"Is it a revolt?" asked the blithely detached Louis XVI when a servant informed him that the Bastille had been stormed by a mob in Paris. "No, your majesty," the man replied. "It is a revolution."
It sure was. As the History Channel's documentary, "The French Revolution" -- airing tonight -- vividly relates, the violent overthrow of Louis' top-heavy ancien regime was the mother, and the model, of all revolutions. No wonder President Bush and his Jacobins have such a bee in their bonnets about the French. The Bush administration tried to have a revolution in Iraq, but nobody came.
American troops swept into Iraq to instigate a "regime change" from dictatorship to democracy. That sounds like an attempt at revolution if ever there was one. The problem is that revolutions have to be homegrown to be effective. As the French example proves, a revolution is really a long social and political evolution that finally explodes.
Many of the American theoreticians behind "regime change" thought they could succeed because they remembered the constitutions and new forms of government imposed by the United States on Germany and Japan after World War II. But that was different. In that case, the United States served, in effect, as midwife to the liberal, democratic forces that Adolf Hitler and Japan's militarists had repressed. And a very financially generous midwife at that.
In fact, there never has been a successful revolution in modern times that was conducted in a country by a foreign power. Calling a revolution "regime change," as if such a radical transformation of politics and society were a simple technical matter -- like upgrading your software -- isn't going to set a precedent.
France's historical upheaval had deep roots in decades of conflict between the king and his nobles and between the upper classes and the seething poor. The radical notions of the French Enlightenment were part of it too, but those ideas themselves had been developed much earlier by French thinkers like Montesquieu and Descartes. In 1789, what all the antagonists shared was the common context of a very old national identity. As a schoolboy, Robespierre -- the revolution's principal architect -- composed an homage to France and to the king that he personally recited to Louis (whom Robespierre would later order beheaded, along with 35,000 other French citizens). Rightly or wrongly, each party in the revolution identified its goals with the glory of la patrie.
