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The Scary Echo of the Intolerance of the French Revolution in America Today

by Carol Hamilton

Ms. Hamilton has a Ph.D. in English from Berkeley. As an undergrad she studied history at UW-Madison with George Mosse, William J. Courtenay, and Brian Peterson (of Florida International University), among others. Her mother is Virginia Vanderveer Hamilton, professor emerita and the author of biographies of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and Alabama Senator Lister Hill.

"Denunciation is the mother of all virtues, just as surveillance is the most reliable guarantee of the people’s happiness and liberty." -- Félix Le Peletier, Jacobin revolutionary

In Charles Dickens’s 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities, the French aristocrat Charles Darnay is rescued from the guillotine by the testimony of Doctor Manette, his father-in-law, a man revered by the revolutionaries because of his long, unjust imprisonment in the Bastille. The day after his reprieve, however, Darnay is again hauled before the revolutionary tribunal and denounced by the vengeful couple, Ernest and Therese Defarge, and a third mysterious accuser. The Defarges dramatically reveal that the third accuser is Doctor Manette himself. Decades before in his prison cell, Manette had composed a letter in which he recounted the crimes of Darnay’s father and uncle, the men responsible for his arrest and confinement. That letter concludes:

And them and their descendants, to the last of their race, I, Alexandre Manette, unhappy prisoner, do … denounce to the times when all these things shall be answered for. I denounce them to Heaven and to earth.” 1

The leading practitioner of denunciation during the French Revolution was the fanatical Jean-Paul Marat, the man who used the phrase “enemy of the people.” Marat, a disappointed practitioner of science and medicine, printed in his newspaper. Friend of the People, the names of those he considered deserving of the guillotine. For these “counter-revolutionaries” he endorsed show trials and summary executions.

Tom Paine, whose efforts on behalf of the American Revolution had made him famous, was in France as a witness to, and participant in, the new revolution. Regarded as a wild-eyed radical in Britain and America, in France he seemed a timid moderate. In a 1793 letter to Georges Danton, one of the revolutionaries, the alarmed Paine attempted to intervene:

There ought to be some regulation with respect to the spirit of denunciation that now prevails. If every individual is to indulge his private malignancy, or his private ambition, to denounce at random and without any kind of proof, all confidence will be undermined and all authority be destroyed.2

Paine’s warning was ignored. Eleven months later, the infamous Law of 22 Prairial (June 10th) was passed by the French National Assembly. Article 9 stated: "Every citizen is empowered to seize conspirators and counterrevolutionaries, and to bring them before the magistrates. He is required to denounce them as soon as he knows of them." "With the Prairial decree," comments Claude Lefort in Democracy and Political Theory, "the Terror declares that it knows no limits; the very dimension of Law disappears." 3 Paine was imprisoned and narrowly escaped execution. Danton and his allies were executed the following April.

Marat, who fought with the pen, died by the sword. In an effort to stem the tide of denunciation, Charlotte Corday stabbed him to death as he lay in his bathtub, soaking his diseased skin. Unfortunately, rather than putting an end to the violence, Marat’s demise only exacerbated it. Corday was guillotined for his murder, and the Reign of Terror erupted. At least 16,000 people perished during the Terror, which sparked a reaction called the White Terror, during which young royalists grabbed people off the streets and murdered them.

The spirit of denunciation was surely the worst political legacy of the French Revolution. It reappeared with a vengeance in the twentieth century. In Nazi Germany, Jews and communists were denounced by their neighbors, relatives, and associates. Stalin had “enemies of the people” arrested in the middle of the night and dragged off to gulags. Many Americans living today remember the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the hearings held in front of the ominously entitled House UnAmerican Activities committee.

Denunciation is a malignant practice that damages the political process, spreading cynicism, destroying careers, and discouraging public service. Its practitioners arouse and manipulate the emotions of their followers, who in turn succumb to self-righteous and irrational indignation. Sadly, both the spirit and the practice of denunciation are present now in debates between American conservatives and liberals. Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter play the role of Marat with enthusiasm. Each week on Fox News, Hannity denounces an “enemy of the state.” In recent years a spate of denunciatory right-wing books has appeared, among them, Michael Savage’s Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, Ann Coulter’s Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, and Daniel Flynn’s Why the Left Hates America. Some on the political left have attempted to respond in kind, with James Carville’s We’re Right, They’re Wrong, Jack Huberman’s The Bush-Hater’s Handbook, and Al Franken’s more humorous Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them. Such books are akin to those political campaign tactics that smear candidates’ personal reputations rather than engage their political agendas—“swiftboating,” as we call it.

