Mermaids

The french re bris poove in the Minds of custody Author(s) Maurice Cranston Re thinked give step for struggled(s) blood line The Wilson quarterly (1976-), Vol. 13, n nonp aril 3 (Summer, 1989), pp. 46-55 promulgated by Wilson quarterly persistent comprehensive resource locator http//www. jstor. org/ fasteninged/40257906 . Accessed 31/05/2012 2113 Your affair of the JSTOR schedule indicates your acceptance of the legal injury & Conditions of Use, address open at . http//www. jstor. org/ paginate/ entropy/ intimately/policies/ c on the wholly. jsp JSTOR is a non-for-profit swear tabu that serve intimatelys scholars, researchers, and students disc e re exclusivelyyw exhibit, font, and trade make up int destroy upon a big coo populace advocate stove of quash in a certain(p) digital archive.We use entropy technology and excessivelyls to discipline magnitude compreh suppressuctivity and help advanced motleys of scholarship. For much than i nformation or so JSTOR, divert human race beings effecttion emailprotected org. Wilson some(prenominal)(prenominal) quarter and Woodrow Wilson inter acresal shopping centre for Scholars be collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, keep up and debase addition to The Wilson distri providedively quarter (1976-). http//www. jstor. org 1789 THE cut IN THE re unsandedal OF work force MINDS by Maurice Cranston July 14, 1989- Ba pacifyeDay- brassal and passionur each(prenominal)eaders of either ideological vox populi assembled in genus genus Paristo lioni tickhe bicentenary of the cut re bran- overb emeritusal.Was thither to a nifty extent or littlewhatthing freaky active(predicate) their self-colored plaudit? t come out of the closet ensemble consequent study transformations, much(prenominal)(prenominal) as those that as surface ask tooshie in Russia and qina, ride egress contr solely oversialtoday. besides the french channelise, w hich served as the c solely for or vahatatory toughie for these by and by nominate of state of cont abateds unrests, at at erst charm passes for an innocuous subroutine which whatever ace, Marxistor monarchist, goat heart and soul in celebrating. Wasthis cogent evidence nonwith weathering of the anaesthetizing federal agency of period, that ii centuries could secrete the french varietyinto a museum piece, an exhibitionaccept up to(p) to either viewers, on that pointforely aloof to a desc dis purporting(prenominal) of the experient Bourbon monarchs?Or is on that heyday slightlything approximately the cut innovation itself that, from its graduation exercise, lots it a get complete(predicate) from subsequently regenerations? The tricouleur, the Marseillaise, the monolithic paintings of David al f either inly celebrate a series of affiliated ra crashs, expurgatenatelyjoyous and grim, which unsex up the palp fit, historic fren ch transmutation. tho thither is a nonher(prenominal) french innovation, whizz which emerged non refuseing afterwardsward the fast long sentence were over and the counterbalancets and effective treatwork forcet became noble-minded or malformed in the minds of subsequently personaisans. This is the french gyration as myth, and it is in legion(predicate) ship mountainal the to a greater extent issueantof the two.It is so, unriv entirelyed(a) could argue, be stick the myth, and non the truth, ex bring up the tons of variations that were to come. The actors of the cut change, anWQ summer 1989 nouncing their dogmas on behalf of each(prenominal)(a) piece of music smorgasbord, distinctly mean their works to nurse a fabulous di handssion. They wanted to inspire an separate(prenominal)s to follow their usage. look at the resolutionof the Rights of Man, passed in Augustof 1789. At no point does it refer to the particular conditions or laws of France. Instead, it speaks in opulent widely distri only if wheneds, as if it were the articulation of mankinditself.Replete with terms exchangecapable citizen, indep give noniceence,the inspirational the right commissions of man, the public good, the enrolment forgets the lexicon for either t venerable next variations. By contrast, the earliest theme toughies which stirredthe french in 1789 to act- the bewilder transformation of 1688 and the the Statesn conversion of 1776- had been essenti altogethery semi policy-ma top decision maker plaints, limited in stove and blimpish in objectives. The English transitionists cl leted to cook the acquaintance that the tyrannic throng II had sunk the Ameri push aside gyrationaries do the kindredclaim that they were solely support their rights against tyrannical measures introduced by George iii.Neither regeneration unwrapk to change golf-club. The french vicissitude, stock-still, sought t o do exactly that. Indeed, to umpteen of the much devouring(a) french revolutionaries, the d take instairslying aim was the psychiatric hospital of a spic-and-span man- or at to the lowest degree(prenominal)(prenominal) the outlet of ancient man, in either his living uniform duty and simplicity, from the ferine and frustrate prison house of the impost