Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the French Revolution The political atmosphere of 1789 in Paris was tumultuous to say the least. With the first nationally held elections in around 200 years and the convening of the Estates General at Versailles, the stage was set for the events that would dominate the European landscape for the next decade and beyond, paving the road to the French Revolution. Where did the road to revolution begin? One could very sincerely, and probably correctly, argue that the movement toward abolishing the monarchy and replacing it with a more popular government began with the ideas and writings of two men, Charles de Secondat, known as the Baron de Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Their extensive philosophical works inspired a generation of revolutionaries and radicals and provided a massive quarry from which the revolutionaries could mine ideas and continue to refine them. The ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau eventually transformed into the actions of the revolutionaries, but the exact vehicle leading to arrival at this juncture is difficult to ascertain; was it the will of the French or merely circumstance that produced revolution? In his book, Will & Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the French Revolution, Norman Hampson discusses the theme, in the context of Montesquieu and Rousseau’s commanding influence upon later writers and actors of the revolution.
Norman Hampson is an expert regarding the period of the Enlightenment, as he has several books to his credit on the subject, including A Social History of the French Revolution (1963), The Enlightenment (1968), The First European Revolution (1969), and The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre (1974). The primary focus of Will and Circumstance is on the lasting impressions of Montesquieu and Rousseau upon the leaders of the following generation, who would rise up and establish the Republic. Hampson’s secondary focus is to determine whether the revolution came about as a result of a concerted determination on the part of the French, or, conversely, if the revolution was a product purely of the circumstances of the time. Ultimately, Hampson leaves the reader with the conclusion that the revolution was a product of both will and circumstance, just as Sebastian Mercier had in his 1798 book, Le Nouveau Paris; “It is quite simply the maturity of things and events. People bring in plenty of moral and rational elements but its causes were always determined by purely physical actions.” Hampson notes that in the very next page of Mercier’s book he takes the opposite view and, instead, proclaims will to be the cause of the revolution: “The word ‘Liberty’, if pronounced loudly enough, has always made the Parisians formally willing independence and prosperity.”?1 Hampson includes an extensive bibliography in the book detailing his sources of information on the five writers he examines. With in depth content, Will and Circumstance is an excellent source of knowledge about the Enlightenment, with the only drawback being that Hampson assumes that his readers already know a good bit about the subject and, as such, he goes into little detail about more common knowledge. Nevertheless, Will and Circumstance makes an excellent addition to the body of work already written upon the Enlightenment and French Revolution.
In particular, Hampson focuses on the prominent roles played by the two of the greatest French philosophers of the time, Montesquieu and Rousseau. Montesquieu’s greatest literary achievement is his De l’esprit des lois or “On the Spirit of Laws”(1748). In this massive work one can find Montesquieu’s “complex and sometimes contradictory insights” that “[were] conceived not so much as a study of the laws that regulate political societies as of the principles behind those laws.”2 Indeed, this expansive work touches upon many subjects, including Montesquieu’s opinions of suitable government forms, structures, and duties to the citizenry. The importance of these ideas found firm soil in the legislators and revolutionaries of the Estates-General following ascension to power in the years after 1789. With the Assembly and the Crown struggling for power, “the Assembly had to legitimize its stand [for political control over the state] by an appeal to abstract theory. This meant that it came to regard itself as the sole embodiment of the general will, with the king no more than the chief agent of government.”3 This “abstract theory,” of course, refers to Montesquieu’s proposal of a balanced legislative and executive system, the use of which would preclude the sort of abuse of power the Assembly and Crown were each, of a certain necessity, fighting to maintain. In addition to his ideas about how government should be structured, Montesquieu believed that particular circumstances dictated particular governments, based upon such factors as geographic location, weather, and population; “The form of government most in conformity with nature is that whose particular dispositions most accurately reflect the character of a people.”4 Montesquieu’s determination of what goal government pursued depended upon the type of government; a monarchy would require of its citizenry what Montesquieu called vertu, an unending loyalty to the king and state; a republic would be concerned with the general will of the people (not to be confused with Rousseau’s thoughts about the ‘general will’ of the state), so the government would need to be representative of the people, such as by a legislature “elected by all those not in a condition of dependence on others”5; Hampson does not go into detail about Montesquieu’s requirements for despotism, saying only that it “quickly came to appear as the negation of good government, rather than a viable system in its own right…”6 Montesquieu’s discussions of government would contribute much to the attitudes of later writers, such as Billaud-Varenne, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, who “quoted ‘the famous Montesquieu’ when arguing the need for diversity within France’s different provinces”7. Although this example is limited in the scope of Montesquieu’s influence, it does show that from the most influential to the lesser known writers of the time, a common background knowledge of Montesquieu’s work inspired the pervading thought of the day.
Hampson quickly summarizes a key difference between the styles of Montesquieu and Rousseau: “Montesquieu won over his readers by his arguments; Rousseau swept them off their feet by the power of his exhortation and the excitement of his prose.”8 Indeed, it is in large part for his deeply moving and emotional writing that Rousseau’s work persists, aside from the sheer brilliance of his content. Known as the father of Romanticism, the language of his work was, to the eighteenth-century reader, exciting and enticing, as his style, coupled with his unique thought, helped to motivate the ensuing generation of revolutionaries. Rousseau’s enduring triumph, Du Contrat Social or “The Social Contract” (1762) became the foundation of Rousseau’s own unique brand of republicanism. Where other philosophers saw republicanism as a means by which the commoner might gain liberty, Rousseau saw more; the commoner would gain liberty, but if only to advance what Rousseau called the general will. This ‘general will’ of the people would always be determined by the volonté générale, meaning, what is best for all. Rousseau extended this volonté générale to mean that what was good for the whole was therefore invariably good for everyone individually. Hampson quotes Rousseau and then somewhat sarcastically continues, by saying “‘The sovereign [i.e., the general will] by the mere fact of its existence, is always what it ought to be.’ Leaving aside the insoluble problem of how one can distinguish the general will from the majority, or even from the will of all…, the man who has voted for something other than the general will must realize that he was mistaken as to his own interest, and change his mind. If he is reluctant to do so, he must be ‘forced to be free.’” 9 This obviously poses problems to self-determination and liberty, but to Rousseau, this difficulty is less important than the achievement of the volonté générale. Rousseau’s ideas emphasizing the importance of the state over the individual may seem rather socialist to the modern reader, but Rousseau preceded Marxist socialist theory by more than half a century. More significant, however, is that the very idea Rousseau was promoting was without any sort of precedent whatsoever. The state’s clearly defined goal would be unity and the welfare, sacrosanct above all else.
Rousseau did realize, however, that such an arrangement would be purely fantasy and that it would be very problematic to implement it in a real state. Comparatively, then, Montesquieu’s thoughts on the structure of government appear to have been more useful to the revolutionaries, as they could extract some logical use out of a realistic theory. As for Rousseau’s fantasy, the concept of the volonté générale was salvageable, if not much else of his thought on governmental structuring was, and became a kind of war cry for the revolutionaries. Rousseau’s most important contribution to the revolutionaries, though, was the power and force of his emotion, woven so critically in the style with which he crafted his works. Rousseau’s command over passion and Montesquieu’s ideas on government would help to shape the later works of Mercier, Brissot, Marat, Robespierre, and Saint-Just, all of whom Hampson details in his book. Even while documenting these men, Hampson maintains a watchful eye on the impressions left on each by Montesquieu and Rousseau, discussing the causes of revolution, whether of will or circumstance, as he takes the reader through a view of time from 1789 and beyond, through the historical titan that is the French Revolution.