For Bastille Day, we have
answers to a bunch of questions about the French Revolution.
Today people all over the
world celebrate the 1789 storming of the Bastille Saint-Antoine — a
dramatic popular rebellion that sparked the French Revolution.
But what was the French
Revolution, how did it reshape Europe and the world, and what relevance does it
have to the workers’ movement today? Here’s a short primer, lovingly compiled
by Jacobin to mark the occasion.
What was the French
Revolution?
The French Revolution was one
of the most dramatic social upheavals in history. In 1856, French sociologist
Alexis de Tocqueville reviewed the so-called “grievance
books” — lists of demands made by the various social layers of France in
anticipation of the Estates-General, the assembly that would
undermine Louis XVI’s reign and lead ultimately to revolution. What he
discovered startled him.
When I came to gather all the
individual wishes, with a sense of terror I realized that their demands were
for the wholesale and systematic abolition of all the laws and all the current
practices in the country. Straightaway I saw that the issue here was one of the
most extensive and dangerous revolutions ever observed in the world.
The revolutionary process
started with open rebellion in the summer of 1789 — including the storming of
the Bastille on July 14. It would before long topple the absolute monarchy of
Louis XVI, divest the nobility of their hereditary power, and completely
undermine the political influence of the Catholic Church.
This dramatic revision in
French society unleashed a chaotic process of revolutionary advance and reactionary
blowback. The forces of property were unwilling to stand idly by as their
enormous privileges were threatened; they attempted to undo all the radical
changes brought on by the revolution and restore the old social hierarchies
even as the revolutionaries worked to cohere an entirely different kind of
society based on more egalitarian ideals.
From this unstable crucible
ultimately emerged Napoleon, who would construct the Bonapartist
state through war and empire, ultimately leading to France’s renewed
subjugation by the old powers of Europe and the restoration
of the monarchy.
What was France like before
the revolution?
The vast majority of people in
France lived in destitution, with little chance of escaping their condition.
Peasants were entirely at the mercy of the nobility, who had preserved much of
the fundamental power relationship of feudalism. As Jean
Jaurès described in 1901, the economic subjugation in the countryside was
profound:
There was not one action in
rural life that did not require the peasants to pay a ransom… Feudal rights
thus extended their clutches over every force of nature, everything that grew,
moved, breathed […] even over the fire burning in the oven to bake the
peasant’s poor bread.
This led to near-universal
poverty in the countryside. English agriculturalist Arthur Young
remarked at the time:
The poor seem poor indeed; the
children terribly ragged, if possible worse clad than if with no clothes at
all; as to shoes and stockings they are luxuries… One third of what I have seen
of this province seems uncultivated, and nearly all of it in misery. What have
kings, and ministers, and parliaments, and states, to answer for their
prejudices, seeing millions of hands that would be industrious, idle and
starving, through the execrable maxims of despotism, or the equally detestable
prejudices of a feudal nobility?
The urban population of
artisans and journeymen laborers experienced similar hardship. Economic
reorganizations in the kingdom threatened the apprenticeship system,
jeopardizing the ability of craftsmen to control their own work. Day laborers —
permitted to exist in the cities only when they could produce papers proving
their employment — were stalked by royal police.
At the same time, a wave of
immigration brought dramatic demographic changes to Paris. Historian Eric Hazan estimates that in 1789 immigrants numbered about
two thirds of the city’s population, and they each had to “request a passport
in their region of origin to avoid being arrested en route as vagabonds and
sent to beggars colonies.”
The clergy and nobility,
together comprising about 1.6% of the population, were doing just fine — most
nobles lived in extreme opulence and inherited their positions hereditarily.
The Catholic Church controlled by some estimates 8% of total private wealth.
But in the years immediately
prior to the revolution, a new class of financiers — generally upwardly mobile
craftsmen or landholding peasants — began to grow in the cities, threatening to
replace the nobility as the most decadent of social layers.
Meanwhile, the kingdom was in
the midst of a catastrophic financial crisis. The king was broke, and the
system of accounting that had developed chaotically during the Seven
Years War left the his functionaries unable to account for the
kingdom’s wealth until it had almost disappeared. Foreign financiers were
recalling their debts, the harvest of 1788 was decimated by a drought and a
series of hailstorms, and the free
trade agreement brokered between France and Great Britain at the end of the
Seven Years War flooded the French market with British textiles, ruining French
garment production.
