May 5, 2007
Someone Else’s Civil War III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:45 AM EST With reference to intervening in civil wars, John Steele Gordon writes that he’s “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. . . . 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.” I agree with all of this. Maxim guns proverbially took the suspense out of Victorian colonial warfare, but eighteenth-century Whig oligarchs could with some justice have spent their time chanting “Whatever happens we have got/ The Sinking Fund and they have not.” British superiority at state finance was probably the crucial determinant of the British victory in what has been called The Second Hundred Years War. I agree that the expenses of intervening in the American Revolution helped destabilize the French monarchy, and that while the intellectual inspiration we provided didn’t help, the long-run fiscal crisis of the French state mattered more. However, I am not sure any of this contradicts my earlier post that “in the long run France did well out of its investment.” Louis XVI was not France, despite his grandfather’s probably apocryphal insistence that “L’État, c’est moi.” If you are going to go broke fighting Britain, you might as well get something for your money; the French state also went broke because it borrowed a lot of money to fight Prussians, Austrians, and Dutchmen. That was money spent for nothing; money spent successfully splitting the British Empire means that the French are now merely in the shadow of what they can depict as a crude provincial society, one they can console themselves by sneering at, rather than in the shadow, forever, of an ancient and hated rival whose citizens invented proper physics, the calculus, and an awful lot of the rest of modernity. Suppose the French were in the shade of a world empire that could count, say, Marlowe as a national poet, rather than, for example, Longfellow, and that numbered among its cheeses the noble Stilton, rather than Monterey Jack. That would really sting. The French would have gone broke in any case, which means their revolution happens anyway, which means nationalism spreads, which means German unification, and then those “Lafayette, we are here” boys become a very prudent investment. To forestall any misunderstanding, I am fooling around—as is, I suspect, Mr. Gordon. Without French support the United States becomes much less probable, and I do not think, not for a minute, that Mr. Gordon believes we would then live in a better world. Nothing in his modestly monarchist exchanges with Alex Burns suggests that Mr. Gordon assesses a French crown as too stiff a price to pay for Mr. Lincoln, nor his posterity, and the jubilees they would bring in their turn.
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