French Renew Debate : Revolution: Was It Best of Times?

It was an inspired idea: Nearly 200 years after King Louis XVI was guillotined during the height of the French Revolution, a French television producer decided that the unfortunate monarch merited a new trial, with TV viewers as the jury.

The producer hired an actor to play the king, who was convicted of crimes against the people. But to give the plot a twist, he selected a real lawyer, best known for his recent defense of a Nazi war criminal, to represent Louis XVI in court.

When the jury rendered its verdict, the results might have surprised even the most ardent royalist: 55% of French viewers favored the king’s acquittal, according to a poll after the program. A total of 17.5% voted for exile. And only 27.5% said he should be put to death, as he was on Jan. 21, 1793.

Summit and Gala

This summer marks the bicentennial of the French Revolution, which dethroned Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette. To celebrate, the French government is getting ready to throw its biggest party in at least 100 years to fete the birth of the republican, secular, kingless nation. The high point is scheduled on Bastille Day, July 14, when President Francois Mitterrand will host President Bush and five other leaders of the industrialized world for an economic summit that also will double as a gala national birthday celebration.

But despite the best efforts of Mitterrand and company to give a festive air to the anniversary, France itself remains troubled and divided by the event that it is supposed to honor. It is a nation that approaches the critical moment in its history with agonized mixed feelings, even among the descendants of the original revolutionaries.

Descendant of Hero

“When I was young I was passionate about the revolution,” said Christian Arnoux, 26, a descendant of the early revolutionary hero Georges Jacques Danton. “Then I began to study the royalty, and I began to ask myself if the royalty was not stability. I still ask myself these questions. There is a duality in me. Even though one of my ancestors had a very important role in the making of the republic, I still have this duality.”

Unlike the United States, which celebrated its bicentennial in near-unanimous agreement that its revolution of 1776 was a good idea, a sizable percentage of the French are not so sure about 1789. Under the banner of the “Anti-89 Movement,” several dozen organizations plan counterdemonstrations and other actions during the time of the government festivities.

The official celebration has already been accompanied by a proliferation of books on the revolution--at least 200 so far--and an assortment of trinkets and souvenirs ranging from scarfs to earrings with miniature guillotines. The Anti-89 Movement has countered with its own set of mementos, including 30-franc ($5) black armbands such as those worn by the royalists and a slick $30 desk diary that lists atrocities and mocks the sacred dates of the French Revolution.

Under the Bastille Day heading of July 14, for example, the “Counterrevolutionary Calendar” offers the following notation: “In Paris on this date, a riot permitted the liberation of two fools, four forgers and a debaucher imprisoned at the Bastille.”

The note is technically correct: The only prisoners in the huge brick building with eight round towers and 80-foot walls were the four forgers, a madman who thought he was Julius Caesar, another man, equally mad, who had threatened the life of the king, and the Comte de Solages, whose family had committed him for incest.

Symbolic Value

Of course, the symbolic value of a common, unarmed people rising up against armed guards to seize and later destroy this bastion of the king is much more important than the crimes of the prisoners.

But the Anti-89 Movement is not going to give the revolution any respect. The rest of the book is crammed with pithy little anti-revolutionary comments such as this from royalist writer Leon Daudet:

“Commemorate the French Revolution? That’s like celebrating the day you got scarlet fever.”

The problem is that for many here, to honor the storming of the Bastille and the stirring, idealistic Declaration of the Rights of Man means also to accept the terrible bloody years of the guillotine, civil war and religious persecution that followed and cost the lives of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Danton and thousands of others.

“To commemorate the revolution on the basis of the Declaration of the Rights of Man,” said French stockbroker Andre de la Fressange in a letter to the newspaper Le Figaro, “is a little bit like commemorating the first autobahns in paying tribute to fascism and Nazism while forgetting about Auschwitz and Buchenwald.”

“I am not in a very good position to talk about the rights of man since I am a descendant of the Terror,” said Patrick Brunet, a relative of Charles Henri Sanson, the famed executioner of Paris who chopped off the heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, among thousands of others.

