Socialist History of the French Revolution - Jean Jaurès

Introduction to “Socialist History of the French Revolution”

We want to recount to the people, to the workers, to the farmers, the events that occurred between 1789 and the end of the nineteenth century from the socialist point of view. We consider the French Revolution an immense and admirably fecund fact. But in our eyes it is not a definitive fact about which there is nothing left to history but to lay out its consequences. The French Revolution indirectly prepared the arrival of the proletariat. It realized the two essential conditions for socialism: democracy and capitalism. But essentially it meant the political arrival of the bourgeois class.

The economic and political movement, large-scale industry, the growth of the working class which grew in number and ambition, the uneasiness of the farmers crushed by competition and besieged by industrial and merchant feudalism, and the moral disquiet of the intellectual bourgeoisie whose delicate sensibilities a mercantile and brutal society offended, all of this has gradually prepared a new social crisis, a new and more profound revolution; a revolution through which the proletariat will seize power in order to transform property and morality. And so it is the march and the interplay of social classes since 1789 that we want to recount. It is always somewhat arbitrary to lay out clear borders and divisions in the uninterrupted and nuanced progress of life. Nevertheless we can with sufficient precision distinguish three periods in the last century in the history of the bourgeois and proletarian classes.

First, from 1789-1848 the revolutionary bourgeoisie triumphed and established itself. Against royal absolutism and the nobility it used the force of the proletariat, but the latter, despite their prodigious activity, despite the decisive role they played in certain events, were only a subordinate power, a kind of historic supporting force. They at times inspired real horror in the bourgeois owners, but basically they worked for them; they didn’t have a radically different concept of society. The communism of Babeuf and his rare disciples were only a sublime convulsion, the final spasm of the revolutionary crisis before the pacification of the Consulate and the First Empire. Even in 1793 and 1794 the proletariat was intermingled with the Third Estate: they lacked a clear class consciousness or the notion of any other form of property. They hardly went beyond Robespierre’s impoverished ideas: a democracy politically sovereign but economically stationary made up of small peasant owners and an artisanal petite bourgeoisie. They had none of socialism’s marvelous sap of life, the creator of wealth, beauty and joy. On the worst days they burned with a dry flame, a flame of wrath and envy. They were unaware of the seductiveness, the powerful sweetness of a new ideal.

And yet, barely had bourgeois society begun to calm and establish itself than the socialist idea began to appear. After Babeuf, between 1800-1848, there were Fourier, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Louis Blanc, and then under Louis-Philippe the workers’ uprisings of Lyon and Paris. The bourgeois revolution was hardly definitively victorious when the workers asked: “Where does our suffering come from and what new revolution must be carried out?” They saw in the waters of the bourgeois revolution, at first foaming and wild, then calmer and clearer, their worn out faces, and they were seized with horror. But despite the multiplicity of socialist systems and working class revolts, before 1848 bourgeois domination was intact.

The bourgeoisie didn’t believe it possible that power was escaping it and that property was being transformed. Under Louis-Philippe it had the strength to fight against the nobility and the priesthood and against the workers. It crushed the legitimist uprisings in the west as well as the proletarian revolts of the starving cities. It naively believed, with the pride of a Guizot, that it is the end point of history; that it has historical and philosophical titles to definitive power, that it sums up the centuries-long efforts of France, and that it is the social expression of reason. For their part the proletariat, despite the jolts of poverty and hunger, were not conscious revolutionaries. They barely glimpsed the possibility of a new order. It is primarily among the “intellectual” class that the socialist “utopias” recruited their followers. In any event, the socialist systems were strongly impregnated with either capitalist ideas, like that of Saint-Simon, or petite-bourgeois ideas, like those of Proudhon. The revolutionary crisis of 1848 was necessary for the working class to achieve consciousness of itself, for it to carry out, as Proudhon said, the definitive break with other social elements.

