A common misconception about the French Revolution is that it was some sort of classical liberal or libertarian revolution. That is, some still claim that the revolution was, for all its flaws, in “the spirit” of what is historically known as liberalism. The flawed interpretation of the revolution is kept alive for two reasons. One is used among the post-liberal conservatives who try to use the bloodshed of the French revolution as “evidence” that liberalism leads to totalitarianism. A common mistake is to equate the liberal ideology with the theories of various “enlightenment”—and un-liberal—theorists such as Rousseau.
Another mistake occurs when modern libertarians attempt to rehabilitate the French Revolution to portray is as pro-freedom phenomenon. For example, in an essay titled “Thinking about the French Revolution,” David Boaz—a libertarian, although of the ultra-milquetoast regime-libertarian variety—lists the French Revolution among “the triumphs of liberalism.”
But, the French Revolution was not liberal in either the way it was conducted, or in the results it attained. Moreover, the so-called “liberal spirit” or the “spirit of 1789” existed only in the very earliest months of the revolution. Yes, the liberal critique of the ancient regime was generally correct, and the reforms the liberals demanded in 1788 and early 1789 were largely compatible with liberalism/libertarianism.
But by the early 1790s, the revolution was overwhelmed by sentiments such as nationalism—which led to calls for more political centralization—and by the politics of grievance which was centered on the lower classes taking vengeance on the ruling classes of the old regime. By 1791, the “moderate” liberal wing of the revolution had been relegated to a minority and played little part in the actual governance of the French republic. Indeed, counterrevolutionary groups—such as the Vendée rebels and the dissident advocates of French federalism—were acting far more in the spirit of libertarianism than were the revolutionaries themselves.
Liberal apologists for the revolution might also point to the Declaration of the Rights of Man as evidence of the revolution’s embrace of liberalism. Yet, in practice, the Declaration did nothing to actually limit the power of the French state, and the behavior of the revolutionaries made it clear that the liberal statements contained within the Declaration amounted to little more than empty slogans in practice.
It is easy to see why some modern-day advocates of liberalism/libertarianism might still be confused about the nature of the revolution. In the very early years of the revolution, American libertarians like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine largely thought the revolution to be liberal. On the French side, the great defender of the American revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, allied himself with the revolutionaries early on. Yet, by 1792, the liberals were already out of power to the point that Lafayette was forced into exile. The great liberal pamphleteer Thomas Paine was arrested as an enemy of the revolution and barely escape being executed in 1794.
So much for the “liberal” revolution.
In the end, the French Revolution did not lead to freedom, self-determination, or any of the developments that we would consider to be characteristic of a triumph of liberalism. Indeed, the nineteenth-century French libertarians themselves—such as the great Gustave de Molinari—would come to correctly see the revolution for what it was: little more than a transfer of power from one ruling class to another, all while also centralizing and strengthening the French state.
Liberalism Aborted, and the Failure of Reform
Ralph Raico, the great libertarian historian of European political thought, says this about the French Revolution:
In discussing the history of liberalism, there are a number of distorting factors. One is to consider the French Revolution, even fundamentally, a liberal revolution. Yes, in the end, there were some liberal reforms made. Religious toleration, for instance, and equality of classes before the law. But these were reforms that were in the cards. These were reforms that the French monarchy was edging towards—it was not going to happen in two years.
On the other hand, what did the French Revolution do? It brought in twenty-five years of war that only ended at Waterloo, so it put back reform in many respects. You have to ask yourself whether the quickening of the pace of reform, of the necessary and liberal reforms, was worth what they had to go through.1
The period of reform was essentially the liberal period of the Revolution, which had grown in strength throughout the 1780s, but was already on the way out by 1790. The liberal ideology had been gaining ground in France for years prior to 1789, and this is reflected in suggested reform at the 1787 assembly of notables. These included the abolition of internal tariffs and the creation of elected provincial assemblies. In some cases, the notables even pushed for drastically easing the existing corporatist scheme under which politically connected groups were exempt from taxes, leaving more ordinary people to bear the brunt of the tax burden.
