Lecture delivered at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan
February 3, 2000

 

Why bother to compare the American and French revolutions? What do events that occurred so long ago have to do with us, now or in the future? Even granting that the American Revolution still matter, as we live under most of the provisions of the 1787 Constitution, framed in its aftermath, why should we still care about the French? Why compare their old debacle with the longstanding success of American republicanism?

Because the French and not the American Revolution is often regarded as the modern revolution, the precursor of the Leninist and Maoist revolutions, themselves long believed to be harbingers of the future world order. Whereas the American Revolution was merely a political revolution (the claim goes), the French Revolution was also a social revolution—so much more profound.

The collapse of Soviet communism dampened this enthusiasm. But even after the Soviet empire collapsed, the new Russian regime has rejected the commercial republicanism or liberal democracy of America and western Europe. Not only Russia, but a number of the regimes founded in the following decades can be classified as what one scholar has called illiberal democracy—regimes in which real democratic elections are held but the economic and civil liberties that we associate with republicanism scarcely exist. Russian Acting President Vladimir Putin has said, “all possible support for new Russia’s democratic institutions is the only guarantee” for “set[ting] up an insurmountable barrier. to the dark past.” But he added, “Russia will not soon become, if ever, a second copy of, say, the United States or England, where liberal values have deep historical traditions…. Among us, the state, its institutions and structures, have always played an exclusively guiding role in the life of the country and the people. A strong state for Russians is not an anomaly, not something that must be fought for or against, but on the contrary is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator an driving force of all change.” ‘Illiberal democracy’ resembles the French revolutionary regimes far more closely than the American regime.

Finally, we compare the French and American revolutions because we want to know not only that new republics differ so sharply from ourselves, but why they do so. Considering the American and French revolutions together—events thoroughly studied by generations of scholars—can serve as an exercise in how to ‘do’ comparative politics. Comparing and contrasting the social, political, and economic institutions of one country with those of another, comparing and contrasting the kinds of statesmen who rule those countries and the kinds of citizens (and subjects” who inhabit them, can help us to isolate ‘probable causes’ of political life—why things turn out for the better or the worse–and so guide us as citizens and as scholars in trying to understand the world.

To think about these two revolutions, the first thing we need to know is: What, exactly, is a revolution? ‘Revolution’ is a metaphorical word. To understand it, one must know what it is that has revolved. Aristotle explains that it is the regime of a country that changes in a revolution. A regime or politeia is the organization of the most authoritative offices of the country, the ones that shape its distinctive way of life, serving the purposes set by those who rule it. The system of authoritative institutions is founded and embodied by the politeuma or ruling body—those individuals who wield authority in the country. Aristotle classifies regimes into six types based on quantitative criteria (rule of the one, the few, or the many) and qualitative criteria (the good and the bad). Within each of these types there can be many sub-types, based on what we moderns would call socioeconomic factors: for example, a democracy consisting mostly of farmers and warriors will differ significantly from one consisting mostly of artisans and traders. A revolution, then, is a change of political form, a change of kind and not merely of degree: from oligarchy to democracy, democracy to tyranny, and so on.

To Aristotle a revolution did not involve seizing something called ‘the state.’ There was little in the way of any permanent institutional structure to seize. Typically, one faction would overthrow another, establishing its own institutions and replacing the previous rulers. The ancient Greeks did not have a term like our ‘state.’

Various modern writers define ‘state’ variously. I define the modern state as a set of bureaucratic institutions, separated from the society it rules, a society occupying a clearly defined territory. A modern bureaucracy is a rule-bound, impersonal organization, as distinguished from the older governing organizations in which the allegiances were personal, based on patronage. A state also contrasts with a private corporation. General Motors has a centralized locus of authority and is assuredly bureaucratic, but it rules no territory, and it can only tell you what to do as long as you’re on the clock.

As objects separated from society, states are instruments desired by the ambitious. States are useful to states-men because states enable them to mobilize and concentrate the human and material resources of a given territory, for whatever purposes statesmen may conceive.

Beginning roughly in the year 1500, state-building in modernity has had several consequences that we now see all around us: extensive, uniform administration of large territories by central bureaucracies that have been expanded and regularized; a split between military and police functions; sophisticated systems of taxation and of finance; the disappearance of mercenaries, accompanied by civilian control of the military; the development of something called ‘nationalism,’ sometime by states in order better to rule social groups, sometimes in reaction against states by those social groups. The French Revolution serves as an excellent example of state-building. In 1789, the French monarchy controlled a fairly large state, by the standards of the day: 50,000 men staffed Louis XVI’s bureaucracy. By 1796, French bureaucrats numbered nearly 250,000—most of them appointed during the period of the Terror, in 1792-93. This apparatus has endured throughout the many changes of regime subsequent to 1796.

