who wanted to do everything in their power from ever letting it happen again. So this second group of anti-revolutionaries were constitutional liberals who worshiped the rule of law, and for whom revolution was anathema to everything they held dear. In France, we would put both King Louis Philippe and François Guizot in this category, even if they had, oh so ironically, come to power thanks to the July Revolution.
Both men admired the principles that had animated the men of 1789, but who had nonetheless concluded, no less than Metternich, that acquiescing to reform was only the beginning of a very slippery slope. Guizot himself had written a history of France and believed that the King’s concessions in the early days of the Estates General had led directly to the reign of terror. And remember, Guizot’s father had perished in the terror, as had King Louis Philippe’s.
By the mid-1840s, both men had become stubbornly convinced that everything that needed to be achieved had been achieved, and that any further reform would invite that slip into radicalism and the return of Madame La Guillotine. This kind of thinking could also be detective in the minds of rulers over in Germany, where we’ve discussed that there were these constitutional regimes, Ludwig in Bavaria, Leopold of Baden, and Frederick Augustus in Saxony. Those constitutions existed more as a stopper to prevent revolution than any kind of expression of liberal idealism.
Finally, there was a third group who cringed at the idea of the French Revolution, but who drew the opposite conclusion from Guizot and Metternich. Where Guizot and Metternich thought that reform was an invitation to revolution, they felt that reform was a necessary release valve to prevent revolution. So in this category, you would find Odilon Barrot and the dynastic left in France who wanted to save the monarchy by reforming the monarchy.
You would also find in here a guy like Alexei de Tocqueville who would go on to write his own book about the French Revolution, where he would argue that all the quote-unquote gains of the French Revolution had already started under the Ancien Régime, and that basically you didn’t need a revolution to improve society, you just needed continuous gradual improvement. We’ve also discussed so far two massively influential reformers in Italy and Hungary who bit this same basic mold.
In Italy, we talked about the Count of Cavour in Episode 7.9, and in Episode 7.8, I introduced Istvan Szechenyi. Both of these guys had broad sweeping visions for the futures of their respective countries. They believed in liberal constitutional government, economic modernization and social improvement. They simply did not believe revolution was the means of achieving those ends. In fact, this is the very lesson they had drawn from the French Revolution. That the ends had been just, but the means counterproductive. The attempt to cram a century’s worth of work into a single year had not just led to disastrous consequences, but they had upset the whole project of reform.
I would also throw into this group of anti-revolutionary reformers all of the Austrian liberals in Vienna, who we also talked about in Episode 7.8. They believed that the stubborn brittleness of Metternich’s government was inviting a revolutionary upheaval that could be headed off by intelligent and necessary reform.
So those are the guys who desperately wanted to avoid another French Revolution, who instantly shuddered at the idea of ever letting anything like that happen again. But is that how everyone felt? Oh my goodness, no.
There were those who had picked up the thesis of Adolphe Thiers and believed that the Revolution of 1789 had been a good thing, a project launched for noble reasons, and in fact launched because the existing regime was simply too stubborn to change without revolutionary energy.
In this telling, men like Lafayette and Mirabeau were heroes to be emulated, while you kept on constant guard against villains like Robespierre and Saint-Just. As you can imagine, this was a very attractive thesis among liberals in Germany and the Austrian Empire who saw their own situation as analogous to the Ancien Régime of 1789. Their kingdoms were reeling from an economic crisis, their governments were financially shaky, their natural rights were trampled on by tyrants.
So the French revolutionary project that unfolded between 1789 and 1792 was absolutely a model to be emulated. Bring the liberal, educated, intellectuals of the country together and force the Kings to grant them a constitution and to guarantee basic civil rights. If they were going to be denied a constitutional place in government, if their local assemblies were going to be neutered, if they were not allowed to vote, if the government was unresponsive, then it was perfectly acceptable to look to 1789 and say, yes, we want that too. A moment when men of goodwill and conscience joined together to define the rights of man and the citizen.
Now, of course, these neo-1789’rs knew the lesson of history well, and they knew that they would need to guard against the villains of 1792. But they did not believe that the reign of terror was necessarily inevitable. It had simply happened that way in France thanks to a variety of coincidences, mistakes, and bad luck. So liberals across Europe believed that they could forge constitutional governments that defined civil rights and popular sovereignty without falling prey to the reign of terror.
Thus, the specter of the French Revolution would loom very large indeed in the minds of these liberal revolutionaries as the course of 1848 rapidly progressed faster than they could keep up with. As we will see, they will all hit a moment of truth where they have to decide whether to keep pushing and join with more radical forces, or quit the whole project, reconcile with the old conservative order, and fight against those radical forces that might lead to the new reign of terror.
But there were also those who rejected this whole contrived moralizing of the good revolution of 1789 and the bad revolution of 1792. They did not recoil from the insurrection of August the 10th, the First French Republic, or the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety. They idolized not the buffoon Lafayette and the hypocritical trader Mirabeau, but rather the steely resolve of men like Danton and Robespierre and Saint-Just and Marat.
These had been men who saw the tyrants of Europe for what they were and knew that one must stand up when the going got tough, not go hide in the corner. These more radical Republicans further believed that there was just as much injustice perpetrated by comfortable liberals as conservative absolutists. So they saw the Revolution of 1789 as merely the precursor for the much more important, much more glorious, and much more necessary Revolution of 1792.
