From even the earliest days of written commentary on the French Revolution, it has been common for pundits and social critics and commentators to compare the American Revolution with the French Revolution. The reasons given for the difference vary significantly. Among conservatives—those who follow the Burkean line on the French Revolution—place most of the blame on ideological and religious difference between Americans the French. Other take a more comprehensive view, looking to the roles of feudalism, class conflict, and the nature of the French state.
When making distinctions between the two revolutions, the focus is often on the violent excesses of the French revolution. That these excesses occurred is well established, but far less often discussed is the question of how the revolutionaries obtained the resources, political capital, and means of coercion to carry out these abuses. Moreover, why did the French Revolutionaries have so much more coercive power at their disposal, for use against the domestic population? These were demonstrations of state power at a scale and intensity level that would have been impossible for American revolutionaries, even if they had wanted to carry out similar acts.
The idea that Enlightenment philosophy somehow singularly caused the excesses of the Revolution—such as the Reign of Terror—has always been simplistic, to say the least. Even if changes in the public’s philosophical beliefs changed substantially in the late eighteenth century, and were very different from that of the Americans, this theory ignores institutional, historical, and geopolitical factors that made the French Revolution very different from the American one.
Obviously, any phenomenon as complex as the French Revolution is not the result of any single factor. But there are many important non-philosophical reasons why the French Revolution produced bloodshed on a level that eclipsed that of the American Revolution.
One: Political Centralization Was at the Center of the Revolution
One enormous difference between America and France in the late eighteenth century was the degree to which state coercive power was developed. In the American colonies, political power remained extremely decentralized, and generally weak. France, on the other hand, had developed one of Europe’s most centralized states, with vast regulatory and coercive power, at least by eighteenth century standards. Lous XIV, of course, was known for his many efforts to centralize state power during his reign, and the French, overall, was an innovator in bringing local power under its control.
This would prove to have enormous implications for the French Revolution. Rather than tear down or dismantle the state, the French revolutionaries sought to merely supplant the old state agents and functionaries with new personnel loyal to the revolution. That is, the state remained very much in place, but who controlled the state changed. Then, once revolutionaries controlled the state apparatus, they worked to centralize political power even further.
This takeover of the old regime was facilitated by the so-called Municipal Revolution through which local officials of the old regime were overthrown and a new revolutionary administration was put in its place. The revolutionaries benefited, however, from the fact that a fully formed state apparatus already existed, having been forged during the centuries of absolutism in France. However, whereas the old regime’s municipal elites were careful to protect their own local prerogatives from the monarch as best they could, the new revolutionary bureaucrats were far more amenable to working in concert with revolutionary elites in Paris. This was then enforced with militias that answered to the revolutionary elites. Charles Tilly explains:
The lawyers, officials, and other bourgeois who seized the state apparatus in 1789-90 rapidly displaced the old intermediaries: landlords, seigneurial officials, venal officeholders, clergy, and sometimes municipal oligarchies as well. “It was not a rural class of English-style gentlemen,” declares Lynn Hunt, “who gained political prominence on either the national or the regional level, but rather thousands of city professionals who seized the opportunity to develop political careers.” At the local level, the so-called Municipal Revolution widely transferred power to enemies of the old rulers; patriot coalitions based in militias, clubs, and revolutionary committees and linked to Parisian activists ousted the old municipalities. …Relations between each locality and the national capital altered abruptly.1
This was a transfer of power—perhaps anticipating the Bolshevik takeover of the old Tsar’s secret police in Russia—rather than total destruction of the old order. The new revolutionary state went well beyond what the old regime had done, even taking control of the Catholic Church and expropriating its property. Tilly continues:
Not only did [the revolutionaries] integrate the structure of the Catholic Church into that of the French government ...but also they made the unprecedented step of extending the purview of the national government to everyday life at the local scale. Although Louis XIV had gained a great reputation as a state-builder and his successors continued the work of centralization, their efforts to penetrate local communities had been partial, tentative, and often unsuccessful. They had succeeded mainly in the realm of taxation—and even there the method of collecting the major taxes was to assign a quota to the whole community and let the local council do the assessing and collecting.2
Unlike the Americans, the French had little regard for true decentralization or federalism. It is true there was a “federalist revolt” in some areas of France during the revolution, but historian Bill Edmonds has shown that this was nothing like federalism as conceived in the United States. Rather, the “federalist” revolt—Edmonds uses the scare quotes to denote that unseriousness of revolution-era federalism—was little more than an attempt to establish some modicum of independence from the growing Jacobin dictatorship that was forming in the early 1790s.
