A Marxist View of the First French Republic

11 Pages·1947·0.343 MB·English

by  R. R. Palmer

A Marxist View of the First French Republic
Author(s): R. R. Palmer
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Dec., 1947), pp. 324-333
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1876094 .
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REVIEWAVR TICLE
A MARXIST VIEW OF THE FIRST FRENCH REPUBLIC
R. R. PALMER
T
HE strength of Marxist parties today in torical writer and add new evidence, were any
Europe, notably France, gives a timeliness needed, to show that others than career his-
and practical importance to their views on any torians may write significant history. The book
subject. M. Daniel Guerin offers us a systemati- is thoughtful and thorough; the author worked
cally Marxist study of the French Revolution.' on it for five years; he is entirely familiar with
It is, in fact, of the substantial and documented the relevant literature and has read widely in
histories of that Revolution, the most systemati- a great variety of sources. No more could be
cally Marxist ever written by a Frenchman. asked of him in the way of technical competence
Guerin's party connections are unknown to the or preparation. Nor is he more dogmatic than
present reviewer. He seems not to be Stalinist; some others in imposing his own pattern on the
he speaks of a recent degeneration of Marxist French Revolution.
thought and thinks that the modern revolution- For these reasons, because of its general con-
ary movement has been somewhat distorted by temporary implications and because it will oc-
the fact that its first triumphs came in Russia. cupy a permanent place in the historiography of
Real revolutionary feeling, he seems to hold, has the field, the book seems to deserve criticism and
ebbed since early in the present century. "If one summary at some length. Its message should be
compares the level of socialist or communist of interest to many who cannot take time to
thought today with what it was fifty or even read two sizable volumes on the French Revo-
twenty years ago, one is aghast. The clearest lution or who, if they did, might feel unable to
concepts have lost their meaning. Whether the judge the validity of the interpretation.
terms be 'democracy,' 'socialism,' 'dictatorship Guerin's message becomes clear in three
of the proletariat,' or 'permanent revolution,' ways: first, by what he says of other writers on
everyone simply monopolizes them for himself, the Revolution; second, by his application of
repudiates them or knocks his adversary on the Marxist categories of thought; and, third, by
head with them without any longer realizing the story of the First Republic as he himself re-
what they mean."2 To clarify these terms and to lates it.
help restore revolutionary thought, through an Of the work of other historians he is conscious
investigation of the French Revolution, is one throughout: he quotes from them frequently
of the author's principal purposes. and at length, as he does from Marx and Engels,
His book will therefore be useful to an under- and he concludes with a bibliographical essay
standing of contemporary France. It is also an which students at all specialized in the subject
impressive piece of historical writing, to be pon- should not fail to read. To what may be called
dered seriously by students of the French Revo- rightist authorities, such as Taine and Madelin,
lution. The author is not a historian by profes- he gives scant attention. The egregious Pierre
sion. His one other important work, Fascisme et Gaxotte he does not even mention. His points
grand capital,3 written about ten years ago, was can be more effectively made against historians
not on a strictly historical theme. But the pres- commonly regarded as on the Left. He finds that
ent book should establish his position as a his- Louis Blanc and Jean Jaures, in writing their
, La lutte de classes soutsl a Premiere Republique: socialist classics on the Revolution, failed fully
bourgeois et "bras nus" (I793-I797). By Daniel to cut "the umbilical cord tying them to the
GUPRIN. 2 vols. ("La suite des temps," No. i6.) bourgeoisie" and that Albert Mathiez and
Paris: Librairie Gallimard, I946. PP. 5II+472. Georges Lefebvre are "not sufficiently disen-
Fr. 850. gaged from the cocoon of bourgeoisd emocracy."4
2Ibid., I, 42. These are very extreme statements, in which the
3Paris, I936. 4 II, 369, 37I, and 379.
324
A MARXIST VIEW OF THE FIRST FRENCH REPUBLIC 325
meaning depends entirely on the meaning of than class struggle, 'national defense' rather
"bourgeois"a nd which in practice may give un- than civil war. Their interpretation of facts suf-
informed readers an entirely inadequate idea of fers from a fundamental weakness: they have
how much the writers named have emphasized somethingt o conceal."6 Guerin affirmst hat he has
the role of the working classes. But, for Guerin, nothing to conceal: he favors a class war of
all differences among Frenchmen on the Revo- workers against bourgeois and declares as his
lution seem to be differences among bourgeois. purpose, in the long labor of writing this book,
He looks forward to the rise of a proletarian the weaning of proletarians from all trust in the
school, which in one place he envisages as a bourgeoisie.7
group of collaborating researchers,o n the model The initial question, and Guerin honestly
of the Marx-Engels Institute at Moscow. recognizes it as a question, is whether there in
What Guerin says of Jaures illustrates his fact was a proletariat or an incipient proletarian
position. Jaures, he claims, Marxist though he movement in the eighteenth century. It is here
tried to be, was never able to overcome the na- that the apparatus of Marxian sociology is
tional illusions about the Revolution. "Hence brought into play. That the French Revolution
his 'socialist' history is not sufficiently different was in its results essentially a bourgeois move-
from history as written by bourgeois demo- ment, directed against feudal and landed inter-
crats, for whom the great Revolution, by estab- ests, is admitted and affirmed. In the "objective
lishing democracy, is supposed to have equipped conditions" of the time it could be no other.
