Big Events, Big Causes?

Israel acknowledges that others have thought it a mistake to think that the French Revolution has to have a “‘big’ cause” (likewise, more generally, for “great new developments in history”). Israel disagrees: “The French Revolution was a rupture with the past so complete and dramatic, the scale of the departure from ancien régime society, culture, and politics so total and far-reaching, the transformation so foundational for subsequent Western and eventually also non-Western developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that arguing there was no major social structural cause—only a tableau of, in themselves, relatively minor ones—is not just unconvincing, it is not even remotely plausible” (p. 11).

Well, there's a gauntlet. It's one thing to say others are wrong, another to insist that their views are utterly implausible. I winced because I am one of those others: I think that “for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost” is a homespun but indispensable reminder for all social analysts. But the problem is not that I happen to disagree with Israel. The problem is that I can't figure out what reason he has to insist on this view. Look at the bit I quoted (and alas I cannot find more in the surrounding pages). First comes the insistence that the revolution was not just big; it was really big. Okay. But why do even immense, colossal, gigantic changes have to have big causes? Next comes the reminder that the revolution was “foundational” around the globe for a couple of centuries. Sure. But this is eye-popping. Why should the future of the revolution bear at all on the question of its causes? Put differently, why should we think that developments with big consequences must have big causes? Someone more polemical than I might riposte that such a claim isn't even remotely plausible. I would say only that it needs some serious defense. No such defense is on offer here.

Ideas as Causes? Ideas as Agents?

The sentence I just quoted seems to commit Israel to presenting a “major social structural cause” of the revolution. But the book’s subtitle promises “an intellectual history” of the revolution. The author also promises that focusing on “the actual leadership of the Revolution” will offer “a way to build on the emerging sociocultural approach, and, especially, more effectively integrate social history with intellectual history” (p. 12). I don't see any way to reconcile these gestures. I would root for the last—for many years I have thought, and even argued in print, that the ideal/material distinction and the division of labor between intellectual and social historians are train wrecks; that nothing good comes in their wake; that we shouldn't keep trying to figure out how to properly characterize the relationship between the terms of the distinction, but stop drawing it. But that's not what Israel is up to. The subtitle gets the book right. Or, if you like, the big cause of the French Revolution here isn't some “major social structural” development, at least not on any conventional understanding of that language. It's ideal or ideological or intellectual: It's the radical enlightenment Israel has portrayed in his previous work. “Radical Enlightenment,” Israel announces in the book’s closing paragraph, “was incontrovertibly the one ‘big’ cause of the French Revolution” (p. 708).

True, Israel acknowledges the exodus of the wealthy (p. 110), the dissolution of the monasteries (pp. 186–88), the steep increase in the price of bread in 1791–92 (p. 225), and France’s military defeat in Belgium and ensuing riots at home in March 1793 (p. 311). But such comments are strikingly rare and compressed: Even the less brief passage on the monasteries does not, for instance, rehearse just how much real estate was held by the Roman Catholic Church. It is as if Israel flatters his readers by taking for granted that they already know the usual plot of the story—the armed women marching on Versailles, corpses hanging from lamp posts, heads stuck on pikes, and all the rest of it. Or, more ominously, as if he thinks none of that matters much.

Sometimes Israel describes enlightenment ideas as agents, actors that do things in the world: “The principal agent of black emancipation in the Caribbean during the 1790s was unquestionably the philosophique tendency within the Revolution, that is, the Radical Enlightenment working through the Paris Amis des Noirs and the Brissotin faction” (p. 349). Those enamored of microfoundations and methodological individualism will balk at such talk. But even those of us open to genuinely corporate actors—if you like insisting that Congress is a they, not an it, you might ponder the fact that there is no way to be an individual congressperson without the social institution of Congress—might wonder just how the enlightenment “work[s] through” actors. (Roughly parallel questions confront some influenced by Michel Foucault, who describe discourse as an agent or who argue that agents are constituted by discourse.) Perhaps Israel is enjoying literary license here and means only that the (garden-variety human) agents fighting Caribbean slavery did so because of their enlightenment commitments. I'm honestly unsure.

Anyway, the thesis that radical enlightenment caused the French Revolution immediately raises an objection about comparative politics. Whatever you think about ongoing debates about whether we should conceive of enlightenment as an international affair or instead think of a series of largely national enlightenments, France was not hermetically sealed off from the rest of Europe. Plenty of people elsewhere were conversant in Spinoza (to take Israel’s favorite) and the rest. So why weren't there more revolutions on the French model elsewhere?

Israel must be aware of this problem. His prologue offers “more than one hundred British, Americans, and Irish in Paris” toasting the revolution. Gibbon and Burke aside, he declares, “distinguished and politically aware British, American, and Irish intellectuals, poets, and authors, like their German and Dutch counterparts at that time, mostly endorsed and applauded the Revolution” (p. 1). So the same radical enlightenment ideas were available—and embraced—elsewhere. Why didn't those other countries go through quasi-French Revolutions? Later, Israel comments on Pitt’s repressive measures in March 1793: “While some British writers and reformers still supported the Revolution, conservative, proaristocratic views heavily predominated at home” (p. 342). Why did radical enlightenment take off in France but fizzle in England? A number of possibilities beckon: I'm tempted, however fiendishly, by the thought that lots of little contingencies happened to unfold in different ways. Whatever the answer, the question is pressing. A big cause that's present in many countries but has the effect in question in only one is anomalous.

