Revolutions that aim to re-educate people lead to a military dictatorship – at the end of the French Revolutions, Napoleon

In the spring of 1789, it all began quite innocently. Because the privileged classes had refused to pay new taxes for decades, the French state was bankrupt. Therefore, a meeting in the old style, an Estates Assembly, was convened, at which the clergy, nobility, and wealthy urban bourgeoisie were to finally approve the new taxes and then quickly disperse. As we know, they stayed, and everything changed.

Two years later, in the spring and summer of 1791, many Frenchmen and women pored over their books and asked themselves: What has this actually achieved for us, what so many pathos-filled speeches are selling as a revolution as sublime as humanity has never seen? The women's answer was: Nothing at all. On the contrary, the very men who pose as revolutionaries are behaving more macholy than ever.

They may have boasted about having read, understood, and implemented Condorcet and Voltaire's arguments for gender equality, but we see no sign of new freedoms. Approximately two-thirds of France's male population also gave the thumbs down: they didn't have the necessary tax revenue for three working days to be entitled to vote.

They were even less likely to be elected, because anyone who wanted to become a member of the new National Assembly had to pay at least fifty days' income to the tax authorities and also pass a test of their beliefs before electors, who handed over their income to the state for at least one week.

In other words, the protective barrier against democracy stood unshakably strong, and this was a primary purpose of the first revolutionary constitution, which finally came into force on September 3, 1791. But of course, this was not allowed to be said; on the contrary, it had to be concealed at all costs with a particularly high level of rhetorical bombast. This was done in the Declaration of the Universal Rights of Man and of the Citizen of August 26, 1789.

It listed a long list of freedoms that were completely uninteresting to the vast majority of the population: freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of enterprise, above all. Workers, however, were not even allowed to form basic protective associations and were therefore subject, without rights, to the wage dictates of the entrepreneurs, bankers, and financiers, the new masters of France. And, of course, the declaration didn't mention political participation—freedom of political participation was not a human right in 1789, not even a right for men, let alone for women.

Those who gained nothing politically also felt cheated economically: The new state had abolished all social protection and welfare institutions for those living in the cities on the brink of subsistence – and that was at least 70 percent – without replacement. It did so by completely expropriating the Catholic Church in France and auctioning off its rich assets – 6.5 percent of French land and 260,000 properties, including many prime properties – to the highest bidder.

Wealthy city dwellers and wealthy aristocrats had thus made thousands upon thousands of bargains in real estate and agricultural land, and they were determined never to give them up again. This was the red line that no subsequent French regime, whether reactionary, liberal, or revolutionary, could cross.

In this way, many peasants who had previously paid their dues to monasteries and cathedral chapters found themselves with new masters, or, as it was expressed in Sicily seventy years later: They got jackals instead of the old leopards, and the jackals were much hungrier for prey than the leopards. In other words: The wealthy new landowners increased the rents for land using every conceivable legal trick, and they had no shortage of devoted and obliging lawyers.

In general, people in the countryside felt more duped than ever before. In August 1789, the National Assembly had solemnly declared the feudal system, and with it the nobility, abolished. Whether their lord in the castle next to the village could call himself Marquis or not was of little concern to the peasants. For them, it was a question of taxes or no taxes. This was precisely what the landowners from the nobility and upper bourgeoisie were concerned with, too, and they held the upper hand.

With tremendous fanfare, some services and disadvantages that had long since ceased to be financially significant were abolished, and then a sleight of hand was used: In a breathtaking distortion of historical facts, the old feudal inequalities, which centuries ago had once been payment for protection against external violence, but had long since become nothing more than an oppressive fee for the right to use land, were declared to be good bourgeois income titles and thus politically sanctified.

Anyone who no longer wanted to pay the interest in cash or in kind had to pay a redemption sum that even wealthy large farmers could not afford. It's no wonder that in 1789 and 1790, so much unrest was brewing in the countryside: first fear, escalating to hysteria, then anger, then violence.

In 1791, more than 90 percent of the population saw their way of life and order of life as worse than two years earlier, and often even threatened. The general economic situation contributed significantly to this. After decades of demographic growth, which had pushed France's total population to 25 million, a European record, the structural weaknesses of the French economy became increasingly apparent.

Agriculture, in which more than ninety percent of the population worked, was hopelessly outdated despite isolated reforms, as was the system of political regulations that imposed strict bans on any grain transport within the country, including between areas of underproduction and overproduction.

The first outbreak of revolutionary violence at the grassroots, viewed with deep concern by the early revolutionaries, the storming of the Bastille state prison, which had long since been empty of any state prisoners of any importance, and the brutal massacre of its garrison, took place on the very day on which the price of bread in Paris had reached its highest level since 1648: July 14, 1789. This was a warning sign to which the new elite did its very best to turn a blind eye.