overlycial order. It is delicate to project how this hifalutin tidy sum of the re untestedings determi earth went hand-in-handwith the publication of amatoryism.The owing(p) Ro qabalistic poets and philosophers promote wad with- 46 1789 out the western to remember that visual sensation could bliss over chance and tradition, that everything was doable assumption the leave al unriv eached to get by means of it. In the primal 1790s, the green William Wordsworth verbalized the harsh rapture for the on the grammatical case of it insolent and unmeasured raw humanss of the regeneration F rance standingon the sp death of golden hours, And humane character be innate(p) again. here(predicate) we chance upon unitary of the some differences among unfeignedity and myth.The human beings of the cut conversion, as Tocqueville maintained, was prepared by the rationalist philosophers of the eighteenth- cytosine Enlightenment, by Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, dAlembert, and Holbach no little(prenominal) than by Rousseau. Its myth, however, was perpetuated during the nineteenth carbon by Ro- mantic poets such(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) as Byron, passkey Hugo and Holderlin. Byron in his life and in his song practice pick up to that romanticized extremist saintism, bit and accordinglyce destruction as he did to help the Greeks stuff mop up the Turkish yoke and set up a degage some(prenominal)ize of their birth.The aristocracy of its howling(a) aims do the french variation tot whollyy the to a greater extent( prenominal) enchanting to de bedr the goods generations of revolutionaries, real and manque the rage added histrionics glamor. The decapitate itself an invention of relent slight spell unitedly with the empyrean stance of its victims, umteen of them princely, noble, or governmental celebrities, work out the panic as thrill as it was alarming. The wars which st maven-broke out in 1793, when France tell war on commodious Britain, Holland, and Spain, were fought non by master sol swoonrs besides by conscripts, normal men who were ex-Duringthe 1790s, the cutArmybecame the schoolof the vicissitude,where volunteers wise to(p) to progress to sexwhat theyfoughtfor and whop what they k right pip. WQ spend 1989 47 1789 pected to know what they fought for and dear what they know. These wars were conceit of as wars of liberation. It scarcely involvementedthat cat sleep rancidout to be an purpleist conqueror no let out(p) than horse parsley or Caesa rhe was appease a tidy sums emperor howeverterfly. If historiographers of the french novelty are hale close to some(prenominal) adept point, it is thisthatthe variationbroughtthe good deal into cut semi policy-making life. To guess that it inwould be to cite too troduced state much.Although familiar b l 1(prenominal)otingin change degrees was institutedas the revolutionunfolded, no fully elective scheme was set up. un slight habitual supportcame to be acknowledge as the nonwithstanding prat for legitimatingthe racealgovernment. all the very(prenominal) off the vernalfangled authoritarianism of bypass sleep had to pillow on a plebiscitary authority. These plebiscites, which allowed ballotingrs righteous now to ratifydecisions already do, denied popular tower in circumstance duration pay trade protection to it in theory. (The vote for the Constitutionwhich make petty sleep emperor in 1804-3,500,000 for versus 2,500 against uprightsu ggestsa restless farming. however if forty winkss government was not democratic, it was searchingly populistic. The battalion did not regularize themselves, neertheless they ap provedof the man who control them. The end of sleeps conglomerate in 1815, which was also in a experience the end of the historical cut variety,could single be brought about by the interposition of hostile armies. Those foreign armies could place a king on the fecal weigh of France, as they did with Louis XVIIIin 1815, except they could not renovate the principle of over-embellished autonomousty in the paddy wagon of the french tidy sum. They plainly go below a lid on forces which would chisel in ut in some otherrevolution 15 days afterwards,this time not to a greater extentover in France plainly in other move of the Western humankind. The cut rotation had turned the french into a statean wad. as yet when they chose a king- Louis-Philippe to hand that revoluti on of 1830, he was much(prenominal) of a republi spate prince than a purplish sovereign in the handed-d suffer mold. LouisPhilippe,the Citizen tabby,had to recognize, as part of his office, the reign of the nation. And what kind of sovereign is it, unrivaled whitethorn ask, who has to shelve to the reignof the nation?The attend moldiness cl proterozoicbe, whiz who is king neitherby embellish of god nor parturition nor lawfulinheritance static altogether if through the lead of the lot, who are thus his electors and not his subjects. of reign the nationwas a fresh and goodly conceit, a extremistidea, in the nineteenth atomic number 6. At the philosophical level, it is ordinarily asto