And even the second period, which ran from February 1848 – May 1871, from the provisional government to the bloody repression of the Commune, was troubled and uncertain. It is true that socialism already affirmed itself as a force and an idea and that the proletariat affirmed itself as a class. The workers’ revolutions rose up so threateningly against the bourgeois order that the leading classes leagued against it all the forces of the bourgeoisie and the landowning farmers frightened by the red specter. But socialist doctrines remained indecisive and confused. In 1848 the communism of Cabet, the mutualism of Proudhon, and the statism of Louis Blanc hopelessly collided, and the thought mold which should have given the working class form was inconsistent and incomplete. The theoreticians argued over the metal in fusion that came out of the furnaces and while they argued reaction, led by the man of December, smashed all of the unformed molds and cooled the metal. Even under the Commune Blanquists, Marxists, and Proudhonians imprinted divergent directions on working class thought. No one can say which socialist ideal a victorious Commune would have applied.

What is more, there was confusion and blending in the movement itself, just as there was in ideas. In 1848 the revolution was prepared by radical democracy as much, if not more than, by working class socialism, and during the June days bourgeois democracy laid the proletariat onto the burning paving stones of Paris. And in 1871 the Commune issued from an uprising of the commercial bourgeoisie irritated by the law on terms due and the harshness of the royal nobles of Versailles as well as from the patriotic frustration and republican defiance of Paris.

The socialist proletariat didn’t delay in putting its revolutionary mark on this confusion, and Marx was right to say in his powerful and systematic study of the Commune that through it for the first time the working class took possession of power. This was a new fact, one of incalculable scope. But the proletariat profited by a kind of surprise. In the isolated and overexcited capital it was the best organized and most perceptive force. But it was not yet in a condition to carry along and assimilate France to it. France belonged to the priests, the big landowners, and the bourgeoisie, of which M. Thiers was the leader. The Commune was like a knife tip reddened in the flames but which shatters against a large refractory block. But from 1848 – 1871 proletarian progress was enormous. In 1847 the proletariat’s participation in power was virtually fictitious: Louis Blanc and the worker Albert were paralyzed in the Provisional Government, and a perfidious bourgeoisie organized against them the swindle of the national workshops. The socialists platonically discussed at the Luxembourg Palace, they abdicated and resigned themselves to being but a powerless academy. Lacking the strength to act, they speechified. And then, when the deceived working class rose up in June it was crushed before having been able to touch power for a single moment. In 1871 the sons of the fighters of June held on to power, exercised it. They weren’t a rioting mob: they were the revolution.

The proletarians thus raised to power were brought down from it. But they nevertheless gave new working class generations a sign of hope, one which was understood. The Commune closed the second period, one where socialism affirmed itself as a force of the first order, though still confused and convulsive. But it was still the Commune that rendered the new period possible, the one we are all involved in and where socialism methodically proceeds to the total organization of the working class, to the moral conquest of a reassured peasantry, to the rallying of the bourgeois intellectuals disenchanted with bourgeois power, and to the total seizure of power for new forms of property and new ideals.

Confusion is now no longer to be feared. There is unity of thought in the working class and the socialist party. Despite the conflicts between groups and the superficial rivalries, all the proletarian forces are united by one doctrine and for the same action. If the proletariat were to seize power tomorrow it would immediately use it in a defined and decisive way. There would certainly be conflicts of tendencies: some would want to strengthen and push forward the centralized actions of the community, while others would want to ensure local groups of workers the greatest possible autonomy. In order to regulate the new relations of the nation, of professional federations, of communes, of local groups, of individuals, in order to establish both perfect individual freedom and social solidarity an immense effort in the fields of ideas will be needed, and amidst all this complexity there will be disagreements. But despite it all, today there is a common spirit that moves the socialists and the proletariat. Socialism is no longer dispersed among hostile and powerless sects. It is increasingly a great living unity that is multiplying its hold on life. It is now from socialism that all the great human forces, labor, thought, science, art, even religion – understood as humanity’s taking control of the universe – expect their renewal and growth.

