July 14 is National Day in France (Fête nationale française), the rough patriotic equivalent to America’s Fourth of July celebration. Commonly known in the English-speaking world as Bastille Day, it commemorates the storming and sacking of the Bastille prison tower, a symbol of the old world’s royalist power and corruption, in Paris in 1789. The nationalist holiday also serves as a moment to reflect on the history of revolutions, both in France and in America.
While couched in similar republican ideals, America’s revolution carried with it seeds of religious liberty, economic opportunity, and democratic freedom. France’s revolution was formed of a desperation derived from a severe financial crisis (including a bankrupt central government), grinding poverty and economic turmoil, a self-indulgent monarchy, and an indifferent aristocracy whose privileges trampled the poor underneath their feet. The results of the French Revolution were destructive and destabilizing to the social order in ways that are still echoing across French politics and society today.
The reason for such divergent outcomes can be found in the deeply religious roots of the American Revolution, in stark contrast to the expressly secular enlightenment origins of the French Revolution. French republicanism was an explicit rejection of religion and church authorities. While both revolutions created secular governments, the Declaration of Independence refers to unalienable rights given by the Creator. Yet, “In France,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom [marched] in opposite directions.”
Each one of the three traditional French social foundations—church authority, aristocracy, and monarchy—would come tumbling down in the French Revolution. Republicanism and religion were allied and partnered in revolutionary America; they were inimical and antagonistic in revolutionary France.
What started in France as an attempt to reform the religious institutions gave way to a wholesale renunciation and dismantling. As revolutionary fervor picked up steam, hostility toward the church and its officials grew. Bishops and priests lost their rights and privileges. Ecclesiastical properties and other assets were confiscated and sold to fund the new government.
The objective of the Revolution was to remove Christianity and the church’s influence from French society altogether. In place of France’s traditional Catholicism came the deification of reason. In the cathedral of Notre Dame, the Christian altar was dismantled, replaced by an altar to the secular enlightenment ideal of liberty, its doorway dedicated “to Philosophy.” Secularization’s effect on French society has persisted through today, and laïcité (secularism) remains the official position of French government.
Linked to the role of religion was the nature of the social contract that the two declarations provided. The American Founders were able to declare life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness “unalienable” rights, a phrase not used in the French declaration, because the American declaration is clear that these human rights were given by God (“endowed by the Creator”). Therefore, no human power has the legitimate authority to take them away. Government was legitimized by the will of the people, and its role was to protect and preserve these unalienable rights.
Because the French declaration—and the secular revolutionary spirit it represented—acknowledged no god, the state itself became the giver and the arbiter of human rights. The utopian vision of the French Revolution, as would be the case for Marxist utopians in the 20th century, required that the state force the individual to conform to its will, which seeks the common good of society as a whole, not to protect the individual’s liberty.
The Rousseauian contract of revolutionary France gave the state the right to deny an individual’s liberty to comply with the collective will, represented by the state. In other words, the state could “force him to be free” and to sacrifice his freedom for the common good. The French Revolution required recreating a new ethical structure in the absence of a divine lawgiver. In a universe devoid of a moral absolute, this could only be based on the state’s power. It was a short path from there to the Reign of Terror and the guillotine for thousands of French citizens.
The Terror marked a new and dark phenomenon of modernity that would tragically reemerge with a vengeance in the 20th century’s Nazi and Stalinist regimes. By 1802, a million French citizens would lie dead at the feet of the republic, and soon to follow, the Napoleonic wars would kill millions more in an imperialistic quest to restore France’s former glory. The ideals of the Rights of Man did not survive the chaotic upheaval that sought to bring them about by violent force, nor did they overcome the power of the Napoleonic reaction and its quest for restored order domestically and French imperial grandeur abroad.
Beyond the matter of religion, economic conditions further separated the nature of the revolutions. Americans of humble means were relatively more prosperous than their European contemporaries. Economic opportunities abounded on the new continent. Optimism and confidence accompanied. With a shortage of labor in America, many well-paying jobs were readily available. America prospered despite the ravages of war. Small-hold farmers could feed themselves and their families while generating excess to sell to market.
It is difficult for 21st-century eyes to appreciate the mind-boggling scale of the problem of poverty in Europe at that time. Peasants accounted for 80 percent of France’s population; they had no land, and most had no regular income. At the same time, a treaty with Great Britain had undercut France’s manufacturers, aggravating the existing depression. Anti-government riots sprung up in many large cities, with officials being burned in effigy. Government buildings and other symbols of authority were attacked and destroyed.
The French government had accumulated massive debts that it could not repay, yet the king continued spending on luxuries that France could ill afford.
Class divisions and great inequality of wealth amplified the social unrest in pre-revolutionary France. The nobility possessed numerous privileges, including exemptions for most taxes, and held a substantial majority of all the land in the country. As the national debt crisis worsened, French citizens were crushed under an enormous tax burden disproportionately borne by the lower classes. The horrific economic conditions among the poor produced a powder keg of French social unrest that was absent in revolutionary America.
The French Revolution was an economic disaster for France. Inflation ran rampant as paper money and government bonds suffered massive depreciation, eventually to less than a 10th of face value in terms of purchasing power. Those concerned about looming inflation in America, and its potential effects on the political and social order, should take note.
The French tripartite motto (liberté, égalité, fraternité) of revolutionary France posed inherent and incompatible contradictions. Fraternity, which includes the idea of equity (i.e., the equality of outcomes, not just of rights before the law), was incompatible with natural rights and the sovereignty of the individual and the practical differences and distinctions between people with different capabilities and aptitudes. The socialist and utopian worldviews—then and now—are willing to deny liberty or equality before the law (for example, property rights) in order to achieve a more equitable social outcome.
One of the enduring lessons of the French experience is that revolutions are not permanent. There is no guarantee that America’s long march toward freedom and equality cannot be reversed by despotism and tyranny. Liberty, equality, and other unalienable rights can be lost as quickly as they were won. America almost lost them all before and during the Civil War. If not jealously guarded with “eternal vigilance,” the freedoms we have come to take for granted can be lost in a moment. “Politics and perfidy” are alive and well in America today, and both liberty and justice are threatened by their presence.
One lesson of the French Revolution for 21st century America is that to the extent that conditions among our poor, the working class, and the middle class continue to deteriorate, with a widening wealth and income gap and the absence of good quality jobs with decent wages, we are inviting greater social unrest. While the United States is today nowhere near the dreadful economic conditions of late 18th century France, the warning should not be ignored.