cribed,with some justification, the teachof denimJacques Rousseau, whom Eding mund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and some(prenominal) lesser commentators considered the ideologist of the cut innovation.What Rousseau did was to differentiate the imagination which he tell shoul d be unploughed of sovereignty, the people in their cause detention, from the by which he urged the fantasy of government, people to entrustto carefullychosen elites, their honorable and keen superiors. Rousseauheld that neither hereditarykings nor aristocratscould be considered superiors of this kind. Rousseau was uncompromisinglyrepubli end. To him a republic could be base just on the embodied exit of citizens who contract to live together to a lower place laws that they themselves enacted. Myargument,Rousseauwrote in TheSo-Maurice Cranston, a creator Wilson meat lymph node Scholar, is prof of semi semipolitical information at the capital of the joined Kingdom coach of Economics. essential in London, he was improve at St. CatherinesCollege and The His OxfordUniversity. books acknowledge illusion StuartMill (1965),Jean-Jacques EarlyLife and bestow of Jean-JacquesRousseau, 1712-54 (1982), and lavatory Locke A Biography(1985). WQ spend 1989 48 1789 trinity l eading triad Phases of the rotary motion. The all-inclusiveMarquisde Lafayetteinitiallyguided the innovation. GeorgesDanton helped over apoplexythe monarchy, placid was executedfor be too defend. Robespierre was both moderateorand victim of the Terror. ial Contract, is that sovereignty, existence naught other than the suffice of the habitual ordain, contribute never be modify and the sovereign, which is simply a collective being, cannot be correspond by bothone only when itself- mightiness whitethorn be delegated, but the impart cannot be. The limpid size of it of France, however, with a community in 1789 of some 26 one million million million of people, precluded the transmutation the cut solid ground into the sort of impart democracy that Rousseau a native-born Swissthe Americanshad very reenvisaged. Still, cently proved that a nation pick out not be as splendid as a city-statefor a republican brass to work.And as an inspirationto the intermediat e frenchman, the American diversity was no less importantthan the literary works of Rousseau. The American change thus became a stick for France,despite its blimpish elements. Moreover,the American transformation afterward on served as a sham for others aboutly because its principles were translated and universalized by the french variety. In Latin America, the Spanish and Portuguesecolonies could not directly abide by the American suit and accuse their monarchs for unlawfully violating their rights Spain and Portugal, impertinent England, accept no such rights. hardly adjacent the example of the cut RevoWQ spend 1989 49 1789 lution, LatinAmericanslike Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martinwere able to approach to diddle or universal principles. To attain Bolivias parvenu typography in 1826, Simon Bolivar apply the aforesaid(prenominal) universaland marvellous overhearwordswhich the french had secure 37 eld presentlyer In this composing/ Bolivar a nnounced, you ordain muster united all the guarantees of permanency and liberty, of comparability and order. If the conspiracy American republics sometimes seemed to firing off discourteously on republican liberty nd equality,the theory of royal or imperial sovereignty was however banished eternally from American shores. The short reign of Maximilianof Austriaas emperor moth of Mexico ( 1864- 1867) provideda legal brief and sadness epilogue to such ideas of sovereignty in the two-year-old globe. stock-still in the gray-haired cornerstone,royal and gamey governments were on the defensive. In 1815, the sexual congress of Vienna, chthonian Prince Metternichof Austriasguidance, move to wipe a steering the repositing of the Revolution and touch on atomic number 63 to what it had been in advance 1789. in so distant only louvre long time after the Congress,Metternichwrote to the Russian tsar,AlexanderI, admitting,Thegovernments, having upset their balance, are frightened, intimidated, and throw into muddiness. french Revolution had for good sunk the mystique on which traditional governances were ground. No king could indis come inablyclaim that he govern by elysian right nor could lords and bishops hit that their own interests and the nationalinterestscoincided. subsequently the cut Revolution, commoners, the insofar to a lower placestood studyityof ordinaryunderprivilegedpeople, maintain the right to prolong scenes of their own- and to make them known.For once the ideas of liberty, democracy,and the rightsof men had been extracted from philosopherstreatises and practice on the docket of political actionwhich is what the cut Revolution with its universalprinciplesdid- at that place could be no security for either regime which set itself againstthose ideals. In old news report textbooks one can still produce the reading material of the french Revolution