The Persistent Lie of the French Revolution
By Ricardo de la Cierva
Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope
Taken from Misterios de la Historia.. Doce polémicos ensayos de síntesis y divulgación sobre temas muy controvertidos (Mysteries of History. Twelve polemic essays of synthesis and dissemination on very controversial topics.)
On July 14, 1989, all of the television broadcasters in the world met in Paris, where Socialist French President François Mitterrand sang before many rulers and heads of state, and a thousand million credulous spectators all over the world, the glories of the bicentennial of the French Revolution. With all the great regalia of a historical folklore spectacle, Monsieur Mitterrand, as heir and spokesman for the Revolution, exalted the taking of the Bastille by the populace on July 14, 1789, as the beginning of an utterly original historical convulsion that ended the retrograde darkness of the Ancien Régime of the Catholic Monarchy, and inaugurated a happy era ruled by the slogan Liberté, Egalité, Faternité. It commemorated more or less the birth of democracy, public liberties, Western liberalism, recognition of human rights, universal and solidary progress of the peoples, the first victory of secularization, the political wellspring of modernity. Faithful to France's call, the presumed heirs of the French Revolution all over the world also set the bells tolling. Books on the French Revolution, that is, those extolling it, inundated the bookstores in all languages. The network of Western newspapers that claim the monopoly of progressivism in action, among them Spain´s El País, Italy's La Repubblica, as well as the French left's weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur had called an international seminar in Paris to give universal cultural splendor to the great commemoration, and then chronicled the series of most solemn topics stringed together, on the French side, by Prime Minister Michel Rocard, the former enfant terrible Régis Debray, and some centrist scab politician, task that was surprisingly designated by the United Kingdom to Lord Hugh Thomas, the now conservative historian who advised the North Americans there on the understanding of Robespierre. On the Spanish side, naturally, by the Minister of Culture Jorge Semprún, heading a band of reddish intellectuals with the special collaboration of another surprising scab, Doctor Federico Mayor Zaragoza, who strived to keep himself at the front of UNESCO by means of granting cheap concessions to world progressivism. Also attending the seminar were some obscure Germans, some soviet oppositionists, and a scatterbrained Polish, all of them absolutely ignorant that four months later, just four months, the Berlin wall was destined to be demolished, impelled by forces not precisely born from the French Revolution, although some still think they were.
The only happy and generally discordant note in this celebration was the one given by Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, UK’s Prime Minister and direct heir of the first great European intellectual who wrote on the Revolution in France when it was still in full steam, Edmund Burke, the first great critic and demythifier of said revolution. Thatcher, smiling, responded to the journalist who asked her opinion on the birth of Human Rights in the French Revolution: "I thought those human rights had been already proclaimed. in theory and, above all, in practice, in my country, at least one century earlier". And it is, indeed, that Locke's works and the British revolutionary convulsion had inspired, as the vulgar journalist was unaware of, the French instigators of the great Revolution. And with greater effectiveness had inspired the British reformers.
Jacobine History, Critical History.
The historical process of the Revolution was consequently still being encouraged, when everybody was busily seeking its interpretations. After the genial Burke, source of the new liberal-conservative movement of the following centuries, the French traditionalist school headed by Joseph de Maistre and the monarchyc school in the same country, confronted the French Revolution harshly from a historical perspective that at times have attained notable academic heights, such as those of Pierre Gaxotte and Jacques Bainville in our time. But in the combats of History in favor of the Revolution, two very powerful divisions that until recently seemed to dominate the battlefield, have aligned themselves: the Jacobin historians of the Third Republic, elevated to the rank of official and untouchable interpreters by the republican and anti-monarchic propaganda of the end of the century, and the group of Marxist historians of the revolution, headed personally by Karl Marx himself who, as is well known, recognized in the French Revolution his main source of historical and social inspíration. The apparent predominance of the Marxist school of historians consolidated in mid-twentieth century from also French models seemed to ensure a new Jacobin victory in the intellectual commemorations of the bicentennial.
It has not been so. A good portion of the university professors and authors of world history in Spain and Hispanic America, as well as in many other parts of the world, continue sympathizing with that interpretation, Jacobin and progressivist, of the French Revolution, and have let the bicentennial pass without criticism of any kind. The cultural direction the Socialist International has taken with this motive is a clearly Marxist orientation, just when the theoretical, economic and political sinking of Marxism was incubating, as I have just suggested. But if the Jacobins dominated the historiographic scene in the First Centenary in 1889, they encountered an unexpected opposition and in a terrain they had considered to be their own, for the 1989 commemoration.
For that which the Jacobin camp, sunk in its routines and paralized, has not offered any interesting contribution, all serious and deep innovations have come from the critical camp, but not in a reactionary and anti-liberal sense, but, quite on the contrary, from liberal mentalities that want to be truly liberal.
