With a bit of massaging and cherry-picking, many major episodes in history from the Enlightenment forward fit into the mainstream narrative of liberal progress pitted against hateful reactionary resistance. The plethora of endless, oversimplified representations of the Civil War, for instance, advance this narrative. So too does the legacy of World War II and the ensuing Cold War, in which the Nazis were presented as a kind of radical right, and even the Georgian socialist Stalin was recast as a proto-Putin Russian nationalist by establishment pundits.
By contrast, the liberal narrators of mass media and public education struggle with the French Revolution. The Jacobins, who eventually came to define the Revolution and directed the sadistic mass executions of thousands of their countrymen, were leftist fanatics. From the first Bastille Day to Thermidor, horror after horror was perpetrated in France in the name of equality, reason, democracy, and progress. Rather than carrying out an inquisition against members of a particular religion, the Revolution saw religion itself come under brutal persecution—this time from atheism. So it is unsurprising that American discourse tends to gloss over the French Revolution.
Yet there is much worth examining, and it is to be hoped that Regnery’s new book Gateway to the French Revolution, edited by Anna Vincenzi, will bring some of it to light. By juxtaposing the writings of three preeminent critics of the French Revolution—Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, and Friedrich Gentz—this collection highlights how counterrevolutionary thought applies to the dilemmas of our day.
While no doubt familiar to most readers, Edmund Burke surely merits renewed attention through the republication of his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke’s distinct idea of tolerance is worth considering in an age of empty rhetoric about tolerance from those who have birthed a relentless “cancel culture.” Even as he distances himself from the increasing spirit of Enlightenment skepticism and irreverence, Burke repudiates the notion that liberal indifference is the only alternative to endless, miserable wars of religion.
“That those persons should tolerate all opinions, who think none to be of estimation, is a matter of small merit,” he notes. At the same time, he explains that religious preference and a religious establishment do not automatically entail persecution: “Violently condemning neither the Greek nor the Armenian, nor, since heats are subsided, the Roman system of religion, we prefer the Protestant; not because we think it has less of the Christian religion in it, but because, in our judgment, it has more. We are Protestants, not from indifference, but from zeal.” The best sort of Englishmen “tolerate, not because they despise opinions, but because they respect justice.”
As for the question of abstract right, Burke considers how the Girondins appropriated all the Catholic Church’s assets in France with the stroke of a pen, and contrasts their approach with that of Henry VIII—“one of the most decided tyrants in the rolls of history”—whose seizure of monastic property was limited by the concrete conventions of English common law. For Henry, “exaggerations, and falsehoods” were needed to legitimize the looting of English monasteries.
“Had fate reserved him to our times,” Burke concludes wryly, “four technical terms would have done his business, and saved him all this trouble; he needed nothing more than one short form of incantation—‘Philosophy, Light, Liberality, the Rights of Men.’” Just as the bravest soldiers are not necessarily those who speak the loudest about valor and courage, the most just societies are not necessarily the ones which rely upon beautiful-sounding abstractions. In the case of France, at any rate, such abstractions merely served to cover over appalling abuses and lawlessness.
Count Joseph de Maistre’s “Essay on the Generative Principle of Constitutions” still applies as a wry potshot at the Enlightenment outlook that undergirds our world: “The unsuspecting, overweening self-confidence of the eighteenth century balked at nothing, and I do not believe it produced a single stripling of any talent who did not make three things when he left school: an educational system, a constitution, and a world.”
Maistre’s claim is that the Revolution was the inevitable result of a fixation with written constitutions and the naïve conviction that an entirely new, functional social order could be called into existence ex nihilo through a document composed by a set of intellectuals. While his critique aimed at those who had repeatedly purported to reinvent France, Maistre would hardly have been surprised by the many drastic upheavals that have marked American history. No stability is to be found in mere paper, he argued.
So the relevance of the French Revolution to America today cannot be overstated. In 1789, the philosophes promised that mankind would be free once all the authoritarian impediments to individual liberty had been torn down—or, as a fashionable saying of the day had it, once the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest. We now have a broad understanding that assures us that once the oppressive forces of family, community, and human sexuality have been steamrolled, we shall each be able to conjure up a private, individualized utopia.
The realization that man is a social creature and cannot be happy alone has been blotted out by a resentment toward authority and limitations, which ultimately becomes a bitter grudge against God. This is the same grudge Maistre observed in the Revolution’s literary precursors:
It is a mortal hatred, the tone of anger and often of fury. The writers of that period, at least the most distinguished among them, no longer treat Christianity as an unimportant human error. They pursue it like a formidable enemy. They oppose it to the last extreme. It is a war to the death. What would seem incredible, if our own eyes had not seen the sad proofs of it, is that several of these men, who call themselves philosophers, advanced from hatred of Christianity to personal hatred of its Divine Author.
Today we have ironical devil-worshippers frolicking in the public square; back then, the Enragées blasphemously decked out Notre Dame Cathedral as the Temple of Reason and found it amusing to water donkeys using communion chalices. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Translated by none other than John Quincy Adams, Friedrich Gentz’s book The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution seeks to distance the French Revolution from its American counterpart, a task American conservatives should surely appreciate. It is often argued that America is a fundamentally liberal if not leftist regime, and that true conservatism is therefore inherently un-American.
To this, Gentz would answer with an emphatic “no,” explaining that the French and American Revolutions differed not only in degree but in kind: “The relations between the inhabitants of a distant colony, and the government of the mother country, is never to be compared in all respects with the relation between the government and their immediate subjects. In the former there always lies something strained, something equivocal, something unnatural.” By 1776, British Americans were more distinctively American than British, and they owed more to their own communities and institutions than to England.
Moreover, Gentz insists, the American conflict was “merely a defensive revolution,” whereas the destruction of the French social, religious, and political order “was from beginning to end, in the highest sense of the word, an offensive revolution.” In other words, the American Revolution is better understood as a War for Independence—a war of secession. The colonists were not so much interested in overthrowing the British monarchy as they were in seceding from an empire governed by aliens. And when these former colonists set about framing the United States Constitution, they avoided the folly of their French revolutionary counterparts by contenting themselves with the clarification and harmonization of an order of states already extant.
One thing which all three contributors to this volume teach is the fatal weakness of what passes for contemporary natural law discourse. Whenever natural law is invoked now, it is always by conservatives, but in such a way as to appeal to liberal principles such as human rights, a.k.a. the rights of man.
The point is not to reject the concept of natural law or even human rights but to question even the mainstream “conservative” understanding of them. In common usage, human rights refers to the right of the individual to pursue self-actualization over and against the limits that might be placed upon him by communities, traditions, and institutions. From there, it is but a short step toward demanding that all communities, traditions, and institutions be drastically reconfigured to accommodate whatever aspirations the individual may have, however insane they may be. For if our vision of natural law does not also accord rights to communities, traditions, and institutions, then who is to say which aspirations are insane and which aren’t?