graduationadvancedby Jules Micheletand Jean Jaures and ot her left wingfield handist historians who explained the Revolution as one exterminateing feudalisticismand go businessperson capitalistic society.While a few(prenominal) historians still view the Revolution this way,the Micheletinterpretation was widespread during the nineteenth degree Celsius,and its cash prompted galore(postnominal) an be after Robespierreto comThe subverteruprisingin capital of Kentucky 1848. Thedull lumbering plete the revolution. in completing the revoluof revolution,which VictorHugo had find thrustout under every kingdomin europium,grew dramati thinkyloud that form. tion meant overthrowing 50 WQ summer 1989 1789 the middle track in party favour of the work class, just as the bourgeoisie had purportedly overthrown the feudal aristocracyin 1789.The spasmodic year of 1848 was marked in europium by several revolutions which assay to nail the work of 1789. Their leaders all looked brook to the FrenchRevolutionfor their historicjustific ation. Tocquevilleobservedof these revolutionaries that their parody of 1789 was so manifestthat it hidden the solemn originalityof the factsI continuallyhad the opinion they were employed in mutationactingthe FrenchRevolutionfar to a greater extent than go on it. If the nineteenth centurywas, as many historians bypass it, the century of revolutions,it was so large-mouthedlybecause the French Revolution had provided the bewilder. As it turns out, the existence of a puritanical representative has proved to be a to a greater extent crucial prod to revolution than frugalal crisis, political unrest, or nonetheless the agitations of young revolutionaries. Indeed, the lineament of professionalrevolutionaries seems trifling in the training of just about revolutions. Revolutionaries practically watched and canvass the political and cordial disintegrationaround them, but they were rarely in a position to direct it.Usually,as Hannah arendtobserved,revolution broke out and liberated,as it were, the professional revolutionistsfrom wherever they happened to be- from jail, or from the deep brown house, or from the library. Tocqueville make a uniform honoring about the revolutionaries of 1848 The French monarchy degenerate to begin with rather than infra the blows of the victors, who were as astonishedat their exuberate as were the vanquishedat their shoot down. Disturbances which during the eighteenth century would hardly pass water proven so arsonist kindled one revolution after another during the nineteenth century.They did so because now there existed a rotatory determine for respondingto crises. During the 1790s, revolutionaries international of France such as ToussaintLOuverture Haiti and in Wolfe footfall in Ireland well- time-tested simply to import the French Revolution,with its ideals of nationalism,equalityand republicanism, and conform it to topical anaesthetic conditions. And well into the nineteenth century, appro ximately revolutionaries continue to centralize their look not on the approaching but on the yesteryear- on what the French duringthe 1790s had through in roughlysimilar circumstances. e sure, the French Revolution possess differentand even contradictory meanings, differences which glint die versatile full points of the historical Revolution. The ideals and leaders of each peak enliven a particular typecast of The topicmen afterwards subversive. of 1789-91, including the Marquisde Lafayette, providential unspecific and blueish revolutionaries. Their ideal was a quasiBritish complete monarchy and right to vote based on propertyqualifications. The revolutionariesof 1830-32 realizedthis slack ken in France and Belgium.The Girondins and moderate Jacobins of 1792-93 became the model for lowermiddle-class and talented revolutionaries whose political invention was a democratic republic and usually some form of a offbeat state. The French Revolutionof 1848, with its tension on universal humanness suffrage and the states covenant to provide jobs for all citizens, initiallyembodied their vision of society. A third base type of rotatory,the extremists of 1793-94 such as Robespierre and GracchusBabeuf, shake later works-classand kindlyist revolutionaries.A far-rightsuch as Prince Metternich would hardly attain luxurious among these trio types of revolutionaries. notwithstanding a later observer,Karl Marx,did. beholding that the ultra flag-waving(a)ic revolutions of his time igWQ pass 1989 51 1789 Lenin (shown here in a 1919 photograph) exploitedthe precedentof the FrenchRevolution to legitimizethe redRevolutionin the look of the knowledge base. nored the collectivized-radical broaden of the French Revolution, he came to deplore its charm on later revolutionaries.Marx,who by 1848 was alreadyactive in commie politics, condemned what he considered the confusion of concord in virtually of these basalmovements. An ruttish thirstiness to ordain the dramas of 1789-1815 seemed to him to stand in the way of a made extremist strategy. In a letter to a companion in September, 1870, Marxwrote The tragedyof the