In Our Time - The French Revolution's Legacy

Episode Date: June 14, 2001

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French Revolution. In 1789 the Bastille was stormed, the King Louis XVI was put under national guard and the calendar was turned back to zero. The French Revolution began its upheavals in the name of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité.On this side of the English Channel there were those who thought it ‘bliss in that dawn to be alive’, but the statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke was not among them. He said, “The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever”.What was really the end of an age? What was the impact of this revolution on the culture of Europe? And did it really change political life in Britain for ever? With Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University; Anne Janowitz, Professor of Romantic Poetry at Queen Mary College, London;the nineteenth century historian Andrew Roberts.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In 1789, the Bastille was stormed. The King Louis XVIth was put under National Guard and the calendar was turned back to zero.

The French Revolution began its upheavals in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity. On this side of the English Channel, there were those who thought bliss it was that dawn to be alive, but the statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke wasn't among them. He said, the age of chivalry is gone, that of sophisters, economists and calculators have succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Was it really the end of an age? What was the impact of this revolution on the culture of Europe, and did it really change political life in Britain forever?

with me to discuss what kind of a watershed the French Revolution marked in the tide of history, especially in this country, is Stefan Kalini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University. He is currently working on a book of The Intellectuals in Britain and France. Anne Janowitz, Professor of Romantic Poetry at Queen Mary College London, who wrote Lyric and Labour in the Romantic tradition, and the 19th century historian, Andrew Roberts, who's currently working on a book on Napoleon and Wellington.

Anne Janovitz, can you set the scene for us about, British revolutionary culture say in around the 1780s, 10, 15 years before the French Revolution. What links were there, to start with, between the British and French, as it were, would be revolutionaries? Well, I think it's very important to realize that there was a domestic radical movement in England that begins centuries before in the idea of Anglo-Saxon freedoms and the notion of a freeborn Englishman that continues and develops in the 18th century, and that becomes, quite important around a series of radical campaigns in the second half of the 18th century, including the campaign for enfranchisement, the campaign for dissenters' rights in Parliament for civic entitlement.

Campaigns developed from cranky people coming from the countryside for land nationalization. The abolition movement... Can you give us some idea over the time? We talked about 1770s, 1770s, and 1780s. So when we think about... A land nationalization, something as radical as that. Yes, absolutely. So when we think about the impact of the French Revolution on English culture,

we tend to have a thought of Wordsworth wandering around in the countryside, musing on how heavenly it had been to be young in the period of the French Revolution. But in fact, to really think about the impact of the French Revolution on English political, cultural, and literary activity, I think you really have to turn to the city to, to the social urban experience, where the impact was really felt, it seems to me, as a catalyst for things that were already going on. So towards the end of the 18th century, let's say, just for roughness, at the last third, at the end of the period of the Enlightenment, there's a lot of, as it were, revolutionary thought around in England, particularly in the cities, especially in London.

And that corresponds with, in fact, there are corresponding societies with France. Well, in fact, one of the most extraordinary things about the... again, the impact of the idea of what was happening from the storming of the Bastille was that it brought together persons from all different walks of life and social backgrounds into groups, which is what happens in cities. People go to taverns, they talk to each other, they go to dinner parties, they talk to each other. And societies were formed, which were called the corresponding societies, which were set up as really as radical pen pals between London and Paris,

where people wrote to each other. In fact, the genre of what was called the friendly letter became a very political genre in the period. So in the corresponding society in London, you had radical intellectuals, you had people like Spence the Land Reformer, you had dissenters all talking to one another, which I think was an extremely socially and culturally radical activity.

Well, that gives us some idea of the bedding in before the revolution itself. Stefan Kalini, weeks after the storming of the Bastille, the wiggily, a Charles James Fox, wrote to a friend, quote, how much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world and how much the best. That's a very powerful statement, obviously. Why did he welcome it in such exultant and radical terms?

