“Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations, that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than the others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature. I take exception to this general view.” (Carlo M. Cipolla)[1]
Liberty, equality, and fraternity were the values in the name of which the revolutions that marked the transition from feudalism to modernity took place throughout the world. They were launched as the motto of the French Revolution of 1789 and taken up by the European revolutionaries of 1848, the Forty-eighters. The spirit of these values hovered over the artisans of the nation-states of the 19th and 20th centuries. Even the unionist Romanians of 1918 claimed to be inspired by patriotic ideology.
In a previous article we noted that despite the high values they proclaim, the progressive ideologies of modernity have produced so many conflagrations and social upheavals. Yet it is not fraternity but the struggle for survival that has found its place in the historical evolution of European states. In this article, we will focus on the second value—equality—in order to assess the extent to which it was respected and bore fruit during the French Revolution and afterwards.
“Liberty, equality, fraternity or death!”
This was the overarching motto of the French revolutionaries of 1789. During the ten years of the Revolution and its aftermath, the spirit of self-sacrifice gradually faded. Thus, posterity took up only the first part of the formula, without the alternative of supreme sacrifice to promote the three values. These values promised a formula of just government for all French people, who became equal citizens. A citizen is a member of a state, by birth or naturalisation, who has certain duties and enjoys certain rights in relation to that state by virtue of its laws.
Through a long and bloody revolution, the French made the transition from feudalism to capitalism: they abolished the monarchy, the privileges of certain lords, of certain legal offices and of certain principalities, cantons or cities, of the nobility and of the clergy. They abolished the duties and servitude of the lower classes, the peasants and factory workers, and slavery. The rising bourgeoisie was favoured, the state became secular, wealth and land were confiscated, and the monarchy was transformed into a republic by the beheading of the king. Civil rights specific to the modern era were promoted: the right to liberty, security, property, the expression of ideas and opinions, and the right to a fair trial under the law.
However, the revolutionary process, which lasted for so many years, was also marked by negative events that not only systematically violated these rights, but were often downright despicable: armed conflicts, corruption, immorality, massacres, lynchings, or treason. From the liberating symbol of the Bastille, the dreaded prison emptied by the revolutionaries, to the much more terrifying symbol of the guillotine, with its now popular, everyday spectacles. There were constant divisions: between the people and the army, between the National Guard and the generals, between royalists and republicans, laymen and clergy, bourgeoisie and lower classes, moderates and radicals, Catholics who recognised the authority of the Pope and those who rejected it, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, townspeople and peasants, familyists and anti-familyists, revolutionary committees and “suspects”, etc. In the end, it all took on the proportions of a civil war.
As an example of how the ideals of the Revolution were violated, it is enough to recall the enactment of the “law of suspects” in 1793: a revolutionary tribunal unleashed terror, and anyone could be condemned to death at any time without a fair trial. The hunt for suspects was based on an almost mechanical and absurd system of denunciation, through the vigilance of committees of revolutionaries called, ironically, “public safety” and “national security.”[2] Liberty, equality and fraternity were nowhere to be seen in a country that had been shaken to its foundations, that was economically and financially bankrupt and that had suffered years of famine. It was only through the imperial expansions of General Napoleon Bonaparte’s era, from 1798 onwards, that it “recovered” economically.
Reversing the slogan
It seems that death was the dominant idea that was taken from the motto, during the more than ten years of the French Revolution. Tens of thousands died in its wake. Hundreds of thousands more emigrated, even to the frozen lands of Canada. History shows that the French revolutionaries’ attempt to rule the country in pursuit of the three grand ideals of their motto led to successive regimes of terror and destruction. What was wrong with the revolutionary ideology and strategy? How do good intentions pave the way to hell?
The answer has at least two parts. A first explanation would be that the mere appeal to abstract values and ideal rights was not enough to lay the moral and then legal foundations of society. The French Revolution was a “philosophical revolution,”[3] as it was criticised at the time. The result was that it was not possible for citizens to coexist in the absence of a system of civic rules, principles and moral norms to which most members of society adhered and which would lead, through laws, to the establishment of specific, concrete duties and rights of the members of society. The total change proposed by the French Revolution actually led to chaos. With the abolition of religion, public morality, with its religious foundation, was also abolished.