Professor Jacques Godechot had begun those positive and critical contributions with his two very clear textbooks 'Les Révolutions, 1770–1799', Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963. Translated by Herbert H. Rowen as 'France and the Atlantic revolution of the eighteenth century, 1770-1799', 1965. and 'L'Europe et l'Amérique à l'époque napoléonienne (1800-1815)', Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1967. Anything but reactionary are François Furet and Denis Richet in their 1988 extensive analysis 'The French Revolution' (Abe Books) and the utopic revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf whose study on the genocide of La Vendéw has been updated by R. Secher and J.J.Brégeon (Paris, Tallandier, 1987). This overpowering book is dedicated to France's foremost university historian, Professor Pierre Chaunu, author of the most important historical contribution to the bicentennial: 'Le grand déclassement' (París, Robert Laffont, 1989) which, just as the former work, has not been published in Spanish, of course, and has been the object of a very tenacious campaign of silence by the Jacobin band of History, forced to resort to these mean procedures on account of the penury of their arguments and the exhaustion of their routines. How interesting it is to establish that these two historians critical of the Revolution, Godechot and Chaunu, are also distinguished Hispanists! In this scientific and critical current, entirely at the margin of the Jacobin tedium, we offer this summary, which we presented at a conference closing the cycle organized by the Real Sociedad Económica Matritense de Amigos del País, started in 1989, because it is convenient to recount with clarity to the general public what really happened in the French Revolution under the light of the new critical contributions which we believe to be definitive.
Nothing began on July 14, 1789.
To begin with, (Godechot is entirely right) the Revolution did not begin in 1789 and much less with the taking of the Bastille on July 14, just as our [Spanish] War of Independence did not begin on May 2 but, much more clearly, on the last week of May 1808 with the proclamations of the first patriotic Juntas and the pronouncements of the Armed Forces around the feast of San Fernando. One and the other dates were "invented" afterwards for very diverse reasons. Neither was the French Revolution something primordial or original, but should be inscribed historically in which has rightly been called the Atlantic Revolution, in which it is possible to delimit three stages: The American Revolution that formally breaks out on April 18, 1775, in the Battle of Concord, and was ratified in the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, the French Revolution, and the Spanish American Revolution, the first sparks of it happening in 1810 as a result of the fall of Seville, the Capital of Spanish America, at the hands of Napoleon. These three phases of the same Atlantic revolution are interconnected and depend on the current of ideas and principles illumined by the Enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century
The French Revolution, of which we now occupy ourselves, has as an essential antecedent the American Revolution, with which it is connected through the figure of General Marquis of Lafayette, an important actor in one and the other, and relevant member of the Assembly of Notables of 1787, which is the authentic historical beginning of the Revolution.
The Assembly of Notables, taken place toward the end of February 1787, caused the destitution of Finance Minister, Calonne, who proposed the equality of Frenchmen regarding taxes, from which the two privileged estates, clergy and nobility, were exempted, for which reason the burden fell mostly on the bourgeoisie or plain people who were far removed from government by the monopoly of public positions exercised by the French nobility. Bourbonic reformism in eighteenth century Spain, from Phillip V to Charles IV, with its apogee during the reign of Charles III who died on the eve of the French Revolution had allowed much better the access of the bourgeoisie to public positions (gown nobility, "golilla" party of the count of Floridablanca, José Moñino) vis a vis the monopolist pretensions of the military-noble party, headed by the count of Aranda and fed by the 'manteísta' university students, rich students from noble ranks. The bourgeoisie or plain estate in Spain did not feel itself marginalized or vexed by the Crown; in France, it did, and for this reason revolutionarily demanded power as well as the abolition of privileges. At the end of the eighteenth century, Spain was much more monarchist than France; in that same year 1789, in which the Revolution broke out in France, the Spanish Cortes, assembled in the church of San Jerónimo el Real, swore as prince of Asturias the heir of Charles IV, the infant Ferdinand, with all of the deputies kneeled on the entrance of the king, and not out of servility but of respect and conviction.
In the Assembly of Notables, General Lafayette, "heroe of two worlds", demanded calling the Estates General, gathering representatives of the three estates that voted separately (nobility, clergy and plain people), with which the privileged would always win by two general votes against one. Everybody thought in the France of 1787 (as it would be thought in the Spain of 1810), that the calling of the Estates General (in Spain the Cortes Estamentales) would be the panacea of France's ills that was not precisely in a bad economic situation (France was the richest and most powerful nation in Europe) but it was beset by a great social discontent especially in the bourgeois order, more numerous and influential, of course, than in Spain, which was decades away from flaunting an authentic middle class. However, in France in 1787 (and in 1789, the Revolution being in full swing) nobody would put the Crown in question by far. Initially, the French Revolution had nothing republican in its aims.
The pressure exercised by the committees of correspondence was so intense that Brienne put off the convocation of the Estates General for May 1, 1789, for the King to sign. An impassioned political turn drew the universal attention of the French, although it fades away from our perspective today; from the Assembly of Notables an utopian hero of the plain estate, Necker, had replaced the former Finance Minister; Calonne, but the French economy, thriving, though unbalanced from the privileges, would not straighten itself with Necker's magic spells, and some bad crops turned out to complicate everything and stirred up the general discontent.
First falsities, first Utopies.
The summoning of the Estates General, that allowed a great freedom of expression and publishing, generated rivers of ink that centered on the forty thousand Cahiers de doléances, or records of grievances in which never was the abolition of the Crown demanded, but the suppression of the privileges, especially those most abused, fiscal equality, and the just ordering of the administration were indeed demanded. However, the most famous publication at that feverish and distinctly pre revolutionary time was a pamphlet by the enlightened Abbe de Sieyés, 'What is the third estate', which claimed that the third estate was everything, that the rest of the estates would be nothing without it and that, consequently, if the third was practically identified with the nation, on it should the power of the State be invested. From that moment on, this Sieyes' thesis became the gospel of the Revolution.
