Yeah hello is this working okay welcome my name is Steven Szabo I’m a visiting fellow right now at the Institute and I’m delighted to be able to moderate this session with my good friend Yvonne VA Laura as you probably know Yvonne is well known to
Both on this both on this side of the Atlantic and in the Washington as well in the US he’s one of those rare people that has really combined reflection with action he’s been both an academic and very much an activist and also an important adviser in the Serbian
Government just to give you a little background he served as vice president for programs at the German Marshall Fund in Washington where we were together for ten years and before that he was executive director Estes until this year and then before that he was executive director of the trust for Vulcan
Democracy which is also a German Marshall Fund program before that he also was involved in the Serbian government serving as an advisor he also worked for the Open Society Institute and he held academic posts in McAlester College and also Smith College in the US and the University of Sussex he’s
Written extensively and democracy transition totalitarianism and post work reconstruction and of course he was very much involved in the democratic movement in Serbia in the 1990s so Yvonne I’m delighted to be able to be back with you again you know our topic today is really the French Revolution
And the legacy of the French Revolution so I will turn it over to Yvonne and then we’ll you’ll speak for a bit I’ll ask him a few questions and then we’ll open the floor for a discussion so he went Steves thank you very much and let me just reciprocate and saying that
Professor Steve Sabo is a renowned expert on Germany he’s written many books he worked with big Brzezinski who was his professor I believe and ran something called the transonic Academy in Washington at the German Marshall Fund with co-operation with several big german foundations the bosch Tifton kissin and
Site and every year there was a different topic and this year it all ended with the topic on germany but most of all steve is a wonderful person and it’s great that we’re both together for this opportunity I’d like to thank the organizers of the festival for giving me
The honor to speak about what I would call the mother of all revolutions to use a very American phrase because the French Revolution not only because we all studied it in our history classes in school and high school and those who went on to do social sciences because it
Captures the mind whether it’s the famous or infamous quote of mahi Antoinette kill Mazda brioche that they should eat cake if there’s no bread or if it’s the terror under hobbies Pierre and Sandhurst in 1793 or the term a durian reaction it is a model on which all further revolutions were somehow
Imprinted the Russian Revolution was seen through the eyes of the French Revolution the same terms were being used thermidorian reaction when Stalin came to power but also the subsequent French revolutions in 1830 leisure una de 1848 the Paris Commune in 1871 there’s a line of French revolutions
That follow Hannah Arendt in her famous book on revolution those of you who have read it know that she compared in in great analytical and political philosophical detail the similarities and differences and even though the American Revolution is equally important she mentions the fact that the French Revolution is better remembered because
Somehow the Americans weren’t as good at remembering and pushing forward putting forward their experience and thus the French Revolution remains the key one of course one must understand that the French Revolution comes as part of what Alexis de Tocqueville called the modern Democratic revolutions begun with the English revolution with Cromwell in the
Late 17th century and of course for the first known for the first beheading of their King Charles the first in 1649 this was followed by the Dutch revolution that was just as prominent the Golden Age of the Netherlands then the American Revolution and the the the Constitution the Declaration of Rights
And then only the French Revolution but then so it forms part of a family of a transition as we would call it today a an epoch changing dynamic where basically Europe comes out of feudalism where the rights of the nobility of the clergy and where the Divine transcendence of power the fact that
Power is seen legitimized by the fact that God embraces the monarchy the king the queen and so there’s a line from the sky and God down to the king and over the people so the sovereign is the king what happens and this is probably the most important feature of the
Revolutions and in particular of the French Revolution is this is really the end this is where the people the individual becomes center stage of modern human society as the American Constitution says we the people last event a popular the sovereignty of the people and this is basically the
Fundament on which we still stand today the fact that we were born as modern political societies in those and during those revolutions and again the French one stands out because of everything that happened to it of course this does not happen ex nihilo it doesn’t happen on the 14th of July with
The storming of the Bastille the busty day as it is called in English it’s the result of the long both historical societal political and intellectual dynamic and the first one I would like to mention of course is the Enlightenment la lumière and the names that are associated with it are of