men with an instrument for emancipating them- These objective conditions apparently mean the
selves in successive and peaceful stages, freeing state of affairs brought about by dialectical
them thereby from the need of any revolution process irrespective of the wish or intention of
in the future. Authentic Marxism, on the con- any person or class. But in addition to this bour-
trary, discovers hidden in the bushes of the geois revolution, which was all that objective
bourgeois revolution the young shoots of an- conditions would allow to succeed, there was
other class struggle and another revolution, the another revolution at work, the "permanent
continuation and final end of the one which be- revolution," the age-old protest of the exploited
gan, in France, in I789."s In general, the author against the exploiters. This not only threatened
complains that the most advanced writers on the bourgeoisie and feudal aristocracy alike; it pro-
Revolution have been only advanced republi- vided the "internal mechanism" of the bour-
cans; that they will not do full justice to the geois revolution itself. Without constant pres-
working-classo r antibourgeois movement of the sure from the lowest class and without using the
I 790's, will not see it as more than incidental or mob action of the common people, the bour-
troublesome to the main current; will not accept geois would not have succeeded even in accom-
the proletarian thrust as basic, indispensable, plishing their own revolution against the aris-
and constructive in the great Revolution; will tocracy. The dynamic of the permanent revolu-
not admitt hat even in I793 and I 794 the bour- tion furnished the drive by which the bourgeois
geoisie outwitted and cheated the common man. revolution was carried through. Thus, a prole-
The author taunts the bourgeois unmercifully. tarian revolution went along with a bourgeois
He says that the bourgeois today is under an revolution. It is the erroro f a "vulgar Marxism"
inner compulsion to forget his own history. The to suppose that a purely bourgeois revolution
bourgeois cannot comfortably remember that had to come before a proletarian revolution
he, too, once came to power by revolution, ter- could begin.8
ror, and class war. "Even during the Revolution The author is careful in using the term "pro-
the dominant class [the bourgeoisie] took care letarian" of the eighteenth century. He knows
to mask its class struggle against the sans- that the word does not strictly apply, that far
culottes under effusions of equalitya nd fraternity fewer people then than now were uprooted, to-
.... patrie en danger and salut public. What tally without resources, and dependent on daily
bourgeois actors in the Revolution did, bour- wages, and that a large section of the laboring
geois historians of the Revolution carry on; they population was made up of artisans and small
have applied themselves, in their investigation
of the Revolutionary period, to finding a justi- 6 II, 387. All italics within quotation marksa re
fication for bourgeois democracy rather than Guerin's.
direct democracy, class collaboration rather 7Ibid., pp. 365, 375, and 389.
SI, I6-I7. 8 I, 3-22.
326 R. R. PALMER
shopkeepers dependent not on wages but on mentous than the French Revolution itself?
selling to customers. He prefers, for the toiling "The French Revolution," he finally declares,
class, the nontechnical term bras nus (taken "was, above all, the work of the exploited
from Michelet), the bare-armed manual work- masses."I2 A fact which no one denies, that the
ers, "rude people," sans-culottes. The bras nus intervention of working-class elements was de-
were only dimly class conscious; they over- cisive on the course of the Revolution, tends to
lapped into the lesser bourgeoisie. But they had, merge for Guerin into the essence of the Revo-
or rapidly developed during the Revolution, an lution itself. And though he modestly insists
antibourgeois psychology and made economic that he is only trying to see the class struggle
and political demands repugnant to the bour- within the cadre of the French Revolution, the
geoisie.9 That there were such people and that truth is that he is seeing the French Revolution
they felt and acted as stated is surely a fact, within the cadre of a perpetual bourgeois-prole-
copiously set forth by earlier historians; there tarian struggle.