Things were bad. Panicked
about the financial crisis, Louis XVI squeezed the people even harder,
demanding increased taxes from all layers of society.
But there were rumblings of
resistance, in the cities, as well as the countryside. Elites like
Louis-Sébastien Mercier expressed dismay at the insubordination of urban
workers:
There has been visible
insubordination among the people for several years now, and especially in the
trades. Apprentices and lads want to display their independence; they lack
respect for the masters, they form corporations [associations]; this contempt
for the old rules is contrary to order… The workers transform the print shop
into a real smoke den.
And peasants, still expected
to sacrifice even their most basic of foodstuffs as tribute to king and church,
took matters into their own hands as famine loomed. As one mayor of a rural
district remarked, “It is impossible to find within half a league’s radius a
man prepared to drive a cartload of wheat. The populace is so enraged they
would kill for a bushel.” The starving peasants were unwilling to deliver flour
to their feudal masters to satisfy the demands of an enormous war debt; they
prefered to eat it instead.
What other solution but revolution?
What happened on July 14,
1789?
The storming of the Bastille
on July 14, 1789 represents the popular revolution’s inaugural moment.
Encouraged by the rapid pace of reforms — and exasperated with the National Assembly’s unwillingness to take a harder line
with the intransigent king — masses of artisans and laborers assaulted the
Bastille de Saint-Antoine, seized its gunpowder, and released the handful of
prisoners held there.
By claiming the fortress on
behalf of the revolution, they sent a powerful message to the forces of old
wealth that still dominated the kingdom — the upheaval in France would not be a
simple legislative reorganization, but rather a social revolution. From this
point forward, the French revolutionary process would, in many ways, take its
lead from a volatile popular insurrection that surged again each time its
gains were threatened.
Hazan describes it this way:
The storming of the Bastille
is the most famous event in the French Revolution, and has moreover become its
symbol throughout the world. But this glory rather distorts its historical
significance. It was neither a moment of miracle, nor a conclusion, nor a
culminating point of the ‘good’ revolution before the start of the ‘bad’, that
of 1793 and the Terror; the storming of the Bastille was one shining point on
the trajectory of the Paris insurrection, which continued its upward curve…
Foreshadowing the dramatic
seizure of Tuileries by thousands of sans-culottes in 1792 — which would
establish the insurrectional Commune and finally depose the king — the storming
of the Bastille represents neither culmination nor catalyst of the French
Revolution. Rather, it was a moment in which masses of oppressed Parisians
thrust themselves into the process of reform already underway in France,
challenging the king’s absolutism as well as the authority of the overcautious
legislative assemblies. In this way, they helped transform what could have been
a period of cautious reform into a period of genuine revolution.
Who were the sans-culottes?
The sans-culottes were the
insurrectionary “movement of the laboring poor” who, in historian Eric
Hobsbawm‘s words, “provided the main striking-force of the revolution.”
Named for their lack of the distinguished breeches worn by elites, the sans-culottes
inhabited the political terrain of the street and the square as the bourgeois
revolutionaries performed their political work in assembly halls and from
within legislative bodies.
Most fundamentally, the sans-culottes
were concerned with establishing a system of direct, local democracy which
could guarantee a consistent price of for vital provisions — the poor craved
the same food security as the nobles, and resented the profound difference
between the bread consumed by rich elites and the bread available to common
laborers.
A popular uprising ejected
Louis XVI from his final hiding place in Tuileries on August 10, 1792
— a tremendous victory for the armies of sans-culottes who descended en masse
upon the king, accusing him (quite rightly) of treasonous collusion with
foreign monarchies to squash the revolution at home. Following this victory,
the sans-culottes formed the Insurrectional Commune and proposed a sweeping
reform: “equality and bread.” They wrote, “Wealth and poverty must disappear in
a world based on equality. In future the rich will not have their bread made
from wheaten flour whilst the poor have theirs made from bran.”
Twin aspirations motivated the
sans-culottes: freedom from tyranny and access to bread.
The sans-culottes’ demand for
fixed prices on foodstuffs offers insight into the development of the French
economy in this period — as more and more artisans were stripped of their
self-sufficiency and forced to accept wage labor, they discovered themselves
unable to afford even simple consumer goods. For the sans-culottes, demanding
lower food prices — not higher wages — was the intuitive response to the
transition to wage labor.
