To what degree did the French Revolution provide a template for future totalitarianisms?
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I thought it instead had reached its peak after Robespierre's fall?
Not to mention declaring war on Austria.
What I meant is there's a difference between setting harsh laws that veer toward authoritarianism when there's an actual war going on, with foreign armies bearing down on the capital, when most of your officers have deserted to the enemy, and whole regions are in open revolts, and setting them up when you're entirely at peace time.
1933 Germany was at peace time, 1936 Spain was at peace time. The shift toward authoritarianism in those two contexts is not the same as a shift when there's a war on.
Otherwise, it's equating any country on a war footing with authoritarian states, including the UK during the Blitz, France during WWI...
Those situations are not equivalent with XXth century totalitarian countries.
At the end of the day, in the 500 days of the "Terror", 17k people were executed after their trials. It's a lot of people yes, but given the size of the population and the exceptional circumstances, it's not as insane as it could be, especially with a civil war going on.
Trying not to do what-aboutism, but the Terreur also voted free education and freed the slaves. The legal Assembly was still functioning during that time, and a key goal was avoiding the rise of a new Caesar that would bring down all the new liberties acquired by the people.
Could it have been done better? Well of course.
Is the Terreur a period of bloodthirsty monsters intent on sating their thirst on top of a pile of corpse to satisfy personal ambitions? Was Robespierre an insane and out of control tyrant? Absolutely not
Source: there was an issue of "L'Histoire" on that very topic a couple months back
I don't find the argument that a revolution was inevitable convincing, it's possible that societies would just change gradually without even having the idea of a revolution being feasible or desirable.
In history there are not infinite amount of moments where something like a French revolution could happen, history and the world is finite and theoretically the number of oppurtunities could be small enough that the probability of none of them leading to anything as extreme as the French revolution could be decently high.
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It was the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, tho. Not exactly peacetime there.
On the one hand, the most radical French revolutionaries were the most forward thinking in hindsight, and a lot of what they fought for continued to be rallying cries over the long decades of the 19th century.
On the other, the centralizing and absolutist tendency of the Parisian government carried over from the ancien regime to the various revolutionary governments up to and including the regime of Napoleon, and that tendency became much more of a template for modern revolutions than the American one, all things considered. And it is this tendency towards one people, one land, one language and one law, that I would at least consider harshly statist. And this emphasis on the unity of the state and the people subject to it feels to me one of the roots of a lot of totalitarian ideologies.
How would the amount of deaths caused by the Terror compare to the ones caused by the French monarchy in centuries prior? By the French Monarchy I mean the state senencing and executing people, not war-related deaths otherwise we broaden the scope.
The monarchy was certainly not spotless, see how the Huguenots were treated.
On the other hand, it is kinda telling how the Bastille, symbol of monarchial oppression, was basically empty when the mob raided it.
Coming up with a single answer for kingdom is difficult, not just because of the very long time, but also because each province has its own laws.
What was popular for royal justice at this time for "royal offenses" (treason, counterfeiting, shaving coins, etc.) was to be branded with a fleur-de-lys, and then released after a short stay in prison. Anyone convicted of a major crime with the brand was executed. You can see this in one of the Three Musketeers trilogy (I forgot which one).
Executions other than this did happen, long term incarceration weren't really a thing for anyone at that period, unless you were a noble (who often paid for their own meals & such). It was either short prison stays, fine, or death.
Some of the biggest differences with the Terror was how eager they were to convict someone of treason & the "witch-hunt" like fervor for accusations that gripped the public.
Just use fractional units. No one is stopping you from measuring something in ⅓ miles etc.
What most people forget is that the traditional measures aren't a single system they are several working together.
The vast majority of people never need to convert feet to miles because one is a measurement of length & the other distance.
Not really.
The peak of the Terreur is what's called the Grande Terreur and that started long before Robespierre fell. And 9 Thermidor is generally regarded as the moment the Terreur effectively stopped, even if some measures remained afterwards.
There might be a confusion with the Thermidorian reaction that came afterwards and that's called the Terreur Blanche. But it's considered a different event, is mostly aimed at the ones who promoted the Terreur in the first place and is also probably a less bloody affair overall.
Centralisation is still a core part of the French ideology today. I see your point, but I don't think it's valid to create a line from the Revolution and French centripetal tendencies to totalitarianism. Japan, Siam, became totalitarian but I don't think they were that exposed to the French Revolution. States prior to the Revolution tried to be very centralised as well (China for example)
I mean, if the thesis is that the Revolution paved the way for totalitarianism and fascism, then 36 is a bad example. The fascism didn't arise from war, it arose from peacetime. Spain was not at war when the Nationalists revolted against a democratically elected government.
I think the reasoning would be, most earlier attempts of centralization were still very much a "government centralization" only. For example, governmental documents written in pre-revolutionary Brittany needed to be written in French. But despite the centralization agenda, the king's government didn't really care what the average person wrote/spoke, unless some specific issue arose.
