The French Revolution and the Inertia of Government

If I had to summarize in a sentence the biggest common thread between both the English Civil War and the French Revolution, it’s how much all governments are governments of inertia. For good or bad, any government whose institutions and norms have been around for a long time is a pretty stable equilibrium. The biggest problem that its enemies have is simply convincing a critical mass of people that it might actually be possible to achieve major reforms, if not complete replacement. People tend to be unimaginative on alternative institutional arrangements. This applies doubly so towards changes that don’t map to obvious and mentally accessible historical templates. Something like Curtis Yarvin’s sovereign corporations, or Robin Hanson’s futarchy, are notable because of how rare they are. Even when they get proposed, they have a very futuristic feel – which is to say, one can imagine them somehow, somewhere, far in the future. Imagining a clear path from here to there is much more difficult.

The obvious consequence of this, which is everywhere on display around you, is that dysfunctional or substandard government can persist a very long time. This holds true even if lots of people would prefer a change, or sometimes even if lots of elites would prefer some kind of change. But for forecasting the future in the conditional sense (where the stakes are probably highest), the flip side is actually almost as important. Once the revolution has gotten going, the new institutional arrangements have none of the old inertia benefit. Which is to say, revolutions look a lot like the golden rule of affairs – there’s never just one.

And this isn’t just the case in France, either. Russia had the February Revolution (we’ll have constitutional government under Prince Georgy Lvov) and the October Revolution (get ready for misery - horrible communist misery). America, after its war of independence, had the Congress of the Confederation, a period so dysfunctional that it tends to get left out of American history altogether, before it had the Constitution and the Federalists. In the English Civil War, it only took 9 years of Cromwell’s dictatorship after the execution of Charles I in 1649 for everyone to decide that they weren’t much interested in extending this after Cromwell’s death, and so King Charles II was installed in 1660.

And so it is in France. Actually, France takes this to a new level, because the chaos eventually gets so continual and extreme that you stop counting in terms of discrete events. You may think you’re just establishing a constitutional monarchy under the constitution of 1791. But since that’s just some document that a bunch of guys came up with a year ago, why should anyone pay it any particular heed? So next thing you know, King Louis is being executed and you need a new constitution of 1793, since it’s awkward to have the last constitutional document refer to a guy who’s dead. Except that never really actually gets implemented, so then you need the constitution of 1795, which lasts about three months until another coup, and eventually you get the constitution of 1799…

Constitutions are useful markers here not because they’re sacred, inviolable documents. Quite the contrary – often they’re barely even implemented. But they represent the fervent desire to establish some kind of precedent that will bind everyone else. The alternative, which the French revolution has a lot of, is the endless shifting of power, horse trading and back stabbing that happens when there’s no formal structure and lines of authority to decide who is really in charge. New constitutions are thus somewhat useful markers of when the reality of power has gotten so disconnected from the previous piece of paper that the current mob feel the need to justify the difference.

Parenthetically, this reveals the brilliance of the current constitutional order in the US. If the option is available, you are much better off referring to the same piece of paper and saying that you’re totally still the legitimate heirs of 1789. A shockingly large number of rubes will fail to notice that the modern government bears almost no resemblance in any of its practical arrangements to the government of 1789, so maybe, just maybe, you’re not actually governed by the piece of paper after all, and the government can very easily change with the paper staying the same.

All of which to say, if politics had the equivalent of a VIX index of implied future volatility, it is going to be high for quite some time after a revolution. Most of the participants at the Festival of the Federation in 1790, must have assumed that all the unpleasantness was over. A year after the storming of the Bastille, here was the King, and Lafayette, and Talleyrand, and Marie Antoinette, and everyone else saying what a great outcome it all was and how chuffed they were with France’s glorious new future. Instead, it was actually a great time to be selling your French property and getting out of dodge while nobody was yet trying to restrict you from doing so. Out of the celebrants, Lafayette had fled the country and wound up in an Austrian prison in 1792, Louis and Marie Antoinette were both executed in 1793, and through good luck and good management, Talleyrand skipped town for a few years, slightly ahead of a warrant for his arrest.

