A Very Different French Revolution

Did a secret society bring about the French Revolution? In the classic fictional version of this widely believed conspiracy theory, Alexandre Dumas’s novel Joseph Balsamo, a Masonic society known as the Illuminati gather in a ruined castle in 1770 and plot the overthrow of the French monarchy. Their leader, called the “Great Copt,” speaks of the day when “the monarchy is dead…religious domination is despised…social inferiority is extinguished.”

Dumas would have found a great deal to appreciate in Jonathan Israel’s Revolutionary Ideas. Israel, a much-respected professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, does not present the French Revolution of 1789 as the result of a literal conspiracy. But he repeatedly characterizes it as the work of a “small minority” or “unrepresentative fringe” of disaffected Frenchmen who, in his view, consciously and deliberately sought to bring about the greatest political upheaval the Western world had ever seen. Israel does not contend that they belonged to a secret society. But he does argue that they shared a common creed, which they acted deliberately to realize. It is very much the same creed outlined by the Great Copt, although Israel would add sexual and racial inequality to the list of injustices his heroes sought to overthrow.

Israel makes this case in one of the most unusual histories of the French Revolution ever written. He calls it an “intellectual history,” but by this he does not mean that he has restricted himself to one part of the subject, and left the political, social, economic, and cultural histories of the Revolution to others. He means that only ideas matter for understanding how the Revolution came about, and what course it took. A particular set of ideas was its “sole fundamental cause,” and conflicts over these ideas drove it forward.

As a result, despite its great length, Revolutionary Ideas has surprisingly little to say about the most famous revolutionary events. The fall of the Bastille in July 1789, to which writers like Jules Michelet and Thomas Carlyle devoted many brilliant pages, flies by in two terse paragraphs. The “October Days” of 1789, in which angry Parisian crowds, led by market women, marched on the royal palace of Versailles, invaded Queen Marie-Antoinette’s bedroom, and forced King Louis XVI and the royal family to return to Paris with them, gets the same. The dramatic execution in January 1793 of King Louis, who just four years earlier had claimed a divine right to rule over France as its absolute monarch, is dispatched in two sentences.

Personalities also get short shrift. Previous historians and biographers have speculated endlessly about the psychology of the prim, tightly coiled Maximilien Robespierre, the fanatical Jean-Paul Marat, or the erratic, vainglorious Georges Danton, going back over their childhoods, inquiring into their sex lives, combing their correspondence for intimate revelations. The troubled marriages of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, and of Napoleon and Josephine, have come in for endless dissection. Even in seven hundred pages of text, Israel has no time for such matters, in general providing no more than an economical line or two of background for each of his dramatis personae (although there is also a helpful “Cast of Main Participants” in an appendix).

The vast majority of the French population fare particularly poorly in Revolutionary Ideas. As even readers of the most basic textbook know, the French Revolution began at a moment of economic crisis, in which spiraling prices for the population’s staple food—bread—had driven millions to the brink of indigence and starvation. They also know that the Revolution might easily have been strangled in its cradle, had not the common people risen up at a moment of political crisis, stormed the Bastille, and then asserted their power in cities and towns across the country.

Again and again, it was the actions of common people that broke political stalemates and drove the Revolution forward. In scarcely more than three years, from 1789 to 1792, a land of absolute monarchy transformed itself into a democratic republic that gave the right to vote to all adult men. Less than a year later it lurched into civil war and the horrific repression known as the Terror, in which many thousands of innocent people were executed as alleged “enemies of the Revolution,” even while France was simultaneously embarking on an extraordinary experiment in utopian social reform. None of this could have happened, for better and worse, without the participation of ordinary French men and women.

