Politics of the Impossible

THE AGE OF THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION: THE STRUGGLE by R. R. Palmer. 584 pages. Princeton. $10.

Ever since the French Revolution of ficially ended in 1794, historians have asked whether it enlarged or diminished the sum of human freedom. Joining the debate with revolutionary fervor, Robert Roswell Palmer, a specialist in 18th century France who is on the faculty of St. Louis' Washington University, plumps unequivocally for the Revolution, charging that its detractors have besmirched an "inevitable" and largely admirable chapter of history.

Palmer's book is a sequel to The Challenge, which covered the years 1760-92, and is as conscientiously documented and skillfully reasoned as its predecessor. In it he spruces up the Revolution about as well as a man can.

Glossing over its dark side--the dogmatism, the factional fights, the bloodshed--the author argues that the revolutionaries, whatever their vices, fought for an egalitarian system, while the antirevolutionaries, whatever their virtues, were merely defending the aristocratic society. Palmer sees France's upheaval as a revolution of Western Civilization that has profoundly influenced "all revolutions since 1800, in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa," and he follows its meanderings until the dawn of the 19th century.

The Virtue of Terror. While Palmer is a meticulously honest historian incapable of suppressing any facts, he interprets them with some elasticity. He maintains, for instance, that Robespierre and John Adams were spiritual twins of the Enlightenment, that Adams in Robespierre's shoes might well have behaved as ruthlessly as the fanatic Jacobin.

The comparison is about the nastiest accusation ever leveled against Adams, an urbane and skeptical politician who, for all his impatience with his contemporaries, respected their right to differ with him--most notably in his gallant defense of British soldiers after the Boston Massacre. Robespierre, by contrast, labored under a crabbed, crass perversion of Enlightenment philosophy that allowed no room for disagreement or human foible. Those who did not share that vision were packed off to the guillotine; some 17,000 were beheaded during the Terror. By equating Virtue with Terror, Robespierre set a comforting precedent for every subsequent despot from Stalin to Castro.

The Cult of Audacity. The stumbling block in any apologia for the French--or Russian--Revolution is simply that lofty idealism generated appallingly barbaric action. The paradox has been noted not only by class-conscious conservatives, as Palmer suggests, but also by such unimpeachable libertarians as Albert Camus and George Orwell. Palmer writes caustically of the British Establishment that scorned dem ocratic principles in the shrewd pursuit of its own self-interest. But when French arms were triumphant in 1794 and Britain's security endangered, the government in London indicted only a few persons for treason; and, though far more suspect than most Frenchmen who perished in the Terror, every one of them enjoyed his day in court and was acquitted.

Palmer, in all fairness, finds this a "refreshing contrast" to the Terror. But the contrast goes deeper. Despite the dogged survival of its aristocracy, in evolution the British enjoyed far more freedom than the French could find in revolution, or for a long time afterward. Such indeed was the judgment of France's great political philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed that the later phase of the revolution, "which did so much harm to contemporaries by its fury, has done everlasting harm by its examples. It created the politics of the impossible, turned madness into a theory and blind audacity into a cult."

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