And this brief list highlights the overwhelming general trend here in both personnel and causes – there is an alarmingly high turnover of both. It is striking how many figures grace the stages early in the story, only to just disappear later on. Take Jacques Necker, Louis’ on and off again Finance Minister over whom so much of the pre-revolutionary controversy centered, but who eventually just gets politely shuffled off stage in 1791 to exile. Or consider the Parlement, whose conflicts with Louis XVI formed such a large part of the initial series of conflicts, but which had already sunk into irrelevance such that by the time it was abolished in 1790, you barely even noticed. The sacred rights of nobles to have a say in legislation was not a concern of long duration. Maybe that’s something worth thinking about before you kick off your list of complaints to the king. Are you on net a beneficiary of the current institutional arrangements, relative to the space of possible things that might come about if everyone starts to believe that institutional arrangements are much more malleable than they seem?

My favorite example of this is that Jacques-Louis David, who was basically Albert Speer with a small side of Goebbels, started doing his masterpiece painting, “The Tennis Court Oath”. Unfortunately, too many of the figures present got purged or executed before it could be finished, and he decided that it would be more prudent to just scrap the whole thing.

The grim upside in this monstrous affair is that once the initial round of executions is done, and most of the sympathetic reactionary figures are dead or exiled, it turns into a black comedy where each round of people gets killed for being insufficiently revolutionary. The Girondins, the “moderate” revolutionaries who supported the King’s removal, but argued only that he shouldn’t be put to death, were led to the guillotine still singing La Marseillaise. You’d need to have a heart of stone to not laugh at this, these nitwits determined to not be hit with the clue stick on the way out. Maybe, just maybe, something in our original worldview wasn’t quite right. It’s like the original version of so many modern memes:




“Jacobins are the real reactionaries!”

“So much for the tolerant left!’


The longer it goes on, the more you have to work to find the “comedy” amongst the “grim”. The most memorable summary of just how far all this changed within a few years, and how much of a shock it would have seemed, comes from Moldbug, quoting Hippolyte Taine, translating La Harpe. La Harpe was actually one of those pro-revolutionary artists who did get hit with the clue stick, becoming both reactionary and Christian by the end. In his fictionalized dialogue from the salons of 1788, he places himself as one of the incredulous guests laughing as Cazotte (who ended up guillotined himself for monarchist sympathies) prophesies the path of the French revolution. Even without knowing the full biographies of all the characters, the sentiment is quite jarring.

It seems to me, La Harpe says, as if it were but yesterday, and yet it is at the beginning of the year 1788. We were dining with one of our fellow members of the Academy, a grand seignior and a man of intelligence. The company was numerous and of every profession, courtiers, advocates, men of letters and academicians, all had feasted luxuriously according to custom. At the dessert the wines of Malvoisie and of Constance contributed to the social gaiety a sort of freedom not always kept within decorous limits. At that time society had reached the point at which everything may be expressed that excites laughter. Champfort had read to us his impious and libertine stories, and great ladies had listened to these without recourse to their fans.

Hence a deluge of witticisms against religion, one quoting a tirade from ‘La Pucelle,’ another bringing forward certain philosophical stanzas by Diderot… and with unbounded applause… The conversation becomes more serious; admiration is expressed at the revolution accomplished by Voltaire, and all agree in its being the first title to his fame. ‘He gave the tone to his century, finding readers in the antechambers as well as in the drawing-room.’ One of the guests narrates, bursting with laughter, what a hairdresser said to him while powdering his hair: ‘You see, sir, although I am a miserable scrub, I have no more religion than any one else.’

They conclude that the Revolution will soon be consummated, that superstition and fanaticism must wholly give way to philosophy, and they thus calculate the probabilities of the epoch and those of the future society which will see the reign of reason. The most aged lament not being able to flatter themselves that they will see it; the young rejoice in a reasonable prospect of seeing it, and especially do they congratulate the Academy on having paved the way for the great work, and on having been the headquarters, the center, the inspirer of freedom of thought.