Similar calls for reform appeared in the lists of grievances compiled by the three Estates in France in early 1789. Reformers sought to end the special political and financial privileges of the wealthy and the clergy. Notably, many members of both the nobility and the clergy were open to reforming the tax system, so as to spread the tax burden more evenly among the official classes. Many among the nobility and clergy also supported the expansion of political representation for the Third Estate, which represented the bourgeois middle classes.
At this point, the revolution was still a liberal affair, and political “representation” was still regarded as something for the most productive members of society—namely, property owners within the nobility and the bourgeoisie. There was, as yet, no universal suffrage.
It was also during this period that the economic reformers such as A.R.J. Turgot were pushing for more economic liberalism through greater limits on government spending.2
Moreover, the liberal reformers generally assumed that the monarchy would continue, and so reform would come in with the creation of a constitutional monarchy and limited executive power. In many cases, political power was to be decentralized with powers divided between the central state and regional elected assemblies. As an illustration of how reform played out in the political sphere, we could note that the leading liberal in 1789 may have been the Count of Mirabeau, who favored a British-style constitutional monarchy. Indeed, Mirabeau’s sympathy for the French monarchy had been such that he was in secret talks with King Louis XVI in the early years of the revolution. (For this, Mirabeau was later denounced by the radicals and declared a traitor.)
Indeed, the Mirabeau situation helps illustrate how the French monarchy turned the revolution against the liberals. The liberal reformers had been largely in favor of reforming the monarchy rather than abolishing it. And, there appeared to be sufficient political will for reform to the point that, if the monarchy played along, the forces of reform within the Third Estate, the clergy, and the nobility could have prevented the advent of the radical republic. Yet, the king refused to accept any significant restraints on his power, and opposed anything but mild constitutional reform. This provided the radical revolutionaries with the excuse they needed to claim that the monarchy had to be overthrown in order to obtain any true reform of the bankrupt and corrupt French state.3
Thus, thanks to the obstinacy of the monarch, the liberals were dominant in the revolution only in the earliest months, and were likely out of power by the end of 1789. By the end of 1791, the liberal “revolution” in the style of Mirabeau had been swept aside. The so-called moderate faction, the Girondins, were confirmed as a minority within the National Convention with the August 1791 elections, with radical Montagnards controlling a plurality of seats. The Girondins became less relevant as time went on. The September Massacres of 1792 illustrated the radicalization of the French reform movement into a civil war and revolution. The most radical elements were further fueled by the Republic’s declaration of war against Austria in April 1792.
As it always does, war radicalized the population and provided an excuse for martial law and the implementation of a police state. Thus, with the advent of war, the revolution and civil war at home were imbued with paranoia about foreign intervention and domestic “enemies of the revolution.”
Meanwhile, the revolution was proceeding on two other fronts, and also in ways that had virtually nothing to do at all with liberalism. These were the urban uprising of the Paris mob—which pushed its radical agenda through the powerful Parison Commune. And then there was the rural peasant revolution in which, in the revolution, peasants saw an opportunity to settle old scores with a ruling class that the peasants (sometimes correctly) saw as their oppressors.
