Yesterday France was celebrating the anniversary of one of the most catastrophic events in the history of Western civilisation: the French Revolution.
On that day, 224 years ago, the mob stormed the Bastille and liberated the seven prisoners held there. Not much of a triumph, one would think, but it’s the symbolic value that counts.
The mob, expertly egged on by bloodthirsty revolutionaries, was thereby liberated to do what the mob does best: murder, rob and destroy.
The downtrodden masses had shaken off the centuries of oppression by kings, aristocrats and the Church. Or at least that’s how they were encouraged to think of those centuries. Good people described them as Western civilisation, the greatest the world had ever known. Even better people referred to them as Christendom, thereby pinpointing the source of all that grandeur.
The difference of opinion predictably led to mass slaughter and destruction. About a million Frenchmen were massacred in the immediate aftermath, another two million in the subsequent wars.
As if to emphasise that it wasn’t just certain classes that were singled out for extermination but also the culture they had created, the mob went on to destroy man’s highest architectural achievements: Romanesque and Gothic buildings.
In the estimation of the prominent medievalist Régine Pernoud, over the next 100 years about 80 percent of such structures were razed and most of the others defaced.
In our neck of the Burgundian woods one can still admire countless Romanesque and Gothic churches, most of them empty, some slated for destruction but not yet destroyed. If that represents the remaining 20 percent of a great civilisation, imagine the marvel that was France with all 100 percent still intact.
One man’s marvel is another man’s target, and clearly the newly liberated mob had to hate such reminders of the glory of God. It wasn’t just the buildings to which they were taking their wrecking balls – it was to everything the buildings represented.
How any decent person can feel jubilant on 14 July escapes me. Yet there were fireworks in every village, with villagers getting drunk joyously, rather than just as a matter of daily routine.
Interestingly, the same class divisions that partly inspired the original mayhem are still extant. Thus there isn’t a single Frenchman among our friends, cultured people all, who shares in the spirit of celebration.
One chap told me at a party the other day he agreed with me entirely: there’s nothing to celebrate.
He then went on to describe himself as both a royalist and a Thomist – a most agreeable combination in my eyes. Not every one of our friends here is either a Thomist or a royalist, though many are at least one of those, but they all think of their revolution as a disgrace.
So one suspects they won’t be celebrating 4 August with any more enthusiasm than they displayed on 14 July. On that day all class privilege and titles of nobility were abolished in France, just as they had been in America a few years earlier.
The Americans still haven’t come to their senses, but the French have. Amazingly in a republic, all those Messieurs les Comptes and Mesdames les Baronnes we know wear their titles on their sleeves the way their British equivalents don’t – and we’re supposed to be a monarchy.
A psychologist might refer to this tendency as overcompensation, but whatever we call it France remains a much more hierarchical society than Britain. That may be why it remains marginally more civilised, although the gap is closing.
America, for which the advent of social egalitarianism coincided with the beginning of their civilisation rather than, as it did in France, its end, may have suffered less from her revolutionary upheaval – after all, she had much less to lose.
Consequently even civilised Americans, those who still haven’t moved to England or France, have their barbecues on 4 July, weather permitting.
That’s why I tend to be more reticent when talking to Americans about their revolution. This represent a triumph of self-restraint, for my feelings about the 4th of July are the same as about the 14th.
Remarkably, even Burke, who was right about everything else, was wrong about the relative merits of the two revolutions.
In general many, not just Burke, have argued that there were fundamental differences between the American and French revolutions, or indeed between the Anglo-American (‘Right-wing’) and the French (‘Left-wing’) Enlightenment.
I have never found the arguments to be as immediately persuasive as Coleridge did, to name one conservative scribe. Both the philosophical and religious sources of the putative two types of the Enlightenment were the same, owing much to the Reformation and its intellectual spawns Hobbes and Locke.
This debt was acknowledged as gratefully by Jefferson or Madison as by Montesquieu or Voltaire – Protestant deist Locke was admired in Catholic France more than in his own land.
Hysterical hatred of monarchy as the political manifestation of Christendom and of Trinitarian Christianity as its base; egalitarianism; deism; pluralism understood in a most mechanical sense, rampant statism – all these were shared equally by the philosophes of both the Old and the New Worlds.
If one lot arrived at their deism, in effect atheism, from a Catholic starting point and the other from a sectarian Protestant one, they all got there in the end.
Then they all converged in their keenly felt urge to wipe out Western civilisation, otherwise known as Christendom.
One can feel complacent about America, where this constituted not so much a desire to destroy as a refusal to create. France is a different matter, of course, and I do hope one day 14 July and 4 August will be declared national days of mourning.
Mind you, I am not holding my breath.