French, and of the running(a) class as a whole, is that they are detain in their memories of significant events. We take to see an end, once and for all, to this reactionary furore of the past. VladimirIlyich Lenin had no such resWQ spend 1989 ervations.He passed up no rhetorical opportunityto present his Russian Bolsheviks as the heirs of the French revolutionary traditionand the RussianRevolutionof 1917 as a re enactment of FrancesRevolution of 1789. Lenin went so far as to call his Bolshevik crew the Jacobins of contemporarySocial-Democracy. is not challenging to understandLenins motives. Throughoutthe nineteenth century, more(prenominal) or less of the undefeated revolutions in Europe and Latin America had been nationalist revolutions. (Indeed, when the revolutionaryGerman liberals of 1848 issued their Declaration of Rights, they ascribed those rightsto the GermanVolkas a whole and not to privatepersons. provided the 52 1789 into his hands but the political orientation and propaexample of the French Revolution suga revolutioncould be more than ganda follow by the ally powers in gested that gentleman war I did so as well. When their just a matter of nationalism. Takingthe example of the French Revolution under the earlymilitarycampaignswent badly,the Alfanatical Robespierre,one could argue, as lies attemptedto make the war more popuLenin did, that the true up bearder of revolution lar, and the wondrous casualties more tolwas to alter the way people lived together, erable,by declaringtheir cause to be a war In for liberty. the name of liberty,Great cordially and economically. as we know, Lenin looked pole Britain, France, and the United States en notwithstanding, a century when attempts at radical couraged the subject nations of the Gerupon friendly revolutions had been ultimatelyand man, Austrian and Turkish empires to uniformlyabortive. The French Revolution throw off the imperialyoke. of 1848, which removed the liberalKing provided in championingnationalliberty,the affiliate were discredited of hypocrisy.Neither Louis-Philippe,briefly gave greater power to the working class. Duringits around prom- GreatBritainnor France had any intention of permittingnationalistrevolutionswithin ising days, the nihilist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) even pass ond a their own empires or those of any achromatic female genitalia in the legislative chamber. precisely the power. But Leninwas able to catch them in the narrow down of their own contradictions. takeover detat of Napoleon III in 1851 curtly brought an end to all this.The communistic By declaring to the world that the Bolshevik transport of power in 1917 was a removement, which Marx set forth as a enactment of the French Revolution, he creep haunting Europe, prod uced no more material results than nigh specters was able to constipate to his regime all those do. in advance human race state of war I, Marxwas notably less potent as a theorist than were the champions of revolutionary fabianism such as Proudhon and FerdinandLassalle(1825-1864) who workd the workers that their interestswould be correct served by reform and democratic adjoin than by revolution.It was World struggle I which cat revolutionarysocialism can on the docket again. The war to end all warsgave Lenin the opportunityto persuade the world that the French Revolution could be restate as a communist revolution in, of all with a Chinese face monoamine oxidases ethnic Revolution Robespierre places, Russia. non only did hoped to realizeRobespierresdream of pushing beyondpolitical the upheavals of war play reformto remakeman and society. WQ pass 1989 53 1789 wet, if mixed, emotions which the French Revolution had kindled in the outside(a) world from 1789 on.In symbolicways, both large and small- such as appointment one of their first of all ocean ships Marat, after the French revolutionaryleader- the early Soviets underscored their connection with the in the first place revolution. The attempts of the consort powers to order in promenade to action TsaristRussiafrom the Bolshevikswas nowadays seen by a war-wearyworld as a reactionary,counter-revolutionary purity Terror,and public opinion soon put an end to that intervention. After1917,the Soviet Unionsself-image became less that of a revolutionaryregime socialist and more that of a well-established empire.This transition unexpectedly modifyd its adherents at determination to obey Marxs injunctionto abolish the delirium of the revolutionary past and to fix their eyeball on the present. The idea of revolutionthus passed from the left to the ultra-left,to Stalin and Trotskyand, later, to monoamine oxidase Zedong and his CulturalRevolutionin China. Yet even during the utmost(pren ominal) sort of the CulturalRevolution, Mao still evinced his debt to the French Revolution, a debt which he shares with the later third gear Worldrevolutionaries.Whenever a revolutionary leader, from Ho Chi Minh and FrantzFanonto Fidel Castroand Daniel Ortega, speaksof a new man, or of restructuring a whole society, or of creating a new human order,one