On the fifth of May, 1789, King Louis XVI, still serene and in no way feeling overpowered, inaugurated the sessions of the Estates General in Versailles. The polemic broke off right away; the third estate demanded the vote count to be by individual, which would give it a majority because its representatives voted in block and some groups of the nobility and of the clergy were willing to vote in favor of the bourgeoisie. That is why the other two estates resisted the vote by individual and strived to maintain the vote count by estate, until the representatives of the third estate assembled separately and constituted themselves in a National Assembly, the name that the representative and legislative Parliament in France still has today. Three days later, king Louis XVI ordered the dissolution of the Assembly and then the representatives occupied the king’s indoor tennis court. There they swore an oath under which they agreed not to separate until a Kingdom’s Constitution was established. A week later the King apparently gave in, but he called troops to gather around Paris
Having failed, the utopian Necker was dismissed on July 11, action that stirred up the revolutionary excitedness. On July 14, popular masses in Paris, aroused by activists of the third estate and the petty bourgeoisie, took the fortress of the Bastille, where they were able to free only a few common convicts, but exhibited in the assault a tricolor ribbon (the current French flag, with the white of the Bourbons at the center) and forced Necker's recall. All of France lived with great tension that summer; the more resolute peasants assaulted the castles of the landed nobility, with great concern of the National Assembly, determined to direct the rebellion in the countryside in their favor. The grande peur broke out, the great fear in all of France, foreboding a bloodbath. Then, the progressive deputies of the nobility and of the clergy, headed by the Marquis of Lafayette and the cynical bishop of Autun, Monsignor Talleyrand, promoted a utopian fantasy on the night of August 4: the solemn abolition of privileges, the triumph of equality. And before the month was over, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens, a fundamental document for the theoretical establishment of the bourgeois liberties, but which at the same time stressed the right to private property and the preservation of public order by means of an efficacious police force. The American Revolution, more than a decade before, had offered equally liberal declarations but much more efficacious because they were complied with, while the French Revolution applied those liberties only to its followers; but the French declaration was made not only for domestic use as the American one was, but with universal vocation for revolutionary export to the rest of the world. This is the way it was understood by the numerous imitators that already in all of Europe yearned to follow the example of the French revolutionary bourgeoisie. In addition to the liberty and equality, the Declaration turned the subjects into citizens; established the national sovereignty although it did not suppress the crown; it dictated that the general will of the Enlightenment was the fount of the law and of communal living; it established the separation of powers that Montesquieu had detected in the unwritten English constitution, and referred to God vaguely as the Supreme Being. The Declaration was the clearest heritage of the Enlightenment. Its main defect is that it was never complied with.
The clubs, already openly revolutionary versions of the committees of correspondence, began proliferating in Paris and in all of France. The most famous and radical of them all was that of the Jacobins, named after the convent in which they held their meetings, and the masonic lodges were their main recruitment sources even when the Jacobin revolution soon turned against many moderate members of the masonic order. From July 1789 through September 1791, the supreme power in France rested on the Assembly, which called itself Constituent because its main objective was to give France a Constitution, resulting in the one of 1791, in which a regime of limited monarchy, that is, a constitutional one, was established. In actual practice, equality turned out to be relative; the bourgeoisie substituted the nobility in the positions of power. Noblemens' rights were abolished but with the possibility of recovering the tributes, whereby the lot of the peasants did not improve too much. The Assembly nationalized the property of the Church, but the wealthy classes turned out to be benefited with this, more than the peasants. Legislation in the social sphere was inspired by capitalist liberalism much more than on the improvement of the lower classes. The territory was divided into 83 departments, the National Guard was created as an armed guarantee of the Revolution, and the royal army, on a mercenary basis, was transformed into one of citizens. The alleged 'social pact' of the Constituent Assembly did not establish a democratic republic and much less universal suffrage. Citizens were in fact divided into active and passive; despite the claims of equality only a little more than four million citizens out of 25 million had, on account of their income, capacity to vote. The group of representatives spontaneously seated in the Assembly saw that situation symbolized with a political label: Right and Left.
The Assembly did not suppress religion nor did it yet establish the secular State, but it promoted the secularization in conformity with the Illustration heritage, by means of the civil constitution of the clergy, that demanded the popular election of bishops and parish priests (on whom the obligation to marry would very soon be imposed), as well as requiring the clerics to swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. Pope Pius VI condemned these measures (including the simultaneous stripping away of ecclesiastical and religious property), causing a serious schism among the clergy in France. The King's flight away from the country, stopped at Varennes as a result of treason, had been attempted precisely because of the religious problem. The Assembly, even then, restored the King in his functions (to whom the Constitution granted very ample powers with his faculty to name and dismiss ministers) after having suspended him in his functions on account of his flight. At the end of September 1791, having fulfilled its mission, the Constituent Assembly was dissolved.
Convention, Regicide and Terror.
