france

Robespierre and Iran

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The tomb of Napoleon is a Paris landmark and tourist attraction.  You will not find anything remotely like it for Robespierre – and Napoleon was not even French.  Such are the ways of memory and history – and the voice of the people.  And the Marseillaise so righteously intoned by Paul Henried in Casablanca.

Maximilien Robespierre was a little-known French provincial lawyer.  As a consequence of a series of events that we label as ‘the French Revolution’, Napoleon became the Emperor of France, with more power than any Bourbon king ever held, and sought to become ruler of the world.  The battle of Waterloo was, in the words of his Grace, the Duke of Wellington, a ‘damned nice thing – the closest thing you ever saw in your life’.  But it was enough to see off the Corsican, who died in the exile generously allowed him by the Allies.

The images of Napoleon are many and consistent – and they fit nicely into the flowering of the Romantic movement, and the celebration – salutation, even – of the ego. 

This has never been so with Robespierre, a shy man born to serve a cause.  He was the definitive French ideologue and bearer of the gospel of Jean Jaques Rousseau.  Through his dedication and transparent commitment to the revolution, Robespierre rose above the herd to become the de facto leader of the French nation. 

Nothing in his life, or that of any other person, could have equipped Robespierre to deal with the issues facing someone in his position.  He had served as a part time judicial officer, but he had given up that when he had had to sentence a man to death.  Was he cut out for high office – let alone leadership of a nation in chaos?

The French nation was simply not ready for the nation-shattering changes that followed in the five years after the fall of the Bastille.  To secure those kinds of changes, the English had spent about six hundred years house training their kings, nobles and priests. 

France under Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety was surrounded by life threatening enemies from within and without.  Its response was the Terror, and the guillotine, and horrors that prefigured the worst of those in Europe of the following century. 

We can see ourselves as Hottentots dancing round the rim of a live volcano – and no mere human has found a way to avoid the risk of falling in.  The canvas is masterfully painted by Thomas Carlyle, at times in terms that prefigure the horrors of Nazi Germany. 

Robespierre, the ‘sea green incorruptible’, was sanctified, and then hardened, and then, like Macbeth, rendered devoid of his humanity.  It was kill or be killed – and the others through blind fear finally found enough nerve to get him.  The unkillable Fouché, who survived to serve Napoleon, whispered in their ears that their leader had delusions of godliness – and a list.  ‘Is your name on it, Citizen?’ 

Robespierre died by the guillotine, and he comes down to us now as the archetypal terrorist.   He was a decent young man who got crushed in an earthquake.  ‘O unhappiest Advocate of Arras, wert thou worse than other Advocates? …A man fitted in some luckier settled age to have become one of those incorruptible, barren Pattern-Figures, and have had marble tablets and funeral sermons……May God be merciful to him and to us!’  (Carlyle).

By the time Robespierre was killed, his naïve obsession with ideology and the Supreme Being were as childlike as his sky-blue jacket.  His cat-like features did not mask his capacity to inspire dread, and his conviction of the infallibility of his faith was at best dangerous when he preached about ‘virtue’ and ‘terror’ to a politically naïve audience.  He had no mates.  Dr J M Thompson said:

No one was so admired by his fellow citizens, no one so little loved…. he was too small-minded to forgive, and yet powerful enough to punish.  But punishment is a measure of despair.  It may cause conformity; it cannot produce conviction…. So, he failed and fell – the victim of men who had no convictions, and who were in most respects worse than himself.

As ever with that teacher, there is much wisdom.  Punishment as ‘a measure of despair’ may be seen as the dilemma underlying our whole criminal justice system.

You will not, therefore, find in Paris, or even Arras, a great monument to the person seen as the author of that lethal cancer called the Terror.  But that does not make it any easier to deal with the lingering wistful charm of the Corsican, who wanted to conquer and rule Europe, India, and the world.

Robespierre and Napoleon were very different men.  Not least in the number of those who died as a result of their acts of governance.  With Robespierre, the number runs into thousands.  With Napoleon, the number runs into millions. 

These numbers pass all understanding and would only be matched by monsters like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.  And it was Stalin who had that most shocking insight: ‘The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic’.

But Robespierre had an insight into people and history, and the sense and courage to espouse the lessons of history, that are not sufficiently remembered.

At the beginning of 1792, the French were discovering that it was very hard to translate the glory days of 1789 into a body of government that worked.  The nation was simply not politically mature enough.  But the French knew that they were surrounded by foreign and internal forces that would punish them and restore the old regime.

Having declared war on the Crown, the Nobility, and the Church, the fledgling government embarked on a war against Europe.  France declared war on Austria in April 1792.  In hindsight, some kind of showdown looks to have been inevitable, but declaring war was another thing. 

The war party was led by Brissot and Vergniaud.  The king went along with it.  He and Lafayette thought that one way or another, a war might assist the cause of the king, win or lose. 