The state complicates but does not erase class classical regime theory. A polity may still be tyrannical or monarchic, oligarchic or aristocratic, ‘mixed’ or democratic. But the state may persist through such regime changes, making for a remarkable sight: The political regime may undergo revolution but the state itself may as a consequence change or stay the same in size and strength.

When speaking of state organization, one needs terms in addition to those descriptive of ‘regimes.’ With states the key terms are not ‘the one, the few, and the many’ but: 1) degree of centralization; 2) degree of bureaucratization; 3) size of territory ruled. The major political feature of modernity, ‘stateness,’ complicates revolution considerably. Revolutionaries now seize control of ‘the state.’ They do so ostensibly to serve certain social constituencies according to the purposes and the standard of moral judgment revolutionaries actually seek to enforce. Once in control of the state, revolutionaries become part of a different ‘class,’ so to speak, namely, the state’s men and the state’s women. They seize the state but the state in a way seizes them. Their interests may now differ from the interests of the very social classes from which they arose. When Lord Acton warns that power tends to corrupt, he may be considering a symptom of just this phenomenon.

While the French Revolution continued the monarchic state-building project under several regimes, ending with that of Napoleon, the American Revolution ended such a project. To be sure, our revolution resulted in a national government, a government strengthened between 1787 and 1791 by the framing and ratification of the U. S. Constitution, and for several years thereafter by the able and prestigious administration of George Washington. But this government was hardly a state apparatus by European standards. Such an apparatus was not fully consolidated in this country until the New Deal, and to this day it is not as extensive as its European counterparts.

What is more, whereas both American and French revolutions were violent, and resulted in the confiscation of the property of the political enemies by the revolutionaries, the French Revolution was really several revolutions in a row—from the liberal regime of 1789-91, to the terror-driven regime of Robespierre, to the liberal but somewhat authoritarian regime of the Directorate a couple of years later, and finally to the orderly tyranny of Napoleon in the early years of the nineteenth century. Each of the first three of these regimes disposed of its predecessor violently, causing the Spaniard Goya to paint his sickening image of the revolutionary monster which devours its children.

Why do we see this nexus of violent regime instability and state-building in France, contrasting with the freer, more stable outcome in America? (In this, of course one must acknowledge the catastrophe of the U. S. Civil War; nonetheless, over the two centuries following their revolutions, Americans had a less troubled political life, with no thoroughgoing regime changes.)

American conservatives have long had an intelligent answer to this question, written in 1800 by the Prussian Friedrich Gentz, who by then was serving as an advisor to Prince Metternich of Austria. John Quincy Adams translated Gentz’s book, The French and American Revolutions Compared, as a sort of very high-level political campaign pamphlet. His father’s opponent in the 1800 presidential election, Thomas Jefferson, had enthused over the French Revolution several years longer than had been wise, and Gentz’s book must have looked like a pretty good snowball to aim at the liberty cap of the Sage of Monticello.

Gentz argues as follows: First, the American revolutionaries were colonists; that matters because the rights of sovereignty of an imperial power are so often dubious. States found colonies for the benefit of the state, not for the benefit of the colonists. By contrast, the French revolutionaries overthrew a king on his native soil; major reforms could have been legally undertaken, but not without the king’s consent, in accordance with the constitution. Instead, one group—albeit by far the largest one, the Third Estate, the commoners—declared itself to be representative of the whole nation. A part that claims to be the whole is really a faction, a usurper. Therefore, Gentz concludes, the difference between the American and French revolutions was the difference between right and wrong, legitimate and illegitimate.

Second, the American Revolution was defensive, a matter of stern necessity. The revolutionaries demanded no new rights, exercising a “glorious moderation,” sticking to “a fixed and definite purpose,” namely, independence under the rule of law. Because it was factitious, the French revolution was offensive, animated by demands for new rights hitherto imagined only by philosophes and publicists. It was not a moderate but an “insatiate revolution,” always pushing ahead to demand more, always destroying everything in its path in a march toward “the unbounded space of a fantastic arbitrary will.”

Third, the American revolutionaries maintained governmental continuity. The colonial legislatures remained, while the monarch and his colonial governors were replaced by governors elected by the people or their representatives. The American revolutionaries thus avoided “the deadly passion for making political experiments with abstract theories and untried systems.” In France, each faction had its own conception of what the revolution should be. The revolutionaries there appealed to abstract natural rights rather than to the strict limits of constitutional law. Such grand appeals to big ideas, fueling and fueled by factionalism, resulted in civil war. Further fueled by the fear of reprisal for their crimes, the revolutionaries’ passions turned by cruel, resulting in the Terror of Robespierre and a series of offensive wars against much of Europe—wars that, in the years after the publication of Gentz’s book, would see Napoleon conquer, then lose, the continent.