How, through what crises, through what human effort and evolution of things has the proletariat grown into the decisive role it will play tomorrow? This is what we socialist militants propose to recount. We know that the economic conditions, the forms of production and property are the very basis of history. Just as for most human individuals their profession is the essential thing in life, it is the profession, which is the economic form of individual activity, that in most cases determines the habits, ideas, sorrows, joys, and even the dreams of men. In every period of history it is the economic structure of society that determines the political forms, the social mores, and even the general direction of ideas. And so in every period of this tale we will set out to uncover the economic bases of human life. We will attempt to follow the movement of property and the evolution of industrial and agricultural techniques. In broad strokes – as is appropriate in a necessarily rough tableau – we will note the influence of the economic state on governments, literature, and systems.

But we don’t forget that Marx – too often diminished by narrow interpreters – never forgot that it is upon men that economic forces act. And men have a prodigious diversity of passions and ideas, and the nearly infinite complexity of human life doesn’t allow itself to be brutally and mechanically reduced to an economic formula. Even more, even though man is above all as part of humanity, even though he is affected by his surrounding influences and is a continuation of the social milieu, he also lives, through his senses and intelligence, in a vaster environment, which is the universe itself.

The light of the stars most distant from and foreign to the human system doubtless only awaken dreams in the poet’s consciousness that are in conformity with the general sensibility of his time and the profound secret of social life, just as the light fog that floats over the prairie is formed by the moon from the earth’s hidden humidity. In this sense even stellar vibrations, however distant and indifferent they might appear, are harmonized and appropriated by the social system and the economic forces that determine it. Goethe, one day upon entering a factory, was seized with disgust for his clothing, which demanded so formidable a productive apparatus. And yet, without this industrial growth of the German bourgeoisie the old Germanic world never have felt or understood the magnificent impatience that made Faust’s soul burst forth.

But whatever the relationship of the human soul, even in its most daring or subtle dreams, with the economic and social system, it moves beyond the human environment into the immense cosmic environment. And the contact with the universe makes mysterious and profound forces vibrate in it, forces of the eternally moving life that preceded human societies and which will survive them. Thus, as vain and false as it would be to deny the dependence of ideas and even dreams on the economic system and precise forms of production, it would be just as puerile and crude to summarily explain the movement of human thought strictly through the evolution of economic forces. It is often the case that the human spirit rests upon the social system in order to surpass and resist it. Between the individual spirit and social power there is thus at one and the same time solidarity and conflict. It was the system of modern nations and monarchies half emancipated from the Church that allowed the free science of Kepler and Galileo, but once in possession of the truth spirit is no longer the province of the prince, society, or humanity: it is the truth itself, with its regulations and its chain of ideas, that becomes in a way the immediate environment of the spirit. And even though Kepler and Galileo established their ideas on the foundations of the modern state, after their observations and calculations they were the province strictly of themselves and the universe. The social world, where they had found their support and their starting point opened out, and their ideas knew no other laws than those of sidereal immensity.

It would please us, through the half-mechanical evolution of economic and social forms, to always allow the high dignity of the free intelligence to be felt, liberated from humanity itself by the eternal universe. The most intransigent of Marxist theoreticians could not reproach us for this. Marx, on an admirable page, declared that until now human societies were only governed by fate, by the blind movement of economic forms. Institutions and ideas were not the conscious work of free men, but the reflection of unconscious social life in the human brain. According to Marx we are still in prehistoric times. Human history will only truly begin when man, finally escaping the tyranny of unconscious forces, governs production through his reason and his will. His intelligence will no longer live under the despotism of economic forms created and guided by him, and it will be with a free and unmediated gaze that he will contemplate the universe. Marx thus glimpses a period of full intellectual liberty where human thought, no longer deformed by economic servitude, will not deform the world. But to be sure, Marx doesn’t contest the fact that already, in the darkness of the unconscious period, great spirits have raised themselves to freedom. Through them humanity prepares itself and announces its coming. It is up to us to grasp these first manifestations of the life of the spirit. It allows us to have a foretaste of the great ardent and free life of communist humanity which, freed from slavery, will appropriate the universe through science, action, and dreams. It is like the first trembling which, in the forest, only moves a few leaves, but which announces the upcoming great gusts and vast shakings.

