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war itself was a consequence of the revolutionary situation in France;
and the revolutions which took place in other nations in the last years
of the eighteenth century were, similarly, a direct outgrowth of the
French Revolution. Most of these revolutions were made possible and
sustained
by
French aid. Where such aid was unavailable or unsuccess–
ful, as in Ireland, Hungary or Poland, attempts at revolution failed.
Europe in the seventeen nineties could experience the Revolution only
as an export because the dynamic social forces which produced the
Revolution in France-and which gave that conflict its vast scope and
significance-had not yet developed within it.
The French Revolution of 1789 was made possible by the unique
alliance of a powerful and wealthy bourgeoisie with a numerous pea–
santry. It was this alliance, inconceivable elsewhere, which initially gave
the Revolution its democratic character. And it was another and later
alliance-this time between a more radical segment of the middle-class
(the Montagnards) and the artisan urban masses
(sans-culottes)
which
in 1793, after the flight of the king and the fall of the monarchy,
preserved and furthered the Revolution. This alliance, which brought
about what Palmer has called "the second Revolution," was far more
popular, democratic and egalitarian than the first: it was in fact an
experiment, however partial and finally unsuccessful, in social democracy.
Though short-lived, it underlined the uniqueness of the French Revolu–
tion-its radicalism, its truly social revolutionary character, its "mission,"
in the words of Georges Lefebvre, "to be the revolution of equality."
But by 1795 this "revolution of equality" was no more. And this
is the special tragedy of the French Revolution: that the bourgeoisie
who began it by proclaiming the radical and universal doctrine that
all men are by "nature" equal in rights-these rights being "liberty,
property, security and resistance to oppression"-should have betrayed it
in a period of social reaction by claiming that these rights were ex–
clusively reserved for the middle class, for the owners of property who
alone were "interested in the keeping of the law." The "letter" of this
law was, to be sure, liberal and constitutionalist-the men of Thermidor
and the Directory did not wholly repudiate the Revolution: they merely
~ondemned
democracy
along with
the Old Regime, and gave to liberalism
a somewhat narrower connotation
by
transforming it from the universal
law ,of "nature" and "reason" into their own class ideology. The "spirit"
of Thermidor and the Directory is accurately represented by the Thermi–
dorian Boissy d'Anglas, who identified the middle class as "the best
citizens" and declared that "a country governed by landowners is in the
social order, whereas one governed by persons other than property owners
is in a state of nature." How sad, then, that it was this regime, rather