One of the guests had taken no part in this gay conversation; a person named Cazotte, an amiable and original man, but, unfortunately, infatuated with the delusions of the visionary. In the most serious tone he begins: ‘Gentlemen,’ says he, ‘be content; you will witness this great revolution that you so much desire. You know that I am something of a prophet, and I repeat it, you will witness it… Do you know the result of this revolution, for all of you, so long as you remain here?’

‘Ah!’ exclaims Condorcet with his shrewd, simple air and smile, ‘let us see, a philosopher is not sorry to encounter a prophet.’

‘You, Monsieur de Condorcet, will expire stretched on the floor of a dungeon; you will die of the poison you take to escape the executioner, of the poison which the felicity of that era will compel you always to carry about your person!’

At first, great astonishment, and then came an outburst of laughter. ‘What has all this in common with philosophy and the reign of reason?’

‘Precisely what I have just remarked to you; in the name of philosophy, of humanity, of freedom, under the reign of reason, you will thus reach your end; and, evidently, the reign of reason will arrive, for there will be temples of reason, and, in those days, in all France, the temples will be those alone of reason… You, Monsieur de Champfort, you will sever your veins with twenty-two strokes of a razor and yet you will not die for months afterwards. You, Monsieur Vicq-d’Azir, you will not open your own veins but you will have them opened six times in one day, in the agonies of gout, so as to be more certain of success, and you will die that night. You, Monsieur de Nicolai, on the scaffold; you, Monsieur Bailly, on the scaffold; you, Monsieur de Malesherbes, on the scaffold; … you, Monsieur Roucher, also on the scaffold.’

‘But then we shall have been overcome by Turks or Tartars?’

‘By no means; you will be governed, as I have already told you, solely by philosophy and reason. Those who are to treat you in this manner will all be philosophers, will all, at every moment, have on their lips the phrases you have uttered within the hour, will repeat your maxims, will quote, like yourselves, the stanzas of Diderot and of “La Pucelle.” ’

‘And when will all this happen?’

‘Six years will not pass before what I tell you will be accomplished.’

‘Well, these are miracles,’ exclaims La Harpe, ‘and you leave me out?’

‘You will be no less a miracle, for you will then be a Christian.’

‘Ah,’ interposes Champfort, ‘I breathe again; if we are to die only when La Harpe becomes a Christian we are immortals.’

‘As to that, we women,’ says the Duchesse de Gramont, ‘are extremely fortunate in being of no consequence in revolutions. It is understood that we are not to blame, and our sex.’

‘Your sex, ladies, will not protect you this time… You will be treated precisely as men, with no difference whatever… You, Madame la Duchesse, will be led to the scaffold, you and many ladies besides yourself in a cart with your hands tied behind your back.’

‘Ah, in that event, I hope to have at least a carriage covered with black.’

‘No, Madame, greater ladies than yourself will go, like yourself in a cart and with their hands tied like yours.’

‘Greater ladies! What! Princesses of the blood!’

‘Still greater ladies than those…’

They began to think the jest carried too far. Madame de Gramont, to dispel the gloom, did not insist on a reply to her last exclamation, contenting herself by saying in the lightest tone, ‘And they will not even leave one a confessor!’

‘No, Madame, neither you nor any other person will be allowed a confessor; the last of the condemned that will have one, as an act of grace, will be…’ He stopped a moment.

‘Tell me, now, who is the fortunate mortal enjoying this prerogative?’

‘It is the last that will remain to him, and it will be the King of France.’ ”

Indeed, when one reads the path of all this, the contemporary French attitude towards the whole thing seems ghastly, glib, and frivolous. To view this as a noble story of the people shrugging off the shackles of a despotic king and implementing freedom and democracy requires zooming out to such a large distance and squinting at what details are still evident that you’re left with a narrative to be told to a small child, and not a very inquisitive child at that.

Zoom in any more on the narrative, and it quickly seems monstrous – François Joseph Westermann apparently writing to the Committee of Public Safety after ordering no quarter given on fleeing Vendée rebels

There is no more Vendée, Republican citizens. It died beneath our free sword, with its women and its children. I have just buried it in the swamps and the woods of Savenay. Following the orders that you gave to me, I crushed the children beneath the horses' hooves, massacred the women who, those at least, will bear no more brigands. I do not have a single prisoner to reproach myself with. I have exterminated them all.