Course the french encyclopaedists Montesquieu Voltaire Rousseau but things are never as simple because there’s a close relationship with those who are now going to leave the European Union with the United Kingdom with Britain because the Scottish Enlightenment was very important in influencing the French enlightenment Hume all the philosophers
And they were widely read by the French academics and thinkers of the 18th century Montesquieu in particular was influenced and inspired by English politics by the way that they managed after their revolution through more of an evolutionary process to come to the kind of relatively stable political
System governed by a parliament yes it was a monarchic parliamentary system but still had the trappings of something stable where opinions were confronted and British society moved on so just as in today’s world things were very interlinked and we cannot observe this movement as something in the French
Revolution that is a sui generis thing it comes related to what’s before and what’s after only to mention of course that general Lafayette went to help the fight off the British and liberate themselves from the colonizer or someone like Thomas Paine who worked on both sides of the Revolution in his rights of
Man and in Thomas Paine and the rights of man there’s this famous sentence which says that every generation has a right to rewrite the way that they act in society together and that a revolution is something that is quote unquote allowed that is even positive
For a society to move forward and it is as you know the rights of man was that was a best-seller as we would say it was sold in thousands and hundreds of thousands of copies the same success in France was a book by an Abbott Lobby CAS
Who wrote a book Kiska lolita what is the Third Estate the Third Estate are of course the people because the two first the states the clergy and the nobility were those who along with the King were running a country and so the rise of the situation of the bourgeois of those who
Actually made society work through their economic activity rose slowly to to prominence AB ACS’s book sold 30,000 copies in four weeks time it was published in January of 1989 so you know when we think back to this period of more than 200 years ago through the eyes
Of what we now know as the social media as Twitter and the speed of the spread of information it was very much in very speedy in those days relative to the kind of things that they had books and of course books were read by more than
The person who bought them and so this book of CAS was really one of the groundbreaking elements apart from of course everyone reading the books of the 18th century of Montesquieu of the encyclopedist of Voltaire and then in particular of who saw who advocated of course the the general will and the public
And the public good so what we have is a basis of a popular movement and of course the economic side of it was that France had a number of very bad harvests in the preceding years there was hunger so not to be too Marxist about it there was a socio-economic aspect to the
Reason why why the people rose along with the intellectual influence that came from the the French and and the other ideas of the of the Enlightenment and so you have a dynamic that is basically a snowballing effect that begins at the beginning of 1989 and there’s an acceleration of historical
Events there is the march of the women the famous march of women on Versailles where the women in the Parisian markets are unhappy with what is happening and they decide to take things into their own hands and go to the seat of power there is of course the convocation of
The estates-general the a Taj Mahal where the Third Estate is for the first time implicated and where the King goes along with this and where there is the forming of the National Assembly which very quickly in June becomes the National Assembly and where in fact the
Third Estate of about a hundred of 580 representatives is equal to the representatives of the clergy and of the nobility that are about two hundred and fifty 60 each and you have this political dynamic which then leads of course to the storming of the Bastille in July and then in fact the the
Outbreak or the outpouring of a democratic atmosphere which was crucially linked to the creation of a public sphere there there is of course there was a salon intellectual during the 18th century the late 18th century where there was this movement of ideas of high class third estate people meet
And discussing the Palais Royale was a was a particular meeting place those of you have been in Paris should know that that’s where some of the fomenting of these developments occurred and then it spills out onto the street because of the hunger because of the dissatisfaction and in preparation of
The estates-general that took place in May and June of nineteen seventeen eighty-nine there is a preparation throughout France where people are asked to write their grievances and they are put in what we’re called the Calle de dólares the the the notebooks of grievances and there are about 40,000
Grievances that are put together in this Calle so you see a very broad-based involvement where people finally have a door open to say what they’re worried concerned about anxious about and this all comes to the Versailles where there is this meeting and we’re actually there
Is a huge pressure on the King on the monarchy to to reform and of course you know the the end is known the this brings to the end the monarchy in France the King tries to run away and also there’s a sermon the sermon of the Judah
Poem it’s a kind of a pledge that these people all of the main revolutionaries who are there all together at the beginning pledge that they will work for the people and move towards a regime of popular sovereignty it is epitomized in a famous drawing painting by jean-louis
