French Revolution

Background

Quigley locates the French Revolution inside the longer Western Civilization cycle he develops in Tragedy and Hope and The Evolution of Civilizations. The eighteenth century, in his periodization, was the second Age of Expansion of Western Civilization (his dating varies, but roughly 1690–1815, overlapping with what most historians call the long eighteenth century plus the Revolutionary–Napoleonic wars) (T&H 25, 39). The cultural register of this Age of Expansion — what Quigley repeatedly calls 'the spirit which prompted the outburst of self-reliance and optimism so characteristic of the whole period from 1770 to 1914' — found its political expression in 1789 (T&H 39).

The immediate background, however, was specific and French: the financial crisis of the late 1780s, produced by Bourbon support for the American Revolution combined with structural under-taxation of the privileged orders; the calling of the Estates-General in May 1789 in an attempt to broaden the tax base; the tactical-procedural fight over voting (head versus order); the Third Estate's self-constitution as a National Assembly (17 June 1789); and the Tennis Court Oath (20 June). The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 became the symbolic moment of revolutionary irreversibility (T&H 39–55).

Quigley's analytical interest is not in the revolutionary narrative per se — he treats it as well covered elsewhere — but in its position in the larger civilizational arc. He returns repeatedly to the same point: the Revolution dramatized, in extreme form, the eighteenth-century conviction that 'man is innately good and needs but to be freed from social restrictions' — the proposition out of which Western Civilization would build its industrial, scientific, and political achievements until 1914 (T&H 39).

Quigley's framing

Quigley's reading of the Revolution as the political expression of a cultural register is unusually compressed in the corpus. 'It was this spirit which set loose the French Revolution. It was this spirit which prompted the outburst of self-reliance and optimism so characteristic of the whole period from 1770 to 1914. Obviously, if man is innately good and needs but to be freed from social restrictions, he is capable of tremendous achievements in this world of time' (T&H 39). The Revolution is, in this reading, less a discrete political event than the public dramatization of an assumption about human nature that the Industrial Revolution, scientific optimism, parliamentary democracy, and laissez-faire economics would all subsequently institutionalize as the operating premise of nineteenth-century Western Civilization.

A second strand of Quigley's reading is in the financial-historical chapters of Tragedy and Hope. The Revolution, the Directory, and Napoleon's rise were partly underwritten by Protestant Swiss bankers — specifically the Geneva-Basel group around Necker, Mallet, Hentsch, and Hottinguer — whose financial interests Quigley traces with unusual specificity. 'These bankers, all Protestant, were deeply involved in the agitations leading up to the French Revolution. When the revolutionary violence got out of hand, they were the chief forces behind the rise of Napoleon, whom they regarded as the restorer of order. As a reward for this support, Napoleon in 1800 gave these bankers a monopoly over French financial life by giving them control of the new Bank of France' (T&H 528). This is one of Quigley's most explicit accounts of how a financial-banking network can be present at and shape the outcome of a major political upheaval — a pattern he applies generally throughout the corpus.

A third strand is the doctoral-thesis register. Quigley's own first major scholarly work was the doctoral study The Public Administration of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, which examined how the post-revolutionary administrative state was exported to and adapted in Italy. The French Revolution, in this register, is interesting to Quigley primarily as the source of the bureaucratic-administrative innovations — prefectoral government, codified law, centralized fiscal administration, conscription, statistical census — that Napoleon institutionalized and exported to the territories under French control between 1796 and 1814 (Quigley, 'Napoleonic Italy,' 1938).

Course of the Revolution

Quigley's narrative treatment of the Revolution itself is compressed but covers the standard phases: the Constituent Assembly (1789–1791), with the August 1789 abolition of feudalism, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the civil constitution of the clergy, and the constitutional monarchy of 1791; the Legislative Assembly (1791–1792), with the declaration of war on Austria in April 1792 and the September Massacres; the Convention (1792–1795), with the trial and execution of Louis XVI (January 1793), the Reign of Terror under Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety (1793–1794), Thermidor (July 1794), and the Directory (1795–1799); and the Consulate and Empire (1799–1815), with Napoleon's reorganization of the French state along administrative-bureaucratic lines that survived every subsequent French regime change of the nineteenth century.

Quigley's distinctive emphasis is on the way the British financial-imperial system — the Bank of England, the national debt, the gold standard — outlasted the French Revolution and the Napoleonic challenge: 'Britain's victories over Louis XIV in the period 1667-1715 and over the French Revolutionary governments and Napoleon in 1792-1815 had many causes, such as its insular position, its ability to retain control of the sea, its ability to present itself to the world as the defender of the freedoms and rights of small nations and of diverse social and religious groups. Among these numerous causes, there were a financial one and an economic one. Financially, England had discovered the secret of credit' (T&H 63). The Revolution and the Empire, in this reading, are episodes in a longer Anglo-French competition that Britain wins largely because of structural financial advantages that France did not match (T&H 63–70).

Consequences

The Revolution's substantive consequences, in Quigley's reading, were administrative and ideological rather than territorial. The post-1815 Bourbon Restoration did not restore the Ancien Régime; the Napoleonic Code, the prefectoral system, the centralized fiscal administration, the metric system, the secular civil registry, and the formal equality of citizens before the law all survived. Every subsequent French regime — Restoration, July Monarchy, Second Republic, Second Empire, Third Republic — inherited these innovations and exported them, especially through the Napoleonic codes adopted by Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, parts of Germany, Spain, Latin America, and (later) Japan and the Ottoman successor states.

Ideologically, the Revolution produced the ideological vocabulary of the nineteenth century: liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and (in reaction) conservatism. The 'spirit' Quigley identifies at T&H 39 was both a vital source of industrial and scientific achievement and a corrosive force on every institution that had survived from the Ancien Régime — including, by the late nineteenth century, the religious and family institutions that had structured European life for centuries before. The 'tragedy' of his book's title is partly the working-out of this corrosive dimension: a Western Civilization whose initial revolutionary optimism produced two centuries of expansion and then, in the First World War, exhausted the social and religious foundations on which the optimism had silently rested (T&H 1305–1311).

In the Milner Group register, the French Revolution and Napoleonic period are pre-history: the Group's network would not exist for another eighty years. But the Anglo-French rivalry the Revolution dramatized is the same rivalry that produced, by the 1890s, the imperial-federation movement and the Anglo-French diplomatic re-alignment that the Group's founding generation took as given (AAE 4–6; T&H 60–75).

Legacy

For Quigley the French Revolution is most important as the dramatized form of an underlying cultural shift — the eighteenth-century conviction that human nature is innately good and that institutional reform is sufficient for human flourishing. He treats this conviction as both the engine of Western Civilization's third Age of Expansion and as the source of the civilizational over-confidence that produced 1914. The Revolution itself is, in this analytical frame, less a foundational event than a public manifestation of a much longer cultural transformation (T&H 39, 1305–1311).

Methodologically, the Revolution is also Quigley's clearest example of how a banking network can shape an apparently popular upheaval — the Swiss Protestant banker network's role in financing the Bourbon collapse, navigating the revolutionary chaos, and reinstating order through Napoleon is a template he applies in compressed form to the Dawes Plan, to the founding of the Federal Reserve, and to the inter-war financial coordination of the 1920s (T&H 528–530). The pattern — public political upheaval, private financial continuity — is one of the recurring structures of his corpus.