Today is Bastille Day, France's national holiday commemorating the 1789 storming of the Bastille and the beginning of the end of Bourbon monarchy. What many people don’t realize is that the revolutionaries weren't attacking a government office or military barracks. The Bastille was a prison holding captives by order of the king for their politics, rather than for “traditional” crimes.
What followed the Bastille was more than a simple adjustment of the political structures: It unleashed radicalism that led to the execution of the King and the Reign of Terror, during which over 40,000 people were executed or died in prison. Eventually, the Terror gave way to the Directory, then the Empire of Napoleon, the Napoleonic Wars, and the eventual restoration of the monarchy. The 19th century did not bring respite to the French people, who suffered through more revolution and successive wars that didn't abate until after the Second World War. All of this began because those in power didn't seize the opportunity to address fundamental flaws in their system. Imagine if the King had paid heed to the protestors. (For a great history of the revolution, Citizens by Simon Schama is the definitive work.)
As is the case with most revolutions, once they begin, there's no predicting how they'll end. Certainly, Robespierre, among the more radical of the French revolutionaries, didn’t expect that the Revolution ultimately would call for his head. History suggests that most revolutions don't follow a neat template. They’re perhaps the ultimate example of the maxim, “Be careful what you wish for,” because the wish and the reality don’t neatly track.
When people stop trusting the system
Some fear that there is a revolution coming to America. I don’t think a violent revolution is coming but there is a revolution — of expectations, ideas, feelings about institutions, and disappointment with government’s failures — happening before our eyes. Sure, the polarization of our politics is an issue, as is the pernicious expansion of executive power. That's coupled with a seeming indifference of Congress, and the Supreme Court’s novel theories to support it. But I maintain that all of this is background noise to more fundamental issues that we face.
The rise of the radical right and of the Democratic Socialists, while seemingly divergent in their political philosophies, are rooted in the same zeitgeist. There's broad sentiment in America that the system has failed, that it's broken beyond an easy fix, and that it's rigged against the working class and the middle class. As the wealth divide has widened — with wildly unimaginable fortunes being made and multiplying by the day, mostly benefiting the already-wealthy, while jobs are being replaced through AI, and with the rising costs of goods, services, and housing — the mood is right for populism. The recent emergence of white Christian nationalism, Democratic Socialists, and many of the politicians and commentators of the left and the right that are the loudest voices in the news and social media all are products of a bubbling populism across our nation.
I believe populism, and a sense of not having a stake in the broader successes of America and its economy, increasingly drives the right and the left. And the problem with populism is that, like revolutions, no one can really predict where it will go, and when and how it achieves its ends.
Often, populism strikes quickly and harshly, capturing the mood of the moment with horrific results. As Volker Ullrich, in his highly recommended book Fateful Hours, quotes a commentator from 1933, Hitler had “won the game with little effort…All he had to do was huff and puff — and the edifice of German politics collapsed like a house of cards.” Are the United States’s political institutions, party apparatus, economy, and governing documents as fragile as Weimar Germany’s? Of course not. Yet it all is fragile. The institutions of our democracy didn't appear fully formed; they're the result of centuries of human experience, endeavor, trial, and error. They are constructs that can prop up the most abundant and innovative nation the world has known, but they easily can be torn down, given the right circumstances.
Today, we seem stuck in a rut of competing extremes, rather than practical compromise. President Trump is right that other nations have taken advantage of global economic systems to our detriment. But that doesn’t justify enacting punishing tariffs. He's right that a country can't have an open border for anyone to step across. But that doesn’t justify the mass incarceration and deportation of those who've resided here for decades.
Similarly, NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani is right that the system has left many New Yorkers in economic binds. But I believe that the solution to rising housing costs is found in building more housing — not in freezing rents or assessing penalties on property owners. Others suggest abolishing prisons, when rehabilitating the criminal justice system might be necessary instead. Defunding the police makes little sense to me, particularly when police reform, better training, and body cameras could address the problem. Practical solutions are within our grasp.
France vs. America
The American Revolution is a curious one, different from the French Revolution and most others. It wasn't an uprising of the working class, à la Russia. And it wasn't an uprising of the peasant class, à la China. It was an uprising of the elites in America against the elites and the monarchy of Great Britain. As such, it was in many ways a “conservative revolution” — one that employed the philosophy and governing principles of the very nation from whom it sought separation.
Ours is a nation that was created by revolution only in part. Certainly, there was a war. But America is a nation born of evolution — of ideas and systems and local control. As Condorcet noted in comparing the American Revolution to the French: “The Americans were satisfied with the code of civil and criminal legislation which they had derived from England...They had only to direct their attention to the establishment of new powers, to be substituted in the place of those exercised over them by the British government.” The alternative was not nearly as productive for humanity. As Albert Camus noted in 1957, “The French Revolution gave birth to no great artists…The only poet of the times was the guillotine.” And as Robespierre observed, “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible…” Hardly words upon which to build a just future.
I think both the Democratic and Republican parties are missing the moment. They should be working to address the inequities in our society before some of the disaffected folks take matters into their own hands. If they fail, there won’t be an evolution of systems, but a revolution of principles. That revolution, while perhaps not violent, will yield paroxysms of destructive ideas drawn from the dustbin of history, rather than imagining a better world.
There are lessons to be learned from past revolutions. In 1963, Hannah Arendt had this to say: “One of the main consequences of the revolution in France was, for the first time in history, to bring the people into the streets and make them visible.” Populism in America today capitalizes upon the desire for visibility among those who feel invisible. If we take their frustrations seriously, we can choose reform over revolution — and spare ourselves the cost that history so often demands after the latter.
