Thomas Jefferson remained enamored of the French Revolution long after most of the Founding Fathers, sickened by the atrocities of the Revolution, became critics of it. Jefferson was the American Minister to France at the start of the Revolution, and here is his account of the storming of the Bastille:
On the 14th, they send one of their members (Monsieur de Corny, whom we knew in America) to the Hotel des Invalides to ask arms for their Garde Bourgeoise. He was followed by, or he found there, a great mob. The Governor of the Invalids came out and represented the impossibility of his delivering arms without the orders of those from whom he received them.
De Corney advised the people then to retire, retired himself, and the people took possession of the arms. It was remarkable that not only the Invalids themselves made no opposition, but that a body of 5000 foreign troops, encamped within 400 yards, never stirred.
Monsieur de Corny and five others were then sent to ask arms of Monsieur de Launai, Governor of the Bastille. They found a great collection of people already before the place, and they immediately planted a flag of truce, which was answered by a like flag hoisted on the parapet. The deputation prevailed on the people to fall back a little, advanced themselves to make their demand of the Governor, and in that instant a discharge from the Bastille killed 4. people of those nearest to the deputies. The deputies retired, the people rushed against the place, and almost in an instant were in possession of a fortification, defended by 100 men, of infinite strength, which in other times had stood several regular sieges and had never been taken. How they got in, has as yet been impossible to discover. Those, who pretend to have been of the party tell so many different stories as to destroy the credit of them all.
They took all the arms, discharged the prisoners and such of the garrison as were not killed in the first moment of fury, carried the Governor and Lieutenant governor to the Greve (the place of public execution) cut off their heads, and set them through the city in triumph to the Palais royal.
About the same instant, a treacherous correspondence having been discovered in Monsieur de Flesselles prevot des marchands, they seize him in the hotel de ville, where he was in the exercise of his office, and cut off his head.
These events carried imperfectly to Versailles were the subject of two successive deputations from the States to the King, to both of which he gave dry and hard answers, for it has transpired that it had been proposed and agitated in Council to seize on the principal members of the States general, to march the whole army down upon Paris and to suppress it’s tumults by the sword. But at night the Duke de Liancourt forced his way into the king’s bedchamber, and obliged him to hear a full and animated detail of the disasters of the day in Paris. He went to bed deeply impressed.
Although the storming of the Bastille is usually taken as marking the beginning of the French Revolution, the really decisive event was the decision by the Third Estate to declare itself the National Assembly. This took place on 6 June 1789, on the proposal of the Abbé Sieyès, who declared that the other two estates, the nobles and the clergy represented only themselves and their own particular interests, whereas the Third estate represented the nation. This was followed on 20 June by the Serment du Jeu de Paume or Tennis Court Oath, when the deputies swore “not to separate, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the kingdom is established.”
The Abbé once again intervened decisively in the history of the nation. As Lord Acton recounts, on 18 Brumaire, “Bonaparte, when threatened with outlawry, lost his head, and Sieyès quietly told him to drive out the hostile deputies. Thereupon the soldier, obeying the man of peace, drew his sword and expelled them.”
Lord Acton’s judgment on this intriguing character is well known: “The Abbé was not a high-minded man, and he has no friends in his own country. Some dislike him because he was a priest, some because he was an unfrocked priest. He is odious to royalists as a revolutionist, and to republicans as a renegade… I should not hesitate to acknowledge him as the first political intellect of his age.”
As for Jefferson, he shared the Jacobin faith that the earth belongs to those who are on it, not under it, that the future would be unlike the past, that it would be better, and that the experience of ages may instruct and warn, but cannot guide or control. He was, one recalls, an extravagant hater of tailzies and perpetuities.
Jefferson, as he continually demonstrated throughout his career, had a great faith in the people, except when the people had the temerity to disagree with him. It is a great pity that Jefferson did not expire immediately after his drafting of the Declaration of Independence.
Teddy Roosevelt, as I recall, said that Jefferson was a much over-rated man, and by the way, of Thomas Paine, a filthy atheist. As to the “prisoners” liberated from the Bastille, there were seven, some demented, there housed by request of family, and including the Marquis de Sade whom I understand dwelt in relative comfort, afforded fine cuisine, imbibing good wine, and with his library to keep him occupied in a pleasant manner. The storming and heroic liberation of the Bastille is an early example of left-wing spin.
Internet atheists are fond of quoting Jefferson’s various statements about religion, as if Jefferson was the greatest mind that ever lived. Kosciuszko urged Jefferson to give up his slaves, and left a trust of his own money to free them, but Jefferson refused. There was an order of nuns in New Orleans who feared Jefferson due to his support of the French Revolution and wrote to him asking if he supported the same thing in the US, shortly after the Louisiana Purchase.
Napoleon was the result of the Revolution. Poles were his allies as he marched to Moscow. The Polish anthem even mentions him.