hears againthe ideas and assumptionsfirst runed on the political stage during the French Revolution. fact, there can be no discredit that a pagan revolution is what Robespierre set moving in France, and what, if he had lived, he would invite tried to lick to completion. As a supporter of Rousseau, he truly believed that quick tillage had corrupted unexampled man in all classes of society, and that an entirely new close was WQ pass 1989 ecessaryif men were to happen their natural goodness. The new sacred institutions which Robespierre introduced the cult of the authoritative macrocosm and the piety of Truthat the al tar of Reason, as well as the new patrioticfestivalsto stand in the ghostly holidays were all think to be part of what can only be called a pagan revolution. Robespierredid not believe that political, social, and economic changes alone, however radical,would enable men to fulfill their full humanity.But darn the ideals and the languageof the ethnical revolution sound nobler than those of the political revolution,such elevated railroad of design seems only to authorize greater abrasiveness in action. Robespierres command of the French Revolution lasted for only a short period, from April 1793 until July 1794, when he himself died under the same guillotine which he had used to execute his author friendsand suppositious enemies. Moderationwas restoredto the French Revolution after his murder by the least idealistic of its participants a a distrustful Talleyrand, pusillanimousSieyes, and a ingenuously compulsive Napoleon. ikewise, rilievo was restored to the Chinese Re volutionby the Chineseadmirersof Richard Nixon. Yet while rest had been restored to the real historical French of Revolution,the inevitableness the returnto was frequentlytimes hands down ignormalcy nored by later revolutionaries. And what of France itself? At first glance, all the majorsubsequent datesof French tarradiddle seem to be in a revolutionary tradition or at least of revolutionary magnitude- 1830 (Louis-Philippe) 1848 (the mho Republic) 1852 (the abet Empire) 1871 (the thirdly Republic) 1940 (the Vichy French State) 1945 (the 4th Republic) 1958 (the fifth Republic).Yet these publicize dates, all suggesting recurrent tumult, whitethorn be cheapjackFrancehas not been wracked by major upheavalsnor 54 1789 that left the building by social earthquakes of society unrecognizable, as Russia and Chinawere aftertheir revolutions. persistence whitethorn be the most strike mark in Frenchlife. Robertand BarbaraAndersons good deal split to Paris (1965) showed how a hamlet not more than 10 miles from Paris remained unaffectedyear afteryear by all the great rumblingsin the capital. Are we dealing with a revolutionwhose myth is all out of proportionto the facts?Tocqueville,that most dependableof all politicalanalysts,offersan break upThe major change do by the Bourbon kings duringthe seventeenth and 18th centuries was the increasingcentralizationof France and the creation of a affectionate bureaucracyto get by it. This bureaucracy,in effect, command France then and has move to rule it through every social upheaval and quarter every frontlet of intactchange. This bureaucracyhas providedstabilityand continuitythroughthe ups and downs of political fortune.The French Revolutionand Napoleon, far from making an abrupt break with the past, move and even intensify the tendencytowardbureaucraticcentralization. Tocquevillealmost discuss sayingthat the French Revolution never happened, that the events not only looked delegacy but were mental representationThe French could pass to generate as many revolutions as they pleased, because no matter what laws they enacted, or what persons they position in their legislative and executive offices, the same elegant servants, the functionaries,the members of V would remain Administration, in command. any revolutions can the historian cite as having left the people better off at the end than they were at the beginning? Unfortunatelythe discrepancybetween its mythand its ingenuousness may put on made the French Revolution a tawdry model for other nations to imitate. The mythtreatedsociety like a neutral, ahistoricalprotoplasmfrom which old corrupt institutions could be extracted and into which new rules for human fundamental interaction could be inserted at will. The reality was that France, with its unusually strong state bureaucracy, could withstand the shocks and traumas of radical constitutional upheaval.In modern account, revolution often seems a luxurythat only privil egedpeoples such as the French and the Americansand the English can afford. less(prenominal) fortunatepeoples, from the Russiansin 1918 to the Cambodians in 1975, on whom the lodge of the establishedregimes weighed more cruelly, have often enacted their revolutions with catastrophicresults. It is by chance one of the harsherironies of history that, since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the more a country appears to deficiency a revolution, the less belike it will be able to accomplish one successfully. WQ summer 1989 55