George Washington’s reservations about the French Revolution were practically and morally correct.
George Washington’s reservations about the French Revolution were practically and morally correct.
J uly is a unique month for national reflection. Toward its beginning, we celebrate the inception of the greatest country on earth, one conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now in the month’s middle, we commemorate the beginning of the French Revolution, a movement that set off years of democratized bloodshed.
Today is Bastille Day, which celebrates the revolutionaries who stormed the political prison and armory in Paris, a physical manifestation of royal authority. Just as the anniversaries of the two revolutions are proximate, their events were also contemporaneous. Soon after assuming office for his second term, President George Washington chose not to allow the nascent American Republic to aid the French radicals in a war against Great Britain. He made the correct decision from a practical standpoint, as the United States was ill-equipped to engage in another costly war with its former mother country. Simultaneously, Washington displayed great fortitude from a moral perspective. The French Revolution was filled with atrocities, and America’s helping the revolutionaries would have been a grave sin.
But Americans should not be too quick in criticizing the French for throwing off the shackles of bad government. We did so a few years before they did, and they helped us in our effort. Louis XVI of France was right to do so because we were engaged in a moral revolution. King George III and Parliament were levying unfair taxes on the colonists without giving them representation in the legislature. Although we recognized that our situation under the British yoke had become intolerable, we acknowledged that we had inherited some good traditions. One such tradition was a bill of rights. The English Bill of Rights in 1689 guaranteed British subjects rights to free speech, bearing arms, and trial by jury, which we reproduced and expanded in our Bill of Rights. Rather than discard the good traditions we received from Britain, we reinvigorated their moral justification, blending respect for tradition with the idea of natural rights.
A regrettable mistake the French revolutionaries made was reading John Locke without an Edmund Burke chaser. Although they rightly declared in the Declaration of the Rights of Man that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” they refused to consider how they could use the Ancien Régime to manifest their rational principles. Instead, they opted to destroy all vestiges of the previous society so that, as Denis Diderot put it, mankind would “weave the entrails of the priest, for the lack of a cord with which to strangle kings.”
Washington saw the danger of the French tearing down all their institutions as soon as 1789, in the opening days of the revolution. In a letter to Gouverneur Morris, he wrote that while “the revolution which has been effected in France is of so wonderful a nature that the mind can hardly realise the fact,” the people needed “great temperance, firmness, and foresight.” The danger, he concluded, was that “to forbear running from one extreme to another is no easy matter.” Washington’s concerns would soon be realized, as the storming of the Bastille would precede the total dismantling of French civilization — the good and the bad — setting off years of mob and state-sanctioned bloodshed among the French people.
The ensuing slaughter is another way the French Revolution was immoral compared with America’s. Few revolutions will be without violence, and death was present on both sides of the Atlantic. The difference is that America’s violence was legitimate and controlled. The Continental Army, which the Continental Congress gave Washington a mandate to lead, undertook most of the fighting, and they were subject to the military conventions of the time. True, there were instances of mob violence before the army organized, most famous among them the Boston Tea Party in 1773. But even this action was targeted and humane.
The Sons of Liberty did not pick any random ship to raid. The tea belonged to the British East India Company, to whom the Crown had given a tax break and several other forms of corporate welfare at the expense of American merchants. The colonists chose that particular vessel to make a political point.
Additionally, as John Adams noted, no one died — defending the event as “but an Attack upon Property.” There were, of course, foolishly destructive anti-English attacks in the era, but the Founders quickly denounced them. For example, in 1765, a mob burned an effigy of Boston’s Stamp Act collector, Andrew Oliver, before ransacking his home. Though Adams was sympathetic to the mob’s grievances, he condemned their actions as “a very attrocious Violation of the Peace and of dangerous Tendency and Consequence.”
We cannot say the same about the mobs of the French Revolution and their leaders. On its face, the storming of the Bastille might have been a reasonable analogue to the Boston Tea Party. It was an attack on a structure supported by the royal family, in which they kept political prisoners.
Had the mob stopped there, one could argue that its actions were as righteous as those in Massachusetts. Instead, they went on to kill the Bastille’s governor, the Marquis de Launay, and Paris’s provost of the merchants, Jacques de Flesselles. While the Sons of Liberty cleaned the deck of the ship they boarded, France’s National Guard put their enemies’ heads on pikes. Launay and Flesselles would be the first casualties of a revolution that would eventually kill tens of thousands more.
The most bloodthirsty leader during the carnage was Maximilien Robespierre, who led the ironically named Committee of Public Safety during his Reign of Terror. He viewed the terror he generated as “prompt, severe, inflexible justice” and “an examination of virtue.” Washington was perhaps Robespierre’s greatest foil. In the same letter to Morris, Washington warned that, while the first stage of the French Revolution proceeded somewhat smoothly, it was “of too great magnitude to be effected in so short a space, and with the loss of so little blood.”
The Father of Our Country knew that involving the United States in France would damage not only its military strength but also its moral fiber. As we celebrate Bastille Day today, we should be thankful that Washington’s foresight and prudence did not delegitimize the American experiment by aiding and abetting a conflict driven by the whims of violent mobs. We can learn from his and other Founding Fathers’ tendency to conserve the good of the previous society while casting off the bad, and we can reaffirm their emphasis on ensuring that people act humanely, no matter the validity of their grievances.