Prior to 1789, the world had certainly seen its share of brutal and excessively bloody wars, in which many people had died. But the French Revolution was something different: it wasn’t a war; it was the mass execution of unarmed and defenseless civilians.
The French Revolution was also a tragedy. It began promising freedom of speech and ended by murdering people who had simply dared to express an opinion. It began promising freedom of religion and ended by killing priests and brutally enforcing atheism upon the populace.
What went wrong?
The revolutionaries correctly identified a political problem — the absolutist Bourbon dynasty — but they incorrectly sought to fix that problem by changing, not the government, but rather the society.
One fixes governmental problems by changing the government. One fixes societal problems by changing society. The French Revolution attempted to fix governmental problems by changing society, and so was doomed to failure.
Having toppled the monarchy, the revolutionaries discovered that they had no thought-out plan to replace it. What followed was a series of ad hoc governments, hastily structured, quickly manifesting their weaknesses, and as hastily replaced by other equally impromptu governments.
The ideology of the revolution — ideologies lack nuance and complexity — tended toward an absolutism of thought and often of action. The demand for absolute freedom led predictably to chaos. The chaos led predictably to a demand for order, which led to tyranny. The absolute nature of the revolutionary ideology — critics of the French Revolution called it “metaphysical” — also led to oversimplification. Blanket edicts replaced subtle legislation.
A century earlier, John Locke had already pointed to the distinction between government and society. A decade earlier, Thomas Paine had pointed to the same distinction with fresh wording for a new circumstance. To its own detriment, the French Revolution failed to heed this insight.
While both society and legislation can be frustratingly complex, the Byzantine intricacies of governments and cultures are the way they are for a reason. Patient examination will reveal wisdom in the labyrinthine structures. Both natural structures — oysters or stalactites — and human structures — great architecture — require time to be built, and in this time, acquire a multitude of details and variations.
Impatient revolutionaries wish to sweep aside the complexities at once, and introduce an absolute simplicity. Impracticality is the least of the vices of such thinking: it soon turns deadly.
The Jacobins were an influential faction among the revolutionaries in France. The Benthamites in Britain were followers of Jeremy Bentham, originally gathered around his system of philosophical utilitarian ethics, but then broadening those principles and hoping to apply them to society and government. Both groups, while differing from each other, made the same mistakes.
Edmond Burke made insightful critiques of the French Revolution as it unfolded and even predicted its various developments before they happened. Writing about Burke, historian Russell Kirk explains:
Society is immeasurably more than a political device. Knowing this, Burke endeavored to convince his generation of the immense complexity of existence, the “mysterious incorporation of the human race.” If society is treated as a simple contraption to be managed on mathematical lines — the Jacobins and the Benthamites and most other radicals so regarded it — then man will be degraded into something much less than a partner in the immortal contract which unites the dead, the living, and those yet unborn, the bond between God and man. Order in this world is contingent upon order above.
Burke saw that humans have three great relationships: to those who lived before them, to their contemporaries, and to those who will live after them. Any thoughts about the differences between government and society must account for all three.
The revolutionaries in France fell to one side or the other: either a legalism which found endless rules for people to obey, or an anarchistic nihilistic absence of any guidance.
The antidote offered by Burke was a morality which was not one of endless legislation, but which offered rather ethical guidance, as Russell Kirk reports:
There exists no simple set of formulas by which all the ills to which the flesh is heir may be swept away. Yet there do exist general principles of morals and of politics to which thinking men may turn.
The prudent thinker, Kirk writes, “is concerned with a number of” the same “primary questions” as the French Revolutionaries were, “and with a vaster array of prudential questions, to which the answers must vary with the circumstances and the time.” Contrary to the romanticized image of revolutionaries, the leaders in France from 1789 to 1799 were remarkably doctrinaire and rigid, unwilling or unable to allow for variances in legislation or morality, seeking simplistic universal rules to be applied mechanically to all people at all times in all places.
A century later, Burke’s thought would be echoed by Jacob Burckhardt, who referred to a class of thinkers, including those of the French Revolution, as the “terrible simplifiers.” Rather than having an ideology, Burke’s mission was to show that ideologies are doomed to fail, and in the process of their failure, bring misery.