Their motives were very different.  The people’s war party had this fixed idea that their revolutionary principles had universal application.  Brissot, a later victim of the Terror, got carried away.  He called for another crusade, ‘whose name is nobler and holier, a crusade on behalf of universal liberty.’ 

Well, if that sounds like moonshine that would warm the hearts of Shelley or Byron, it was also the kind of guff spread later by Napoleon and his disciples.  Nor have the French entirely dropped this noble aspiration from their world view.

Since France hardly had an executive government, the war was voted on by the Assembly.  The Declaration said that it followed a formal proposal of the king and that ‘the Court of Vienna, in contempt of treaties, has continued to grant open protection to French rebels; that it has instigated and formed a concert with several European powers against the independence and security of the French nation.’  The thinking was that a war would pull together a nation that was dividing.  That was true – but at what cost? 

Robespierre was almost on his own in opposition.  He showed real fibre, and he was nothing if not consistent.  ‘The source of the evil is not in Coblenz – it is among you, it is in your midst.’ 

There was some dreadful pride on show.  Brissot wrote to his general saying they should not act like ministers of the Old Regime: ‘How can their petty schemes compare to the uprisings of the whole planet and the momentous revolutions that we are now called upon to lead’.  He thought they would be marching into Berlin next year.  Vergniaud spoke in terms that are revoltingly familiar: ‘Men have died in the recent fighting.  But it is so that no one will ever die again.  I swear to you in the name of the universal fraternity which you are creating, that each battle will be a step towards peace, humanity, and happiness for all peoples.’ 

They really thought they had the answer for the liberation of all Europe.  They thought that when they crossed the Rhine, they would be greeted with acclimation by the oppressed peoples of Germany.  (Before they started the war that ended so badly at Sedan, and scarred the French psyche permanently, they all bought Baedeker Guides for touring and sight-seeing in Berlin!)  On the eve of war, people go off their heads.

The decision to go to war became fundamental to the way that what we call the Revolution unfolded, and to the implementation of what we know as the Terror.  And it was taken over the vigorous, sustained, and courageous protest of the young and highly principled provincial lawyer from Arras, who was also opposed to capital punishment on moral grounds.  This says a lot for the true character – the character devant le déluge – of the young avocat from Arras.

Robespierre said the king hoped to use the war to restore the old regime; Brissot wanted to set up a bourgeois republic – but the kind of bourgeois a little above Robespierre and his followers in the social scale; and Lafayette wanted war to help set up a military dictator ship.  These were not charges of small change.

Robespierre expressed his opposition in terms that might usefully be etched into the front door of both the White House and 10 Downing Street, and even at Canberra.

The most extravagant idea that can arise in the mind of a politician is the belief that a people need only make an armed incursion into the territory of a foreign people, to make it adopt its laws and its constitution.  No one likes armed missionaries; and the first counsel given by nature and prudence is to repel them as enemies.

‘No one likes armed missionaries.’  How on earth could any sane person suggest otherwise?  Well, George Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard did with Iraq.  Do you remember all that nonsense about a ‘beacon of democracy’ or a ‘freedom deficit’? 

If you are being bayoneted or raped, or you are watching your husband or children being tortured, do you stop to inquire into the political bona fides or ideological driver of the leader of the invading army? 

It is not just that the Americans saw this in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – they had seen it all at home it in their own war of independence.  That conflict had its own ghastly brand of civil war.  Appalling crimes were committed on both sides, especially in the civil war in the south between the Patriots and Loyalists.  There were, Churchill said, ‘atrocities such as we have known in our day in Ireland.’  Professor Gordon S Wood said that the ‘war in the lower south became a series of bloody guerrilla skirmishes with atrocities on both sides.’

There is one other thing to say of Robespierre and his role in the governance of France from 1789 until his death in 1794.  He did not seek or obtain any position or power by force or falsehood.  (That very humane English historian, J M Thompson, said Robespierre was impervious ‘to any bribe except flattery.’)

Let us look back, not with the eye of eternity, but with hindsight.  We now know that the French people suffered breakdowns and agonies for about a century after the apocalypse of 1789.  It is not a matter for a mere mortal to compare the various infamies suffered by and in France in that time, but it may allow us to get a clearer view of the position of Robespierre if we look at five critical factors that dominated the period of time traditionally labelled ‘the French Revolution’ and continued to give rise to instability, pain, and war for about 100 years. 

Those five factors are: the uselessness and desertion of the royals and the nobility; the outbreak of a state of war with the Church; the declarations of war by and against Europe; the betrayal of the French nation by the king and his family and by leading generals; and the rise to power of man of military genius the like of which we had not seen.

Nevertheless, the resistance to invasion – by ‘armed missionaries’ or whoever – remains constant.  It is part of the human condition – part, if you like, of la comédie humaine. 