This elite was new in that it had now been amalgamated from the abolished nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie. From now on, money or no money determined membership in the dominant ruling class or exclusion from it. The nearly ten percent of the population who benefited from the events from 1789 onward, when asked whether what had happened to their advantage was a revolution or not, responded, translated into the political jargon of the year 2025, something like this: It was a necessary structural adjustment of a social and political nature to fundamentally changed economic, mental, and cultural conditions of the time—not a break, but continuity with contemporary means.

A revolution, a moderate one at that, and at the same time the last of its kind, was only necessary because the refusal of privileged classes, who did not want to give up their unjust and anachronistic privileges and special rights, had led to a national financial crisis as part of a reform backlog that had now been resolved, so that the future history of France could be diverted and transferred into the calmer waters of evolution.

From the perspective of the revolutionaries, the following were considered outdated until 1789 and now adapted to the new circumstances so that the spirit of the times and institutions were no longer in conflict with one another but harmoniously intertwined: the social hierarchies, which were no longer to be determined by birth but by individual achievement, i.e. money; the political order, which was no longer to be determined by the triple monopoly of powers of a monarchy de facto dominated by the court nobility, but according to the principle of the separation of powers.

Added to this was the economic order, which had to be characterized by free trade at all levels; the ecclesiastical-religious order, in which the Catholic Church was to be transformed into a state authority and, as in the economy, the healthy spirit of competition was to prevail. Believe what you want, enrich yourself as you can—these were the imperatives of the new era.

The separation of powers was, in effect, a second firewall. It provided for a monarchy that, although no longer justified by the grace of God but by the will of the nation, had to delegate its legislative power to the parliament of dignitaries elected by census and the judiciary to judges who were essentially independent, nevertheless remained very strong.

This is what the Comte de Mirabeau, the most eloquent and influential revolutionary until his untimely death in April 1791, tried to convey to King Louis XVI, for whom he served as a double agent: "Sire," he must have advised the ruler, "seize this unique opportunity! The propertied need you more than you need them, for they fear nothing more than a social revolution that turns everything upside down and robs them of their sacred possessions! Step to the forefront of the revolution, justify it with the millennial authority of your office—and you will become more powerful than ever before!"

Mirabeau knew what he was talking about: Under the new constitution, the king was not only the sole head of the executive branch, but also the commander-in-chief of the army and head of diplomacy. Moreover, the founders of the constitution of 1791 had not taken the separation of powers so seriously: The king could thus exercise a suspensive veto against all laws, which, as far as humanly possible, would have rendered them moot.

Make something of your new position—this cry went unheard. Louis XVI did the worst thing he could, tried to flee to a foreign country with which he had been in conspiratorial contact—and died a good year and a half later, a criminal at the hands of the nation, on the guillotine.

Could a more skillful monarch have prevented the second revolution that took place in the summer and autumn of 1792? A few years earlier, in Tuscany, the Habsburg Grand Duke Leopold planned to give his country a constitution similar in many ways to the French Constitution of 1791, thus partially disempowering himself through this separation of powers—while simultaneously gaining invaluable prestige as a modern ruler in accordance with the principles of the Enlightenment, and in his eyes, this represented considerable added value.

Although the whole thing did not come to fruition because the ruler thought more modernly than his nobility, one conclusion nevertheless suggests itself: With a king of Leopold's stature, the conditions brought about by the first French Revolution could probably have been stabilized.

That they were contemporary on a European scale is demonstrated by the fact that in the so-called Restoration from 1814/15, which was not so "restorative," the same principles as in 1791 came into effect, certainly in a much more ecclesiastically conservative guise, but with the same blended elite. One cannot expect a conservatively educated ruler like Louis XVI to ride a tiger, but the Revolution of 1789 was hardly a tiger either; more like a somewhat unruly horse that could have been tamed.

From the perspective of Messrs. Sieyès, Lafayette, and Co., the king's defection was a catastrophe primarily because, like all moderate revolutionaries, they faced the problem of slowing down, saying "stop," and stopping. They had robbed a monarchy established for six hundred years of its sacred character and reduced the king from a religiously exalted figure somewhere between heaven and earth to a constitutional body responsible to the nation and deposable by it. They had thereby shown all classes, even the lowest and lowest, that nothing is fixed and everything can be overturned.

In doing so, they had inadvertently raised the question: why not continue like this, but this time in our own interest? The king had been supposed to be such a pillar of stability against the revolutionary quicksand dynamic, but now there was truly no stopping him. In Paris in 1791 and 1792, unimagined potential for conflict was brewing: The paper money of the assignats, whose stability was supposed to be guaranteed by the sale of church property, proved to be extremely soft and instead produced rampant inflation, so that the basic foodstuff, bread, threatened to become unaffordable for the majority of the population.

