Civilization: The West and the Rest

by Niall Ferguson

  The French Revolution had in fact been violent from the outset.17 The storming of the hated Bastille prison on 14 July 1789 was celebrated with the decapitations of the marquis de Launay (the governor of the Bastille) and Jacques de Flesselles (provost of the merchants of Paris). Just over a week later, the King’s Secretary of State Joseph-François Foullon de Doué and his son-in-law Berthier de Sauvigny were also murdered. When the revolutionary mob attacked the royal family at Versailles the following October, around a hundred people were killed. Seventeen-ninety-one saw the Day of the Daggers and the massacre on the Champs de Mars. In September 1792 around 1,400 royalist prisoners were executed following counter-revolutionary demonstrations in Brittany, Vendée and Dauphiné. Yet something more was needed to produce the carnage of the Terror, the first demonstration in the modern age of the grim truth that revolutions devour their own children.

  A generation of historians in thrall to the ideas of Karl Marx (see Chapter 5) sought the answer in class conflict, attributing the Revolution to bad harvests, the rising price of bread and the grievances of the sans-culottes, the nearest thing the ancien régime had to a proletariat. But Marxist interpretations foundered on the abundant evidence that the bourgeoisie did not wage class war on the aristocracy. Rather, it was an elite of ‘notables’, some bourgeois, some aristocrats, who together made the Revolution. A far subtler interpretation had already been offered by an aristocratic intellectual named Alexis de Tocqueville whose two major works, Democracy in America (1835) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), offer an unrivalled answer to the question: why was France not America? There were, Tocqueville argues, five fundamental differences between the two societies, and therefore between the two revolutions they produced. First, France was increasingly centralized, whereas America was a naturally federal state, with a lively provincial associational life and civil society. Second, the French tended to elevate the general will above the letter of the law, a tendency resisted by America’s powerful legal profession. Third, the French revolutionaries attacked religion and the Church that upheld it, whereas American sectarianism provided a bulwark against the pretensions of secular authorities. (Tocqueville was a religious sceptic but he grasped sooner than most the social value of religion.) Fourth, the French ceded too much power to irresponsible intellectuals, whereas in America practical men reigned supreme. Finally, and most important to Tocqueville, the French put equality above liberty. In sum, they chose Rousseau over Locke.

  In chapter XIII of Democracy in America, Tocqueville hit the nail squarely on the head:

  The citizen of the United States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he only claims its assistance when he is quite unable to shift without it … In America the liberty of association for political purposes is unbounded … There are no countries in which associations are more needed, to prevent the despotism of faction or the arbitrary power of a prince, than those which are democratically constituted.18

  The comparative weakness of French civil society was therefore a large part of the reason why French republics tended to violate individual liberties and to degenerate into autocracies. But Tocqueville added a sixth point, almost as an afterthought:

  In France the passion for war is so intense that there is no undertaking so mad, or so injurious to the welfare of the State, that a man does not consider himself honoured in defending it, at the risk of his life.19

  Here, surely, was the biggest difference between the two revolutions. Both had to wage war to survive. But the war the French revolutionaries had to fight was both larger and longer. This made all the difference.

  From the moment in July 1791 when the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II called on his fellow monarchs to come to Louis XVI’s aid – a call answered first by Frederick the Great’s heir, Frederick William II – the French Revolution was obliged to fight for its life. The declarations of war on Austria (April 1792) and Britain, Holland and Spain (February 1793) unleashed a conflagration that was far larger and longer than the American War of Independence. According to the US Department of Defense, 4,435 Patriots lost their lives in defence of the United States up to and including the Battle of Yorktown; 6,188 were wounded. The figures for the War of 1812 were respectively 2,260 and 4,505.20 British casualties were somewhat less. Even if a large proportion of the wounded perished and a significant number of soldiers and civilians succumbed to disease or hardship caused by war, this was still a small conflict. Some of the most celebrated battles – Brandywine or Yorktown itself – were mere skirmishes by European standards; total US combat deaths at the latter were just eighty-eight. The death toll for the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was vastly larger – by one estimate, total battlefield mortality on all sides between 1792 and 1815 was 3.5 million. A conservative calculation is that twenty times as many Frenchmen as Americans lost their lives in defending their revolution. And this does not include the victims of internal repression. An estimated 17,000 French men and women were executed after due process, between 12,000 and 40,000 went to the guillotine or gallows without a trial, and somewhere between 80,000 and 300,000 perished in the suppression of the royalist rebellion in the Vendée.21 The French Revolution was also far more economically disruptive than the American. The Americans had inflation followed by stabilization; the French had hyperinflation, culminating in the complete collapse of the assignat paper currency. The entire male population was mobilized for war. Prices and wages were controlled. The market economy broke down.