It wasn't until the French Revolution that the governments cared that the common man was not following the centralization policies.
I'm no expert on Asian history, but from what I do know, I believe most early centralization attempts were like the pre-revolution type in Europe. It wasn't until after they experienced some form of Westernization that the second type occurred.
The real centralisation of languages and customs came during the 3rd Republic, a century later. The Revolution and particularly the Terreur isn't particularly known for this
It really seems that serious linguistic repression did not intensify until the 19th particularly later 19th centuries
There was some during the revolution, not sure if it was during the Terror or not. For example, forcing quatre-vignt . Was it standard before then, yes, universal, no.
To be honest, I think most of it was unofficial. Being metropolitanism on steroids, with the added fear of being accused of being an "enemy of the revolution" if you weren't metropolitan enough. And most people probably weren't knowledgeable enough to know that wasn't official.
It's fair to say that centralization alone doesn't make a society totalitarian.
That said, I'd say it's more the centralization combined with the desire to uproot and replace all other institutions with the supremacy of the state. It is this latter part that makes a state totalitarian, completing a process that began in the early modern period with the crowns of Europe increasing their power over the nobles, the cities, and the church, all of whom were hitherto roughly autonomous. What the French Revolution did was to divorce such absolutism from the institution of the crown and the divine right of kings, instead placing legitimacy into the classical liberal idea of popular sovereignty. Napoleon may have tried to get some of that divine right luster through his second marriage to a Habsburg, but ultimately he crowned himself and crowned his first empress Josephine in the name of the people of France.
Modern beliefs about nation and the necessity to submit to the state, and modern techniques of bringing people to do so in one way or another, do lead up to totalitarianism, and though the late 18th century did not have many of the technologies of the early 20th century, the foundations for the latter's patterns of totalitarianism were laid in the former.
Thinking about it again, it's less the Terror that was a pattern for totalitarian ideology, and more Napoleon and his third way between republicanism and the ancien regime.
Agreed. I'd go further and say Napoleon III pushed the concept a bit further.
I don't have time this morning to reply to all of it, but on the breakdown of institutions I'd just say "is it really paranoia if they're really out to get you" 😁😉
Popular republicanisms, yes. Totalitarianisms, kind of, and at a distant remove.
European leftism is to some extent descended from the fiercer revolutionary types who looked at the downfall of the First Republic and started thinking about how to "do it right next time," accepting the core premise of a violent overthrow of the ancien regime, though by the time we see Marx and so on popping up on the historical radar, the predominant regimes they sought to overthrow had an increasingly bourgeois character, instead of being dominated entirely by the old landed aristocracy as was 1788-era France.
Conversely, European liberalism (in the classical sense, roughly "people who like political democracy and also capitalism") is to a large extent descended from people who looked at the French Revolution and the First Republic and started thinking about how to "do it differently next time," without as much willingness to shed the blood of the aristocratic class.
Left-wing totalitarianism is in some sense descended from the specific branch of left-wing politics Lenin promoted in Russia. While many leftist political groups are quite firm on the idea that democratic structures are vitally important, the Bolsheviks in particular had set themselves up in such a way that maintaining the supremacy of the Party was always going to take precedence over listening to the citizenry as a whole. You could plausibly call Marxism-Leninism a sort of great-great-grandson of the French Revolution, along with many other great-great-grandchildren that are less totalitarianism.
Right-wing totalitarianism is, I would argue, not in line of descent from the French Revolution. It is specifically motivated by hostility to socialism on the part of the bourgeoisie, and fueled by Romantic Era nationalism which (especially in central Europe) was often a reaction against the perceived weakness and helplessness Germany and Italy had displayed in the face of Napoleon.
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However, neither left nor right-wing totalitarian states really relied on the French Revolution as a template, because the French Revolution itself never came close to constructing a totalitarian state. You don't have to be a totalitarian to order executions.
Just wanted to clear up some basic aspects of what has been discussed here;
As an aside, I was watching a BBC documentary on iconoclasm during the French Revolution, and the main point of the documentary is that rather than being a bloodthirsty mob of imbecilic lunatics, the mobs of the French Revolution were actually literate, highly politically conscious groups that understood the power that symbols held. They didn't just destroy art and monuments willy nilly, but they would cleverly subvert them and their meanings. This pretty simple idea (that isn't that far-fetched when you realize that the male population of Paris at the time had one of the highest literary rates in the world) was met with such complete and utter revulsion by the people in the comments, as it completely goes against the Anglo-American historiographical claim of the French Revolution being nothing but chaotic mob rule exacting Anarcho-Tyranny on a helpless population, as opposed to the civilized and orderly "revolutions" of 1688 and 1776. It's a line of argument that goes back to Edmund Burke, and continues to this very day.