This produced no significant political decentralization, but the federalism movement was used as an excuse for the ruling Montagnard faction with a reason to crack down on “counterrevolutionaries” and centralize political power even more. Edmonds writes:
The threat to the Republic from “federalist” revolts has been used since [Marxist historian Albert] Mathiez as partial justification for the Montagnard policy of Terror. But if the most serious “federalist” revolts were themselves products of a Montagnard policy, that of keeping provincial Jacobins in power no matter how limited their support or how strong the local opposition to them, then the Terror in the great “federalist” centers must be counted as a consequence of the Montagnard strategy of enforcing centralism and political uniformity and not simply as a justifiable response to a crypto-royalist, separatist, counterrevolutionary threat.3
Lord Acton notes that the experience of absolutism had largely prevented the early liberal reformers in 1789 from creating a new decentralized French state. The old regime had already destroyed what was necessary to build true federalism:
The early notions of reform moved on French lines, striving to utilise the existing form of society, to employ the parliamentary aristocracy, to revive the States-General and the provincial assemblies. But the scheme of standing on the ancient ways, and raising a new France on the substructure of the old, brought out the fact that whatever growth of institutions there once had been had been stunted and stood still.4
Whatever hope there might have been for the liberal reformers in 1789, when the revolution was still somewhat guided by liberal constitutionalist ideals, was gone by 1792. It was in that year that the revolutionaries declared that it was a crime to advocate for any significant decentralization. Indeed, as the Belgian-French libertarian Gustave de Molinari points out, “the revolutionary government began by proclaiming the indivisibility of the Republic.” From that point on, there was little hope of establishing a group of decentralized and independent states within a confederation, as was happening in the United States.
This takeover of a pre-existing state apparatus thus allowed the revolutionaries many powers that the American revolutions could never hope to access. For the French state, there was far greater access to tax revenue, to military resources, and to a pre-existing nationwide bureaucratic state. Under the old regime, it was all quite primitive by modern standards, but enormously powerful by American standards of the time. This national power also allowed the revolutionaries to raise much larger armies through conscription, and to use those armies against domestic enemies on a large scale. Naturally, this allowed for the violent and draconian enforcement of revolutionary policies in the form of the Terror.
Two: Revolutionary France Faced Strong Neighbors in a Geopolitical Struggle
In their history of the French Revolution, Francois Furet and Denis Richet attribute the failure of the “liberal achievement” of the early period of the revolution to various factors. Many of these are historical “accidents” such as the regime’s financial bankruptcy and the flight of the king.5 But principal among these was France’s wars with its neighbors. That is, the revolutionary regime became a wartime regime, and that carried with it all the state-building, paranoia, and expanded state exploitation that comes with war.
“The war ruled the Revolution much more than the Revolution the war,” Furet and Richet conclude, and this led to a more powerful and centralized that than would have otherwise grown out of the Revolution.6
Tilly makes similar observations, and writes:
Going to war accelerated the move from indirect to direct rule. ... “Once France declared war on Austria in 1792, the state’s demands for revenues and manpower excited resistance just as fierce as that which had broken out under the Old Regime. In overcoming that resistance, revolutionaries built yet another set of centralized controls.7
War hysteria also paved the way for conscription which became universal for the first time under the French revolutionaries, although it had existed during “emergencies” under the old regime. The difference of course, was that revolutionary France effectively descended into a state of perpetual “emergency” with either foreign armies or “counterrevolutionaries” requiring attention from the republic’s military enforcers.
This can be contrasted with the situation in America. In America, there was no equivalent of an Austrian army on the borders in a fashion similar to that experienced in France’s eastern frontiers. Yes, the American revolutionaries were engaged in a war with a major power—i.e., Britain—but Britain itself had to be mindful of its own enemies much closer to home. And, the advance of British armies on American soil would have to come by sea or through countless miles of wilderness on a march from Canada. In other words, the geopolitical situation in North America favored the American revolutionaries much more than it did the French revolutionaries. Those who were generally sympathetic to the revolution in France could thus much more easily be convinced of the need for more taxation, more conscription, and generally more direct control from Paris. This would prove to be enormously helpful in further building the coercive power of the central republican state.
The fact that the revolutionaries perceived themselves to be in a very precarious position—thinking themselves at war with all the “crowned heads of Europe”—would fuel further efforts to punish perceived internal enemies. Historically, of course, “crackdowns” by wartime regimes often become more intense as the military situation is perceived to be worsening. It was not a coincidence, for example, that many of the most violent repressions of domestic dissidents under the National Socialists came after the German loss at Stalingrad in 1943.
Three: Demographic Pressure: Population and Poverty
A third factor—and one that helps us understand the extreme ferocity of mob violence during the revolution—was “demographic pressure.”
In France, the standard of living was lower for the average person, and food shortages were an occasional feature of ordinary life. In the American colonies, the residents, most of whom were small farmers, likely enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world at the time.