Looking back from the perspective gained by two hundred years, Gentz’s analysis holds up very well in many respects. Especially telling is his observation on the moderation of the American Founders, their respect for law even as they revolutionized.

Nonetheless, Gentz evades or minimizes one key point. In replacing a king with elected governors, the Americans asserted popular sovereignty. In this the American revolutionaries were one with the French. Both upheld popular sovereignty limited by natural and civil rights, “the rights of man and the citizen,” as the French styled them. The problem in France was rather a matter of emphasis. The French declaration says that “ignorance, forgetfulness or contempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments.” This is as silly and doctrinaire a statement as might be imagined, leaving no role in politics for prudence or ‘common sense,’ the ability to establish and maintain institutions that secure natural and civil rights. In this, the Americans and the French parted company. Popular sovereignty framed by natural and civil rights is no political impossibility, as the Americans proved. But you couldn’t prove that by the French of the 1790s, or for many decades to come.

This corrected version of Gentz’s analysis is as good as far as it goes. But why did the two sets of revolutionaries diverge at this point? What inclined the Americans toward a politics of prudence, the French away from it? Here we need to look not so much at ideas—although I’ll do that, too—but at structures—social, political, and economic institutions.

To look at those structures, you need to know something about the development of the French state. As Tocqueville observed in The Old Regime and the Revolution, French state-building began centuries before the revolution, under the monarchy. State-building occurred under conditions of tension between the landed, titled aristocrats and the French kings. The aristocrats needed the kings’ troops to help control the peasants, who periodically rebelled against aristocratic exactions. But the kings also competed with the aristocrats for the revenues to be extracted from the peasants.

In contrast, there were no native-born American aristocratic or monarchic lines among the English settlers. Class distinctions, yes, but no estates, no social groups ‘born to rule.’ Also, America had no peasants, although of course there were slaves. As for warfare, which so often built up the state in Europe, much of it was conducted by colonists imbued with the English tradition of the militia—citizen-soldiers, not professionals or conscripts.

Let me separate these two points: warfare and socioeconomic antagonism. With respect first to war, the German historian Otto von Hintze wrote, “Absolutism and militarism go together on the [European] continent just as self-government and militia do in England.” State-sponsored standing armies were used by monarchs in order to extract revenues from subjects and to acquire new territories, new subjects, new revenues, from foreign rivals. Monarchs initially had no way to govern conquered territories directly, but the aristocratic allies they employed for this purpose had aristocratic self-interest too prominently in mind for monarchic tastes. Gradually, monarchs began to solve this problem by putting their own hired officials into the provinces—by establishing a centrally-controlled proto-bureaucracy—and by separating police from armies, thus freeing the latter for more wars and regularizing the collection of taxes and the enforcement of tax collection. This formula eventually succeeded, reaching its apogee in France under Louis XIV, more than a century before the revolution. Civil and foreign war helped monarchs to build the absolutist, monarchic state. No wonder the American revolutionaries were suspicious of the civilian agents sent by George III “to eat out our substance,” as the Declaration of Independence puts it, and of standing armies as well.

What is more (and often overlooked), the peasants who were both the foundation of the economy and the ones who were being squeezed, enjoyed some political self-government, via the village assemblies. Peasants could, as we now say, ‘network’ among themselves. Given their subordination to the various armed classes above them, such networking usually led only to violent but ineffective rebellions. But given a crisis among their rulers, they had the basis for an organized revolt.

Under the process of state-building, French monarchs extracted revenues for warfare and political control by offering royal privileges in exchange for those revenues—guild privileges, sale of offices, municipal privileges, and the like. Once granted, a privilege cannot be granted again; revenue from the sale of an office is what policy wonks of today call a ‘one-shot revenue enhancer.’ Therefore, it’s not just a play on words to say that there is a certain static quality to statist economics. Entrepreneurial dynamism need not apply. The only entrepreneurialism is seen in the state-builder himself, who ‘grows’ the state in order to ‘grow’ his income. In addition, in times of economic distress, discontent falls not on ‘the economy’ but on the state itself. Statism thus tends to turn on itself, undercutting its own authority and its own revenues even as it attempts to gather authority and revenue to itself.

