I think perhaps we have collectively been too eager to deny the relevance of 1776 to us today, too sure of our own superiority to listen to revolutionary leaders' advice about society, human nature, and government, and too quick to disparage or simply ignore the national past that began in those desperate and idealistic days 250 years ago.
-Brendan McConville, from his essay in The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding
The society of the modern world, which I have sought to delineate and which I seek to judge, has but just come into existence. Time has not yet shaped it into perfect form; the great revolution by which it has been created is not yet over; and amid the occurrences of our time it is almost impossible to discern what will pass away with the revolution itself and what will survive its close. The world that is rising into existence is still half encumbered by the remains of the world that is waning into decay; and amid the vast perplexity of human affairs none can say how much of ancient institutions and former customs will remain or how much will completely disappear.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book Two, Chapter VIII, 1840
The guiding notion of the Enlightenment, and later of Marx and Lenin's "scientific" socialism, was that henceforth the alliance between happiness and justice would no longer come about through the individual quest for wisdom, but through the rebuilding of society as a whole. And before building a new society, the old one first had to be completely destroyed. It was at the end of the eighteenth century that the idea of revolution took on its modern meaning. Personal salvation was from then on subordinate to collective salvation. . . . suffice it to say that somewhere between 1965 and 1970 I thought I'd seen the irremediable bankruptcy of this illusion, the progenitor of the great totalitarian movements that have ravaged the twentieth century.
Robespierre regarded any disagreement as the latest betrayal, any deviation as questionably motivated. It was once said that he was a lover of mankind who could not enter into sympathy with the minds of his own neighbors or colleagues. . . .
It could be said that the best a man can do is enlarge his ego to the betterment of his kin, of his kind, and his nation, and so find satisfaction in their widening beneficence. This, after all, is what Robespierre thought he was doing, or at least hoped he was doing, on a grandiose scale. But in the end, as happens so often to those who claim to know the truth, or believe themselves to be the messenger of God, the politics of the revolution clouded his wisdom, and the Terror darkened his judgement.
-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800
In France, as it turned out, the actual people (in contrast with the abstract notion of 'The People') wanted justice from their rulers rather than their beheading. Their aim, if they could be said to have one, was to make customary ways work better for them, not to overthrow them all from the bottom up. The elite Revolutionaries, though, had other ideas: those 'customary ways' were obstacles to be swept away, and once that was achieved, a new world would triumph. It's an old story now, and it usually leads to the same destination: the mass liquidation of those who don't fit the model.
-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
But did he see himself as ruthless? Or as a ghoulish fiend? This is unlikely. For one thing, the Terror was an old Roman idea: If a roman legion did not do its duty, then indiscriminate punishment would be meted out. For another, Robespierre preferred to preach virtue as Rousseau, his model, had done. Virtue, of course, mandated dedication to family, to work, to civic zeal and the dreams of the revolution. But it also meant getting rid of the enemies of virtue, whoever they were, wherever they were. From as early as 1789, he trafficked in a world of conspiracy theories, warning about newly minted "patriots," old traitors and hypocrites ("who flatter you today to betray you tomorrow"), and the need for constant purges. As the revolution wore on, as the gore deepened, as the daily tumbrels bore victims to the guillotine, Robespierre prophesied that for those who refused to adopt virtue, "the Razor of the republic" awaited. The Terror, he also declared famously, is nothing, nothing "save justice, prompt, severe, inflexible. It is an emanation of Virtue." . . .
. . . And even as head of the Twelve, he shrank from blood. It has been duly noted that the only execution he ever attended was his own.
-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800
In Paris the convention beamed. Feeling invincible, it thus announced its most ambitious stroke yet: the December 15, 1792, "Edict of Fraternity," decreeing "war on castles, peace for cottages," and promising fraternal aid to any nation wishing to recover its liberty. It stated wondrously, "the French nation proclaims the sovereignty of the people [in all cooperating regions]. . . . You are, from this moment, brothers and friends, all are citizens, equal in rights, and all alike are called to govern, to serve, and to defend your country.
