DEMOCRACY AND THE IRRATIONAL
"The ideal of 'direct democracy' — democratie pure in the language of the time — was very prominent in the context of 1789 and continued to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the absence of more accessible historical examples of democratic governments, the French revolutionaries found their inspiration in the models of the Greek city-state (the polis) and of the Roman Republic — perpetuated within Western political tradition by historians of classical antiquity and republican writers."1
Thus, Europe refused to listen to the sane advice of Thomas Hobbes.
But what emerged was not a secular state, but the sacred concept of the nation-state. "Its first purpose," observes Fontana of the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and Citizen, "was to confer on popular sovereignty the sacredness which had always accompanied the acts of the monarchy by appealing to universal principles and the authority of God."2 According to S.E. Finer, "...the Revolution became a kind of religion, and one that everybody was supposed to share".3
Above all, the great innovation of the French Revolution was the creation of the citizen-soldier-voter nexus. The Declaration 'consecrated the principle of election by or through the People'.4 The deification of the people had begun: the French people deified, the Germans soon reacted by deifying the German people. Finer quotes Heine as having anticipated Nazi Germany 100 years before the event: "There will come upon the scene armed Fichteans whose fanaticism of will is to be restrained neither by fear nor by self-interest; for they live in the spirit, they defy matter like those early Christians who could be subdued neither by bodily torments nor by bodily delights..."5
According to Fontana: "The new French republic showed that modern democracies would not be, as many had hoped, exclusively committed to commerce, quiet living, and peaceful relations with their neighbours. On the contrary, they could prove more aggressive and imperialistic than any of the monarchies of the Old Regime. The partisans of Greek, Italian, and Hungarian independence in the nineteenth century, the Red Army at St. Petersburg, the thousands of names on the mass graves on the Somme, aggressors and resistance fighters of 1939-45 all found themselves following in the steps of the ragged battalions who marched through Paris in the summer of 1792 singing for the first time the 'Marsellaise'."6
It is, therefore, not surprising to read that "The history of democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries involves the story not so much of making the world safe for democracy, as Woodrow Wilson wanted it, but of making democracy safe for the world."7
Notes:
1 Biancamaria Fontana, "Democracy and the French Revolution", from Democracy: The Unfinished Journey,, ed. John Dunn, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 112
2 ibid., p. 115
3 S.E. Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 1544
4 ibid., p. 1534
5 ibid., p. 1549
6 Biancamaria Fontana, "Democracy and the French Revolution", p. 124-5
7 Charles S. Maier, "Democracy Since the French Revolution", from Democracy: The Unfinished Journey,, ed. John Dunn, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 126
