Europeans and European colonists began rejecting the absolutist, aristocratic, and oligarchical systems that had emerged from the crises of the 17th century.
The Enlightenment was part of that rejection, but not the end of it.
Two works of the 1760s and 1770s symbolize further development of anti-establishment thought:
Paine was not an American, but an Englishman right off the boat, and he shows how "American" revolutionary thought was part of something larger. (See the text itself for more.)
Superficially, as anti-monarchist as Paine. A citizen of republican Geneva. In the Social Contract he argued that the original political act had been the willing submission of free human beings to a government meant to protect them all. The people originally were and remained sovereign. They could revoke their consent to any government that defied the General Will.
Many differences between Paine and Rousseau, and one can argue about the extent of their influence, but there is a common thread: Each believed that the political and social system of their day made no sense and had no legitimacy. This idea widely shared in America, France, and countries where there was no successful revolution.
Why?
For America the answer is easy: American society was itself revolutionary, because there was no native, hereditary aristocracy, no resident king and court, no single established church (even where the Church of England was established, there were no bishops). Most of all, vast numbers of people had a permanent landed interest in society, and could vote.
When Britain tried to restrict the self-government of these self-respecting colonial Englishmen after the Seven Years' War, then revolutionary sentiment broke out.
What about Europe, and especially France?
We looked in the last lecture at some of the dysfunctional aspects of French society. But dysfunctionality all by itself would have led only to desperate peasant revolts like many other forgotten desperate peasant revolts in the time of Louis XIII and Louis XIV.
What pushed France to a memorable and important revolution was a combination of:
juxtaposed with
France was not a backward country, it was one of the most advanced in the world. It was the possibility of further progress that tantalized the people -- intellectual leaders but not just intellectual leaders.
Schama shows how crowded, prosperous, growing cities of France created a bustling society that could not be contained in the structures of the Counter-Reformation Catholic church or the absolutist hierarchy imposed by Louis XIV. These structures irrelevant to a society on the verge of the industrial and scientific age.
One of Schama's best symbols is the baloon launching at Versailles on Sept. 19, 1783. He reminds us that "man" did not "learn to fly" with the Wright brothers in 1903, but with the Montgolfiers and other French aerialists of the 18th c.
This accomplishment had an awesome cultural effect.
Louis XVI invited Montgolfier to Versailles to demonstrate this wonder, and 100,000 people came from Paris to see it. Versailles, of course, had been created to insulate the king from normal people. Now it was invaded by normal people who wanted to see something besides the king.
Another example of the growing distance between the formal structure of royal power and the center of action can be seen in the success of the Palais-Royal: a royal palace in Paris turned by the Duc d'Orleans into a shopping plaza and entertainment center, that everyone wanted to hang out at.
It was successful because it was vigorous, open to everyone. No coincidence that it was financed by a close relative of the king. The rich and influential, too, were rejecting formal, approved, royally-sponsored culture -- at least the more adventurous were.
Similarly, the appeal of the popular theater of Paris, with its occasionally subversive themes: The Marriage of Figaro. Unanticipated side effects seen in a dispute between a fight over a seat in the theater between a lawyer of the Paris Parlement and a military courtier, who had booted the lawyer out of a seat the lawyer had paid for.
The lawyer took him to court and argued, successfully, that his rights as a "citizen" had been violated, because in some spheres "money alone put commoners and nobles on the same footing."
A "bourgeois revolt" against "noble privilege"? Well, the lawyer was relatively high up in privileged society, on the verge of nobility. He was hardly rejecting the whole structure. But he felt that in large areas of social life that structure was or should be irrelevant.
In the last three decades before the Revolution there was a battle of symbols, between the establishment (who defended the old royalist, society of orders ones) and urban society, including members of the establishment, who looked for new ones of their own.
The issue of spontaneity was important. Rousseau perhaps more important for his praise of spontaneous, sincere emotion than for his political ideas.
His novel La Nouvelle Héloise (the New Heloise) was an exchange of letters between a married woman and her lover. The novel was radical not for the extramarital sex (commonplace in 18th c. French literature), but because the relationship went beyond casual sex, and achieved honest forthright, sexual and spiritual love. Even the husband is transformed by it.
It was a sentimental tear-jerker that glorified good, honest tears as opposed to mannered sophistication.
Simon Schama discusses similar messages of "authentic feeling" encoded in paintings of the time, esp. those of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (discussed in class).
Rousseau himself became, after his death, the patron saint of authentic feeling. Even Louis XVI and his Austrian wife Marie-Antoinette played at simple domesticity -- without convincing "the public" that they meant it.
Another issue was one of community. Schama argues that in the 1780s, the painter David was creating symbols of a heroic community of self-sacrificing citizens, using classical stories well-known to the educated public: The Oath of the Horatii, for instance. In the French Old Regime there were no citizens, only subjects, and no opportunity for heroic self-sacrifice. There was instead corruption (as Rousseau had argued) and the selfish pursuit of private interest at the cost of the common good ("privilege").
At the same time David was creating a visual language for the upcoming revolution, the "foreign woman" Marie-Antoinette" was being abused in pornographic pamphlets as a monster of depravity, the source of all that was wrong, a subversive presence.
Connections of the American Revolution to the French one. They are many. Two stand out.
Early Modern History Course Home Page.
You are visitor # since February 25, 1998.