seems nothing especially Marxist in this point. The subordination of everything else, neces-
The Marxian element lies perhaps in the belief sary and acceptable in a monograph, does, how-
that these people were a unitary class, whose ever, produce a one-sided impression of the Rev-
antibourgeois interests were, of all their inter- olution as a whole. It is still true, despite all that
ests, the most ultimate, irreducible, fundamen- may be said, that "bourgeois"a nd "proletarian"
tal, and everlasting. had common ground in the 179o's, notably in
And this is the author's belief. He affirms, in preventing a restoration of the Old Regime. It
a concluding note on his method: "Class domi- is still true that France was at war and that
nates man. Class interests prevail over the in- war imposes action not to be explained in terms
timate feelings of man."'10 How this is to be of class. It is still true that the civil wars in
made consistent with recurrent earlier state- France, in the Vendee and in the south, were at
ments, that the bras nus of the I 790's were only least as much regional as class inspired. It is still
dimly class conscious, is not altogether clear; true that there is such a thing as social and polit-
presumably it would be argued that these peo- ical dissolution, into which France in I 793 near-
ple did not yet know that it was their class that ly fell, and that there is such a thing as effective
made them feel and act as they did. Only an in- government and "order," which, on the whole,
finitesimal minority, the author holds, were the Committee of Public Safety undertook to
fully conscious of their class position and its restore. And it is still doubtful whether "class"
meaning. These were the leaders, the avant exists at all with all the force and significance
garde. imputed to it by the author or whether the ten-
It is class history, the author insists (in his sions and frictions of human beings in society
note on method and elsewhere), that he is con- can be so conveniently polarized or lumped. It
cerned with writing. He begs us to remember seems gratuitous to reduce to two classes and to
that he is not attempting another general his- one struggle the complex world of the Third
tory of the Revolution. "We have aimed unique- Estate of the I 7go's-bankers, speculators,
ly at considering the French Revolution from lawyers, soldiers, government employees, ship-
the point of view of class relationships."II Nor owners, great merchants of the port towns, small
is the struggle of the bourgeois class against merchants of the interior, manufacturers large
feudalism and monarchy included. The book is, and small, merchant-capitalists, maBtre-fabri-
as its title says, an account of the struggle be- cants, members of the recently abolished guilds,
tween bourgeois and proletarian. As a mono- artisans of the "free" trades, journeymen, ap-
graph on this subject it is magnificently useful; prentices, unskilled workers, casual laborers,
it ferrets out and points up a thousand evidences rural domestic workers, bourgeois landowners,
of this struggle. Yet the book is not a mono- peasant landowners (large and small), peasants
graph merely. It becomes, despite the author's renting their farms (large and small), peasants
disclaimers, an interpretation of the whole on shares (the metayers), landless peasants liv-
Revolution. How could it be otherwise, when ing by wages, those living by collective village
the class struggle of the proletariat is for the rights, persons who had acquired property taken
author so transcendently momentous, more mo- from the church, those who hoped to do the
same, together with economically nonworking
I Ibid., pp. I I-I3. classes from pure rentiers to destitute widows
1OI I, 408. ,1 Ibid., p. 406. 12 Ibid., p. 407.
A MARXIST VIEW OF THE FIRST FRENCH REPUBLIC 327
and orphans. All these people, besides being the century-old commercial rivalry and funda-
crisscrossedb y provincial and religious lines, re- mental in shaping the subsequent course of the
acted in diverse ways to purely economic con- Revolution. The cause of the war he finds in the
ditions of inflation, prices, wages,scarcity, requi- ambitions of the French bourgeoisie; he dis-
sition, or other controls. If we insist on a dual- misses most of the causes usually given and in-
ism, we can distinguish between rich and poor, sists that the British and continental govern-
or between propertied and propertyless, or be- ments tried to live at peace with Revolutionary
tween those who had to buy food and those who France. That the bourgeois Girondists really
produced or sold it, or between those who bene- aimed at the liberation of Europe he regards as
fited from a rise of prices and those who bene- nonsense. Their real aim was conquest, espe-
fited from a rise of wages; but we cannot so cially in Belgium, by which they hoped to re-
trenchantly distinguish between bourgeois and gain a position of commerciala dvantage against
proletarian in a useful meaning of those terms, Britain; for the British business classes, by their
or even between bourgeois and bras flu. own conquests during the eighteenth century
One more point of doctrine needs elucidation and by their introduction of machine produc-
before a digest of-t he author's narrative can'be tion, were driving their French competitors to
intelligibly offered. This concerns the meaning the wall.i6
of democracy. The author holds that parliamen- The French bourgeois, having started their
tary institutions as created in the French Revo- war, were characteristically unwilling to pay for
lution were a sham or fiction, an expedient by it. They would not tax themselves, having just
which the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie, after made a revolution in part to lighten taxes. They
wresting sovereignty from the king in the name would not lend their money- to the Republic,
of the people, managed to withhold it from the for the new Republic was a poor financial risk.