But if the American Revolution had achieved certain political repercussions in Europe, the revolutionary transformation in France (which up to then had rather consisted of an intense reformation without irreparable traumas) had produced very deep reactions everywhere. Correspondence societies were formed in England but the revolution did not go through because the bourgeoisie had participated in government since more than a century earlier. Revolts occurred in Belgium, Holland, and Germany, where personalities such as Kant and Goethe looked at the changes in France with sympathy, while in Spain, the government of Charles IV tried to isolate possible Illustrated imitators from France with the laying of a border 'cordon sanitaire' which naturally intensified the contacts and the avalanche of propaganda publications. The emperor of Austria, Francis II, sent France an ultimatum on April 20, 1792, for the revolutionary expansion and aggression in Alsace and Belgium, at that time subjected to Austrian domination; in Avignon, fiefdom of the Pope, and in Savoy, included in the Kingdom of Sardinia. This hostile attitude of Austria, shared by the rest of the crowns in Europe, encouraged the intimidated king Louis XVI, married to Marie Antoinette archduchess of Austria, and advised him to veto some of the provisions of the Legislative Assembly which had been the successor of the Constituent one, since the royal veto was perfectly constitutional. Then the revolutionary masses (always agitated by activists; this type of manifestations are never spontaneous) launched a humiliating assault against the Palace of the Tuileries, followed by an anti-revolutionary proclamation by the Prussian general, Duke of Brunswick.
Almost at the same time, the internal and the external war in France broke out. Brunswick's pronouncement was sent on August 1, 1792; on the 10th, Danton and Robespierre lead the masses to a definitive assault on the Tuileries after which they took the king of France to prison at the Tour du Temple, surrounded by imprecations cried by the parisian populace, the sans-culottes, used by the Jacobins for their radical purposes. The Assembly and the revolutionary government were successful in identifying French patriotism, which had been the great making of the French kings, with the revolutionary mystique, and described him as an enemy of France and allied with the enemies of France. The French people responded by incorporating into a great national and revolutionary army composed of chiefs and officers of the former royal army, in which the artillery had been traditionally the most cared for and better trained arm. On September 20, 1792, the French artillery and the citizens' army, at the cry of Long live the Nation! prevented the conjoining of the too confident armies of Austria and Prussia and attained a formidable victory that altered the sign of future wars, where national participation, as opposed to the mercenary conception of recruiting, would be the key to victory, The day after the cannonade of Valmy, a new Constituent Assembly in war, which was called Convention, begins to function. Dominated by Girondin and Jacobin lawyers and bankers, with only two workmen among its 750 members. the Convention abolished the monarchy and, in consequence, the Constitution of 1791; proclaimed the republic, presumably democratic (although it had very little of that), and showed itself thoroughly bourgeois and hostile to any shade of socialism; approved an expansive decree to "assist" those peoples that wished to recover their liberty, and consequently aspired to widen the territory of France to its "natural borders", and with a minimal margin voted for the execution of the king Louis XVI and the queen Marie Antoinette with the infernal machine that had been invented by a revolutionary deputy: the guillotine.
The king of France succumbed under the ominous shear on January 21, 1793. A prince of the same blood, the Duke of Orleans, and an apostate bishop, Talleyrand, were among the regicide deputies.
The legal assassination of the king of France on the great esplanade next to the Seine, in front of his own profaned palace, shocked the people of France and the European crowns, who unchained a great militery coalition against the regicide revolution Austria, Prussia, Sardinia, and the United Kingdom arranged their strategy against the Revolution, and Spain, ruled by the Bourbon dynasty, closely related in blood to the French one, convoked from the pulpits a formal crusade against the Convention.
At a moment, allied armies invaded French territory from everywhere; two Spanish armies took Hendaya and got close to Perpignan, while sixty departments rose against the revoñutionaries and a civil war broke out in La Vendée, Catholic region in the west of France, where the people in mass sublevated for throne and altar. On June 2, the sans-culottes and the montagnards, radical deputies situated in the high seats of the Assembly, radical and Jacobin, imposed themselves over the girondins in the convention and handed over the authentic power to a Public Health Committee headed in a dictatorial manner by an illumined madman freemason, Robespierre.
The Convention gave birth to a new constitution, that of 1793, which established a democratic republic with an insistence on social improvements, but with the inconvenience that it was never put in practice. To respond to the internal civil war and the external menace, the Convention and the Committee unleashed a wave of totalitarian utopianisn and bloodshed known in the history of the great human tragedies as the Terror, the victims of which exceeded forty thousand (not counting the genocide of La Vendée), among them about one third were workmen and artisans, and almost another one third were peasants; many noblemen who hade been unable to emigrate and many ecclesiastics who refused to apostatize also fell. Such is the way this first democratic republic born in the European continent would apply its ideal of liberty and fraternity. Their spokesmen justified the hecatomb also in a very democratic way: 'there is no liberty for those who oppose liberty.'
The empire, totalitarian prolongation of the Revolution.