[13 July 1804]
To the Soeur Therese de St. Xavier farjon Superior, and the Nuns of the order of St. Ursula at New Orleans
I have recieved, holy sisters, the letter you have written me wherein you express anxiety for the property vested in your institution by the former governments of Louisiana. the principles of the constitution and government of the United states are a sure guarantee to you that it will be preserved to you sacred and inviolate, and that your institution will be permitted to govern itself according to it’s own voluntary rules, without interference from the civil authority. whatever diversity of shade may appear in the religious opinions of our fellow citizens, the charitable objects of your institution cannot be indifferent to any; and it’s furtherance of the wholesome purposes of society, by training up it’s younger members in the way they should go, cannot fail to ensure it the patronage of the government it is under. be assured it will meet all the protection which my office can give it.
I salute you, holy sisters, with friendship & respect.
Th: Jefferson
William P. Walsh wrote, “including the Marquis de Sade…”
No, owing to deterioration in his mental condition, the Marquis had been transferred to the mental hospital at Charenton ten days earlier, on 4 July.
Released in 1790, he adopted the name of Citoyen de Sade and in 1792 he was elected a deputy for the Section des Piques in Paris to the National Convention that proclaimed the Republic on 20 September (4 brumaire an 1) His speeches show him to have been a vehement and abundant orator, but not florid. His intemperate criticisms of Maximilien Robespierre, the Committee of Public Safety’s spokesman in the Assembly and, as we should say, Leader of the House, earned him the unwelcome attention of Lazare Carnot, the War Minister and, in effect, Prime Minister. Accused of “moderatism,” on 5 December 1793, he was expelled from the Assembly, thereby losing his immunity from arrest. Imprisoned for a year, he never returned to public life.
The longest serving prisoner was Auguste Tavernier, confined in 1757 for his part in Damien’s plot to assassinate King Louis XV. Marat’s newspaper L’Ami du peuple raised a considerable public subscription for him.
Bastille Day is a dark day for the Catholic Church, I don’t believe any French Catholic should celebrate it all.
Tito Edwards wrote, “I don’t believe any French Catholic should celebrate it all.”
I tend to agree with two Catholic writers, G K Chesterton and Belloc. Chesterton wrote “The French Revolution was attacked because it was democratic and defended because it was democratic; and Napoleon was not feared as the last of the iron despots, but as the first of the iron democrats. What France set out to prove France has proved; not that common men are all angels, or all diplomatists, or all gentlemen (for these inane aristocratic illusions were no part of the Jacobin theory), but that common men can all be citizens and can all be soldiers; that common men can fight and can rule.”
And Hilaire Belloc said this: “The scorn which was in those days universally felt for that pride which associates itself with things not inherent to a man (notably and most absurdly with capricious differences of wealth) never ran higher; and the passionate sense of justice which springs from this profound and fundamental social dogma of equality, as it moved France during the Revolution to frenzy, so also moved it to creation. Those who ask how it was that a group of men sustaining all the weight of civil conflict within and of universal war without, yet made time enough in twenty years to frame the codes which govern modern Europe, to lay down the foundations of universal education, of a strictly impersonal scheme of administration, and even in detail to remodel the material face of society—in a word, to make modern Europe—must be content for their reply to learn that the Republican Energy had for its flame and excitant this vision: a sense almost physical of the equality of man.”
“and Napoleon was not feared as the last of the iron despots, but as the first of the iron democrats.”
MPS, do you realize what an absurdity that statement is? As for Belloc, he was always crazy when it came to France, as one would expect a half Frenchman to be. As for Chesterton, the facts of history were ever putty in his hands when making a polemical point, and he used his imagined, so far from the reality as to be a mirror image, Revolutionary and Napoleonic France as a stick to belabor the shortcomings of the England of his time.
Donald R McClarey wrote, “the shortcomings of the England of his time.”
No shortage of those, in Chesterton’s time, or any other. He never identified them more bitingly than when he remarked that “Our middle classes did well to adorn their parlours with the picture of the “Meeting of Wellington and Blücher.” They should have hung up a companion piece of Pilate and Herod shaking hands.”
I have seen it myself in the bar parlours of old inns.
http://tinyurl.com/hybdzwn
As for Belloc, he was one of the few writers in English to do justice to Carnot, the War Minister and, effectively Prime Minister, as “the Organiser of Victory,” as Michelet calls him. Belloc is good, too, on the “Generation of Genius,” Kléber, Moreau, Reynier, Marceau, and Ney on Sambre-et-Meuse, Hoche, Desaix, and St. Cyr on the Rhine and Bonaparte and Masséna in the Apennines, in the period between the fall of the frontier fortresses and the victory of Fleurus.
“Our middle classes did well to adorn their parlours with the picture of the “Meeting of Wellington and Blücher.” They should have hung up a companion piece of Pilate and Herod shaking hands.”
Which merely illustrates that in polemics Chesterton frequently took leave of his senses. The nineteenth century would witness democratization and an improvement in the standard of living in England, all done without a Terror ending in military dictatorship. Chesterton’s comparison of Napoleon to Christ is simply nuts.
Belloc could never acknowledge that at the end of almost a quarter of century of war all France got was defeat and monarchy.
