The World We Have Gained: The Future of the French Revolution
The French Revolution has fallen out of favor.1 Even as recognition of its significance has spread, its reputation has suffered; for many, in the public and profession alike, it has become the harbinger of violence, terror, totalitarianism, and even genocide in the modern world. Edmund Burke seems to have won his argument with Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. His prophetic line of 1790—“In the groves of their academy, at the end of every visto, you see nothing but the gallows”—might be read as the epitaph of all the utopian visions spawned by the French Revolution
.. One of the last lessons he drew, in a letter of 1881, was the lesson of unpredictability. Although the French bourgeoisie had precisely defined demands before 1789, no Frenchman of the eighteenth century, Marx claimed, had the least idea before 1789 of how to get them satisfied.
.. Much has been written about how conspiracy fears and theories prepared the way for the Terror, and I do not contest the connection.