  It is against this background that the radicalization of the French Revolution – the fulfilment of Burke’s prophecy – needs to be understood. From April 1793, when power became concentrated in the Committee of Public Safety, Paris was a madhouse. First the faction of the Jacobin Club known as the Girondists (their more extreme rivals were the Montagnards) were arrested and, on 31 October, executed. Then the followers of Georges-Jacques Danton followed them to the scaffold (6 April 1794). Finally, it was the turn of the dominant figure on the Committee of Public Safety, the high priest of Rousseau’s cult of republican virtue, Maximilien Robespierre, who fittingly was made to face the falling blade. Throughout this danse macabre, the musical accompaniment of which was the still startlingly bloodthirsty Marseillaise,* the most deadly accusation to be levelled at an ‘enemy of the people’ was that of treason. Military setbacks propelled the paranoid turn. As Burke had foreseen, for he knew his classical political theory, such a democracy must inevitably be supplanted by an oligarchy and finally by the tyranny of a general. In the space of a decade, the Convention was replaced by the Directory (October 1795), the Directory by the First Consul (November 1799) and the title of first consul by that of emperor (December 1804). What had begun with Rousseau ended as a remake of the fall of the Roman Republic.

  At the Battle of Austerlitz,† on 2 December 1805, some 73,200 French troops defeated 85,700 Russians and Austrians. These figures should be compared with the forces at Yorktown in 1781, where Washington’s 17,600 men defeated Cornwallis’s 8,300 Redcoats. The casualties inflicted by the later battle exceeded all the participants in the earlier battle by more than 12,000. At Austerlitz more than a third of the Russian army was killed, wounded or captured. Yet the weaponry used there was not significantly different from that used by Frederick the Great’s army at Leuthen nearly half a century before. Mobile artillery inflicted most of the casualties. What was new was the scale of Napoleonic warfare, not the technology. By 1812 the French army numbered 700,000. In all, 1.3 million Frenchmen were conscripted between 1800 and that fateful year. Around 2 million men lost their lives in all the wars waged by Bonaparte; close to half of them were French – approximately one in five of all those born between 1790 and 1795. In more ways than one did this revolution devour its own children.

  Was there something distinctive about American civil society that gave democracy a be
tter chance than in France, as Tocqueville argued? Was the already centralized French state more likely to produce a Napoleon than the decentralized United States? We cannot be sure. But it is not unreasonable to ask how long the US constitution would have lasted if the United States had suffered the same military and economic strains that swept away the French constitution of 1791.

  THE JUGGERNAUT OF WAR

  The Revolution devoured not only its own children. Many of those who fought against it literally were children. Carl von Clausewitz was twelve years old, and already a lance corporal in the Prussian army, when he first saw action against the French. A true warrior-scholar, Clausewitz survived the shattering Prussian defeat at Jena in 1806, refused to fight with the French against the Russians in 1812, and also saw action at Ligny in 1815. It was he who, better than anyone (including Napoleon himself), understood the way the French Revolution had transformed the dark art of war. His posthumously published masterpiece On War (1832) remains the single most important work on the subject to have been produced by a Western author. Though in many ways a timeless work, On War is also the indispensable commentary on the Napoleonic era, for it explains why war had changed in its scale, and what that implied for its conduct.

  ‘War’, Clausewitz declares, ‘is … an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will … [It is] not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means.’ These are perhaps his most famous – and also most mistranslated and misunderstood – words. But they are not his most important. Clausewitz’s insight was that in the wake of the French Revolution a new passion had arrived on the field of battle. ‘Even the most civilized of peoples’, he noted, clearly alluding to the French, ‘can be fired with passionate hatred for each other … ’ After 1793 ‘war again became the business of the people’, as opposed to the hobby of kings; it became a ‘juggernaut’ driven by the ‘temper of a nation’. Clausewitz acknowledged Bonaparte’s genius as the driver of this new military juggernaut. His ‘audacity and luck’ had ‘cast the old accepted practices to the winds’. Under Napoleon, warfare had ‘achieve[d] [the] state of absolute perfection’. Indeed, the Corsican upstart was nothing less than ‘the God of War himself … [whose] superiority has consistently led to the enemy’s collapse’. Yet his exceptional generalship was less significant than the new popular spirit that propelled his army.

  War, Clausewitz wrote, in what deserves to be his best-known formulation, was now ‘a paradoxical trinity – composed of primordial violence, hatred and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability … and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone’. True, the ‘wish to annihilate the enemy’s forces’ is a very powerful urge – the ‘first-born son’ of this new war of the nations. But, Clausewitz warned, defence is always ‘a stronger form of fighting than attack’, for ‘the force of an attack gradually diminishes … ’ Even in defence there is an inherent difficulty: ‘Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult … a kind of friction … lower[s] the general level of performance.’ For these reasons, an effective commander must always remember four things. First, ‘assess probabilities’.* Second, ‘act with the utmost concentration’. Third, ‘act with the utmost speed’:

  The whole of military activity must therefore relate directly or indirectly to the engagement. The end for which the soldier is recruited, clothed, armed and trained … is simply that he should fight at the right place and the right time.

