Relevant History welcomes historical mystery author Susanne Alleyn. She's the granddaughter of 1960s children's author Lillie Vanderveer Albrecht and is the author of the Aristide Ravel historical mystery series, set in revolutionary Paris, as well as of A Far Better Rest, a reimagining of A Tale of Two Cities. She is currently working on the fifth Ravel mystery; a non-mystery historical novel, also set in eighteenth-century France; and a nonfiction project. Visit her at her author website, and at her blog, where she chats with fictional sleuths from across the centuries. Make sure you check out her entertaining and insightful interviews of sleuths Hetty Henry (from Relevant History author M. E. Kemp), Annie Fuller (from Relevant History author M. Louisa Locke), Mary Wollstonecraft (from Relevant History author Nancy Means Wright), and Lt. Michael Stoddard (my fictional sleuth).
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Most people’s knowledge of the French Revolution is pretty much limited to 1789, Bastille Day, and howling mobs, illustrated with snippets from The Scarlet Pimpernel. Guillotines, lots of gore. So what should make all that stuff Relevant History? We in North America don’t have kings and queens to overthrow. There’s no palace of Versailles, no Marie-Antoinette swanning about with a three-foot hairdo.
Well, just about everything we think of when the words “French Revolution” come up (aside from Bastille Day) actually happened as a result of the second revolution.
Eh?
The second French Revolution?
1789 is the date most people learn about, and “the Revolution” seems like a highly compressed event (Bastille falls, mobs in streets, Antoinette loses head, mass guillotinings, all within a few months). But “the Revolution” actually went on for five years, from 1789 to 1794. And during those five years, France had, not one, but two revolutions, the relatively peaceful 1789 one—and the 1792 one, which initiated the messier and much more violent chapter known as the Terror.
The 1789 revolution? It began with a financial crisis, and a polite rebellion of middle-class delegates who had come to Versailles to make suggestions to Louis XVI about how to fix the financial crisis, and climaxed with the attack on the Bastille, after which Louis (mostly) caved in. It was responsible for legal reforms, and transformed France from an absolute monarchy to a limited, constitutional one. The bourgeoisie (rather than the nobility) now were firmly in charge under the king, in an elected assembly. Everyone who wasn’t a hidebound, tight-assed ultraroyalist was overjoyed by the changes. (Until Louis proved himself to have no allegiance to the new constitution by unsuccessfully trying to escape.)
With the many reforms that the 1789 revolution brought, optimistic citizens probably pointed to their new constitution and parliament and claimed that France was halfway to a rather conservative democracy. But it was still, undoubtedly, a democracy for the bourgeoisie and the bankers. The constitution created in 1791 favored the wealthy: rich financiers and industrialists, the upper middle class, and the landowning aristocracy, who had lost their titles and their nastier feudal privileges, but none of their property. Men who paid a certain amount of taxes were called “active citizens” and were able to vote and run for office. But it won’t come as much of a surprise that most ordinary people didn’t pay enough taxes to qualify, and thus were “passive citizens” and effectively muzzled, kept out of any participation in government—which suited the aristocracy of wealth very well. The short version: the ruling class, with some new blood in it, kept on ruling.
Well, surprise, surprise: It didn’t take the urban blue-collar population, the lower middle classes and the working classes—known as sansculottes—long to realize that, ultimately, they had gained no power and few material benefits from the revolution of ’89. A few key events mark where that first hopeful, happy revolution began to go wrong, and where the sansculottes began to grumble. The first was Louis XVI’s bungled attempt to flee; that fiasco made plenty of people permanently distrustful of their chief executive. Then the new constitution disenfranchised about 70% of the population. And then there was the war, with France’s old enemies Prussia and Austria—possibly one of the stupidest wars ever blundered into, with the starry-eyed but unworkable idea that Liberty should promptly be exported to the rest of Europe, which cost many lives and a lot of money, and never seemed to end. And so the sansculottes grew steadily angrier and more frustrated, particularly with the new, “democratic” ruling classes who weren’t sharing the benefits of their nice, moneyed, bourgeois revolution.
Perhaps this story begins to sound familiar?
We in the United States have been lucky. The outcome of our first revolution, our bourgeois, capitalist, conservative democracy that was established in 1789(!), has lasted well over two centuries, while the first French Revolution and its bourgeois, capitalist, conservative constitutional monarchy lasted barely three years. Our bourgeois republic, with reforms and regulations tweaking it over the centuries, has worked pretty well.
In France, though, it didn’t take long for the overpressured system to crumble. In the summer of 1792, the sansculottes of Paris had had enough; they held their own blue-collar revolution, toppled the monarchy, went in for participatory government in a big way, and demanded many more rights, including quite a few measures intended to promote economic, as well as social, equality. The leaders were, of course, middle-class professionals (as ever), but this time they were going to pay some attention to the sansculottes and do what “the people” demanded.
Yep, it’s sounding familiar.
Our system in the USA is growing more and more corrupted in favor of the wealthy and powerful. Our “99 percent”—our sansculottes—are beginning to realize how, as many previous reforms have been whittled away over the past few decades, the bourgeois republic has failed them. Are we, too, on the way to a second revolution, the 1792 revolution, a revolt against the greed and indifference of the one percent who do nothing for their millions but shove money around?
Let’s hope, if it happens, we can manage it better. Because the real 1792 revolution, under conditions of war, paranoia, and squabbling factions, led soon enough to the unforgiving emergency dictatorship called the Terror—and then political infighting and show trials and guillotinings (and more paranoia). Which eventually led to an exhausted population that said “To hell with it,” and let a certain charismatic young general named Bonaparte take over and clean up the mess.
Will the 99 percent rise up in a second American Revolution against the tyranny of Wall Street, giant corporations, lobbyists, and venal politicians?
It sounds kind of attractive, doesn’t it?
And perhaps, if it happens, it may lead to something better. But let’s hope we’ve learned some lessons from history, because, under similar conditions, the Second American Revolution might lead us straight to the Terror—and finally Napoleon—instead.
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A big thanks to Susanne Alleyn. She’ll give away one hardback copy of The Cavalier of the Apocalypse to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I'll choose the winner from among those who comment by Sunday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available within the U.S. only.
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