Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre by Jonathan Israel (Princeton)

The French Revolution jump-started modern political philosophy. Contemporaries immediately sensed that something momentous was happening, but what did it foretell? The very opening scenes drove the horrified Edmund Burke to lay down the basic principles of conservatism in 1790. Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine responded in a fury, vindicating the new idea of universal rights. As one shocking event succeeded another, intellectuals and politicians across Europe and the Americas struggled to figure out where they stood, what they accepted, and what they rejected. Liberalism emerged as one possible set of responses, and nationalism, socialism, and communism followed. For Marx, the bourgeois revolution of 1789 against aristocracy and feudalism presaged the proletarian revolution to come: he repeatedly referred to the French cataclysm and hoped one day to write a history of it. Like Marx, the French aristocrat Tocqueville aimed to write a book-length account of the revolution of 1789 but never did. Instead he wrote a preliminary study, The Old Regime and the Revolution, which brilliantly explicated the links between democracy and despotism in modern politics.

No other event in modern history has had a comparable resonance. The French Revolution had this astonishing impact because it repeatedly confounded everyone’s expectations. As if planted in a political hothouse, new political terms, organizations, ideologies, and tactics sprouted up one after another. As time went on, however, it began to seem more like a tangled tropical forest. A revolution that began in the name of liberty and the universal rights of man was choked by civil war, state-sponsored terror, a penchant for armed conquest, and the Napoleonic police state. Those in charge stumbled from one unforeseen political crisis to another, raising inevitable questions about the nature of the dynamic that fed the revolutionary process.

The French Revolution gave rise to many kinds of revolutionary ideas, not to mention ideas about revolution—but was it made by ideas that were revolutionary from the outset? In his provocative and unrelenting book, Jonathan Israel insists that a “revolution of ideas” was “the motor and shaping force” of the French Revolution. By this, he means certain eighteenth-century ideas now familiar to those who have read his previous massive tomes on the European Enlightenment: “philosophy,” and more specifically “materialist-revolutionary philosophy.” His definition of the motor force seems very precise: “the real agent was the radical current [of Enlightenment philosophy] that rejected Locke and Montesquieu, which was promoted by Denis Diderot (1713-84), Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715-71), and Paul-Henri-Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723-89).” Materialism and atheism were what powered the revolution. The very charge levied countless times by ultra-conservatives is embraced by Israel as much closer to the historical truth than historians could bring themselves to acknowledge.

Since none of these three instigators were alive at the time of the French Revolution (d’Holbach died a few months before July 1789), their materialist and supposedly democratic ideas had to be championed by others. Israel identifies a left-wing revolutionary leadership of journalists, editors, renegade priests, and turncoat nobles who rejected Christianity and embraced republicanism from as early as 1788. This shifting group of “philosophers of the Third Estate” immediately took the offensive in 1789, even when not elected to office, and pushed through sweeping reforms of every aspect of French life. They upheld freedom of the press, defended the rights of religious minorities, agitated for the abolition of slavery and rights for women, oversaw the abolition of nobility, and eventually toppled the monarchy and established the first republic in French history. Things went wrong in June 1793 when Robespierre, a mawkish adept of Rousseau, overthrew the true republicans in a coup and installed an authoritarian populist regime that perverted the democratic and atheistic course of the revolution. Indeed, according to Israel, Robespierre’s regime amounted to nothing less than “an early form of modern fascism.”

There are many problems with this account, beginning with its premises. The first of these is that materialist philosophy—the contention that everything in nature (including humans) is but matter in motion—and democratic politics necessarily go together. Diderot, Helvétius, and D’Holbach are not easy to characterize politically because they wrote primarily on other matters, and because they published their most important works at a time when the French monarchy still punished its critics, thereby encouraging literary circumspection. Their political positions can be termed radical in the sense of questioning traditional practices, but they usually have been interpreted as supporting constitutional monarchy or monarchical reform (Diderot went to Russia to consult with Catherine II), and in the case of d’Holbach, even despotism when needed. Like Voltaire, d’Holbach argued that the “absolute power” of a ruler could be justified when it was used to reform abuses.