But it is with us yet again.  In the current war involving Iran, what armed force would repel the people of Iran more – that commanded by Donald Trump, or that commanded by Benjamin Netanyahu?  Could your average Iranian imagine any person on earth more Satanic than either of those two people?

When I visited Moscow in 1988, I took a tour of the Kremlin.  When we climbed to a spot that gave an aerial view, our guide got very emotional.  ‘That is the gate he came in by – and that is the gate that he left by.’ 

He was not referring to Hitler – who had not learned the lesson of the defeat of Napoleon by winter and the peoples of Russia.

But it is Napoleon who gets the monument. 

We refuse to learn.

Robespierre and Iran

The tomb of Napoleon is a Paris landmark and tourist attraction.  You will not find anything remotely like it for Robespierre – and Napoleon was not even French.  Such are the ways of memory and history – and the voice of the people.  And the Marseillaise so righteously intoned by Paul Henried in Casablanca.

Maximilien Robespierre was a little-known French provincial lawyer.  As a consequence of a series of events that we label as ‘the French Revolution’, Napoleon became the Emperor of France, with more power than any Bourbon king ever held, and sought to become ruler of the world.  The battle of Waterloo was, in the words of his Grace, the Duke of Wellington, a ‘damned nice thing – the closest thing you ever saw in your life’.  But it was enough to see off the Corsican, who died in the exile generously allowed him by the Allies.

The images of Napoleon are many and consistent – and they fit nicely into the flowering of the Romantic movement, and the celebration – salutation, even – of the ego. 

This has never been so with Robespierre, a shy man born to serve a cause.  He was the definitive French ideologue and bearer of the gospel of Jean Jaques Rousseau.  Through his dedication and transparent commitment to the revolution, Robespierre rose above the herd to become the de facto leader of the French nation. 

Nothing in his life, or that of any other person, could have equipped Robespierre to deal with the issues facing someone in his position.  He had served as a part time judicial officer, but he had given up that when he had had to sentence a man to death.  Was he cut out for high office – let alone leadership of a nation in chaos?

The French nation was simply not ready for the nation-shattering changes that followed in the five years after the fall of the Bastille.  To secure those kinds of changes, the English had spent about six hundred years house training their kings, nobles and priests. 

France under Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety was surrounded by life threatening enemies from within and without.  Its response was the Terror, and the guillotine, and horrors that prefigured the worst of those in Europe of the following century. 

We can see ourselves as Hottentots dancing round the rim of a live volcano – and no mere human has found a way to avoid the risk of falling in.  The canvas is masterfully painted by Thomas Carlyle, at times in terms that prefigure the horrors of Nazi Germany. 

Robespierre, the ‘sea green incorruptible’, was sanctified, and then hardened, and then, like Macbeth, rendered devoid of his humanity.  It was kill or be killed – and the others through blind fear finally found enough nerve to get him.  The unkillable Fouché, who survived to serve Napoleon, whispered in their ears that their leader had delusions of godliness – and a list.  ‘Is your name on it, Citizen?’ 

Robespierre died by the guillotine, and he comes down to us now as the archetypal terrorist.   He was a decent young man who got crushed in an earthquake.  ‘O unhappiest Advocate of Arras, wert thou worse than other Advocates? …A man fitted in some luckier settled age to have become one of those incorruptible, barren Pattern-Figures, and have had marble tablets and funeral sermons……May God be merciful to him and to us!’  (Carlyle).

By the time Robespierre was killed, his naïve obsession with ideology and the Supreme Being were as childlike as his sky-blue jacket.  His cat-like features did not mask his capacity to inspire dread, and his conviction of the infallibility of his faith was at best dangerous when he preached about ‘virtue’ and ‘terror’ to a politically naïve audience.  He had no mates.  Dr J M Thompson said:

No one was so admired by his fellow citizens, no one so little loved…. he was too small-minded to forgive, and yet powerful enough to punish.  But punishment is a measure of despair.  It may cause conformity; it cannot produce conviction…. So, he failed and fell – the victim of men who had no convictions, and who were in most respects worse than himself.

As ever with that teacher, there is much wisdom.  Punishment as ‘a measure of despair’ may be seen as the dilemma underlying our whole criminal justice system.

You will not, therefore, find in Paris, or even Arras, a great monument to the person seen as the author of that lethal cancer called the Terror.  But that does not make it any easier to deal with the lingering wistful charm of the Corsican, who wanted to conquer and rule Europe, India, and the world.

Robespierre and Napoleon were very different men.  Not least in the number of those who died as a result of their acts of governance.  With Robespierre, the number runs into thousands.  With Napoleon, the number runs into millions. 

These numbers pass all understanding and would only be matched by monsters like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.  And it was Stalin who had that most shocking insight: ‘The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic’.

But Robespierre had an insight into people and history, and the sense and courage to espouse the lessons of history, that are not sufficiently remembered.

