May 4, 2007
Someone Else’s Civil War II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:30 PM EST Fredric Smoler writes, “The French once intervened in what was in many senses a British civil war, the one known as the American Revolution. They backed the winner, and in the long run France did well out of its investment. There may have been blowback by way of encouraging their own revolutionaries, but after a while the investment paid off with a lot of young fellows shouting, ‘Lafayette, we are here!’” I’m not sure that Louis XVI, as he approached the scaffold, would have thought his decision to enter the American Revolution on the side of the Americans had proved to be a good idea. French finances were already in terrible shape before France entered the war and were in much worse shape afterwards. The French financial system was a century behind Britain’s, with no properly funded national debt, so the war was financed by short-term borrowed money at high interest rates. Tax farmers instead of bureaucrats collected taxes and it is estimated that less than half the revenue extracted from the French people ended up in the national treasury, making the citizenry overtaxed and the government underfunded. (That probably accounts for why so many of the tax farmers found themselves intimately, if briefly, acquainted with Dr. Guillotin’s bright idea a few years hence.) And the privileged classes were exempt from most taxation and fiercely resisted any reform of a system so advantageous to them if terrible for the country. In the event, I think it was the expense of supporting the American Revolution rather than any intellectual inspiration that proved to be the match that set off the French Revolution. Then the pent-up fury of the French people provided the explosion. The collapse of the French financial system forced the government to call the Estates General for the first time since 1614. Once assembled, the King’s government could not control it and matters quickly spiraled out of control. The result, in the memorable words of Margaret Thatcher, was “a pile of corpses and a tyrant.”
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