French Revolution, adieu

National Review, August 4, 1989

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION will ever rest in controversy, as Charles Dickens knew when he wrote about it as the best of times and the worst of times. Was the Terror a product of ideology or of circumstances? Or both, and to what degree? The answer: Pick your historian.

What is most striking about the 1989 bicentennial is that this time the Revolution has not divided France politically and culturally. Indeed, the public attitude has been one of bemused indifference. In 1889 the wounds were still very deep and French politics had a different configuration. Republicans and Catholic traditionalists fired paper broadsides at each other. The same was true of the Dreyfus case, and of the Action Frangaise controversies of the Twenties and Thirties. The Vichy regime enlisted the support of a good many followers of Charles Maurras, not including Charles de Gaulle. The Communists, who considered themselves the heirs of the Revolution, were very strong after World War 11, boosting themselves on the myth of the Resistance.

But that all seems very long ago now. Controversies over the French Revolution remain sharp, but mostly in the academy. France today is prosperous, more so than at any other time in its history. There is some comedy in the fact that the nominally Socialist Frangois Mitterrand is behaving like a monarch, and being mocked for it. Complaints are loud that the festivities are costing too much. M. Mitterrand should be reminded that one of the major complaints about Louis XVI concerned courtly extravagance.