Heads will roll

One reason that few have attempted so herculean a task is the nouns. The reader needs to be guided through a bewildering array of impossible-to-escape terms: the Convention, Jacobins, September Massacres, Indulgents, National Assembly, Girondins, Committee of Public Safety, Cordeliers Club, Festival of the Federation, Montagnards, Cult of the Supreme Being, Paris sections, Hébertistes, Vendée Uprising, levée en masse, Terror, Thermidorean Reaction, Directory, Fructidor, Brumaire coup, and so on. Popkin manages this superbly while keeping the reader interested in the personalities who were often driven by what the young revolutionary Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just called “the force of things that perhaps led us to do things that we did not foresee.” A New World Begins makes clear that all sides in the Revolution conformed to that iron rule of history, the Law of Unintended Consequences.

King Louis XVI had not intended to bankrupt France by helping the Americans win their War of Independence, but that was the consequence of his decision to declare war on Britain in 1778, only 15 years after the conclusion of the ruinously expensive Seven Years’ War. He found the prospect of humiliating Britain too good to miss. But the resulting financial crisis only turned into a political crisis after Louis sacked four reform-minded finance ministers in a row and then brought one of them back as a belated afterthought. Almost anything would have been better than these constant changes in policy and personnel. “It may be considered politically unwise,” Popkin reports the king as saying after one major policy reversal, “but it seems to be that is the general will, and I wish to be loved.” Popkin correctly argues that “a stronger, more authoritarian royal government might have reacted more effectively to the renewed fiscal problems that developed in the 1780s.”

Similarly, it was not the nobility’s intention to provoke a full-scale revolution when it destabilized the ancien régime by forcing the king to call the first parliament for a century and a half rather than allowing the reforming ministers to bring them into the tax system. How many times in history has Alexis de Tocqueville’s brilliant insight been proved correct: “The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it tries to reform itself”? For the nobles later carted off to the guillotine, it was small solace that the king who tried to tax them had gone first.

Nor was it the revolutionaries’ intention, when they initially overthrew the monarchy, to indulge in bloody purge and counterpurge, as much against their own comrades as against the nobility. Yet the extremism of people such as Saint-Just naturally came to the fore in the years after the revolution, a time of paranoia, foreign invasion, domestic insurgency, hyperinflation, and continuing crisis. Saint-Just himself even promoted a scheme to take 5-year-old boys away from their families and teach them to be soldiers and farmers. For such fanatics as Saint-Just and his leader, Maximilien Robespierre, the violence of the Terror, including the mass execution by drowning of prisoners-of-war in Nantes and the daily guillotining of scores of people for months on end, were perfectly justifiable.

Popkin’s account of the fall of Robespierre, who was essentially the Joseph Stalin of the French Revolution, is a true page turner. First, he turns on his fellow revolutionaries, even popular ones such as Georges Danton. “Don’t forget to show my head to the people,” Danton told his executioner. “It’s worth seeing.” Then Robespierre managed to alienate his own power base among the Jacobins in the various revolutionary committees, leaving his erstwhile allies terrified that they would be next. Popkin points out how “The Incorruptible,” as Robespierre was nicknamed, was “too strongly identified with the revolutionary movement to be ignored, but too unpredictable to be trusted.”

Robespierre became unaccountably silent and unapproachable at key moments, allowing his enemies to organize a plot against him. Finally, on July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor on the revolutionary calendar), the day after a speech that his rivals felt threatened them all, they pounced, denouncing Robespierre’s tyranny and ordering his arrest. On that very day, 40 people were guillotined who would have survived if the conspirators had moved earlier. As the cart took Robespierre and his closest supporters to the guillotine on July 28, a spectator noted: “It was a holiday, all the elegant people were at their windows to see them pass. They applauded and clapped their hands all along the rue Saint Honoré.”

Robespierre had tried to commit suicide earlier but had only managed to shoot off part of his jaw. The executioner cruelly ripped the bandage off, leaving Robespierre screaming in pain as the blade descended. In retrospect, it seems somewhat ungrateful of the executioner, whom Robespierre had kept in such regular work for so long.

Popkin is initially far too generous to Robespierre, suggesting that he “was the last figure who could truly claim to have embodied the vision of liberty and equality,” as though there was any true liberty in France under his rule. On the very next page, he partially corrects himself, however, adding that “although the Terror restricted liberty, it continued to promote the other great revolutionary ideal of equality. Even in hindsight, it is difficult to say that the basic achievements of the Revolution could have been preserved in 1793 and 1794 without something resembling a revolutionary dictatorship.”

That was certainly the message that Vladimir Lenin and Stalin took from the French Revolution, and plenty more bloodthirsty killers besides. Most readers will hopefully conclude that there are other, less violent ways to secure reforms. By the time Napoleon appears after 500 pages, the reader rightly senses that the guillotine will be put out of commission, at least for political crimes, and not a moment too soon.

Andrew Roberts’s most recent book, Leadership in War, is published by Allen Lane.