Some of the denunciatory fervor may be a product of historical ignorance. How many of our feuding pundits and politicians could tell you the first modern progenitor of their own political philosophy or name its founding text? How many conservative pundits have actually read Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France? How many liberal politicians—or American students—have read the work of John Locke?

The term conservative, in its political sense, was coined in 1819 by a Frenchman, the writer Viscount Francois-René de Chateaubriand, who founded a magazine called Le Conservateur, meaning “the conserver” or “the conservator.” He defined a conservative as “one who is a partisan of the established social and political order.” Chateaubriand favored the restoration of the French monarchy and aristocracy as well as the preservation of the established French (Catholic) church.

In the past two decades, the word liberal has been demonized in American politics, and liberal politicians have tended to shrink from the word rather than explain and defend it. The Latin root of liberal is liber, which means “free.” The familiar expression a liberal education refers to a broad-ranging education suitable for a free man, rather than a slave. The liberal arts are those that make demands on the imagination and intellect, as opposed to the supposedly mechanical training of craftspeople and workers. Liberal was also originally associated with economic theory, as in the expression free trade.
Although they may emphasize different traits, historians and scholarly theorists of liberalism and conservatism generally agree on the defining attributes of their subjects. In Recasting Conservatism (1994), Robert Devigne elucidates the conservative world-view as follows:

Conservative political thought, as most fully expressed by Burke’s response to the French Revolution, developed throughout the West in opposition to Enlightenment beliefs that societies could be guided along a secular, self-governing, and egalitarian path. It was characterized by a pessimistic view of human nature, a preference for community or the state when this was in conflict with individualism, and a rejection of political institutions based on rational modes of behavior. 4

John Gray, a scholarly theorist of liberalism, provides a list of its defining traits:

It is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against the claims of any social collectivity; egalitarian, inasmuch as it confers upon men the same moral status…; universalist, affirming the moral unity of the human species and according a secondary importance to specific historic associations and cultural forms; and meliorist in its affirmation of the corrigibility and improvability of all social institutions and political arrangements.” 5 (italics original)

In other words, while conservatives value social hierarchies, liberals champion equality; conservatives want to preserve, liberals to improve; conservatives look to the collectivity, liberals to individuals; conservatives to the past, liberals to the future. Conservatives are the party of order and the status quo, while liberals are the party of civil liberties and reform.

Because conservatives perpetually seek to preserve, and liberals seek to improve, the agendas of both groups are bound to shift over time. As traditions change or disappear, conservatives find other embattled customs to defend. After one group of reforms has been implemented or defeated, liberals propose new reforms. As John Stuart Mill, author of On Liberty, asserted, “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.” The conservative Disraeli agreed, declaring, “ No government can be long secure without a formidable opposition.”

Therefore, conservatism and liberalism are interdependent. Neither is static, and one cannot flourish without the other. Their spasmodic conflicts, Thomas Carlyle wrote, often end in embraces. This mutual dependence is another reason that a climate of denunciation is inappropriate in our political discourse.

Infected by the French Revolution and partisan hatreds, the founders of the United States and their supporters engaged in ad-hominem attacks and the spreading of defamatory rumors. Even George Washington was mocked and vilified, to his fury. Nonetheless, it was obvious that mutual recriminations damaged both well-meaning individuals and the “healthy state of political life.” The much-abused Alexander Hamilton complained, “It is a maxim deeply ingrained in that dark system [denunciation] that no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false.” 6 In his first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson cautioned his audience against “political intolerance”:

Let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions … Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. (italics added) 7

1 Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, New York: Doubleday, 1921, 315.

2 Tom Paine, Writings, edited by Eric Foner, New York: Library of America, 1995, 394.

3 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, translated by David Macey, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 82.

4 Robert Devigne, Recasting Conservatism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, 1.

5 John Gray, Liberalism, second edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, xii.

6 Alexander Hamilton, Writings, edited by Joanne B. Freeman, New York: Library of America, 2001, 887.

7 Thomas Jefferson, Writings, edited by Merrill D. Peterson, New York: Library of America, 1984, 493.