Often armed only with pikes —
useful for parading the severed heads of food-hoarders or monarchists through
the street, as was their habit — the sans-culottes did more than just pose a
grave threat to the old hierarchies of the monarchy. They also forced formal
revolutionary bodies like the Legislative Assembly to adopt more radical
positions to meet the expectations of the unsatisfied and insurgent poor.
Though historian Albert
Soboul tried to make the case that the sans-culottes were a peculiar kind
of proletariat — as did
socialist Jean Jaurés — this category makes little sense in the context of
eighteenth-century French society. Instead, the sans-culottes were a social
coalition comprised of those who were pinched the hardest by the changing
French economy, including day laborers constantly on the hunt for underpaid
work, artisans (like the garment-makers) whose livelihoods were threatened by
the transition to more industrial modes of manufacturing, and apprentices who
were no longer permitted to form “corporations” (trade associations).
Consistently denied the
democracy and plenty promised by the revolution, the sans-culottes repeatedly
took things into their own hands, driving the revolutionary momentum forward
each time the bourgeoisie proved hesitant to further challenge the status quo.
Whatever their particular class position, their contribution to the revolution
was profound. As Hazan writes:
It is true that the notion [of
the ‘sans-culotte’] is fairly elastic, sometimes conjuring up by metonymy the
world of popular Paris, sometimes the crowds of the great revolutionary journeés,
sometimes again the militants who dominated the life of the sections. But the often violent confrontations with the
assemblies and established authorities were not the work of a stereotypical
ideal: they show the very real presence of this being of flesh and blood, the
Parisian sans-culotte.
Sans-culotte is as sans-culotte
does. Constant confrontation with the privileged, often violently and in the
street, demanding a world in which food is easily available and democracy
simple and direct — this orientation, more than anything else, makes a sans-culotte.
Who were the Jacobins?
Following the mass
insurrection of the sans-culottes that effectively dissolved the monarchy and
brought the armed bourgeoisie to power, European monarchies feared the French
example would destabilize their power in their own countries. Austria took the
side of the deposed regime, as did Prussia. Revolutionary France responded with
declarations of war in 1792.
Meanwhile, the sans-culottes —
having recently learned the power of armed mobilization — continued to make
demands on the revolutionary government, threatening not only the old figures
of the ancien regime but also the ascendant bourgeoisie.
In response to this crisis,
the Committee
of Public Safety was formed as a bulwark against the aggression of the
wealthy, both French and foreign. The Committee was convened under the
leadership of the most militant section of the revolutionary bourgeoisie — the
Jacobins.
Officially called the Society
of the Friends of the Constitution, the Jacobin Club in the period of
Robespierre embodied the most radical response to the revolutionary crisis; to
defeat the forces of reaction, they found themselves compelled to take radical
measures — including price controls, food seizures, and the period of tactical
violence that would come to be known as the “Reign of Terror.” While in early
periods the Jacobin Club had included more moderate
actors, the radical wing that cohered around Robespierre — known as the
Montagnards — ultimately became the dominant tendency within the Jacobins’
ranks.
Politically, these Jacobins
were radically different from the forces that held power in the earlier stages
of the revolution — constitutional monarchists like Lafayette
(who despised the Jacobins, calling them “a sect that infringes sovereignty and
tyrannies citizens”), liberals like the stargazing Parisian mayor Jean-Sylvain
Bailly, and more conservative republicans like the militarist Jacques-Pierre Brissot.
Although their leadership was
drawn from the ranks of the intellectual bourgeoisie — not the sans-culottes —
the Jacobins were committed to separating the right of political participation
from property; Robespierre wrote in 1791, “every citizen has the right to
cooperate in legislation, and hence to be elector or eligible, without
distinction of fortune.”
In fact, the Jacobin Club —
along with the networks of fraternal
organizations that sprung up to disseminate revolutionary teachings — had
been instrumental in producing the very layers of radicalized working
people who would later come to be known as the sans-culottes. In the absence of
political
parties as we understand them today, the sans-culottes received their
political education from revolutionary societies like the Jacobins, who
produced newspapers and called gatherings where revolutionary propaganda was
read aloud.
