I MUST START by stressing that I am not a French-style royalist. People who seriously hope that France will one day be ruled again by the descendants of Louis XVI or his relatives are usually so anti-democratic that they regard a British monarch as a dangerous leftie – and a heretical Protestant.
Many of these modern-day French monarchists also believe that anyone who can’t trace their ancestry back to Asterix the Gaul should be deported from France.
For obvious reasons, I am definitely not one of those.
Having said that, there is a lot of romantic nonsense talked and written about the French Revolution – mainly by the French themselves.
Listening to these revo-mantics, one would think that in the space of a few weeks in 1789, every powder-faced aristo was forced to donate his or her wealth to the starving masses; every lazy landowner was dispossessed in favour of a worthy producer of handmade goat’s cheese; and a despotic king and his free-loading wife were displaced (and then humanely dispatched) to make way for a benign bunch of philosophy-reading democrats who gave Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité to everyone in France.
But almost all of that is almost entirely false. And the aim of this book is to explain why.
Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité may have been the initial aims of the Revolution, but for several years the reality was more like Tyranny, Megalomania and Fratricide. And what the French rarely acknowledge, or even realize, is that guillotining royals and aristos was not at all what their revolutionaries originally intended. The fact is that even during the storming of the Bastille, almost no one in France was calling for King Louis XVI to be deposed, let alone decapitated.
The truth is that even before 14 July 1789, a revolution had taken place, and a new, egalitarian Constitution was being drafted by a more or less democratically elected parliament (if male-only suffrage can be called democratic). This Constitution overtly reaffirmed Louis XVI’s position as head of state. He was far from happy with some of the changes being imposed upon him, but he accepted them, and began to work with the new government on creating a reined-in, English-style monarchy.
What was more, once his wife Marie-Antoinette had been forced to stop spending the GDP on parties and necklaces, and the aristocrats were no longer able to tax their peasant tenants to death, Louis XVI was very popular with the average Français and Française. He was the star guest at the ceremony to mark the first anniversary of Bastille Day, during which a mass oath of allegiance was sworn to both king and nation.
Louis XVI’s attendance at the ceremony was heartily cheered by the Parisian crowds – the same people who had spent much of the previous summer rioting. Most ordinary citizens felt that, without the stalling tactics of the aristocrats, Louis would have given them fairer taxation and even a measure of political influence years earlier. This was why in 1790, the King was still seen by the general population as a potential benefactor, a figure of hope.
That same year, an author and former soldier called Antoine Rigobert Mopinot published a project to erect a statue of Louis XVI in Paris, ‘to transmit to future generations the happy revolution that has revitalized France under [his] reign’.fn1 Mopinot went on to assert that the new regime ‘ensures the continuing prestige and stability of the French throne, and gives the French nation complete freedom to observe its laws, with the support of royal power’. He was expressing the general view at the time that there was no contradiction between revolution and royalty. In 1792, Mopinot was still in possession of an unsevered neck, and was again pitching his project to the post-revolutionary parliament, so no one can have thought that his desire to celebrate Louis XVI’s continued existence was particularly subversive.
However, by 1793 this process of peaceful reform had come to a brutal end, and France was charging down the perilous path of civil war, dictatorship and mass public executions. It is estimated that 300,000 French men, women and children were killed by their compatriots, many of them in the most barbarous way imaginable (drowning and bayonetting were especially popular), during the ‘Terreur’ that followed the fall of the constitutional monarchy. And the tragic fact was that by the end of it all, the poorest and most oppressed sections of the population were left even worse off than they had been in 1789.
All of which suggests that something went disastrously wrong with France’s Revolution…