David that hangs in Versailles today and it’s one of the kind of epic epic paintings just a bracket on genre dahveed he is one of the deputies of the assembly who voted for the death of the king and when the reaction of Termidor happened a lot of these people had to
Leave France and escape because they were being now hunted by the reactionary people and Jean weeda weeda spent the last days of his life in Brussels painting portraits of Belgian nobility and if you go to the Museum in Brussels you will see a number of his paintings there but he’s also
Famous for that painting of genre maja who is in that bathtub with with skin problems it is a fascinating story where there are so many strands and just let me mention a few of them as you know there is a Declaration of the Rights of Man or the human being and and the
Citizen and as I mentioned women were very involved and there was a parallel Declaration of the Rights of Woman and female citizens in 1791 by someone who later became as the feminist movement occurred in the 60s and 70s and a lot of these women’s stories were told is or lamp
De Guiche who wrote this declaration advocating for for for women’s rights she was unfortunately one of the victims of the terror and was guillotine before Danton and before Robespierre and and san juste met their end at the guillotine also the france revolution in france abolished slavery in all of its
Colonies in 1794 so a very early move to liberate slaves this was unfortunately then restored by Napoleon in 1802 but high tea the island of Haiti received its independence at that year and ended slavery on its territory a little-known fact is that Haiti is the second republic in the new continent of America
Of course the America being the first republic in haiti being the second unfortunately we see the different fates of the US and and Haiti today I think what’s interesting to note is that of course the bases were put forward for a liberal democratic we would say today
Rule based on the sovereignty of people but it took actually France 100 years to finally achieve what we would call Democratic stability for all intents and purposes and that was in 1870 when the Third Republic in France occurred France went through a really true holder rollercoaster of
Regimes you know if you count all of them there were about ten of them there was a revolution the first Republic the first Empire with Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy the Second Republic the Second Empire the the revolutions that I mentioned in July
1830 1848 and then later in 1871 and so it’s very important to note that time needs time if I can put it that way that you know when we those of us who follow Ukraine for example and are very anxious about the fact that the oligarchs still
Have a lot of power that there are a lot of young people in the Parliament who want to make change that we read every day about this friction between those who want to reform and make Ukraine a more democratic place and on the other hand those who want to keep their
Privileges and their vested interests one has to sort of remind oneself that these things take time and that obviously probably hopefully it won’t take a hundred years like it did in France but that there should be an understanding without neglecting or without not needing to criticize the bad
Things that are happening this is some frustrating most of all for those who live in the country and I myself come from Serbia from a country that used to be called Yugoslavia that disappeared in front of our eyes and so as Hannah Arendt says in her book on revolution expect the unknown and
Expect that there are possibilities for the creation of the new and the French Revolution did want to create everything AB ovo a new man a new calendar a new society new system of governance and there was true popular belief in this just like there was at Euro Maidan in Kiev when
The people came out and said they want to join Europe as you know the official Russian version is that this was a conspiracy in the coup d’etat and that this was all fake and it’s again as if they in the Soviet Union had never read Marx that there is actually something
Called people power and that the people where when they’re unhappy or hungry or dissatisfied with the leaders they will come out into the street and that they will voice in that famous book of Alfred Hirshman voice loyalty and and exit their people do have voice they don’t
Always use it they won’t use it if they’re half satisfied or quarter satisfied but they’re if they’re totally unsatisfied they will come out and they will change things if they see fit and that is really what the modern democratic revolutions were about let me
Not speak for too long and end on on a on a final note that has more to do with again the introduction on the fact that this came out of ideas that were fermenting gestating and maturing during the 18th century and that is that the French Revolution in this whole dynamic
Gave birth to two main strands of political philosophical thinking and that was liberalism and socialism this is where the gestation of a variety of thinkers like Tocqueville and constant on the liberal side or the socialist utopians like faux pas and Simone Cobb a and and who Don and others came out and
These two strands basically appeared because these people are sort of fellows at that time we’re trying to understand was happening what was this big change with the Industrial Revolution with the societal changes with the changes in political power and they tried to explain to themselves this world and to
