Most of my posts have something to do with Hell on Earth, a love story. But I don’t think the novel or anyone in it had anything to do with the French Revolution, with the possible exception of Foo Ling who, as we know, could have been anywhere, anytime, wreaking havoc. Nevertheless, I think the French Revolution is always something worth looking at
The American Revolution is what you get when intelligent men and women are willing to risk everything they have to be free.
The French Revolution is what you get when the rich and powerful become so arrogant that the poor and the weak are willing to risk everything just to get even.
There was no middle road in the days leading up to the French Revolution because there was no middle class. That’s too bad because a middle road, a road of compromise might have prevented the revolution from ever happening and would have saved a lot of heads in the long run. But you need a middle class to have a middle road.
It is the middle class that gives revolution a bad name. The middle class is comfortable, sometimes too comfortable. It has enough money to eat well, dress well, and live well and enough education to recognize how well off it is. They have enough morals to be fair with one another and enough drive to try and get the better of one another. The last thing they want is for a revolution to screw everything up. A good, long, hard fought war can knock you right out of the middle class and into the bread lines.
While it’s hard to have a revolution with a strong middle class it’s pretty easy to have one without a middle class. In fact, the absence of a middle class is what usually causes a revolution, although no one ever wants to look too deeply into this fact.
The wealthy and powerful tend to ignore the French Revolution because it was a bad time for the rich. They lost their status, their money, their possessions and their heads. Can anyone blame them for trying to forget one of those rare times in history when it didn’t pay to be rich? And they would just as soon the poor didn’t dwell on it either.
The poor don’t like the role they played in the revolution. Having had every shred of decency taken from them leading up to the revolution they countered by throwing away whatever compassion they might have still possessed during the struggle and in the end rejected any claim they might have had to being civilized.
The trouble is, even if you are able to drive the French Revolution out of mind, there is always, like the song said, something there to remind you. Most recently there was the Arab Spring, one of the more beautiful pseudonyms to be used to describe mass murder, butchery, and ruthless bloodshed. Before that there was the fall of Communism and today we have the protests on Wall Street.
The message is that if one group of people continues to hold down another group of people, then someday, in some way, they will make you regret you were ever born. Inequities whether it is the power held by a few or the money held by a few, have a way of balancing out.
Faster than you can say, “There goes the Bastille,” the status quo becomes the state of unrest and the heads of state become heads in a bucket. With so much at stake why would anyone want to see the middle class eliminated or marginalized?
So forget, “The south will rise, again.” If there is to be any hope at all for this country, the battle cry had better be, “The middle class will rise, again,” because if it doesn’t, a lot of heads are going to roll. And that middle class better be more than just the group of people in the middle. It had better be happy group of people in the middle.
The poor and disadvantaged like to believe they could become middle class and the middle class has always entertained the idea of someday becoming wealthy but few poor people hold any hope of becoming millionaires. The country needs the return of a middle class that is not only in the middle but comfortable enough in the middle to act as a buffer or voice of reason, a bridge as it were, between those residing in that golden city on the hill and those languishing in the valley of darkness.
I wrote a research paper--actually two research papers--in college regarding the French Revolution. I remember very little of the one, which was based on the biography of Robespierre, who was the Joseph McCarthy of the French Revolution. The other was an autobiography of a wealthy priest who was imprisoned, but later freed. I don't recall the actual details, only that in his autobiography written twenty years after the event, he made himself out to be a courageous hero who suffered his imprisonment with a stoic strength that was unmet by his fellow prisoners, who either complained or cried about their unfortunate predicament. I imagine he returned to being wealthy after his release and that such a return to the finer things in life somewhat softened his own intepretation of the whole ordeal. It's interesting how--as you said--the wealthy would prefer to ignore the French Revolution. I would suggest, based on this Frenchman's autobiography, that if one is incapable of ignoring it than the next best thing is to remember oneself as a courageous, late-eighteenth century superhero priest.
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