Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
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American system was just starting to show its distinctive characteristics. It was at this time not acceptable for a man to campaign for an office, as the clever but mistrusted young New York lawyer Aaron Burr was said to have done, very unsuccessfully, for the vice presidency. Neither Hamilton nor Jefferson had stood for election to anything in the new constitutional regime, and when elections were contested, there was no campaign and the voter turnout was often as low as 5 percent.7
The emerging Democratic-Republican opposition was a two-headed beast from the beginning—disgruntled southern slaveholders, distressed by the urban, industrial, and commercial nature of Hamiltonism, and along with them the northerners, who were in rebellion against the financial establishment of Hamilton’s friends. The first group wanted to put the brakes on the Hamilton economic system; the second wanted to accelerate it and make it more open and meritocratic. It would take no less talented a political chameleon than Jefferson to keep this broad church under the same roof and lead it anywhere useful. These were the origins of the modern Democratic Party. The anti-Federalists were called Republicans, and later, Democratic-Republicans, and were in fact what are now known as “Democrats.” Jefferson sold the idea that the Federalists were essentially British Tories, monarchists, cronies, corrupt speculators, warring alike on the hard-working bourgeoisie and the virtuous and tranquil South, a society that was paternalistic, rather than exploitively slave-holding. (The Federalists eventually, in the 1820s, became National Republicans, then a decade later Whigs, and finally, in the 1850s, Republicans.)
The French Revolution had a huge impact on Europe, which lingers yet, but it proceeded in a haphazard, often absurd sequence. France was Europe’s greatest nation by any measurement—27 million people in 1789, almost three times as populous as Britain, with the richest agriculture and most admired literature and intellectual community in Europe.
But Louis XIV’s wars and monumental grandiosity, especially the Palace of Versailles, strained the treasury, which relied on taxation of the lower classes, and his wars, in the end, accomplished only a minor extension outwards of the northeast frontier. The wars of the eighteenth century were horribly expensive and achieved nothing for France, as in the American Revolutionary War, and the Seven Years’ War had been a disaster.
Finally, in May 1789, to raise revenues, Louis summoned the Estates General, which had not met since Richelieu had dismissed it in 1614. The first estate, the clergy, had 300 of the 1,200 delegates, owned 10 percent of the country’s land, and paid no tax. The second estate, the nobility, had 300 delegates and owned about 30 percent of the country’s land, and about half of their delegates were somewhat reform-minded. The remaining 97 percent of the people were represented by the 600 delegates of the third estate, though most of them were lawyers, business people, and the bourgeoisie; the rural peasantry and urban poor, at least 60 percent of the population of France, were not represented other than in whatever altruistic thoughts their socioeconomic betters had for them.
After a few weeks, the first two estates tried to exclude the third, who repaired to a covered tennis court and, joined by 47 nobles, swore to pursue reform, which was not why they had been summoned. They declared themselves to be the National Assembly, and the king attempted to dissolve them on June 27. Riots ensued, culminating in the seizure of the Bastille, a prison and arsenal in Paris, on July 14. It contained only five counterfeiters and two deranged prisoners, and 250 barrels of gunpowder. (The half-mad dissolute, the Marquis de Sade, had been released a week before.) The governor of the Bastille was decapitated and his head bobbed on a pike at the head of tens of thousands of angry marching demonstrators, after they had blown up and burned down the Bastille.
On August 4, the National Assembly voted to abolish almost all aristocratic and clerical privileges, and on August 26 adopted a Declaration of the Rights of Man largely based on the American Declaration of Independence. On October 5, a mob of 5,000 women, and men dressed as women, marched to Versailles and compelled the return with them of the royal family to the Tuileries Palace (the Louvre) in central Paris, where they were more or less detained.
The Count Mirabeau was the principal figure of the National Assembly, and he was a constitutional monarchist who was adept at preventing the extremes from making inroads. Unfortunately, he suddenly died in March 1791, following a particularly frolicsome evening with two dancers he brought home with him after an evening at the opera. A new constitution establishing a monarchy of limited powers which Mirabeau had been working on was proclaimed on May 3, 1791. Maria Theresa’s daughter, Queen Marie Antoinette, persuaded the king to flee Paris, which they did on June 20, 1791, disguised as servants. They crowded everybody into a slow carriage and foolishly stopped for the night at Varennes, not far from the frontier of the Austrian Netherlands, where the king was recognized, captured, and ignominiously returned to Paris.
The moderates felt betrayed by the king’s flight and the extremists vindicated. Marie Antoinette’s brother, Emperor Leopold II, asked for all Europe to help restore the French monarchy. On August 27, he and the Prussian king, Frederick William, joined by Louis’s brother the Count d’Artois, met at Pillnitz and urged pan-European action to restore Louis to power. Nothing came of this except the rage of the National Assembly, which achieved its apotheosis with France’s declaration of war on Austria in April 1792.
Except for one year, war would continue until 1815, taking about 750,000 French lives and a larger number of other nationalities as war engulfed Europe from Cádiz to Moscow and from Copenhagen to Naples and, briefly, spread into Egypt and Palestine. The Revolution moved steadily to the left and ever further from its declared goals, and violently devoured ever greater numbers of innocents, until the Committee of Public Safety, which had implemented the Reign of Terror, was itself executed on the guillotine, to the delight of the fickle, blood-thirsty mob. Reaction and corruption ensued, followed by the Bonapartist dictatorship and empire.
If the king had had any notion of how to govern, he would not have had to call the Estates General. If he had had any political acumen, he could easily have set himself at the head of the reformers and been the indispensable man. If he had even managed the flight to Varennes and beyond properly, he could have returned to Paris eventually, as his brothers did, in the baggage train of the Duke of Wellington’s army.
One of the great watersheds of Western history was a sanguinary and tragicomic farce that presaged the ambiguity of the legacy of the Enlightenment itself. The moderate civilizing evolution advocated by Voltaire, Franklin, and their friends degenerated into terror, licentiousness, dictatorship, endless war, and futile reaction. The first claimants to emulation of the American Revolution soon became a horrifying cautionary tale.
France joined America as a republic in 1792—the first of five republics in France (to date), interspersed with a directory, consulate, two empires, two restorations, a “popular monarchy,” two provisional governments, a government in exile, and an undefined “French State,” governing in the name of a foreign occupier. The First Republic would last only three years.
American cartwheels of delight, solidarity, and legitimization of events in France would not be durable. Jefferson went impetuously cock-a-hoop for the French revolutionaries, delighted that the monarch to whom he had presented his letters of credence was executed as “a criminal,” and soon subsumed into the breezy assurance that “The tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants.” Jefferson was not only a bigoted and delusional Francophile and Anglophobe; he was a poseur. He sincerely believed that revolution was a discrete movement that must sweep Europe and ensconce America as its legitimizing trailblazer, or perish and imperil the American Revolution with it. Both Hamilton and Jefferson urged on Washington a proclamation of neutrality, which he did issue on April 22, 1793, and Jefferson’s true colors as a romantic revolutionary sobered by a political opportunist and a champion of inherited and slave-holding property became more visible.
Unlike Thomas Paine and some other American true believers, Jefferson knew that what had occurred in America wasn’t a revolution at all. It was a forced national disembarkation of the colonial power, a national self-empowerment, in which the land-owning and professional and leading commercial classes reinforced their control over the disaffected country, covering the whole drama in the stirring vocabulary of liberty and obscuring a tax dispute that flared into a continental war of liberation. What was unfolding in France was a much more profound