And so our interpretation of history will be both materialist with Marx and mystical with Michelet. It was economic life that was the basis and the mechanism of human history, but across the succession of social forms man, a thinking force, aspired to the full life of thought, the ardent community of the unquiet intelligence, avid for unity and the mysterious universe. The great mystic of Alexandra said: “The high waves of the sea raised my boat to where I could see the sun at the very moment it rose from the waters.” In the same way the vast rising waters of the economic revolution will raise the human boat so that man, that poor fisherman worn out by a long night’s work, can salute from the highest point the first glimmer of the growing spirit that will rise over us.

Nor will we disdain, despite our economic interpretation of great human phenomena, the moral value of history. To be sure, we know that the beautiful words of liberty and humanity for the past century have too often covered a regime of exploitation and oppression. The French Revolution proclaimed the Rights of Man; but the owning classes included in these words the rights of the bourgeoisie and of capital.

The owners have proclaimed that men were free when the owners have no other means of domination over non-owners than property itself, but property is the sovereign force that disposes of all others. The basis of bourgeois society is thus a monstrous class egoism compounded by hypocrisy. But there were moments when the nascent Revolution combined the interests of the revolutionary bourgeoisie with the interests of humanity and a truly admirable human enthusiasm more than once filled peoples’ hearts. In the same way, in the midst of the countless conflicts unleashed by bourgeois anarchy, in the struggles of parties and classes, there were many examples of pride, valor, and courage. We will salute with equal respect the heroes of the will by raising ourselves above the bloody melees; we will glorify the bourgeois republicans outlawed in 1851 and the admirable proletarian combatants fallen in June 1848.

But who could reproach us for being especially attentive to the militant virtues of the insulted proletariat who over the last century so often gave its life for a still obscure ideal? It is not only through the force of circumstances that the social revolution will be carried out; it is by the force of men, by the energy of consciousnesses and wills. History will never exempt men from the need for individual valor and nobility. And the moral value of the communist society of tomorrow will be marked by the moral elevation of the individual consciousness of the militant class of today. To propose as an example all those heroic fighters who over the past century had passion for the idea and sublime contempt for death thus means doing revolutionary work. We will not smile at the men of the Revolution who read Plutarch’s “Lives.” It’s certain that the great impulses of internal energy they gave birth to them changed little in the march of events. But at least they remained upright in the storm: under the lightning of the great storms they didn’t display faces distorted by fear. And if the passion for glory animated their passion for liberty and courage in combat, no one will hold it against them.

And so, in this socialist history, which goes from the bourgeois Revolution to the preparatory period of the proletarian revolution, we will attempt to leave nothing out that is part of human life. We will attempt to understand and translate the fundamental economic evolution that governs societies, the spirit’s ardent aspiration towards total truth, and the noble exaltation of human consciousness defying suffering, tyranny, and death. It is by pushing the economic movement to its very end that the proletariat will free itself and become humanity. It must thus become fully conscious of the role of economic movement and human greatness in history. At the risk of momentarily surprising our readers by the disparate nature of these great names, it is under the triple inspiration of Marx, Michelet, and Plutarch that we would like to write this modest history, where each of the militants who collaborated in it will add his nuance of thought; where all will be garbed in the same essential doctrine and faith.

The Causes of the Revolution: The Philosophical Spirit

At the end of the eighteenth century two revolutionary forces enthralled spirits and increased the intensity of events by a formidable coefficient. These were the two forces:

On one hand the French nation had reached intellectual maturity. On the other the French bourgeoisie had reached social maturity. French thought had become conscious of its grandeur and wanted to apply its methods of analysis and deduction to all of reality, society and nature alike. The French bourgeoisie had become conscious of its power, its wealth, its rights, and its near infinite possibilities of development. In a word, the bourgeoisie had attained class consciousness while French thought touched the consciousness of the universe. These are the two ardent resources, the two sources of the fire of the Revolution. It was through them that it was possible, and it was through them that it was great.

M. Taine interpreted the effect on the Revolution of French thought, of what he calls the classical spirit, in the falsest fashion: I would even say he did so childishly. According to him the Revolution was completely abstract. It was led to the worst systematic errors and the worst excesses through general and vague ideas, by the empty concepts of equality, humanity, right, popular sovereignty, and progress. And it was classical culture removed from French spirit a sharp and complex sense of reality; it was this that habituated the French of the eighteenth century to noble but vain generalizations.