Forecast what was needed and where it was going and somehow these two strands remained the principle strands of all of our political thinking I would say until very recently socialism is not having a pretty good time we see that Social Democratic parties are kind of losing a
Bit everywhere we saw that in France we see with mr. Schultz in Germany that he is really not doing quite as well as he expected Austria you are more expert than I am on what is going on here but the demise of socialism generally or you
Know and we could have a very deep debate on what actually socialism means and what was socialism in the in the Communist world but let’s leave that to the side but I would say that in in a way we have been dominated by discussion and that now is changing so we’re going
Through another sort of questioning you know is there a West is there liberalism is is there something else but going back to that time this is really what defined the the political sphere this is what defined how the the intellectuals influenced or didn’t politics and someone like Tocqueville I think who
Wrote this book on the ancien régime a la revolucion apart from his famous book on democracy in America both that are still very much worth reading if you’re interested in politics generally in political philosophy but one of the lessons that one draws from Tocqueville’s ancien régime la
Revolucion and that is what I was alluding to a little earlier is that the old regime still lives for a very long time in the new regime and that this is one of the impeding factors speed your movement to change in in society the famous Hungarian sociologist elemér hunky she wrote beautifully about
This when he wrote about the annus mirabilis the annus mirabilis and kind of the subsequent years of the change in 89 when change happens suddenly people believe that it will all change at the same time in that suddenly the Sun will start shining behind the dark facade of communism or authoritarianism and then
There’s the slow realization that in fact to build that shiny facade if it ever is built it takes time and engagement and actually going back to this talk villian idea the old regime is there for a very long time pulling backwards or the abuse if you want of
The change by those who used to be political winners and now become economic winners and hold the levers of economic power so all that I think is is very relevant and that’s why it is worth looking at the French Revolution it was also the birthplace of sociology Emile
Durkheim the one of the fathers founding fathers of sociology wrote one of his famous thought is that now society is the new god the fact that we live with each other that we alone define the way that we want to organize the ways of power of a society the fact that we are
Tending towards a an institutional arrangement where freedom is institutionalized but there is no such thing as absolute freedom freedom is always constrained you know you read your Hegel or or others and the secret there of course is how does one use institutions to cushion the effects of
Conflicts which will always be there and obviously the first person in modern political terms to write about this was Machiavelli in the Renaissance so that’s really where the line go towards the formation of modern politics because Machiavelli understood that there was a secular realm of power possible and secondly the conflict would
Always be there and so the art of freedom and of creating a democratic system was how does one allow for conflict or disagreement or a difference of views that in the end comes together through discussion and compromise and that is really something that is the bedrock of democracy and that is the
Uncertainty of democracy and that is why democracy whether it starts with the French Revolution or the American is one that needs to be nurtured every day when you get up it’s not given on a silver plate it’s not given forever it’s something that’s recreated every day the French political philosopher Claude
Lafleur called it la mancha undemocratic and wrote very eloquently about the empty space of power it’s really the institutions that are the space of power and whoever sits in that space cannot be the one that is seen as leading it is the institutions to put it all to simply
Are the ones that have the power to be and final final anecdote or thought is I’m sure many of you have heard that during the the visit of Richard Nixon to China in 1972 when the ping-pong diplomacy broke open the relations between the US and China to enliven
Umber to to mouth the tongue was asked by one of the Americans what do you think of the French Revolution and he famously said well it’s too early to tell now it’s like with Marie Antoinette and the Hilmar laborers let them eat cake
I went and did a bit of research I did a lot of work on on the French Revolution in 1989 and actually helped me understand all the difficulties that we in the post car world were going to encounter and I was a little more I would say self-satisfied
That I was informed about the difficulties that were going to occur and thus a little less dissatisfied by the difficulties that occurred but in these two aspects it is actually you who saw who in his confessions says that a a princess at one point in the mid 18th
Century said that they should eat cake so there’s there’s a bit of apocryphal stuff here and the same goes for true and lie a british diplomat said actually that it was probably a misunderstanding that someone was asking to in lie about the 1968 french revolution and that of
Course four years later it was too early to tell but of course that was totally irrelevant because this story is much much more fun to say that he actually said well two hundred years thank you i was a great quote i didn’t realize she said brioche because in the USC we’d