A Royalist Himself

“At first,” Brunet confided in a recent interview, “I was not too concerned about all the festivities planned for this summer. But now I think the responsible thing is to mention that many innocent people were guillotined--people who had nothing at all to do with the nobles.” Brunet likes to show a visitor a letter written by Sanson in which the executioner admits to being a royalist himself at the time of the king’s execution.

The American Revolution led to more than 200 years of continuous democratic government. In contrast, the French Revolution, considered by most historians to be the true father of the “modern revolution” of class conflict and bloody purges and counterpurges, has been followed by political instability including three revolutions, a directorate, a consulate, a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, another monarchy, two empires and five republics, including the current one.

Not all the French people uneasy about celebrating the revolution are royalists, although they and the fundamentalist Roman Catholics have the loudest voices.

Some are members of political factions, such as the extreme right-wing National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who fear that the ruling Socialists will use the celebrations to propagandize for leftist causes. “The high priests of ‘89, profiteers of the revolution,” Le Pen calls them.

“The Establishment, represented by the government in power,” said National Front leader Bruno Megret, “has tried to exploit the bicentennial to push its own ideology.”

Particularly irksome to the right-wingers was the New Year’s address by Mitterrand in which he talked of liberalizing immigration laws to make it easier for minority settlers, including thousands of North African Arabs now in the country illegally, to become citizens.

“When the revolutionaries drafted the Rights of Man,” Megret whispered in a recent interview, “they were not talking about black people.”

In fact, race is never mentioned in the 17 articles of the Aug. 26, 1789, Declaration of the Rights and Man and the Citizen. However, the very first article clearly states: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility.”

There are also regional pockets of protest, particularly in western France, where the bitterness of the revolutionary civil wars remains strong even today. Twenty years ago, some of these areas in the Vendee region, for example, were still electing royalist representatives to the National Assembly.

Louis Fruchard, mayor of the small town of Mauleon, near Poitiers in western France, proclaimed recently that it would be “indecent” to celebrate the revolution in his area, where he said 60% of the population died in the Vendee civil war, when royalists fought alongside peasants against the revolutionary army from 1793 to 1796.

“The great historians have romanticized this page of history,” Fruchard said, “because they are ashamed of it. The revolution is stained with blood.”

Asking the people of western France to honor the revolution, leading French historian Francois Furet said in an interview, “would be like people in Atlanta holding a party for Sherman.”

In fact, to a large extent it was Furet and a small group of modern French writers on the revolution who gave the government the idea of how to celebrate a pivotal historical event that not everyone likes. It involves a kind of selective memory, picking out the good parts of the revolution and rejecting the bad.

In this way, the Socialist government of Premier Michel Rocard, like the conservative government of Jacques Chirac before it, has chosen to emphasize the positive (the storming of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man) and ignore the negative (the Terror and the civil wars).

An example of this was illustrated recently when Chirac, in his capacity as mayor of Paris, attended an unveiling at the huge Place de la Concorde for eight freshly sandblasted and cleaned statues dedicated to the nation’s major cities.

In their speeches, Chirac and the other dignitaries assembled in the square, formerly known as the Place de la Revolution, extolled the virtues of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. They praised the accomplishments of the meeting of the Estates General that laid the groundwork of the revolution. They lauded the storming of the Bastille.

But they never mentioned the bloody spectacle that later took place in the same square, where more than 1,500 people were beheaded in eight weeks in 1793.

The victims included 20 peasant girls from Poitou, which is near the small town where Louis Fruchard--the man who said it would be “indecent” to celebrate the revolution--is mayor.

One of those beheaded was a handsome bourgeois woman named Manon Roland, who had been an early supporter of the revolution, but who objected to its bloody turn.

As she strode bravely to her death, her hair cut high to bare her neck for the blade, she uttered words that have become an epitaph for a revolution that went wrong:

“Liberty, O liberty,” she declared, “what crimes are committed in thy name.”