The relationship between the masses and the ruling classes are generally going to be more tense in places where starvation is seen as a looming threat, and the ruling classes are blamed for it. In the years leading up the revolution in France, the population had been growing, yet food production was often not keeping up. The French historian Jacques Godechot writes:
from 1730 onwards, the population of France, which hitherto had been relatively stable (a high deathrate making up for an invariably high birthrate) increased. In the countryside, from 1730 to 1789, it went up by 50 or 80% and sometimes even doubled. ...”The number of our children drives us to despair, we cannot feed or clothe them....” wrote the peasants of La Caune...8
Early on in this period, until about 1770, Tilly calls this “demographic pressure” and notes that
increased agricultural production, which was originally responsible for the demographic rise, was easily able to keep pace with the demands of the new generations. From 1770 onwards, however, the increase in the population, combined with a succession of bad harvests made it difficult to feed the masses. It also became difficult to find them work. The rise in prices obliged consumers to spend most of their available money on foodstuff.9
Politically, this took its toll on the regime, and Godechot notes that the “three bad harvests of 1770, 1772, and 1774” was a political problem for the regime and had a “psychological significance” for the masses. Although the climatic conditions that contributed to bad harvests were hardly the fault of the old regime, “crowds prefer to blame one man, rather than meteorological contingencies, for their misfortunes.”10
There was nothing like this going on in the American colonies. In America, foodstuffs were not hard to come by, and urban unemployment was not a significant issue. Indeed, in America, there were no large urban populations to suffer from unemployment at all. Urban conditions in Paris, where day laborers and unemployed former farmers sought work and faced destitution, created very tense conditions. These populations provided foot soldiers for a political movement of resentment, revenge, and violence, and were unlike those of any American city. So, it is easy to be shocked by the violence of the sans-culottes during the French revolution, and the sheer magnitude of the mass executions, especially in comparison to the Americans.
While portrayals of the American revolution as a very mild and genteel affair are indeed wrong, it is also true that the ferocity of American violence against the opponents of the American revolution never matched that of the French Revolution. American revolutionary violence, and reprisals against the so-called Loyalists were very real. The American revolution likely produced even more refugees than the French revolution. But the actual bloodshed was far more restrained, even on a per capita level. A.A. Fursenko notes, for example, that “Whatever persecution the loyalists endured, it remains a fact that not a single royal governor suffered physically for his views, and some supporters of England were even able to preserve their property.”11
The violence of the French revolution is easier to understand when we consider the stresses imposed by demographic pressure. For many within the French masses, the old regime was viewed as an obstacle to feeding one’s children properly. Moreover, for most of the lower-income groups of France, there was the perception that they had no hope of moving into the more prosperous classes so long as the old regime endured. In America, however, “Class lines were fluid, and class contradictions had not yet assumed as sharply defined a form as in Europe.12
In Europe, however, a chance at upward mobility required the violent eradication of the old ruling class. At least, that is how many within the lower classes saw it. In America, in contrast, there was abundant farmland—and even free land in the West—and the upper classes could simply be ignored in America in a way that was not realistic in France.
For the French revolutionaries, the total overthrow of the old regime required immense amounts of violence, largely because the old quasi-feudal order was so thoroughly entrenched and offered significant resistance. Both Rothbard and Fursenko agree that in America, in contrast, the old “feudal” order had never taken deep root and was far more easily dislodged.13 Thus, as Fursenko puts it, “In America there was ...no special need for terror, since the destruction of the old order did not require such efforts as in France.”14 Or,. as Rothbard concludes “[I]n Europe, ridden as America had not been by internal feudalism...mass upheaval would have had to rend and disrupt the entire social fabric” [emphasis added].15
In America, the refugees of the nascent feudal order fled to Canada or Britain. Some even stayed in America and—because they were then so thoroughly out of power—were given full rights as citizens in the newly independent states.
The American revolution, which was indeed very radical, succeeded in uprooting the old order in the colonies with greater ease. French-style violence was simply unnecessary, and we will never know if the American revolutionaries would have resorted to such methods had they been deemed essential for victory.
- 1
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), p. 108.
- 2
Charles Tilly,The Vendée (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. xi.
- 3
Bill Edmonds, “’Federalism’ and Urban Revolt in France in 1793,” The Journal of Modern History 55, No. 1 (Mar., 1983): 53.
- 4
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, “The Heralds of the Revolution,” from Lectures on the French Revolution. (https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/laurence-lectures-on-the-french-revolution-1910-ed).
- 5
Gerald J. Cavanaugh, “The Present State of French Revolutionary Historiography: Alfred Cobban and Beyond,” French Historical Studies 7, No. 4 (Autumn, 1972): 595.
- 6
Ibid., p. 595.
- 7
Tilly, Coercion Capital, and European States, p. 110.
- 8
Jacques Léon Godechot, trans. Jean Stewart, The Taking of the Bastille (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), p.42.
- 9
Ibid., p. 5.
- 10
Ibid., p 16.
- 11
A. A. Fursenko, trans Gilbert H. McArthur, “The American and French Revolutions Compared: The View from the U.S.S.R.,” The William and Mary Quarterly 33, No. 3 (Jul., 1976): 491.
- 12
Ibid., p. 491
- 13
The term “feudal” here must be understood as something other than real feudalism as it existed in the middle ages. True feudalism was part of a political system that was heavily decentralized, and in which local land owners had true sovereignty and autonomy from monarchs. The “feudalism” of the eighteenth century was part of the absolutist state, and provided certain legal rights to select classes, with these privileges being backed up by the power of the central state.
- 14
Fursenko, p. 491.
- 15
Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, Vol 4 (Auburn: AL, Mises Institute, 1999 [1975]), p. 453.