A second explanation comes from the way the French Revolution began: with the proclamation of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” (La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen). If you start by demanding rights, you run the risk of creating a paradox: the rights demanded have no basis in relations between people and cannot be implemented by regulating people’s behaviour. For example, there is no point in declaring that the right to property is a natural right inherent in human beings, if the social and economic conditions do not exist for individuals to retain their property, or if the laws do not protect their property, because in these conditions they cannot enjoy their right, nor can they hold anyone responsible for violating it.
Human rights[4] were formulated in the spirit of the Enlightenment, an influential school of thought in Europe and America in the 18th century. The first article of the Declaration of Human Rights states: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.” Although this formulation seems simple and perfectly acceptable, it raises questions about its ethical, social and political functionality.
First of all, the formula les hommes—although translated as “men”, which implies all human beings—refers only to male citizens, not to all people. This makes it less generous to everyone.
Secondly, a right is declared (equal rights for all men), but it is not guaranteed by special, state, legal measures, but by something that is expected of people, a desirable attitude: to consider themselves equal and to agree on the common good. Obviously, if this scenario is not put into practice, whether out of conviction or fear of sanctions, the right proclaimed will remain abstract and completely unworkable. Did the drafters of the Declaration assume that people would suddenly, in defiance of thousands of years of tradition, treat each other on an egalitarian basis and seek the common good? And if so, what was the basis for this assumption?
Reason versus religion
Under the influence of Enlightenment figures (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, etc.), who exalted the power of human reason over social transformation and progress, the French revolutionaries pushed the limits of absurdity: they created the cult of the Goddess of Reason. They turned human reason into a veritable deity of their secularised society. In a procession that appeared to be religious, they personified her in a nude, promiscuous dancer, enthroned her in the cathedral of Notre Dame and worshipped her. This ritual was imitated throughout France, where citizens considered themselves enlightened by La Deésse de la Raison. Her cult was proclaimed “the only true cult.”
Yet everyday experience everywhere and at all times shows that not all people have reason and conscience to the same extent, nor do they always use them. This is a self-evident fact, and what is self-evident needs no argument. Moreover, everyone can see that children develop reason and conscience as they grow up, which is why they do not have the right to vote until they reach adolescence. It is also possible that, because of poor upbringing, they may fail in the process of refining their innate capacity for reason and conscious action.
It is now generally accepted in theories and research on the human psyche that people are not entirely rational in their thinking, but are influenced, without realising it, by non-rational elements. These are not necessarily irrational, but they are nonetheless unconscious. They can be very diverse, in varying proportions, good or bad: feelings, emotions, intuitions, instincts, illusions, unconscious impulses, prejudices, superstitions, beliefs, faulty reasoning, unspoken passions, and subliminal perceptions. For example, for the same lucid, conscious conviction: “It is wrong to kill”, people may have very different motivations and reasons: some may support it because they respect the right to life, some because they are obeying a biblical commandment, some because they fear the punishment of the law, some because they have killed and have a guilty conscience, and so on.
The unconscious was postulated in psychoanalysis[5], then in psychiatry[6] and psychology[7] as a part of human psychic life alongside the conscious part. It operates in the mind of every lucid individual, more or less pronounced, pathological or not, depending on the individual’s life history, personality, intellectual endowment, and moral choices. Reasoning is a process that also requires an effort of the will, an effort to master the non-rational part of our psyche. To be rational is to be constantly vigilant against the slippages of the dark side called the unconscious.
Listening to the voice of conscience also has a moral connotation: it involves discerning between right and wrong and striving always to choose the good. There are several examples of great consciences in history, and even they do not always seem to have acted purely rationally; the biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Churchill, Titulescu, etc. bear witness to this.
Even before the development of the study of the psyche, obvious realities could be ascertained: few people cultivate a higher conscience to always act in accordance with its inner voice. In general, people believe themselves to be rational without being so, or they choose not to use their abilities to reason to the extent that they have them. They tend to listen to the more comfortable impulses dictated by personal concerns, emotions, instincts, etc. Even people with a high level of theoretical, scientific education may lack a healthy moral conscience, one that respects the ethical norms that are viable in their community, or one that improves existing deficient norms. Intellectual enlightenment does not guarantee the promotion of the values of freedom, human dignity or the equality of citizens.