people and retain it for themselves.I3 The Na- They would not even dear the financial decks
tional Convention was not a truly democratic by repudiating the debt of the Old Regime, since
body and did not truly represent the sovereign- most of this debt was in fact owed to them-
ty of the people. True democracy and popular selves. They made the other classes pay. They
sovereignty the author finds rather in the Paris sold real estate confiscatedf rom the former priv-
Commune and other communes of France, in ileged orders. And by printing paper money they
the popular clubs and section committees, and financed the war by= inflation, depriving the
in the "revolutionary armies," i.e., not the mili- common man of his purchasing power and so
tary armies but the semiorganized bands of unloading the main cost upon the poor. At this
food-gatherers and suspect-hunters of I 793. point the author's argument would be stronger
These he sees as agencies of direct democracy, if the revolutionary bourgeoisie had really con-
each led by a small class-conscious minority of fiscated the property of nobles as such and if the
the avant garde bent on the use of direct ac- poorest class had been the only class to complain
tion.I4 These agencies are said to resemble and against inflation.I7
anticipate the Paris Commune of I87I and the The common people, the brasn us, tormented
Soviets of i9i8.I5 by rising prices in I793, became economically
Let us turn now to the author's own story. restless and gave rise to certain leaders called
Nine-tenths of the space, despite the dates in enrages, "the direct and authentic interpreters
the subtitle, deals with the period from the of the movement of the masses; they were, as
spring of I 793 to the fall of Robespierre in July Karl Marx does not hesitate to say, the 'prin-
I794, the classic period of the rise and rule of cipal representatives of the revolutionary move-
that wing of Jacobins known as the Mountain. ment."'I8 These enrages expressed a profound
On this period the presentation is very detailed. but philosophically unformed anticapitalist and
The author largely ignores the circumstances antibourgeois position, but they could not see
of the fall of the monarchy and inauguration of beyond the capitalist and property system be-
the Republic. He begins his recital with the cause conditions for transition to a new ecohom-
war, the first French incursion into Belgium, ic order were not yet present and also because
and the ensuing hostilities between France and many small people were at that time property
Great Britain, which he regards as a renewal of owners.'9 All that they demanded, therefore,
'3 I, 23-27, II3, and passim. x6 I, 45-62. 8'Ibid., p 77-
14 Ibd., pp. 27-4I. J5I , 37; and II, 348. 17I bid., pp. 62-66. Ig Ibid., pp. 79-80.
328 R. R. PALMER
was controls on the existing order: prohibition dropped its Girondists. But the claim to author-
of the exchange of paper money for gold, which ity and independence of action on the part of
drove down the value of paper; controls on the the Convention was maintained. The bras nus
price of bread and other commodities; prohibi- were deprived of the full reward for their efforts.
tion of hoarding; requisition and enforced cir- The victors were the bourgeois Montagnardso f
culation of goods. They had, however, despite the Convention, now rid of the Girondists and
the inevitable primitiveness of their economic free to go their own way.24
thought, "the incontestable merit, as compared It is next argued that, with the Girondists
to the Montagnardsw ho were shut up in parlia- out, the French bourgeoisie rallied and consoli-
mentary legalism, of proclaiming the necessity dated itself behind the Montagnards.25 Not much
for direct action."20 stress is laid on the federalist rebellions which
These enraggsa nd their bras nus supporters, followed the purging of the Convention and
both in person and in program, were distasteful which, as primarily sectional or interbourgeois
to the bourgeois revolutionaries. One wing of wars, have a somewhat unsettling effect on the
the latter, the Girondists, was unwilling to deal author's principal thesis. It is necessary for the
with these lower-class elements at all; another remainder of his story to equate the regime of
wing, the "Jacobin demagogues," was willing to the Mountain with the dominance of an essen-
make temporary concessions to the bras nus by tially unified bourgeoisie. He cites numerous
stealing the program of the enrages.2' First,t hey cases of individual bourgeois who, after first
had to get rid of the Girondists. The simple favoring the Girondists, later accepted and
course, that of direct action, would be for the profited from the domination of the Mountain.
people to get rid of the National Convention it- Nevertheless, one of the weakest links in the
self. But Robespierre, as a leading Jacobin author's chain of thought lies precisely here; the
demagogue, could not tolerate such a solution. Mountain itself was never a unit, still less were
He must give the least possible offense to the the extra-parliamentary interests which sup-
Right and the least possible opening to the ported it;' and the fact that many business
Left. people and property owners accepted it as a de
facto government, after it had seized power, is
If Robespierret hus nailed himself to the parlia-
surely no proof of their liking for it or positive
mentary fiction, it was for another reason no less
imperious.H e had to shield himself not only from attachment to it. There is a great difference be-
the Right but also fromt he Left; he had to protect tween saying that the rule of the Committee of
himselff romt he popularv anguard.A t this moment Public Safety was a bourgeois type of regime
[May I793] a dictatorshipm ight becomea dictator- (which is scarcely doubtful) and' saying that it
ship of sans-culottes,i .e., an anticipation of the was the rule of the bourgeoisie.