Absolutism contradicted itself. It encouraged men to think of France as one thing. At the same time, it needed to use the carrot of privilege and the stick of military coercion in a policy of divide and rule, of disunity. When the tensions so caused were strained by the economic crises of the late 1780s, the regime left itself vulnerable to challenges from within and ‘from below.’ The Revolution began as an aristocratic attempt to capture the state—a modern version of the factional struggles that tore ancient Rome. But the Third Estate, especially its middle-class segment, soon co-opted the revolution, allying itself with the urban poor and the simmering peasantry.

So that’s why the French Revolution started. But why did this large set of social groups embark on a career of extremism, unlike the Americans?  The answer has several levels: political thought, political experience, foreign policy, economic class, and religion are the most significant.

On the level of political thought, the French never solved the problem of faction. In the tenth Federalist, James Madison shows how faction might be used to stabilize, not ruin, a republican regime by the means of such institutions as representation, division of power, and federalism. The French weren’t listening. Almost to a man, they insisted on cultivating one national will expressed in a unicameral legislature. In a way, they needed to reinforce unity more than the Americans did, because French social divisions were estates, not classes—sharper divisions, legally enforced, tied up with political authority. But the French attempt to replace royal patriarchy with republican fraternity simply could not work in such a large territory, among such a large and diverse population. The French national assembly was a novelty, with no ties to, and therefore no support from or authority over, local governments. In this it resembled the first American constitution, the Articles of Confederation. A federal structure like that seen in the American Constitution wasn’t considered, and would have been difficult to design and to establish; that structure is what makes Madison’s extended republic possible. ‘Fraternity’ was the inadequate ideological substitute for the resolutely non-ideological pursuit of happiness.

By contrast, the Americans got rid of the vestiges of anti-republican politics by breaking free of the king—who kept his head and his throne—and exiling his Tory allies to Canada. Class conflict, rather than estates-conflict, more easily lends itself to Madisionianism. Class conflict can lead to balanced sharing of power; estates-conflict more likely produces factions with claims to rule that are more rigidly exclusionary.

On the level of political experience, both the French and the American revolutionaries featured young lawyers and government officials rather prominently. But the French revolutionaries had experience only in the politics of a statist monarchy. The Americans had extensive experience in the republican politics of routine colonial life. As a result, when the French became self-governing, many of them simply did not know what to do. They had loved ‘Enlightenment’ from afar, worshipped ‘Reason’ as a goddess, but had no practice at the self-government they preached. As the Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero argues, such inexperience led to fearfulness; fearfulness led to the commission of political crimes; crimes led to guilt and fear of retaliation; these led to the Terror. In a psychological pattern that became familiar in this past century, fear among the rulers resulted in state terrorism against the population. French politics remained prey to regime-threatening factionalism, for the next 180 years. In the United States, the quasi-aristocratic Southern planter class very nearly sundered the state, for precisely the same reason; they posed a regime threat to commercial republicanism in North America.

On the level of foreign policy, a further, equally futile attempt to forge national unity was warfare, a standard ploy of monarchs commended to ‘the prince’ by Machiavelli. The French republicans waged offensive war against a continent full of monarchs, even as French kings had done. Here again, fear ruled: The revolutionaries invented something very much like what we call ‘total war’—complete with mass conscription, maximum feasible mobilization of all national resources, and propaganda—all out of the fear that France might become another Poland, divided and conquered by enemies of the republic foreign and domestic.
These wars required substantial revenues; revenue extraction provoked popular resistance, which provoked more state-building. The revolution in the name of the people was advanced against the people by the suppression of political clubs and local militia. In the end, this only elevated Napoleon Bonaparte, a new monarch at the head of a still larger state apparatus.

America designedly fought no major wars after the revolution, until 1812.  No less a military hero than Washington established this wise policy. Both the American and French revolutionaries invoked the imagery of Roman republicanism. But the ‘Roman’ imagery associated with Washington linked him to Cincinnatus, the man called from his farm to serve the republic who, having served, returned to his plow.

On the economic level, Karl Marx got it somewhat wrong. The French Revolution was not a ‘bourgeois revolution’ in the same sense as the revolutions in England and America. To be sure, the revolution did establish a political economy based on private property rights. However, the revolution also confirmed France as a statist country with a bourgeoisie largely uninvolved in industry or finance. Although the populations of both countries were mostly agrarian, French farmers we peasants revolting against landlord-aristocrats, and then against the extractive French state. Independent and commercially-oriented, American farmers rebelled first against a foreign state, then against American debt-holders, but lacked any moral purchase with which to resists George Washington or Congress, whom they had helped to elect.

