Tomorrow, July 14th, is Bastille Day in France, a national holiday that commemorates the ambiguous legacy of the 1789 revolution. This was when the people of Paris – or some of them - stormed the prison called La Bastille and released a rather disappointing total of seven political prisoners. This rebellion led directly to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, then to chaos and bloodshed, and the dictatorship of Napoleon, then a return of monarchy in 1815, and finally a democratic republic thirty-three years later. Revolutions are never predictable, being ten percent rational and ninety percent emotional.
Bastille Day seems superficially similar to the Fourth of July: there are flags, there are fireworks, there are patriotic speeches – and everybody goes to the beach. But it’s really a very different kind of celebration. The Fourth is about national independence and patriotism, but the 14th was a direct and violent attack by the poor against the rich, especially against the king and the aristocracy. It was not at all like the orderly, legalistic Declaration of Independence, and still less like events of January 6 last year. Bastille Day was a riot against an autocracy, and January 6 was a riot in support of one. This is how history rolls along, from one absurd event to another.
It was no accident that these two momentous events happened only thirteen years apart. Many of the founding fathers had been influenced by the revolutionary writings of the French Philosophes, and the French, in turn, were inspired by the events in America in 1776.
Both these revolutions illustrate the old, unresolved question of how much power any one ruler should have. An English philosopher called Thomas Hobbes published in 1651 a book called Leviathan, now a classic, in which he argued that our only security lies in giving absolute power to one individual – a king, an emperor, or a dictator – who will protect us from external threats and, just as important, from each other. Remove the absolute ruler and anarchy is the result.
That is a standard conservative argument. Plato made it long ago, and even Winston Churchill was skeptical about the benefits of popular rule. “The best argument against democracy,” he grumbled, “Is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” In a newspaper interview, M. Roger de Prévoisin, the leader of the Royalist Party of France, claimed that a king – a real king - would bring the whole disorderly country together and make France great again.
We’re not really supposed to even think about the subversive appeal of an absolute ruler. It’s one of those political conundrums that has not been solved in four hundred years, so it’s at least worth a moment of reflection, especially on Bastille Day. Order and freedom always pull in opposite directions: there’s no getting around it, unless we find a way to remake human nature.
History seems to tell us that political revolutions are nothing but trouble. But here’s the catch – and don’t blame me, it was Thomas Jefferson who said it: “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?” Without the occasional messy rebellion, Jefferson believed, nothing would ever change.
