Does History Repeat Itself?
“THE Bastille is besieged! . . . The chain yields, breaks; the huge drawbridge slams down, thundering. . . . Far down in their vaults, the seven prisoners hear muffled din as of earthquakes; . . . for four hours now has the world bedlam roared; . . . [then] rushes in the living deluge; the Bastille is fallen!”
With such staccato phrases, Thomas Carlyle describes the start of the French Revolution in 1789. It was the end of an age. The Bastille prison in Paris had a long history of imprisoned and forgotten innocents. It had become a symbol of the tyranny of the French Bourbon monarchy and aristocracy. To this day, the date of its destruction, July 14, remains the Independence Day of France.
Many of the intellectuals of Europe believed that this revolution—with its stirring battle cry “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity”—was the beginning of a new age for all mankind. It seemed to promise freedom from oppression, to be the start of a new era of benevolence and peace. But did the French Revolution fulfill such Utopian dreams? No, says history.
The National Assembly of 1789-91 enacted legislation designed to turn France into a benevolent democracy. When this Assembly was dissolved in 1791 the mood was, “Free at last!” However, the new Assembly, meeting to put the ideas of the “founding fathers” into operation, was divided from the start. Soon riots and massacres filled Paris with near anarchy. The new government guillotined Louis XVI and under Robespierre and others instituted the Reign of Terror. The Terror destroyed not only “enemies” of the Revolution but also many of its “children.”
In rather quick succession the more moderate Directory succeeded the Terror, and then Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power. He was made “consul for life” in 1802. “The French nation needs an hereditary ruler,” he later held, and he promptly had himself declared emperor in 1804. “I reign only through the fear I inspire,” he said not many years later.
Thus in a few years the government of France had gone full circle. Indeed, to make the irony even sharper, after Napoleon was forced to abdicate, the Bourbons returned in the person of Louis XVIII. They returned, some say, having learned and forgotten nothing.
This is but one example of what some view as a trend. History seems to repeat itself. As the German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel put it: “Peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon principles deducible from it.” Why is this? What are some of these lessons not learned from history? Can we personally benefit from them?