The French Revolution: The Story of a Conspiracy Against the People
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“Nothing is as sad, for good Frenchmen, as the history of the Revolution, for it is the history of the nation’s suicide. But nothing is as salutary, for one must know the evil in order to cure it,” asserts the historian Gustave Gautherot.
In the eyes of the French today, observes Fénelon Gibon (1850-1926), secretary of the General Society for Education and Instruction, our country, before 1789, “was nothing but a dark cesspool where numerous larvae, our ancestors, struggled in stupefaction and misery. For them, the history of France is only the history of the events that, it seems to them, prepared or foreshadowed the Revolution.” The Revolution itself constitutes the unique event, awaited for centuries, the center of the history of France and the world. Everything that preceded it—political, social, military, and religious institutions, victories, foundations, conquests—is condemnable or contemptible.
Yet, however widespread this mentality may be, it is diametrically opposed to historical truth. In ten centuries of continuous progress, the France of Hugh Capet had undeniably become the leading nation in the world. How, then, can we explain that, instead of the reforms that were certainly necessary and, moreover, already underway at the end of the 18th century, a revolution that wiped the slate clean of the past was preferred?
In his work, originally published in 1919 under the title *A Short History of the French Revolution*, Fénelon Gibon paints an unvarnished portrait of the revolutionary period itself (1789-1799). He also devotes several chapters to the deep and ancient roots of an upheaval that official history presents as spontaneous, popular, and beginning only in 1789.
He emphasizes that, contrary to popular belief, France under the Ancien Régime was a government of public opinion; that the family then presented an insurmountable bulwark against the despotism of the State. He reveals the most active crucibles of the revolutionary spirit throughout the 18th century, lists the principles proclaimed in 1789, and explains how, under the guise of "liberalism" and the pretext of "keeping up with the times," these principles were assimilated into "conquests," which justified turning a blind eye to the bloodshed. He denounces the sham of the grievance notebooks, which, far from reflecting the true opinion of the French people at the time, were merely the artificial product of the Enlightenment philosophers' machinations. He provides a macabre tally of the Revolution's victims, mostly from the common people, perishing on the guillotine or in the "national bathtub." He shows that the Terror was not only a reign of cruelty, but also of cowardice, and explains how the Directory, an era of conspiracies and scandals, managed to maintain itself through the most heinous acts, notably by overturning all elections that were not favorable to it.
"It is fashionable," writes Fénelon Gibon, "to invoke the grand words of national sovereignty and democracy, which, etymologically, is the rule of the people. Yet this direct government instituted by the fathers of the Revolution" was inspired "by a completely different will than that of the majority of French people, misled by the deceit of words." It is this will, and the perverse brutality with which it was imposed, not to say inflicted upon the people, that this work invites you to explore by following the chronological thread of the revolutionary plot step by step. Drawing on the most rigorous historical sources—and in particular the archival research conducted by Émile Keller, Gustave Gautherot, Louis Madelin, Hippolyte Taine, and Frantz Funck-Brentano—Fénelon Gibon successfully unfolds this narrative and shows that the Revolution, the result of the maneuvers of a handful of admirably organized conspirators acting, both before and after the storming of the Bastille, to the detriment of the general interest, was not only carried out without the people, but against them.
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