My summer reading for 2025 was Simon Schama’s very influential 1989 book Citizens, a Chronicle of the French Revolution. Not surprisingly, I was led to this book by listening to The Rest is History podcast, which brings out the full array of colourful characters associated with this eventful period of history.
As will be known to those who study the history of the French Revolution, Schama disputes the claim that the revolution marked the rise of the bourgeoisie; rather, it appears as a form of inter-elite competition, albeit one fought over universal human values such as equality, liberty and fraternity. The category of “lawyer” became a particularly durable one that could engage both the supporters and the enemies of the revolution, based as much on what one had read (particularly Roman history) as any representation in the courts. Of course, the categories of revolution supporters and enemies shift considerably over time.
Schama notes that what is marked throughout the Revolutionary period is what he refers to as “the brutal competition between the powers of the state and the effervescence of politics” (p. xvii). This presents us with an important question regarding trust: why could the French Revolution not achieve closure? Why could it not establish a constitutional monarchy like what happened in the 1688 English Revolution? Nor could it establish a parliamentary system with checks and balances of the sort that characterised the American Revolution that was so influential in France.
The primacy of politics is central to the French Revolution. One of its most durable and insidious features is the proposition most vocally put forward by Robespierre that the Friends of the People may well be the Enemies of the People, and that patriotism may be the mask of despotism. At different times those who appeared to be the heroes of the revolution find themselves the enemies of the revolution to be disposed of by the guillotine.
At the centre of the revolution is the idea of La Patrie, the people. There are those who speak for the people and those who are the enemies of the people, and the people constitute both a form of popular sovereignty and a form of national identity. And it’s this tension between nationalism and populism, and between the powers of the parliament and the institutions of terror and public security, that mark the period from 1789.
The question is resolved only, ultimately, very violently, of what to do with the monarchy and to do with the churches. In retrospect, had there been some kind of settlement, could then perhaps some of the bloodshed would have been avoided by allowing the monarchs to go into exile and a new role for the churches?
It was noted that the lawyer category becomes a very durable occupational category over this period, and there’s some wonderful switching of allegiances. My favourite is Philippe Egalité, formerly Louis Phillippe II, Duke of Orleans, and one of the wealthiest men in France. who suddenly becomes a friend of the people and an enemy of the nobility. The French Revolution ultimately struggled to articulate its founding symbols, with the Festival of the Supreme Being of 1794, which proposed a new state religion based on civic virtue, being a very confused affair convened by Robespierre not long before he himself met the demise through the guillotine.
Schama’s book captures the extent to which the philosophical legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is quite central throughout the period. Rousseau provides both a concept of naturalism and a sense in which what would subsequently be referred to in sociology as the socialised self marks a kind of distortion from an original state of being. This becomes a recurring theme of European philosophy, most notably Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche around the question of what it means to be human in a society that constitutes individuals as social beings.
Rousseau also raises this recurring question of what it means to have a General Will and what it would involve for the individual will to be subordinated to the General Will. Is this the origins of tyranny, as the very influential readings of Edmund Burke and others suggested or is it providing the possibility for a collective society, as the Marxist interpretation has suggested. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, surely the most powerful legacy of the Revolution, is ambiguous on that question.
Finally, I noted the concept of philosophical universalism. When France decided to go to war in 1791, there was a perception that French troops would be welcomed as they came up against the troops of the Austro-Hungarian and Prussian empires and elsewhere because they were the bearers of common humanity and a glorious future. Now, this sounds very naive to us, but we can think forward over two centuries to the Wolfowitz Doctrine of the early 2000s, the idea that American troops would be welcomed in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, not simply as those deposing tyrannical leaders but as the bearers of a new kind of being.
This philosophical universalism, needless to say, has led us to many problems. Only with the rise of Napoleon were these issues fundamentally resolved in the direction of empire and governmentality. But of course, they are never resolved.
The legacy of the French Revolution remains a powerful one to this day, but one that remains very problematic in that it poses the question of what it would mean to have societal trust, short of a total transformation of all of society’s institutions.
