The French Revolution. Edited by Gary Kates. Routledge, 1998
“Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society.” (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte).
On the night of 4 August 1789 the newly triumphant French National Assembly issued a decree formally abolishing feudalism. The process of building a bourgeois (capitalist) society in France has been documented by the influential French academic historians Albert Mathiez (1874-1932), George Lefebvre (1874-1959) and Albert Soboul (1914-1982). They were also very public members of the French Communist Party, and in due course this provoked a “revisionist” challenge from liberal and conservative ideologists. This collection of essays provides further proof, if it were needed, that the study of history is not just about interpreting the past but part of a struggle for the sort of future people want.
For liberals, Alfred Cobban (1901-1968) argued that the revolution had an early constructive phase, but efforts to create a liberal capitalist constitution were overcome by violence. The conservative François Furet (1927-1997) emphasised the role of political ideas, especially those of Rousseau, upsetting the natural order of things. A central concern of these “revisionist” challenges has been what they saw as the dominance of Marxism in interpreting the French revolution and its relevance for the modern world. Marx drew attention (see quote above) to the way the French revolutionaries referred to ancient Rome, as a mask for their tawdry bourgeois objectives. It provided the revolutionaries with: “…the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep their passion at the height of the great historical tragedy”.
The French Stalinist historians, following Lenin and the Bolsheviks, drew an explicit parallel between the French Jacobins and the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 Russia. In 1920 Albert Mathiez wrote:
“Jacobinism and Bolshevism are two dictatorships born of civil war and of war, two class dictatorships operating through the same means: terror, requisitioning and taxes; and having, in the last resort, the same goal: the transformation of society and not only of the Russian or French society, but of the universal society.”
The Jacobins under Robespierre’s leadership, and the Bolsheviks with Lenin’s leadership, acted in the belief that their small elites represented the real will of the people, even though they were not accountable to them. The French revolution, of course, was the classic bourgeois revolution. Robespierre and the Jacobins employed the means and objectives appropriate for such a revolution. The Russian revolution, as Matthiez unwittingly revealed, used the same methods for the same goal: a capitalist revolution. The Bolsheviks abolished feudalism and constructed a society based on wage labour and capital, but under state control. This, historically, is the bourgeois role of Bolshevism.
Lew Higgins
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