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Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light
Susan Dunn
Faber & Faber
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What everyone likes to remember about the French Revolution is that it proclaimed the rights of man, including equality for all under the law. By comparison, its slightly older and wiser sister, the American Revolution, is often dismissed as a mere war of independence. Libert é, Egalité, Fraternité, the words of its famous motto, have a more populist ring than "we hold these truths to be self-evident." Besides, the infant French republic swiftly abolished slavery, gave women the vote, legalized divorce and granted civil rights to Jews, Protestants and illegitimate children.
What everyone would like to forget is what happened next. The king was executed. Le peuple — as in power to the people — took over. During the following frenzy of radical reform, Gallic paranoia and political correctness, at least 25,000 French citizens were put to death. Citizen Robespierre, chief theorist and energizer of the bloodbath, described the Terror as "nothing other than prompt, severe and inflexible justice."
"Mercy had become treason," author Susan Dunn comments, "democracy had become tyranny." And so, in its 1799 plebiscite, "the exhausted people of France" chose order and the rule of law. By an overwhelming vote (3,011,007 to just 1,562) they adopted a constitution that made the country a virtual dictatorship. Enter the emperor Napoleon from stage right. France did not have republican government again until 1871.
Needless to say, the American Revolution fared much better. Americans had many advantages, of course. Fewer people (4 million to France's 24 million), no oppressed urban mob, and political experience in both the short-lived Continental Congress and long-established colonial legislatures. In the realm of ideas and political solutions, which are the author's main concern here, the American success was (as it still is) largely due to James Madison's understanding of the limitations of human nature. "If men were angels," he wrote, " there would be no need for government."
Only under a political system where many conflicting interests kept any single group from taking power could political freedom survive. Whence all those famous checks and balances, the two houses of Congress, the trio of separate powers, executive, legislative and judicial.
The political thought and experience of America's Founding Fathers, available to French leaders, were scornfully rejected as unambitious. French delegates voted overwhelmingly to invest all the powers of the new government in a single, legislative body, the National Assembly.