Well, I think there was a strong sense in Europe, outside France as a whole, that this really was one of the most dramatic and significant breaks in history. After all, France was, in some ways, the most powerful state and strongest monarchy in the 18th century in Europe, and the idea that it might be challenged by this kind of popular movement, although in 1789 it's worth saying, it's not yet a very broadly popular movement. It's on the whole still quite an aristocratic movement,

and the traditional elites who gather in Paris for these meetings are not really in any sense what we would recognize as leaders of a democratic movement. But nonetheless, they are challenging the autocracy, they are challenging the inherited privilege of the strongest state in the world. And I think it's worth saying that with somebody like Fox, he's drawing on a liberal British tradition which had prided itself on its constitutional monarchy. and so in some ways where Britain had been taken as the model for advanced political and constitutional arrangements in the 18th century,

particularly by French admirers actually, there was now the sense that this was going to be taken further and that this was an optimistic development, which of course, as I'm sure we'll discuss, then comes to grief in certain ways. But if you take Fox as the man who really welcomes it, the man on the other side quite quickly afterwards in response to the sermon by Price, Edmund Burke, with his reflections on the French Revolution, points out very sternly what he sees and he prophesised correctly, will be the terrible things that will happen as a consequence of this revolution and how harmful it is to Britain, to thought, and to Europe. Yes. Well, I think Burke, writing in 1790 and reflecting on the very first stages

of the French Revolution, does foresee largely correctly that what, What's being released here is in some ways a kind of uncontrollable force and a force for violence. Burt argues that politics is inherently a matter of pragmatic small adjustments to changing circumstances and that the attempt to begin, as it were, from scratch and to, by the light of pure reason, build up your constitution and to build up your social arrangements, and to scrap all the inherited and accumulated, diverse forms of social control and forms of social association that had existed, that this is going to be fatal.

This is going to remove the protections that individuals had found in what Burke famously called the little platoons of family and neighborhood and trade association and so on, and leave the individual exposed to the very very, very chill wind of a central and authoritarian state. And so Burke in part sees this as the defect, really, of attempting to apply rational principles to politics at all. Andrew Roberts, Burke seems keen to persuade the British people,

that French revolution is nothing like the glorious revolution that happened in Britain and England 100 years before. First of all, do you think he was right? and how persuasive were his arguments at the time? We'll talk about how long they lasted later, but how persuasive were they to the people he was addressing at that time? Well, I think that they were very persuasive because the Whig Revolution of 1688 was bloodless,

and even on the first day of the French Revolution, the guards of the Bastille were massacred. And so you had a sense that this was going to be a bloody, violent thing in France, whereas in 1688 the revolution that brought the Whigs to power and of course Burke was originally a wig were very, very different. He did, however, correctly see that there were much closer parallels with the 1649 revolution.

Obviously at the time of writing the reflections, he didn't know that the king would be decapitated as obviously Charles I had been. But the parallels there were an awful lot closer and he was able to spot those because he had the advantages of knowing what had happened in 1649. Do you think he was thought to, do you think that he was, his arguments were proved right, right, that's a big word, at the time, Andrew.

But his predictions, his predictions certainly were very quickly. But how, sorry, what I'm really what does, how did his arguments, how, how big a grip did they have on the British, particularly the, the power, those who ran power at the time? And was that because of the arguments or was that because of, if it was from our old enemy, France, and we were. turning against them and that sort of thing. Well, I think the predictions are important to take into account because as they slowly unfurled and actually came one after the other to be seen to be true, so the argument was strengthened, the arguments that he was making,

that we just heard earlier about the nature of civil society, man as a fallen being the politics of envy, if you like. These things were strengthened massively as time went on, and he had a tremendous influence on, conservative thought on the Pittite reaction. Pitt, of course, had become Prime Minister five years before the revolution took place, but he was just yet another politician of the day until the revolution. And then the backlash, the Tory backlash, as it were,

really dominated British politics until the fall of Liverpool in 1827. Can I just move to this with you, Janavitz. Can I just move to the third person in the sort of the receiving of the French Revolution? We had Fox, the greatest event, Burke, watch out, this is going to lead to terror and the European. And then we have Thomas Payne. You know, Burke lost the House of Commons debate on the French Revolution to Fox. And then Payne wrote that Burke, as he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick. How do you think that Payne won the argument and how did he win the argument then?