Jonathan Israel, in some remarkably cavalier passages, treats these popular actions almost with annoyance. He ignores several generations’ worth of historical inquiry into how ordinary French people of the revolutionary era lived and thought. Rising literacy rates, declining patterns of religious observance, and a consumer revolution that put books within the reach of millions do not concern him. He takes no interest in the common people’s culture, and never considers the possibility that they might have conceived and articulated revolutionary political ideas on their own. “Bread prices were high and the urban and rural population restless,” he writes. “But this was nothing new. Popular disaffection, experience suggested, could mostly be shepherded wherever the elites wished.”

On several occasions, he deplores the inability of “the most ignorant part of the population, the illiterate and semi-illiterate,” to appreciate what revolutionary ideologues had to offer. “Most ordinary folk did not read their books and would scarcely have understood had they tried.” The work of historians such as Robert Darnton, who have shown how the public read and responded to the ideas of thinkers like Rousseau, gets little attention here.

Israel’s approach may seem surprising to readers who have never encountered him before, but those who have followed his career will understand what is at stake. Although he made his name as an economic and political historian of early modern Latin America and the Netherlands, for the past thirteen years Israel has been engaged in an extraordinary intellectual project. In a series of lengthy volumes, he has produced the most comprehensive and possibly the most ambitious history of the Enlightenment ever undertaken by a serious scholar.

For all the project’s enormous dimensions, Israel’s thesis is shockingly simple. Starting in Radical Enlightenment (2001), he argued that in the seventeenth century, a daringly new intellectual movement took shape, centered in the Netherlands, and owing the most to the commanding figure of Benedict Spinoza. These thinkers espoused a materialist, “monist” philosophy that rejected any fundamental distinction between matter and spirit. From this intellectual leap, Israel argued, there followed a rejection of hierarchies of every sort. The proponents of the “radical Enlightenment” (a term he borrowed from the UCLA historian Margaret Jacob) were not only atheists, but also democrats, social egalitarians, feminists, advocates of complete religious toleration, and even, for the most adventurous among them, believers in sexual toleration. By the end of the seventeenth century they had expounded upon this “package” of ideas (Israel’s word) in clandestine books and pamphlets, mostly printed in the Netherlands, that subsequently reached a wide European audience.

In his next volume, Enlightenment Contested (2006), Israel traced the way these thinkers, and their intellectual heirs, continued to elaborate the same basic “package” throughout the eighteenth century. He also examined their supposed conflict with a “moderate Enlightenment” (another term earlier used by Margaret Jacob) that accepted some of the radicals’ premises but sought to reconcile Enlightenment with the existing social, political, and religious order. Most of the great figures we today associate with the Enlightenment—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Kant, Adam Smith—belonged, in Israel’s telling, to this second, moderate movement. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the single most popular and influential Enlightenment writer, largely did as well. Among the great philosophes, only Denis Diderot was located, for Israel, squarely in the “radical” camp.

In Democratic Enlightenment (2011), Israel then tried to show how the radical Enlightenment turned explicitly political, and brought about the French Revolution. Revolutionary Ideas, which examines the Revolution in far more detail, is the continuation of Israel’s argument about what the Enlightenment wrought once it burst out of studies and salons and printing houses and was, as the Great Copt promised his followers, “proclaimed aloud in the streets.”

Israel’s fellow scholars have not, for the most part, looked favorably on his enterprise. They did give Radical Enlightenment considerable credit for showing the importance of the Netherlands to early Enlightenment thought, and for highlighting its role as a center of radical publishing (although, again, this is a subject on which Margaret Jacob had already done important early work). They have expressed amazement at, and appreciation for, his Herculean energy, which puts much younger scholars to shame. Democratic Enlightenment, for example, covered a dauntingly vast geographical canvas, from Japan to Peru to France, and cited thousands of sources in at least seven languages.

