Excuse My French I

Revolution.

In the American psyche, it’s hard to associate anything other than greatness with the word.

Discarding the recent push to turn all of our Founding Fathers into supervillains, generations of Americans have held the concept of revolution in high esteem, as many claim the greatest country in mankind’s history would never have existed without one. Specifically, rebelling against the tyrannical King George III was an absolute necessity to guarantee the God-given civil liberties that men were endowed with through the establishment of a republic. This rebellious attitude towards centralized power—highlighted in “One Nation Under Rome”—was ingrained into the very fabric of America from its founding, thus being naturally hostile to Catholic ideals, such as the concept of a monarchical spiritual leader like the Pope. Hence, the idea that the most popular strand of American Protestantism is nondenominationalism, in which no hierarchy or binding teaching exists in the most radical form of individualism, should not be surprising. It wasn’t always that way from the beginning, but the seeds were planted. It was only a matter of time before potency transformed into act.

This, of course, was not the only rebellious uprising against the allegedly tyrannical figure oppressing the people’s civil rights in the late 18th century, as France would do the same roughly a decade after the founding of America.

The only difference was the French monarchy had been intact for nearly 1,000 years.

I take that back.

There was another major difference.

Revolutions will inevitably spill blood. The American Revolution saw roughly 25,000 colonists die fighting their enemies. Logically, it checks out: if the cause is important enough, men across cultures, eras, and history have always been willing to die for it.

But the French Revolution was a different beast, which rarely gets discussed. Conveniently enough, both the French and the American Revolution get grouped together as products of the benevolent Enlightenment thinking that freed the people from monarchy and into the sublimity that are republics.

But unlike the American Revolution, the violence turned dark very quickly.

Let’s paint the picture a bit.

In the years leading up to the 1789 revolution, France had one of the strongest armies in the world, a large and thriving economy, and the second most popular language / culture behind the Englishmen.

However, the country’s fortune changed quickly, and the inflection point was the combination of the Seven Years’ War defeat and funding of the American Revolution that caused a serious debt crisis to ensue. By the 1780s, nearly half of the country’s revenue was servicing the outstanding debt. To make matters worse, harvest failures in the 1770s and 1780s increased economic hardship for the masses, as increased bread prices had a cascade effect on the economy, causing tens of thousands of jobs to be lost due to decreased demand for textile manufacturing.

The cherry on top was the decline in religiosity among the public. A strange, yet accurate proxy for this in Europe during the time is the growth of Masonic lodges, which expanded 20x to 2000 between 1772 and 1789.

While there were a handful of variables at play, the most powerful factor was the surge in popularity of Enlightenment thinking.

Paris is notably the birthplace of the Enlightenment, as most of the notable thinkers, like Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, are from this era of French history.

Its most popular idea was popular sovereignty, or the idea that the people were the true rulers of society, rather than the King being sovereign and solely maintaining the responsibility to uphold tradition, order, and morality. This was a direct undermining of not only the legitimacy of the King but also of the ruling class, many of whom were either directly or indirectly a part of the Church’s hierarchy.

Enlightenment ideals also completely flipped the narrative about the nature of man. Christian doctrine affirmatively teaches that men are flawed and drawn to greed, wrath, lust, and the rest of the deadly sins due to the fall of Adam that altered the original order of flesh being subject to the intellect / will, and the intellect / will being subject to God. Some Enlightenment thinkers approached man’s nature with a neutral stance, like Locke who believed that men were born as a clean slate. This not only rejected the flawed-nature approach that had prevailed for so long but also rejected the idea that men were born with a natural desire to know and worship God. Rousseau was even more radical, asserting men were inherently good and simply needed to be freed from the shackles of traditional Christian society to reach their full potential.

Freedom was also starting to become reconstructed. The Christian concept of the freedom to pursue truth, beauty, and goodness was quickly warped into the freedom to do whatever one pleases as long as it didn’t “harm” anyone else.

It’s easy to identify which form of freedom the modern West is built upon and the fruit it produces.

All of these prevailing ideas created the perfect backdrop for the secular revolution that would take place.

Of course, this threat was immediately identified by the Church and was denounced by Pope Pius VI in his encyclical Quod Aliquantum, causing the clergy to stand firm against these ideas and prepare for the spiritual and ideological battle ahead. Due to the direct contradiction of Catholic teaching and the Enlightenment ideals that were sweeping the country, the battle was inevitable.