At the beginning of 1792, the French were discovering that it was very hard to translate the glory days of 1789 into a body of government that worked.  The nation was simply not politically mature enough.  But the French knew that they were surrounded by foreign and internal forces that would punish them and restore the old regime.

Having declared war on the Crown, the Nobility, and the Church, the fledgling government embarked on a war against Europe.  France declared war on Austria in April 1792.  In hindsight, some kind of showdown looks to have been inevitable, but declaring war was another thing. 

The war party was led by Brissot and Vergniaud.  The king went along with it.  He and Lafayette thought that one way or another, a war might assist the cause of the king, win or lose. 

Their motives were very different.  The people’s war party had this fixed idea that their revolutionary principles had universal application.  Brissot, a later victim of the Terror, got carried away.  He called for another crusade, ‘whose name is nobler and holier, a crusade on behalf of universal liberty.’ 

Well, if that sounds like moonshine that would warm the hearts of Shelley or Byron, it was also the kind of guff spread later by Napoleon and his disciples.  Nor have the French entirely dropped this noble aspiration from their world view.

Since France hardly had an executive government, the war was voted on by the Assembly.  The Declaration said that it followed a formal proposal of the king and that ‘the Court of Vienna, in contempt of treaties, has continued to grant open protection to French rebels; that it has instigated and formed a concert with several European powers against the independence and security of the French nation.’  The thinking was that a war would pull together a nation that was dividing.  That was true – but at what cost? 

Robespierre was almost on his own in opposition.  He showed real fibre, and he was nothing if not consistent.  ‘The source of the evil is not in Coblenz – it is among you, it is in your midst.’ 

There was some dreadful pride on show.  Brissot wrote to his general saying they should not act like ministers of the Old Regime: ‘How can their petty schemes compare to the uprisings of the whole planet and the momentous revolutions that we are now called upon to lead’.  He thought they would be marching into Berlin next year.  Vergniaud spoke in terms that are revoltingly familiar: ‘Men have died in the recent fighting.  But it is so that no one will ever die again.  I swear to you in the name of the universal fraternity which you are creating, that each battle will be a step towards peace, humanity, and happiness for all peoples.’ 

They really thought they had the answer for the liberation of all Europe.  They thought that when they crossed the Rhine, they would be greeted with acclimation by the oppressed peoples of Germany.  (Before they started the war that ended so badly at Sedan, and scarred the French psyche permanently, they all bought Baedeker Guides for touring and sight-seeing in Berlin!)  On the eve of war, people go off their heads.

The decision to go to war became fundamental to the way that what we call the Revolution unfolded, and to the implementation of what we know as the Terror.  And it was taken over the vigorous, sustained, and courageous protest of the young and highly principled provincial lawyer from Arras, who was also opposed to capital punishment on moral grounds.  This says a lot for the true character – the character devant le déluge – of the young avocat from Arras.

Robespierre said the king hoped to use the war to restore the old regime; Brissot wanted to set up a bourgeois republic – but the kind of bourgeois a little above Robespierre and his followers in the social scale; and Lafayette wanted war to help set up a military dictator ship.  These were not charges of small change.

Robespierre expressed his opposition in terms that might usefully be etched into the front door of both the White House and 10 Downing Street, and even at Canberra.

The most extravagant idea that can arise in the mind of a politician is the belief that a people need only make an armed incursion into the territory of a foreign people, to make it adopt its laws and its constitution.  No one likes armed missionaries; and the first counsel given by nature and prudence is to repel them as enemies.

‘No one likes armed missionaries.’  How on earth could any sane person suggest otherwise?  Well, George Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard did with Iraq.  Do you remember all that nonsense about a ‘beacon of democracy’ or a ‘freedom deficit’? 

If you are being bayoneted or raped, or you are watching your husband or children being tortured, do you stop to inquire into the political bona fides or ideological driver of the leader of the invading army? 

It is not just that the Americans saw this in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – they had seen it all at home it in their own war of independence.  That conflict had its own ghastly brand of civil war.  Appalling crimes were committed on both sides, especially in the civil war in the south between the Patriots and Loyalists.  There were, Churchill said, ‘atrocities such as we have known in our day in Ireland.’  Professor Gordon S Wood said that the ‘war in the lower south became a series of bloody guerrilla skirmishes with atrocities on both sides.’

There is one other thing to say of Robespierre and his role in the governance of France from 1789 until his death in 1794.  He did not seek or obtain any position or power by force or falsehood.  (That very humane English historian, J M Thompson, said Robespierre was impervious ‘to any bribe except flattery.’)

Let us look back, not with the eye of eternity, but with hindsight.  We now know that the French people suffered breakdowns and agonies for about a century after the apocalypse of 1789.  It is not a matter for a mere mortal to compare the various infamies suffered by and in France in that time, but it may allow us to get a clearer view of the position of Robespierre if we look at five critical factors that dominated the period of time traditionally labelled ‘the French Revolution’ and continued to give rise to instability, pain, and war for about 100 years. 

