By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
The French Revolution , which began in 1789, unfolded in several phases over the next ten years, only acquiring a “stability” character when Napoleon Bonaparte applied the so-called “18 Brumaire Coup”, which made it possible to install the Consulate. This Consulate, as we know, lasted until 1804, when Napoleon, through a plebiscite, managed to consecrate himself Emperor of France. From 1789 to 1799, France was in political and social turmoil. The revolutionary wave that spread through it ended up contaminating practically the entire European continent, as well as nations from other continents, such as Brazil.
However, despite being considered an event of undeniable importance, there were many analysts who took a critical position on the configuration that the French Revolution ended up taking. One of them was the Irishman Edmund Burke , who, in 1790 – even before the Jacobin “terror” – already denounced the danger of the French revolutionaries repudiating the customs and traditions of their country. In the 19th century, a French politician and historian named Alexis de Tocqueville , with a liberal-conservative political orientation, established a very unique critique of the 1789 revolution, presented in his work The Old Regime and the Revolution .
Tocqueville, analyzing the Revolution's antecedents, realized that, in addition to a strictly national political revolution, such as the one that had taken place in England in 1688, the French Revolution was prepared by a network of international ideas, “planted” by Enlightenment philosophers throughout the 18th century. The circulation of these ideas in French urban centers produced the search for revolutionary action not simply in the name of the French, but in the name of Man and Citizen in an abstract way. Thus, what we had was more than a “bourgeois revolution”, but a revolution of greater proportions, which Tocqueville compares with religious revolutions:
The French Revolution acted in relation to this world just as religious revolutions act in relation to the other. It has considered the citizen in an abstract way, outside of any particular society, in the same way that religions consider man in general, regardless of country and time. He did not only research what was the particular right of the French citizen, but also what were the general duties and rights of men in political matters .¹
Tocqueville continues his analysis:
As it seemed to aspire even more to the regeneration of the human race than to the reform of France, it kindled a passion that the most violent political revolutions never managed to produce. until then. It inspired proselytism and generated propaganda. This is how it took on this air of religious revolution that so terrified its contemporaries, or rather, it became a kind of new religion itself, an imperfect religion, it is true, without God, without cult, without beyond, but which, nevertheless, like Islam, flooded the whole earth with its soldiers, apostles and martyrs .¹
It is clear that, in the same way as the wars provoked by the advent of Protestantism, which spread throughout Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, or the wars of Islamic expansion, in the VII and VIII, the French Revolution would have produced, according to Tocqueville, a “creed”, a perspective of transformation of this world whose limit was “total perfection”. It is not for nothing that the Jacobin Robespierre instituted an atheistic religion in France called “The Cult of Reason and the Supreme Being”.
NOTES
¹ TOCQUEVILLE, Alexis. The Old Regime and the Revolution . trans. Yvonne Jean. Brasília:Editora Universidade de Brasília, 1997. P. 60.
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