Lafayette, Robespierre --- And Us

I've been reading Albert Mathiez's history of the French Revolution. Most recent histories of the French Revolution aren't very good. The Jacobin years are treated as a mere precursor of Soviet communism (bad); at best, the early years of the revolution are granted the status of a first step toward the kind of world we in the G7 countries now inhabit (very, very good). On the bright side, these lame attempts to domesticate and familiarize the Revolution demonstrate its continuing vitality and relevance (and the increasing inability of our intellectual class to accept that anything other than itself has ever been entirely real). Given the widening ruin into which our placid, "post-historical" world has suddenly and unexpectedly detoured, we may likely expect new interpretations that look more kindly on the salutary ruptures with "business as usual" that Revolutionary France undertook in response to its own crisis of fiscal collapse and elite corruption. But what's missing in all this is a sense of the utter singularity of what happened in France. Writing in the 1920s, long before France was "modernized", Mathiez got this. In 1789, with minimal violence and little warning, the French people found themselves standing on the edge of an open landscape without precedent. Nobody knew what democracy was supposed to be, where it ended, what, if anything, was off-limits. Contrast this with our smugly self circumscribed world, where everything is "known" so well that nothing "unknown" can happen -- because if it was "valid" it would be happening already, right? The revolutionary French literally "stopped at nothing" -- once it became clear that a clean break was being made with the coherent world embodied in the old order,there was no remaining basis to declare this or that specific thing sacrosanct.

I think it's going to become increasingly obvious that some such attitude is the only "practical" response to the actual dimensions of the situation we now find ourselves in.