The Public Health Committee decreed a general mobilization and, by means of the cadre of officers who had served the crown, organized a national army of a million men that victoriously repelled the invading European armies, until they achieved military victory in all fronts and forced the allied crowns to sign the Peace of Basel of 1795 with France. In the Pyrenees, the revolutionary troops had occupied a great portion of the Basque Country, but when they invaded the north of Catalonia they were forced back across the border by an uprising of the Catalonian people that, with their free corps, flanked the units of the Spanish army. This made it easier to the government of Charles IV, led by Queen María Luisa´s favorite, Don Manuel Godoy, to attain favorable conditions in Basel, for which Godoy, generalissimo of the national armies, was distinguished with the title of Prince of Peace. But by that time, the French people were already sick of blood and terror, and an unstoppable opinion movement eliminated the montagnards (Robespierre deservedly died by guillotine) and approved the moderated evolution of the Convention, which was named termidorian or moderated, and improvised the moderate Constitution of 1795, similar to the one of 1791 but without the monarchy, The universal suffrage, which had never been put in practice, was again suppressed; two assemblies should be elected, one of the Five hundred and the Council of Elders or Senate, with the executive power in the hands of a directory of five members. It was, evidently, about an institutional system very apt for the provocation of coups d'état, which would follow one after the other in that regime of bourgeois republic which lasted from 1795 to 1799. During that time, the artillery general Napoleon Bonaparte, a Corsican of unlimited ambition whose ideas were reduced to an absolutely anachronic illustrated despotism varnished with the symbolism of the revolution, distinguished himself by his resounding victories at the front over the Italian Army
Those victories left the United Kingdom alone on a war footing against the moderated revolutionary regime, in which firmament, unstoppably, rose Bonaparte's star. France occupied the Pontifical States in 1798, created in Italy a constellation of satellite republics, and sent Napoleon to the pre-romantic Egyptian campaign, where he defeated the Mamluks in the Battle of the Pyramids, where his archaeologists discovered the Rosetta Stone that contained the keys to the hieroglyphic writing, and lost his squadron to British admiral Horatio Nelson in the Bay of Aboukir. But Napoleon´s horizon was not in the Egyptian adventure.
Bonaparte abandoned his troops, presented himself in France where the new Jacobin directory had discredited itself by its defeats before a new European coalition, incited, as always, by Great Britain, and was determined not to let the upper hand be gained by other young generals, like Massena, defeater of the powerful Russian Army in Zurich. On October 9, 1799, Bonaparte disembarked in the South of France after having evaded the British blockade in the Mediterranean, and was acclaimed as savior by the moderates who sought peace above all else. On November 9 that year, Bonaparte, named general in chief of the army of Paris, burst into the assembly of the Five hundred, guided by his brother Lucienne, who was its president, threw out the deputies by force and established a Consulate that covered his personal dictatorship with the historical names of Sieyés and Ducos as members of a triumvirate. It was 18 Brumaire according to the pedantic and ridiculous calendar of the Revolution, and Napoleon Bonaparte announced "The Revolution has ended!".
It was a new and enormous lie, in which many keep on believing. The Napoleonic era, from 1799 to 1815, is nothing more than the Bonapartist, dictatorial (still more dictatorial) and imperial era of the French Revolution. The Napoleonic armies took control of all of Continental Europe from 1799 (they had begun two years before) through 1812, in the name of liberty, that is, the subjection and enslavement of the peoples, but everywhere wielding the slogan of liberty, equality and fraternity. To Europe, Napoleon and his soldiers were the flag bearers of the Revolution, the sowers of the new ideas that they imposed wherever they dominated on satellite and servile dynasties, under a French imperial regime which turned the illustrated despotism into a paternal and benevolent monarchy. Historians have not agreed on the number of millions of deaths caused by Napoleon in Europe after those caused by the Revolution in France itself. This is not the moment for detailing the history of the Napoleonic era, which carried the "patriotic" Terror to all corners of Europe and almost everywhere (Austria, Prussia, the Netherlands, Germany) gave rise to a sheepish conformism that reached extremes of abjectness in genial Europeans such as philosopher Hegel (who saluted the "victory of liberty" in Jena in 1806) as "the end of history", and composer Beethoven who dedicated his Heroica Symphony to Napoleon). The enthusiasm did not last long: Hegel transferred his transcendental praises to the new totalitarian Prussia, and Beethoven withdrew the dedication and wrote a splendid overture in honor of the Duque of Wellington for his triumph in the Battle of Vitoria in 1813.
Spain and Russia, victors of the Revolution.
Because two great peoples in Europe, with a national sentiment not inferior to that of the French revolutionaries, had risen against the Revolution and against Bonaparte, who incarnated it tyrannically: Spain since 1808 and Russia since 1812, in addition to the strategic coordination of Great Britain, were the victors over the Revolution and Napoleon. In Spain, the people, the Church, and the armed forces united themselves under the evocation of an imprisoned monarchy, that had abdicated abjectly in Bayonne — when the Spaniards started to die for it in Madrid in early May 1808 — not only the Crown in favor of the usurper and his brother, but also surrendered the history, the dignity and the honor of Spain.
