第四章：法国大革命结束了什么

原书及其作者：法国大革命，起于捍卫人权、推翻君主专制，却通向了恐怖统治和军事独裁。这个过程值得警醒。

系列上一篇：How it happened | 过程

 -----

Chp4 What it ended

>p66-67 The initial impulse of the French Revolution was destructive. …… On the other hand, the Revolution’s destructive achievements often fell far short of its ambitions; and what the men of 1789 or 1793 thought they had abolished forever often reappeared, and quite soon, in forms ostensibly different but which those who had survived had no difficulty in recognizing with dismay.

• 先复习一下，从王室颓靡开始，法国大革命的主角已经轮着番经过了三级议会（estates-general），三十人委员会（committee of thirty），国民议会（the national assemble），制宪议会（the National Constituent Assembly），立法议会（the Legislative），国民公会（the Convention）和雅各宾派（Jacobin），热月党人（Thermidorians）和督政府（the Directory），现在来到拿破仑（Napoleon Bonaparte）和执政府。

• 光从这么多括号应该已经能看出来局势到底有多乱了，从1789年攻占巴士底狱算起，到如今的执政府成立已经是1799年了，社会颠过来倒过去的革命已经有10年了，现在的问题除了社会分裂、激进对立，还要加上人心疲乏、旧事物复辟。革命者梦想着一步建立尽善尽美的天堂，然而十年后的现实依旧迷茫，理想不会因为做梦而实现。理解法国大革命到底改变了什么，没改变什么，还要等到许多年后。

1-3.Despotism, Aristocracy, Corporatism and privilege

>p67-68 The Revolution began as an attack on despotism. Montesquieu had defined it in De l’esprit des lois (1748) as the rule of one, according to no law. Obeying no law, despotic authority was arbitrary, and its animating spirit was fear. As usual, regular usage soon diluted the original rigour of the word’s meaning. Already by 1762, Rousseau was implying in his Social Contract that there was no meaningful difference between the authority of a despot and that of a monarch. By the end of that decade despotism was widely understood as the abuse of monarchical power, and indeed of any sort of authority. By 1789 this had come to mean above all imposing taxation without consent, arbitrary powers of arrest and imprisonment, stifling freedom of expression and opinion, and the activities of all who served these purposes, such as ministers and intendants. In a word, no distinction was now drawn between despotism, tyranny, and absolute monarchy.

>p69-70 By the middle of 1789, aristocracy was the term used to encapsulate all that the Revolution was against. It was the quarrel over the form of the Estates-General which brought these preoccupations to the surface, and the loud and prolonged resistance of most nobles to giving up the guaranteed share of future political power that the ‘forms of 1614’ held out to them. …… Nobles were already resigned to the loss of their separate fiscal status, and to a regime of careers open to talents rather than to birth or inheritance. ...... The whole character of the French nobility had been transformed by these procedures; but now it simply ceased to recruit. It soon became clear that although the revolutionaries no longer recognized nobility, they could not abolish it. Families established as noble in 1790 continued to treasure their status and their ancestry. But what had been the most open elite in Europe was now unable to renew itself, and had been transformed by revolutionary legislation into a closed caste, destined in the long run to extinction. And meanwhile nobles all over Europe were warned that their age-old hegemony could no longer be taken for granted.

>p70-71 But the bonfire of privileges on 4 August was general. As the implementing decree of 11 August put it: ‘All particular privileges of provinces, principalities, countries, cantons, towns and communities of inhabitants, whether pecuniary or of any other nature, are irrevocably abolished, and will remain absorbed into the common law of all French people.’ This was to consign the whole chaotic and luxuriant variety of the old regime to oblivion and open the way to a more rational and uniform organization of the country and of society. The old order had been corporative, every organization defining itself by its privileges and monopolies. But the revolutionaries of 1789 did not believe in monopolies of any sort, which they saw as conspiracies against the public or national interest. This included all types of professional organizations and trade guilds