France was no longer simply a great nation; this decree made it a revolutionary state abroad as well—the first in European history. World revolution was now its stated goal, republicanism its guiding star. With chilling precision, Brissot put it this way: "We cannot be calm until all Europe is in flames." But there were consequences for such ambition: As is so often the case, the newly "liberated" territories began to chafe under French rule, suggesting that one taskmaster had simply taken over for another. And by this stage, the rulers of Europe, angry and bewildered, no longer could stand idly by. Having little choice, they saw the convention's actions as the unmistakable sound of war against all monarchs.
-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800
But history would not wait for Louis. Newly arrived in Paris, Gouverneur Morris, one of the central drafters of the American Constitution and among the keenest observers of the age, echoed the dispatches that his Russian counterpart, Baron Simolin, was sending to Catherine the Great. Morris was stunned by what he saw. "We stand on a vast volcano," he observed. "We feel it tremble, we hear it roar, how and when and where it will burst, and who will be destroyed by its eruptions, is beyond the ken of mortals to discern." On July 31, 1789, he also added: "This country is at present as near to anarchy as society can approach without dissolution." He was right.
-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800
Whether Trump is an authentic carrier of radical change is absolutely the central question to any analysis of his administration. But how do we judge? Taibbi isn’t exactly wrong. The financial fortunes of the 70 million who voted for the president belong in that discussion—but in a minor way. Why so? Because a true revolution is an almost spiritual event. Ordinary persons in large numbers will seize on some ideal devoid of immediate economic benefit—liberty, equality, salvation—and mobilize under that flag.
-Martin Gurri, from here
The revolt of the public will not necessarily usher in an authoritarian age. It does not necessarily foster populism. It is not necessarily destructive of liberal democracy. The revolt of the public, as I envision the thing, is a technology-driven churning of new people and classes, a proliferation and confusion of message and noise, utopian hopes and nihilistic rage, globalization and disintegration, taking place in the unbearable personal proximity of the web and at a fatal distance from political power. Every structure of order is threatened—yes. Nihilism at the level of whole societies, in the style of ISIS, is a possible outcome. But no particular system is favored or disadvantaged—and nothing is ordained.
-Martin Gurri, as culled from here
Throughout the past, as successive stages of social evolution unfolded, man's awareness followed rather than preceded the event. Because change was slow, he could adapt unconsciously, "organically." Today, unconscious adaptation is no longer adequate. Faced with the power to alter the gene, to create new species, to populate the planets or depopulate the earth, man must now assume conscious control of evolution itself. Avoiding future shock as he rides the waves of change, he must master evolution, shaping tomorrow to human need. Instead of rising in revolt against it, he must, from this historic moment on, anticipate and design the future.
-Alvin Toffler, from his 1970 classic, Future Shock
Man enjoyed no greater blessing, he argued, than civil government. It protected him both from his neighbor's self-interest and his own "propensity to superiority." To resist a ruler was treason. Adams rejoiced in the security their sovereign extended to his subjects. It was "the duty of every subject, for conscience's sake, to submit to his authority, while he acted according to the law." Should he imperil the natural right and liberties of his subjects, however, "he overthrows the very design of government, and the people are discharged from all obedience."
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Religion played a central role in his life and his thinking, as it would in the Revolution. It was no accident that so many Boston town meetings were conducted in houses of prayer, or the republicanism, as envisaged in Massachusetts Bay, traced the independent-minded, egalitarian, community-based lines of Puritanism. Men who preferred a church without a bishop came naturally to the idea of a state without a king.
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
What qualified from one vantage point as sterling patriotism appeared from another as bare-faced treason.
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
As the war drew to a close and Washington stepped down from command, he turned the army over to Knox, who was given the assignment of reducing it to 700 men. He demonstrated a prophetic vision as a statesman. While serving as secretary at war under the confederation government, Knox realized that he needed to redefine perceptions about the army to suit the needs of a democratic republic. Many prominent American leaders wanted to disband the army completely and viewed any force as antithetical to representative government. Knox created a vision of a new kind of army in which solders were instilled with the nation's most cherished values. He believed that soldiers could be trained to fight to preserve political ideals rather than geographic boundary lines, to love liberty more than personal ambition, and to value honor above greed and the spoils of war.
I am told that there is no danger because there are no riots; I am told that, because there is no visible disorder on the surface of society, there is no revolution at hand.
