[Editor’s note: this article is a selection from Chapter 81 in Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty and provides a look into Rothbard’s view of the French Revolution. Rothbard does not write extensively on the French Revolution, but provides a number of indications of his view in Conceived in Liberty, and also in Volume I of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought.]
In reaction to England’s role, the liberal and democratic forces in Europe—and, for that matter, in America—had begun to turn to France for aid and sustenance. France, England’s ancient foe, played this role, interestingly enough, long before the French Revolution, aiding the left in America, Holland, and Ireland, and providing a haven for refugees of all of the lost revolutions. This was done not because of idealism (as its own role in crushing Genevan liberalism made evident), but to help even the score with Great Britain.
And so outside of America the wave of liberal revolutions had failed abysmally. They failed basically because they were bourgeois rebellions that did not tap support among the peasant masses by mounting a total assault on the feudal land system. By failing to be truly revolutionary, the middle classes could not command mass support and left themselves vulnerable to armed force. As Palmer explains:
The democratic movement failed everywhere, before 1789, except in America. . . . Moderate though it was, or seems in retrospect, it failed to obtain any concessions at all... all the efforts of English and Irish parliamen tary reformers and of Dutch, Belgian and Genevese democrats, had come to absolutely nothing. Indeed, matters were if anything worse, for the fear and vindictiveness of threatened oligarchies had been aroused.
The democratic movement had failed for various reasons, in some places because the forces of the old order had successfully called upon foreign aid, and in all cases because the democratic interests, though important and en lightened, were a numerical minority in the country as a whole. They had no mass following. The “mass,” outside London, Paris, or Amsterdam, really meant the rural population. Country people at lower income levels in the countries now being considered, were politically unaroused. ... So far as the ruling aristocracies drew their incomes from land, or their influence from the good will of the tenantry, they had little to fear from disaffected lawyers or impudent pamphleteers; the one thing that would undermine them was wholesale defection on their own estates. This did not happen until it hap pened in France in the summer of 1789.
If these events prove anything, it is perhaps that no purely middle-class or “bourgeois” revolution could succeed. Lawyers, bankers, merchants, shop keepers, students, and professors could not alone unseat the holders of politi cal power. . . . Another reason for the democratic failure, applying at least 452 to Holland, Belgium and Geneva, was that these countries had the misfortune to be small, and hence easy objects of intervention. The attempt of conservative Europe to intervene in France in 1792, was to have a very different outcome.1
Above all it was necessary to engage the masses, as the American revolutionaries had done. But in Europe, ridden as America had not been by internal feudalism, still dominated by monarchy and by theocracy, mass upheaval would have had to rend and disrupt the entire social fabric. The stage was set for France to pick up the baton of the American Revolution. The seemingly far greater radicalism of the French Revolution was merely a function of the far greater built-in resistance to libertarian principles. As Palmer justly concludes:
The American and the French Revolutions “proceeded from the same principles.” The difference is that these principles were much more deeply rooted in America, and that contrary or competing principles, monarchist or aristocratic or feudal or ecclesiastical, though not absent from America, were, in comparison to Europe, very weak. Assertion of the same principles therefore provoked less conflict in America than in France ... it was the weakness of conservative forces in eighteenth century America, not their strength, that made the American Revolution as moderate as it was. . . . The difference lay in the fact that certain ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, found on both sides of the Atlantic—ideas of constitutionalism, individual liberty, or legal equality —were more fully incorporated and less disputed in America than in Europe.
. . . For a century after the American Revolution, as is well known, partisans of the revolutionary or liberal movements in Europe looked upon the United States generally with approval, and European conservatives viewed it with hostility or downright contempt.2
The French, indeed the European liberals in general, had to face far more entrenched opposition than had the Americans, and Palmer brilliantly concludes that in France “the revolution was itself a reaction against an immovable conservatism already formed.” Just as in America British aggrandizement radicalized public opinion, so the tendency of European counter-revolution to harden after suppression of the revolts of the 1780s radicalized French revolutionary opinion.
It should be noted that the European theorists of the old order did not take the current neoconservative tack of praising the American Revolution and reviling the French. These reactionary ideologues knew their enemy, and that most emphatically included the American Revolution, which was attacked with the same phrases later used to denounce the French. Similarly denounced were the Dutch, Genevan and Belgian revolutions of the 1780s. The Abbé Feller, theorist of the Belgian right, Mallet du Pan in France, and Schlozer and other historical jurists (as opposed to natural rights jurists) in Germany all became noted opponents of the French Revolution and were equally hostile to the American. Edmund Burke formed his defense of reaction in the cauldron of the moderate and liberal Dutch, Irish, and English reform agitations long before he attacked the alleged horrors of the French Revolution. The American Revolution, the European right realized, was a vital milestone in the advance and development of the western revolutionary tradition.3
- 1
R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution I: The Challenge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 1, pp. 368-69.
- 2
Ibid., p. 189.
- 3
On the linkage of the American and French revolutions, see Louis Gottschalk, “The Place of the American Revolution in the Causal Pattern of the French Revolution,” in H. Ausubel, ed., The Making of Modern Europe (New York: Holt, 1951), 1:494-510; and Jacques Godechot, La Grande Nation (Paris, 1956), and Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770-1799 (New York: Free Press, 1965).
