The French revolution should never have happened this way

Telegraph

04-08-2025

It is more than 50 years since Zhou Enlai said that it was too early to say how the French Revolution had turned out. However, in this well-researched, detailed, though sometimes dense book, simply titled The French Revolution, John Hardman appears to have brought us nearer a conclusion: although change had to come in a country where feudalism survived long after it had disappeared in England, and absolute monarchy was unsustainable, it would have been far better that matters changed in a different way to what actually occurred.
Hardman claims, justifiably, to have written the first purely political history of the revolution for over a century. This does not mean that the colour of extraneous events is entirely eliminated; but if you want the full drama you would do better to start with a more generalised history that takes a bottom-up view of the proceedings, for Goodman's is unashamedly top-down. (Although it was written nearly 190 years ago, and has, in terms of material available, long since been surpassed, Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution, which in parts reads rather like a screenplay, still gives the reader all the atmosphere he or she could need.)
Hardman does not write for the uninitiated. Although he begins his book helpfully with a dramatis personae, and ends it equally helpfully with a retrospective timeline, some basic idea of what happened in the years before and after 1789 is broadly assumed. New readers should not start here, but those who know the general story, or think they do, will find his book adds a thorough and different dimension to the events.
Some, but not all, assumptions turn out to be true. King Louis XVI harmed his cause by his reluctance to end France's caste-based politics and system of rule, for castes that had been long excluded were only more determined to have a part in the running of their country. As for Louis's wife, Marie Antoinette of Austria (l'Autrichienne was one of the more charming sobriquets the French people found for her), she really never was quoted uttering 'qu'ils mangent de la brioche' – 'let them eat cake' – when the mismanagement of the economy by the ancien régime has caused grain and therefore bread shortages.
However, her extravagance, her colourful private life (she was not faithful to her husband) and her willingness to become involved in the government of the country in which she had no constitutional right to interfere became well known beyond the court, and made her deeply unpopular.
Hardman makes the useful point early on that other revolutions have, regrettably, largely followed the template of France's; and one is constantly reminded of what happened in Russia after 1917, though that was, if anything, even more violent and divorced from anything approaching the rule of law than what had happened 130 years earlier. In both instances, the people rose up and some from what had not traditionally been the governing class took over.
Once that happened, the ideology of those who ruled moved steadily to the Left (which in the end became largely indiscernible from what we now think of as the fascist Right), factions developed, and (to use a well-worn metaphor) the revolution began to devour its own children. Something that began in defence of liberty, and freedom of speech ended up creating a polity in which there appeared to be no liberty at all, and where free expression could easily lead to the guillotine.
One conspicuous difference between the French and Russian revolutions, as Hardman outlines, was the fate of the monarchy. Although Louis was reluctant to cede rights as an absolute monarch he soon understood the practicalities and began to yield powers, albeit through an attempt at negotiation. In Russia, the Romanovs were simply arrested, imprisoned and, without any attempt at a trial, slaughtered. Louis XVI was eventually put on trial as the people in charge of the French government became more extreme and motivated by class hatred, and steadily imprisoned and executed members of those factions who were happy to retain a constitutional, as opposed to an absolute, monarchy.
Louis's trial was, as Hardman points out, entirely unfair; he was charged with crimes against liberty, which could mean everything and nothing, and was predictably found guilty – though the decision to give him the death penalty was made by the margin of only one vote.
There was then a vote on a reprieve for the King, which was rejected by 70 votes. Not only did the assembly that tried him seem reluctant to overturn the previous, albeit narrow, decision, but the roots of the bloody Reign of Terror were already taking hold: people disposed to take a lenient view of those deemed enemies of the revolution risked being viewed not simply as compassionate, but as enemies of it themselves.
Louis went to the guillotine in January 1793; his wife followed a few months later after a trial that was less unfair but more grotesque than his. Not least to see whether she could be provoked into an act of treachery by revealing military secrets to the country of her birth, France had declared war on Austria. She duly obliged and passed secrets on to her Austrian contacts. The other charges she faced were as absurd and unprovable as those her husband had faced, and the grotesquerie came when entirely fabricated charges of her having sexually interfered with their son, the Dauphin, were presented. It was wholly unnecessary, as treason alone would have sufficed to send her to the guillotine, entrapped though she had been. At least the Bolsheviks who machine-gunned a cellar full of Romanovs in 1918 made no pretence of following the rule of law.
The show trials of the King and Queen led to a rash of such outrages in the year or two afterwards, and massacres of large numbers in cities such as Lyon where people were deemed recalcitrant. Factions split into further factions – Girondins, Dantonists, Montagnards, Jacobins and so on – as those who found themselves temporarily in charge decided to kill many of those who were not. Something approaching civil war came when the Commune took on the Convention; a climax of sorts followed when Robespierre was put to death, in the wake of which a degree of sanity and order were eventually restored.
A great lesson of the French Revolution is that, when much of the population of a polity has nothing to lose, they can behave rashly and accordingly. Louis should have realised this long before 1789. Hardman, leaving all possibilities open, invites us to question whether he failed because his upbringing and his place in France's constitution made him inflexible, or whether his wife's dominance undid him, or whether he was simply obtuse.
This is a book of exceptional clarity and analytical force, reliant on evidence and not on supposition, and tells the story with great conviction. Hardman also astutely compares Louis's fate with those of Charles I – brought down not by a mob but by losing two civil wars and for refusing to accept the will of his people – and James II, forced to flee in 1688 at the Glorious Revolution for wilfully ignoring the reality of the Reformation and the move towards constitutional monarchy.
But it is also clear that 17 th century England was a happier country than France, with nascent democracy and social mobility. These were examples France, and above all the Capetian dynasty, ignored until far too late: and some of the scars are still visible in France today.
★★★★★