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The Rise of Freedom: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

The Age of Revolutions

A Philosophical History of Freedom

The Age of Revolutions

  • Popular Sovereignty
  • The theory of limited power
  • Two Revolutions Compared
  • From the Revolt of the Third Estate to the Jacobin Terror
The great novelty of this modern period in Western history is the emergence of a society that organizes itself outside of religious dependency. This does not mean the disappearance of religious belief or the death of God. But God becomes a private matter, no longer mixed with political affairs. There is no disappearance of religion but a dethroning of its guiding role. It becomes a system of individual beliefs.
The secularization of the Western world did not occur overnight. It was prepared with ideas. As is often the case, philosophy is at the forefront of major cultural changes.
Since Machiavelli and Hobbes, man is understood as a being of passions, animated by contradictory tendencies. It was therefore necessary to find regulatory principles for these passions to avoid the conflicts and violence they lead to.
We have talked about economists and their advocacy for the free market. But for many philosophers, the solution to the problem rather presupposes the establishment of a sovereign power through a legal contract.
Until the 18th century, the primary political concern for these philosophers was that of sovereignty. It is primarily a question of justice: who can legitimately exercise sovereignty?

Popular Sovereignty

The idea was inspired by Locke in the 17th century and then taken up by Rousseau. Sovereign power must not only come from the free will of the people but also reside in it. This is the Rousseauist theory of the sovereignty of the general will, which we refer to as democracy today.
Rousseau conceives of the people as autonomous individuals capable of subjecting themselves to the laws they establish. The free will of the people constitutes the only just foundation of sovereignty. Rousseau would develop this legal humanism, characteristic of Modernity, to its ultimate consequences by conceiving of the people as an individual capable of freely self-determining or as a collective entity, such as a general will. Thus, the contract involves submission to laws that man, as the general will, gives to himself as a particular will. The theory of the general will or the sovereignty of the people thus allows for the reconciliation of freedom and submission. The self-institution of the law or political autonomy has indeed been an essential component of democracy since Rousseau.
But the question of the origin of sovereignty is not the only one. Reflection can take a new direction, namely, the mode of exercising sovereignty. Is the general will always just? And above all, is it authorized to intervene in civil society and within what limits?

The theory of limited power

One of the Enlightenment philosophers whose influence was very strong in France and America is John Locke. He was the inspiration behind the Founding Fathers of the United States, but also of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789
All previous systems had considered that freedoms are only privileges granted by power, granted under an authorization that can be revoked at any time. For Locke, a man's life is his own under a natural right (meaning: under a moral principle inherent in human nature) and that the only moral purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights.
Locke assigns to the state the mission of defending individual property, meaning "life, liberty, and estate":
The great and chief end, therefore, which men unite into commonwealths, and put themselves under government, is the preservation of their property. (Two Treatises of Government, § 87).
Thomas Jefferson inscribed Locke's theory of inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Furthermore, Article 2 of the French Declaration of the Rights of 1789 also draws inspiration from this Lockean tradition of natural law:
The goal of any political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

Two Revolutions Compared

The American Revolution was led by men who spoke of fundamental inalienable rights. It led to the formation of a decentralized and limited rule of law state. On the other side of the Atlantic, another political experiment unfolded: the French Revolution, which began as a courageous revolt of the people, ultimately ended in a series of massacres, bloody internal conflicts, and paved the way for the military dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. Why such a difference?
In the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political philosopher, attempted to pinpoint these differences between the two sister revolutions. He attributes the success of the American Revolution to several factors.
Firstly, in defining the republic. The French Republic is one and indivisible. The American Republic is composed of sovereign states, each possessing its jurisdiction and local interests. Federalism is considered treason in France. In America, treason would consist of wanting to impose unity. Until the American Civil War, at least, the Union, with its diversity of States, was the strength of the Federation.
He also argues that America's faith in a higher law played a decisive role. The Declaration of Independence proclaims all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights (life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness) and that the purpose of a government is solely to secure these rights. It was about restoring principles and ideals that were trampled underfoot by the British crown.
The First Amendment of the American Constitution, drafted in 1789, states: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This formulation explicitly protects against the tyranny of the majority. However, the French Revolution was quite different. The French sought to break completely with the past. The age-old principles of the Christian heritage no longer met the expectations of revolutionaries like Robespierre.

From the Revolt of the Third Estate to the Jacobin Terror

Abbé Sieyès (1748-1836) is often regarded as the father of the French Revolution. He is the author of What is the Third Estate?, published in January 1789
The Third Estate comprised all those who did not belong to the clergy or the nobility. From the very first lines of his famous pamphlet, Abbé Sieyès praised individual liberties and free competition:
Isn't the effect of monopoly known? If it discourages those it excludes, is it not known that it makes those it favors less skilled? Is it not known that any work from which free competition is removed will be done more expensively and in a worse manner?
The night of August 4, 1789, is a foundational event of the French Revolution, even more significant than July 14, which was later chosen as the national holiday. Indeed, during the session held at that time, the Constituent Assembly brought an end to the feudal system. Privileges were abolished, including those of the nobles and the clergy. In March 1791, after several months of legal limbo, guilds were also abolished, and complete freedom of labor was established. The Revolution ratified Turgot's work. But not for long...
By the end of 1791, famine had exacerbated popular unrest in France. Riots paralyzed the grain trade, and bread was scarce. A vast movement demanded the agrarian law, that is, the distribution by the State of wheat production. The Assembly, however, resisted this attempt at collectivization. Initially, it voted for the confiscation of Church properties and, in a second step, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.
The confiscation of Church properties aimed to avert the financial crisis; it was intended to serve as collateral for the Assignats, meaning a massive issuance of paper money. Furthermore, as Dupont de Nemours had predicted, the issuance of counterfeit currency only worsened the crisis, causing widespread inflation and a sharp decline in the value of the Assignats. In August 1792, the hunger riots led to the insurrection of Paris, the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, and ultimately, the Reign of Terror.
In 1795, five years after the first issuance, the paper money had lost 99% of its value. The French Revolution continued under the Directory until 1799, when Napoleon seized power through a coup d'état. He became the First Consul of the French Republic before being crowned Emperor in 1804. This was one of the first glaring contradictions with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which proclaimed that private property was inviolable.
In America, there was no economic dirigisme, nor a monetary bankruptcy like that of the Assignats. And above all, there were no proscriptions, no mass emigrations, no guillotine, no massacres, and no Reign of Terror. Immediately, one can see the difference in the means of action that separates the American Revolution from the French Revolution.
With Rousseau and Robespierre, the French sought to believe that the Nation or the general will had unlimited power and justified all actions. From the fact that the people governed, it was concluded that they had all rights. There was clearly a contradiction between the great principles of the Revolution and the means employed to make them triumph.
This is, moreover, the meaning of the remark by Friedrich Hayek in his book The Constitution of Liberty:
The decisive factor that rendered vain the efforts of the Revolution in favor of the promotion of individual liberty was that it created the illusion that, insofar as all power had been handed over to the people, all precautions against the abuse of this power had become unnecessary.
Quiz
Quiz1/5
What were the main objectives of the State according to Locke?