WHAT'S LEFT OF WHAT'S RIGHT, PART 2

FRENCH PEASANTS AS THE ORIGINAL RIGHT

As mentioned in the first post to this series, the present instalment began as part of the current third instalment. In the process of writing it, I initially thought that the discussion here probably wouldn’t take up more than a sentence or two. I soon realized though that I had much more to say on the topic than I’d initially appreciated. Wanting to do my usual due diligence, it started by just a little fact checking on my assumptions. What came out of that tumble down the rabbit hole has turned out to be more detailed than I could possibly justify including in the forthcoming (third series instalment) post. So, I’ve decided to give that discussion its own dedicated post, here, which I’ll be able to then reference in the forthcoming post.

As a quick contextual reminder: I was building off Jean-Claude Michéa’s observation that the left and socialism not only had different histories, including points of origin, but stood in moral and political conflict with each other. The left had its origins in the French Enlightenment, emphasizing progressivism, universalism, individualism, and rationalism. Its biases lay in the direction of science, scientism, monadism, centralization, homogenization, technocracy, social engineering, and bureaucratic paternalism. While it didn’t strictly invent the administrative state, it took that logic to new levels. It was the incubation milieu of what would eventually become the managerial class. It took its popular moniker, la gauche, from the side of the room it had sat on within the national assembly, during the French Revolution (see here and here).

This rising left, given the need to distinguish itself from l’ancien régime, against which it was struggling for power, asserted the importance of private property and unfettered markets – and so undermining the landed property power, and indeed the moral economy, of the monarchy, aristocracy, and the church. Initiatives to restrict trade or markets were regularly denigrated by the emergent left as nothing more than an attempt to protect ancient privileges. The increasingly unfettered markets and related rise of industrialization spread across France.

This spread was not as expansive as in England, but it still had a profound impact on the life of working people, who were increasingly urbanized, pushed into industrial factories, and when they did stay on the land, saw their traditional ways of life disrupted, and often severely threatened. It was in this context that Michéa noted the rise of socialism in the early to mid-decades of the 19th century. This though was not a socialism of the left, as it valorized and endeavored to preserve or recover the community values and institutions that had nurtured communal life and were constantly under attack by the emergent left.

If “right” means opposite of “left” then, in a very real sense, it was proper to describe this 19th century phenomenon as a socialism of the right.¹ This, incidentally, raises the interesting question about how there are many more ways to be on the right – i.e., to oppose the agenda of the left – than there are to be on the left.² Understanding this explains a lot of interesting facts about the political world; this in part is what the rest if this series will be about. In that context, I started to think about this situation going back to the very beginning, or at least the original self-conscious self-assertion of the left. (Arguably, the left had already gained significant influence in England, much more surreptitiously.³ The standard default position is to define the “right,” during the French Revolution, as composed of the monarchy, aristocracy, and the church, defending l’ancien régime. And those were the interests sitting on the right side of the national assembly during the French Revolution.

However, if we appreciate that the left of the French Revolution was not simply about the immediate, local objectives of republicanism or liberalism, but was rather the political weaponization of the values and axioms of the French Enlightenment (always keeping in mind the distinctions between it and the Scottish Enlightenment), then the “right” must be defined not so narrowly either. Anyone who opposed that broader left, on any terms, for any reason, had to be considered an expression of the right. And, as it turns out, there was a right which was not reducible to a mere kneejerk defense of l’ancien régime. This was the peasant revolt – some say counterrevolution – that occurred amid the French Revolution. I had just the faintest recollection of something along these lines, going all the way back to my Introduction to European History, 101, undergrad class in the early 80s. So, I decided to have a closer look; and wasn’t that interesting.

This is going to be a bit of a longer post than has been usual by recent standards. And it will be driven largely by quotations from the scholarly historical literature. If you just want the upshot of it all, that will be available in the forthcoming post. But for those of you interested in getting into the weeds a bit and appreciating how historians, who had no access to the thought of Jean-Claude Michéa, nonetheless arrive at strikingly similar analyses, this is worth a read.

The progressivism and universalism of the French Revolutionary left understandably led them to oppose the entrenched traditions, customs, and institutions of l’ancien régime with the values of the French Enlightenment: progressivism, universalism, individualism, and rationalism. All such traditions, customs or institutions were regarded by the left as archaic, irrational obstacles to their triumphal march into the ever-brighter progressive future.

