The first French Republic arising out of the events of the Revolution seemed to have its origins shaped more by passion and spontaneity rather than any rational preconception. In fact at its onset it was the product of much previous thought regarding ethics and political systems as well as a reaction to events an ocean away.
France in the last decades of the old regime was being transformed from a medieval society based on control of the land and its produce to one benefiting from the spread of commercial activities concentrated in urban environments. By the late 18th century this transformation was well underway resulting in much newly made wealth that allowed for life, particularly in the cities to transcend the subsistence existence of generations past.
Many things would come from this new affluence, but freedom from want freed up time for more creative activities such a political discourse. It was only natural that such thoughts would favor the conditions that had allowed them to flourish and to belittle those which were viewed to have suppressed them in the past.
Thus the ancient order and those most benefited by its associated privileges came increasingly under attack. To its critics, the life of the court and its principle pillars of support, the military and church seemed increasingly detached from the emerging influence of the more urban commercial classes. This new elite was drawn to new ideas of universal natural laws which endowed all Frenchmen with similar rights, and so in that context groups with special privilege were felt to be unnatural.
By the time that the Estates National were called the intelligentsia of France was well versed in natural rights thanks to Rousseau, Montesquieu and other enlightenment writers along with such British political philosophers such as John Locke. It was the experience of the American Revolution however that piqued not only their interest, but ironically due to the debt incurred by French participation required the King to bring all of the country’s three estates together for the first time in nearly two centuries.
This assembly provided the crucible for the sudden seizure of power by the more numerous and now more powerful third estate from the nobility and clergy resulting in the formation of the National Assembly which effectively seized political sovereignty by abolishing feudal privilege and enacting numerous radical reforms.
Soon to follow was The Declaration of the Rights of Man a preamble to the constitution of 1791 which in its original iteration was a constitutional monarchy.
That famous declaration asserted that the aim of political association was the preservation of the natural rights of all men including liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
It was liberty that was the catalyst for it all. In all the history of mankind seldom had men experienced liberty. Great Britain and the Dutch had been the among the most laudable for their efforts in that regard, and in so doing had provided an infrastructure for burgeoning commercial prosperity. When the United States wrested independence from Europe’s most powerful state, men throughout France and indeed the continent felt its time had come for them.
The tragedy of the Revolution that was to haunt the country ever after was the descent from a constitutional monarchy into Jacobite anarchy necessitating a strongman in Napoleon Bonaparte to rescue the citizenry from their own misguided impulses.
Edmund Burke a contemporary and vocal critic of the Revolution predicted its descent into terror. The fault he felt was in creating a government anew out of the ideas of philosophers and intellectuals who in one act of arrogance threw out centuries of tradition and practice. That many existing policies required modification was evident, but they also had endured because they had often provided an effective means to govern.
By their fiat the new government in throwing out all vestige of the past immediately and permanently alienated vast swathes of the country who had both prospered or respected that past. In contrast, Burke argued that the American Revolution had been successful because it was a conservative one. It did not reorder the means of production and the means of government, but had simply replaced home rule for that of a distant parliament. Burke concludes that governing is a far too difficult process to be left to intellectuals and theorists, requiring instead practical men who take the best of the past and adopt it to the needs of the present.
By throwing out any wisdom from the past France had removed too many political guard rails. What would follow throughout the remainder of the eighteenth century was a battle between the disenfranchised with the battle lines drawn sharply between monarchists and their cohorts in the church and military and the republican forces that represented a large part of the rest of the country. That battle was too often a bitter one with republics alternating with monarchies and emperors dependent on economic and political events of the moment.
Above it all hung the idealistic notion of the Declaration of the Rights; Liberty, equality, and fraternity. It was a powerful notion however and in the aftermath of the debacle of the Prussian War it proved strong enough to overcome the forces of monarchy to lead to the reestablishment of a republican government- France’s third since the revolution.
Yet as France entered the twentieth century the class struggles that had proven so corrosive in years past remained. Much had changed in those one hundred years however, including the rise of wide spread industrialization giving new power to the working class who viewed the bourgeois rulers of the Third Republic with as much suspicion and hostility as they did the ancient regime.
The challenge for France in this new century was to make progress with or in spite of a government that at times might be ill suited at any given moment to placate the diverse interest of a populace so widely divided. Ministers and premiers would come and go which was inherent in the constitutional structure, but despite this the country seemed to prosper. Enormous scandals provided much angst and fodder for gossip, but despite this the country prospered. Political and commercial disputes became ever more acrimonious, but somehow the country prospered.
Any discussion of France before the Great War such as in the novel Some Damn Fool Thing has to recognize the vibrancy of a country and culture that could flourish despite division, discord and political incompetence. Much of this had to do with individual initiative and occasional genius, but behind it all the notion of the importance of the individual Frenchman each with their right to Liberty, equality and fraternity can not be readily dismissed.
Soon an even greater challenge would come on such a scale as few could imagine. Then even Burke would concede the importance of such ideals as liberty equality and fraternity to abetting the near impossible task of governing a democracy in a life or death struggle. Fortunately for France at that time there were men who could embody such ideals into focused action, perhaps the ultimate form of political government.