So though they were enemies of each other, these radicals actually agreed with Metternich that reform really was just the thin end of the wedge, that it would lead to a greater revolution that would overthrow the despotic monarchies of Europe. In their minds, the widespread slandering of the first French Republic, and even the portrayal of the reign of terrorists, the most terrible crime in the history of the world, was the nefarious propaganda of the comfortable classes, whether of conservative or liberal stripe. Their propaganda emphasized the dramatic horror of the guillotine in order to cover up the horrors the common people of Europe lived with every day.
And the best summation of this argument actually comes from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain. Now, the book wasn’t published until 1889, but in it, Twain writes a passage that would have had a lot of radicals nodding their heads in 1848. He wrote:
“There were two reigns of terror, if we would but remember and consider it. The one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood. The one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years. The one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions. But our shutters are all for the horrors of the minor terror, the momentary terror, so to speak. Whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning, compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror, which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over. But all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real terror. That unspeakably bitter and awful terror, which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness, or pity as it deserves.”
Now granted, I don’t think many of these radicals were actively pursuing a new reign of terror. But they were also not planning to settle for a constitutional monarchy by and for the richest families of their country. And as we’ve already seen in France, these guys were not going to let the blood of patriots be spilled simply so they could swap one Bourbon for another and give another 100,000 bankers and industrialists the right to vote.
What in that represented the nation? Where in that were the people? Where was liberty leading the people? Oh right, that painting was locked now in the attic so it did not offend the forces of order.
In Italy, these radical Republican forces who celebrated 1792 rallied around Giuseppe Mazzini and then later Garibaldi. In Hungary, they would rally around Lajos Kossuth. And when I get back from the book tour, I will introduce you to the radical leaders in Germany who would not be satisfied by the mere token reforms promised by men who celebrated 1789 but feared 1792. Men like Friedrich Hecker, Robert Blum, and Gustav Struve. Everywhere, they would find their support not solely in the salons and cafes, but among artisans and workers and students. Those who would mount the barricades not just for the right to publish an article or to mildly criticize the government or the right to vote if you made a gargantuan amount of money. They fought to topple the King and to bring power to the people. All of the people.
So, so far, we’ve got men who idolized the conservatives of 1788, men who idolized the liberal nobles of 1789, and men who idolized the Jacobin republicans of 1792. Well, there was also in 1848 also now emerging a small clique of men for whom even 1792 was not enough. These guys believed that 1789 had been merely a step to 1792, but also believed that 1792 was simply a step to something greater. So where did these guys look? That’s right. They looked to 1796!
1796, you say. What are you talking about? The Directory? Surely not. Nobody says, ah, yes, the good old days of the French Directory. Let’s definitely go back to that.
And no, of course, I’m not talking about the Directory. I’m talking about Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals. With the small but ever growing and increasingly influential spirit of socialism and communism beginning to take root, men like Louis Blanc and Karl Marx looked at Babeuf and his gang as the first example of what the force of history was aiming to make of humanity, communities and nations that shared not just political rights, but the wealth of the nation.
How, indeed, are you just going to sit back and say, ah, yes, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and one citizen should have one vote and then call it a day, when so few had so much and so many had so little? The vote was nothing to an entire family, dad, mom, children, who were all stuck working 18 hours a day for starvation wages. It was thus not the spirit of 1789, or the spirit of 92 that moved them, but the spirit of 1796.
And it was not the name Robespierre that got their hearts thumping, but rather Babeuf. Babeuf had been among the very first of the socialist revolutionaries who would not stop short at merely answering the political question, but who wanted to answer the social question as well. And as we’ll see as we move further down the road on 1848, that the memory of Gracchus Babeuf was not simply a matter of picking some obscure hero out of the historical record. There was actually a direct line of revolutionary succession, because one of Babeuf’s fellow conspirators in the Conspiracy of Equals was an Italian revolutionary socialist named Philippe Buonarroti. Buonarroti was imprisoned, but later released, and would then go on to a long and active career inside the revolutionary secret societies that sprang up after the Congress of Vienna. And we’re going to talk more about the role that Buonarroti played in kindling and spreading this revolutionary socialism. But for his small cadre of disciples, the Revolutions of 1848 would be a chance not to complete the work of Lafayette in 1789, or Robespierre in 1792, but the work of Babeuf in 1796.”
So as we move forward through the Revolutions of 1848, I want to keep these attitudes about the spectre of the French Revolution in mind. Because everyone is about to be tossed out into the streets, and certainly the divide between those who loved 1789 but feared 1792, and those who scoffed at 1789 but embraced 1792, and those lurking on the fringes and saying, no, actually, you’re both wrong, it’s 1796, that’s the thing. Well, the divisions between those revolutionary groups would fatally compromise the revolutionary project, and allow those who in fact held fast to their conservative abhorrence of revolution to gain the upper hand, and then, at least over in France, leave an opening for the men who looked back fondly not on any of the French revolutionary moments we’ve talked about today, but who instead pined for 1799 and the Coup of Brumaire. And at least in France, it would be the men of 1799 who would emerge victorious, just as they had the first time around.
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