Book Review

Book Review

Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution

by Patrice Higonnet

     History books about the French Revolution can be perplexing. The ideologies and motivations of the participants are complex, contradictory, and not easy to grasp in the context of today’s political paradigm. This is complicated by the way that ideologues have projected their own biases and agendas onto their writings on the subject. Otherwise the meaning of the French Revolution can gets sidelined as some authors grapple with the easier to manage narrative of events and participants. That is not Patrice Higonnet’s method or intent in Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution. Instead his history dissects and examines the thoughts and beliefs of the Jacobins while minimizing the importance of what actually happened.

     The book starts with a quick and simple timeline of events from the Fall of the Bastille to The Terror and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. It is a sketchy narrative. Readers who are new to the subject of the French Revolution would be wise to read a more clearly and detailed account of what happened before starting Higonnet’s book. Having said that, it is also clear that Goodness Beyond Virtue is far better than Thomas Carlyle’s muddled babbling in The French Revolution which should be avoided by anyone who values their own sanity. Higonnet is a chronicler of ideas and his abstract writing style does not function well in describing people or what they do.

     From there, the rest of the book is about the Jacobins, what they did, and what they believed. The Jacobins were a social club that splintered off from the Freemasons but they were not a secret society and their membership, at least for quite a while, was open to almost anyone and their activities were not clandestine. They were not the ones who started the French Revolution but when it began they were there to give it shape and guidance. The Jacobins were primarily middle-class, the proto-bourgeoisie as Karl Marx would have it, and intent on recreating the world from scratch by ending feudalism, government by monarchy and aristocracy, and rule by the Catholic church; all this was to be replaced by a Parliamentary form of government. They wished to usher in a new era of rationality based on the values of the Enlightenment. Patrice Higonnet points out that their ideals were too lofty to be realized by mere mortals. In addition, the heart of their theories contained a fundamental contradiction that, in addition to the previously mentioned problem, eventually led to their downfall. This contradiction was their belief in both individual freedom and communitarian principles. On one side, they thought that every human being had the right to live to their full potential but on the other side they thought that this meant a maximum amount of civic engagement. They never took into account that the two sides of the equation placed restrictions on each other that proved to be irreconcilable.

     It is difficult to situate the Jacobins in today’s conceptualization of the political spectrum. They called themselves libertarians but that term meant something entirely different to them than it does to the conservative extremists who use the term now. “Libertarianism” for them had a lot to do with social justice and equality; the idea was that by removing the governing forms of the Old Regime, all citizens would have a chance to participate in political decision-making and this would lead to greater socialequality across class lines, The rich, the middle class, and the poor would all have equal say in government despite their financial status. Curiously enough, the Jacobin clubs allowed members from all sides of the political spectrum to join; initially both liberals and conservative worked together for the common goal of initiating the modern era of politics. After a while this alliance did not hold, though, and the schismatic conservative Girondin faction separated and began bickering with the leftist Montagnards who began the Terror, a time when the Parisian Jacobins introduced the guillotine to remove anybody they saw as standing in the way of progress.

     Goodness Beyond Virtue is written in a very French writing style that may be frustrating for readers not used to this. There are a lot of long, run-on sentences that sometimes have evasive meanings. Some paragraphs and chapters read like lists of thoughts that do not appear to have any central idea. There is not necessarily anything wrong with this style; it is just the way French authors write.

     Higonnet also leaves a lot out. The writing is largely oriented to the left wing faction of the Jacobins and little is said about the Girondins. Danton, a major figure in the revolution, gets skimmed over too and a lot of the writing revolves around Saint-Just, Marat, and Robespirerre. But this all serves the author’s intentions well since his whole purpose in writing this book is to exonerate the Jacobins. He clearly states that the Terror was a terrible mistake but that Jabin ideology was in the service of a noble cause and should be honored despite the bloodbath that the French Revolution became in the end. Higonnet wants to save the Jacobins’ reputation from conservatives and reactionaries who believe that their ideology was the cause of the Terror. He argues that the atrocities were a political miscalculation rather than the result of a flawed and dangerous doctrine.

     Goodness Beyond Virtue is not a good place to begin your studies of the French Revolution. It is an examination of a set of thoughts, beliefs, and ideas. When abstracted and disembodied from the people who produced them, they might seem a little too obscure to be of any value. However, if you are already familiar with this time and place in history, it can do a good job on enhancing your understanding of it.

Higonnet, Patrice. Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: 1998.