So, to sum up.  He did betray the revolution.  Definitely.  But it could have been worse…The King might have come back…

This quote comes from the guestbook on a site called www.robespierre.org.uk/ It is a very biased site in favour of Robespierre created by a lady who is a big fan of Robespierre.  So the question is, are you? 

My feeling is that he was almost certainly ‘incorruptible’ and he genuinely believed in the idea of virtue.  It is important to remember that throughout the terror he had the support of the Convention and the two main committees, the CPS and CGS, so it is wrong to refer to him as a dictator.  It is possible that he became more and more paranoid (as dictator’s tend to do) and that when he made his speech to the assembly on 27th July in which he suggested that some members of the assembly were traitors, he was simply deluded.  He had been working outrageouedly hard in the preceeding months and the pressure of operating the CPS during the war would have got to anyone.  Being unable or unwilling to name the traitors sealed his fate and is perhaps a sign that he was becoming desperate to maintain his position.  The way he has been treated by historians is pretty appalling I think – he was certainly not the villain he is generally portrayed as and too often the circumstances in which he worked are ignored.

Firstly, I don’t like to give Hitler too much credit.  I have never thought of him as an intelligent man, though his political skill cannot be denied.  I simply do not believe that Hitler sat down to plan the way the 3rd Reich would be managed or that he was able to consider the consequences of his decision making in any great depth.  He was an outsider to the political system – he had never held high position in local, regional or national government so he did not know how government worked.  He had vague aims, such as becoming the leader of Germany – but he had no comprehensive plan of how to do it.  In 1923 he launched a putsch, then when that failed he changed his mind and became a ‘democratic’ politician.  He would never have received more than a tiny amount of support had it not been for the Wall Street Crash which he did predict but he was not alone in that.  Communists and extremists from all sorts of political backgrounds had predicted a worldwide crisis so we shouldn’t think of Hitler as a visionary in this case.  The political crisis that developed in German after 1929 was not of Hitler’s making and in the summer of 1932 his movement was close to breaking up as some advocated another  putsch.  Hitler can be given some credit for patience at that time but power was delivered to him at a time when his electoral support was declining.   He may have wanted power but there is no way he could have planned that he would achieve power in the way that he did.

Once in power, his style of government was awkward, contradictory and in many ways ineffective.  He rarely took decisions, except in the field of foreign policy, and he never took the lead in initiating policy.   There is much merit of course in Kershaw’s ‘working towards the fuhrer’ theory but I would like to see more research done on the role of the Gauleiter’s – did they work towards the fuhrer or did they consider their personal regions to be more like medieval lands, held thanks to the King, but their’s to do with what they wished? 

To conclude I do regard Hitler to have been a rather weak dictator  in the sense that his rule was improvised and that he did not exercise the sort of ‘total’ control over his party that, for instance, Stalin did in the USSR.

1.  The Enlightenment

2.  The financial crisis

3.  The actions (and inaction) of the King

4.  The rise in political power of the Sans Culottes

I think the enlightenment is the most important of these 4 issues and in this post I will explain why.  All events are products of their time.  The revolution couldn’t have happened in the 1400′s because no-one challenged the authority of Kings back then.  By the late 1700′s people were beginning to question traditional forms of authority and the technology existed for ideas to spread.  It is true that the enlightenment was very much a middle class movement – the average Parisian worker couldn’t read or write but they wouldn’t have been immune to the new ideas which were being discussed in salons and cafes around the city.  The power of the Catholic Church had been in decline since the Reformation and works such as Rousseau’s Social Contract had directly challenged the current form of government in France.  All of the men who attended the Estates General would have been aware of the ideas of the enlightenment and they were determined that these ideas should be a part of a ‘new’ France.  They may not have formed a coherent plan but if you go to a big meeting feeling that something is wrong in the world, you are going to make every effort to get those feelings off your chest.  The deputies certainly arrived at the Estates General with a sense of uneasiness about the current state of France.  It is true that those feelings alone could not have sparked off the Revolutionary situation – the failure of the King to present a practical solution to the financial problems and ‘accidental’ events such as being locked out of the assembly halls and meeting in the Tennis Court were all important in pushing the Revolution down a more radial path.  However, had the deputies arrived without having read the works of the Enlightenment, they surely would not have had any point of reference when it came to the kinds of changes they wanted to see.