Drawing Historical Parallels

And the perils of apocalypticism

Historians are naturally prey to drawing parallels between the periods they study and the present. I’m certainly no exception, and I think the exercise can be a useful one. I’ve been doing it since 1988, when I wrote a short piece for The New Republic (reprinted here) speculating that just as attempts at reform and liberalization had spun out of the government’s control in the France of Louis XVI, so the same thing was happening in the USSR of Mikhail Gorbachev (Soviet specialists ridiculed me in letters to the editor for suggesting that the USSR could ever possibly collapse). Two decades later, in The First Total War, I compared visions of apocalyptic war in revolutionary France and in the post-9/11 United States and pointed to parallels between guerrilla warfare in Napoleonic Europe and in the Iraq War.

But sometimes the same rough historical period can suggest wildly different sorts of parallels to the present, and that is certainly true of eighteenth-century France seen from the vantage point of today. And in fact, the more obvious and tempting parallel may not be the most useful one.

As a historian of the French Revolution, listening to the MAGA faithful react to Donald Trump’s most recent indictment does put me irresistibly in mind of France’s National Convention in the febrile spring of 1793. Two loose factions, usually referred to as the Girondins and the Mountain, were hurling incendiary charges at each other on a daily basis. They accused each other of corruption, of conspiracy, of aspiration to dictatorship, of plotting to destroy the fatherland—the entire political lexicon of Marjorie Taylor Greene, 230 years avant la lettre. On April 13^th, the Girondins secured the indictment of their most violent opponent, the deputy Jean-Paul Marat, on charges of incitement to pillage, murder, and insurrection. Eleven days later (judicial procedure took place more speedily in those days!), the Revolutionary Tribunal acquitted him, and he returned to the Convention in triumph. Soon afterwards, in a rather more successful version of the January 6^th attack on the Capitol, popular militants besieged the Convention and forced the expulsion of the Girondin deputies, 21 of whom died on the guillotine the next fall.

Of course, specialists in other periods draw other parallels. Some look to Weimar Germany. Others to the American Civil War or the Gilded Age. The Roman Empire has been a perennial favorite.

For the most part, those drawing parallels between the past and present today tend to focus on past episodes of societies at a breaking point, perhaps on the cusp of dreadful violence and upheaval. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold... the blood-dimmed tide is loosed.” As in Yeats’s poem, ancient intimations of the end of days creep into our modern political visions. There is nothing new about such apocalypticism, but it has gained much strength and prominence since Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Just months afterwards, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder rushed into print with his book On Tyranny, and in an interview proclaimed it “pretty much inevitable” that Trump would copy Adolf Hitler by declaring a state of emergency and staging a coup. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on Italian fascism at NYU, likewise warned of Trump’s “coup in the making,” and in 2020 published a book called Strongmen that consisted entirely of parallels between a large range of political figures: Trump on one end, Hitler and Mussolini on the other (see my review here).

But are these really the only sort of possible parallels? They certainly draw attention. Yet despite them, the United States has so far managed to avoid the sort of collapse they suggested we were heading towards. In fact, in the crucial months of November 2020 to January 2021, when Donald Trump actively attempted to overturn legitimate election results, our institutions held. They continue to hold today, as Trump finds himself under indictment. Perhaps the collapse is still coming. But it’s worth thinking a moment about why our institutions held in 2020-21, and what might have made this moment different from some of those – Weimar, revolutionary France – to which it has been so often compared.

If US courts, election officials, and, on January 6, Vice-President Mike Pence, all refused to overturn the election results, it was because of the legitimacy that our election system possessed in their eyes. That legitimacy derived in part from the sense that the system had been established by constitutional process and reflected, in the final analysis, the will of the people. But it also derived simply from its venerability, from the fact that it had existed, in one form or another, since the ratification of the constitution more than 230 years previously. Precedent of this sort has weight in politics. People hesitate to overturn it lightly. When Hitler destroyed the Weimar constitution in 1933, that constitution was just fourteen years old. When the militant sans-culottes attacked the National Convention on May 31, 1793, they were attacking an institution that had not existed even nine months earlier.

Keeping this point in mind, when I look back to eighteenth-century France, I see a different sort of parallel with the present day. It does not involve the chaos and bloodshed of the French Revolution, but rather the inertia and torpor of the Old Regime in its dotage. Throughout the eighteenth century, the French government was by most measures hugely inefficient, dysfunctional, corrupt, and paralytic. Unlike its most important international rival, Great Britain, it had no central bank, forcing it, in a century of rapid economic change, to resort to any number of jury-rigged substitutes in order to raise funds at less than exorbitant interest rates. Its tax collection system was a bizarre mess, and to call its central administration “byzantine” would be an insult to that proud empire. Its less than impressive armed forces lost most of the major wars of the century, and in the process lost most of the country’s overseas empire. Basic government functions were routinely paralyzed by conflict between the crown and its own high courts, the parlements. The wonder is not that the regime collapsed in 1789, but that it survived for as long as it did.

If it did survive for so long, it was in large part because French elites could not imagine anything different. The monarchy had existed since the Middle Ages. It was ordained, so the clergy insisted, by God himself. It was as immovable as the earth. Even when the political conflicts of the time led observers to make dire predictions of future strife, very few envisaged anything as sweeping and radical as what actually happened in 1789. Even during the first two years of the French Revolution itself, only a small minority of the population could imagine, still less openly advocate, a France shorn of its King.

The Revolution did happen. The earth moved. My point is simply that despite paralysis, dysfunction, debt, and apocalyptic rhetoric, long-standing regimes can totter on for a very long time, and there are reasons to think that ours may do so as well. For one thing, despite all the occasionally apocalyptic talk of a debt crisis, we spend only a small fraction of our national budget on debt service, compared to what France was spending on the eve of the Revolution. In drawing parallels to eighteenth-century France, we could indeed say that we are now in 1793, or in 1788. But perhaps we are in 1750, or even 1720. Are we indeed on the brink of revolution? Tyranny? Civil war? Or just more of the same?