Making France Great Again: Seeing the French Revolution in a world of right-wing populism

Professor Rod Phillips is reconfiguring his third-year course on the French Revolution to relate the Revolution to the modern world of right-wing populism.

As he was revising the course outline, Phillips realized that before and during the Revolution the French faced many of the challenges North Americans, Europeans, and others face today. It is not that the French Revolution was right-wing – it is generally credited with being left-wing, if anything – but that the politics and culture of the period parallelled tendencies in politics and culture today.

Consider that before the Revolution, there was widespread distrust of institutions, especially the monarchy and the Church, the mainstays of pre-Revolutionary France. We can track a decline in respect for the monarchy and loss of faith in the church, and both were subjected to harsh criticism in words and ridicule in images.

Once the Revolution got under way, other characteristics of the current political landscape in North America and Europe emerged. Misinformation abounded and accounts of conspiracies and plots were everywhere, starting with the ‘Great Fear’ that swept through the countryside in the summer of 1789 – an unfounded fear of a ‘famine plot’ by nobles to starve the peasantry. The rumours were spread and amplified in small villages, rural marketplaces, and taverns, which proved as effective as social media.

In the cities, populism was the order of the day, as political leaders leaned into ideas of popular sovereignty and stoked the activism of crowds. Nationalism? Many historians trace its origins to the Revolutionary period. As for political polarization, the French Revolution invented it, giving us the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in politics. It was expressed at the time in political purges, censorship, civil war, and the Terror and its aftermath. And don’t mention respect for the Constitution: the Revolutionaries wrote and tore up three of them in the space of 10 years.

Then there were the culture wars. Even though the Revolution embraced equality, there were intense debates over women’s rights, religion, race and slavery, the emancipation of Jews, and minority languages. And let’s not forget cultural nostalgia, which puts the ‘Again’ in MAGA – the belief that there was a golden age of greatness that can be retrieved. The French Revolutionaries believed there was a distant time when the French people were free and virtuous, before they were enslaved and corrupted by the Church and the monarchy. Returning to that pristine state was what they called ‘regeneration’.

Finally, then as now, strong men emerged to claim that they embodied the will of the people and could solve all their problems. During the French Revolution they included Robespierre and Napoleon.

Distrust of institutions, populism, conspiracy theories, culture wars, nationalism, reactionary nostalgia, strong men… it’s a familiar list and the era of the French Revolution had them all. But Phillips points out that similarities to today do not mean that ‘history is repeating itself’ or that we can learn lessons from history. Even so, focusing on these intriguing similarities in two vastly different political and cultural contexts provides a different take on the French Revolution and enables us to examine how the people of that time dealt with conditions and challenges we are familiar with today.

HIST 3113, “Society and Revolution in France, 1789-1799,” is offered in Winter Term, 2026.