Those five factors are: the uselessness and desertion of the royals and the nobility; the outbreak of a state of war with the Church; the declarations of war by and against Europe; the betrayal of the French nation by the king and his family and by leading generals; and the rise to power of man of military genius the like of which we had not seen.

Nevertheless, the resistance to invasion – by ‘armed missionaries’ or whoever – remains constant.  It is part of the human condition – part, if you like, of la comédie humaine. 

But it is with us yet again.  In the current war involving Iran, what armed force would repel the people of Iran more – that commanded by Donald Trump, or that commanded by Benjamin Netanyahu?  Could your average Iranian imagine any person on earth more Satanic than either of those two people?

When I visited Moscow in 1988, I took a tour of the Kremlin.  When we climbed to a spot that gave an aerial view, our guide got very emotional.  ‘That is the gate he came in by – and that is the gate that he left by.’ 

He was not referring to Hitler – who had not learned the lesson of the defeat of Napoleon by winter and the peoples of Russia.

But it is Napoleon who gets the monument. 

We refuse to learn.

France and England Compared

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The Lectures on Foreign History, 1494 – 1789, by J M Thompson (see below) may be the most read history book on my shelves.  It fills in a lot of holes, but I want to set out some observations of the author in the final lecture on the events leading to what is known as the French Revolution.  They illuminate major issues in the history of England that, in my view, still set us apart today from the U S.

French writers, unlike the English originals, had no practical experience of politics, and had not experienced a revolution.  ‘They tested their politics not by the experiment of self-government, but by the uncertain analogies of Greek and Roman history’.  Here is the age-old divide between the love of theory over the channel and the commitment to hard experience by the Anglo-Saxons.  It is fundamental and too little noticed.

Dr Johnson was cryptic about class and hierarchy.  ‘The great in France live very magnificently, but the rest very miserably.  There is no happy middle state as there is in England.’  This too is fundamental.  He might have added that the English aristocracy paid its way, in more ways than one, while the effete French refused point blank and got blotted out for their trouble.  While the English nobles in the 17th century joined with what the French called the bourgeoisie to bring the Crown to heal, the French nobles indulged in the Fronde, which delivered the Sun King and an absolute monarchy that a Tsar might have marveled at.  There is a chasm of difference between the two nations.

When the French Revolution came, its first practical reforms followed the English model, but its abstract Declaration of Rights was borrowed from America.  There lay just the difference between the two.’

A ‘mixture of arbitrariness and impotence was the tragedy of Louis XVI’s government.’  That is spot on – in every page of Carlyle.

The French were nothing like a unified nation with a uniform law – that England had been building at least since Magna Carta in 1215.  (Before they achieved Home Rule for religion in 1534.)  Voltaire remarked that ‘you changed your laws, your horses, at every stage of the road’.  (He also accused his countrymen of being ‘so full of vehemence, so free of depth.’)

‘Unjust taxation, because the privileged classes were largely exempt, and the wealthy could afford to compound with the tax-collector, whilst the poor and underprivileged were fleeced in proportion to their apparent means – one must either be very rich, or pretend to be very poor.’  This is another fundamental difference between the two hierarchies, and the world’s richest man now, in a rare lucid moment, might glimpse the truth of the real world.

‘Social disunity, then, and social unrest were the most fundamental causes of the Revolution.  The order of social privilege should correspond to the order of social service; in eighteenth century France the one exactly inverted the other.’  (My emphasis.)  I have always been leery of the phrase ‘ruling class’, but the above seems to be a fair description of the U S ruling class now, especially the revolting robber barons intent on obliterating – with a chain saw Texas and Deliverance style – as much of the order of social service as they can lay their polluted mits on.

This leads to the grand finale.  Speaking of England, Dr Thompson said that the ‘political spirit of the eighteenth century was based not on the equality, but on the harmony of classes.  Poor and rich together took a patriotic pride in ‘our free constitution which they continually contrasted with the slavery of continental countries’.  …. What prevented revolution in England was the social duties of the rich and of the political rights of the poor: it was the absence of this recognition which made the French Revolution inevitable.  Liberty does not depend on the institutions of a country, but upon the spirit in which they are administered.  Democracy is not a constitution, but a state of mind.’

‘It is as difficult for a nation to change its character as it is for an individual’.

These are piercing insights.  As

 it happens, the three passages I have emphasized represent just about all I have learned in seventy years of looking at the past.  The French term is noblesse oblige, and what counts is a state of mind.  If the descendants of slave driving Puritans ever had it – which I doubt – they have certainly now spat it out.  And they have done so with their eyes wide open and their minds utterly closed.

The following note is from A Curated Library.

*

LECTURES ON FOREIGN HISTORY 1494 – 1789

J M Thompson

Blackwell, 2nd Ed, 1944, rebound in half claret leather with cream label.

