Here is that La France insoumise, never tired of being wrong all the time about everything, has attempted in recent weeks to rehabilitate the figure of Robespierre. The deputy of Essonne Antoine Léaument, close to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who seems to spend most of his day on social networks, multiplies tweets with revolutionary accents, asking for a new night of August 4 or the restoration of control of price – a measure much more linked to the Terror than to the spirit of 1789, which was very attached to free trade. In front of a compact crowd of about thirty people, he paid homage, on July 28, to the Incorruptible on the forecourt of the house where he lived, in Arras.
The figure of Maximilien Robespierre is complex and his ideas have evolved over time. But let us seize on this debate to recall the two main opposing theses on the French Revolution, theses that recent historiography allows us to settle. For the left, and LFI in particular, 1789 was a break in our history. It made France pass from an aristocratic regime to a republican regime by installing the opposition between these two regimes as a constituent of our political debates. These debates, giving rise to revolts and new revolutions, have marked our history, particularly in the 19th century. For Tocqueville, on the contrary, the aristocracy had begun to wither before 1789, under the effect of the secular process, and not limited to France, of equalization of living conditions. The Revolution, in this context, constitutes a contingent political gear more than a social revolution strictly speaking. Not so revolutionary as that, it even, according to the documentation accumulated by Tocqueville, accentuated administrative centralization, a very French tradition, inherited from the absolutism established by Louis XIV and his Comptroller General of Finance Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
The Revolution did not accelerate social mobility
For the left, the Revolution is at the origin of the march towards equality. For Tocqueville, it was equality which, in the French institutional context, led to a revolution. If the process of equalization of conditions is brutal and post-1789, the thurifers of Robespierre are right and the Terror can be seen as a necessary evil. If, on the contrary, the process of equalization predates the Revolution, the Tocquevillian analysis prevails and the uprising of the people must be considered as a political fact and not an economic or social one. From this perspective, no moral argument can justify, a posteriori, the Terror.
Historian Raphaël Doan drew my attention this summer to a paper published in the Journal of Social History (Social Mobility in France 1720-1986: Effects of Wars, Revolution and Economic Change, Marco Van Leewen, Ineke Maas, Danièle Rébaudo, Jean-Pierre Pélissier, 2016) which mobilizes an important statistical apparatus to quantitatively study the relationship between wars and revolutions on the one hand, and social mobility on the other. Measuring social mobility is a way of understanding the question of the equalization of conditions – today we would speak of “opportunities” or “equal chances” – present in Tocqueville. By comparing the difference in social situation between parents and their children, the authors show that the Revolution of 1789 had no impact. Social mobility grew as slowly after 1789 as before. The numbers show no change. It was not until the middle of the 20th century and the prosperous period of the Glorious Thirties that equality of opportunity finally progressed significantly from one generation to the next.
Growth, education, freedom: the winning triptych
Tocqueville had therefore been right, unlike the Insoumis. We must admit that it is difficult to be surprised by this result: the author of The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) has always been right, like Raymond Aron, against those who, intellectually and morally, indicate the south with remarkable stubbornness, despite their degrees in sociology or history. There are a few lessons for today. The main one is that social ascent needs, not revolts, violence or wars, but economic growth, education and freedom. Nothing new under the sun, nor really… revolutionary. But a real and good political program.