Book review: ‘Revolutionary Ideas’, by Jonathan Israel
Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre,
by Jonathan Israel
Review by Duncan Kelly
For Israel, resurrecting the Radical Enlightenment is part of a project designed to save the Enlightenment more generally. Both as a moment and as a political project, he thinks it must be rescued from political relativism under the guise of academic postmodernism. He also wants to salvage the French Revolution and its connections to Radical as well as moderate Enlightenment from generations of Marxist historians who see it simply in terms of class conflict, as well as their revisionist liberal critics, who see the logic of terror inscribed into revolutionary catechisms from the outset.
In August 1793, four years after the fall of the Bastille, the Tennis Court Oath and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and just seven months after the execution of Louis XVI, a democratic constitution for France was proposed. It represented a flowering of Enlightenment rationalism, balancing radical ideas of popular sovereignty with a pragmatic recognition of the need for a system of representative government.
Yet by October, with enemies all around, the constitution had been set aside as the French government declared itself “revolutionary until the peace”; a warrant was put out for the arrest of the Marquis de Condorcet, a philosopher and mathematician who had been one of its principal engineers. He would take his own life around five months later.
by Jonathan Israel
Review by Duncan Kelly
For Israel, resurrecting the Radical Enlightenment is part of a project designed to save the Enlightenment more generally. Both as a moment and as a political project, he thinks it must be rescued from political relativism under the guise of academic postmodernism. He also wants to salvage the French Revolution and its connections to Radical as well as moderate Enlightenment from generations of Marxist historians who see it simply in terms of class conflict, as well as their revisionist liberal critics, who see the logic of terror inscribed into revolutionary catechisms from the outset.
In August 1793, four years after the fall of the Bastille, the Tennis Court Oath and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and just seven months after the execution of Louis XVI, a democratic constitution for France was proposed. It represented a flowering of Enlightenment rationalism, balancing radical ideas of popular sovereignty with a pragmatic recognition of the need for a system of representative government.
Yet by October, with enemies all around, the constitution had been set aside as the French government declared itself “revolutionary until the peace”; a warrant was put out for the arrest of the Marquis de Condorcet, a philosopher and mathematician who had been one of its principal engineers. He would take his own life around five months later.
After Condorcet’s Girondin faction was pushed aside by the Montagnards, the Revolution took a different course into Terror, with the “incorruptible” Robespierre ruling through the Committee of Public Safety until the coup of 9 Thermidor (or July 27) 1794. Thermidorean reaction would see Robespierre executed the next day, and a new period of rule established under the Directory. Five years later, Napoleon’s dictatorship took power. France’s democratic experiment was over – and yet nothing would ever be the same again.
According to this hefty new study of the French Revolution by Jonathan Israel, a professor of history at Princeton, what such events really show is the motivating power of ideas in guiding and transforming events. In his terms, the French Revolution was a “revolution of ideas” before it became “a revolution of fact”; indeed, it was three revolutions all at once.
Ideas about political equality, anticlericalism and modern republicanism grounded in “reason” motivated Radical Enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet and Thomas Paine, while they clashed with the “moderate Enlightenment constitutional monarchism” embodied by more pro-royalist factions (the Feuillants) and aristocratic supporters such as Lafayette. Both struggled against Robespierre’s “authoritarian populism”, which for Israel prefigures modern fascism. The radical compound in this instance might have been uniquely French but its impact spread widely. The resounding Declaration of the Rights of Man, writes Israel, was a “manifesto entirely incompatible with all ancien régime notions of social, racial, and religious hierarchy”.
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