But for the most part, the intellectual historians who reviewed these volumes rejected Israel’s claims about the radical “package” of ideas that had supposedly taken shape in Holland and then transmitted itself, more or less unchanged, across Europe for the next century until it lit the fuse of the French Revolution. The evidence was thin, they argued, for seeing Spinoza and the other early radicals as democratic, or egalitarian, or feminist, or for attributing to them such vast influence. “Spinozist,” it was noted, very early became a term of abuse, and not every book denounced as such actually had much relation to Spinoza’s thought. They charged Israel with arguing by assertion, characterizing works as “radical,” and then attributing influence to them, without sufficient evidence (I had my own hand in these debates). Israel, for his part, has responded with great vigor.^*

Revolutionary Ideas shows that Israel has the courage of his convictions. He has accepted very few criticisms, and remains entirely committed to his original line of argument. Not only did the radical Enlightenment cause the French Revolution, in 1789 it was still essentially the same radical Enlightenment that he tracked in his earlier volumes. Its proponents were committed to the creed first taught, in his view, in seventeenth-century Holland: democracy, religious toleration, human rights, and social, racial, and sexual equality. Faced with an established order that ferociously opposed these ideas, they saw no path forward but radical and, if necessary, violent revolution. And while they did not achieve anything like full success, they still laid “the foundations of democratic modernity.” Again, the thesis is shockingly simple.

Of course, Israel recognizes that the actual events were considerably more complicated and that the French Revolution was a bloodily contentious movement, not a unified and coherent one. But he gets around this problem easily—too easily. The 1789 apostles of radical Enlightenment may not have been the whole Revolution, he explains, but they were the “authentic Revolution”—even the “real revolution.” He speaks of the Revolution’s “essential principles,” its “core principles,” its “veritable course,” its “soul.” Everything else was false, inauthentic, unsatisfactory, counterproductive, or worse. Robespierre, whom most historians take as the exemplar of French Revolutionary radicalism, was, for Israel, quite the reverse. He had an “approach…directly contrary to the Revolution’s core values” and was in fact the incarnation of “authoritarian populism prefiguring modern fascism.” As this language suggests, Israel is not in the least interested in taking an impartial view of his subject. Rather, he has taken sides, with gusto, and has decided to fight out the original battles once again, in the pages of his book.

Who are his heroes, those he calls his “unrepresentative fringe”? For the earliest years of the Revolution, he particularly singles out the flamboyant Comte de Mirabeau and the dour clergyman Emmanuel Sieyès, who together were the most important figures in transforming France’s antiquated Estates General, which the king had summoned to deal with a major financial crisis, into the revolutionary National Assembly in 1789. Both men were adept politicians, and both had a strong debt to the intellectual school known as the Physiocrats, which originally supported a strong French monarchy. Israel, however, characterizes them as lifelong dedicated followers of the antimonarchical radical Enlightenment, and describes Sieyès in particular as a “hardened ideologue.”

As for the later years of the Revolution, after the Terror, Israel looks especially to a group of intellectuals known as the “Ideologues,” who imagined a “science of ideas” that would serve as the basis for a new system of public education (they invented the word “ideology”). A well-educated and rationally organized society, they hoped, could resist the temptations of political turmoil. Most historians believe the Ideologues owed more to John Locke than to Israel’s radical Enlightenment, and do not consider them particularly egalitarian (let alone feminist). But they did have a commitment to the democratic Republic.

The ideologues also supported Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt, something that leads Israel, their admirer, into a surprising defense of this early imperialist venture. He acknowledges that Napoleon hoped above all to challenge Britain’s hegemony in the East. But he adds, none too convincingly, that “the French sought to emancipate Egypt from her enslavement to tyranny, religion, ignorance, and the Turk, and improve the lives, economy, and society of the Egyptians.” Napoleon, he writes, “sincerely nurtured plans for harmonious friendship,” but his efforts to bring “revolutionary Enlightenment” to Egyptians “failed entirely with the Muslims.”

