Barbarians at the Gate

A work will sometimes surface, so shallow in the profundity it affects, so shoddily written and altogether so egregiously bad that it calls for notice, even when the reviewer might prefer to set it aside for others to appraise: not necessarily to warn potential readers off, but to signal some of the hazards that await them. That is the case with Eli Sagan’s “Citizens and Cannibals.”

The best that I can fathom of the book is that it is about the birth pangs of Modernity with a capital M, the anxieties which that trauma inspires and the ensuing nervous disorders that spawn terrified terrorists and “cannibalistic” terror, like that of Robespierre, in the service of high ideals. But I could be wrong, because the book is muddled and perplexing. A magpie collection of untidy lore, all secondhand information scrupulously credited, it promises a lot and delivers little. This history of the French Revolution is to serve “as a prism through which to view, and attempt to comprehend, the Modern world.” Looking through a piece of glass cut to reflect and analyze light becomes a figure of speech about seeing reality transformed, and possibly deformed. But Sagan’s interpretation muddies rather than illuminates. So let’s get a few things clear.

The revolution was not, as the subtitle implies, about modernity. It was about money and food shortages. It started as a taxpayers’ revolt, and its most violent episodes turned on bread and wages. Economic crisis, political crisis and violence surged in counterpoint. Revolutionary measures presented as solutions to the country’s troubles made its problems worse. Political reform buttered no parsnips, anarchy skidded into terror and the cascade of greater and lesser massacres was only suspended by the dictatorship of a soldier: Bonaparte. A logical outcome, because war was the only successful enterprise of the revolution and the army the only growth industry it wrought.

If modernity is marked by secularism and trust in reason, then its signs were there before the Bastille fell in 1789. If the essence of modernity lies in industry, communication and consumption, the revolution was a serious setback to its development. Far from being a factor of modernization, it disorganized economic activity, chilled credit, discouraged capital, held back industry and blocked growth for a generation.

Modernization was never an issue. The revolution struggled not for modernity, but to return to a better world in some legendary past: Athens, the Roman Republic, sylvan democracies, “natural” orders. Modernization has been described as the mobilization of the masses for economic progress, but that’s not what the revolution offered or revolutionaries wanted, which was political experiment, education, indoctrination. Revolutionaries preferred political to industrial revolution, ideological radicalization to practical solutions, conflict to conciliation. They seared these tendencies into the French tradition and invented modern politics. But that’s nothing to brag about.

So it goes also with other words that Sagan likes to throw around: “enlightenment,” “liberalism,” “people,” “democracy,” and so on. “I will not attempt to differentiate between the concepts of ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘liberalism’ ... I shall use the concepts interchangeably.” That’s not a good idea. True, both represent aspects of modernity and modernization. But enlightenment, which emphasized reason and individualism at the expense of tradition, was administrative, bureaucratic, utilitarian and, above all, elitist. Liberalism favored free trade and gradual, not abrupt, political and social reform. Napoleon was the last enlightened despot, not the first liberal one. Enlightenment was about efficiency; liberalism was about liberty: laissez faire, laissez-passer. Neither concept was much at home in revolutionary France, which replaced defective royal absolutism with a despotism more absolute than anyone expected.

The same goes for democracy, another word Sagan likes to throw around, which we take to mean government of the people, by the people, and also an indifference to hereditary class distinctions and tolerance of minority views. After the revolution, rights became equal, at least in theory and hereditary distinctions, before they came back in full force, designating preferred victims. Sagan talks a lot about the people of France, though that people is never defined. At times the people provide “powerful” support from below, at times they are presented as “a mass society democratically constituted,” at others “the elite of the Third Estate.” But we are also told that less than 3% of the population enrolled in Jacobin clubs. So, just how powerful was support from below, if you bear in mind that the revolution played out in urban centers, and that urban population was no more than 16% of the country’s total, that three out of five men and four out of five women could not sign their marriage certificates?