The Jacobin Club, by virtue of
its size and militancy, had even influenced discussions in the National
Assembly during the revolution’s early stages. As the Abbé
Grégoire recalled:
The Jacobins would take it [a
question booed by the conservative majority of the Assembly] up in their
circular invitations or their papers; it was discussed by four or five hundred
affiliated societies, and three weeks later addresses poured into the Assembly
asking for a decree on a matter that had initially been rejected, but which the
Assembly then accepted by a large majority, since public opinion had been
matured by discussion.
Eric Hazan explains, “The society and its branches operated as a
system for spreading revolutionary ideas across the country. Nothing is more
absurd than the idea of ‘Jacobinism’ as an authoritarian and meddlesome Paris
dictatorship.”
Above all else, the Jacobins
were intensely concerned with translating the revolutionary fervor of 1789 into
a durable and sustainable revolutionary society. They saw their role as to
strengthen and deepen the radical ideals of the Revolution while protecting it
from attack. As Robespierre wrote
in 1794:
[W]hen, by prodigious efforts
of courage and reason, a people breaks the chains of despotism to make them
into trophies of liberty; when by the force of its moral temperament it comes,
as it were, out of the arms of the death, to recapture all the vigor of youth;
when by tums it is sensitive and proud, intrepid and docile, and can be stopped
neither by impregnable ramparts nor by the innumerable armies of the tyrants
armed against it, but stops of itself upon confronting the law’s image; then if
it does not climb rapidly to the summit of its destinies, this can only be the
fault of those who govern it.
What should we think about the
“Reign of Terror”?
The Reign of Terror was a
period of intense violence led by Robespierre’s Jacobins, during which the
guillotine became the most potent political tool and repression the most vital
political task. Though far fewer than the millions who lost their lives during
the Napoleonic Wars, 17,000 people — counter-revolutionaries as well as
dissident thinkers within the revolution — were executed by the guillotine.
Tens of thousands more were killed without trial or died in jail — historian Timothy
Tackett estimates a total death toll closer to 40,000.
The legacy of this period is
still much debated.
But it is hard to dispute that the terror emerged in response to the urgent
need for political and military defense. The old figureheads of the ancien
regime were more than mere symbols of opulence or historical tyranny; many were
active antagonists of the revolution, working to dismantle its progress and
assassinate its soldiers precisely at the time when the revolutionary
transformation was most vulnerable.
Robespierre wrote
in 1794:
If the spring of popular
government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in
revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is
fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than
justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it
is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general
principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs.
It has been said that terror
is the principle of despotic government. Does your government therefore
resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of
liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed. Let the
despot govern by terror his brutalized subjects; he is right, as a despot.
Subdue by terror the enemies of liberty, and you will be right, as founders of
the Republic. The government of the revolution is liberty’s despotism against
tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime? And is the thunderbolt not
destined to strike the heads of the proud?
. . . Indulgence for the
royalists, cry certain men, mercy for the villains! No! mercy for the innocent,
mercy for the weak, mercy for the unfortunate, mercy for humanity.
One more thing seems nearly
certain: sending political opponents within the ranks of the revolutionaries to
the guillotine — the Dantonists, the Hebertists
— was a reflection of political weakness that left Robespierre isolated and
ultimately defenseless
against the plots he so feared.
With the benefit of hindsight,
Engels wrote
in a letter to Marx in 1870 that:
These perpetual little panics
of the French — which all arise from fear of the moment when they will really
have to learn the truth — give one a much better idea of the Reign of Terror.
We think of this as the reign of people who inspire terror; on the contrary, it
is the reign of people who are themselves terrified.
Terror consists mostly of
useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure
themselves. I am convinced that the blame for the Reign of Terror in 1793 lies
almost exclusively with the over-nervous bourgeois, demeaning himself as a
patriot…
Marx himself, though certainly
critical of the particulars of “revolutionary terror” as it played out in
France, took a less
ambiguous stance towards violence in the defense of revolution:
[T]here is only one way in
which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth
throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and
that way is revolutionary terror.
Who ruined the French
Revolution?
By the summer of 1794 — five
years after the summer of unrest that saw the convening of the Estates-General,
the formation of the National Assembly, and the storming of the Bastille — the
revolution was fragmented and Robespierre was increasingly isolated, left to
occupy a left flank of the revolutionary leadership that was largely devoid of
allies or support.