Think we used to eat cake you think of torta you know and that brioche but in any case thank you so much yvonne it was really we should come to the wall us and say this the to the american people do they need to hear it but anyway i
Thought i would just ask a couple of questions more contemporary about the concepts today of liberty equality fraternity but certainly when we have the discussion feel free to to go back to the french revolution if you’d like a couple of questions for you before we
Open it up the first one of course and i have this bad feeling that were at this end of a liberal era we a lot there’s a lot of discussion about this now I’m just reading Carl Schurz cos wonderful book about Vienna at the turn of the
Century we talks about the death of Austrian liberalism at that time and I get their feeling sometimes we’re going through that in the United States and different ways but in any case the key code the key question I have is concerns the balance between these three concepts which are always in tension between
Those three of but do you see an imbalance today between liberty and equality which is undermining fraternity and given us you know that we talked about the u.s. is a one percenters are they increasing concentration of wealth and what that means absolutely thanks thanks very much Steve
– to bring it to contemporary issues and concerns that we all have – two introductory points and the first one is that and Hannah Arendt talks about this very eloquently in her book on revolution and that is the salience the importance of this social question what
She calls the social question as one of the main differences between the American and the French Revolution and that finally the social question was really one of the reasons for the downfall of the French democratic process we would probably say today the appearance of the terror under Robespierre although I must say
Robespierre is a very complicated figure and those of you who like your Booker Prize novelists Hilary mantel who wrote Wolf Hall and about Thomas Cromwell wrote actually 25 years ago a great book on the French Revolution called a place of greater safety where she talks about the debates between Robespierre and
Donto and Mulan really I would I would recommend it and I think that also speaks to the French Revolution and its importance that a lot of authors have gone back to it just to mention Buettner and danton’s death for example or other novelists and and the artists who have
Done on this so the social question and this is relevant to your question of inequality or equality I think is one that that plagues us as all fraternity this is the second remark we could today call solidarity or the sense of belonging to a one human kind where one
Does have to pay respect to the to the rights of the other person to be able to put yourselves into the shoes of the other person a French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote a book called lumen is Mandela Tom the humanism of the other person so as to understand even
Though we’re different there are these needs to put oneself into the skin of the other and understand and you know just to mention it on pass all the VHF and us of of Angela Merkel I think is a kind of show of solidarity whatever problems or disagreements we
May have about the way it was done or or announced or or not announced so I think the key point that I would like to make in answering your question is that certainly in equality today is one of the driving forces of what is happening and without wanting to simplify anything
The fact that people the the the Isetta of today the Third Estate the middle class is feeling that they are losing out and have been for the past 20 years basically since the Reagan Thatcher revolution the deregulation of the financial markets the fact that they feel that their salaries are at best
Stagnating if not falling while the famous 1% is ever growing richer is something where there has been resilience people have been patient waiting for subsequent people whom they have elected leaders to somehow address this and with then with the financial crisis of 2008 that basically hasn’t
Ended I mean we have low levels of growth we have of course the the migration crisis is piled up on top of that there’s a demographic issue and so the liberty and the agel ET are out of sync because I think one of the ideas of the revolution and and that’s the I
Think Tocqueville is the one who who somehow formulates it in his book on democracy in America where he says there needs to be an equality of conditions of course we can’t all be equal but at least the starting point there’s has to be some kind of level playing field
Where we can have the equal opportunity to to achieve and then given very social political economic and other factors you know this this will there will be a kind of of separation this is of course a great desi there Adam and the reality of society of modern
He dictates otherwise you know call it class conflict if you want to use the marketing term that has driven the history through the 19th century in the early 20th century but the the other aspect of it which goes back to people power is that the conditions of equality
And Liberty have always needed to be fought for in the street in institutions the right to vote universal suffrage the right to an eight-hour working day the the right of women to vote all of these things again it was not given by anyone on a silver plate you know let’s