Donald R McClarey wrote, “The nineteenth century would witness democratization and an improvement in the standard of living in England…”
One recalls Disraeli’s taunt to his Liberal opponents: “You proclaim ‘Peace and Plenty’ amid a starving people and a world in arms!”
As for “democratization,” Chesterton himself pointed out, “The politicians said the working-class was now strong enough to be allowed votes. It would be truer to say it was now weak enough to be allowed votes. So in more recent times Payment of Members, which would once have been regarded (and resisted) as an inrush of popular forces, was passed quietly and without resistance, and regarded merely as an extension of parliamentary privileges. The truth is that the old parliamentary oligarchy abandoned their first line of trenches because they had by that time constructed a second line of defence. It consisted in the concentration of colossal political funds in the private and irresponsible power of the politicians, collected by the sale of peerages and more important things, and expended on the jerrymandering of the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this inner obstacle a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket when there is a permanent block on the line. The façade and outward form of this new secret government is the merely mechanical application of what is called the Party System. The Party System does not consist, as some suppose, of two parties, but of one. If there were two real parties, there could be no system.”
“One recalls Disraeli’s taunt to his Liberal opponents: “You proclaim ‘Peace and Plenty’ amid a starving people and a world in arms!””
Dizzy was always generous with hyperbole and a miser with the truth.
“The politicians said the working-class was now strong enough to be allowed votes. It would be truer to say it was now weak enough to be allowed votes.”
So weak that as he wrote this the Liberal Party was about to be relegated to third party status by the Labour Party, and England was entering a period when the English economy would be held up for ransom by Unions. Chesterton once again viewed facts as infinitely malleable things as he built his alternate version of reality whenever reality stubbornly refused to conform to his beliefs.
My children have gotten tired of me saying “I finally understand the French revolution” after years of government and elite abuse by both parties. I understand it, including the excesses that happened, although I certainly don’t endorse them. When people are denied means of peacefully obtaining redress (like through elections), our worst characteristics come to the forefront and result in violence. What we see on the streets today is to some degree the result of 50 years of “our betters” ignoring us and sending our posterity overseas while they personally greatly benefitted.
Revenge is not a valid motive; it is an emotional response. We will always have the agitators like ANTIFA taking advantage of that emotional response. What is astounding is that in both our revolutions in 1775 and 1860, more sane minds prevailed in thwarting that urge for revenge that the French Revolution embodies. Those desiring progress would do well to keep an eye on the rearview mirror.
And, oh yeah. Ignore the press who fan the flames of revenge.
Chesterton and Belloc rightly saw that Big Money is the enemy of little people running their own lives (which is how GKC understood democracy). However, a free society inevitably sees some people acquire more money than others, to interfere with which threatens the very liberty you want to defend. Liberty in the practical political order requires both restraining Big Money while tolerating it (as Edmund Burke wisely understood). The solution may not be morally neat, and certainly involves the Church preaching against both avarice and envy.
“is the enemy of little people running their own lives”
Chesterton was a poor money manager and likely would have died broke if his wife hadn’t taken over the family finances. Belloc’s parents lost their modest fortunes in the French stock market and he spent his life writing endlessly to maintain his family. For men who wished to found a new economic system, they gave little evidence of understanding the current one.
“Liberty in the practical political order requires both restraining Big Money while tolerating it (as Edmund Burke wisely understood).”
Seeking to restrain Big Money has a bad habit of achieving mediocre results.
France would have benefited in 1789 from a fairly thorough national regeneration. The trouble is that the very uncertain social dynamics of the period produced some utile institutions and practices but a great deal of bloodshed, imprudence, and injustice. In the former category might be the abolition of heredity subjection and feudal dues, the transfer of allodial rights over rustical land to the peasants tilling it, the codification of the laws, the foundation of a common court system, the foundation of a uniform administrative hierarchy (w/o civil service examinations as yet), training academies for public employees, and a central bank. In the latter would be the madcap seizure of Church lands, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the ghastly violence of the Vendée, the Terror in Paris, and the 23 year long effort to conquer much of Europe (while losing St. Domingue to the detriment of the metropole and the local population).
Art:
Agreed. Great Britain went through many of those very changes (some slow, some violent) over the course of recent centuries. For example: the class that led the Revolution in France had long had seats in the House of Commons, commoners coming to lead His Majesty’s Government for some decades, effectively resisting attempts by the Crown and Lords as late as George III to push them aside and govern by court rather than cabinet. The British notion of peerage v nobility meant that the younger sons of peers had no special legal status and less cultural inhibition to enter trade or the military or even to intermarry with the wealthier gentry, as the latter felt less to intermarry with the wealthier merchant class, which was abhorrent to the old French nobilite de sange, who even disdained their compeers enobled for military service (d’epee) or civil magistracy (de la robe). The whole economy of 18th century Britain seemed to have been freer and less rule-ridden than elsewhere on the Continent outside of Holland. The stresses that tore France apart were either less or found release in less devastating fashion.