AT THE END OF 1793, A PRINTER IN THE AMERICAN FRONTIER SETTLEMENT of Lexington, Kentucky, as far away from the French Revolution as any point in the Western world, published The Kentucky Almanac, for the Year of the Lord 1794. Along with a calendar and weather forecasts for the coming year, the almanac’s main feature was a poem, “The American Prayer for France.” Addressing the deity as the “Protector of the Rights of Man,” the anonymous poet implored him to “make thy chosen race rejoice, / and grant that KINGS may reign no more.” His message was clear: the outcome of the French Revolution mattered, not just to France’s “heroes brave, her rulers just,” but to all those around the world who believed that human beings were endowed with individual rights and that arbitrary rulers should be overthrown. At the same time, however, the poet’s words showed how hard it was to interpret the upheaval that had started in France in 1789 from a distance. Even as the Kentucky author implored God’s protection for the Revolution, the revolutionaries were suppressing religious worship in France, and as he praised the justice of their actions, their Revolutionary Tribunal was straining the definition of justice to its limits.1
Today, more than two hundred years since the dramatic events that began in 1789, the story of the French Revolution is still relevant to all who believe in liberty and democracy. Whenever movements for freedom take place anywhere in the world, their supporters claim to be following the example of the Parisians who stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789. Whoever reads the words of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, published in August 1789, immediately recognizes the basic principles of individual liberty, legal equality, and representative government that define modern democracies. When we think of the French Revolution, however, we also remember the violent conflicts that divided those who participated in it and the executions carried out with the guillotine. Likewise, we remember the rise to power of the charismatic general whose dictatorship ended the movement. As I sit in my study in Lexington today, making sense of the French Revolution is as much of a challenge as it was for the anonymous author of the Kentucky Almanac.
When I began my own career as a scholar and teacher in the 1970s, the memory of the worldwide student protest movements on university campuses in the 1960s was still fresh. Those movements had inspired interest in the French Revolution, which seemed to stand alongside the Russian Revolution of 1917 as one of the great examples of a successful overthrow of an oppressive society. Ironically, the understanding of the French Revolution in those years of upheaval seemed largely fixed: virtually all historians agreed that it had resulted from the frustrations of a rising “bourgeois” class determined to challenge a “feudal” old order that stood in the way of political and economic progress.
By the time I participated, along with researchers from all over the globe, in commemorations of the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989, the situation had changed drastically. The communist regimes in Eastern Europe were now tottering, and the fact that the French Revolution had inspired the Soviets was a reason to ask whether France’s upheaval had foreshadowed totalitarian excesses more than social progress. The polemical essays of a dynamic French historian, François Furet, challenged the orthodoxy that had dominated study of the Revolution; among other things, he appealed to scholars in the English-speaking world to turn to the subject with fresh eyes.
The decades since 1989 have brought even more questions about the French Revolution to the fore. In 1789, the French proclaimed that “all men are born and remain free and equal in rights”—but what about women? At the start of the American Revolution, John Adams’s wife, Abigail, famously urged him in a letter to “remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.”2 In revolutionary France, the issues about women’s rights and relations between the sexes that still preoccupy us today were openly debated in the press, in political clubs, and even in the nation’s legislature. Mary Wollstonecraft, recognized as the pioneer of modern feminism, wrote her trailblazing Vindication of the Rights of Women in revolutionary Paris, but a French reviewer commented that women there had already shown they could do more than even Wollstonecraft imagined.3 Some of the women of the period—the playwright and pamphleteer Olympe de Gouges, the novelist and salon hostess Madame de Staël, the backroom politician Madame Roland, and the unhappy queen, Marie-Antoinette—became prominent public figures and left ample records of their thoughts. Others took part in mass uprisings or exerted influence through their daily grumbling about bread prices. Under the new laws on marriage and divorce, some women welcomed the possibility of changes in family life; others played a key role in frustrating male revolutionaries’ efforts to do away with the Catholic Church. A history of the French Revolution that does not “remember the ladies” is incomplete.
In today’s world, the issues of race and slavery during the French Revolution also command attention they did not receive in the past. On the map, the scattered islands of France’s overseas empire in 1789 looked insignificant compared to the holdings of the British, the Spanish, and the Portuguese, but their importance was out of all proportion to their size. In 1787, the colonies provided 37 percent of the goods imported into France and took 22 percent of its exports. One French colony alone—Saint-Domingue, today’s Haiti—provided half the world’s supply of sugar and coffee. These profits came from the labor of enslaved black men and women. In 1789, the 800,000 slaves in the French sugar islands in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean outnumbered the 670,000 in the thirteen newly independent American states; indeed, the number of Africans being transported to the French colonies reached its all-time peak just as the French revolutionaries were proclaiming that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The French colonies and their slaves were far away from Europe, but they preoccupied the minds of thinkers in France. The abbé Guillaume Raynal’s History of the Two Indies, a multivolume work with passages condemning colonialism and slavery, was a bestseller in the prerevolutionary years. In 1788, Marie-Antoinette authorized the gift of a gilded watch for “Jean-Pierre, Madame de Boisnormand’s mulatto,” a playmate of her son.4 The question of how to reconcile the principles of freedom with the economic importance of the colonies tormented revolutionary leaders throughout the 1790s. After much controversy, they voted to abolish slavery and to grant full rights to people of all races, but only after they were faced with history’s largest slave uprising, the beginning of a “Haitian Revolution” that ended in 1804 with the creation of the first independent black nation in the Americas. A history of the French Revolution that gives this previously neglected topic the attention it deserves changes our understanding of the movement’s meaning.
