why is Paris called the Mother of revolution?
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THE BICENTENNIAL OF 1789 OCCASIONED CONSIDERABLE HOOPLA in France and a great deal of attention on this side of the Atlantic too. The anniversary dates marking the fall of the monarchy and the foundation of the First Republic, however, seem to have gone largely unnoticed. The reasons are not hard to find. Perhaps never in the two centuries since the fall of the Bastille has the Revolution's reputation sunk as low as it stands today. The work of an influential school of "revisionist" historians in France, led by the late François Furet, as well as the best-selling Citizens by the American historian Simon Schama, have lent intellectual respectability to the longstanding popular image of the Revolution, especially in the English-speaking world (one thinks of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities), as predominantly a blood-spattered orgy of mindless violence. And in the current political climate, revolutionary activity of any kind possesses little romance or credibility. The three books under review, each in different ways, remind us that the Mother of Revolutions was a gigantic leap forward for human dignity. The poor were defeated in the end, but not before they had demonstrated a capacity to act in behalf of their own liberation such as history had never seen before.
From 1789 on, the French Revolution contained two currents: the bourgeois leadership, consisting mostly of lawyers, journalists and office-holders, and the popular movement of the poor -- wage-earners, artisans, shop-keepers, the so-called sans-culottes. For a time, they marched together, but their objectives were always essentially different. Furet insisted that the emergence of the popular movement as a semi-independent force in 1792-93 brought about a dérapage (a sliding or skidding off course) of the Revolution itself, regrettable and unnecessary after the great achievements of 1789 and the moderate compromise of the constitutional monarchy.
But the liberal revolution of 1789 was a failure. The famous night of August 4, 1789, in which aristocratic and clerical members of the Constituent Assembly vied with each other to renounce their ancient "rights" to exploit the peasantry, did not free the peasants from feudal exactions; they were saddled with redemption payments until 1793, when, during Furet's "aberrant" phase of the Revolution, the Convention eliminated them. Under the Constitution of 1791, the King's passive resistance, use of the veto and inept but persistent plotting made government unworkable; after Louis's flight to Varennes, the monarchists in the Legislative Assembly tried to cover up his obvious treason and shield him from popular anger. And finally, in 1792, the Assembly launched France into a war that it did not know how to win.
On August 10, 1792, those designated as "passive" citizens and denied the vote by the Constitution of 1791, most of them illiterate, many seldom sober, took matters into their own hands by storming the Tuileries palace and literally driving Louis from his throne. That night, the Legislative Assembly reluctantly suspended the monarchy, after which half its members fled Paris. The Assembly's rump dissolved itself and called new elections, by universal male suffrage, to a National Convention. This was no dérapage, but the final break with the Old Regime, after three years of delay and compromise. In the process, France briefly achieved the closest thing to a democracy that the world had seen since Periclean Athens -- that is, until it was throttled by the dictatorship of Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety.
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