Bastille Day (July 14)

Yesterday was Bastille Day. And what better place to turn for a reminiscence than to Jacobin?

Harrison Fluss writes in a 2016 article about Hegel on Bastille Day 07/14/2016.

Fluss doesn't say much about the original Bastille Day itself. The article is mainly focused on how Hegel understood the French Revolution as a whole. And also because he explains that Hegel was a supporter of the French Revolution and the basic democratic principles he saw embodied in it.

Hegel (1770-1831) has been presented, notably by Karl Popper, as essentially an authoritarian enemy of freedom. This is ridiculous. Ironically, that portrayal of Hegel as a reactionary in his time goes back to Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843), who was an active supporter of the anti-Semitic, rightwing element of the German nationalist movement of that time.

Fluss also discusses Hegel's position on the French Revolution generally, including the "Jacobin terror" of 1793–1794, in the context of his 1806 Phenomenology of Spirit, his first major philosophical publication. That work has never been regarded as an easy read. And the book is part of his own handling of the German Idealist tradition, known as part of "Continental" philosophy. It was a major step at the time in developing what we would understand as a more sociological understanding of historical developments. It was based on the notion of the World Spirit, a concept that goes back to Plato's Timaios, but is mostly an unfamiliar one today. Still, despite the mystical sound of it, it was a serious attempt to develop an understanding of the cutting-edge scientific developments of the time.

Here is Fluss' description of how Hegel described these develpments in the Phenomenology of Spirit:

The Jacobins can be appreciated as an expression of a real historical movement to overcome the irrationality of feudalism. They relied on popular forces for their power, helping to shape those forces in turn. Hegel acknowledged the need for plebian revolutionary methods also in the case of the Gracchi brothers in their struggle against the Roman patricians. And even if Hegel never wrote explicitly on the Haitian revolution, Hegel positively acknowledges the “free and Christian republic” of Haiti, established through a black Jacobin slave revolt.

Hegel acknowledges in his last essay on the English Reform Bill that the Jacobin constitution of 1793 was the most democratic document the world had ever seen. But it remained only a piece of paper. Compared with the sublime ideas and rhetoric of the democratic Jacobins, the interests of the revolution had to develop in a more prosaic manner.

However, with the advent of Bonapartism, this prose was written in the style of dictatorship and war. Hegel may have criticized the Jacobins for their excesses, and how those excesses grew as a result of their lack of historical efficacy. But at the time he wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel was supporting the armies of Bonaparte as they tore through Europe. When Hegel wrote pro-Bonapartist propaganda as a newspaper editor in Bamberg, he was — to use a Leninist expression — a revolutionary defeatist. He wanted his home government to lose and be reshaped by the French.

The Phenomenology of Spirit was a post-Jacobin, Bonapartist manifesto heralding the dawn of a new and rational age with the emperor at the forefront. In a letter to Niethammer from 1808, Hegel states that the will of heaven is incarnated in the will of the emperor, since Napoleon was, for Hegel, the only agent available at the time to carry through the ideas of the revolution. In Hegel’s German eyes he was able — at least for some time — to turn Robespierre’s permanent revolution into a permanent war of exporting revolution. In the newspaper Hegel wrote for in Bamberg, he supported that revolutionary export concretely in Bonaparte’s Confederation of the Rhine.

The 250th anniversary of Hegel's birth in 2020 was the occasion for some new biographies of the philosopher. One of them, Hegel: Der Philsooph der Freiheit [Hegel: The Philosophy of Freedom] by Klaus Vieweg, gives a lot of attention to Hegel's political outlook, which he makes clear was progressive and democratic in the context of his time.