Well, I do think that the notion that Burke was proved right, and somehow that means his impact was most important. when he said what he says is not actually what happened culturally in England of the period. You had Fox, who became very close to dissenting movement for reform, and these more cranky street-level radicals, who, in fact, certainly up until the end of 1792, did in fact imagine, as Wordsworth said, that we were forerunners in a glorious course,

and that in fact what was happening in France was like the glorious revolution. And what was quite extraordinary, I think, about Payne's response to Burke was that Payne said, if you look at what happened in 1688, what you have to understand is that what it established was that it should be principles and not individual persons who are the bearers of the state. He said it should be reason and reason. not custom that determines how we govern and how we understand legislation. And for that reason,

it should be the present and not the past that determines how we understand how we want to make our lives politically and culturally. And this had an enormous resonance amongst persons who were not only interested in a democratic franchise, but who, having been shaped by and illuminated by the Enlightenment felt that these were all rational principles that in fact, if it were in case, in fact, the case that the Revolution of 1688 embodied these, then the French, what looked like it was going to be a constitutional monarchy would be the spreading of that. I think it's important to note that when we talk about the impact of the French Revolution on English culture, that there's an enormous impact of English culture

on the idea of the French Revolution. Fine. Can you briefly reply to that, Andrew? Then I want to take it forward. Just very briefly, yes, I agree with that. But the fact is that it held back things like franchise reform for 40 years. The reaction, the pittite reaction, was able to just wipe franchise reform off the political agenda for four decades until the 1830s,

which is on the agenda, I was on the agenda, on the radical side, and it did ideologize politics, but it was a disaster in the short term. Can I go back to France now? So there's the revolution, there's the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and so on. It's intended as an international document. What sort of international impact did it have? I think I'm going to confine it to this country,

because if we go around the rest of the world, at this stage, we won't have time to do it properly. So what does the impact of that have, coming from the message from France, we've had the reaction from this country, What about the message from France? Stefan. Well, I think it has a tremendous long-term impact.

I think what Anne Janowitz has said just now is right about the short-term situation. And we have to remember, I think, that we talk about the French Revolution, as though it were a single event. But, of course, it's a long series of events. And the response to 1789 itself and the Declaration of the Rights of Man is in all kinds of ways very positive. and is seen as not just the kind of new dawn that Wordsworth or in a different way Fox was hailing, but that it was actually an example of the way the British model was being taken up in Europe.

Of course, by 1793 or 1794, after we've had the terror and far more extreme and interventionist proposals from the successive ruling groups in France, this looks to many of its early, as it were, moderate supporters, to be turning into a nightmare, that it's really departed from what had seemed to be the positive introduction of and guarantee of a range of civil liberties, and to be introducing a kind of state terror, which in the end had to be resisted. And that's very much, I think, the dominant, as it were, educated or ruling class reaction in Britain in the succeeding decades.

And that becomes the divide, doesn't it? Andrew Roberts, when Marie Antoinette was guillotine in 1793, on one side you could see it as the logical outcome and logical aim in a way of some of the revolutionists, on the other side, a terrible mistake for the French. Can you give us your view on that? Oh, it was an absolutely astonishingly awful mistake for the French to kill her. It shocked reactionary opinion or indeed conservative opinion throughout Europe. They'd already, of course, had an invasion by the...

the Prussians, the French, but nevertheless, this was obviously now going to be a war to the bitter end. Because of her Austrian connection. Because she was the daughter of the Emperor of Austria. And whilst it was considered understandable if the French killed their own royal family to kill Austrias as well as absolutely madness. And an evil and vicious. And this is what really made the Napoleonic wars so long-term and vicious. Yes. Sorry. Well, I just wanted to say that it seems to me that what's quite important to realize is that the guillotine of the king and queen meant in England that the idea of the glorious revolution as the antecedent was exposed, was exploded, let's say, and the English regicide is what appeared as the ghost from the past, which I think that was what precipitated the reaction.

