The French Revolution is clearly one of the central events in Western civilization - a period of history whose characters and events have always fascinated me. The more moderate American Revolution, in comparison, was much less influential upon the world of its time - even if it was more successful and less bloody. I would argue it was more successful precisely because it was more moderate and less murderous than the French Revolution.
But the French Revolution ironically was a failed revolution: Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité quickly descended to the towering figure of Robespierre and his Reign of Terror as the revolution spun out control and began to murder itself.
First the royalists were beheaded, next the moderate girondists, and by then the violence and suspicion was totally out of hand as the revolution devoured itself. In my opinion, after they started beheading the moderate Girondists it was only a matter of time before everyone else went to the guillotine. 26 years after the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" was written up, a Bourbon once more sat on the throne as the King of France - that is what I mean by "failed" Revolution. Since 1793, France has had no less than 11 subsequent constitutions (while the United States still uses their first). This is what I mean about moderation and political stability. It is the legacy of those revolutions so different in style, substance, and in legacy.
During one rapacious stretch of mindless revolutionary paranoia, 1,376 individuals were guillotined in only 47 days. The moderate girondist Mme. Jeanne Roland de la Platiere's last words before her death on the guillotine were: "O liberty! how they have played with you." She put it well, in my opinion.
Or Camille Desmoulins, writing to his wife from prison, claiming, "J'avais rêvé une république que tout le monde eût adorée. Je n'ai pu croire que les hommes fussent si féroces et si injustes." I always much preferred the moderate Montesqieu and Lafayette to Robespierre and his fellow radicals. Not surprisingly, they did not do so well in the French Revolution which is a prime example of Gresham's law of political morality: the bad drives out the good as everyone becomes corrupted while political life becomes not unlike the Hobbesian war of all against all in "a perpetual and restless desire for power, that ceaseth only in death."
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Wordsworth came to suffer the disillusion of young revolutionaries in all ages who discover that in shedding an ocean of blood they have more often than not done more harm than good. If the French revolution was the end of monarchy and aristocratic privilege and the emergence of the common man and democratic rights, it was also the beginnings of modern totalitarian government and large-scale executions of "enemies of the People" by impersonal government entities (Robespierre's "Committee of Public Safety"). This legacy would not reach its fullest bloom until the tragic arrival of the German Nazis and Soviet and Chinese communists of the 20th century.
In fact, Rousseau has been called the precursor of the modern pseudo-democrats such as Stalin and Hitler and the "people's democracies." His call for the "sovereign" to force men to be free if necessary in the interests of the "General Will" harks back to the Lycurgus of Sparta instead of to the pluralism of Athens; the legacy of Rousseau is Robespierre and the radical Jacobins of the Terror who followed and worshipped him passionately. In the 20th century, his influence is further felt by tyrants who would arouse the egalitarian passions of the masses not so much in the interests of social justice as social control. Let us take Rousseau for the literary genius he was and appreciate his contribution to history; let us look at his political philosophy with great skepticism.
.........For Napoleon was only the seed which was to bloom widely in the bloody 20th century in dynamic dictators like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. "Nobody can rule guiltlessly," claimed Saint-Just. This may be true, but political violence is the worst evil of this century of spectacular crimes and Robespierre, to my knowledge, was the first European intellectual to put forth this absurd idea that terror is the best and most effective manner for bringing about "justice."
The French Revolution was the deserving death knell for the old system of monarchy in Europe. Unfortunately, in too many places the governments which replaced ancient regimes was as bad or worse than those which preceeded them (from Napoleon on up to Lenin and the fascists). The chaos and violence which Napoleon helped bring about has (let us hope) only in the last fifty years been succesfully worked out of the European system. Let us learn from the past, so that we may not repeat its errors. Let the 20th century (and the Jacobin Terror) be a warning!
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The mysterious and menacing figure of Maximillien Robespierre;
"The government of liberty is the despotism of liberty against tyranny."
Robespierre's legacy of "despotism" was not to bloom fully until the pogroms of the 20th century.
Of course, Robespierre himself was guillotined during the Terror.
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Robespierre's Malevolent Legacy:
Terror as "Justice"
"Terror is nought but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is less a particular principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the most pressing needs of the fatherland."
Maximillien Marie Isidore de Robespierre
Address, National Convention, 1794
"Robespierre, with his cruel moral relativism,
embodied the cardinal sin of all revolution, the hearlessness of ideas."
Paul Johnson
"The Spectator"
"He [the revolutionary] is damned always to do that which is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer, to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves by whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it - an abstract and geometric love."
Arthur Koestler
"Darkness at Noon"