The most important group for Israel, however, is the one that briefly dominated France at the height of the Revolution. This was the so-called Brissotin or Girondin faction, of whom the most important members were the intellectual and journalist Jacques-Pierre Brissot and the philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet. Although active in revolutionary affairs from the start—and more genuinely radical than either Sieyès or Mirabeau—they only came to real political prominence in the winter of 1791–1792, when they led calls for France to declare war on its neighbors and spread revolutionary ideas beyond its borders. Historians have endlessly debated the extent to which the Brissotins constituted an organized political faction, and whether they held consistent political ideas.

But Brissot and Condorcet themselves had undeniable political importance, and a credible case can be made that they embraced a wider creed of universal rights than almost any previous Western political figures. Both were early supporters of granting full civil rights to French Jews and worked toward the emancipation of black slaves in France’s Caribbean colonies. Condorcet in particular was an early and enthusiastic advocate of women’s political rights. He also initially drafted the never-implemented French Constitution of 1793, the most expansively democratic such document produced up to that point in history, which Israel examines in the strongest and most original chapter of Revolutionary Ideas.

The Brissotins had a vicious rivalry with the political faction called the Montagne (for their habit of taking the highest seats in the National Convention). Led by Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Marat, the Montagne had close ties to the popular activists known as the sans-culottes, and supported their agenda of price controls on staple products and harsh repression of suspected counterrevolutionaries. The Brissotins, by contrast, developed sources of support in provincial cities and eschewed Montagnard populism.

By the spring of 1793 the two sides had fallen into a death struggle in which each accused the other of treason and counterrevolution. The Brissotin deputy Maximin Isnard (who, incidentally, first proposed the creation of the Committee of Public Safety, which later helped direct the Terror) declared at one point that if sans-culotte insurrections continued, then “Paris will be annihilated, and men will search the banks of the Seine for signs of the city.” Finally, in the late spring, heavily armed sans-culottes surrounded the National Convention and forced it to expel the Brissotin members. The Montagne, now triumphant, showed their enemies no mercy. Brissot and many of his allies died on the guillotine. Condorcet went into hiding after being pronounced guilty by the Convention of the capital crime of denouncing the constitution that replaced his own. After he was caught, he took poison and committed suicide.

Jonathan Israel admires the Brissotins enormously, and does not have a critical word to say about them. “They were, in fact,” he writes, “the founders of the modern human rights tradition, black emancipation, women’s rights, and modern representative democracy…the first organized champions of democratic, rights-based, secular modernity.” He considers their fall an unmitigated tragedy, which very nearly led to the complete extinction of their cherished causes (the Ideologues’ revival of these causes being partial at best, and crushed in its turn by Napoleon’s 1799 coup d’état). Israel quotes copiously and uncritically throughout the book from their newspapers and memoirs and speeches. Indeed, it is not going too far to say that these works constitute his most important source. By contrast, he reviles the “Montagnards,” Robespierre especially, and uncritically repeats the Brissotins’ invective against them. Robespierre had “debased” and “half-baked” ideas. He lusted for dictatorship, and his personality was characterized by “megalomania, paranoia, and vindictiveness.”

Israel is, in fact, quite credulous when it comes to Brissotin accusations against the Montagne. One striking example appears in his treatment of the notorious September Massacres in the late summer of 1792. Upon the news that the Prussian army had broken through French lines and was marching on Paris, crowds of sans-culottes stormed the prisons and killed at least 1,200 alleged counterrevolutionaries. Afterward, the Brissotins and the Montagne accused each other of instigating the slaughter. Israel admits that “little documentary evidence survives proving the premeditated complicity of leading Montagnard politicians” (for “little,” read “none”). But just ten pages later he casually writes of “the Montagne’s obvious complicity.” Incidentally, while historians have established that nearly all adult male Parisians of the revolutionary era could read and write, Israel here refers blithely to “gangs of illiterate Parisians” who had supposedly fallen under Robespierre’s spell.

