The New Regime

"Isser Woloch was a student of R. R. Palmer’s and was very influenced by his point of view. This book is a somewhat dry presentation. It is, however, an absolutely crucial book for making you understand that after Tocqueville, after Furet, after Schama – books that focus on all the problems of the revolution – here is one that concretely lays out the staggering number of changes that take place in this period, in every single domain of political and social life. This is an incredible corrective, because what he shows you is that everything changes. Maybe I’m obsessive about this, but the whole question, “Does the revolution fail?” or “Why does the revolution fail?” is a misguided one. What he shows you is that all these different things change in ways that will never be turned back again. They’re institutional changes, so the things that Tocqueville says don’t happen, the things that Furet says don’t happen and lead the revolution to veer off into totalitarianism, he’s showing they are changed by the revolution, and remain an important part of French life right up to the present. I always tell students, you have to read this book, because you have to see that it isn’t just Louis XIV redux, it really is a massive overhaul of French life. They don’t really succeed in that. They propose doing it and it was a blueprint for the future. One of the things that goes on in the revolution is that things are laid out on the agenda which will remain on the agenda for generations to come. Divorce is instituted in 1792. They don’t get back to the same divorce law until the 1970s. Universal education is laid out as a programme, they start trying to do it, but it’s not really achieved until the end of the 19th century. But certain things are achieved. “The whole question, “Does the revolution fail?” or “Why does the revolution fail?” is a misguided one.” The rewriting of the penal code, from 1791, is essentially the penal code that will remain in existence ever after. They eliminate torture in the judicial process for ever. They institute equality under the law for ever. They institute forms of legal inheritance for children, including girls, that will remain in the law for ever. These are incredibly fundamental changes that take place. Amongst them, and one that people tend to forget, is that when the monarchy comes back in 1814, there is a constitution. There is a written document that says, there’s going to be a lower house and an upper house. Yes, they limit the vote, but there is no way that you’re not going to have a constitutional form of government from that time onwards. These are crucial developments in French political and social life that shape what happens during the entire 19th and 20th centuries. What the revolution showed is that it would, in future, be impossible to ignore the vast mass of the people. There will be many solutions to that problem. Some of those solutions won’t be so great. One could argue that fascism and communism are both different answers to, “What do you do about incorporating the mass of the people into the polity?” But representative forms of government will also be one very important example. The French don’t invent that. The United States is developing it also. But the revolution shows that governments are going to ignore this at their peril. In that sense, it has an enormous impact. Because everyone from then on is thinking, what are we going to do about this? What changes do we have to make, in order not to lose our position? There is something about the suddenness of the French Revolution that makes people come to the realisation that the way government is organised is actually just a convention. It’s not given by nature, it’s not given by tradition. It inaugurates an enormous debate about how far you can go to change things just because you think it’s reasonable and right to change them, and how much change has to take place in a more gradual way. “What the revolution showed is that it would, in future, be impossible to ignore the vast mass of the people.” The revolution raises the whole issue of how change takes place, and how much people should organise to insist that change takes place. It rips off the veil of tradition and says that the only justification for government is that it makes sense, that it’s fair, that it’s equal, that it’s just. These are debates we have right up to the present: How to negotiate the tension between what we currently have and what ought to be. It gives a force to this that no other event had previously done in quite the same way, which is why everyone who writes about it, from Burke on, is completely obsessed with what happened. Yes, in the sense that Occupy Wall Street is about not just sitting around saying, “Oh! There’s a growing gap between the rich and poor,” but figuring out what we’re going to do about it. It’s a way of saying that just because things are the way they are doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. It’s not acceptable, just because it’s there. What the revolution does is create a staggering rupture in people’s ideas in that regard, because a centuries-old monarchy just collapses, and is replaced by something that France had never had, a republic."