The classical liberals of the early and mid‐​19th century generally held, given the refusal of the Old Regime to reform itself, that the Revolution was inevitable and was the only means whereby the old ruling elites could be dispossessed of their privileges. These lettres had several functions but their most common use was to detain and imprison individuals without trial or due process. Lectures on the French Revolution.

Governments could become vast, expensive, debt-ridden, intrusive, and burdensome even though they remained subject to periodic elections and largely respectful of civil and personal liberties. Internally, the Revolution became more radical with the trial and execution of the King in January 1793. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959. Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. [P]roperty is an inviolable and sacred right. 17. And it also looks good, at least in the long view, compared to the ancien regime that preceded it.

The result was the Constitution of 1791, which, for the first time in France, created a liberal constitutional monarchy. A century after the French Revolution Herbert Spencer worried that the divine right of kings had been replaced by “the divine right of parliaments.” It also was partly the result of the desire to liberate the rest of Europe from the burden of feudalism by force of arms if necessary. Conservatives typically follow Edmund Burke‘s critical view in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Sign up to have Cato At Liberty posts delivered straight to your inbox! The fifth and final stage of the Revolution began with the coup d’état on 18 Brumaire (November 10, 1799), which bought General Bonaparte to power, first as Consul and then as self‐​proclaimed Emperor. The hopes of many liberals for the Directory were dashed by persistent corruption, the threats of political coups from both the “left” (radical Jacobins) and “right” (royalists), the annulment of elections when royalists did better than expected, and an ongoing policy of anticlericalism. The Directory reintroduced free markets and limited government and was thus naturally attractive to liberals recovering from the Terror. During the Terror, the Jacobins suspended the rule of law in order to eradicate their enemies. Under the Directory, the inflationary paper money, assignats, originally issued in 1790, was replaced by a more stable metallic currency, and the policy of massive economic interventionism came to an end. Henry Collins, ed. The Jacobins reversed many of the liberal reforms that had been introduced since the Estates‐​General was first convened.

and publications. This state of affairs continued until 1814, when Napoleon belatedly rediscovered the virtues of liberal constitutionalism on his return from Elba. The role played by classical liberals in the French Revolution was significant, although they had to compete (not always successfully) with radical democratic Jacobins, militaristic Napoleonic imperialists, and unrepentant monarchists. Liberals and libertarians admired the fundamental values [the French Revolution] represented. That illiberal madness only ended when Maximilien Robespierre, the leader of the Jacobins, was arrested on the ninth of Thermidor (July 27, 1794) as a result of internecine struggles among the ruling elite. The Old Regime and the Revolution. London: Macmillan, 1910. In addition, the “Ventôse Decrees” allowed the state to confiscate the property of “enemies of the state.” It is estimated that 17,000 people were officially executed during the Terror—many by the newly invented humane killing machine known after its inventor as the guillotine. Molinari, Gustave de. Classical liberals were active at some of these stages and were able to implement many of their reforms, but at other times they were forced into exile, as was Benjamin Constant. Three years ago I discussed that topic at FreedomFest and on the Britannica Blog.

The results of that philosophical error—that the state is the embodiment of the “general will,” which is sovereign and thus unconstrained—have often been disastrous, and conservatives point to the Reign of Terror in 1793-94 as the precursor of similar terrors in totalitarian countries from the Soviet Union to Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Some of the gains were short‐​lived and were overturned by later regimes, thus making an overall assessment of its achievements difficult. Prior to the Terror, the most liberal of the groups was the Girondins, so called because its most influential members represented the Gironde region around Bordeaux. The Girondins were further weakened by a split in their ranks over the trial and execution of the King. ———. The historian R. R. Palmer has shown how reform ideas, money, and people flowed back and forth between America and Europe during those decades as the aptly named “trans‐ Atlantic” revolution swept away the old regime and created the foundations for the modern liberal, constitutional, and democratic societies that were to emerge in the 19th century.

When trying to draw up a “balance sheet,” one needs to take into account the complexity and long duration of the Revolution and the short‐ and long‐​term changes brought about in European society. However, their position as defenders of individual liberty was severely weakened by their support for the war on those nations that supported theFrench monarchy.

In many respects, the most positive achievement of the Revolution was the creation of a new language of politics, natural rights, constitutionalism, democracy, and republicanism—which can be summarized in the revolutionary slogan of “liberty, equality, fraternity”—along with the expectation that the institutions of a free society would be built during the coming century on top of the precedents established during the liberal stages of the Revolution. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. . The French Revolution, which usually dates from the meeting of the Estates‐​General in 1789 to the end of the Directory in 1799, or sometimes to 1815, was part of a more general movement for liberal reform that transformed Western Europe and North America in the late 18th century.

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