Overall, too much of Israel’s argument depends on this unconvincing use of evidence. Against nearly all other historians of the Revolution, he insists that his heroes Sieyès and Mirabeau “in the main” rejected “the principle of monarchy” from 1789 on, without quoting a single line from them to support his allegations (or fully confronting the fact that Mirabeau became a close, paid confidant of Louis XVI). Israel claims that another of his heros, the writer Volney, had an “especially prominent” role in pre-revolutionary agitation in Brittany while citing nothing other than Volney’s own writings. He claims that “many eyewitnesses agreed” with a prominent Brissotin’s attack on the Montagne while citing only the attack itself.

Then there is the question of what he calls Robespierre’s “dictatorship”—one of the hoariest counterrevolutionary legends about the French Revolution. Robespierre had enormous influence in the Jacobin Society whose branches extended through the country. He served on the twelve-member Committee of Public Safety, which, along with the Committee of General Security, organized ferocious repression during the Terror. For much of the Terror, Robespierre was the dominant figure on the Committee of Public Safety and used the position to purge many of his enemies and rivals in the larger political universe.

But the Committee was a volatile and contentious body, and Robespierre was often too sick to attend its meetings—his most recent biographer, Peter McPhee, portrays him as a physical and emotional wreck in the spring of 1794, when the Terror was most intense. No serious historian of the French Revolution of the past century has accepted the idea that Robespierre ever exercised a true personal dictatorship, and Israel has no new evidence to present on the subject. Nonetheless, he accepts the Brissotins’ accusations that Robespierre did, in fact, become a dictator—a term he never defines, and which therefore inescapably comes freighted with twentieth-century connotations. In keeping with his belief that the Montagne’s “authoritarian populism” foreshadowed fascism, he even refers to the purge of the Brissotins in the spring of 1793 as “Robespierre’s Putsch.” As usual, he gives the sans-culottes no credit for independent action, and without clear evidence assumes that they acted at Robespierre’s instigation.

It is, in the end, impossible to accept an interpretation of the French Revolution that takes sides so completely with one group of its actors, and that is based so heavily on their own highly polemical writings. The sheer volume of Israel’s research is impressive, but when it mostly reflects such a narrowly partisan point of view, what does it really amount to? Israel certainly gives us reasons to admire many things about Mirabeau, Sieyès, and the Brissotins, but he is too ready to cast them as principled, idealistic intellectuals. The overwhelming evidence is that most of them were first and foremost politicians. They compromised, made dubious and sometimes corrupt bargains, indulged in hyperbole, and not infrequently lied through their teeth to get what they wanted. Condorcet was largely an exception to this rule—an authentic visionary who came closest of any of the revolutionaries to Israel’s ideal. But one man does not make a movement. And it is also a fact that all of the Brissotins, in large part for their own domestic political advantage, advocated a European war that would last, on and off, for twenty-three years and cost millions of lives.

Israel has the confidence to say that nearly all other historians of the subject have been wrong. But that same confidence has kept him from evaluating his evidence with the necessary critical eye. And it has also kept him from giving serious consideration to the thought that anything other than a certain elevated set of ideas might have driven such a vast and complicated upheaval, while leading him to treat most of the men and women who actually fought its battles with unfortunate condescension.

It is still, in one sense, very easy to sympathize with Jonathan Israel. “Democratic, rights-based, secular modernity” looks very frail of late. The “color revolutions” and the Arab Spring, which ignited such strong hopes that revolutionary action might yet have positive effects in the world, have so far mostly trickled out into the sands of cynical disillusion. How inspiring to think that the Enlightenment values we cherish today once had conscious, courageous defenders. How tempting to think of their death struggle against their enemies as a simple duel between good and evil, and to imagine them as martyrs from whose graves “a glorious Phantom may/Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day,” as Shelley wrote.

But history does not have the neatness, or the moral clarity, of conspiracy fiction. There was no Great Copt plotting out the events of the French Revolution and driving it forward. And, alas, there was no unified, coherent radical Enlightenment either—at least not as Jonathan Israel has imagined it.