The author wrote extensively on the French Revolution.  I have read and enjoyed everything he wrote on that period.  A tutor at Cambridge understood my respect.  He said that the author wrote at a time when style mattered.

James Matthew Thompson lived between 1878 and 1956.  His father was an Anglican priest.  He studied theology and philosophy at Oxford and was ordained in 1903.  In 1906 he became Dean of Divinity at Magdalen College, Oxford.  He challenged orthodoxy, and resigned as Dean in 1915.  After the war, he returned to teach history.  The lectures in the present book were delivered to first year students during the winter terms of 1921 to 1924.  The book of those lectures was first published in 1925.  It may lack the complete style of the later works on French history, but it is wonderfully assembled and crisp, and it fills in many holes in the historical knowledge of those who go straight from the Renaissance and Reformation to the French Revolution.

In the Preface, Thompson says that ‘the essence of history is not the learning of facts, but the judging of evidence.’  In the first chapter, he puts that another way.

You don’t study history to learn historical facts, but to acquire historical judgment.  It is not learning that makes a historian, but discernment.

That is rolled gold.  Two pages later, we get: ‘Politically speaking, England in 1494 is already 400 years ahead of the rest of Europe’.  That proposition is not just English hubris.

Since the eleventh century it has been virtually one country under one king – a condition that France and Spain are only just reaching, and which Italy and Germany will not reach for another 400 years.  It has the only effective parliament in Europe, and the only limited monarchy which remains limited during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Its kings have suppressed the arbitrary power of the nobles without transferring it to the crown.  By losing their continental possessions, they have learnt the uselessness of foreign conquest.  England in 1494 is peaceful and orderly, and the richest country in northern Europe.

And that’s without mentioning Magna Carta, the common law, habeas corpus, the Inns of Court and the judiciary, or the fact that England would shortly repatriate its church – which would further distinguish itself from Europe, even the Protestant parts.

The cannons of the King of France were inscribed Ratio ultima Regum – ‘the final argument of kings.’

Anyone could learn to fire a gun, and one gunman was almost as good as another.  Armies grew bigger.  Disciplined masses took the place of erratic heroes.  The business of raising and arming troops passed from the feudal lord to the professional soldier, and from the professional soldier to the State. 

An Anglican divine may have something to say about the Reformation.

It is always a difficult question, how far it is proper to receive wages for religious work, or to exact payment in return for spiritual privileges.  But all conscientious men feel (and they felt the same in the sixteenth century) that it is wrong to make a profit out of religion.

What would the Mormons now say?

It was not merely the demand for books, or the interest in theology, which secured Luther his circulation; but also his style.  Michelet compared it to a mixture of Moses and Rabelais [!].    The upshot of Luther’s teaching was to dethrone the Pope and enthrone the Bible.  Authority was not destroyed; it was only transferred.  Orthodoxy was not impaired; it was refounded on the Scriptures.

You now see why style matters.

You might then wonder on the benefits of a marriage between Germany and Luther.

The lecture on the Netherlands Revolt from Spain is riveting.

Politically, the Revolt leaves all Europe in debt.  The success of the northern states gave ‘the right of citizenship to revolutionary principles.’  For the first time since the organisation of the New Monarchies, a whole people had claimed and won its independence…. the Netherlands Revolt was a striking instance of the political results of the Reformation.  It showed that Protestantism could give not only the desire for political freedom, but also the resolution to achieve it

As to the Sun King, Louis XIV, French historians believe that in a single generation, six millions of people died of want.  The author quotes Acton:

It would be easy to find tyrants more violent, more malignant, more odious than Louis XIV; but there was not one who ever used his power to inflict greater suffering or greater wrong.

Louis XV?  ‘…. he was one of the most evil men who ever occupied a throne.’

What is the upshot?

…. we cannot fail to be impressed by the strength of nationalism, and its claim to be the ruling principle of political science.  This is the first lesson of modern European history; and none is more necessary nowadays; for it explains the disaster of 1914 – the nemesis of nationalism…

Those remarks were indeed prophetic in 1924.  The worst of nationalism was yet to come.  It is crude nationalism that now undermines the United States and is undoing the European experiment. 

There are times when I think that my fondness for this book, and books like it, is about on a par with my fondness for footy.  This book is a must for those who want to try to understand where we have come from and where we may be going. 

And it’s worth getting for the Michelet quote on its own.  Moses and Rabelais!  From a sometime divine.

Napoleon

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Mr Justice T W Smith was regarded as the leading judge on our Supreme Court in his time.  He declined a knighthood.  They were not then automatically granted to those appointed to the Supreme Court of Victoria, but were in the gift of the government.  Smith, J thought that may be seen as an inducement to judges not to offend government.  He referred to what Napoleon said when asked why he had reinstituted a titled aristocracy.  ‘Because it is by such baubles that men are governed.’