In their 1965 book The French Revolution, historians Francois Furet and Denis Richet sum up the complexity of the revolution—and the lack of any unifying liberal purpose behind it—this way:
The peaceful revolution led by the lawyers, liberal nobles and priests at the Estates-General had failed – the revolution of Enlightenment, of which the century had dreamed, was being blocked by the king. Some other outlet was bound to present itself. It is tempting for the historian to interpret the upheavals of summer 1789 as a chain of independent events inspried by a common political object: the Paris uprising and the municipal revolution following the example of the deputies, and the peasant revolt delivering the final blow to the Old Regime. However, to view these events as a conspiracy of evil as the aristocracy did, or as ineluctable necessity as the Patriots did, would be to oversimplify. There was no single “Revolution” in the summer of 1789, nor was there simply a succession of interrelated revolutions. In fact, there occurred a telescoping of three separate and nearly simultaneous revolutions which completely upset the timetable of the enlightened reformers: the revolution of the deputies at the Estates-General, the urban revolution, and the peasant revolution. Only the first was the result of responsible political thinking applied to the construction of a new society. The other revolutions were a mixture of nostalgia for the past and apocalyptic visions of the future. They owed as much to the old millenarian dreams of the poor as to the ideas of the philosophes. Above all, they revealed a new aspect of the crisis undermining the Old Regime: the impatience of the populace and the violence to which it was prepared to resort.4
Furet and Richet tell us that when they assembled in Paris for the Estates General in 1789, the reformers “had come from their provinces to reform the state and to give it a constitution.” They had hoped to do it “with the king’s co-operation.”5
These reformers soon found themselves in the minority, and at the mercy of far more radical factions. For Furet and Richet, the idea that these radical factions were the result of a natural evolution of liberalism, however, was baseless. They note that much of the Paris mob’s methods and ideals could be found in French political behavior which already had been well established in some corners of peasant society by the eighteenth century. Among the revolutionaries of the Paris laborers and the rural peasants, the turn toward violence and enforced unity was not new, but was simply “rekindled by the revolution.”6
Maximillien Robespierre, the leader of the radicals, was a gifted politician and adept at harnessing the power of the revolutionary mobs, regardless of disregard for liberal ideology. Thus, the Montagnards—who were hardly the ideological descendants of the reformers of 1789—were ultimately the true political force behind the revolution and the terror. Most of the remaining liberal elements within the revolution were ultimately destroyed by the Montagnards as they marched many of the Girondins to the guillotine in 1793.7 By then, the Girondins had already been reduced to a small minority, perhaps constituting nor more than two dozen disorganized deputies within the constituent assembly.8
Given all this, it’s no surprise that the revolution failed to produce results that we might call liberal. As Raico suggests, the fact that France made some steps in the direction of liberalism during the early nineteenth century is hardly evidence that the revolution was the cause of this. As we’ve seen, liberal reforms were already in the cards in France, and these were arguably set back by the revolution which had turned France into a national-security state during the 1790s, and which resulted in Napoleon’s police state.
Even the move toward religious toleration ended in anti-liberal excesses. Indeed, revolutionary legislation on the Church could not be called even liberal in the fundamentals. It went far beyond the issue of religious toleration. It attacked freedom of speech by prohibiting monastic vows. It forced clergy to take an oath of obedience to the state. It prohibited free association by proscribing the voluntary formation of religious houses and associations. The private property of the Church was expropriated by the state and sold off to fund more government spending.
Raico is likely correct in suggesting that the French revolutionary wars, and the Napoleonic wars that resulted from them, led to setting back liberal reforms by decades. As is virtually always the case everywhere, wars strengthen the state, imperil private property, and reduce civil liberties. This was certainly the case in the twenty years following the rise of the radicals in France. To the extent that France began to look more like a true liberal society in decades following Napoleon’s reign, we can note that correlation hardly proves causation. The revolution was more likely a detour from the development of liberalism in France, and not a cause of it.
The fact that the revolutionaries justified their terrors and their police-state policies under the banner of liberalism hardly makes the revolution actually liberal. The unfortunate reality of religious “freedom” under the republic—characterized largely by violent anti-clerical fanaticism—helps to illustrate this. Raico notes:
We further see the lack of liberalism among the revolutionaries in the fact that the French revolutionaries’ “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” is in no way as unequivocal as the American Bill of Rights. The French declaration says, for instance, there shall be freedom of thought, even for religion, “within the limits of the law.” They never got to the American point [as shown by the American Bill of Rights], which was that Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.9
Within the Declaration we note the weasel words: “These limits [on individual rights] can only be determined by law.” What this means in practice is that the French state could retain for itself the prerogative to limit the freedom of thought and religion so long as “the law” enabled such limits. In practice, because the revolutionaries generally believed no power to be off limits to the assembled legislature, no rights were actually secure from the state and “the law.” Not surprisingly, most natural rights were thoroughly ignored whenever they were thought by the ruling regime to be an impediment to the state.