  Above all, however, the juggernaut must be kept under control. What Clausewitz calls ‘absolute’ war therefore ‘requires [the] primacy of politics’ – in other words, the subordination of the means of warfare to the ends of foreign policy. That is the real message of On War.22

  So what were Napoleon’s policy aims? In some respects, it is true, they acquired a reactionary patina: contrast Jacques-Louis David’s Consecration of Napoleon I (1804), swathed in imperial ermine in Notre Dame, with the romantic hero of the same artist’s Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass (1801), every inch the revolutionary Zeitgeist on horseback (in the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s phrase). This was the metamorphosis so repellent to Ludwig van Beethoven, the musical spirit of the age, that he angrily scratched out the original title of his Third Symphony – ‘Buonaparte’ – and changed it to ‘Sinfonia eroica’. Having crowned himself emperor in December 1804, Napoleon obliged the Austrian Emperor Francis II to renounce the title of holy Roman emperor and then married his daughter. With the Concordat of 1801, meanwhile, Napoleon made France’s peace with the Pope, sweeping away the remnants of the Jacobin Cult of Reason.

  Yet there was little else that was backward-looking about the empire Napoleon sought to build in Europe. It was truly revolutionary. Not only did he enlarge France to its ‘natural frontiers’ and shrink Prussia. He also created a new Swiss confederation; a new forty-state western German Confederation of the Rhine, stretching from the Baltic to the Alps; a new kingdom of (North) Italy; and a new Duchy of Warsaw. True, these new states were to be French vassals; he even installed his spendthrift youngest brother Jérôme as the titular ruler of the new Kingdom of Westphalia and his dandy of a brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, as the equivalent in Naples. True, too, the vanquished paid a heavy tribute to the French victors. Altogether between 1795 and 1804 the Dutch gave 229 million guilders to the French, more than a year’s national income. Napoleon’s campaigns of 1806–7 were not only self-financing, but covered at least a third of ordinary French government expenditure. And in Italy between 1805 and 1812 fully half of all the taxes raised went to the French treasury. Nevertheless, the European map as redrawn by Napoleon transformed the old patchwork of hereditary territories into a new grid of nation-states. Moreover, French rule was accompanied by a fundamental change to the legal order with the introduction of the new civil law code he had sponsored – a change that was later to have lasting and positive effects on the economies of the countries concerned. French rule swept away the various privileges that had protected the nobility, clergy, guilds and urban oligarchies and established the principle of equality before the law.23 When Napoleon later said that he had ‘wished to found a European system, a European Code of Laws, a European judiciary’ so that ‘there would be but one people in Europe’, he was not entirely making it up.24 Simply because his empire did not endure does not mean he lacked a political vision. For Napoleon, war was not an end in itself. It was, as Clausewitz understood, the armed pursuit of a policy.

  It was not Bonaparte’s goal that was at fault; it was the fact that sooner or later his enemies’ forces were bound to outnumber his, even if their commanders could never match his skill. Ravaged not so much by the Russian winter as by the Russian strategy of deep retreat and attrition (not to mention rampant typhus), the Grande Armée succumbed to superior numbers – in particular superior numbers of horses – at Leipzig in 1813.25 It was much the same story when the Prussians tipped the balance at Waterloo in 1815. Long before then, however, France had already lost the war at sea. At Aboukir Bay (the Battle of the Nile) in 1798, Sir Horatio Nelson won his ennoblement by craftily attacking the French fleet from both sides, dealing a death-blow to Napoleon’s dream of conquering Egypt. Seven years later, at Trafalgar, Nelson’s force of twenty-seven ships outmanoeuvred a larger Franco-Spanish flotilla by employing the ‘Nelson touch’ – the tactic of sailing at high speed through the enemy line, firing broadsides to the starboard side of one ship, the rear of another and then the second ship’s port side.

  The significance of Napoleon’s defeat at sea was twofold. First, France was gradually cut off from its overseas possessions. Already in 1791 the hugely lucrative sugar colony of Saint-Domingue had exploded into revolution under the leadership of the freed slave François-Dominique Toussaint ‘Louverture’ (literally ‘the opening’) after the Legislative Assembly in Paris had extended the vote to
free blacks and mulattos but not to slaves. The abolition of slavery by the National Convention in 1794 plunged the island into a bloody racial civil war that spilled over into neighbouring Spanish Santo Domingo and raged until Toussaint’s arrest and deportation to France in 1802, and the restoration of slavery by Napoleon. Altogether, between 160,000 and 350,000 people lost their lives in the Haitian Revolution. A year later the French opted to sell the vast North American territory then known as Louisiana (not to be confused with the present-day state) to the United States at a bargain-basement price: 828,800 square miles for $15 million (less than 3 cents an acre). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, France lost the financial war. Despite continued sales of former Church lands, the introduction of a new currency and the squeezing of Dutch and Italian taxpayers, Napoleon could not get the cost of borrowing down below 6 per cent. Between Trafalgar and Waterloo, the average yield on French government rentes was two full percentage points higher than that of British consols. It was a fateful spread.