legislation that Pitt then put through. And it's quite interesting that, you know, nothing really happened in England. Nothing really happened in terms of large-scale riots. But what happened was speech, seditious writings. The legislation against seditious writing was about the fear of what talking about freedoms might mean. And if people recalled the regicide

and the period when there had been a Commonwealth in England, that was what seemed. very dangerous to the state in England. Can Napoleon be seen as a continuation of the French Revolution and his impact as part of the French Revolution? Well, of course, this has been the long-running debate, really, about how far there is some kind of inherent logic to the initial French Revolutionary principles

which leads to what becomes eventually the Napoleonic autocracy. I think the first thing, the first thing, thing to say is that, of course, the traditional British historiography about Napoleon had been that that's the enemy and that he's bent on conquering Europe and we in the name of British liberties and so on are resisting him. Of course, in most parts of Europe it wasn't seen like that. Napoleon came as the liberator. Napoleon and the French armies were the bearers of revolutionary principles,

often attracting support from the indigenous radical movements in the various European countries and aimed at the overthrow of the monarchy or the established order there. But I think what very quickly comes to be argued is that the very way in which the later stages of the French Revolution had concentrated all power in the state and had eliminated the intermediate bodies paved the way if that state fell into the hands of a figure like Napoleon

for an almost limitless, And much of the argument throughout the 19th century then precisely was, was this the result of a series of contingent circumstances, the fact that the French did go to war, as we've already said, which changes the nature of their politics, was it to do with the response of the monarchies of Europe, was it to do with the sheer chance of Napoleon's own ambitions and talents, or was he in this sense the kind of logical embodiment of the state power. centralized state power, which the revolution unleashed. I would just quickly say, of course, the, in a way more subtle revisionist account of this that we get in the 19th century, especially from somebody like Tokviel, is that the French state had always been a centralized autocracy, that actually Napoleon wasn't very different from, for example, Louis X and Louis the 15th and the 17th and 18th century, and that in that way, and in a way this is the provocative element in this revisionist account, In that way, what we're dealing with here is a continuity in French history

and not the establishment and export of universal radical principles. But isn't it also the case that the other idea of Napoleon that makes him different from the king is that he's just a guy. He isn't born to privilege. He brings himself up. And so, again, in relation to its impact over in England, There's a sense of Napoleon as somehow being the continuation perhaps of a democratic or a revolutionary idea. But did his arrival after an ideological revolution bring to war in politics in Europe, let's concentrate on that for a start,

the idea of ideological conflict from the first time, the idea of war at a different scale, the levy or mass, instead of there being armies of 60 or 70,000, his armies were 600,000 strong. Everybody's in the army. the nations at war, the idea of nations. I mean, did he actually push it on in a way which would not have occurred, Stefan, I don't think, to the Lewis? The Bourbons were never going to invade Russia. It's a peculiarly Napoleonic concept

that nationalism could be used for him. And of course, later in Germany and Italy, and particularly in Prussia, it's used against him. in the War of Liberation of 1813, the Prussians think of themselves as Germans, really, for the first time and that they're going to wreak a terrible vengeance on France. And the French nationalism.

He is, absolutely. Militrism, Prussian militarism. He's responsible, in a way, the French Revolution is responsible for the two terrible things that have happened in the 20th century, communism and German militarism. Stefan, are you lost for words, are you finding the right one? somewhere in between those two.

I mean, I think we have to stand back a little from just the immediate events of 1789 to 1815 because there we're concentrating on what Napoleon did and the effect that he had. But, I mean, I think taking slightly longer perspective, the idea that members of a modern state are citizens, that this in some sense is a matter of their political equality, that...

