The revolution is still with us

Writing about Beethoven, liberty and revolution can easily go to your head. Well, Wordsworth got it in one when he wrote: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive But to be young was very heaven.” The French revolution promised an end to corrupt, despotic monarchies in France and in many other European countries. But anti-democratic forces, initially Robespierre and the Jacobins; then Napoleon Bonaparte, the would-be Emperor of Europe, and, eventually, back to the oppressive monarchs, swept aside this brief outpouring of democratic and liberal ideas. If there are periods of history where you feel you could have been there, cheering on your heroes, one of mine would certainly be that period between 1789 and 1793 when a genuinely free, democratic society stood a fighting chance of being founded in France. Leaders like Brissot and Condorcet wanted parliamentary democracy, an end to slavery, racial and sexual equality, and education to be provided for all children. They were so far ahead of their time: I would have been with them all the way, well, maybe not all the way to the guillotine! This ferment of republicanism and how it came to be so cruelly snuffed out, is brilliantly described in "Revolutionary Ideas" by Jonathan Israel. This book has 708 pages of text, without notes, etc., but I found the effort of getting through it well worthwhile. Chinese leader Chou En Lai was attributed as saying to President Nixon: "The impact of the French revolution on western civilization - too early to tell." If he did say it, he was probably right, we still haven't fully achieved the enlightened goals of those radical reformers of the 1790s.