François Furet was a leading historian of France.  One of his works is Revolutionary France, 1770-1880.  It gives perspective to the events known as the French Revolution – a consummation devoutly to be desired.  It runs to 537 pages of text.  Eight of those pages are devoted to the coronation of Napoleon, and they show in detail just what Napoleon meant by the ‘baubles’ by which men are governed.

Everything was researched and rehearsed in exquisite detail so that the Corsican could place the crown on his own head – and slight the pope.  He was following in the path of the Holy Roman Empire, and Charlemagne the Great.  But he would not grant latterday homage to Charlemagne.

I have raised myself up to my actions.  He [Charlemagne] stayed at the point where birth placed him.  To reign in France, one must be born in grandeur, have been seen from childhood in a palace with guards, or else be a man who is capable of standing out from all the others….Right of inheritance, if it is to be successful, must pass to children born in the bosom of greatness.

You would be hard pressed to find a better example of megalomania.

The coronation took place in Notre Dame on 2 December, 1804.  Louis XVI had been executed on 21 January 1793.  In the history of the entire world, had there ever been such a reversal?  The Emperor claimed, and could enforce, powers the Bourbons could hardly dream of. 

But after his final defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon left five million dead, France in ruins, and the shell of an army he had abandoned twice.  He lost because he could not stop fighting, and the nation of France was fractured for the rest of the nineteenth century.  It endured appalling revolutionary schisms in 1830, 1848, and 1870.  The last led to the nation’s worst defeat in war at Sedan.  France just survived the First World War, and then participated in the mad lust for revenge that led to the Second.  And just recently, the gillets jaunes showed that the readiness to revolt can outweigh dreams about the Emperor and la gloire.

In the space of one generation, France had gone from dreaming of a whole new regime according to the philosophical gospel of Rousseau to a rampant evangelical nationalism under a foreign emperor, and the result was a tragic mess.

Writing when the fulness of this tragedy had been revealed, Hippolyte Taine was understandably bitter.  Taine completed his vitriolic history of the Revolution at an ugly time for France, in 1884, when the nation was still trying to achieve a settled state, and was still recovering from the most recent aftershock, the appalling events of 1870.  The book concludes after looking at the bequest of Napoleon by saying:

In this philosophical barracks we have lived for eighty years.  Those barracks had seen ‘the omnipotence of the State, the omnipresence of government’ – ‘Never were finer barracks constructed, more symmetrical and more decorative in aspect, more satisfactory to superficial views, more acceptable to vulgar good sense, more suited to narrow egoism….’

The great French historian Georges Lefebvre said this of Napoleon at the end of a two-volume history of his life from 1799 to 1815:

Nor was it an accident that led to the dictatorship of a general.  But it so happened that this general was Napoleon Bonaparte, a man whose temperament, even more than his genius, was unable to adapt to peace and moderation.  Thus it was an unforeseeable contingency which tilted the scale in favour of ‘la guerre éternelle’ [eternal war]…

The great Napoleonic achievement – the establishment of a new dynasty and the building of a universal empire – ended in failure.  Hence the imagination of the poet has tended to see the Emperor as a second Prometheus whose daring was punished by the heavenly powers, and as a symbol of human genius at grips with fate….But a military dictatorship did not of itself necessitate the re-establishment of a hereditary monarchy, still less an aristocratic nobility.  Nor was the best means of defending the natural frontiers to be found in expanding beyond them and so giving rise to coalitions in self-defence.  Yet this was what Napoleon was personally responsible for setting in train.

….He had in fact become more and more hostile to the Revolution, to such a degree that if he had had the time, he would in the end have partly repudiated even civil equality; yet in the popular imagination, he was the hero of the Revolution….He had instituted the most rigorous despotism; yet it was in his name that the constitutional reign of the Bourbons was opposed….

Yet the Romantics were not wholly wrong about him, for his classicism was only one of culture and cast of mind.  His springs of action, his unconquerable energy of temperament, arose from the depths of his imagination.  Here lay the secret of the fascination that he will exercize for ever more on the individual person.  For men will always be haunted by romantic dreams of power, even if only in the passing fires and disturbances of youth; and there will thus never be wanting those who will come…to stand in ecstasy before the tomb.

Now, most us find it hard to be ‘romantic’ about war or death, and standing in ecstasy before the tomb might be reserved to those people in France who prefer romance to the frightful history of France after Napoleon.

I had wondered why the French celebrate Bastille Day.  I was there at the Travellers Club on the Champs Elysee when it looked like the masses might scale the fortress.  It would be idle to dream of equality at that address.  But they did start beheading people in public in Paris on 14 July 1789.

