I had always thought that it was Deng XiaoPing who said that it was too soon to tell whether the French Revolution had been successful.
I’ve since been updated insofar as it was Chou EnLai talking to Richard Nixon in 1972 and the comment referred to the 1968 student demonstrations
Nevertheless, it does illustrate that revolutions tend to have long tails. In modern times we can look at the 1917 Russian revolution and the Irish Civil War of 1922 as illustrative.
Tim Stanley writing in the Daily Telegraph on 31^st October under the banner headline that “the Brexit revolution has come to an end” argued that as with France in 1799, the elites are back in control, but Britain has still been changed for the better.
“…why did the Tories elect Liz Truss even though it was obvious six weeks ago, now confirmed, that Rishi would be a far better PM? My theory is that we all subconsciously knew that Sunak spelled the end of the Brexit revolution. Not its reversal but, like Napoleon’s coup of 1799, the defeat of its radical spirit.
Brexit conforms to the four stages of the French Revolution: crisis, contradiction, purification and reaction. In 1789, Louis XVI called an Estates General in his quest to raise cash; in 2016, David Cameron called a referendum to eliminate Euroscepticism. Both backfired. The Estates General demanded a constitutional monarchy and the Brits voted to leave the EU, so Louis fled to Varennes and Dave to his garden shed.
Theresa May now tried to ride two visions of the new order – protectionist and paternalist vs free trade and liberal – and with Parliament fractured, and counter-revolutionaries conspiring, she was unable to get us out of the EU. This necessitated the election of Boris Johnson, the British Georges Danton, a literate rake, a champion of the people. His instincts were small state but, being a populist, was inclined to give the mob what it wanted – hence he marched us out of Europe but also rebranded Tory politics as faux-European. Conservatism became Gaullist: culturally conservative and littered with grands projets.
I liked it, but Boris will be Boris and his regime collapsed in scandal. With the PM forced to retire (Danton took refuge in Acris, Big Dog at the Casa del Campo), we entered our Jacobin phase of ideological intensification. Yes, Liz Truss was our Maximilien Robespierre, and though her utopian vision was far more modest than critics made out, the very idea that we might guillotine the board of the Bank of England triggered a Thermidorian Reaction.
The French decapitated Robespierre and installed a collective leadership till Napoleon took power. In Britain, some faceless men pulled off a coup to install Sunak in four days flat, which was impressive for a country where it can take six months to replace a boiler.
Looking back on the 1790s, many Frenchmen asked what the point of their revolution had been. They killed a king and finished with an emperor.
Yet feudalism was also eliminated, and the French now saw themselves as a nation, with a Left and a Right, both espousing liberties – the rights of the people – they each claimed to be more willing to protect. Here, Britain is out of the EU for good. The greatest testament to the permanence of Brexit is that even the Labour Party accepts it, and is patriotic and critical of free movement (have you noticed how often its MPs are on GB News?). At some point, a Labour government, or a Tory one, may well put us back in the Single Market, for if we are not willing to reform tax and trade on the lines Citizen Truss wanted, then we’ll wind up a stagnating economy trapped behind a tariff wall. And how else do we resolve Northern Ireland?
But even if that came to pass, we have still dodged the bullet of European political integration, re-establishing Britain as an Atlantic-facing nation, global and yet parochial. Sunak, elected in just 2015, is a child of that revolution, even if he doesn’t entirely understand what the founding fathers wanted. I recall seeing him interviewed at the 2019 Tory conference where he was asked to name the best bit of Brexit. The correct answer is “freedom”. He gushed, “Free trade zones!”
I preferred it when Boris reputedly said “F business”. I translated it from the unpardonable French to mean: “Something matters more than making money, and we will not be dictated to by the markets” – which is precisely what has now happened. Rishi will never blaspheme against business. His job is to sell austerity, hiking taxes on the middle class and cutting services for the poor, sugaring the pill by appointing Suella Braverman to the Home Office and Kemi Badenoch to equalities; culture war bribes to the Red Wall sans-culottes.
I’ll be honest: I miss the hope-filled Sturm und Drang of early Brexit, of the sense of forces unleashed and institutions scaled. One could almost hear the glass shattering in Whitehall.
But I have no right to impose an ideological vision on the country, especially when the chief issues now are feeding our people and keeping the lights on (I’m not Greta Thunberg), and I take comfort in what our revolution has achieved.
It has given us greater sovereignty, an empowered parliament, municipal conservatism, controlled legal migration, levelling-up, a renaissance of journalism, books and independent TV. I believe our era will be regarded as a golden age of debate, when, after decades of consensus, real ideas were passionately interrogated and regular citizens elevated to the king and queen of politics.
Like the French in 1799, we are a different society now: Labour stands for the King, the Tories kneel before the voters of Grimsby. Brexit has made Britain a better place.”
But we still voted for Truss and ended up with Sunak. The Conservative Party activists are pondering their futures as members and candidates in next May’s local elections are asking how many Hail Mary’s do they need to win their seats.
See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/31/brexit-revolution-has-come-end/