Rousseau and the French Revolution

The revolution had begun with nobility. In detecting the weakness of the French monarchy, the nobles had succeeded in 1789 in forcing a meeting of the “States General”, an institution they usually controlled. Some of the nobles had hoped to increase the power of the nobility at the expense of the monarchy, and some had hoped to institute reforms to the Enlightenment.

The nobles, however, were unable to form a unified coalition, and could not compete with the vigor of liberal and radical representatives. Control of events slipped from the hands of the nobles, and the Revolution entered a second, more liberal phase. The second phase was largely dominated by Lockean liberals, and it was they who produced the “Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights”.

The Liberals, however, could not in turn compete with the vigor of the most radical members of the Revolution. As the Girondins and Jacobins assumed greater power, the Revolution entered its third phase.

The Jacobin leaders were explicitly disciples of Rousseau. Jean Paul Marat, who looked misaligned and did not bathe often enough, explained that he did so “to live in simplicity and in accordance with the precepts of Rousseau.” Louis de Saint-Just, perhaps the bloodiest of the Jacobins, made clear his devotion to Rousseau in speeches to the National Convention. And if we speak of the most radical of the revolutionaries, Maximilien Robespierre expressed the devoted predominant opinion of the great man: “Rousseau is the only man who, through the upliftment of his soul and the greatness of his character, showed himself worthy of the role of the master of humanity.”

Under the control of the Jacobins, the Revolution became more radical and more violent. Now they were the spokesmen of the general will, and having at their disposal the “universal compulsive force” that Rousseau had dreamed of fighting the reluctant private wills, the Jacobins considered it appropriate for many to die.

The guillotine remained busy while the radicals cruelly killed nobles, priests, and almost anyone whose political ideas seemed suspicious. “We must not only punish traitors,” Saint-Just urged, “but all people who are not enthusiastic.” The nation had plunged into a brutal civil war, and in an enormously symbolic act, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed in 1793. That only made things worse, and all of France declined into a Terror Regime.

The Terror culminated in the arrest and execution of Robespierre in 1794, but it was too late for France. His energies had dissipated, the nation was exhausted, and there was a power vacuum that would fill Napoleon Bonaparte.

The story of the Counter-Enlightenment then shifted to the German states. Among German intellectuals, there was some early sympathy for the French Revolution. German intellectuals were not ignorant of the Enlightenment in England and France. Several of them were attracted by the ideas of the Enlightenment, and by the mid-1700s Frederick the Great had attracted several Illustratationist scientists to Berlin, as well as other intellectuals. Berlin was for a time a hotbed of French and English influences.

For the most part, however, the Enlightenment had made few incursions among the intellectuals of the German states. Politically and economically, Germany was a set of feudal states. Bondage would not be abolished until the nineteenth century. The majority of the population was illiterate and agrarian. Most were deeply religious, predominantly Lutheran. Blind obedience to God and feudal lord had been rooted for centuries. This was especially true in Prussia, whose people Gotthold Lessing called “the most servile in Europe.”

So among the Germans the reports of the Terror of the French Revolution caused horror: they have killed their king and queen. The priests were chased, cut off their heads, and marched through the streets of Paris with their heads inserted at the ends of their spears.

But the note that German intellectuals took of the Revolution was not that Rousseau's philosophy was to blame. For most, the culprit was clearly the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was anti-feudal, they pointed out, and the Revolution was a practical demonstration of what that meant: the wholesale sacrifice of the sovereign lords and ladies themselves. The Enlightenment was anti-religion, they pointed out, and the Revolution is a practical demonstration of what it means — killing God's men and burning churches.

But from the German perspective, the situation worsened, because Napoleon emerged from the vacuum of power in France.

Napoleon also provided an opportunity for a weakened feudal Europe. Hundreds of small dynastic units were no match for the new military tactics of Napoleon and his bold audacity. Napoleon spent ravaging the old feudal Europe, swept away the German states, defeated the Prussians in 1806, and proceeded to change everything.

From the perspective of the Germans, Napoleon was not only a foreign conqueror, he was a product of the Enlightenment. When he conquered, he set the rules, extended equality before the law, opened government offices to the middle class, and guaranteed private property. In matters of religion, he destroyed the ghettos, gave the Jews freedom of worship, and gave them the right to own land and practice all trades. It opened secular public schools and modernized Europe's transport network.

Napoleon offended many powerful forces by doing that. He abolished guilds. He angered the clergy by abolishing ecclesiastical courts, tithes, monasteries, convents, ecclesiastical states, and seized much of the church's property. He enraged the nobles by abolishing feudal possessions and rights, dividing the great possessions, and generally lessening the power of the nobles over the peasants. Functionally, for the purposes of the Enlightenment perspective, he operated as a benevolent dictator who accepted many of the modern ideals but used all the power of government to impose them.

His dictatorial impositions went further. He exercised censorship wherever he went, recruited subjugated peoples to fight in foreign battles, and taxed subdued peoples to finance France.

So now most German intellectuals were facing a serious crisis. The Enlightenment, as they saw it, was not simply a foreign disaster on the other side of the Rhine — it was a dictatorial presence ruling Germany in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte. In what way, asked each German, won Napoleon? What had the Germans done wrong? What was to be done?

The poet Johann Hölderlin, Hegel's roommate at university, declared, “Kant is the Moses of our nation.” To study the story of how Kant, already deceased, was going to drive to Germany and get her out of slavery, we return to Königsberg.

Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism , Chapter 4, translation Walter Jerusalem