The Revolutionaries’ Assault Against Decentralization and Self-Determination
The revolutionaries’ disregard for “rights of man” is on full display in how the revolutionaries treated those whom they deemed “counterrevolutionaries.” For example, with the outbreak of the “federalist revolt” in 1793, those who opposed the increasing centralization of the French political power in France were deemed to be traitors to the republic and the republic brought the reign of terror to bear on the “counterrevolutionaries.” It is ironic, however, that in making their case against the abuses of the French state, it was the counterrevolutionaries who appealed to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Historian Bill Edmonds writes that the federalist resistance was “based ... on the theory of the Declaration of the Rights of Mand and the Citizen, and in particular the right of resistance to oppression proclaimed by article two.”10 [p27] The revolutionaries, not surprisingly, ignored the Declaration and imposed harsh penalties on the “rebels,” sending many to the guillotine.
The conflict between the republic and separatists in the Vendee further illustrates how more liberalism was to be found among the counterrevolutionaries than among the supporters of the supposedly liberal French revolution. The Vendean rebels sought to practice their religion freely and to not be forced into military service. The republic, in contrast, sought to dictate terms to every corner of France. In 1793, peasants in the Vendée region had resisted the state’s edicts after being forced into military service, and after the local clergy were forced out of their positions by French anti-clerical legislation. Further illustrating the lack of actual liberalism among them, the French revolutionaries had imposed new aggressive forms of mass conscription on the population. In response, the Vendeas ran off republican troops and sought self-governance in the areas of military service and religious practices. The revolutionaries’ response to the Vendean call for self-government was brutal and constituted one of the bloodies chapters of the Reign of Terror.
So, once again, we find it was the counterrevolutionaries who best embodied the liberal values of limited state power and self-government. The revolutionaries, on the other hand, embraced centralization, conscription, police statism, and rule from a distant elite.
It is also notable that the revolutionary impulse to crush all efforts toward local self determination grew out of the revolution’s nationalistic drive toward greater centralization of state power. Unlike the American revolutionaries, who really had embraced decentralization, self-determination, and a weak central state, the French state had leaned into declaring France to be indivisible. Edmonds notes that “[t]o attack the unity of the Republic had been declared a capital crime on September 25, 1792.”11This further illustrated the lack of any true liberalism at the center of the revolution. In the nineteenth century, the great libertarian Gustave de Molinari noted that the revolutionaries’ insistence on the unity and centralization of the French state confirmed that the revolution had been an oligarchic endeavor to preserve economic privilege for the ruling class, and thus not a liberal revolution in any meaningful sense.12
The Tax Burden
Finally, it must also be noted that the French Revolution did not even reduce the tax burden for the people of France. Apologists for the revolutionaries often claim that the revolution brought relief from the monstrously unfair taxes of the old regime. This, however, was not the case, and in this we further see the lie of the “liberal” revolution.
In his research on the winners and losers of the revolution, historian D.M.G. Sutherland writes,
The elimination of tax privilege [for the nobility and clergy] did not lead to a reduction of taxes, which is what everyone had hoped for in 1789. Nor did the abolition of feudalism transfer income to the people who worked the land. The clear winner was usually the state, because higher taxes overwhelmed any benefits that may have accrued to landlords.13
Sutherland finds that during the revolution, the French state abolished two forms of revenue collection that we might now call taxation. These were the tithe and seigneurial “customary dues.” The customary dues went to local lords. The tithe went to the Church. The abolition of dues and tithes still left taxes and (state-monopolist) rents very much in place. Moreover, taxes swiftly increased to replace tithes and dues leaving the overall tax burden even higher than it had been, in many cases.
Sutherland continues and notes that in the first period that mandatory rents adjusted after the abolition of the tithe, taxpayers “saw rents rise by more than the value of the tithe.”14
In other words, the reduction of the old decentralized taxes were fully replaced (and then some) by new taxes that enriched the central state. Now, payments to decentralized authorities like the Church—which spent tithe funds on local poverty relief, the salary of the parish priest, and upkeep of the parish church—were “diverted to the state” rather than local institutions.15 Now, instead of going to building local infrastructure and relief for paupers, tax revenues went to Paris to finance wars.