modern "dictatorship of the proletariat" (total Although the bourgeoisie never lost the up-
democracyf or the brasn us, dictatorshipf or counter- per hand, having outplayed the bras nus in the
revolutionaries).I f Robespierrev. iolated the As-
events of May 3I, the half-year following that
sembly, which was deemed to exercise the sover-
date, according to Guerin, saw the farthest
eignty of the people by delegation,h e would slide
into the abyss of direct democracy,e ncouraget he surge of the Revolution to the Left.26D irect de-
people in arms to demand exerciseo f sovereignty mocracy won many successes; it was the heyday
by the sovereign itself, deal a fatal blow to the of the popular clubs, the communes of Paris and
fragilec onstructionr aisedb y bourgeoisp hilosophers elsewhere, the section committees of surveil-
to turn the people from this temptation.22 lance, public safety, etc., the revolutionary
armies, and socially significant terrorisms uch as
A.nd Guerin at this point regrets that even the that at Lyon. The economic controls demanded
socialist Jaures, in narrating the incidents of by the enrage'sw ere put on the lawbooks, espe-
May I 793, expressed his preference for parlia- cially after the popular insurrection of Septem-
mentary and legal forms.23 ber I793. Signs of reaction, to be sure, soon set
The Jacobins tricked the brasn us. The people in. The club of the femmes re'volutionnairews as
staged the insurrection of May 3I. The Com- closed in October. And the triumphant Jacobin
mune and other democratic agencies brought demagogues, having appropriated the program
pressure on the Convention. The Convention
24 Ibid., II4-3I.
20IbJ., p. 84. 22Ibid., p. II3. 25 Ibid., pp. I32-36 and 306-66.
2I Ibid., pp. 8o and IO9 ff. 23I bid., p. II5. 26Ibid., pp. I74-230.
A MARXIST VIEW OF THE FIRST FRENCH REPUBLIC 329
of the enrages, proceeded to arrest them.27J ac- be to revolutionize material conditions. He
ques Roux and those like him passed from the notes Aulard's idea that with a little more effort
scene. Their place as spokesmen for the common Christianity might have been annihilated in
people was inherited by the HWbertistsT. he au- France at the time; he agrees that the masses
thor judges the Hebertists much as do other his- cared little for the church but still regards Au-
torians, regarding them as turbulent job-holders lard's judgment as a little facile.
or office-seekers, the small fry of Revolutionary Reasoninga s a rationalista nd not as a material-
bureaucracy, selfish in motive and aimless in ist, Aulard disregards the economic and social
program. Where the enrages had been sincere, motives which draw the miserablet o seek refuge
disinterested, and truly proletarian in sym- and consolationi n the idea of God. He would be
pathy, the vague crowd known as Hebertists right if the Revolution, perseveringi n the way
were merely plebeian-disoriented bourgeois opened up, had extirpatedt he veryr ootso f religious
hoping to profit from mass discontent. Still, sentiment.B ut the Revolution,t hough it did go a
little further than the bourgeoisd emocratics olu-
after the loss of the enrages, the H6bertists were
tion of the religiousp roblem,r emainedt angled in
the only spokesmen that the inarticulate toiling
the frameworko f bourgeoisl aw. It did not im-
classes had left.28 prove the condition of man enough to let him do
The Hebertists launched the movement of without God. Here again we touch on its ultimate
dechristianization. Having no solution to eco-
limits.32
nomic problems and no desire. for real social
revolution, they hit upon this attack on religion Dechristianization was blocked, we are told,
as a safe means of mobilizing mass opinion, hop- not only or even chiefly by the failure of the
ing thus to strengthen themselves against the bras nus to understand the material basis of re-
entrenched politicians of the Mountain. To the ligion but by the fact that the bourgeoisie,
Hebertist chieftains the antireligious campaign, though strongly anticlerical, in the last analysis
according to Guerin, was merely a tactical needed Christianity as a form of insurance for
move; but they unleashed a force that they their own property.33T hat many French bour-
could not control, for the brasn us did in fact, he geois of the time did in fact take this utilitarian
says, detest the church. The bras nus went be- view of Christianity is, of course, perfectly true;
yond the bourgeois idea of liberted es cultest o the it is a hallmark of the Age of Reason. Robes-
forcible suppression of religion altogether. De- pierre himself, in calling atheism "aristocratic,"
christianization he represents as a profound and spoke of the poor man's consolation through
powerful movement; anti-Christianity he re- faith in God. Yet Guerin's dualism is surely
gards as a class, i.e., proletarian, feeling; and overstrained. To regard the bourgeois of the
he describes with satisfaction the scenes of pop- I790's as the ultimately proreligious class and
ular joy surrounding vandalism against the the workingmen and peasants as the ultimately
churches.29 He regards the worship of Reason at antireligious class simply does not correspond
Notre-Dame de Paris in November I 793 as the to the facts as known. At this point the author
very climax of the Revolution.30Y et he observes seems to impose some of his own heartfelt wishes
that it could not succeed and that seen in retro- on the subject. It is noteworthy that he hardly
spect it was really a diversion because there was mentions the Revolutionary calendar, surely
no simultaneous attack on the material condi- one of the characteristic products of the drive
tions from which religion naturally springs. He for dechristianization. The calendar originated
holds that religious belief necessarily flourishes not with the populace but with certain bour-
in a society based on private property and un- geois intelligentsia, as did much of the rest of
equal classes in which most people require the the antireligious excitement.