And so the revolutionaries were unable to precisely conceive the living diversity of conditions and men. They were incapable of seeing the passions, the instincts, the prejudices, the ignorance, and the habits of the 27,000,000 men they suddenly had to govern. They were thus condemned to recklessly overturning social life and individual existences under the pretext of reforming them. The narrow classical ideology applied to the conduct of societies: this, according to Taine, was what precipitated the Revolution into utopianism, adventure, and violence. M. Taine repeats the sentence against the Revolution delivered by Napoleon I: “It was the work of ideologues.” But even more than Napoleon, he fails to recognize its grandeur and might. And his condemnation goes even further: it is not just the revolutionary ideology he denounces, it is the national ideology and the very foundations of the French spirit.

But M. Taine is completely wrong. He saw neither what the classical spirit was nor what the Revolution was. It was he who substituted a futile scholasticism and a reactionary ideology for precise knowledge and a clear vision.

Far from having been abstract and vain, French Revolution was the most substantial, the most practical, the most balanced of revolutions history has seen to this day. We will soon demonstrate this.

The men of the Revolution had a profound knowledge of reality, a marvelous understanding of the complex difficulties into which they’d been cast. There has never been a program of action that was more extensive, more precise, and more sensible than that contained in the Cahiers of the Estates General. Never has a program been more fully realized through more appropriate and decisive methods. And as we will see, the French Revolution met all its goals. It accomplished or outlined everything the social conditions allowed, all that the new needs commanded, and in the past century nothing has succeeded in Europe and the world but that which has followed the road laid out by the Revolution.

It is on the counter-revolutionary side that we find utopianism and senseless and sterile violence. Even the agitations of the Revolution have a meaning: hidden beneath the revolutionary phraseology were the most substantial conflicts, the most precise interests. There wasn’t a single group, there wasn’t a single sect that didn’t respond to a parcel of social life. There was not a phrase, even the most apparently vain, that wasn’t dictated by reality and that didn’t bear witness to historical necessity. And if M. Taine, whose work reveals an almost incredible ignorance, has so wildly misunderstood the Revolution, what becomes of his theory about the classical spirit and the vertigo of abstraction?

But here again he was completely wrong. In the first case, through the most arbitrary abstraction he incorrectly opposed science to what he calls the classical spirit. He sang a magnificent song of praise to science as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It revealed the structure of the universe, its immensity, the laws of the worlds that move in it and are connected. It taught man what the earth was, its place, its form, its dimensions, its movements and its probable origin.

Under the eyes of man it began the classification of the countless forms of life and it taught man himself, until now proudly isolated, that he was part of a long series of beings; that he was a bud, the highest one, of the immense tree of life. It attempted to analyze human society, to discover the secrets of social life, and it attempted to break down economic phenomena, the ideas of wealth, rent, value, and production.

In short, from the distant movements of the stars, barely perceptible in the heavens, to the beginnings of new trades in factories, science has attempted to understand and develop everything in the same continuous order as that of nature itself. This is what the scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did, and this education of the public spirit by science would have been admirable if, according to Taine, the classical spirit hadn’t accustomed the French to retaining about immense reality only a few general and summary ideas ready made for the frivolous combinations of conversation or the fearsome combinations of utopia.

Solid and stable science vanished into thin air in the salons, and then was deformed in the assemblies and clubs. From this came the vanities and follies of the Revolution.

But by what strange operation was M. Taine able to separate modern science from the classical spirit? These are two forces that are not only connected; they are also intermingled.

The classical spirit consists in analyzing the essential elements of every idea, of every fact, in eliminating whatever is superficial or fortuitous, and of then lining up all the necessary elements in their most natural, logical, and clearest order. This method, this habit of simplification and connection was necessary to the human spirit in order for it to approach the infinite complexity of nature and life, to undertake the scientific conquest of the universe.

