Yellow Vest Revolution?

Much like during the French Revolution, the current French President is attempting to gather the concerns and grievances of the citizens. One can only hope the historical precedent goes no further. A commentary by Karl von Habsburg.

There is likely no serious historian left who still considers the French Revolution a true milestone of progress. It was a time when a few more rational-thinking and peaceable reformers, who sought to work out necessary progress alongside the King, were physically threatened or shouted down by a group of agitators. It is telling that the ‘greatest heroes of the Revolution’, such as Danton, Robespierre, and Marat, not only operated with French blood on their hands but also met their end by French hands during the Reign of Terror. Today, what the French regard as the most glorious period of their history is de facto viewed as a time when a few populist, opportunistic politicians seized power under the pretext of being the voice of the people, while in truth the majority of French citizens wanted nothing more than peace and an end to hunger.

Throughout the entire period of the Revolution, hardly anyone has been more misunderstood than Louis XVI. He was a mild, not very decisive King, who was fundamentally well-disposed towards the people’s demands to restrict the privileges of the nobility and the clergy. It is also very telling to see that even the wildest revolutionaries saw France as a monarchy until the very end, and the execution of the King only took place at the very close of the Revolution, long after the more moderate revolutionaries had already met their end by the guillotine.

cahiers de doléances

One of the interesting tools the King introduced to draft reforms were the so-called ‘cahiers de doléances’, books of grievances in which citizens could record their wishes and complaints. These grievances were then taken up and addressed by the National Assembly then in formation. Between 40,000 and 60,000 grievance books were collected, in which the citizens of France wrote down their visions for their social and political future, many of which still exist today. The problem was not the creation of the books, nor even the summarisation of their contents, but the implementation within a parliamentary framework that was extremely cumbersome and slow.

Today, we are once again seeing general unrest in France, currently manifested primarily in the ‘Yellow Vest’ demonstrations. Once again, there are marches to the centres of power, whether town halls or government buildings. And once again, there is violence and destruction. And how does the Macron government respond? With hearings where the concerns of citizens are to be written down and summarised—the ‘cahiers de doléances’ once more. It is not yet apparent that the government is even remotely capable of implementing these concerns. We can only hope that something has been learned from history, and that it does not again require a revolution with the most horrific terror regimes to return to normality.

The article originally appeared on the website of Karl von Habsburg.