comfort of belief in an afterlife.3' The only way Meanwhile, in the last months of I 793, there
to get rid of religion (though it would be a rela- was taking form the dictatorship of the Moun-
tively easy and effective way) would therefore tain expressed in the extraordinary powers
conferred by the Convention on the Committee
27 Ibid., pp. 23I-49. of Public Safety. Previous writers on this
regime, says Guerin, have confused two sorts
28 Ibid., pp. 92, 250-56, and 444. of dictatorship: "on the one hand, a popular,
29 Ibid., pp. 256-88 and 448. democratic, decentralized dictatorship, its im-
30 Ibid., pp. I7, 32, 282-85, and 306. 32Ibid., pp. 298-99-
3' Ibid., pp. 299-305 and 425. 33 Ibid., pp. 259-6I and 406-70.
330 R. R. PALMER
pulsions moving from below upward, a dictator- pendence, seems to the present reviewer to be
ship of the sansculottes in arms, grouped in fanciful in the extreme. What Guerin thinks of
their sections, clubs and communes ....; on the present Soviet regime in this connection he
the other hand, a bourgeois, authoritarian, does not say. But to the principle of a "com-
centralizing dictatorship, its impulsions mov- munist" dictatorship, i.e., of a dictatorship ris-
ing from the top downward and directed not ing from and reared upon communes, he is clear-
only against the aristocracy but also, and in- ly steadfast.
creasingly, against the bras nus and the organs The position of Robespierre in the Commit-
of popular power."34T he rule of the Committee tee of Public Safety is for Guerin that of a
of Public Safety he classifies as of the latter front.37 The core of the Committee was the
type; indeed, he calls it Bonapartist rather grands specialistes, Carnot, Lindet, and others,
than popular in character.35 He lays great bourgeois of considerable private wealth. They
stress, as have other recent writers, on the did the work; they governed France. They need-
law of I4 Frimaire (December 4, I793) by ed a colleague popular with the masses. Robes-
which the new regime was centralized and con- pierre was their man. He was in fact popular,
solidated. In this law he sees the emergence though undeservedly, with the bras nus and
of the modern state as a committee of the bour- sans-culottes. But Guerin scarcely sees Robes-
geoisie to rule the working class. He tells how pierre as a positive figure. He credits him with
the Committee of Public Safety, under the re- no tangible program or view of society. This is
gime of I4 Frimaire, replaced the myriad of local apparently because what Robespierre stood for
leaders with centrally appointed "national (in the reviewer's opinion), namely, democracy,
agents," how it strove to control the representa- is itself for Guerin largely an idealistic illusion or
tives on mission, how it banned the "revolution- bourgeois fraud. The author presents Robes-
ary armies," tried to curb the popular clubs and pierre, usually thought so rigid and even doc-
committees, liquidated some leading Hebertists, trinaire, as a pliable politician, a conciliateurp ar
and finally destroyed the revolutionary Paris excellence, an arrangero r fixer, popular with the
Commune by filling its offices with Robespierrist sans-culottes but warily looking to both Right
appointees.36 and Left. "This unique and irreplaceable man
That all this was "reactionary" or a checking knew how to prevent the latent schism within
of spontaneous popular agitation and even that the Third Estate. He was the screen hiding from
the regime symbolized by 14 Frimaire was a the masses the class visage of the Committee of
kind of bourgeois committee to govern the Public Safety."38T his is Guerin's way of saying
"masses" seem to the reviewer to be entirely ac- that Robespierre hoped for national unity in a
ceptable ideas, requiring more emphasis than democratic society. Later, to be sure, a more
they have usually had. That this is all that it adequate picture is given; the author sees him
was, will not be so generally admitted. The un- as a man of two characters, both an ineffectual
derlying question is whether all power is class petty bourgeois and a potential strong man cap-
power. Power and the love of power (and of or- able of grasping the reins of state but forever
der) would appear to have a life of their own vacillating between the two, and whose vacilla-
apart from class. Politics is an autonomous tion led to his ruin.39
thing, not always or necessarily a reflection of Robespierre seems to Guerin to have been at
economics. The drive toward larger areas of ter- heart as reactionary as the other members of
ritorial unity, with the accompanying political the Committee. Nor does Guerin see any sub-
centralization, visible in Europe since the mid- stantial political difference between Robespierre
dle ages, has other causes than class ambition, and Danton. Robespierre, we are shown, for
though it may serve class interests. The regime months collaborated with Danton against the
of I4 Frimaire is to be seen within this long his- Left; he protected the arrested Girondists and
tory of the rise of the modern state. Moreover, defended the notorious "indulgent," Camille
to contrast it with another kind of dictatorship, Desmoulins. On these issues Guerin argues
in which countless small busy organs of "direct vehemently with Albert Mathiez, marshaling
democracy" continually impose their will from much evidence to demolish Mathiez's careful
the bottom upward, never losing their own inde- distinctions between Robespierre and Danton.