At the same time, the Parisian lower middle class, disparagingly called “sansculottes” (literally: people without elegant breeches) by its opponents, organized itself into 48 sections as a defense community against rising prices and as a fighting association with an increasingly pronounced thrust against “those at the top.”

The atmosphere was further heated by investigative journalists such as Jean-Paul Marat, born in Boudry, Neuchâtel, who reported in his newspapers about monstrous conspiracies of the rich and powerful and called on ordinary people to take preventive action: Better to kill 50,000 enemies of the revolution now than to be slaughtered by the long knives of the counter-revolution!

Now all that was needed was a spark to light the fuse of the second revolution, and the monarchical superpowers Austria and Prussia, with whom Louis XVI was secretly in contact, ensured this: As early as the summer of 1791, they threatened the French with the harshest military countermeasures if they limited their king's power, and eleven months later they even said: If you harm even a hair on the monarch's head, Paris will burn!

This was the signal for the second, far more radical upheaval, which, in August and September 1792, overthrew the order established the previous year and was intended to create nothing less than a new world with a new humanity. The fact that a new era was now dawning was already made clear by its numbering: Year 1 began on September 22, 1791; the months were given new names according to the cycle of the seasons and harvests, so that Roman tyrants were no longer honored with names like July and August, and decades replaced the week.

In the same spirit, statues of kings from the Old Testament and French history were decapitated from cathedral facades, and campaigns were launched to de-Christianize and popularize a new cult of pure reason. The leading figures of the Second Revolution, such as Maximilien de Robespierre and Saint-Just, like their idolized wisdom teacher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sought to educate the French, deformed by despotism and alienated from themselves, not into a nation of cynical atheists, but into virtuous deists who believed in a benevolent Creator God and implemented His will in a new political and social order built on equality.

Education, virtue, equality: These are three of the key ideological concepts of the Second Revolution. The fourth is still missing. It is "terror." If virtue was not enough to inspire the re-education of man into a social, altruistic, and patriotic being, terror, materialized by the guillotine, had to achieve its salutary effects.

For the radical revolutionaries, called "Jacobins" after their clubhouse, a former monastery, the measure of virtue was the people, understood as a hard-working class of artisans and shopkeepers. According to Robespierre, despite all the poisoning caused by a perverse social and political order, the seeds of goodness—that is, solidarity, diligence, patriotism, and incorruptibility—were still vibrant in them.

The new order of the egalitarian republic had to be built on these foundations. For Robespierre and the other leading Jacobins, all educated citizens of the purest water who had never seen the inside of a workshop, the human experiment thus initiated was worth the high risk of an alliance with the unbridled Parisian petty bourgeoisie, even if the revolution consumed many of their children, or even ultimately all of them.

Thus, from June 1793, there were three tensely interacting poles in Paris: the sans-culotte sections, the National Convention elected in September 1792 by universal male suffrage, and the Emergency Committee of the Committee of Public Safety, a twelve-member group of radical Jacobins. They used their position of power to sentence the king to death, eliminate more moderate groups as well as radical atheists, sending them to the guillotine, and establish a new order that satisfied their and Rousseau's strict moral imperatives.

In politics, consensus was envisaged, but no opposition. Anyone who resisted the majority was considered a traitor to the general will, to the essentially totalitarian general will mystically exalted by Rousseau—final destination: the guillotine. The economic order was also to be completely rebuilt, according to the age-old principles of a popular economy, now reformulated in a revolutionary way, but remaining deeply traditional and anti-modernist at its core.

The survival of the poor was the top priority, meaning low bread prices, which were to be guaranteed by state-imposed ceilings. Wealth was antisocial and had to be broken down in favor of small-scale property, the new ideal; no one should own more than was necessary for secure survival, both for themselves and for others. All this was proclaimed with great pathos, but there was no time to implement it.

The Second Revolution was ruined by its military victories. The campaigns organized on the basis of the "levée en masse" (mass levy) crushed conservative Europe. Thus, the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety had done their duty and were free to depart – leaving Robespierre and his closest allies on the guillotine, which they themselves so often instrumentalized to eliminate their ideological opponents – and the profiteers of the revolutionary shift in property ownership, the new rich, returned to power in July 1794.

The bottom line is that general conclusions can be drawn from both revolutions: First, revolutions most predictably break out when an economically prosperous secondary elite is prevented from rising to equality with the older, ruling elite. Second, the replacement of an old order with a revolutionary new one is always a leap into the unknown; it unleashes dynamics that no one had anticipated. Third, revolutions that seek to instill a new consciousness in people are self-defeating. Fourth, revolutions that seek to re-educate people culminate in military dictatorships—the French revolutions resulted in the autocratic Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Russian revolutions in the despot Stalin.

Volker Reinhardt is Professor Emeritus of General and Modern Swiss History at the University of Freiburg.