Happy Bastille Day!

You may not think Bastille Day is important for Americans, given that it is a celebration of an event early in the French Revolution, the storming of the Bastille in 1789. But since the day is a kind of celebration of freedom and since the subsequent revolution has become a kind of template for revolutions since that time, we might think about what it means for us today.

I think most Americans have generally positive feelings toward the French Revolution. Our own revolution had occurred about 20 years earlier, and the French had been our allies and a significant help in the American Revolution’s success. We likely wouldn’t have been successful without them.

But, the nature of the American Revolution was significantly different from the French Revolution, both because of the very different location and culture and because of the very different way our societies were organized. While Americans were also living under a monarchy, American society was distinctly different from France, or England for that matter. America had no titled nobility, and society was less rigid and stratified than the European nations. Society was composed mainly of farmers and merchants. In contrast French society consisted of three broad categories — the Etats Général convened by Louis XVI in 1789 consisted of the Nobility, the Clergy and the Commoners, i.e., the farmers and merchants.

While both revolutions were in part about taxation, the objection to the taxes in America came from the commoners—the farmers and merchants—mostly because there was no nobility (they were all in England), and the clergy didn’t have the same roll as in France. Meanwhile, in France the objection to taxes came from the Nobility, who effectively had the power to block the taxes, causing some of the underlying issues that led to the revolution. [Sound like what’s happening today in the U.S.? The primary beneficiaries of the tax cuts just passed were our modern-day nobility.]

As a result, the American Revolution didn’t try to restructure society. We didn’t need to throw out the nobility, they weren’t there. The clergy wasn’t as involved politically, and since they weren’t supported by the state (Church of England clergy were paid by the government, while most clergy in America were paid by their congregants) their involvement in politics wasn’t as significant. So the American Revolution was about political control of the country, not restructuring society.

In contrast, the French needed to restructure their society and government. The nobility and the clergy consisted of 5% of the population, but controlled 2/3rd of the vote of the Etats Général, which was only convened when the monarch needed it. And while the economy was growing, the benefit went primarily to the nobility. Government revenue wasn’t growing at all, making it unable to help the commoners, buffeted by recessions and bad harvests. So while the nobility and clergy were doing fine, the commoners were often starving. [I hear similar arguments about U.S. society today.]

So when Louis XVI convened the Etats Général in May 1789, the divisions soon broke it apart. The commoners soon rejected the Etats, and formed a National Assembly, which initially didn’t include the nobility or the clergy. By July members of the French Guard were involved in mutinies and refused to disperse crowds of protesters. On July 14, many of the Guards joined the protesters in attacking the Bastille, the medieval fortress in Paris that served as an armory and prison, and that also was seen as a symbol of the monarchy.

Over the next decade France went through convulsions as it tried to restructure its society. Angered at the way they had been treated, the commoners tried to demolish many social structures. They killed the nobility, the King and his family, and restricted the privileges of the clergy. They quickly went through many aspects of life, changing them to reflect a different political situation, including changing the clock and calendar (starting with year 0, changing the names of the months, etc), changing the weights and measures, changing the style of dress, changing the form of address (everyone became “citizen” instead of Monsieur or Madame or other title), etc. These changes soon began to tear apart French society, with everything and anything blamed for societal problems.

After killing off the nobility, the effort to remake society soon devolved into factionalism, and eventually authoritarianism. The initial leaders often lost their lives to the backlashes from rival factions, and as the chaos continued, one popular strongman took advantage, seizing control and eventually crowning himself emperor. In a very real sense, the decade of chaos led from monarchy to chaotic republic and back to monarchy. They got nowhere.

The differences with the American Revolution are stark. While our transition also took at decade, it was long-lasting and the violence was mostly limited to battles between militaries, especially after the Declaration of Independence. We didn’t try to change the clock or calendar, we took our time in changing our weights and measures, we didn’t try to change the form of address, or many of the other ambitious and divisive changes that the French Revolution would later try, largely unsuccessfully.

Looking at this, what worries me is that the current U.S. administration seems to be trying to make quick societal and structural changes that seem more like the French Revolution than the American Revolution — so far without much of the violence of the former. Is this really what we should be doing? Is it wise to make radical changes so quickly, and without the consent of the majority?

It’s easy to destroy things. It’s easy to fire large numbers of those who know how to respond to natural disasters, and much harder to replace them. It’s easy to undermine our supports for scientific research, one of the major drivers of our economy since World War II, and much, much harder to restart that research. It’s easy to tear down the norms protecting our constitution, and much, much, much harder to prevent those norms from being violated even more by the next administration. It’s easy to ignore the parts of the constitution you find inconvenient, and harder to enforce the parts you want enforced later. It’s easy to condone and pardon the violence by your own supporters, and harder to then stop that violence when it is used against you. It’s easy to make political decisions based on poorly-defined ideas like “DEI” and “Woke” and even “Socialism,” and much harder then to avoid your opponents applying similarly poorly-defined ideas against you.

Even if the social structures and norms in the United States do need to be changed (and I agree that they do, although probably not in the way this administration thinks), the French Revolution suggests that quickly tearing things down without careful thought on how to build the new and also on how to transition from the old to the new, can lead to bad results. It didn’t work well for France.

I can’t see it working any better now than it did then.