In fact, the great weakness of the revolution rested precisely in its feeble popularity. But it is characteristic of the revolutionaries that their rhetoric about education (another Sagan topic) largely ignored basic literacy and focused on more ostentatious goals like inculcating patriotism, morality and civic virtue. The schools that they projected were less about the three Rs than about forming and reforming citizens. Schoolteachers were not to be called teachers (enseignants) but institutors (instituteurs), because their task was to institute the nation, to forge the character and hone the virtues of citizens-to-be. But it is easier to cut off heads than fill them; and dreams of universal schooling were not realized until the end of the next century. Still, fantasies can be revelatory; and so is Sagan’s take on the great revolutionary fantasy of creating a new man. He notes its failure, but is so fascinated by noble aspirations that he ignores the baser need for literacy that schooling might have served.

This sort of failure stems from the author’s paying more attention to what people said than to what they did. He is interested in ideology, in ideas; less so in the concrete experience and cares of ordinary people. His categories and theories ignore petty considerations of drought, hunger, vengeance, hope, fear and vindictiveness, let alone family and local memory of alliances and antagonisms going back to the religious wars of the 16th century.

Hence his treatment of religious conflicts, which had little to do with secular ideas, as he seems to think, and much to do with the country’s insoluble budgetary mess. That led to the confiscation of church property that had provided the upkeep of churchmen and their activities. When the clergy became salaried civil servants, they were expected to swear a loyalty oath to the state that paid them. But the church is a multinational corporation, its head office is in Rome and the pope would not allow his clergy to swear allegiance to a rival power. Priests taking the oath were excommunicated by the pope; priests who refused to swear it were exiled, imprisoned or executed. This impasse divided the country as it did the church, and turned political conflict into holy war: “The people” were deeply attached to their saints, to their church bells, to the rites of protection and passage that the priests performed. And so was the king, who lost his head in the process.

Once the king had been disposed of and dire economic troubles had been exacerbated by civil and foreign war, terror followed: an exceptional situation in which frightened but determined rulers used fear and force to intimidate their subjects and to rid themselves of political enemies they denounced as enemies of the people. In the history of the revolution, the 12 months of terror appear as a hiccup, although a gory (and premonitory) one. In Sagan’s argument they become “the great black gift of Modernity” and of its panic fallout. Again, theorizing obscures the context of misery and hunger, the frantic calls for bread, the struggle between cities and the countryside for the latter’s grain.

More basically though, Sagan ignores the prevalence of violence in daily life before 1789 and before the terror. The brutality and malignancy of the terrorists reflected everyday muggings, robberies, brawls, rapes and murders. Before the establishment of law enforcement agencies, public order could not be maintained without terror or its threat. In 1789, 40% of the population depended on charity or extortion, gangs scoured the countryside, rioters in the streets of Paris butchered their prey while shouting threats about cutting out liver, hearts, kidneys--all kinds of meat they only dreamed about. The brigands whom Sagan dismisses as “fictional” and “nonexistent” were popular heroes because so many of the people saw themselves as potential brigands.

While the king’s armies that once policed the kingdom fought the republic’s wars, revolutionary forces of armed civilians marched out of towns to squeeze supplies from reluctant peasants. At every level, everyday violence that had been endemic and diffuse was institutionalized as part of politics. Not least, the riots and massacres that preceded, accompanied and succeeded the terror were perpetrated by people with empty stomachs or drunk on adulterated wine--plonk, high in alcoholic content, coloring matter, alum and other chemicals. That is the other side of the terror, one to which Sagan pays no heed.

Fascinated by the paranoid aspect of revolutionary politics, Sagan has nothing to say about the violent and uncertain aspirations of the late 18th century, the apocalyptic perspectives, the upsurge of dreams, visions, theosophies, illuminisms, mesmerism, occultism, millenarianism, secret societies, all promising regeneration, that might place terror in a different light than that of “regressive paranoid behavior.”

Nor does Sagan mention the youth of the chief figures of the terror and their political inexperience. Yet Robespierre was 36 when he went to the guillotine; Danton, 35; Desmoulins, 33 (age, as he claimed, of the sans-culotte Jesus); and Saint-Just, 27. And there’s not a word about the humorlessness and credulousness of the average terrorist true believer. But that’s enough of that. You have been warned.