NAPOLEON WAS THE FIRST OF MANY LEADERS WHO THOUGHT THEY COULD turn the page on the French Revolution. After his defeat, the other European powers restored the Bourbon monarchy, with Louis XVI’s brother, who had been calling himself Louis XVIII since the death of his brother’s son in 1795, as king. No matter how much Louis XVIII might have liked to return to the old regime, he sensed that he could only govern the country if he granted a written constitution, shared power with an elected parliament, and allowed freedom of religion and expression. The abolition of the provinces and the parlements, the unification of the country’s laws, and the ending of aristocratic privileges had all become so ingrained that they could not be reversed. A heavy-handed attempt to re-Catholicize the country provoked a revival of Enlightenment ideas that contributed to the Revolution of 1830, when ordinary Parisians turned out in the streets, as their ancestors had in the 1790s, to overthrow the Bourbons. Survivors of the Revolution, such as Lafayette and Talleyrand, helped install the son of the revolutionary era’s duc d’Orléans as a “citizen king” who brought back the Revolution’s tricolor flag. In 1848, another revolution ended monarchy in France for good and created a Second Republic based on universal male suffrage. Napoleon’s nephew imitated his uncle, overthrowing the republic in 1851 and proclaiming himself Emperor Napoleon III, but he could not stop the progress of democracy. When Bismarck’s newly unified Germany defeated this Second Empire in 1870, France turned again to republicanism, which has remained the country’s form of government ever since, except for the period of German occupation during World War II. July 14—Bastille Day—became the country’s national holiday, and “La Marseillaise” was firmly established as its national anthem.
In 1886, France presented a colossal statue of Liberty to the American people as a symbol of the two countries’ shared commitment to the ideals that had inspired their two revolutions a hundred years earlier. By then, those ideals had spread to many other parts of the world, such as the republics of Latin America. After World War I, the empires that had fought against revolutionary France—Austria, Germany, Russia, Turkey—disintegrated, replaced by nation-states with democratic constitutions. This apparent triumph of the ideas of 1789 was short-lived and incomplete: communist and fascist regimes destroyed freedom in many countries, and even democracies like Britain and France refused to extend it to their overseas colonies. A yet more destructive world war, however, spurred a reaffirmation of the democratic and republican traditions rooted in the French Revolution. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed in 1948, three years after the defeat of Germany and Japan in World War II, was modeled on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789. By explicitly affirming racial equality and women’s rights and incorporating social, economic, and cultural rights, such as the right to education, social security, and health care, the drafters of the Universal Declaration acknowledged the importance of the radical ideas first voiced during the French movement.
The year 1989 was marked by two important events: the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, and the collapse of the communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe. An American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, wrote a best-selling book, The End of History, asserting that the principles of democratic freedom and capitalist free enterprise—two powerful aspirations of the French revolutionaries—had finally achieved global hegemony. Like Thomas Paine’s optimistic assessment of the French Revolution in 1792, Fukuyama’s conclusion was premature. In the three decades since the lavish bicentennial celebration in Paris in 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world has seen a resurgence of authoritarian regimes even in countries that seemed to have embraced democracy. Religious movements of many sorts have fought back against the secularization of public life associated with the French Revolution. In many non-Western countries, the liberal world order whose roots go back to the ideas of 1789 is still criticized as a facade for the maintenance of European and American hegemony, and Toussaint Louverture’s appeal for “another liberty” in place of that outlined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man still echoes.
At the time of the French Revolution’s bicentennial in July 1989, no one knew that the communist bloc would not survive the year. Criticism of the French Revolution at that time came primarily from those who emphasized the ways in which the movement, especially in its radical phase during the Terror, foreshadowed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia. In the aftermath of the collapse of Soviet-style communism, it is easier to see how the two revolutions differed. The French revolutionaries never abandoned their faith in individual freedom and a market economy, even when crises drove them to suspend those principles. After the fall of Robespierre, the French republicans “exited from the Terror.” They did so clumsily and at the cost of considerable popular suffering, but it is remarkable, considering the passions the Revolution had unleashed, that they were able to do so at all. In Russia after 1917, on the other hand, dictatorship became a permanent principle of government.
