Abstract
Reviewed by: Mark Curran, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Revolutionary Ideas is a remarkable book that extends aspects of the bold thesis that Jonathan Israel presented in his Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006) and Democratic Enlightenment (2011) through the tumultuous events of the French Revolution. Weathering a spectacular mauling from his critics, Israel steadfastly maintains that there were two Enlightenments. The first – the mainstream Enlightenment of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of Montesquieu and John Locke – was fatally compromised and oftentimes counter-productive. It was morally and politically conservative, supportive of absolute monarchy and its prevailing social order. The second – a ‘radical’ Enlightenment of the late-seventeenth-century Dutch pantheist Baruch Spinoza and his eighteenth-century atheist and materialist successors including Claude-Adrien Helvétius and the baron d’Holbach – was an altogether more satisfactory and influential affair. It unflinchingly rejected supernatural agency and promoted reason, true equality, justice, toleration, liberty of expression and, most importantly, democratic republicanism. Israel contends in Revolutionary Ideas not only that the philosophies of both of these Enlightenments drove the events of 1789–1799, but that the ‘real revolution’ was the child of the latter radical Enlightenment. This authentic revolution, he insists, was forged by a relatively small group of influential and heroic heirs to the heirs of Spinoza, notably Sieyès, Mirabeau, Volney, Brissot, Condorcet and Tom Paine. These democratic heroes punched above their weight and briefly carried the moment. But, alas, they lost the day. The moderate Enlightenment inspired the constitutional monarchists and proto-fascist authoritarian populist villains of Israel’s drama – Marat and Robespierre receive a particularly colourful drubbing – squashed the promise of the radical Enlightenment and set European history on a compromised and unsatisfactory path.
The level of erudition and scholarly grind necessary to plough such a singular thesis through the rococo chronology of the French Revolution is a wonder. Israel’s narrative involves such a fundamental rethink of so many of the revolution’s actors and events that it never fails to stimulate, to provoke. And that Revolutionary Ideas is as richly furnished with valuable new archival evidence as its three predecessors is quite remarkable. Further, for those of us that have long considered something amiss about the way that generations of historians and philosophers have routinely maligned or ignored the eighteenth-century materialists, Israel’s project undeniably holds a certain allure. D’Holbach’s 1770-published Système de la nature (The System of Nature) did excite stronger reactions from contemporaries than did the majority of the proclaimed masterworks of the French Enlightenment. And, from as early as the 1760s, high-profile conservative detractors did warn of the revolutionary ambitions of a radical philosophe core not all that dissimilar from that presented by Israel. Israel’s work, then, is especially intriguing and valuable because it exists within a curious historiographical blind-spot: we need to know more about the materialists and the impact of their writings on the long eighteenth century, including the French Revolution.
Alas, Israel overreaches with Revolutionary Ideas. The biggest difficulty that he faces in tracing the impact of his radical Enlightenment through 1789 is that its major actors had all either given up the ghost or put down their pens long before the storming of the Bastille. With the memory of the Système de la nature affair faded, with d’Holbach’s atheist heirs Naigeon and Volney perennially in the shadows, and with the names of the ‘moderates’ Voltaire and Rousseau ringing loudest in Paris’s coffee houses and assembly halls, drawing a direct causal line between the radical Enlightenment and the French Revolution requires an audacious double switcheroo. First, readers are asked to accept the elevation of a relatively small band of prominent agitators – most notably Mirabeau, Sieyès, Condorcet and Brissot – to the status of clairvoyant oracles of pure democratic republicanism. From 1787 onwards, Israel paints his troop as unswervingly principled and breathtakingly ahead of the curve. And second, on the basis that only the radical Enlightenment was equipped to beget such an uncompromising agenda, readers have to buy into the idea that these men were the intellectual offspring of Spinoza.
Few informed contemporaries would have trusted Brissot and Mirabeau with the silverware, let alone the future of western civilization. From Mirabeau’s secretive double dealings with Louis XVI to Brissot’s intermittent Rousseauianism, the hard evidence too often seems at odds with Israel’s reading. Together these men left reams of published and unpublished scribblings, before and after 1789, which contain almost no sign of any serious familiarity with the works of d’Holbach, let alone his intellectual forefathers. And strangely, in its rush to challenge prevailing scholarly narratives of just about every major actor and event of the revolution, Revolutionary Ideas too often forgets to help the reader through the basics. Whilst the volume runs to over 700 pages, the Bastille falls in half a paragraph and the flight to Varennes is covered only through the reactions of major figures. The war context is largely conspicuous by its absence. As such, this is not a book for the uninitiated. But those specialists willing to look beyond the failings of Revolutionary Ideas will find an enormously rich and engaging work that invites us to think and to challenge received wisdom.