First of all, you have to tell me: What concrete, specific actions were the various governments of the French Revolution able to implement? There were a lot of ideas floating around, a lot of them clashing against one another. As you yourself said, the various governments didn't do anything concrete before they were overthrown.
The problem is that turning this question around 180 degrees doesn't point us closer to truth.
Because suppose that I grant the premise- rather strongly suggested by the way you pose the question- that the First Republic changed nothing meaningful, did nothing concrete. Then, we must consider that it would behoove us to desire a natural order of things that does not involve constant warfare. And one may argue that "things not changing meaningfully" should not be grounds to go to war if the status quo was presumably tolerable.
You have painted a picture in which the status quo is presumed to be tolerable to Jacques the peasant and to the baron. Jacques the peasant did not see fit to join an army raised by the baron to march on Paris while the king ruled. There was no such army. Given this fact, then there is no obvious reason why either Jacques or the baron should see fit to join or to raise the army to march on Paris while the Republic rules,
unless the Republic has changed something of consequence.
Which brings us back to the same place- your suggestion that a counterrevolutionary march against a republic that has overthrown a monarchy is justified seems to be grounded entirely in the aesthetics of being ruled by a republic rather than by a king.
The bell you kept ringing there was the idea that it
looks wrong. That these city slickers are just disrespectful and insulated from good plain old country ways. As opposed, we imagine, to the local French nobility, who are totally plugged in and respectful of the commoners' way of life and absolutely deserve their loyalty!
...
Then again, suppose that I don't grant the premise that the First Republic didn't change anything.
Because I don't.
The problem is that the Revolution itself was basically vibes until Napoleon came along. What did the First French Republic actually do that was concrete and constructive?
start a war, overthrow (sorta, kinda) the king, begin and end the Reign of Terror, secularize the clergy and get overthrown by 1st Consul.
See, the really obvious significant thing the First Republic did, and you can call it constructive or not, was to declare that in the future, French political affairs would be decided by mass participation, not by a hereditary aristocracy.
This represents an enormous, earth-shaking change in the social order and absolutely does explain why the aristocrats would decide to call in their deep web of favors, connections, and personal wealth to fight back. Why the rural nobility might try to muster armies to march on Paris. Why nobles in exile might try to recruit armies to march on Paris. Why nobles still in France might slip information and support to those exiles' activities. And so on, and so on.
Of course the aristocrats would fight back. The alternative would be to accept permanent loss of their place at the top of society. And since they had considerable resources, connections, and sympathies among the crowned heads of Europe, their attempt to fight would be a serious, dangerous one.
And in places like the Vendee where the French nobility still had meaningful sympathy among the peasantry, sometimes they were able to raise armies from the French masses.
I think this is best understood as a civil war, or a partial civil war, between the Republic and the nobility to determine whether the nobility would get to rule France or not. This is not to deny that the First Republic, the winner of this particular round of warfare, committed atrocities in the process of fighting. But the broader context of the conflict is "in some places, many peasants sided with the nobles' bid to regain rule over France or at least parts of France; the Republic suppressed the nobles' bid to do so brutally." Not "the First Republic cruelly oppressing the earnest and upright peasantry with their strange innovations."
(If you want a revolution where the revolutionaries absolutely
DID start tyrannizing the peasantry, go to Russia. We can talk about that another time)
The trouble is, "the revolutionaries cruelly oppressed the peasantry" is a narrative that's very easy to fall into, when we start by accepting the old English-language narrative about the French Revolution. This narrative is built around the idea that the Revolution was, plain and simple, a bad and wrongful thing that made everything worse. That overthrowing and killing a king and driving the nobility out of the land was a kind of "madness" that would never happen in a properly organized society where the social betters get to stay on top. This narrative, which was strongly favored by the aristocracy-dominated English society of the time, which was at war with France for nearly the entire period from Louis XVI's fall to Louis XVIII's rise. As such, it got an excellent opportunity to get all the way around the English-speaking world while the truth was still putting its boots on.
...
So when all is said and done, I think the French Revolution still needs to be understood, most fundamentally, as a violent rejection of the idea of hereditary aristocratic rule. Like all wars, it was fought by flawed human beings who struggled among themselves, sometimes violently. Human beings who were prone to excess, especially when they were threatened. Human beings who had a generous share of bad ideas to go with their good ideas.
But honestly, I think one cannot really separate the question of "which side of this are you on" from the question of "hereditary rule over human societies, good idea or bad idea?"[/I]
See, the really obvious significant thing the First Republic did, and you can call it constructive or not, was to declare that in the future, French political affairs would be decided by mass participation, not by a hereditary aristocracy.
This represents an enormous, earth-shaking change in the social order and absolutely does explain why the aristocrats would decide to call in their deep web of favors, connections, and personal wealth to fight back. Why the rural nobility might try to muster armies to march on Paris. Why nobles in exile might try to recruit armies to march on Paris. Why nobles still in France might slip information and support to those exiles' activities. And so on, and so on.
Of course the aristocrats would fight back. And since they had considerable resources, connections, and sympathies among the crowned heads of Europe, their attempt to fight would be a serious, dangerous one.
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And I'm circling back to this quite a lot later, but...
You were the one saying that the Revolutionaries had to execute the aristocrats to avert a civil war. I was just taking you at your word.
See, that's the thing.
I didn't say "had to execute the aristocrats."
You were the one who described the Reign of Terror as
"executing an entire social class because some of them might commit crimes in the future." I replied that even during the height of the Terror, it was not the stated policy of the republic to do that. Then you replied with the passage I have just quoted... except I never said that the French revolutionaries had to execute ALL the aristocrats to avert a civil war.