Gentlemen, permit me to say that I believe you are mistaken. True, there is no actual disorder; but it has entered deeply into men's minds. See what is preparing itself amongst the working classes, who, I grant, are at present quiet. No doubt they are not disturbed by political passions, properly so called, to the same extent that they have been; but can you not see that their passions, instead of political, have become social? Do you not see that they are gradually forming opinions and ideas that are destined not only to upset this or that law, ministry, or even form of government, but society itself, until it totters upon the foundations on which it rests today? Do you not listen to what they say to themselves each day? Do you not hear them repeating unceasingly that all that is above them is incapable and unworthy of governing them; that the distribution of goods prevalent until now throughout the world is unjust; that property rests on a foundation that is not an equitable one? And do you not realize that when such opinions take root, when they spread in an almost universal manner, when they sink deeply into the masses, they are bound to bring with them sooner or later, I know not when or how, a most formidable revolution?The Peasantry: Many of them in 1789, were still day laborers or sharecroppers, working other men's land; but by 1793 half the soil of France was owned by peasants, most of whom had bought their acres at bargain prices from the confiscated properties of the Church; and all but a few peasants had freed themselves from feudal dues. The stimulus of ownership turned labor from drudgery into devotion, daily adding to the surplus that built homes and comforts, churches and schools—if only the taxgatherer could be propitiated or deceived. And taxes could be paid with assignats—government paper money—at their face value, while products could be sold for assignats multiplied a hundred times to equal their nominal worth. Never had the French earth been so zealously and fruitfully tilled.
This liberation of the largest class in a now classless society was the most visible and lasting effect of the Revolution. These sturdy providers became the strongest defenders of the Revolution, for it had given them the land, which a Bourbon restoration might take away. For the same reason they supported Napoleon, and for fifteen years gave him half of their sons. As proud property owners they allied themselves politically with the bourgeoisie, and served, throughout the nineteenth century, as conservative ballast amid the repeated paroxysms of the state.
-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon
Nevertheless France was weary of revolution . . . Youngsters, constitutionally rebellious, were now rebelling against revolution.
-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, describing Paris in 1795
In the National Assembly, in its two and a half years, Robespierre made some five hundred speeches, usually too long to be convincing, and too argumentative to be eloquent; but the masses of Paris, learning of their tenor, loved him for them. He opposed racial or religious discrimination, proposed emancipation of the blacks, and became, till his final months, the tribune and defender of the people. He accepting the institution of private property, but wished to universalize small-scale ownership as an economic basis for a sturdy democracy. He called inequality of wealth "a necessary and incurable evil," rooted in the natural inequality of human ability. In this period he supported the retention of the monarchy, properly limited; an attempt to overthrow Louis XVI, he thought, would lead to such chaos and bloodshed as would end in a dictatorship more tyrannical than a King.
Not till near his end did he seem to doubt the full identity of his judgment with the popular will. His mind was weaker than his will; most of his ideas were borrowed from his reading, or from the catchwords that filled the revolutionary air; he died too young to have acquired sufficient experience of life, or knowledge of history, to check his abstract or copular conceptions with patient perception or impartial prospective. He suffered severely from our common failing—he could not get his ego out of the way of his eyes. The passion of his utterance convinced himself; he became dangerously certain and ludicrously vain. "That man," said Mirabeau, "will go far, he believes all that he says." He went to the guillotine.
-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon
Mirabeau begged the deputies to retain the King as a bulwark against social disorder and mob rule. He pictured Louis XVI as a man of good heart and generous intentions, occasionally confused by shortsighted counselors; and he asked, prophetically:
"Have these men studied, in the history of any people, how revolutions commence and how they are carried out? Have they observed by what a fatal chain of circumstances the wisest men are driven far beyond the limits of moderation, and by what terrible impulses an enraged people is precipitated into excesses at the very thought of which they would have shuddered."
The delegates followed his advice, for they too felt the groundswells emanating from the sidewalks of Paris. But instead of meeting a measured loyalty with substantial concessions to the Third Estate, Louis outraged radicals and liberals alike by dismissing Necker a second time, replacing him with the Queen's uncompromising friend Baron de Breteuil, and making the warrior de Broglie minister for war. The chips were down.
-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon
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