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treize,
and, for readers of English the single most influential book for
shaping our idea of revolution, Dickens's
A Tale oj Two Cities.
And what
do all of these books and BUchner's drama say? They say that revolution
is a disaster. It is not just in recent decades, as the opinion of the re–
spectable independent intelligentsia in all countries united in condemning
the wickedness of the Bolshevik system, that the French Revolution, be–
cause of the new legitimacy it gave to the state's recourse to terror and
violence, was judged to be a mistake. This has been the near-unanimous
judgment of literature since the early nineteenth century. Such judgments
seem to assume that the jacobin extension of the French Revolution was
the only reality, that all the rest only lead up to this - that revolution
was a phenomenon to be identified with its most radical form. But the
French Revolution isn't just its jacobin phase, as we are often asked to
believe. It is worth reminding ourselves that all revolutions, including the
French Revolution, are extremely complicated, and it is an error to
identify the idea of revolution with jacobinism.
I also think that one must not take these revolutions at face value.
With all due respect to Adam Michnik, I think it is a mistake to say the
difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution
is that one had a utopia and the other didn't. There is a utopia, a radical
idea in the American Revolution. But, as Ralph Ellison pointed out yes–
terday, freedom for all was obviously
I/Ot
freedom for all. And the idea of
a social contract among equals that was the basis of the new idea of citi–
zenship in the French Revolution by definition excluded women, who
are half of the human race; indeed, in the nineteenth century there was
an enormous regression in the political and economic power of women
in comparison to the
allcien regime.
When you had a society where ruler–
ship was based on a family model, you had possibilities for the legitimate
participation of at least a small number of women in public life. When
the family model was replaced by a contract model - a contract, by
definition, among equals - women, being neither autonomous nor con–
sidered fully rational, were completely excluded from the political
process.
This went on for well over a century in the new representative as–
semblies that were the principal instrument of governance. So all these
radical ideas of freedom enfranchised less than fifty percent of the
population, by excluding people of color and women. While a few
people like Olympes de Gouges raised the issue of suffrage for women at
the time of the Revolution, it was not even considered worthy of dis–
cussion. And slavery was indeed abolished in France in 1794, but it was
reinstated by Napoleon.