That Robespierre was more scrupulous and
34 II, 4. financially honest than Danton is of course con-
35I, 40 and4 20; andI I, 4 and3 0I-4. 37Ibid.,a nd I, 306-66, esp. 36i-66.
36 II, I-I32. 38 I, 362. 39 II, 30I-4.
A MARXIST VIEW OF THE FIRST FRENCH REPUBLIC 33I
ceded but regarded as of no consequence. In the controls were unworkable, that they were
general, seeing the dispute as a mere squabble either too little or too much, that requisitioning
between bourgeois, Guerin cannot understand and price control, in the circumstances, tended
why Mathiez should have so pitilessly belabored to choke off the sources of production. He tells
the unfortunate pere Aulard.40 how the Committee of Public Safety made in-
The most manifest of Robespierre's reaction- creasing concessions to merchants, private in-
ary moves, reflecting the bourgeois need of reli- dustrialists, and farmers and increasing efforts
gion, was according to Guerin his crushing of to control wages as well as prices. This (called in
dechristianization. Robespierre thereby, as early passing a "N.E.P.") he considers a bourgeois re-
as November I793, killed the Revolution. "He action, which is precisely what it was.46
weakened,d isorganized,d islocatedt he mass move- The idea that Robespierre or anyone else in
ment . The mass movement lost its homo- the regime was planning a further revolutionary
geneity and its unanimity. The Revolutionn ever advance in the spring of I794 is regarded by
recoveredfromth e blowd eliveredb y Robespierre."4' Guerin as fantastic. He dismisses the laws of
Or, again, on Robespierre's religious policy: Ventose which were made famous by Mathiez,
"While Robespierre drowned his class preoccu- who tried to see in them a great program of
pation in spiritual effusions, Bonaparte cyni- Robespierre's for social and economic reform.
cally put his feet in the trough. But, apart from Mathiez is here characterized as an imaginatif.47
the difference of form, the underlying thought is Guerin on this point is on strong ground;
the same."42L ater, there is a slight logical em- Mathiez's theory of the laws of Ventose has not
barrassment, for a purely class interpretation, stood up; few historians now think that Robes-
when the author is obliged to argue that by pierre was contemplating an extensive redis-
June-July I794 Robespierre was somewhat too tribution of property when he fell. Guerin adds
favorably disposed to Catholicism to suit the a piece of evidence hitherto unknown to the re-
other bourgeois of the Committee.43 The pre- viewer, viz., that a week after the fall of Robes-
cise religious attitude of the bourgeoisie as a pierre the Committee of Public Safety was still
class is of course impossible to specify, for ordering enforcement of the Ventose laws, mak-
Guerin or anyone else. ing it doubtful that the Ventose laws were meant
The regime of the Mountain, or of the Com- to be socially revolutionary or that the Commit-
mittee of Public Safety, was at first based, as tee disposed of Robespierre in order to forestall
Guerin notes, on concessions to the bras nus in their execution.48
the matter of economic controls. It is to be re- In short, for Guerin, Robespierre was a reac-
marked that, when the enrages demand these tionary. The Committee of Public Safety was a
controls (on currency, prices, hoarding, etc.), forecast of Bonapartism. The Revolution ebbed
our author declares that they were all that "ob- after November I 793. Thermidor was of passing
jective conditions" made possible but that when importance. It was not a turning-point, only an
the bourgeois Jacobins institute these very same acceleration of recession. It is natural that in
controls, they are dismissed as mere palliatives Thermidor the Paris masses refused to rise in de-
grudgingly thrown to the people as a sop.44 fense of Robespierre, for even then the vanguard
Again, we are told toward the beginning of the saw through his pretensions of democracy. They
book that nationalization of the economy was knew him as the man who had protected the
inconceivable in the I790's, but toward the end Girondists, helped the priests, liquidated the
the unwillingness of the Committee of Public Hebertists, denounced the bras nus as counter-
Safety to nationalize the war industries and its revolutionary, tried to hold down wages, and in-
preference for private enterprise are set forth in filtrated the Paris Commune with his own crea-
a tone definitely querulous and disapproving.45 tures.49
It is impossible for a bourgeois to please Guerin. The big bourgeois of the Committee and the
In any case he observes, as have writers of more Convention got rid of Robespierre not because
bourgeois and financially orthodox belief, that they feared him as a Leftist but because they
disliked his religiosity and found him too cool
40 I, 367-404; and II, 376-79. toward the annexationist war.50T hey then pro-
4I I, 46Q. 42 bi,d., p. 420. ceeded, especially since the war was now going
43 I, 366; and II, 2I0-27. 46II, I32-76. 48Ibid.,p . 298.
44I, 8o-8i, 99, I36, and 319. 47 Ibid., pp. 95-98. 49Ibid.,p . 295.
