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Commentary By Brian C. Anderson

The Dangerous Era

Culture Culture & Society

Lies, Passions, and Illusions: The Democratic Imagination in the Twentieth Century, by François Furet (Chicago, 128 pp., $20)

By the time of his death in July 1997, at the age of 70 and just three months after being elected to the French Academy, François Furet had become one of the world's leading historians of revolution. Much of his writing focused on the French Revolution, which he viewed, at least in its frenzied Jacobin period, as proto-totalitarian, foreshadowing the political fanaticisms of the 20th century. Furet's careful scholarship, displayed in Interpreting the French Revolution (1981) and other books, countered the then-dominant Marxist reading of 1789 as an economically determined clash between a rising urban bourgeoisie and a decaying, agriculture-based ancien régime, marking the latest stage in an inexorable historical process that would culminate in a radiant classless society. In Furet's Tocquevillian optic, political life wasn't simply an automatic manifestation of the dynamics of class conflict, as the Marxists believed: Ideas and emotions mattered, and helped to shape history.

Furet presents the French Revolution as based on utopian hopes of a humanity fully democratized and equal, liberated from the past, and master of its destiny — hopes that no political regime could ever completely fulfill. His revisionist take on the revolution largely won the day in his native country, influencing a generation of historians — and made this former Marxist and lifelong man of the Left his share of left-wing enemies.

Still, once opened to even a little bit of liberty, “real” socialism “collapsed like a house of cards,” Furet observes. Marxist regimes proved ultimately incapable of competing with democratic-capitalist societies in achieving human happiness and unleashing productive might. But the Communist idea could survive, at least as an abstract hope for some kind of post-capitalist world, Furet argues, because it was born from the frustrations “inseparable” from liberal democracy. What were those frustrations? The French Revolution introduced a demand for human equality that free societies, with their room for divergent talents and fates, can never cease undermining. And liberal democracy — the “bourgeois city,” as Furet calls it in The Passing of an Illusion — is, for many, unsatisfying in its refusal to recognize any strong notion of the common good or shared transcendent values, basing itself instead on the sovereign individual and his rights. Division is our destiny, something many modern citizens find “intolerable,” says Furet. We're “constantly searching for unity among ourselves,” though we can never find it. For millions of misguided people during the last century, Communism answered both of these problems.

Communism also exploited the deep current of anti-bourgeois sentiment that runs through the modern age — a kind of bourgeois self-loathing. This attitude “is as old as the bourgeoisie itself,” notes Furet. It has inspired artists and writers and thinkers for two centuries, and continues to do so today, as one can see in many Hollywood and other cultural productions. During the 20th century, it was as much a right-wing as a left-wing phenomenon, Furet reminds us, finding in fascist movements a second revolutionary critique of liberal democracy, this one aspiring not to human universality but to the thick communities of nation and blood. Anything but grubby commerce.

This piece originally appeared in National Review Online