No communal or other difference could be tolerated as a bulwark against this left’s universalism. In France, the inheritors of the Revolution instituted an aggressive policy across France of consolidating schools under national standards and supervision and homogenizing the culture and language of the many regional identities and tongues which had previously constituted the rough outlines of French territory. Some estimates, such as that of British historian Eric Hobsbawm, were that pre-revolution as little as 50 percent of the people living on France’s territory spoke French. The monetary system, the daily clock, and the yearly calendar, were changed to flatter the progressivist and universalist vanity of the newly emergent power of this revolutionary left. 

Further illustration of the left (which is to say French Enlightenment) orientation of the new, revolutionary French regime is captured in some passages in the Encyclopedia Britannica (EB) description of the revolution:

The Assembly’s design for local government and administration proved to be one of the Revolution’s most durable legacies. Obliterating the political identity of France’s historic provinces, the deputies redivided the nation’s territory into 83 départements of roughly equal size. Unlike the old provinces, each département would have exactly the same institutions; départements were in turn subdivided into districts, cantons, and communes (the common designation for a village or town). On the one hand, this administrative transformation promoted decentralization and local autonomy: citizens of each département, district, and commune elected their own local officials. On the other hand, these local governments were subordinated to the national legislature and ministries in Paris. The départements therefore became instruments of national uniformity and integration, which is to say, centralization.

Guided by laissez-faire doctrine and its hostility to privileged corporations, the Assembly sought to open up economic life to unimpeded individual initiative and competition. Besides proclaiming the right of all citizens to enter any trade and conduct it as they saw fit, the Assembly dismantled internal tariffs and chartered trading monopolies and abolished the guilds of merchants and artisans. Insisting that workers must bargain in the economic marketplace as individuals, the Le Chapelier Law of June 1791 (named after reformer Jean Le Chapelier) banned workers’ associations and strikes. The precepts of economic individualism extended to rural life as well. In theory, peasants and landlords were now free to cultivate their fields as they wished, regardless of traditional collective routines and constraints. In practice, however, communal restraints proved to be deep-rooted and resistant to legal abolition.

The last sentence there – “communal restraints proved to be deep-rooted and resistant” – is telling. Overall, this EB entry is striking for its thinly veiled sympathy to this emergent left. Consequently, it gives short shrift to the peasant revolts during the French Revolution. In fact, a standard historiographic approach to the peasant revolt has been to emphasize their backwardness, superstition, and kneejerk “conservativism.” This recalcitrance is presented as standing in stark contrast to the Enlightened, scientific, and progressive worldview of the revolutionary left. In contrast, a landmark study of the peasant revolt during the French Revolution, by Harvey Mitchell,⁴ gives a good sense of the philosophical gulf separating this triumphalist left and emergent right.

Anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with contemporary accounts of the civil war in the Vendée and of chouannerie is forcibly struck by the charge of religious fanaticism with which the [peasant] rebels were branded. When confronted with the first signs of peasant fractiousness, a great many revolutionary administrators reported how difficult it was to dispel centuries-old ingrained habits of deference towards the priest, of the persistence of superstition in far-off settlements, of the near impossibility of negating those modes of thought, of how ineffective appeared to them the measures they were contemplating and adopting to bring the benefit of reason and efficient government to these benighted and backward peoples.

Like the medical men of the old regime, whose records are now being studied, but lacking their intimate knowledge of life in the countryside, the agents of the revolutionary administration believed that the removal of seigneurial dues, tithes and royal taxes would by itself lighten the major sources of economic deprivation. They often expressed compassion for this large, impoverished part of humanity, yet they also shared with their predecessors a distaste for peasant filth and brutalization, and an exasperation with peasant distrust of any external advice aimed at improving their lot. Their accounts are indeed strongly reminiscent of those that have come down to us from the physicians who, as good men of the [French] Enlightenment, fought a stubborn obscurantism in the countryside. The revolutionaries belong to this lineage of men, eager to bring order, salubrity, and the advantages of science to the masses of people victimized by murderous illness, magical beliefs and practices, and an obsolete morality. They were confident that the various committees established by the Constituent Assembly to propose measures to combat poverty, unemployment, mendicity and poor health, or to increase agricultural production, revive and stimulate local industry, would in time rescue peasant communities from backwardness, lethargy and isolation.

Conscientious civil servants were having to encounter a range of human experience which made little or no sense in the world of science and faith in progress that gave meaning to their own lives. Primitive Catholicism, they were beginning to see, was not simply Catholicism of an unsophisticated and illiterate kind. It was much more than that. In fact, any understanding of rural mentalities demanded some acknowledgement of the power of beliefs and practices, which were derived not only from the teachings of the church, but from those that were older and more deeply embedded.