Remember that in Switzerland women got the right to vote in 1971 these are things that you need to fight for and so I think that and that’s why maybe people are asking will there be a new revolution you know will will the pressures be such that that that people
Will go out and and things like brexit and and the victory of Trump I would say are manifestations of this dissatisfaction not that one condones it or likes it but there’s been something of a disillusionment with the elites on the power on the part of the Third Estate there’s been a disgruntlement
About the fact that equality is being lost and so there’s a Liberty being used to vote out or simply to one change and unfortunately as we see that change is not always the change that one would democratically want yeah I think yet it’s a very good point a part of the
Problem too is that we don’t have the kind of cohesive organizations that we had in the past like trade unions that would do to help organize people or political parties that they I was just in Hungary yesterday talking to some young people who are trying to organize through the internet you know opposition
These are the people that did the opposition to the Olympic Games coming to Budapest and we’re successful in getting that change but can the Internet and the social media really make up for the Solidarity that you had with Czech trade unions political parties like Social Democratic parties and so on
One last question I love and that goes back to the idea of fraternity and if you the French always had this compared to the Germans Germans had a view of citizenship that they just changed recently of sort of pasty had me born German to get German citizenship the
French always had as you pointed out this idea that if you accept French culture and ideals secularism today you could be French and now of course that’s radically changing not only in France but I would say in Europe and in the United States that so it does this
Concept a fraternity today have to be reshaped to include not just those of the national community but immigrants and refugees or in the case of Europe as I have to even expand to the EU is this idea that or as fraternity really based upon cultural and ethnic identity and is
It which is undermining which is being undermined by the broader concept of eternity I mean can you have fraternity beyond that sort of cultural that’s a tough one I I’m a true believer in in European as’ but I never thought that a United States of Europe was possible give a given our
History here in Europe and that there was always going to be this kind of balance between a kind of at best a multiple layered identity you know you’re you’re from Vienna Austria kind of Central Europe Europe and not making kind of to too strong a hierarchy but bundling that all together I think
That’s what kind of a lot of people who feel themselves Europeans would not renege on you know where they’re their base bears baseline is I think one of the problems that we are confronting today is this fear of loss of ethnic identity of culture and then again I
Think these things are more complicated than one is able to spell it out in words this is coupled with this feeling about socio-economic uncertainty driven by a robot ization by you know what what if I have a job will I have one the digitisation advances if i don’t
Have a job will I ever have one again because of what’s happening and then this of course driven by by populist and what Americans call snake-oil solutions or you know solutions where you say well I will solve this like by myself like Trump said then in in engender a sense
Of fear and fear has always been a sort of a driving factor there there there’s great book on the French Revolution called Lagaan pair of the great fear that that drives some of these things and that needs to be taken into account I just like to mention a wonderful
Definition of democracy by Eastland Bebo again a hungarian historian who said democracy is the absence of fear and i think that the fear that has instilled in people now because of the financial crisis although the migration crisis is one that actually politicians need need to steer and manage and to lead out i
Think that’s why my call had the kind of success that he had a minimalist definition of democracy and i think it’s relevant again to this question is is by by I saw a Berlin who when asked you know what is sort of important for for for a
Good government he simply said it is to avoid the extremes of suffering you know you you you wouldn’t think that when you were asked you know but here you know how do you see it you’d say institutions rule of law etc things are much more basic at some point and I think we’re
Given for example what what I went through in my former country Yugoslavia it was all the opposite people like Milosevic and George one went into the extremes of suffering because they wanted to retain power but I think that the the the present-day situation I truly think that we are witnessing
Something that’s ending in terms of this liberalism socialism but I would like to say that we have been there before in more dramatic terms in at the beginning or the first half of the 20th century with fascism and Nazism very dark times really the disappearance of anything that seemed rational cultural
Civilizational crazy ideas about exterminating a whole people millions of people dead and yet we came out of it so given also that at a time when when when Europe was opening up my country decided go into the extremes of suffering and we came out of it I believe that you know
With engagement and that is why people like myself and a lot of friends got engaged because we you simply don’t give up some people do give up you know Stefan so he goes off to Brazil and ends the way he does I can’t blame him I