Enlightenment: Cause and Ideal?

Still, Israel is a champion of radical enlightenment—not, I suspect, simply as the big cause of the French Revolution but as a constellation of moral and political commitments we should unabashedly embrace. Since Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, indeed since Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, many political theorists will look askance at this. They will think that enlightenment is another kind of domination, or anyway that it has built into it unpleasantly repressive possibilities that have surfaced with a vengeance in our bleary days of neoliberalism, the collapse of citizenship into consumerism, the rape of nature, and so on. To be outrageously peremptory, I'm with Israel on the normative agenda. I think antienlightenment writing, whether ostensibly from the right or the left, is mostly pernicious, sometimes foolish.

The last set of puzzles I had about his book, however, concern the way in which his normative and causal commitments fit together. I suspect that Israel approves of both the revolution and radical enlightenment, that he rightly notices that some revolutionaries invoked the language of enlightenment, and that this happy pair of observations helps inspire him to adopt his causal thesis. Yes, it means something that the revolutionary assembly had Voltaire’s remains installed in the Pantheon (p. 152). But just as I doubt that big events have to have big causes, I doubt that good events have to have good causes. (I think that David Hume’s History of England argues that Puritan fanatics unwittingly gave rise to the rule of law.)

The Brissotins, sometimes joined by the Dantonists (for example, see p. 478), loom large in this book: They are heroes because they act on the cluster of enlightenment commitments that Israel embraces. But suppose we agree that their commitments were politically attractive. Does it follow that they played an important causal role in the revolution?

There are some 30 references to the revolution’s “core values” in this book. And occasionally Israel refers to the “real Revolution” (pp. 593, 596), “always the most important” (695), or the revolution’s “authentic goals” (p. 615). If we construe all this language in normative terms, then the claim that the Brissotins advanced the real Revolution is tautological. So there’s no point arguing about it.

Consider this statement of Israel’s, however: “The French Revolution, we may conclude[,] was really three revolutions—a democratic republican revolution, a moderate Enlightenment constitutional monarchism invoking Montesquieu and the British model as its criteria of legitimacy, and an authoritarian populism prefiguring modern fascism. These distinct impulses proved entirely incompatible politically and culturally, as well as ideologically, and remained locked in often ferocious conflict throughout” (p. 695). Presumably, all three of these revolutions were “real,” that is, actual ongoing developments in the world. But then what's illuminated, what obscured, by such a typology?

What's illuminated is a thesis I have often pressed: that politics is a contest over legitimate authority. Political actors do not simply pursue their “interests.” They speak and act in the name of those who have rightful authority and what should be done with it. If they speak hypocritically or opportunistically, which they sometimes do, that has to be parasitic on what ordinarily is good-faith use of such language. Otherwise no one could ever be taken in.

What's missing is that the contest is not only an argument. We may balk at the anachronism of crediting Robespierre with a “putsch” (Chap. 16) or making him a fascist avant la lettre. But Israel has next to nothing to say about how such an odious actor could find himself at the helm of state—and continue to command support through what we sensibly think of as his bloody lunacies. We might begin by remembering that the political contest is fought on notoriously slippery terrain. Political actors are doing their best to size up constantly shifting circumstances, to try to find some way forward, or anyway not lurch terribly backward. Their vision is clouded—sometimes by their own normative commitments—and in the right or wrong juncture, one false step is everything. Israel seems to have no interest in this sort of thing.

When he dismisses the sans-culottes as “a strikingly small minority,” “less interested in and able to follow politics than the more literate” (p. 217), I wonder about all those people in the streets. Did they know what they were up to? Were they agents with a political agenda, tired of expropriation and exploitation, familiar enough with promises of equality even if not conversant in the finer points of Enlightenment debate? Couldn't they tell that Notre Dame was spectacular, the priests beautifully dressed, and couldn't they sneer at Christian vows of poverty and humility? Couldn't they despise the tax on salt and, for those in their loathsome clutches, tax farmers, too? Israel scoffs that the Montagnards hadn't “shown much capacity to shepherd the sansculottes effectively” (p. 315), but that verb shepherd belongs not in a Christian homily but in the most derisive—and terrified—conservative assaults on democracy. Shades of another hoary device in political science: the mass/elite distinction, with its repulsive and implausible baggage about what docile, sleepy, and mindless sheep most people are. This won't do.

This is why I think that the occasional cursory nod to bread prices or military defeat or church bashing won't suffice, why Israel isn't serious about his promise to fuse intellectual and social history, and why an intellectual history of the French Revolution is so oddly incomplete. The clash of ideas, standing alone, can't begin to explain the surprising twists and turns of politics—of the Revolution itself. Not that it would be better to write a social history! That would be the evil twin of Israel’s book. Even Israel’s daunting erudition and engaging prose can't overcome the intractable obstacles that the ideal/material (think: intellectual/social or, closer to home, attitudes/behavior) distinction strews in his path.