Making sense of this crazy world

Having spent a couple of weeks looking at the thoughts of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, interesting and relevant though they are, it’s time to get back to the stuff of revolutions because it's 1848 and the French, God bless ‘em, are far from done.

Having taken a look at the influence Jeremy Bentham has on our world today, I’m moving on to look at someone who had an even greater influence: John Stuart Mill.

Why? Because Mill, a man way, way ahead of his time, put liberty front and centre in his political work

I said last week that I’d look at how British liberals picked up the baton from the Enlightenment and developed liberal thinking. And I’m going to begin with Jeremy Bentham, the man who gave us utilitarianism and much more. And don’t worry about utilitarianism, I am not going to get too heavy (I can’t) but it is very important and pretty straightforward really.

Having looked at revolutions in England, America and France, the idea of liberty is what powers through most and it gave rise to a political ideology that we’ll be familiar with today: liberalism. So, this episode takes stock of where we are at in the wake of the French Revolution with liberal ideas.

This is the episode where I try to put the French Revolution in perspective. Just how significant was it?

I left things last week in France with the 18 Brumaire coup which had left France governed by three consuls: Abbé Sieyès, Napoleon and, just for the record, Roger Ducos. I called the last episode “Reaction”.  Well, I’m calling this one “Delayed Reaction” because that’s what it seems like to me. There is not a counter-revolution going on but a reaction to what was seen as the excesses of the revolution, and the first reaction that brought in those three consuls wasn’t seen as going far enough, not by Napoleon anyway. So, what kind of government did Napoleon bring about?

We left things last week with the death of Robespierre and the end of the Terror. In Paris, people were literally hugging each other in the streets, such was the relief that it was over. Well, in politics as much as in chemistry and physics, actions nearly always result in a reaction, and that’s what happened in France. Things had gone too far, time to rein the runaway horse in.

Last week I ended things with the execution of Louis XVI. This week I move on to look at the ways in which the French Revolution radicalised and resorted to terror.

Last week I mentioned that most of France thought the Revolution was over as the Constituent Assembly settled down to write a constitution for France but I also said a few weeks ago that the genie had been let out of the bottle, well, the bourgeoisie were still struggling to get the lid back on that bottle with the genie safely inside. And they were to fail. To go back to how I ended things last week, what it all goes to show, again something we see so much today, is that as more people get politicised, they splinter into different factions and head in different directions and it’s so much harder to regain control.

This week we’ll look at how, having pushed the revolution forward only to lose control, the bourgeoisie, men of property lest we forget, tried to haul the reigns in on the runaway horse and regain control.