Admire him and you know and an avid reader of his but but I think there are those who need to kind of stand up and and fight for what is right and not succumb to the present day dynamics which doesn’t mean we don’t have to analyze them
On the contrary we must see very clearly I’d all the deep dark sides that are happening at this moment that is the only way to come out of this I think I would also recommend one of the permanent fellows at the Institute Timothy Snyder’s book on on tyranny
Which he goes into these various nice little pieces of what you can do to as you were saying to sort of fight back okay we have 15-20 minutes hello I’m a historian I chose Habsburg Empire as my subjects because at seminars at the Austrian scientific Institute they give
You quite a lot of cake but my question is about your comments about the two main strands start emerged from the French Revolution liberalism and socialism in your talk I didn’t hear you mention the two offer major isms that emerge one is nationalism at the Battle of Valmy 1792 when French also called
The French seat washout viva la nación and the second one is colonialism and Third Republic which you mentioned they achieve democratic stability some historians have argued that this democratic stability is merely due to the fact that they sent the troublemakers officers to Algeria and soldiers to different parts of the world
So that they do not create problems in the hexagon itself so my first question is really about the importance of the revolutionary rhetoric shall we say the legacy of 1789 in the French colonial project we’ve referenced to fill us off like Kondo say and my second one is about the toxification of isms
Nationalism of course has a very bad reputation today which it maybe didn’t have inform at smart tight and also colonialism 100 years ago as we would see looking at jean-jacques angelfish these are partisans of colonialism so toxification and the legacy of colonialism thank you very much for that question and you’re absolutely right
That I should have mentioned both I think nationalism is probably the the more interesting one to look at because as you said yourself nationalism was a positive political force that went along with with the democratic tendency towards liberty and freedom and creating a consciousness of a of a community and
Of course then that gets a sort of a mixed review through the era of Napoleon who kind of goes out and spreads French civilization the civilizational effort and goes and conquers others and interestingly of course in Spain for example then you have the appearance of what we would call modern partisan
Warfare and guerrilla fighting against the Spaniards but on the other hand you do have the remains of the mission series at least you know in ljubljana for example you have a square of the french revolution in a number of cities along the Dalmatian coast you have streets named after General Mark among
Who was Napoleon’s console in these in these towns and there is a a remembrance of that civilizational effort that you know for whatever one may think the austro-hungarian Empire then took over when it went into the the parts where it was and and in bosnia-herzegovina of course still they speak about how much
Austria-hungary did in building schools roads bus stops and and other things so it is a mixed bag but nationalism just to put it very simply was was a a part of this the popular awakening at that period sort of going through a full arc to then of course what happened in
The early 20th century colonialism again you’re right to point out all these great nations who went through the democratic revolutions the the English and the French and the Dutch all then became conquering conquering powers and drew a lot of their wealth on that and there was a very interesting BBC
Reportage which I saw about a month ago on how many wealthy aristocratic British families actually made their wealth on on what was being done in India for example of course these are things you you didn’t learn at some point I was in school in England and of course this is
Something that that is not part of understanding the complexity of how a country becomes a wealthy by of course exploiting others not to talk about Belgium in Congo and all these others so that’s why I underscore the need to understand the complexity of the social economic and political dynamics that
Occurred because we see in a kind of simplistic way you know the revolution just as the the storming of the Bastille but there was so much that happened before during and then the consequences of those events in later history not only in a country like France but as you
Rightly say around the world yeah but also it reminded me of that wonderful book by Raymond or on a wonderful French philosopher historian the century of total war he traces the total war back to the French Revolution because after the French Revolution you no longer have
Limited Wars you have war sort of fought for ideology with draft with conscription armies you no longer had professional armies but as part of this legacy of the French Revolution and the conscription army was really one of the binding cementing factors of the nation and the Napoleonic Wars were thank you
Do within this current discussion about people who do not feel represented by a representative democracy in email anymore there are many voices of people who are now digging in history of and they want to find maybe other ways or earlier forms of democracy who would better fit
Now I think of for example David Fenner I broke with his book against elections and in this book where he goes back to the ancient Greek form of democracy with this lottery system etc he comes in a certain point in in the book to the conclusion that the French Revolution