This is a part of the common tendency to put all of the revolutionaries in one basket, ignoring the fact that many of them weren't even interested in regicide until 1793, and that the emergency measures weren't put into place until after the outbreak of the Federalist revolts, which occurred well after the revolutionaries seized power. The emergency measures were put into place by the Montagnards in response to a situation that had been caused by the Girondists, making your latter point moot.
Again, the War against Austria was declared by the Girondists, not the Montagnards. The emergency measures were put into place to combat the disastrous results of a war declared by a different faction.
The Bastille being nearly empty is a completely meaningless point to make considering that the mob didn't storm it with the intention of freeing any prisoners, but to seize control of the large amounts of gunpowder necessary to protect themselves against the Royalist forces encircling Paris. The significance that the Storming of the Bastille would hold as an event would only come afterwards, but in the moment it was purely motivated by self-preservation.
As an aside, I was watching a BBC documentary on iconoclasm during the French Revolution, and the main point of the documentary is that rather than being a bloodthirsty mob of imbecilic lunatics, the mobs of the French Revolution were actually literate, highly politically conscious groups that understood the power that symbols held. They didn't just destroy art and monuments willy nilly, but they would cleverly subvert them and their meanings. This pretty simple idea (that isn't that far-fetched when you realize that the male population of Paris at the time had one of the highest literary rates in the world) was met with such complete and utter revulsion by the people in the comments, as it completely goes against the Anglo-American historiographical claim of the French Revolution being nothing but chaotic mob rule exacting Anarcho-Tyranny on a helpless population, as opposed to the civilized and orderly "revolutions" of 1688 and 1776. It's a line of argument that goes back to Edmund Burke, and continues to this very day.
I mean, even though the Han Chinese spoke (and still speak, to an extent) several dialects that can be as mutually unintelligible with each other to be considered actual languages, non-Han populations in lands conquered by native Han dynasties were often subject to cultural or physical genocide, and while the geographic features and sheer size of China made "direct rule from the dynastic capital" exploits very impractical, it's not like several generations of emperors didn't try.
Qin Shi Huang himself, if he'd had some foreknowledge of the Incas' way of dealing with subject peoples, let's just say he would've been thrilled. Hell, modern China's post-Century of Humiliation anti-imperialist posturing might come less out of a place of genuine belief in the evil nature of colonialism or imperialism, and more out of the Chinese ruling classes' belief that China being subject to such a shame was a major subversion of the natural order of things.
The French Revolution's tendency to purge hereditary aristocrats was not new or unique to the French Revolution. Successful peasant uprisings in European history had always tended to destroy the aristocracy as they started winning. When you are rebelling against control by a dynasty, if you don't kill off the aristocrats as a whole, they will tend to rally outside support against you and come back with an army raised by their cousins and pen-pals from outside the immediate zone held by the rebels. Physically sacking centers of aristocratic power (such as castles), destroying the means by which the aristocrats administered the area to their benefit (such as by destroying tax records), and ensuring that the dynasty being overthrown wouldn't just bounce back and restore the status quo (by killing or driving off all members of the dynasty in a position to inherit) would be goals in any event.
The difference is that the French Revolution was successful enough that the impulse of "let's kill the aristos the way they've been killing peasants for centuries" actually had time and space in which to take root and rack up a bigger body count. One which the English-language histories have been happy to dramatize, because there was ample demand in Britain at the time for justifications for fighting the First Republic the same way they'd fought the French monarchy for hundreds of years.
Fascism is a great illustration of the difference between a populist government and a democratic government. You can say that your ideas and your Maximum Leader represent "the real YourCountry" without actually listening to what the preponderance of people in YourCountry say. You can derive legitimacy from the idea that "The People are behind you" without, y'know, actually having institutions designed to give The People any real check on your power.
With that said, the main reason to call fascism right-wing is that it exists in very direct and explicit reaction against the left wing. Although fascism will partly curtail the power of capital to make more room for the power of the Party and state, Fascism exhibits hostility to the idea of truly leveling out economic classes. Fascism, being deeply nationalist, is by nature anti-internationalist. Fascism is hostile to civil liberties and tends to perceive the social reforms of early 20th century liberalism (e.g. women's suffrage) as a mistake- and modern fascism tends to perceive the social reforms of mid- and late 20th century liberalism as even more of a mistake.
While fascists are willing to discard traditions to gain more power, willingness to discard traditions is not the sole feature of the left/right divide. The political right wing is often quite selective about which traditions it cares to defend. Because it is generally acting to defend power structures and hierarchies against perceived encroachment by changing economic, gender, and racial norms, not out of a genuine desire to "make things stay the way they were X years ago" in all ways.
Well, if you accept the divine right of kings, then of course everything bad that happens to a country after they kill their king is rightful punishment for upsetting the natural order.
If, on the other hand, you believe the king had it coming, then you're not going to see things that way...
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