This was somewhat hyperbole, but it was much less hyperbole when, months after any of these rebels still posed any military threat, Louis Marie Turreau lead his troops through the Vendée and exterminated everyone they came across, around 20% of the population, 20-40,000 all told.

Or Jean-Baptiste Carrier gleefully drowning 4000 people at Nantes, women, children, nuns, priests, in his “Republican Baptisms” (on top of the 2000 odd executed in a quarry, such as by blasting them all with a cannon).

The Committee of Public Safety during the Terror executed tens of thousands of people being suspected of being insufficiently revolutionary, old men, women and children included. When put this way, it all tends to just turn into a blur, where you might imagine that somehow this is just them being the equivalent of a Duterte or a Bukele, executing the equivalent of drug dealers and gangs. But no, focus in a little on the mechanism by which this came about, and it really is horrifying. The Law of 22 Prairial was the reform by which the messy process of accusation, trial, and deliberation was massively sped up. Defendants were no longer allowed to call witnesses, nor were they allowed to have lawyers – that is to say, they weren’t really allowed to defend themselves anymore. The line between “accusation” and “conviction” become very thin indeed. The list of crimes was expanded to include new offenses like “seeking to inspire disagreement”, “slandering patriotism”, and “spreading false news”. Only two verdicts were allowed – acquittal, or death. And, finally, citizens were required to denounce these crimes – failure to denounce is also a crime, which, like all crimes, is now punishable by death.

It's basically all the crazy untrustworthiness of the Soviet Union, where everyone denounces everyone else, but with the grim discipline of the NKVD replaced with Haitian anarchy.

And lest you think that this was all some accident, Robespierre had laid out his vision in a speech on the Republic of Virtue, that this was in fact the aim – terror is an emanation of virtue, and without it, virtue will be weak.

If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.

Mike Duncan (from whose Revolutions podcast a lot of this history is taken) does a great job of summarizing the atmosphere shortly before Robespierre met his end:

“The authorities had already had to move the guillotine of the Place de la revolution, to a spot east of the city, where the Place Bastille is now, and then move it further east again after residents complained of the blood and the stench. Executions were no longer a glorious public celebration, they had become a grim and mechanical daily routine that just wasn’t much fun anymore. No one was enthusiastic when Cecil Renault and her entire family – mother, father, sisters, brothers, were led off en masse to be killed for their role in this alleged plot to kill Robespierre. And it was really to no one’s great rejoicing when on July 17th, a herd of old pious Carmelite nuns were led off for the crime of living together communally. When a child pick pocket was led up to the scaffold, the sympathetic onlookers started shouting ‘No more children!’.”

As they say – you executed the King, for this?

The one minor note of optimism here is the – well, not even schadenfreude, more like thankful justice, that many of the worst characters here got eaten by the same forces they eagerly unleashed. Westermann was guillotined for being aligned with Danton. Carrier was recalled after even Robespierre found his activities too much, and then executed after the Thermidorian reaction. Robespierre himself was undone by the Thermidorian reaction, after threatening too many people with being involved in a conspiracy that they decided to get him before he could get them. He tried to organize an insurrection, but that failed. He tried to shoot himself with a pistol, but only succeeded in blowing off half his jaw. He lived in agony for another day before being guillotined himself. It’s grisly, but couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke.

The other terrible indictment of the project is that the French also want to idolize the man who shortly afterwards did more to undo all the principles of the revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte. And even then, 19th century French history is a complete mess until at least after the Paris Commune in 1871. Seriously, there’s a reason that most people don’t know much about France between the fall of Napoleon and it entering World War 1. It’s a total shitshow.