45 Ibid., pp. 8o, I 70 and 324-42. so Ibid ., p. 2IO and passim.
332 R. R. PALMER
favorably, to throw off the mask completely, beyond bourgeois democracy; they reached,
taking back the last of the economic concessions without yet crossing, the doorstep of direct de-
made a year before to the bras nus. The last or- mocracy of the communalo r soviet type."55T hey
gans of direct democracy were now crushed; the too, of course, were put down.
church and the liberted es cultes were resurrected. It is unfortunate, according to Gu6rin, that
The bourgeoisie showed openly its hideux visage. Babeuf in I796 and I797 formeda n idealized
Prices soared; goods disappeared; profiteers memory of Robespierre and that the Babou-
grew rich; the poor went hungry and cold. The vists, looking back, entertained a misconception
result was the uprising of Prairial, in May I 795, of the Committee of Public Safety, never asking
a last spasm of direct democracy in which the themselves what its actual class content had
bras nus streamed into the hall of the Conven- been. One of them, Buonarotti, passed on to the
tion. Guerin holds that the handful of members socialists who arose in the I830's an entirely
of the Convention who yielded to the demon- false idea of Robespierre; the early socialists
strators on this occasion have been falsely glori- came mistakenly to think of the giants of the
fied (by radical democrats) as "the last of the Year Two as predecessors of themselves. This
Mountain." They were in fact, he says, merely idea was not only historically false but calami-
the tail end of the bourgeois revolution. The tous in practice, for it seduced the proletarians
true protagonists of Prairial were the insurgents into trusting the good faith of the bourgeois
who attacked and dispersed the Convention- democrats and hence led to the ruin of social-
"the insurrectionists of Prairial, ancestors of ism in I 848.56
those of June I848 and of i87I, were the first A legend of '93 took form-which is not yet en-
combatants of the proletarian revolution."5' tirely dissipated. The French Revolution was for
They were, of course, put down. later generationsa magnificenta nd overwhelming
Only about twenty pages at the close of the heritage. But they had a distortedi mage of it
book are devoted to Babeuf and his Conspiracy beforet heir eyes. They did not see that at the time
of Equals.52 Much illuminating material on of the Revolution, when the bourgeoisieh ad not
yet finished its business with the old absolutist
Babeuf is introduced in earlierp ages, but, on the
world of feudal survivals, already a class struggle
whole, le babouvismea ppears here, as in most old-
of bourgeois and workers,i n however embryonic
er treatments, as a brief afterclap of revolution-
a form, was written in letters of fire. So they gave
ary thunder. Yet a close connection is drawn themselves trustfully to the bourgeois democrats
between the Babeuf of I796-97 and the events of i848, as the sans-culottesh ad given themselves
of I 793-94. The connection is that Babeuf to the Montagnardas,n d they paid for this ignorance
learned from the failure of the enrage'sa nd the of the hard realities of the class strugglew ith their
Hebertists. "It is in defeat," Guerin observes blood in the days of June, the new Prairial.57
generally, "that revolutionaries educate them-
The moral is plain. The masses should stop
selves and that the Revolution becomes self-
thinking of the French Revolution as a step in
conscious."53B abeuf, he says, developed a truly
their own liberation. "An authentic Marxist
scientific doctrine of socialism, a true theory of
analysis should contribute to detaching the
social and economic planning. Babeuf became
modern proletariat from the bourgeois orbit, by
"communist in his very bones."54T he Babou-
showing the false light in which the French
vists saw the need for a radical reform of prop- Revolution has ordinarily been presented to it
erty. Moreover, "they suppressed the bourgeois
and revealing that even at that time, though in
parliament and confided all power to the insur-
rudimentary forms, the struggle was engaged
rectionary Commune of Paris ... . Thus in one
between rich and poor."58A nd as for the pres-
bold leap they went beyond the bourgeois revo- ent: "If objective conditions at a given moment
lution; they proposed the solution which Robes-
do not yet allow a majority of the oppressed to
pierre had constantly disapproved and fought
find the road to their emancipation, 'the mate-
against, on August io, May 3I, 9 Thermidor, rial conditions of a new society' nevertheless al-
the solution which the insurgents of Prairial had ready exist in an embryonic state, they are 'in
perceived more or less confusedly, the solution process of becoming'; and, while the majority is
that had never ceased to be a nightmare to the still stricken with myopia, a small minority, a
bourgeoisie. And so the Babouvists passed
ss Ibid., pp. 347-48.
5I Ibid., p. 333- 53 Ibid., p. 339- 56Ibid., pp. 349-54 and 363-65.
52 Ibid., pp. 340-63- S Ibid., p. 363. 57Ibid., p. 364. 58 Ibid., P. 375-