To the Editor:

In his article, “Demystifying the French Revolution” [July], David Gress misrepresents a central theme of Simon Schama’s Citizens by implying that Schama supports the thesis of a premeditatedly anti-capitalist French Revolution. On the contrary, Schama devotes considerable effort to showing that the high aristocrats who dominated the early, decisive phase of the Revolution—as well as their counterparts in the royal administration—were committed market capitalists whose vision of deregulation, free trade, and a strong national defense bore an eerie resemblance to that of many modern supply-siders. It was this commitment that led men like the noble ancestor of Republican politician Pierre “Pete” DuPont to welcome the abolition of vestigial feudal privileges—privileges that their own financial position not coincidentally made it easy to sacrifice, given the prospect of reaping enormous profits through economic rationalization and modernization.

Not until the height of the Terror and under the impact of war did the surviving revolutionaries’ doctrinaire capitalism (shared even by Robespierre) give way to the anti-modernist agrarian populism of the lower classes—a populism which, by the way, Schama presents as pervasive and not limited to some politically exploitable urban underclass, as Mr. Gress seems to suggest. He would no doubt like to enlist Simon Schama as a latter-day neoconservative, but in fact Schama is more than a little ironic on the subject of Reaganomics, Reagan defense budgets, and the like. He even compares the wildly expensive, abortive, and ultimately ruinous French naval and port defense build-up of the 1780’s to the Strategic Defense Initiative.

The French scenario described so vividly by Schama evokes less the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power than the modernizing excesses of the Shah (and its revolutionary sequel) or the top-down enlightenment now heralded by Mikhail Gorbachev. . . . Although Mr. Gress, writing from the present, has reason to contrast the imperatives of “linear capitalism” on the one hand and centralized “areal” statism on the other, Schama indicates that, at least at the beginning, they worked hand in glove. The eradication of protective, intermediary institutions was blessed by those who most aspired to a liberal capitalist order.

Schama’s view is thus profoundly tragic but scarcely compatible with the economic libertarianism endorsed by most American conservatives. History suggests that the public, not only of France, Russia, or Iran but even in these United States, will often prefer regressive or uneconomical legislation which is nevertheless perceived as morally and politically “just,” to full freedom to succeed or fail. Is that not, after all, behind much of the clamor for a “kinder, gentler nation”? Paternalism has its uses if not its virtues. Schama’s enthralling tale reminds us that, in their own enthusiasm for a future which works, messianic capitalists ignore this at their peril.

Seth A. Halpern
Scarsdale, New York

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David Gress writes:

Seth A. Halpern is in error if he thinks that I would “like to enlist Simon Schama as a latter-day neoconservative.” Schama is too good a historian to reveal his politics in his work, but judging from other public statements of his, I conclude that he is best described as an anti-totalitarian, that is, a supporter and defender of constitutional democracy. He has stated that any historian interested in the large events and movements of history must put the problem of political violence at the center of his concerns. As Mr. Halpern well knows, liberals used to be quite good at unmasking the real interests behind many kinds of political violence; since the Vietnam war, however, they have become singularly inept at this, to put it mildly. Yet liberalism, in defense of democratic civil and international order remains at least a theoretical, if not a practical, possibility, and I would hope that it is not necessary to denounce Schama’s criticism of violence, and my defense of it, as ipso facto conservative.

Mr. Halpern also seems to have misunderstood what I said about the French Revolution and anti-capitalism. In my article, I described and criticized the formerly prevailing Marxist view of the Revolution—that it marked the rise of capitalism in France—and introduced some of the exciting and interesting work that has given us what is arguably a truer and more realistic picture of the Revolution. Schama’s book is only one example of that work, albeit the most spectacular and in many ways the most impressive. Other historians, like Alfred Cobban, George Taylor, and more recently, William Doyle, have pointed out that while it is true that some revolutionary leaders were liberals (in Adam Smith’s sense), nevertheless the net effect of the Revolution was to ruin trade and commercial prosperity, transfer resources and political power to protectionist landowners, and instill in French political culture a fear of unregulated markets and commerce that did not begin to disappear until the 1960’s.

Finally, I plead not guilty to Mr. Halpern’s implied charge that I am an economic libertarian because I criticize present-day demagogues whose calls for justice and equity merely disguise their will to power. On the contrary, I see no contradiction in rejecting both libertarianism and the specious calls for justice that are in reality demands for power to special interests—demands whose net effect is to reduce everybody’s opportunities and well-being. It is precisely those who claim to want a “kinder, gentler nation” who should be the first to reject false claims on behalf of justice.

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