The (French) revolutionary conscience
In France in 1792-94 your 'political identity' decided whether you lived or died
This is Who made our minds? my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: Edmund Burke v Thomas Paine, The Totalitarian Mind, God’s Capitalists
AN EXTRAORDINARY idea animated the leaders of the French Revolution (1789–99): they meant to reinvent and ‘purify’ France by replacing the French monarchy with a proto-democracy built on ‘reason’ and ‘virtue’.
To that end, they would decapitate the ancien régime, vitiate the divine right of kings, ban the clergy, kill the past, reset the clock at year zero and establish a government ruled by men of ‘reason’. (Women, despite their integral, and violent, role in the Revolution, would be denied a role in its dysfunctional offspring.)
What distinguished the Frenc…