• 随着革命的发展，许多词语的定义走向模糊、混乱，和扩大化。比如君主、专制、暴政基本成了一样的概念，“贵族”成了概括一切反革命的标签，任何形式的团体组织都被认为是邪恶的“垄断”和“特权”集团。这会带来什么发展，看得懂中文的诸位应该不难想象，自然是无穷无尽的身份政治、阶级斗争，和打击范围扩大化。

4.The confessional state

>p71-72 As with the nobility, the clergy’s loss of separate representation in the Estates-General heralded far more substantial damage. Clerical electors had hoped that the new regime would strengthen the role of the Catholic Church in national life after two generations of philosophic erosion, but instead the clergy found themselves appalled and apprehensive at the uncompensated abolition of tithe on 4 August. Religious freedom, vouchsafed a few weeks later in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, was a further blow to their spiritual monopoly. The confiscation of church lands in November spelled the final end of the Church’s independence; and made inevitable too the dissolution of monasteries and the abrogation of monastic vows in the following spring. Lay election of the clergy under the civil constitution then destroyed the hierarchical autonomy of the Church, and priestly protests that one way or another it must give its consent to any such changes only aroused the anti-corporative fury of the National Assembly. …… In February 1795, although the extremes of dechristianization were over, the Republic renounced all religious affiliations; but throughout the Directory there were periodic crackdowns on suspect refractory clergy, when hundreds were sent to the ‘dry guillotine’ of Guiana in South America, while in Germany and Italy territories ruled by the Church were secularized.

• 就像整个法国大革命在任何方面的气质一样，法国以非常专断（参杂着各种专政、抗议、镇反）的方式一步到位达成了彻底的政教分离。

5.Dynastic diplomacy

>p72-73 The new France, it declared, would only fight to preserve its national territory from attack and not to honour the private compacts of dynasts. ‘It is not’, one deputy later declared, ‘the treaties of princes which govern the rights of nations.’ …… The new army, capitalizing on the advantage of France’s vast population, would be made up largely of citizen conscripts. No longer would its recruitment depend on the volunteering of drifters, its numbers sustained by regiments of foreign mercenaries. Nor would its tactics and behaviour be the self-contained, tightly controlled manoeuvres of old regime forces, dependent on their baggage trains and more concerned to preserve their own expensive existence than to take battle to the enemy. The restraint and timidity of old regime warfare can easily be caricatured and exaggerated; nevertheless it was mild indeed compared with the all-out conflict waged by the French—and, increasingly, their adversaries—over the next generation. So dynastic diplomacy, and the style of warfare which had underpinned it, scarcely survived the 1790s. When Napoleon, who built a career on mastery of the new way of fighting, attempted to buttress his monarchical pretensions by marrying an Austrian princess in 1810, it took only three years before he found himself once more at war with his father-in-law in Vienna.

• 王朝式的外交和作战风格也很快随风而去了，国家军队不会再为元首的个人荣耀而战。公民军队迅速淘汰以往各自为政、行动缓慢的旧式军队，精通新式作战常态的拿破仑粉碎了欧洲各国一次又一次的反法联盟。

6-7.Colonial slavery and Redrawn maps

>p74 A movement proclaiming equality and freedom provoked turmoil in islands built on slavery and racial discrimination. …… Meanwhile the French slave trade had collapsed, and the economy of the great Atlantic ports shrivelled. The population of Bordeaux shrank by 15 per cent between 1790 and 1801, and seven years later Napoleon was shocked by the emptiness of its immense quayside. By then, the main impediment to maritime trade was the British navy, which had completely destroyed its French rival between 1798 and 1805, and used its triumph to impose the tightest blockade ever known on the continental coastline. But when the wars finally ended, there was no hope of ever reconstructing the old Atlantic economy of slaves, sugar, and coffee, even though slavery in remaining French colonies survived until 1848.