If the French Revolution does not deserve to be tarred with the same brush as the Russian Revolution, its legacy nevertheless remains troubling in a number of ways. The ease with which Sieyès and Napoleon undermined the institutions created by the revolutionaries is a reminder that ideals such as liberty and equality are not inevitably bound to prevail. The history of the Revolution shows how difficult it can be to achieve a consensus on what liberty and equality mean, and how efforts to promote those values can arouse the resistance of groups ranging from religious believers to the owners of property. The great drama of the French Revolution enables us to appreciate the power of the beliefs that were expressed in the Oath of the Tennis Court in 1789, the Festival of the Federation in 1790, and the cheers that greeted the abolition of slavery in 1794. However, the same intense emotions also produced the drive for war in the spring of 1792, the backlash against women’s rights in 1793, the excesses of the Terror and the hollowing out of democracy after thermidor in 1794. The French Revolution was the laboratory in which all the possibilities of modern politics, both positive and negative, were tested for the first time.
As I have striven, in the course of writing this book, to bring the actors and the ideas of the French Revolution alive for today’s readers, I have learned about many aspects of this endlessly complicated event that were new to me, even after more than forty years spent studying and teaching about the subject. One story that has particularly intrigued me is that of Jean-Marie Goujon, the “prairial martyr” whose name has appeared often in these pages, and his friend Pierre-François Tissot, who survived him by more than half a century. Their letters and writings helped me understand the enthusiasm that powered the Revolution. As an apostle of liberty and equality, Goujon tried to reach out to the common people and inspire them. In the critical years of the Revolution, he went beyond preaching and devoted himself to the urgent matter of making sure the population had food to eat. He was fortunate in that he did not join the National Convention until after the bloody purges of the Girondins, the Hébertistes, and the Indulgents, and he was absent from Paris on 9 thermidor Year II (July 27, 1794), which spared him from having to take sides for or against Robespierre. There is every reason to believe that, as he and his fellow defendants argued at their trial after the prairial uprising, he supported some of the crowd’s demands in a sincere effort to prevent bloodshed and preserve some of the Convention’s authority.
A casualty of the passions of the Revolution, Goujon was just twenty-nine when he died. Contrasting his life with that of his friend Tissot, who did so much to preserve Goujon’s memory, is a thought-provoking exercise. The two were both seized by emotion at the Festival of Federation in 1790. At the same time that Goujon married in 1793 in a republican ceremony, Tissot married his friend’s sister. Tissot lacked Goujon’s charisma and speaking ability, but as Goujon’s political career took off, Goujon was able to employ Tissot in various administrative posts. On the fateful day of 1 prairial Year III (May 20, 1795), while Goujon was at his post at the Convention, Tissot was in the gallery with the demonstrators, where he successfully avoided arrest. For some years after Goujon’s execution, Tissot remained involved with the radical left. He participated in the Babeuf conspiracy and, under the Consulate, was on the list of former Montagnards scheduled for deportation after the December 1800 assassination attempt against Napoleon. Some of his friends, however, convinced the first consul to spare him.
After 1800, Tissot abandoned his radicalism. To support not only his own family but also Goujon’s widow and his younger brothers, he went into business, opening a factory to make lanterns in Paris’s Faubourg Saint-Antoine. As a manufacturer, he made his small contribution to the movement of technological progress—a movement that would eventually allow the world to escape from the poverty that had made the ideals of the French Revolution so hard to realize in the 1790s. Tissot also embarked on a literary career, obtaining a reputation for his translations of Latin poetry. Gradually, he embraced Napoleon’s regime. He was rewarded with a teaching post at the Collège de France in 1813, shortly before the empire fell. Under the Bourbon Restoration, he was active in the moderate liberal opposition, and when that regime was overthrown in 1830, he reached the pinnacle of glory by being elected to the Académie française (French Academy). Author of one of the first histories of the French Revolution, Tissot lived long enough to become one of the few participants in the movement of 1789 who was still alive to witness the proclamation of France’s Second Republic in 1848.
Two young men seized with the spirit of liberty in 1789, two young men who followed the revolutionary movement’s shift toward ever more radical positions until 1794, two men who kept the republican faith even after Robespierre’s overthrow, and whose destinies diverged only because one spoke up at the Convention during the prairial uprising and the other escaped unnoticed. Which of the two best epitomizes the true meaning of the Revolution: Goujon, who sacrificed his life rather than abandon the ideals he had embraced, or Tissot, who eventually accommodated himself to the sober realities of life after 1800? Without idealists like Goujon, the Revolution would never have imprinted itself on the minds of its contemporaries and of posterity; without pragmatists like Tissot, its principles might have been completely repudiated. Through the stories of Goujon and Tissot, we can perhaps come to some understanding of the complexities of the Revolution’s impact on the lives of those who experienced it, and the ways in which its legacy was perpetuated.