All this indicates that the role of reason in individual human life, and especially in collective life, is less than we would like it to be. In the case of France at the intersection of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is obvious that everyday experience should have at least distanced the revolutionaries from the assumption that people think, choose, decide and act primarily on the basis of rational deliberation and argument.
So what led the French revolutionaries to idealise human reason and to regard it as decisive for human behaviour? One explanation is offered by the French historian Jacques Madaule, who points out: “The philosophical movement of the 18th century was undoubtedly directed more against the Church than against the established powers. When they spoke of abuses, they referred as much to those of the clergy as to those of the monarchy and of the privileged classes. The first task of a “rational” government seemed to be to crush the power of the Church. One thing was forgotten: although Catholicism had lost most of its prestige among the ruling classes, the faith remained strong among the people, especially in the rural areas. The civil constitution thus created a rift between the Revolution and part of the French population.”[8]
Consequently, the postulate of equality in the conscience of free men, of male citizens, could only have been a desire of the secular revolutionary bourgeoisie, or even a manipulative strategy for mass action, but by no means a biological reality or an innate virtue of every human being. Simply put, a de facto equality of the entire human race was invented as the sole engine of progress to replace divine reason. The religious idea that divine reason is the source of human reason and speaks to humans through their conscience had been abolished by violence. From where were humans to draw the power of enlightenment? From themselves, just as Baron Munchhausen saved himself from drowning by pulling himself up by the neck. It was an illusion confirmed in the most tragic way by the facts and events of the Revolution: it was precisely in the name of reason that horrors were perpetrated that will be remembered forever. Ironically, the very physical headquarters of reason, the head, was guillotined by the tens of thousands.
Throughout the ages there have been warnings of the danger that values such as reason, liberty and equality could descend into chaos in the absence of morality. Edmund Burke[9] criticised French revolutionary ideology and proposed a different way of transition to modernity: through gradual reforms tailored to concrete situations. Moral and political problems were not abstract and could not be solved as abstractions, nor could they be separated from each other, he argued. Values such as “liberty, equality, fraternity”, however generously proclaimed, are still abstractions and cannot, as such, dictate reforms or other concrete measures in the social, political, economic, or religious fields. If we consider them to be valid everywhere and always, they will never be applicable anywhere or at any time.
Indeed, let us consider how differently the value of equal opportunities for human development is understood by the following categories of people: a trade union leader, a banker, a child in an orphanage, a divorced mother, an orchestra conductor, an architect, a Papuan, a North Korean, etc.
Moral and political problems are human in nature, but they always take forms dictated by concrete circumstances, Burke said. These circumstances are diverse, which is why diversity must be respected so that a government can best reflect the specific characteristics of a people or community. But the French revolutionaries allowed themselves to be led by the illusion of abstract rights and values, unfoundedly ennobling citizens as exponents of fraternity and equality. They denied man’s aspiration to divinity, implicitly that of so many of their fellow human beings. Moreover, they opposed this aspiration to reason, as if the rational could not also be believers. The idealisation of reason led to the unleashing of irrational impulses: the reign of terror, with tens of thousands of bloody executions and other barbaric acts, torture, mutilation, rape, murder, theft, revenge, arson, more than half a million arrests, and so on.
The historian Madaule says: “However, from this nation, born in pain, we must not, in these anxious beginnings, demand humanity… for the time being, we have a tyranny of necessity.”[10] Yet humanity would have been the first condition for the establishment of true equality between the citizens of France during the more than ten years of the Revolution. In the absence of reference to a higher, divine reason that would have made all people equal as creatures and children of the Creator, the “equalities” granted among them are illusory; they resemble those of orphans grouped together in various smaller groups in the great orphanage that is society.
Burke concludes: “The construction of reason is to be regarded as a process rather than a product.”[11] Reason is always practised and found in particular practices rather than as a given of nature, a fixed, generic “monument” of the human mind. In the next article, we will examine the way in which this monstrous scaffolding of illusory human reason is articulated, which has more in common with the scaffolding of freedom than with a monument of enlightenment.