The countryside was the locus in which popular culture fed on a view of man determined by forces over which he had no power – the astrological, the elemental, the occult, the world of spirit and animism. To the town dweller, nurtured in a milieu which put far more stress on calculation, scientific conceptualizations, and a commitment to the successful coercion of nature, the other milieu which operated on such different premises was mysterious, repugnant, and totally hostile.

Both the extent and nature of this self-satisfied, supposedly scientific, administrative intervention by the revolutionary left into the lives of the peasants were a source of growing resentment and distrust for the former on the part of the latter. This is captured in some passages from a paper by Le Goff and Sutherland.⁵

Since Tocqueville's day, historians have pointed out how uneven the centralizing action of the Bourbon monarchy had in fact been. If the king's servants in Versailles and his agents in the provinces did have a great deal of authority over some regions, municipalities and village councils, most ordinary people could still live almost entirely outside the influence of the state. The Revolution came as an unprecedented and often unwelcome intrusion into the lives of many such people. After 1790, the demands the central government made on citizens for attention, activity and loyalty went far beyond the claims of the ramshackle administration of the old regime.

Within a few months of the beginning of the Revolution, the impact on the rural community of government changed drastically. For the first time the Revolution brought the government into close and regular contact with the rural community and thereby it lost its respect. The administrative revolution of 1790-1 changed the nature of a hitherto vague and undemanding "outside" authority. The changes upset the delicate balance between administration and country by demanding that country people participate in government in ways previously unknown.

The Revolution shifted the initiative from the community to government and at the same time gave government a power to coerce which its counterpart in the old regime had never possessed. The effect on the morality of the countryside was traumatic. The petty notables of the rural community who had accepted the Revolution became increasingly isolated. To their fellow parishioners they were now the instruments of the new political regime. But if they were the willing tools of outside authority, they also profited from their new power, using it to gain their own way in local disputes, even to the extent of calling in the National Guard and the army. Against them, the sense of communal solidarity felt by the remainder of the parish community was heightened.

The old régime had governed largely by not governing; it allowed the rural communities to settle the bulk of their own affairs. For perfectly understandable reasons, the Revolutionary authorities in Paris and in the Departments and Districts of the new regime had to change this. But the disruption these changes caused in the balance of power within the rural community was traumatic. Invaded and put upon by the urban revolutionaries and their friends inside the parishes, the rural communities of Brittany became more conscious of their distinctness, vague and shifting as it was, defining it in political terms, terms which, in themselves took on different meanings from those which Parisian assemblies assigned to them at the time and which political historians have given them since.

words like "citoyen", "bleu", "nation","lois", and so on, words charged with sacred meaning to a sans-culotte became words of contempt and derision, in chouan country.

Both the gap between the values and axioms of the revolutionary left and the resistance peasants, as well as the extent of intervention through the rationale of scientific administration by the latter into the long-established communal ways of life of the former, provide insight into the contours of the conflict that gave rise to the peasant revolts. My little bit of a shallow dive into those peasant revolts revealed the immediate observation that it’s hard to generalize with too fine a granularity about the peasants during the French Revolution, since there were several distinctions among what is called the peasants, over land owning status and geography, particularly.

Despite those qualifications, though, a prevalent theme running through the relevant literature –concerned with a deep understanding of the peasants, rather than a kneejerk dismissal of them from within the logic and bias of the revolutionary left itself – is that while the peasants were, understandably, keen on the abolition of (at least aspects of) feudalism and reforms that would give them control over their land, as seen above, they weren’t so keen on the assault upon their ancient communities, customs, and traditions. The peasants opposed aspects of l’ancien régime, but likewise rejected the left ethos of centralization, progressivism, administrative state interventionism, and “scientific” social and economic engineering.