This was a shameful episode, which the Spaniards preferred to ignore in rising against the French Revolution in the name of a felon king, Ferdinand VII, who had betrayed them in Bayonne an act proper of whom a short time before had deposed his own father, Charles IV, and had publicly called prostitute his mother, María Luisa. The military pronouncement around the feast of Saint Ferdinand, at the end of May 1808, and the popular pronouncement of the provincial Juntas began the war of independence, which combined the popular will of resistance, the crusade proclaimed by the Church, the provincial juntas of notables and plebeians, the military units, that attained trascendental victories as that of Bailén, which was a quite appropriate plan of the general staff, and the incredible land and naval defense of Cádiz; the military and strategic coordination of Great Britain, which at the end achieved for the Duke of Wellington the sole command in Spain, and the very efficacious collaboration of the people in arms, the guerilla, in close communication with the military units; These were the the causes of the Spanish victory against Napoleon between 1808 and 1814, until his troops were expelled from Spain. And all Spaniards knew they had expelled not only a tyrant but also the Revolution of which he was the standard bearer. At the price of more than a million Spanish deaths and perhaps two hundred thousand French; at the price of a long-lasting division of the two Spains, one of them traditional and the other one modern, which already showed itself clearly within the general and anti-Napoleonic patriotism of the Cortes assembled in Cádiz, never taken by a French siege, between 1810 and 1813.
Chaunu's implacable demythification.
The above is a basic synthesis of the French Revolution, adapted to the average Spanish-speaking reader, but it is not enough to end with a condensed chronicle of the events, but we need to deepen into the entrails of the Revolution according to the most recent investigations. And supporting ourselves on the fantastic book by Chaunu, which I finally found and could buy in a bookstore in Geneva in 1989, since the Jacobin band had also laid against it a cordon sanitaire similar to the one laid by Floridablanca in 1789, despite it having been breached by a young and brilliant French hispanist, Arnaud Imatz, with a captivating presentation of that book in number 36 (July-August) of the great journal Razón Española. In the following, we take advantage of the book and the very instructive book review; in both of them is a very thorough reference to the magnificent historical production of the bicentennial, with a critical perspective which, as we have said above, has nullified almost entirely the stubborn residues of the Jacobin, and not to say Marxist, historiography.
"Let us ask — says Chaunu — the Belgian, German, Spanish peasants, all the peoples and territories invaded, scorched, and depopulated, the victims of the locally aggressive and belicist politics, what they think of their "liberators" and plunderers, of the return of an army rabble unknown in the West since the Thirty Years War. They will tell us what they thought of the French model identified with the Revolution."
Imatz summarizes sharply the manipulation of the main revolutionary dates from various angles."To the right, to the orleanists, the Bonapartists, and soon thereafter the nationalists, 1789 is a sacred year while 1793 is damned ... The right choses 1793 and denies alleged human rights which it stigmatizes as individualist and bourgeois. Many fascists of the twentieth century follow that same line. Did not Drieu La Rochell explain that hitlerists and mussolinists wanted to break with the legacy of 1789, which was liberal, but not with that of 1793 which was Jacobin and totalitarian. All this having been said, we have to point out that since the beginning of this century (the twentieth) except for a marginal current, the Revolution was taboo. In spite of its concrete and immediate manifestations having been at times "disagreeable", it was considered the necessary step to attain universal equality, liberty and prosperity. The basis of consensus consisted in the expression "let us forget and not revise what has already been admitted". Chaunu is a republican investigator and lives in the pole opposite to reactionary-ism. However, in studying the Ancien Régime, the defects of which he does not ignore, he cannot suppress a certain nostalgia as a Frenchman free of prejudices. In 1789, France was the foremost nation and the foremost European state in almost any aspect. Its literacy percentage was greater than that of Great Britain. The number of persons in France — the illustrated France of the eighteenth century — who could read and write were as many as in all of the rest of Europe combined. And that number of lettered persons had tripled from 1710 to 1780 under the crown. France had almost thirty million people in 1789, with 16 percent of them living in cities, three times as much as in Spain. Land was relatively well distributed: two million families owned forty percent of the land; the rest was divided one fourth among the nobility, another fourth among the bourgeoisie, and ten percent was owned by the Church. In Spain the distribution of the land was much more unbalanced in favor of the privileged class. Thus, in France, the third estate combined owned sixty percent of the land, and the properties of the Church were devoted, in their most part, to beneficence, to the support of schools and hospitals.
It is true that the nobility enjoyed lordly privileges that, rather than effective, were degrading to the rest. The Revolution did little to improve things for the poor.
The Revolution raised the taxes in the countryside, where the fiscal burden in 1815 was equivalent to that of 1789. After the bloodshed.
"The social changes — Imatz summarizes — did not affect even one tenth of the population. The only thing the Revolution did was to distribute a good portion of the land to a minority of officers and minions at a price from one fifth to one tenth of its actual value and, consequently, wealth and prestige.
Fiscal burden in the France of 1789 was one half of that in Great Britain. France was a tax haven. For Chaunu, the Ancien Régime in France was very respectful of private property, of customs and of rights. Security among the peasants and citizens was much greater than that in the nineteenth century, when the "crime neighborhoods'' began to appear. Louis XVI made a mistake in restoring the prerogatives of the parliaments, monopolized by the privileged classes, that reactionarily blocked the administration and forced the advent of the Revolution. Since 1709, nobody had starved to death in France, until the temporary penury of 1794 which brought about a galloping inflation, perfectly remediable by a live and growing society, although not by an anemic state, paralized and turned over by the utopian mirage, awaiting a miracle-worker minister who would reorganize everything as by an act of magic, and not by means of the reforms that the Assembly of Notables had reactionarily rejected in 1787. To remedy the economy, the Revolution resorted to a shallow expedient: stealing the property of the Church. Chaunu is categorical in this chapter, from which the Jacobin historians flee like a cat from embers.