The events of the first decades of our century, which have led to widespread questioning of traditional political institutions, also send us back to the French Revolution. Revolutionary-era protests against economic globalization and the consequences of free trade often sound eerily similar to the demands of present-day movements. Because they argued that government needed to represent the will of the people, the French revolutionaries were the forerunners both of modern political democracy and of modern anti-elitist populism, and the events of the 1790s in France vividly demonstrate the conflicts that can arise between the two. As the world attempts to cope with a resurgence of militant nationalism, the ways in which the French Revolution turned the word “nation” into an explosive force demand new attention. The Revolution’s violent debates about the proper place of religion in society, and the powerful resistance to its efforts to impose secular values, also foreshadow conflicts of our own time. Like people today, participants in the French Revolution felt they were experiencing a transformation of the communications media; the proliferation of newspapers and pamphlets, for example, made it seem as though time itself had speeded up, and difficulties in distinguishing between political truth and false rumors were a constant of the period. Finally, in an era in which “disruption” has become a political program, the history of the French Revolution’s experiment in deliberately demolishing an existing order has never been more relevant. Our own experience of disruption also lends new relevance to the revolutionaries’ efforts, in the five years between the end of the Reign of Terror and the rise of Napoleon, to stabilize their society without undoing the movement’s positive achievements.
The French Revolution unfolded at a moment when public taste favored melodramatic plays and novels featuring stark confrontations between good and evil. Histories of the Revolution often repeat this pattern, even if their authors disagree about which figures and movements should be cast as heroes and which as villains. My own personal itinerary as a scholar of the Revolution has inclined me to strive for a balanced view of the men and women of the revolutionary era. My first research projects on French revolutionary history were devoted to writers and journalists who opposed the movement. Although I never embraced their conservative philosophies, I was challenged by learning that intelligent and articulate people had argued so strenuously against the ideals of liberty and equality that I accepted as self-evident. As I broadened my studies on the journalism of the revolutionary period, I had to engage with the writers who favored the movement, or who even thought it had not gone far enough, and grapple with the paradox that the loudest proponents of democracy during the Revolution, such as Jean-Paul Marat and the pseudonymous Père Duchêne, were also vociferous advocates of overt violence.
Midway through my scholarly career, I found myself exploring the dramatic events that led the French revolutionaries to their historic declaration, in 1794, that slavery was an unacceptable violation of human rights, and that the black populations of their colonies should be full French citizens. I discovered that although in one obvious sense the Revolution was a drama in black and white, it was not a simple confrontation between heroes and villains. Abolitionist reformers in France understood the injustice of slavery and racial prejudice, and yet many of them were so convinced that blacks were not yet ready for freedom that they hesitated to draw what now seem the obvious conclusions from their own principles. The blacks in the French colonies who revolted against oppression did not always see the French revolutionaries as allies. Toussaint Louverture, the main figure in the movement that eventually led France’s largest and most valuable overseas colony to independence, initially told the French that he was fighting for “another liberty,” not the form of freedom the revolutionaries were prepared to offer.
Hardly any of the hundreds of figures readers will meet in these pages can be portrayed in simple terms. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette could not comprehend the revolutionary principles of liberty and equality, but they had a sincere devotion to what they saw as their duty to defend the nation’s long-established institutions. Prominent revolutionary leaders, from Mirabeau to Robespierre, advocated admirable principles, but they also approved measures with a high human cost in the name of the Revolution. Ordinary men and women were capable of both acts of courage, such as the storming of the Bastille, and acts of inhuman cruelty, including the September massacres of 1792. Certainly all of the participants could have agreed on at least one thing: the truth of the words of a young revolutionary legislator, Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, when he remarked that “the force of things has perhaps led us to do things that we did not foresee.”5
The continuing relevance of the French Revolution does not mean that the events of 1789 are simple or that they can offer clear answers to the questions of our own day. Our new perspectives on the role of women in the Revolution, on the importance of the revolutionaries’ debates about race and slavery, and on the ways in which revolutionary politics prefigured the current dilemmas of democracy may give us a new view of the movement, but the Revolution’s message and its outcome remain ambiguous. Liberty and equality turned out to mean very different things to different people at the time, as they have ever since. One of the most relevant lessons of the Revolution, first driven home by the conservative critic Edmund Burke, and most forcefully articulated by the great nineteenth-century political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, is that actions inevitably have unintended consequences. An equally important lesson of the Revolution, however, is that it is sometimes necessary to fight for liberty and equality, despite the risks that conflict entails. The respect for individual rights inherent in the Revolution’s own principles does require us to recognize the humanity of those who opposed it, and it requires us as well to consider the views of those who paid a price for objecting that the movement did not always fulfill its own promises. Despite its shortcomings, however, the French Revolution remains a vital part of the heritage of democracy.