Review: Inventing the French Revolution by Keith Michael Baker
Part of an Ongoing Book Review Series
Keith Michael Baker’s Inventing the French Revolution covers an enormous amount of eighteenth century French intellectual history which preceded and informed the revolutionary events of the 1780s and 1790s. The book is made up of a collection of essays and articles spanning Baker’s career. They nevertheless offer a cohesive and cogent analysis of the legal and ideological underpinnings regarding France during the Enlightenment. Early in the collection, Baker makes a simple yet important point concerning the framing of the revolution by its participants when he observes that when the term l’ancien regime was coined, “the old, or former, regime—to describe the social and political order they were repudiating, they were, in effect, acknowledging that their new order could be defined only in contradistinction to what had gone before” (Baker, 11). This observation demonstrates the enduring improvisational nature of the Revolution, the events which preceded it, and its devolution into chaos and bloodshed.
Baker’s articles cover too many historical figures to discuss them all in this short review, but a couple are particularly worthy of note. The first of these noteworthy figures is Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, who in response to the Jansenist/Parlement crisis in the mid-eighteenth century sought to assert the king’s authority, and in 1759 got approval to build a legal archive to support and further legitimize the king’s absolute rule. He did so by building a parallel archive that would stand in contrast to the archives of the French parlements. As the judicial body of the nation, a nation which held no separate legislative body, the parlement had historically held the registration of laws. Baker suggests that as the concept of the public and of public opinion grew throughout the eighteenth century, this parallel legal archive was a public act that would counter the parlements’ influence upon the people. Moreau thus sought to re-legitimize the king’s absolute rule through the act of influencing public opinion through a legal archive built and housed under the ministers of the crown. As Baker suggests, critical historical research that would bolster the legacy of the monarch’s absolute rule, Moreau thought it would stabilize political tradition and “would thereby serve to maintain and control it” (Baker, 76). Moreau is one of a number of important historical actors Baker discusses who were pro-monarch reformists that sought to solidify and secure the king’s rule through appeals to the same jurisprudence-related arguments and petitions to the public that the parlements had engaged in.
Another key historical participant in French Enlightenment thought that Baker discusses is Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. Mably is particularly important because of his “uncanny anticipation of the confrontation of the Pre-Revolution thirty years before its occurrence” (Baker, 88). Central to Mably’s thinking was his assertion that the faults in the French legal order was its utter lack of constitutional stability or legitimacy. Influenced by English political thinkers Locke and Sidney and asserting claims not dissimilar from Montesquieu, Mably asserted that France’s major problem was its lack of fundamental law. In a statement that predicts sentiments similar to the American Federalists a few decades later, Mably highlights the inherent problems with arbitrary laws. He observes that France was “always governed randomly by events and passions, [and] we have accustomed ourselves to have no respect for the laws” (Baker, 93). Mably appeared also to have either been influenced by Rousseau, or possibly engaged in a form of parallel thinking when he asserts the notion of popular sovereignty. “The people, in whom sovereign power originally resides… is thus eternally endowed with the right to interpret its contract, or rather its gifts, to modify the clauses, annul them, and establish a new order of things” (Baker—quoting Mably, 94). Most presciently, Mably’s recognition of France’s principal obstacle regarding legitimate rule was its lack of a process which redirects itself back to fundamental law through legal processes and especially through a popular representative body. He appeared to recognize that France’s lack of fundamental law (unlike England’s series of fundamental laws which made up its constitution) was a cancer that required vital treatment. Mably discussed the benefits of classical republicanism, like Rousseau, decades prior to the Revolution. He recognized that civic virtue was an impossibility under the reign of a despotic king.
In later articles, Baker focuses more closely on the immediate events and ideas which gave way to revolution as well as the precariousness of power once revolution was underway. He observes the inability for revolutionaries to have constructively transformed themselves from rebels into constitutional framers. “Unlike the American Revolution, which effectively translated the assertion of revolutionary will into the establishment of a stable constitutional order, the French Revolution opened a progressively widening gap between revolution and constitution that was to swallow up successive efforts to bring the revolutionary movement to its constitutional completion” (Baker, 252).
Baker highlights two of the key features that sealed the doom of France’s attempt at constitutional monarchy: the king’s power of suspensive veto and the required delay which exacerbated the legislature’s inability to make necessary constitutional revisions in a timely manner. It is almost as though these features, Baker implies—in an attempt to create constitutional stability—prematurely tied the hands of those who could have made reasonable and moderate adjustments to the constitutional order. The result, Baker notes, was the French Constitution being rendered void in August of 1791, followed soon be the deposing of Louis XVI and the Terror. As Baker suggests in the final article of the collection, “built-in administrative delays connected both to the monarch’s veto and the legislature’s inability to constitutional revisions—the system soon failed” (Baker, 303-304).
For those interested in not only the French Revolution itself, but its intellectual motivations (and failings), Baker’s work is highly recommended.
[James M. Masnov is a writer, historian, and lecturer. His book, Rights Reign Supreme: An Intellectual History of Judicial Review and the Supreme Court, is available here. His first book, History Killers and Other Essays by an Intellectual Historian, is available here.]