A brutal religious persecution.
"In 1789 most of the French were practicing Catholics — says Chaunu, who is a Christian but not a Catholic —. 97% to 98% of the population believe in God, and over 80% are tied to their (Catholic) Church. With respect to the intellectual and moral quality of the clergy and on their generosity that distributes one half of its rents to the poor and a part to hospital and school assistance, there are no true criticisms, just false pamphlets. What is more, the almost unanimous concession demanded in the Cahiers de doléances is that the priests, who are appreciated, be given more funds, as they know the use they make of them."
Despite this actual situation, says Chaunu, "the Revolution began by stealing the easiest, the goods put at the service of everyone, without knowing they were for everyone, that is, the property of the Church. Before the need to extend the basis of coverage of paper money would lengthen the list of the proscribed indefinitely, and declare the war against the entire world and to plunder and ransack the territories momentarily occupied, supposedly liberated". Indeed, the elimination of the tithing in the egalitarian optimism of August 1789, as if the tithing were a privilege, suppressed the sources of popular education, beneficence, and social security that then existed; action that Chaunu describes as stupid and suicidal, and that was intended to demolish the power of the Church, as had demanded insistently the illustrated and masonic front.
"Soon was the monastic France sold." This arbitrary suppression of the religious orders, that infringed upon the right of association and religious liberty, is described pathetically in Chaunu's book. "The most beautiful monuments of romanic and gothic art were destroyed, These are moved away, dismantled, closed, demolished, plundered. The artistic sacking is immense. No modern war has annihilated so many treasures. Functionaries created by the new regime seem to be like the generation of the authentic barbarians of the third century; they are the ones that transformed the romanic abbies into quarries, demolished the churches, wrapped fish in incunable manuscripts stolen from libraries. Good topic for a Minister of Culture to exalt the Revolution nowadays. But he immediately points out something that is essential: "These iconoclasts represent only 2% of the population. The Revolution is not the phenomenon of the masses they want us to believe. There were fifty thousand Parisian revolutionaries, eighty thousand beneficiaries of the national properties (stolen from the Church), and two hundred thousand vagrants. But to win it is necessary to convince the minority".
The Church was so inserted in the social fabric of France, that the persecution against it undertaken already by the Constituent Assembly, continued by the legislative one, and propelled to paroxism by the Convention by means of the Terror, were authentic aggressions not only against the liberties, but directly against the people of France. "when the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was adopted on July 12, 1790, only four bishops out of 136 and only 44% of the clergy swore the oath, from which some points should be subtracted when many retracted. Not to take the oath was equivalent to losing employment, without any recourse, to losing life and liberty, and to facing the menace of misery, to being proscribed from the community. Talleyrand, ('a bunch of shit the size of a woolen sock", as Napoleon used to call him) gave himself to the task of swearing the oath and taking the oath of two other bishops. He is the only one of the four bishops who accepted to proceed with the new consecrations. Those poor priests who took the oath, some of whom intended to encounter the simplicity and rigor of the primitive church, by the end of the winter of 1791 learned what worth the word of the deputies had: a step to the guillotine". and thousands of them died in the worst persecution in History including those in Rome and in the twentieth century in Mexico and in Spain.
The human rights dragged
The religious consideration leads Chaunu to make documented fun of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789. It has nothing to do with the American Declaration promoted by Jefferson, nor with the Habeas Corpus Act of the United Kingdom, preceding the French declaration as Margaret Thatcher was to point out at the bicentennial commemoration. The overblown utopia must be contrasted with the bestial practice. "In reality, during the entire revolutionary period, the law, incapable of performing its mediating function between politics and morals — Imatz summarizes — was only the expression of brute force at the service of the ruling minority. The young poet Andrè Chenier, who had adhered himself to the 1789 utopia before taking sides against the Terror, lived the sad experience of being guillotined at thirty two years of age"
Chaunu extends himself in the criticism of the revolutionary economy that caused the ruin and the terrible falling behind of France, an argument against which nothing can be said by the spokesmen of the Jacobin historiography. The paper money issued by the Revolution in 1794-1795 to defray the immense costs of war is, according to Chaunu, "a criminal madness that stimulated the dilapidation of assets and the destruction of the artistic patrimony, caused distrust of the modern capitalist methods and finally caused the great famine of 1795 with its tens of thousands of deaths. The government, deprived entirely of resources because of its errors, has not but one solution: the paper, the ink, and the plates to manufacture bills. In 1790-1791, revenues fluctuated between one fourth and one eighth of expenditures. In times of peace, without productive investments (more schools have been closed than opened, more hospital beds have disappeared than added, and the roads have not been maintained), to get financing of 78% to 79% of ordinary expenses by withholdings on capital is an achievement that ought to be commemorated. To pay its promises, feed its fantasies, and finance an aggressive war against a pacific Europe, the Revolution has no other recourse but to resort to inflation, the most unjust of all taxes.
