The revolution ended long ago, yet people still argue about it as if it were last week. Its first great debate began before the Terror and is still worth hearing in full.

Burke's case

Edmund Burke, an Irish-born member of the British Parliament who had defended the American colonists, published Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790. That was in 1790, before the Terror, when many British observers still thought France was following Britain's own Glorious Revolution of 1688. Burke disagreed. He argued that real rights grow out of a people's history and institutions, inherited and improved over generations, rather than from abstract principles. Societies are delicate, he wrote, and reason alone cannot redesign them; tear down every institution between the individual and power, and nothing will check whoever seizes power next. "Society is indeed a contract," he wrote, but a partnership "between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

His most striking claim was a forecast. Burke predicted the disorder would end in rule by a popular general who would command the army and become master of the assembly and the republic. Nine years later Bonaparte did exactly that. Burke's critics answered that he idealized the old order, wept for the queen and the court while ignoring hungry peasants, and defended privilege in the language of wisdom.

Paine's reply

Thomas Paine, already famous from the American Revolution, answered with Rights of Man (1791 and 1792). Each generation, he argued, has the right to govern itself; he mocked "the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave." Rights do not depend on history: they belong to every person by nature, and government is legitimate only when people consent to it. Of Burke's famous lament for the queen, Paine wrote: "He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird." In other words, Paine charged that Burke mourned the queen but not the suffering poor.

Paine then lived the revolution's dangers. Elected to the Convention in 1792 though he spoke little French, he argued against executing the king, proposing exile to America instead. As a foreigner tied to the fallen Girondins he was arrested in December 1793, spent most of 1794 in the Luxembourg prison and narrowly escaped the guillotine. Critics of Paine say he trusted reason too much and underestimated how quickly principles can be turned into weapons. Mary Wollstonecraft also answered Burke, months before Paine, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men.

What lasted

Much of the political vocabulary of the modern world comes from these years. The terms left and right come from seating in the 1789 Assembly, where supporters of a strong royal veto sat to the president's right and their opponents to the left. The revolution spread the ideas of national sovereignty, equal citizenship and the secular state; it gave France the tricolor flag, the Marseillaise and the metric system; it pioneered mass conscription. Napoleon's Civil Code was copied across Europe and Latin America. Later revolutionaries used it as a script: Russian Bolsheviks in 1917 openly worried about their own "Thermidor."

How historians have argued

In the nineteenth century Jules Michelet made the people the hero of the story, while Tocqueville stressed continuity, arguing that the revolution completed a centralizing state the kings had begun. For much of the twentieth century the dominant view, developed by Jean Jaurès, Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, read it in Marxist terms as a bourgeois revolution against feudalism, in which a rising commercial class overthrew an aristocratic order and opened the road to capitalism.

From the 1950s the "revisionists" challenged this. The British historian Alfred Cobban argued that most revolutionaries were lawyers and officials, not capitalists, that nobles and wealthy commoners often shared the same investments, and that feudalism was largely dead already. François Furet argued in 1978 that the revolution should be understood through its new political language of popular sovereignty, which made opposition look like treason. Later scholars studied symbols, festivals and political culture, and recent work places France in an Atlantic and global story that includes Haiti and the empire.

A popular myth holds that the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, asked about the French Revolution's impact, said it was "too early to say." The diplomat who interpreted for him later explained that Zhou was talking about the Paris protests of 1968.

Worked example: Burke and Paine on the same day

Take the October Days of 1789. Burke describes the queen fleeing her bedroom as armed men burst in, and mourns that "the age of chivalry is gone." Paine replies that Burke has no pity for the prisoners of the Bastille or the poor of France. Who is right? Burke saw that a revolution which treats all inherited restraint as illegitimate can slide into tyranny, and the Terror and Napoleon proved him prescient. Paine saw that rights cannot depend on the accident of what your ancestors happened to enjoy, and that principle became the basis of modern human rights. A careful reader keeps both lessons.