Let us imagine the human spirit leaving behind for the first time ready made cosmogony, astronomy, and physics, the ready made history, morality, and religion left to them by the Middle Ages. How could it venture out into unlimited and disconcerting reality without being made dizzy, without its being astonished? Would it, as was done during the Renaissance, seek the key to the universe in the books of ancient wisdom? Of course not; Latin and Greek humanity glimpsed but a portion of reality.

The sixteenth century was able to intoxicate itself on the generous spirit of ancient times and thus liberate itself from the intellectual asceticism of the Middle Ages. But this intoxication of reading and erudition left only fog in human brains, and one must look immense and tangled reality directly in the face with a firm spirit.

Let us then shake off the burden of erudition and break the chains of tradition. Let the human spirit gather itself together and isolate itself so as to interrogate the universe without any intermediaries. But will it allow itself to be tempted by the strange charm of dreams? Will it try, like Hamlet, to penetrate the mystery of the world by silent forebodings and to divine, as in a lucid dream, the secrets of heaven and earth that are beyond philosophy? This would be a trap and folly, for it isn’t through dreams, but rather through experiment and reason, through observation and deduction, that man will master the universe. But if this is how we must approach things and beings how will we not get lost in countless and fleeting details? It is method that will save us.

In every order of questions, in every order of facts we must attempt to draw out the most general idea. We must seek the largest and simplest concept under which we can group the greatest number of orders and objects, and we will thus little by little extend our net over the world.

This is science’s method of invention and penetration, and it precisely resembles the methods of expression and demonstration of classical thought. I vainly seek for a way to dissociate them, and it is only through childish sleight of hand and factitious distinctions that Taine was able to oppose the one to the other.

It was according to this method that Newton was able to link the falling of bodies on the surface of our planet with the fall of stars gravitating towards each other. It was according to this method that Linnaeus classified the infinite variety of plants using the sexual organ as the fundamental characteristic. It was according to this method that Haüy studied crystals, ordering them based on their geometric forms. It was according to this method that Buffon and Laplace reduced all stars to the primary nebulous type and deduced the sun and the planets from the same mass of slowly condensed and differentiated vapors. It was according to this method of necessary abstraction that Montesquieu reduced the infinite types of human government to four types. And it was according to this method that Adam Smith was able to study the innumerable diversity of economic phenomena, reduced by him to a few fundamental categories.

In all times and places, under the infinite and overwhelming diversity of particular facts, science through a daring operation perceives and draws out a few decisive and profound characteristics. And it is this clear and relatively simple idea that it tests and develops through observation, calculations, and by the ceaseless comparisons of the extension of the act and the extensions of the idea.

But it was according to the same method that the classical spirit constructed its works. It is thus that Descartes, with the two ideas of thought and expanse, developed the entire material world and the moral world. It is thus that Pascal, burrowing down to the depths of human nature, laid bare our degradation and our grandeur and deduced all of Christianity from the sole idea of the fall deduced. And in just this way our great writers of tragedies and comedies built their living works on a grand and simple theme. And again, with the two ideas of nature and reason, the Encyclopedia shook up all erroneous systems. And finally, with the affirmation of the rights of man and the citizen the Revolution summed up with marvelous power the new aspirations of awakened consciousness and the positive guarantees that the new interests demanded.

The Revolution as well, like the great science which M. Taine vainly opposes to it, found a dominant and vast idea that allowed it to express an entire period of social life and to coordinate enormous forces. In any case, M. Taine cannot condemn the classical spirit and the Revolution without also condemning science itself, and it is only by being inconsistent that he avoids taking the positions of extreme reaction. He stopped half way along that road.

It would have been handy for religious, monarchical, and feudal absolutism if the eighteenth century had limited itself to dull monographs buried in Benedictine archives and patient, erudite research into the past. It would have been handy for all tyrannies, to all privileges if French thought, as it had done in the sixteenth century, had continued to play at verbal debauchery and drowned its revolt in the uncertain and troubled waters of Rabelaisian prose. It would have been handy for priests, monks, and nobles if the eighteenth century, getting a head start on romanticism, wasted its time in meticulously describing with the richest vocabulary the old portal of an old church or the old tower of an old chateau.