An aggressive and criminal war.
Chaunu attacks the Revolution very bitterly for having undertaken an aggressive war in the name of liberty, against peoples that in immense majority did not wish to be liberated nor saved by France
"The mortal sin of the Revolution is, next to the religious persecution, the unjust war. The war will permit murdering, since all opposition is associated with the exterior enemy. The idea of unanimous terror and of the external desire to take down the revolutionary France is entirely preposterous. What interested Berlin and Vienna then was not Paris but Warsaw. The mediocrity of the Austrian and Prussian forces in the West is evident proof that the neighbors of revolutionary France lacked aggressive intentions with respect to her. Everything else is falsification, excuses, lies and propaganda. The war was the deliberate election that the dominant revolutionary faction has made up to cover up the political failure." After this precise summary by Imatz, Chaunu himself says: "Without the war, neither the bloody coup d'etat of August 10, nor the condemnation to death of the faithful Catholic priests, nor the famous elections for the Convention of September (all this in 1792) in which one in every twelve Frenchmen took part, nor the juridical assassination of the king, nor the genocide of the Catholic peasants in la Vendée, nor the persecution of all religious expression (be it Catholic, Schismatic, Protestant or Jew) would have been possible.
Imatz summarizes the tragic consequences of the war unleashed by the Revolution.
Between 1792 and 1797 half a million people died from the war, and from illnesses and penury derived from the war, three or four times as much. The genocide of la Vendée, analized by the utopian socialist Babeuf, as a succession of sadism and torture that initially had not rebelled against the Revolution, and that rose up mainly against the indiscriminate draft for war, against religious persecution and in protest for the murdering of the king, and that heroically resisted the revolutionary armies from March to December 1793, resulted in a terrible figure: 350,000 deaths, approximately equal to those suffered in the Spanish Civil War in the two bands, for all different causes, from 1936 to 1939. Therefore, in the revolutionary phase through 1799, a million Frenchmen perished, an additional million during the Napoleonic era; and in all of Europe 150 million (another million in the invaded Spain). "All responsibility for the unleashing of the continental war, lies on the revolutionary power, that deliberately chose the arms, provoked, attacked and invaded.
A tragic and absurd balance.
The balance of the revolution in its initial phase is catastrophic. "All the graphs — says Chaunu — have fallen sharply from 1790 to 1800. The Consulate and the Empire have filled the gaps, but nothing more. From their actual beginning in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, France and England stand out at the same time. If a global improvement is perceptible in the English space, it is barely per individual during the XVII century. But in the eighteenth, England was not able to leave its competitor behind. It is then, France and England the nations that take off with growth rates higher than 1%. All is to be decided between 1789 and 1800. But the war interrupted the growth of France, which decelerated in all of Europe. Even in England, where that slowdown only affected consumption. From its equal level with England, France passes to a lag of from 10% to 6%. France had catched up with England by 1789 in per capita income, but by 1799 that ratio became 65 to 100. Ten years of paper money and of terrible carnage definitely degraded France: the gap would never be overcome." As regards Spain, we could add, the naval defeat against England in Trafalgar in 1805, and the Napoleonic aggression of 1808 cut off our communication with America, provoked the insurrection that began in 1810 in viceroyalties and captaincies, against Napoleon who had invaded Spain much more than against Spain itself; irreversibly accelerated the loss of its Empire and thrust Spain from the situation of great power it had displayed since the end of the fifteenth century to that of a secondary power which it had throughout the nineteenth century and sadly continues to our days. The French Revolution, that additionally sowed the mortal division of the two Spains, was a catastrophe to Spain, that directly suffers its consequences until today.
A terrible reduction in natality is added to the intimate catastrophes suffered from the Revolution of 1789. Chaunu's lapidary conclusion is majestic as the expression of a tragedy: "By 1815, France has definitely descended in category. Mediocrity may be preferred but nothing justifies the apology of crime". An apology of crime that on the bicentennial has been uncritically, awkwardly sponsored by Mr. Mitterrand, the Socialist International and the epigones of European and Atlantic Jacobinism. Chaunu wraps up in a genial manner: "The demythified history establishes that the chaotic process engendered by the revolutionary hurricane is a random effect, but September 1792, the public accuser of the revolutionary tribunal, the ruin from the paper money and the war, the destruction of the artistic, cultural and religious patrimony, the depopulation, the interruption of the demographic impulse, the genocide of la Vendée, the mass killings of the people in Lyon, Toulon and other places, all this implacably proceeds from the most coherent revolutionary logic. Once more, the Revolution has been born and kills because death is its vocation and annihilation its objective" In their long-gone graves, Jaime Balmis and Donoso Cortés perhaps are able to feel the great relief of seeing how their doctrinal positions against the great Revolution are proven right at the end of the twentieth century by the best representatives of the authentic, unbiased and liberal History, who have in that way destroyed the stubbornness of the Jacobin history and of Marxist history that seemed to dominate the interpretation of the French Revolution for over a century and forever. We now know that such domination was nothing but fear, cowardice, manipulation and political propaganda, now happily hamstrung under the light of true History. And not, as old accusations used to repeat, from the reaction and the darkness, but from the most refined liberty.