Although the old quasi-feudal dues had been abolished, Sutherland says, “the state persisted as an unforgiving and relentless interloper in the tenant-landlord relationship.”16 The republic’s main concern was ensuring that the central state got its cut, and it was enthusiastic in intervening in local affairs to ensure this was done. Moreover, in this spirit, Sutherland notes, “the tax hikes during the Revolution were often staggering...the rise in direct taxation between 1788 and 1791 varied between 85 percent and 160 percent...”17
Rather than meaningfully reduce the overall tax burden, the revolution mostly just enriched the state by repurposing dues and tithes. Now the ruling class of Paris—the new class of revolutionaries—received a larger share of national wealth than would have ever been thought possible before the revolution.
The Fruits of Liberalism?
So, how exactly was the French revolution, to use the words of Boaz, among “the triumphs of liberalism”? These “triumphs” included higher taxes, state control of religious institutions, more military conscription, the Reign of Terror, more war, and the growth of the police state. If this represents a great victory for liberalism, it’s hard to imagine what constitutes failure.
- 1
Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2025), p. 62.
- 2
See Murray N. Rothbard An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Vol. I (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 1995), pp. 363-414.
- 3
It is important to remember that the revolutionary conditions that emerged in the 1780s were not merely the product of philosophers and ideological changes. It is true that eighteenth-century philosophers undermined public support of the monarchy, but the monarchy itself was the author of its own downfall. The monarchy had bankrupted the French state and involved the French state in endless wars which proved to be the key ingredient in calling the legitimacy of the monarchy into question. The financial dimension of the pre-revolutionary situation cannot be ignored, and Rothbard considered the failure of liberal reforms under Turgot to have led to the crisis of 1789.
- 4
Francois Furet and Denis Richet, The French Revolution, trans. Stephen Hardman (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 98.
- 5
Ibid.
- 6
Ibid., p. 186.
- 7
For a discussion of the weak position of the Girondins, see M.J. Syndenham, The Girondins (London: Athlone Press, 1961), p. 17. The Girondins are usually identified as the moderate liberal party because they favored free trade and private property. Ultimately, the Girondins were eliminated as a political force during the Reign of Terror, and only returned to some extent with the Thermidorian reaction. By then, however, the revolution was effectively over and the new republic evolved into a non-revolutionary authoritarian regime.
- 8
Alfred Cobban summarizes it this way: “Dr. Syndenham has shown that the existence of a large and coherent Girondin party in the Convention, consisting of some 200 members, backed by a great body of opinion in the country, is a myth, created for propaganda purposes by the Mountain [that is, the Montagnards]. The reality was the existence of a few loosely connected political groups...” See Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp.64-65.
- 9
Raico, Struggle for Liberty, p. 62.
- 10
Bill Edmonds, “Federalism” and the Urban Revolt in France in 1793, The Journal of Modern History 55, No. 1. (March 1983): 27.
- 11
Edmonds, p. 28.
- 12
In its violent suppression of self-determination, Molinari viewed revolutionary and post-revolutionary French nationalism to be at least as bad as the absolute monarchies of old. In his essay Political Evolution and the Revolution (1884) Molinari writes: “[A]ll states have striven to retain this old regime of appropriated markets for their own services. The states born of the revolution have even shown themselves more zealous than others in maintaining it, and in perpetuating, apparently in the interest of liberty, political servitude. In France, the revolutionary government began by proclaiming the indivisibility of the Republic... Any attempt at separation is considered a crime of high treason, which democratic republics, as much as absolute or constitutional monarchies, denounce with horror and punish with severity. One goes even further: to forestall any attempt to split up the political market, population suspected of secessionist tendencies are forced to renounce their institutions and their language, and are compelled to adopt the so-called ‘national’ institutions and language.” (Translation by David Hart: http://davidmhart.com/liberty/FrenchClassicalLiberals/Molinari/Books/1884-EvolutionPolitique/index.html)
- 13
D.M.G. Sutherland, Peasants, Lords, and Leviathan: Winners and Losers from the Abolition of French Feudalism, The Journal of Economic History 62, No. 1 (March 2002): 18.
- 14
Ibid., p. 6.
- 15
Ibid., p. 4.
- 16
Ibid., p. 2.
- 17
Ibid., p. 7-8.