• 法国大革命所激烈宣扬的自由平等理念，和与英国争夺经济霸权的失败，再加上巨额资助的美国独立战争胜利后并未带来原本预期的收益，导致法国对海外殖民地的控制和奴隶贸易的经济来源一去不返。动荡的政治也导致了欧洲本土的许多国界变更，法国大革命的影响可远远不局限于法国境内。

8.Achievable dreams

>p76 Nothing, in other words, needed to be accepted any more as set in the nature of things. If the mighty French monarchy, the nobility, and the feudal law from which it justified its pre-eminence, not to mention the Catholic Church itself, could be challenged and rejected on grounds of rationality, utility, and humanity, then nothing was beyond challenge. Dreams of all sorts were achievable. …… Never again would institutions, habits, or beliefs be accepted merely because this was how they had always been or were (another way of putting it) ordained by God. The Revolution overturned for ever an innocent world of unquestioning compliance where most things seemed beyond change or remedy.

• 法国大革命仿佛是一个现世中的梦，现在连千百年的传统都可以被理性思考而推翻，社会再也无法回到不假思索的蒙昧之中。但是革命这种激进的变革形式，往往会赋予声量最大者摧枯拉朽的力量，并且对社会成规带来毁灭性影响然后不保证建构，能否带来真正有深度的思想转变始终存疑。

~ The German philosopher Kant, in a famous essay of 1784, had defined Enlightenment as mankind’s emancipation from self-imposed immaturity, and unwillingness to think freely for oneself. (p.p. 77) ~

~ Enlightenment could only progress slowly, and that a revolution would never produce a true reform in ways of thinking. (p.p. 77) ~ 

9.Resistance and persistence

>p77 And yet: although the Revolution symbolized the assertion of political will against the constraints of history, circumstance, and vested interest, revolutionaries soon found themselves learning the hard lesson that will alone was not enough to destroy the old regime. It fought back; and it is the strength and determination of resistance and counter-revolution that largely explain the ferocity of the terror. And when all the strength that the revolutionaries could muster had been spent, terror abandoned, and Napoleon finally defeated, many of the things that revolutionaries had sought to destroy in and after 1789 were still there, or had rapidly re-emerged. Napoleon himself, whose career is inconceivable without the Revolution, was responsible for many of the revivals. He in turn saw them as the mere recognition of political realities.

拿破仑加冕，图源维基

10.Illusory restorations

>p78-79 But nothing would be more superficial. Apart from its gaudy trappings, the monarchy of Napoleon had little in common with that of Louis XVI. Consciously imperial, it sought to evoke Charlemagne rather than the Bourbons. There were no built-in vehicles of opposition such as the parlements or provincial estates. The pseudo-nobility which the emperor created to decorate his monarchical pretensions was much smaller than its pre-revolutionary namesake, enjoyed no legal privileges, and titles were not even hereditary without a certain level of wealth. Entry was by imperial nomination, not by purchase of venal office. More old nobles shunned the chance of joining such a factitious creation than succumbed to Napoleon’s inducements.

>p79 In practice the restoration monarchy was constitutional, with regular elections to the lower house of a two-chamber legislature, guarantees of individual and press freedom, and equality before the law and in taxation. Above all, perhaps, the Charter, just like Napoleon when his rule began, explicitly confirmed the revolutionary land settlement. Lands confiscated from the Church and the émigrés and then sold on would not be returned to their original owners. Indeed, by granting the indemnity of 1825 to those who had lost lands, the government of Charles X unwittingly endorsed the loss. And so successive regimes professing to deplore the work of the Revolution accepted and guaranteed the massive transfer of property that it had effected.

• 尽管法国大革命的后期，拿破仑称帝后仿佛又恢复了很多革命者投入了无数激情才废除的东西，比如说贵族册封、自己加冕称帝等等，但是这已经和法国大革命以前的君主政体完全不同了。法国大革命的理想感染力毋庸置疑，它所针对性破坏的许多东西被永远深及骨髓的改变了，再也没有真正恢复。

11.A world transformed

>p82 Quite literally, nothing was any longer sacred. All power, all authority, all institutions were now provisional, valid only so long as they could be justified in terms of rationality and utility. In this sense, the French Revolution really did represent the triumph of the Enlightenment, and ushered in the mental world in which we still live.

 -----

原书信息：Doyle, William, The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edn, Very Short Introductions (Oxford, 2019; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 Nov. 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198840077.001.0001