When it replaced aristocracy it more or less replaced it with elected and elected aristocracy meaning that the the professional politicians that we have ever since more or less are part of the problem now because more or less you cannot exchange the personal the political personal even if you vote for
This or that party I mean this is a big discussion in Austria since sixty years of big coalition more or less that this not being able to vote politicians out of the whole thing and that they are not representing the the the population anymore because you don’t have farmers
And whoever there but just people just academics is a big point in his book and my impression was that she was saying the French Revolution is a system or the democracy that was brought by the French Revolution is now a system that we are not able to overcome because it’s so
Dominant in our thinking in everything that we have his proposal is this civic citizens assembly is what he is proposing that we cannot find other solutions any more out of and break out of this system what do you think about it or have there been other ways of
Forming this early stage of democracy in the French Revolution and we just took only one part and maybe not you best the best part I don’t thank you very much for that question the the more radical political philosophical critiques of the of what we call our democratic systems are are
Along those lines that basically it’s an oligarchy that rules that we are in oligarchic systems where the electoral representative system is basically a fig leaf for for their power and the impossibility to get rid or out vote these people and that something else is needed I think that’s why some people
Talk about maybe a future oncoming revolution where people try and unseat these these people you have obviously the various attempts the various pirate groups or the left populist or you know undefined populist like the cinque stella in in Italy or the podemos in Spain you know they’re trying to kind of
Find a way through the through the bush and the thicket of the forest in ways in which they can actually have their their voice firmly heard i don’t realistically see a possible change in the near future i don’t exclude a change further on you know revolutions have happened and they
Might happen in our lifetime i think it’s interesting to go back to it to a book like EP Thompson the the english historian who wrote this this voluminous wonderful book called the making of the English working class you know how how they slowly from the Industrial Revolution started to get together and
Organize you know slowly what we would call unions today but basically try and voice their collective grievances and put forward their demands and actually change and Steve is absolutely right to say you know how important the unions were throughout this period in creating a more equitable or or a less unequal democracy
We had a French philosopher like jacques ranciere is exactly a critic in in the way that you are talking about or Sheldon what’s the American political philosopher shoulder Sheldon Wolin talks about fugitive democracy and or my former mentor Michaela bond so in France talks about democracy against the state
So you know it’s not that people are not thinking about this the question is what are the societal forces that are able to actually then push through something something that is is more more equitable I think that there is still a potential in the representative system it’s it’s
Not outlived yet and that’s why I say that I don’t think I can see a change in the near future but then again nobody saw the fall of communism in 1989 which happened like that so you know don’t be surprised if it’s happened and don’t
Rule it out there is one thing I would like to mention and there are a few more minutes left which I forgot to say and talking about this wish and desire of the French and other revolutions to create something new completely and that was the attempt at creating a civic
Religion Jewish lay one of the great historians of France and wrote this wonderful history of the French Revolution his main thesis is that the French Revolution was the fight of Christianity against Liberty and then the move towards secularism and then of course the attempts of the Hobby Speirs
Based on Russo’s thinking to create this this something needed to replace religion they didn’t want the transcendence the divine transcendence of power but they understood that you need to have a glue of some sort and they thought it would be a civic glue of course it failed in in many ways and
Then just some of you may have seen about two three weeks ago there was the result of a public opinion poll in the United Kingdom which said that 53% of Brits do not say they do not have a religion and so looking at what’s happened with the
Populism with these sort of dynamics of uncertainty in a society the taking back control slogan of is a sort of a glue right and the opinion polls showed that basically taking back control is in English votes it’s not a Scottish vote it’s not an iron Northern Irish vote
It’s barely a welcher vote and so this question what what is it that is replacing religious we’re more and more secular societies even those who you know are purportedly more Catholic like the Spaniards or the Italian so I’d like to leave that question with you thank
You well thank you all we’re out of time unfortunately I want to thank Yvonne for a really wonderful tour de force on the French Revolution and thank you all for your questions your participation You
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