But aside from viewing it as a kind of grotesque cautionary tale that runs counter to the prevailing narrative, I think there is quite a lot to learn by putting oneself in the shoes of a potential reactionary at different points in the story. What exactly should you have been hoping for, anyway? At least before the ending of the story is known, it’s harder than you’d think. One sees a strange tension between supporting monarchical principles, and supporting monarchical tradition. When the king is still in power, there is not much of a contradiction here. But once the King is executed, are you specifically interested in restoring the legitimate heir of the Bourbon dynasty? What if he's 7 years old? What if, once he’s dead at age ten, it’s not straightforward whose claim you should support? Or are you just interested in solving the Carlyle problem of finding the most able man, and giving him absolute power? Because it’s pretty clear that by a certain point in the story, that man was Napoleon. The question of when exactly you would recognize him as such is not nearly as obvious as you might imagine. It is a funny exercise imagining the leaders of the French Directory, feeling like they’re on top of their game and in charge of France. But when a historian tells the story of that time period, for much of their reign, the actual tale being told is “what was Napoleon doing at this time?”

When you look into it, a curious regularity is that many of the great authoritarian leaders came to power supporting the governments they later overthrew. Julius Caesar lead the populares against the traditional aristocratic privilege of the Roman Senate. But did this matter once he’d assumed power? Did it stop his rule from being further right than what came before – monarchy, instead of oligarchy? Not one bit. Same thing with Napoleon. It’s well known that he was willing to use “a whiff of grapeshot” to defeat the mob, which sounds pretty based. But it was a Royalist mob, attacking the revolutionary government! Those who just wanted competent authority invested in the ablest man would have been much better off supporting the man shooting at them, though it was very hard for them to know that at the time. Even in modern times, Augusto Pinochet led the crackdown on anti-Allende protests in 1972!

All of which is to say, that it’s not nearly as obvious as you might think where exactly the next competent authoritarian might come from. It is a mistake to place too much weight in the man’s politics before he seizes power. Those destined to rule seem to instinctively know that the first thing to do is actually acquire the power to rule, by whatever means necessary, otherwise all your grand visions amount to very little. Of course, this adds a pretty big risk component once political opposition is swept away. As Moldbug is fond of pointing out, the Democratic Party platform of 1932 is almost the exact opposite of what FDR actually implemented once he took control of the US government. It can cut both ways.

And this tension between supporting the man and supporting the institution can even be extended back to the period when monarchs were in power. King Louis XVI was, in many ways, contemptibly weak, and not up to the task of dealing with the moderate problems he faced. But J.F. Bosher makes a great case, over and over, of all the alternatives Louis XVI had in front of him, whether shaking down the debt holders and effectively defaulting, or sending in troops to arrest the members of the National Convention at the Tennis Court Oath, or a bunch of other options. How much did he deserve your support?

Well, he was a hell of a lot better than what came immediately afterwards. Because even with his weakness, the inertia of governing structures kept things sane.

This isn’t the only view, though. Thomas Carlyle took the opposite position in Latter-Day Pamphlets, when assessing the various revolutions of 1848. You would think that, being a supporter of monarchy, he would be straightforwardly appalled at all these events that overthrew the monarchies of Europe, and offer a strong support of the deposed monarchs. But hating democracy misses the broader point, that nature abhors a weak and fake king:

[W]e had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous, amazing, and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane:—Enter, all the world, see what kind of Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing in their ear, "Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not heroes! Off with you, off!" and, what was peculiar and notable in this year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming, "We are poor histrios, we sure enough;—did you want heroes? Don't kill us; we couldn't help it!" Not one of them turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon; by no manner of means. That, I say, is the alarming peculiarity at present. Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all Kings conscious that they are but Play-actors.
…

These rulers were not ruling at all; they had merely got on the attributes and clothes of rulers, and were surreptitiously drawing the wages, while the work remained undone? The Kings were Sham-Kings, play-acting as at Drury Lane;—and what were the people withal that took them for real?

It is probably the hugest disclosure of falsity in human things that was ever at one time made. These reverend Dignitaries that sat amid their far-shining symbols and long-sounding long-admitted professions, were mere Impostors, then? Not a true thing they were doing, but a false thing. The story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the gospels they preached to them were not an account of man's real position in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and unborn shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices,—a falsity of falsities, which at last ceases to stick together. Wilfully and against their will, these high units of mankind were cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were dupes,—a kind of inverse cheats, too, or they would not have believed in them so long. A universal Bankruptcy of Imposture; that may be the brief definition of it. Imposture everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature; nobody will change its word into an act any farther…