You were not just taking me at my word. You were strawmanning me.
Did the executions carried out during the Terror lack due process, and no doubt kill many people who were not truly part of a dangerous plan by the nobility to restore their fortunes and overthrow the Republic?
Absolutely. As
@dcharleos explained back in January, it was very common for government to be indiscriminate and to ignore what we would call due process, especially in times of civil strife.
But
at no time did the revolutionaries say "we must kill every aristocrat because some of them might commit crimes in the future," nor did I say that they had to. What I did say, and what they said, and what was in point of fact
true was that there were plots and efforts among the aristocracy to reconquer France and overthrow the Republic, and that the Republic's own government had very strong incentives to prevent such a thing from happening.
With both the English and American Civil Wars existing as examples of how messy it can get when an elite that expects to lose power decides to put up a fight and leverages all its resources and connections in an attempt to win that fight, it's hard for me to condemn someone for trying to avoid such a thing. Even if I deplore the errors and excesses committed in the attempt.
The Reign of Terror killed an average of 119-153 people per day, so I'm a little bit sceptical as to how diligent these tribunals really were when it came to ascertaining whether the accused was actually guilty of anything.
As Dcharleos pointed out, this was by no means particularly unusual for a large country trying to rapidly put down a rebellious faction within its own borders. The only difference is that executing prominent men of reputation and means, men who are rich and well connected or even outright titled noblemen, attracts much more attention in the historical record. Much more attention than, say, crucifying peasants of a largely ignored ethnic minority on the fringes of the empire.
10,000 French nobles dead in the Reign of Terror is a tragedy; 100,000 Germans dead in the Peasants' War or 1,000,000 Africans dead of overwork on sugar plantations is a statistic.
Then you use as much violence as is necessary to remove them, and no more. In particular, once you've got the reins of power, you can use this to confiscate their property and remove their legal privileges, so ending their power and status without the need for executing loads of people.
This is ideal, but relies on there not being an ongoing civil war while one is doing such a thing.
When the powerful elites accede gracefully to having their special privileges taken away, and do not respond by trying to fight a civil war to get them back, this can be done...
And don't tell me "But what if they try to stop you!" -- a fortiori, if you're strong enough to execute someone, you're strong enough to take their property.
...And despite your attempt to forestall the counterargument, no, actually, this turns out not to be the case here. First, because depriving an entire class of their property is harder than executing a small minority of ringleaders. Second, because large-scale confiscations trigger larger-scale violent resistance, because nobles will fight to the last corpse of the last person willing to die for their special status if they are assured of losing
all that social status
immediately.
And the seizures would have to be immediate, or immediate on the usual timescales of legal action and estate planning. Because otherwise, they do not act to shut down a plot to bring in entire armies that might arrive in a matter of months.
There's a good reason that kings frequently use confiscation of estates to punish nobles in relatively peaceful times, but tend to pull out the headsman's axe when the nobles' hostility is an
immediate problem. This is because kings don't want to be killed by rebels. Taking away property in a careful, judicious manner is not a viable response to immediate insurrection.
Kings understand this, and often kill nobles who conspire against them, when they get away with it.
It is entirely natural that a republic would do the same to nobles rebelling (or counter-rebelling) against
its authority.
I hate to break it to you, but every functioning society has had some degree of inequality. Societies which try to implement absolute equality invariably become blood-stained basket cases (cf. every communist state in existence).
None of the frequently cited examples of countries avowing themselves to be communist has ever, in fact, tried to implement absolute equality. Their sins lay in other directions.
There are reasons for this, but they are outside the scope of this thread.
The really important bit is that your reply here is a response to me saying:
...
"The aristocrat, or one who identifies with aristocrats, would say that naturally "mass murder" isn't appropriate in this situation. And that it's definitely "mass murder" when the commoners kill their betters, while not being "mass murder" when the nobility has its own army and will use it to shoot you in the face for trying to tell them they're not in charge.
Which very elegantly removes any possibility of the aristocracy ever being removed from power, and quite literally enthrones, no, enshrines the principle of continued social inequality.
The belief that "all men are created equal," is meaningless if an unequal power structure must never be removed by organized force.
We are left with:
"Well, in theory all men are created equal, but for some reason they're not, and we've tried doing nothing about that and we're all out of ideas, so, uh, guess it sucks but what can you do. I guess that people are going to be abused by overlords in palaces forever it looks like, how very sad..."
It comes across as a bit insincere, really."
...
So far as I'm concerned, this statement stands unrefuted.
Under the standards you seem to have applied here about what are and are not acceptable political means, I struggle to find another conclusion.
Under such standards, man is fated to live under the boot of overlords in palaces forever. He can do nothing to assert his freedom or defy an oppressor who extracts power and wealth from his toil. As long as the overlord is willing to resort to violence such that it would require organized violence to put a stop to his rule, he is effectively invincible. Because it is "mass murder" when the elites are killed, but an invisible, largely irrelevant, victimless non-crime when the elites kill the commoners. The killings of the elites are frightful, and the killings of commoners are acknowledged only when they are aggressively brought to one's attention, then shrugged off as soon as grounds to dismiss them can be found.
Perhaps you do not truly believe in such standards. I should certainly hope that you do not! They are most hypocritical and seem almost calculated to preserve the domination of a small, cruel handful over the rest of us.
But whether or not you truly believe in such standards... they are the standards you had been applying to this particular discussion.