Fearful of conspiracies
against his life, Robespierre had argued for the execution of fellow
revolutionary leaders like Hebert and Danton while presiding over the Committee for Public Safety. Perhaps predictably,
Robespierre did fall victim to a conspiracy from his right, and the dearth of
possible allies — the ranks of the moderates and of the left wing having been
severely culled by Robespierre’s own expeditions to the guillotine — sealed his
doom.
On 9 Thermidor (July 27) of
1794, the National Convention, following the lead of Jean-Lambert Tallien,
sentenced Robespierre and three other radical Jacobins to death. After a
short-lived insurrection against the National Assembly — led by the Paris
Commune, the assembly formed by the sans-culottes and their bourgeois allies
after the victory at Tuileries two years earlier — Robespierre and his allies
were arrested. The next day, they were executed by guillotine.
A violent purge of the Commune
followed. Of its ninety-five leaders present at the time of Robespierre’s
capture, eighty-seven died on the guillotine. As Eric Hazan writes, “A new
Terror had begun.”
Filippo Buonarroti, a
contemporary commentator and friend of Robespierre’s, lamented the monumental
defeat, interpreting it as the result of a vulgar alliance between the
surviving elements of the old aristocracy and opportunistic revolutionaries on
the right wing. To justify their actions, he claims, the leaders of the
so-called “Thermidorian reaction” had to distort the legacies of those
they opposed, cynically warping revolutionary principles in the service of
privilege. He wrote:
The interested professors of
democracy, and the ancient partisans of aristocracy, were found to accord once
more. Certain rallying cries that recalled the doctrines and institutions of
equality, were now regarded as the impure howls of anarchy, brigandism, and
terrorism.
Eric Hazan, writing centuries
later, is similarly pessimistic:
What was brutally concluded
with Thermidor is the incandescent phase of the Revolution, in which men of
government, sometimes followed and sometimes driven forward by the most
conscious section of the people, sought to change material inequities, social
relations and ways of life. They did not succeed, to be sure.
Left unprotected by the
popular insurgency of the sans-culottes that, in a previous era, may have come
to his aid, Robespierre died without seeing the completion of the revolutionary
project he embodied, and the French Revolution died soon after.
The weakened French state,
stripped of so much of its democratic potential, could not deliver on the
promises of the revolution, and was left in the control of those who would see
the revolution’s most radical advances overturned. From this political context
soon emerged Napoleon Bonaparte, and the revolution soon mutated into the
Bonapartist state, built through war and empire abroad and aristocratic tyranny
at home. In perhaps the most perverse example of the inversion of revolutionary
principles Buonarotti pointed out, the revolutionary agenda of liberty and
equality became a doctrine
of global domination through Napoleon’s imperial expeditions.
The revolution was in many
respects defeated — though its memories still motivated democratic upsurges
like the worker-led Paris Commune decades later.
How did the rest of Europe
view the revolution?
The insurrection of the
sans-culottes and the liberalization of the French political system had
profound effects on the surrounding monarchies. Predictably, the reaction of
the monarchs was vastly different from the response of the masses.
The monarchs of Austria and
Prussia — including Leopold II,
a relative of the French royals — took immediate interest in the popular unrest
destabilizing their neighbor kingdom, even colluding with Louis XVI and
Marie-Antoinette to orchestrate an inter-kingdom war to weaken the
constitutionalist state.
After Louis XVI was prevented
from fleeing the nation by angry peasants and evidence of his treason was
discovered in Paris, the French people were so outraged they seized the
Tuileries and deposed the king, sparking skirmishes with the neighboring
monarchs.
But common people in
neighboring regions saw inspiration for their own liberation in the French
popular struggle. Swiss Guards — hired as mercenaries to defend Louis XVI
— defected to the ranks of the sans-culottes en masse during the seizure
of Tuileries, and there were similar incidents of side-switching along the
border, as soldiers representing the French nation absorbed dissident foreign
troops.
Following the French
Revolution, popular rebellions also occurred in Italy and Switzerland, citing
the French struggle as an ideological and military example.
What was the relationship
between the French Revolution and the Haitian one?