Talking about men here. Well, that, of course, is part of the argument thereafter. That was argued during the French Revolution itself. I mean, there were a set of traditional liberties in Britain guaranteed by the law for certain categories of people and certain headings. But what I think the French Revolution exported and in a way still symbolises

is the recognition of the dignity of the citizen as such, not simply by the chance of living under certain circumstances, or having acquired certain status in that society, but that members of that society, as you rightly say, for much of this period only the male members of that society, but the principle, of course, has then been exploited quite properly to be extended. But the role really of a modern politics is in some way to give recognition to this dignity and to treat people as equal bearers of rights.

I think that is why the revolution remains such an enormous point of reference for modern history. And in a way, it's a much more optimistic account of it, for all that happened in the 20 years immediately following 1789, a much more optimistic account of its significance than this rather pessimistic emphasis upon how it all turned to tyranny. And Your Honor. Not just all turns tyranny, but also so quickly Napoleon, he infuriated many of the romantics.

When he crowned himself emperor, he went back on the religious agreements that the revolution had spawned. He created an aristocracy. He made his marshals princes and dukes, and in one case a king, and really rebuilt so much of what the revolution was all about ripping down.

So when you look at the, as you rightly say, Stefan, the enormous political implications of the French Revolution, you really have to go back to 1789 and very little further than that. because it's the principles of 89 that don't really last for more than about three or four years that are in the hearts of people, especially in America. We haven't touched America, but that's crucial, especially with Tom Paine.

Can you touch an America and Tom Paine? Okay, well, Tom Paine's thought was probably more... Because he is England, America and France, isn't it? Precisely. It goes to all of those countries and is, in terms of the long-term implications of Paine's thought, it's really more important, I would argue, in America. on the creators of the American democracy than anywhere else. And Chakovitz, do you think that the English distrust,

British distrust now, of intellectuals, main English, stems from the fact that the intellectuals are so heavily implicated in the French Revolution? Well, I think what you're raising is the question of what the meaning of rationalism was, what the meaning of rationalism was within English intellectuals, life in that period. Because it does seem to me that, in fact, what Wordsworth argues when he describes his experience of the French Revolution retrospectively is that he mistakenly was a rationalist when, in fact, his heart was a sympathetic, intuitive person. And so his history of the French Revolution becomes his discovery of how he had split himself, split himself in half,

and behaved as a rationalist in accordance with the principles of the French Revolution, whereas really what he was at heart in a sense was like a Burkean that is interested in custom, interested in rootedness in the land, interested in native affection. And that has meant that the history of cultural life, which sees in Wordsworth and his inheritors, the sense of how it is a, not the rational, but the feeling that allows us to understand each other and relate to each other was actually codified, I think, in the prelude. It's why that poem becomes so important in English history. And yes, I certainly think that that rationality and our distrust, well,

your guy's distrust of rationality does come from a concerted sense that that reason is overtaking what we know intuitively, which is really the Burke's ideas of, of knowing. knowing things sort of through the body and the land. And I think that's right. I think the British are right to be distrustful of intellectuals. One thinks of the damage that Volta and Rousseau and Diderot and the Philosoph and the Encyclopedists unleashed during that terrible period. And thankfully we didn't have, I mean, the world would be a better place had the French

Revolution not happened. And we did have a form of evolution, political evolution taking place in in Britain at the time, which was derailed and sent down a cul-de-sac by the French Revolution. You know, you say that the world would be much better if the French Revolution never happened, but of course it might have meant that you were languishing in the Bastille at the moment, subject to arbitrary arrest. Surely we've got to recognise that whatever actually, as it were, went wrong in the short term, the world was transformed in the direction of a kind of democracy and a kind of liberal principles,

which I'd like to think, even you don't think we should live with us. As Chiuang Lai said, it's too early to say. Right. Thank you all very much. Thanks, Stefan Kalini. Thanks, Andrew Roberts. Thanks, Anne Janu Witts, and we'll be talking about the sonnet next week. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.