Such a spectacle, can we call it joyful? There is a joy in it, to the wise man too; yes, but a joy full of awe, and as it were sadder than any sorrow,—like the vision of immortality, unattainable except through death and the grave! And yet who would not, in his heart of hearts, feel piously thankful that Imposture has fallen bankrupt? By all means let it fall bankrupt; in the name of God let it do so, with whatever misery to itself and to all of us. Imposture, be it known then,—known it must and shall be,—is hateful, unendurable to God and man. Let it understand this everywhere; and swiftly make ready for departure, wherever it yet lingers; and let it learn never to return, if possible! The eternal voices, very audibly again, are speaking to proclaim this message, from side to side of the world. Not a very cheering message, but a very indispensable one.

Alas, it is sad enough that Anarchy is here; that we are not permitted to regret its being here,—for who that had, for this divine Universe, an eye which was human at all, could wish that Shams of any kind, especially that Sham-Kings should continue? No: at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that Shams may cease.

One shudders to think what Carlyle would make of the Republican Party in 2023.

But what Carlyle has in thundering and principled rhetoric, he doesn’t obviously have in terms of practical strategy. Because outside of the specific sham-monarch question, one of the other practical lessons of the ups and downs of the French revolution seems to be the opposite – holding institutions is useful, even (or especially) institutions that have been illegally purged of one’s enemies. Institutions do two things. First, they are opportunities for co-ordination and concentration of power. Second, they are public-facing sources of legitimacy, a kind of vaguely agreed upon sense that these guys are in charge. Often, it doesn’t even matter what the institution’s exact mandate even was. The National Convention was voted in in 1792 to draft a new constitution. But just being the convention meant that it operated as a de facto parliament with general powers, which it then delegated most of to the Committee of Public Safety, which then basically became a dictatorship by committee. None of these aspects, you will note, have anything to do with drawing up a constitution. But it didn’t matter.

Even expelling members doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. Once the Girondins got purged (admittedly, at the hands of a massive stirred up mob), the rest of the National Convention proceeded just fine. Same thing when the members of the Paris Commune were also expelled later on (this time, for being too leftist). The even more striking version, to briefly switch revolutions, was the Rump Parliament in the English Civil War. You might think that shamelessly expelling 180 of the 470 members of a legislative body for disagreeing with you might seriously weaken its legitimacy, but this is probably because you’ve lived under democratic lies too long. A better question is “whatcha gonna do about it?”. Because if you don’t have an answer to that question, then you’ve gotten weaker, not stronger.

It is possible to organize from out of power, of course. Mostly this seems to involve building parallel institutions to subvert the existing regime. Georges Danton was a great example. If you don’t know his story, read through the section on “Revolution” and try to work out at what point he actually held a major position in an important public office – it’s surprisingly late. He did most of his early work in the Jacobin club, which operated as a kind of shadow government for the left. He was involved in the local government of the Paris Commune, but most importantly helped organize the mobs that stormed the palace in the insurrection of August the 10th, which precipitated the King’s removal and eventual execution. In other words, you don’t have to be in the current legislative body (in this case, the Legislative Assembly) if you can just gin up a massive mob to overthrow the monarch presiding over said assembly. His first real post then came when he was appointed minister of justice, but this was mostly just a reflection of the informal organizing role he already had. Once you can stir up the mobs to carry out the September Massacres, executing all sorts of royalists and suspected Royalists, and effectively get away with it, it won’t be long until you’re finally voted into the National Convention (the new legislative body created after you totally crushed the old one), and ultimately in the big leagues of the Committee of Public Safety. Of course, his whole career looks a lot more like Vladimir Lenin than it does like Carlyle. Say what you will about the tenets of Bolshevik Communism, but they understood how power works. They may not have understood anything else, but they understood that. Danton was acting like a government in waiting long before he held real office, including directing a mob substantially at his command. One man’s mob is another man’s national guard.

What you definitely don’t want to do is what the outgoing Constituent Assembly did in 1791, when setting up the Legislative Assembly, and decree that none of the members in the current body should be eligible to sit in the new body. Great job! Now everyone who set up the new system won’t be serving in it, and the ones that do will have pretty damn ambivalent feelings about the constitutional structures you love so much. Giving up power, walking out of institutions without a plan of what to do next, boycotting elections – these are all symbolism without a concrete plan, and counterproductive symbolism at that.