Finally, on the level of religion, it is customary to observe that the close association between the Catholic Church and the French monarchy made anticlericalism and even atheism an all-too-attractive alternative to what might be termed the spiritual side of absolutism. Absolute monarchy made Christianity itself suspect. The reality is more complex. Most of the more ardent atheists were renegade aristocrats, the Marquis de Sade being the most conspicuous example. Among the middle classes, however, most revolutionaries were Christians, whether Catholics or Protestants. A minority were atheists or agnostics. They weren’t much interests in libertinism à la Sade. Many were secular moralists who wanted somehow to retain much of Christian morality without its theological underpinnings. The kind of military discipline required by this not-very-bourgeois middle-class republic required moral discipline.

The problem arose in 1790, when the National Assembly voted not only to abolish tithes, cutting off Church income, but also to reorganize the Church dioceses and to make clerics salaried state officials. That is, the republic sought to entwine the Church in the state structure more tightly than the monarchy had done. As a result, with respect to education, eventually the regime attempted to replace the parish priest with the local schoolmaster. The philosophe Condorcet calls the teachers instituteurs, which means agents of the founding morality of the republic. The republican schoolteacher would then be an agent of the state operating locally, inculcating the proper secular republican virtues in the young.

Needless to say, all of this attracted the unfavorable attention of the clergy and their many faithful adherents throughout the country. It fueled passions on all sides, encouraging everyone to think of politics as an irreconcilable spiritual conflict.

In the United States, where the clergy very often supported the revolution on the basis of a Biblically-oriented version of natural and civil rights, where the established, Anglican Church had much less strength than the Catholic Church of France—hardly any at all in many colonies, which had been founded by religious dissenters—thee was usually no sharp conflict between Enlightenment types, who could afford to remain discreet, and a generally, though not entirely, pious citizenry. The American Founding saw a collaboration between such genuine Christians as John Dickinson, John Jay, and the clergy, and such Deists and secularists as Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams. As for the schools, they remained largely in the hands of religious men for a long time, because religiosity in America simply did not contradict republicanism.

To answer my question—why republican France saw simultaneous instability and state-building, while republican America saw a civil war delayed long enough so that a resolute president and his fellow Unionists could restore the republic and preserve the national state—I have admired arguments advanced by Friedrich Gentz, who points to the moderation and legitimacy of the American Revolution. I have supplemented Gentz’s analysis in two main ways:

First: the class differences in American versus the conflict of estates in France. Because estates are imbricated in a statist or proto-statist structure, every major social conflict threatens the regime itself. Class animosities, by contrast, are often directed not at ‘the state’ at all, and often have little or no revolutionary potential. Note well: many of the worst revolutions of the twentieth century, and many of the worst revolutionary outcomes, occurred in countries with traditions of imposing state structures—Russia, Germany, China.

Second, the socioeconomic bases of the American Revolution were agrarian and commercial; the socioeconomic bases of the French revolution were agrarian and military—military because the state-building monarchic regime preceded the revolution. The Roman-republican militarist imagery of the French revolutionaries reflected and glorified this condition, a legacy of the statism or proto-statism induced by the saliency of Machiavellianism in Europe, crowded with countries formidable to one another. The Americans faced less dangerous enemies on their continent, needing less ‘state’ than Europeans. The state-building aspect of Machiavellianism made less sense here.

In the eighteenth century, a story well known to students of the ancient world was the clash between the two great republics of Rome and Carthage. Rome was a military republic, a regime of the citizen-soldier. Carthage was a commercial republic. The French attempt to modernize the military republicanism of Rome led to disaster, eventually to Napoleon’s career, which might be described as Caesarism on amphetamines. The attempt to modernize the commercial republicanism of Carthage, seen in America and more gradually in England, led to a surprising result: the commercial republics, unlike the ancient republic, have enjoyed victories in the major wars they’ve fought against regime enemies. The English themselves in the 1780s, then the American Confederates, then the monarchic Germans of the First World War and the German tyranny of the Second, and finally the communist and eastern Europe all lost military/political confrontations with regimes they believed too sot, too money-mad, too unsoldierly to fight.

The governance of faction is the practical problem of political life. On this, the statist polities appear more formidable than they are. State power, the ability to impose and to intrude, generates opposition precisely targeted against the political order itself. It sharpens factionalism even as it attempts to smother it. By contrast, regimes of liberty diffuse opposition and moderate or at least redirect political passions. Given the massive increase of technological power that modern life encourages, and the accordingly massive increase in the power of the state, the political discoveries of the American revolutionaries will continue to prove indispensable in the twenty-first century, the century in which you will raise families, govern, and engage others in the American regime of self-government.