Some passages from a David Hunt paper⁶, for instance, emphasize a tendency among the peasants to assert their own, in his phrase, “moral economy” against the values advanced by the left revolutionaries. Furthermore, he acknowledges that the common tendency to dismiss the peasants’ defense of the church against the left as an expression of superstition and atavism reveals a blindness to the realities on the ground for such peasants. For them, the church was not merely a cauldron of supernatural beliefs, rather it was one of their primary “socializing institutions,” inculcating a sense of dignity. In this regard, he refers to discussion in a fascinating sounding, but rather difficult to access book by Le Goff⁷:

Le Goff is particularly effective in documenting an elaborate Vannetais sociability, in cabarets, fairs and veillies, as well as in the Sunday mass. Revolution in the area, he argues, centred on attempts by an external elite “to enforce the writ of undoubtedly more enlightened but none the less unwelcome bourgeois morality on a countryside where it had been hitherto unknown.”⁸

Hunt goes on to add, invoking a quotation from an article by Sutherland:

When rebels demanded payment from purchasers of ecclesiastical estates, one has an impression almost of a “moral economy” in play. Chouans believed that new owners “did not have the right to dispose of the land because it did not belong to them nor even to the clergy but ultimately to the common people who benefited from the Church's trusteeship.” In such moments, rebels were defending a customary notion of property, according to which the people “were the ultimate proprietors of land of which the Church only had the usufruct.”

The church was then simultaneously a socializing institution and the customary holding trust of the people’s common property. It was these peasants who overwhelmingly resisted the invasive administrative state being imposed on them by the revolutionary left. Hunt goes on to explain that this tendency in the peasantry:

was communal in orientation, prone to direct action, hostile to private property. Its practitioners renounced personal solutions in favour of solving their problems together, in communities. They showed a readiness to go beyond legal norms imposed from Paris: first in defence of refractory priests and eventually in armed revolt. And they refused bourgeois definitions of rights to the land: in Vannetais by attacking the contractual underpinnings of domaine congeable, and in Ille-et-Vilaine by taxing purchasers of Church estates.     

So, contrary to how an older, more mainstream (i.e., left biased) literature had portrayed the resisting French peasants, they were not so much defending l’ancien régime as they were defending their communal traditions against direct assault of the revolutionary left. In this sense, the peasants who revolted against the French Revolution were indeed revolting against the French Enlightenment.⁹ They were not trying to simply defend l’ancien régime but rather sought correctives to its abuses, while simultaneously resisting the complete crushing of their organic communities, with their concrete institutional orders.

Whether you want to call this an early version of Michéa’s socialism, or an even earlier expression of Paul Piccone’s new populism, augmented by Schmittian insights (see here and here), clearly these peasants need to be understood as a nascent right. At least insofar as they were not a mere reactionary defense of l’ancien régime, they might even be thought of as the original (critical?) right: insofar as the right is defined as opposed to the French Enlightenment infused political agenda of the left. Whatever is the correct way to unpack all this, clearly conventional categories of political thought need to be recalibrated if we want to frame an accurate understanding of the political playing field, both today and in recent history. And I’ll be taking a stab at clarifying all that in the forthcoming posts to this series.

So, if you haven’t yet, please…   

And if you know anyone else who might find this topic of interest, please…

1. I won’t go into it here, but it was really under the intellectual and political influence of Marx that, over the course of the 19th century, socialism came to be perceived as an expression of the left (see here.)

2. Though, as will be seen in the coming posts, the left does have more than one strategy.

3. As has hopefully been becoming clear to regular readers of this substack, and certainly will be even more emphasized in the future posts to this series, proper understanding of all this requires many people to reconsider their uncritically inherited assumptions about what exactly is of the left and of the right. In the past I’ve avoided this nomenclature because it always seemed so confused to me, as discussed in the introductory post to this series. After reading Michéa, I appreciate now that it can in fact be a valuable lens through which to analyze the world, provided one has a theoretically clear and historically consistent understanding of what the words mean and to what they refer.

4. Harvey Mitchell, “Resistance to the Revolution in Western France,” Past & Present, no. 63 (1974): 94–131.

5. T. J. A. Le Goff and D. M. G. Sutherland, “The Revolution and the Rural Community in Eighteenth-Century Brittany,” Past & Present, no. 62 (1974): 96–119.

6. David Hunt, “Peasant Politics in the French Revolution,” Social History 9, no. 3 (October 1, 1984): 277–99.

7. T. J. A Le Goff, Vannes and Its Region: A Study of Town and Country in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford : New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1981). I can’t find any scanned or otherwise electronic versions and the only paper copy on Amazon is the hardcover going for a cool $145. Nor does the local library have a copy. Maybe interlibrary loan will come through! 😊

8. “Bourgeois” here gives every impression of being a synonym for the revolutionary left. I’ve frequently argued elsewhere that bourgeois capitalists and the managerial class were discrete entities. The current rethinking of political philosophy categories though may well require me to re-examine nuances with that position.

9. Again, needing to be clearly distinguished from the Scottish Enlightenment with its very different extrapolation of the political and social implications of the epistemological revolution that constituted the Enlightenment generally.