Indeed, what’s most useful about all this is not so much studying what happened, but thinking about possible counterfactuals to what might have happened, and what they reveal about the general laws of politics and human behavior. The resemblance of the later French revolutionaries to straight-up communism is quite palpable. Especially Babouef, who explicitly wanted to abolish private property (“Society must be made to operate in such a way that it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer, or wiser, or more powerful than others."). And his idea of this was defending Robespierre and the other executed leaders of the Terror. Babouef, humorously, wrote under the pen name Gracchus, which is funny given the role of the rabble-rousing Graccchi brothers in kicking off a process in the Roman Republic that eventually led to … the Caesars. Babouef, who never actually made it to power, is just one more end point of each group deciding they could rile up a coalition of lower ranks who were out of power to overthrow the people at the top. The Parlement organized against the King, then the National Assembly organized against both the Parlement and the King by harnessing the power of the bourgeois citizens, then Danton organized the Sans Culottes into a mob that overthrew the power of the others, until the trend to that point stopped when Thermidor prevented things going further leftward. Religious reforms started out as being making the wealth and role of priests more equal, then it moved to abolishing tithes, then it moved to seizing Church property, then in moved to requiring priests to swear an oath of fealty to the Republic over the Church, then it moved to just abolishing the Church altogether and replacing it with a Cult of Reason.

The point is that there is a logic to these progressions. They in fact represent taking the established principles (which blog.jim described as “knocking over the apple cart in order to get the apples”) further each time. Thankfully, it’s not like this process always gets taken to its horrible logical conclusion. Existing elites can sometimes realize that enough is enough, and reverse the current trend to try to cement more right wing changes (Thermidor, the Federalists, the Restoration of Charles II). But there’s also no reason this process has to stop on its own. And to see it taken to its fully logical end point, you get Zhang Xianzhong, who Wikipedia politely refers to as “leading a peasant revolt” that led to “massacres in Sichuan that depopulated the region”. Translation: everyone got killed. Everyone. Like Robespierre’s homage to terror, this doesn’t seem to be an accident. His most famous contribution to literature is his Seven Kill Stele:

Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man.
Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.
Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.

Like they used to say about Zimbabwe – it can always get worse.

I think the clearest application to the present, if you are a nobody and not an aspiring Georges Danton, is “Be extremely wary of the first revolution.”

By way of an example, in June 2020, during the height of the George Floyd mayhem, there had been a bunch of protests during the week, leading up to a big organized event on the Saturday night. There were thousands of protestors banging on barricades outside the White House. As it turns out, the security services managed to keep them under control, just. But what if it hadn’t gone that way? What if the mob had broken through the barricade, and the security services had started shooting them? Or what if they’d failed to shoot, and the white house got overrun and burned to the ground? What if Trump got chased out of office as part of a color revolution, or tracked down by a mob?

None of these things happened, of course. Which either means we got lucky, or that the protests were in fact controlled (since the left already holds the levers of power). But what would the French Revolution perspective be on these events? Are you really sure that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi will really stay in charge of a fully unleashed mob that got out of hand? You’d be a bold man to bet that way. Events have an alarming way of taking on a life of their own. You can call up a mob to the front of the White House, but your ability to control it in the heat of the moment may be less than you think. 

For my part, I had a modest position in VIX call options over that weekend. Nothing came of it, of course. Like every bad trade, when it fails, you can always call it a hedge.

I can tell you this, though. If the White House had actually gotten burned to the ground, or Trump got color revolutioned out of power that week, I would have begun planning my life around it being time to leave America.

The good news is that, historically, you actually have a decent amount of time to do this. Things don’t tend to go completely bananas in the next day, week, month, or often even year.

But after the first revolution, you are much better off being an Émigré, waiting to see whether the next big change is a reaction from the right, or further leftward. High political volatility is great if you’re a young, clever, ambitious man looking to quickly advance up the ranks. It is a disaster for everyone else though.