Mr Justice T W Smith was regarded as the leading judge on our Supreme Court in his time.  He declined a knighthood.  They were not then automatically granted to those appointed to the Supreme Court of Victoria, but were in the gift of the government.  Smith, J thought that may be seen as an inducement to judges not to offend government.  He referred to what Napoleon said when asked why he had reinstituted a titled aristocracy.  ‘Because it is by such baubles that men are governed.’

François Furet was a leading historian of France.  One of his works is Revolutionary France, 1770-1880.  It gives perspective to the events known as the French Revolution – a consummation devoutly to be desired.  It runs to 537 pages of text.  Eight of those pages are devoted to the coronation of Napoleon, and they show in detail just what Napoleon meant by the ‘baubles’ by which men are governed.

Everything was researched and rehearsed in exquisite detail so that the Corsican could place the crown on his own head – and slight the pope.  He was following in the path of the Holy Roman Empire, and Charlemagne the Great.  But he would not grant latterday homage to Charlemagne.

I have raised myself up to my actions.  He [Charlemagne] stayed at the point where birth placed him.  To reign in France, one must be born in grandeur, have been seen from childhood in a palace with guards, or else be a man who is capable of standing out from all the others….Right of inheritance, if it is to be successful, must pass to children born in the bosom of greatness.

You would be hard pressed to find a better example of megalomania.

The coronation took place in Notre Dame on 2 December, 1804.  Louis XVI had been executed on 21 January 1793.  In the history of the entire world, had there ever been such a reversal?  The Emperor claimed, and could enforce, powers the Bourbons could hardly dream of. 

But after his final defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon left five million dead, France in ruins, and the shell of an army he had abandoned twice.  He lost because he could not stop fighting, and the nation of France was fractured for the rest of the nineteenth century.  It endured appalling revolutionary schisms in 1830, 1848, and 1870.  The last led to the nation’s worst defeat in war at Sedan.  France just survived the First World War, and then participated in the mad lust for revenge that led to the Second.  And just recently, the gillets jaunes showed that the readiness to revolt can outweigh dreams about the Emperor and la gloire.

In the space of one generation, France had gone from dreaming of a whole new regime according to the philosophical gospel of Rousseau to a rampant evangelical nationalism under a foreign emperor, and the result was a tragic mess.

Writing when the fulness of this tragedy had been revealed, Hippolyte Taine was understandably bitter.  Taine completed his vitriolic history of the Revolution at an ugly time for France, in 1884, when the nation was still trying to achieve a settled state, and was still recovering from the most recent aftershock, the appalling events of 1870.  The book concludes after looking at the bequest of Napoleon by saying:

In this philosophical barracks we have lived for eighty years.  Those barracks had seen ‘the omnipotence of the State, the omnipresence of government’ – ‘Never were finer barracks constructed, more symmetrical and more decorative in aspect, more satisfactory to superficial views, more acceptable to vulgar good sense, more suited to narrow egoism….’

The great French historian Georges Lefebvre said this of Napoleon at the end of a two-volume history of his life from 1799 to 1815:

Nor was it an accident that led to the dictatorship of a general.  But it so happened that this general was Napoleon Bonaparte, a man whose temperament, even more than his genius, was unable to adapt to peace and moderation.  Thus it was an unforeseeable contingency which tilted the scale in favour of ‘la guerre éternelle’ [eternal war]…

The great Napoleonic achievement – the establishment of a new dynasty and the building of a universal empire – ended in failure.  Hence the imagination of the poet has tended to see the Emperor as a second Prometheus whose daring was punished by the heavenly powers, and as a symbol of human genius at grips with fate….But a military dictatorship did not of itself necessitate the re-establishment of a hereditary monarchy, still less an aristocratic nobility.  Nor was the best means of defending the natural frontiers to be found in expanding beyond them and so giving rise to coalitions in self-defence.  Yet this was what Napoleon was personally responsible for setting in train.

….He had in fact become more and more hostile to the Revolution, to such a degree that if he had had the time, he would in the end have partly repudiated even civil equality; yet in the popular imagination, he was the hero of the Revolution….He had instituted the most rigorous despotism; yet it was in his name that the constitutional reign of the Bourbons was opposed….

Yet the Romantics were not wholly wrong about him, for his classicism was only one of culture and cast of mind.  His springs of action, his unconquerable energy of temperament, arose from the depths of his imagination.  Here lay the secret of the fascination that he will exercize for ever more on the individual person.  For men will always be haunted by romantic dreams of power, even if only in the passing fires and disturbances of youth; and there will thus never be wanting those who will come…to stand in ecstasy before the tomb.

Now, most us find it hard to be ‘romantic’ about war or death, and standing in ecstasy before the tomb might be reserved to those people in France who prefer romance to the frightful history of France after Napoleon.

I had wondered why the French celebrate Bastille Day.  I was there at the Travellers Club on the Champs Elysee when it looked like the masses might scale the fortress.  It would be idle to dream of equality at that address.  But they did start beheading people in public in Paris on 14 July 1789.