Between 1791 and 1804 — during
the same period of revolutionary upheaval in the metropole — slaves on
the French island of Saint Domingue rose up against the plantation system that
maintained their misery, demanding for themselves the rights of citizens. The
rebelling slaves dispossessed the planter class of their wealth, executed the
remaining planters on the island, abolished slavery, and established Haiti, the
first free republic in the Americas.
Among the new nation’s
inaugural documents was an appeal to that most fundamental of French
revolutionary tracts: the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.”
We would do well to remember Marx’s
warning: “Ideas can never lead beyond an old world order but only beyond
the ideas of the old world order. Ideas cannot carry out anything at all. In
order to carry out ideas men are needed who can exert practical force.” So
caution is essential to avoid overstating the role of French revolutionary
ideology in the formation of the slave rebellion across the Atlantic — the most
dramatic challenge ever posed to the hegemony of European slavery.
But it is clear that
revolutionary pamphlets from France — of which there were many
— did make it into the hands of slaves in Saint Domingue. And
certainly the demands of slaves to be incorporated into the revolutionary
project of metropolitan France — not to mention the demand for inclusion in the
commonwealth of so-called “Enlightenment values” — shaped the revolution’s
development in Europe, challenging it to expand its understanding of both
man and citizen. C.L.R. James writes:
Excluding the masses of Paris,
no portion of the French empire played, in proportion to its size, so grandiose
a role in the French Revolution as the half million blacks and Mulattoes in the
remote West Indian islands.
What did the Bolsheviks think
about the Jacobins?
They were fans.
Even though the Bolsheviks
were building
a mass party of workers to usher in a socialist society, very different than
what the Jacobins sought to accomplish, Lenin saw much to admire in their
revolutionary example. He wrote
in 1917:
Proletarian historians see Jacobinism
as one of the highest peaks in the emancipation struggle of an oppressed class.
The Jacobins gave France the best models of a democratic revolution and of
resistance to a coalition of monarchs against a republic. The Jacobins were not
destined to win complete victory, chiefly because eighteenth-century France was
surrounded on the continent by much too backward countries, and because France
herself lacked the material basis for socialism, there being no banks, no
capitalist syndicates, no machine industry and no railways.
“Jacobinism” in Europe or on
the boundary line between Europe and Asia in the twentieth century would be the
rule of the revolutionary class, of the proletariat, which, supported by the
peasant poor and taking advantage of the existing material basis for advancing
to socialism, could not only provide all the great, ineradicable, unforgettable
things provided by the Jacobins in the eighteenth century, but bring about a
lasting world-wide victory for the working people.
It is natural for the
bourgeoisie to hate Jacobinism. It is natural for the petty bourgeoisie to
dread it. The class-conscious workers and working people generally put their
trust in the transfer of power to the revolutionary, oppressed class for that
is the essence of Jacobinism, the only way out of the present crisis, and the
only remedy for economic dislocation and the war.
How should we remember the
French Revolution?
The French Revolution was an
enormous social reorganization affecting some twenty-five million people
in France and countless others in regions as geographically distant as Haiti.
During the five years of push-pull between the forces of reaction and the will
of the revolutionaries, common people experienced great hardship, but also the
largely unprecedented opportunity to intervene in matters of national politics
and disrupt the exploitative power relationships that defined their lives. As
Hobsbawm reminds
us:
It was not a comfortable phase
to live through, for most men were hungry and many afraid; but it was
phenomenon as awful and irreversible as the first nuclear explosion, and all
history has been permanently changed by it. And the energy it generated was
sufficient to sweep away the armies of the old regimes of Europe like straw.
Eric Hazan concludes his book
with another reminder — the French Revolution, in many ways, ended in defeat.
The mainstream history is the history of the victors, the forces of reaction
who succeeded in cauterizing the revolution on 9 Thermidor. So our task is to
excavate the history of France’s great revolution, now buried under over two
centuries of permanent counter-revolution. He writes:
The heirs of the
Thermidorians, who have governed and taught us continuously ever since, seek to
travesty this history. Against them, let us keep memory alive, and never lose
the inspiration of a time when one heard tell that ‘the unfortunate are the
powers of the Earth,’ that ‘the essence of the Republic or of democracy is
equality,’ and that ‘the purpose of society is the common happiness.’
Onwards towards the common
happiness. Happy Bastille Day!
Jonah Walters is a researcher
at Jacobin and a graduate student in geography at Rutgers University.
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