why? and why not?

The subtle beginnings of revolution are often ignored in favor of its dramatized offspring. As a result, misconceptions plague the origins of such crises. What may later become overt violence first bubbles up in salon discourse and guild halls. In both psychosomatic and economic terms, revolution is (rather unfashionably) a top-down phenomenon—or, perhaps more accurately, one produced from the middle out. Indeed, it is not the destitution of the masses but the destitution of government that provokes agitation, and it is not deplorability but the onset of haphazard reform that sparks revolt.

The impetus of the French Revolution (generally) erupted from upper-middle-class educated professionals. Without examining the role of intellectuals here (who exist below the ruling elite), the French middle classes, like the intellectuals, both despised and envied those above them while feeling “morally superior” to them. The role of intellectuals in dismantling the old order seems obvious, but why the upper middle class? Social antagonisms reach a fever pitch “when a class has attained to wealth but is, or feels itself, shut out from the highest social distinction” and thus “from positions of evident and open political power” (Brinton, 64). It is reasonable to assume that economic power naturally begets social and political power, but this is not always the case. When wealth, particularly generational wealth, cannot purchase everything, the middle class will seek systemic change.

If then, revolution is a phenomenon that erupts from the (upper) middle-out, then how are the disparate and conflicting interests of the educated elite and the masses reconciled? One sought the creation of a potent and dynamic state; the other, a community of free citizens. This paradoxical entente is best understood through the persons of Gilbert de Lafayette and Charles de Talleyrand.

Lafayette flourished in the celebrity and pomp of the Revolution and the wars that followed. An instinctive progeny of political theatre, he embodied the visceral manifestation of revolution: action for the sake of action, instinct, and memory (sentiment). In his old age, he pined for the passionate and violent days of his youth, for the adrenaline that rises in the blood when overthrowing a government. During the Revolution of 1830, he became known as the père biseur (father who kisses) for the embraces and kisses he so freely offered to revolutionary muses, symbols, and leaders. Marching to the Hôtel de Ville as the 72-year-old commander of the National Guard, he greeted Louis-Philippe and, to raucous applause, announced, “I know my way, I have been here before,” referring to 1789. Memory, to him, was the “spur to action,” revolution “itself part of the process of perpetual renewal.” There was nearly as much beauty in the remembrance of action as in the action itself; it replicated the same passion and vigor for freedom.

While rose petals rained on Lafayette, Charles de Talleyrand was in London, serving as ambassador in his last official position—“putting out the fires that Lafayette had so freely kindled.” In so doing, Talleyrand was the cerebral manifestation of revolution: action for the sake of a designed and well-conceptualized future. His career as a diplomat was spent consolidating the gains of the Revolution. He had no interest in the spontaneity and impulse of political springtimes, nor in the spectacular orations integral to the Rousseauian worldview. As the ancien régime became the Revolution and the Revolution became the Bonapartist Empire, and as the Bourbon Restoration and Abdication came and went, Talleyrand embodied the subtle necessities of political turmoil—reflection, disguise, civility, diplomacy, negotiation. In other words, survival. At the Estates General, Talleyrand represented the clergy, but he quickly aligned himself with the revolutionaries. Despite being the Bishop of Autun, his support for the confiscation of church property and the secularization of government led to his excommunication by Pope Pius VI. Yet for Talleyrand, régime change was equivalent to damage control—nothing more, nothing less.

While Lafayette believed revolutionary power was vested in “utterances, forms, costumes, symbols and a missionary belief in Just Causes,” Talleyrand dismissed these constructions as mere pageantry, “secular mumbo-jumbo that had replaced that of relics and miracles.” The symbiotic relationship between Talleyrand as producer and Lafayette as actor inhabits the core fiction of the Revolution: that a revolutionary people possess two tempers—visceral and cerebral, action and thought, brutality and sentiment, rhetoric and rationale. Eleven years before the Bastille, Talleyrand knelt at the feet of a decrepit Voltaire, the paragon of unbelief. In a dark and mildewed room in the Hôtel de la Villette, he discovered revolution. An ocean away, Lafayette shivered under the snows at Valley Forge. It was in America, amid a flurry of faith and fighting, that the Revolution began for the young Marquis. Aptly, the motto of Lafayette’s crest was Cur Non? (Why not?).

Thus, an entanglement of Cur and Cur Non exists at the heart of revolution. There must be an envisioned world to come and a present loathsome enough to take up arms. There must be documents, constitutions, and theorems just as much as symbols, sigils, and parades. In the context of the French Revolution, the concept of the citoyen (citizen) embodies this potential overlap. While the conceptual framework was built by Enlightenment scholars and their intellectual descendants, it was the visceral Lafayette who thrust the citizen into being—into law, into practice.

For every architect, there must be an agitator; for every diplomat, a dissident.

Further Reading