Bloodshed and Revolutions

Rone Tempest (“Revolution: Was It Best of Times?” Part I, Feb. 2) reports on old battles still alive in this bicentennial year of French Revolution. The French (like Russians, Chinese, and Americans) must face the fact that triumphs of human rights and dignity have sometimes been accomplished with brutal violence. Tempest points out that memories of revolutionary violence run deep in French political opinion. And he touches on the dirty business of how the far right, and especially French racists like Jean Marie Le Pen, use memories of that violence to their own political advantage. He also tells us of the “selective memory” in both the previous Chirac and the present Rocard governments. The article is informative.

But your readers should also be reminded that the common comparison between the limited, military bloodshed of the American War of Independence and French revolutionary Terror of 1793 is also based on memory and forgetting. Some like to forget the massacres commited by French anti-revolutionary royalists or the violence of foreign autocratic powers, against which French revolutionaries defend their republic.

Many forget that French revolutionaries declared all human beings free and equal, quickly granted political liberty to Jews, and attempted to end slavery once and for all. Given these and other enduring social issues, the simplistic comparison between French revolutionary violence and that of our own War of Independence must be qualified.

Let us not forget, just as one example, this one burning issue of slavery directly addressed by the French in the 1790s. This was a problem unresolved in the American Revolution, and one of the reasons our ancestors would slaughter each other, nearly 70 years after the French Revolution, in a vast Civil War. Were our 1860s a time devoid of atrocity and massacre, a time also when we were trying to realize a revolutionary, democratic ideal? Though we, as human beings, must be ashamed of our acts of collective slaughter, military and otherwise, was the issue of human slavery unworthy of hundreds of thousands dead? And are we not also proud that, even at that cost, we have ended slavery?

The question asked in the headline, then, was the French Revolution the best of times, can be answered with another paraphrase of Charles Dickens--it certainly was not the worst of times. All of our common modern history is stained with the blood people have shed to defend their rights against those who wield deadly power and who seek nothing more than to kill them. This is a brutal, ugly historical fact, a common cause of horrible chaos in which the innocent sometimes die with the guilty. It is also a fact that need not occasion the French any unique shame or dishonor.

PROF. ROBERT M. MANIQUIS

Director

1789-1989, The French Revolution:

UCLA Bicentennial Program