Comparing the Violence of the French and American Revolutions
George Washington, General of the Continental Army and first U.S. President.
With the help of French forces, American colonists threw off British rule and established the United States of America following a protracted conflict, which, all told, killed less than 20,000 people in battle. The great political upheaval that followed, including the abolition of the Articles of Confederation and establishment of the Constitution of the United States in 1788, proceeded with no military coups, no civil war, and no bloody purges. Why then, did the French Revolution, inspired as it was by the American example, lead to comparative chaos and bloodshed? The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Constitution of 1791, achievements of the Liberal Revolution in France beginning with the Tennis Court Oath in 1789, were swept aside by the Paris rabble in the insurrection of August 10th, 1792, to be replaced by a new National Convention, which would come to be dominated by the radical Jacobins after the purge of the moderate Girondins. Between September 1793 and July 1794, the Paris streets were slick with the blood of ‘enemies of the Revolution’, so declared by the Revolutionary Tribunal. Captured noble émigrés, clergymen, political figures to the left and the right of the Jacobins, and generals who failed in the field were among those beheaded by the guillotine at the Place de la Revolution. Out in the provinces, representatives on mission carried out their own Terror – take, for instance, the ‘republican baptisms’ in the Nantes province, wherein Jean-Baptiste Carrier ordered the drowning of four thousand men, women, and children under suspicion of harbouring royalist sympathies. In the rebellious, catholic, royally inclined Vendee region, General Louis Marie Turreau led 12 army columns (known as the ‘Infernal Columns’) to exterminate 40,000 enemies of the Republic. It is hard to imagine that the American Revolution could have taken such a bloodthirsty turn – what can explain this discrepancy?
The drownings at Nantes.
Pressure and Circumstance
The paranoia, radical ideology, and bloodshed now associated with the French Revolution was, in part, due to geography – France in 1792 was surrounded on all sides by its enemies, among which were Great Britain, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire headed by Leopold II, the brother of Marie Antionette. The threat of imminent invasion and the restoration of the bourbon monarchy (along with the expectation of reprisals against rebellious Parisians) thrust radicals, not moderates, to the fore – the fearful public looked to bold populists like Georges Danton for their salvation, while their faith in law-and-order moderates like the Marquis de Lafayette plummeted. The American colonists, by contrast, fought against one enemy, and were protected by sheer distance from the great continental powers, who, in any case, were pleased to see Great Britain weakened. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, hostilities with Britain were five years past and the United States was not under external threat.
The French Revolutionaries also contended with a vastly more difficult social and political problems than their American counterparts. The ancien régime, the centuries old feudal system governing French society until the Revolution, was torn down almost overnight in 1789, necessitating an overhaul of the entire legal and administrative state. Drawing on the Enlightenment philosophy of Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, and with no practical experience in democratic governance, the framers and defenders of the first French constitution were admirably idealistic, though thoroughly unequipped for such a feat. It is thus unsurprising that disorder, anarchy, and eventually dictatorial tyranny prevailed over representative democracy in the latter stages of the Revolution. Comparatively, the American framers of the Constitution of the United States were, prior to the War of Independence, British subjects, living under and participating in democratic institutions. In fact, the colonies rebelled against the Stamp Act and Intolerable Acts due to the perception that these violated their rights as British subjects and defied the will of colonial legislative bodies. Thus, through familiarity with British parliamentary democracy, self-governance was to the American people not as alien as it was to the French.
An Unlikely Generation
The leading men of the American Revolution were uncommonly talented and near-unanimously deferential to constitutional, democratic principles, staving off the worst tendencies of social and political upheaval. The founding generation of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams counted no incompetents or would-be tyrants among its ranks. Even Thomas Jefferson, the closest of the founders to a populist demagogue, did not, as president, attempt to undermine the office or the Constitution. George Washington, in particular, was a man for the moment – uniquely positioned to install himself as a tyrant, given his godlike status among the American public and his military acumen, Washington balked at suggestions that he ought to become a king and acted as a symbol of unity whilst president. By happenstance, Washington was endowed with much of the virtue of a Caesar or a Napoleon – an aptitude for strategy, courage, and the ability to inspire loyalty – without their desire for total and lifelong personal power. Hamilton, Madison, Franklin, and Adams doubled as political figures and theorists, all of whom defended the nascent Constitution to great effect. A less competent, more despotic founding generation would have scuttled the American experiment before it began.
The leading personalities of the French Revolution, by contrast, wielded the violent impulses underlying social upheaval to their personal and ideological advantage. The liberal nobles of the early French Revolution, such as Lafayette, the Comte De Mirabeau, and Adrien Duport, who shared the moderate, high-minded sensibilities of the American founders, proved unable to oppose the fire breathing populism espoused by the likes of Jean Paul Marat or Georges Danton. Though the circumstances of the French state at this time opened the door for ideological zealots to seize the reins of power, the particular form that the Terror assumed was made possible by Marat, Louis Antione de Saint-Just, Maximilien Robespierre and other Jacobins. Marat, a tireless advocate for summarily killing counterrevolutionaries, gave voice to and sanctioned all the dark, resentful, and violent impulses of man, encouraging the September Massacres of 1793 as leader of the Committee of Surveillance and acting as the mouthpiece for public fury throughout the Revolution. The 26-year-old Saint-Just, remembered as the ‘Archangel of Death’, personified the excesses of revolutionary fervour. Utopian in his aims, cold-blooded in his methods, Saint-Just led the push to execute Louis XVI and was pivotal in the denunciations, arrests, and executions of political figures who threatened the Jacobin hegemony. The incorruptible Robespierre, revolutionary zealot par excellence, was the principal architect of the Reign of Terror, which he viewed as “nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice”. Though he espoused the virtue of democratic government, Robespierre was unwilling to relinquish his dictatorial powers until all the enemies of France were eliminated – a pursuit that led to his downfall and eventual death by guillotine along with Saint-Just in July 1794. Such monsters probably waited in the wings in the American context, though were suppressed by ardent constitutionalists and by circumstances.
“No one can reign innocently.”
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, the “Archangel of Death”.
The course of the American Revolution was chartered by a founding generation intent on assuaging the violent, persecutory tendencies often associated with large-scale political and social change, whilst the Jacobins aimed to encourage and harness these tendencies to further their goals and crush their enemies, with bloody consequences. The United States, with vast oceans between it and the European powers, was never subject to the external pressure foist upon France in the mid-early 1790s as its enemies closed in on all sides, creating room for careful deliberation in establishing republican government and staving off revolutionary excess.