RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) ("The French Revolution, we may conclude was really three revolutions--a democratic republican revolution, a moderate Enlightenment constitutional monarchism involving Montesquieu and the British model as its criteria of legitimacy, and an authoritarian populism prefiguring modern fascism. These distinct impulses proved entirely incompatible politically and culturally, as well as ideologically, and remained locked in often ferocious conflict throughout. . . ." "In shaping the basic values o the Revolution and the Revolution's legacy, the first, the democratic republican revolution, was from 1788 onward always the most important, the 'real revolution,' despite its successive defeats. Obviously, the causes of the French Revolution are very numerous and include many economic, financial, and cultural as well as social and political factors. But all of these can fairly be said to be essentially secondary compared with the one major, overriding cause driving the democratic republican impulse--the Radical Enlightenment. This is the factor that needs to be placed at center stage." Id. at 695. "Equally integral to the clash that wrecked the Revolution was a powerful socioeconomic factor . . . In a letter [Marc-Antoine Jullien (1744-1821, 'Jullien de la Drome'] . . . warned his son against too obviously parading his zeal for equality. The 'great vice of our social system,' something probably irresolvable, is 'the monstrous inequality of fortunes.' The rich understand the resentment this causes but will not tolerate a genuinely democratic republic knowing sooner or later this will deprive them of some of their wealth. 'That is the rock on which the modern philosophy founders. It has indeed established equality of rights, but it wants to uphold that prodigious inequality of fortunes, putting the poor at the mercy of the rich, and making the rich arbiters of the poor man's rights, by withholding the right to subsistence'." Id. at 285-286.).