The Estates General, a political body to voice grievances and push for policy change, was convened in 1789. The body was composed of three estates: the nobility, clergy, and everyone else. How it worked was the three groups would meet separately and would cast a vote after coming to a consensus, which was then presented to the King to make the final decision. Thus, it served as more of an advisory board in which the King is sovereign and has the final say rather than a legal body with the power to pass laws.

The most important detail about the Estates General was it wasn’t a permanent political body, but rather specifically called by the King at his choosing. Thus, when it was called in 1789 to discuss the country’s fiscal problems, it had been over 170 years since the last gathering.

A lot had changed since then.

Most importantly, the popularity of the Enlightenment meant that people were already growing suspicious of the idea of a sovereign King, let alone being able to be outvoted in a 2:1 ratio by the upper class of nobles and clergy. Holding 98% of the population and a small fraction of political power was completely antithetical to Enlightenment ideals.

Realizing they had strength in numbers, the third estate hijacked the council and declared itself the entire assembly.

The mobs soon stormed the Bastille Fortress—the symbol of royal power—and murdered the captain of the garrison, putting his head on a spike.

The revolution had officially begun.

The assembly composed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, outlining a constitutional monarchy with voting rights for land-owning males and no national religion.

Funnily enough, the only debate with regards to voting was whether universal suffrage should be implemented amongst males. To the revolutionaries, the idea of women voting was insanity, and they believed that female suffrage would—frankly put—destroy society.

If the beef between the Church and the Revolution hadn’t been serious enough, it reached its zenith when the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was passed. Under this legislation, the Catholic Church in France was to be under complete control of the government, with priests and bishops being elected by public vote, contact between clergy and Rome monitored at all times, and clergy swearing an oath of loyalty to the Constitution.

Thus, clergy were faced with a binary option: sell out by pledging their allegiance to the revolution and secure their wellbeing, or remain loyal to the spiritual kingdom and face heavy persecution.

The persecution was serious.

Most Church lands including convents, monasteries, and farmlands were seized and sold off as the solution to the impending debt crisis the country was facing. It obviously didn’t solve the problem, but rather served as an excuse to reduce the Church’s power and assets.

The clergy that refused to submit to the revolution were deported if they were lucky, but most priests and bishops faced imprisonment, torture, or execution. Even nuns faced severe persecution, with one example being the Martyrs of Compiègne who were guillotined for not refusing their vows.

Up until this point, the monarchy was still in place, but the relationship between King Louis XVI and the Assembly was inevitably souring, as anytime there was a disagreement between the two, the King was immediately identified as an enemy of the state.

After losing a war to Austria and Prussia, they issued a joint manifesto, stating their intention to place the King back into power, thus threatening the “people’s sovereignty.”

In this game of chess, the Assembly had no other option but to end the game completely and take out the King.

In September of 1792, Louis XVI was arrested, officially abolishing the monarchy. The original plan was to simply keep him imprisoned indefinitely, but the script flipped when the Jacobins seized power of the government. This radical group took advantage of the moment and publicly executed the King using the guillotine.

It was at this point—when the Jacobins rose to power—that the bloodshed begins to accelerate. They created the Committee of Public Safety whose main goal was to “fight the enemies of liberty,” arresting people with “strong presumptions of complicity with enemies of liberty.”

In other words, they would execute any political enemy, not just of the Revolution at large, but their specific vision of how the Revolution should be implemented. The concept of a public trial went flying out of the window and people were now guillotined just a few days after their sentencing.

The Jacobins also discarded the Christian calendar and created their own revolutionary calendar that started at 1 in the year of 1793.

Their reign didn’t last long, and they were forced out of power, with the entire ruling power tried, sentenced, and guillotined in just three days.

The guillotine, in the long run, did not discriminate. The first victims included nobility and clergy, which eventually became anyone who was loyal to the old ruling class. Next, the revolutionaries that were seen as too moderate and not being down with the “real revolution” were the next targets. Eventually, even some of the revolutionary Jacobins were betrayed by their own members before they lost power and all fell to the sword.

From 1795 to 1799, a governing body called The Directory was established but had very little governing competence and experienced high levels of instability, and it quickly developed an overreliance on the military that would enable the famous—or infamous—Napoleon Bonaparte to seize power.

To be continued.