But classical thought had other things to do. It noted with precision and anger all the superstitions, all the tyrannies, all the privileges that opposed the free growth of thought, the expansion of labor, the dignity of the person.

For this combat it needed a direct, sober, and strong language. It rejected the excess baggage of sensations and verbal curiosities, the systematically picturesque that M. Taine would like to impose on it. Alert, excited, it cast rays of light in all directions and it denounced all present institutions as contrary to nature and reason.

How could it have smashed this old, out of date, and variegated world if it had not appealed to great, simple ideas? Is it by disputing like a village lawyer every feudal right, every ecclesiastical pretension, every royal act that classical thought would have been able to tear France from servitude and routine? A total effort was needed; enlightenment, and an ardent appeal to humanity, to nature, to reason.

But this necessary cult of general ideas in no way excluded within classical thought the precise and profound knowledge of facts or curiosity about details. And this is M. Taine’s second error. He failed to see what the noble classical form contained of richness, facts, and sensations.

I don’t have the time to discuss his superficial judgment of the literature of the seventeenth century, but how is it possible to contest the eighteenth century’s immense effort to document itself? It was the century of memoirs in the historical and social orders. And how many studies, how many efforts in the fields of economy and technology! The Academy of Sciences published a magnificent collection of industrial processes and new inventions. Precise, detailed studies and books supported by statistics and figures abound concerning wheat and subsistence goods. And the economists didn’t limit themselves to formulating their general theories. In their collection of “Éphémérides” they noted the daily variations in prices, supplies, and the state of the market. Books and pamphlets multiplied concerning the feudal regime and the peaceful and practical methods of abolishing the feudal regime through a system of redemptions. In the last third of the century the royal agricultural societies published the most substantial studies. The manufacturing inspectors addressed reports to the government that our modern labor office wouldn’t disavow, and we will borrow from those of Roland de Platière, written five years before the Revolution, the most precious and detailed documents on the state of industry, the forms of production, and the condition of wage workers.

No century was ever as attentive as the eighteenth was to life’s details, to the interactions of all social mechanism, and no revolution was ever as prepared as this one was by more serious study, by richer documentation. One day Mirabeau cried out in the Constituent Assembly: We no longer have the time to study; fortunately, we have a head start in ideas. Yes, a head start in ideas and facts. Never had thinkers been better provisioned, and M. Taine, who seems to be unaware of this immense labor of documentation of the eighteenth century, is mocking us when reduces the classical spirit to the noble ordering of impoverished abstract ideas.

July 14

For several days the great city had prepared itself for resistance. Mirabeau, in demanding on July 8 at the Assembly the establishment of bourgeois guards, was the voice of the revolutionary bourgeoisie of Paris. The Assembly adjourned, but not Paris, and its initiative was to save the revolution. We know that the elections took place by district: the sixty districts had designated 407 second degree electors who named the deputies. But after the elections the primary district assemblies hadn’t dissolved themselves. They continued to meet and in these multiple vibrant centers the events of the Revolution resonated and had repercussions. It was through the revolutionary resonance of the districts that communication was established between the Assembly in Versailles and Paris.

The assembly of second degree electors had continued to meet; even after May 10, even after the cloture of electoral activities the 407 had decided to meet in order to maintain relations with their elected representatives and to watch over events. After June 25, after the royal session, they assembled on rue Dauphine at the Museum of Paris and on June 28 they had moved to the Hôtel-de-Ville itself, to its great hall. And so by the spontaneous revolutionary force of Paris, and before there was even a municipal law, a Parisian municipality was established, functioning alongside the former government of the city. And so bourgeois and popular action, spread across Paris by the many district assemblies, was at the same time concentrated in the Hôtel de Ville by the general assembly of electors. A few priests and nobles had joined the 407 electors of the Third Estate.

On June 30 the assembly of electors had to deal with the affair of the Abbaye, and on July 6, through a deputation to the National Assembly, it gave an accounting of its actions in these serious events: “The ferment was extreme at the Palais Royal; it took on the same character among the more than 2,000 citizens who witnessed our deliberations. The night advanced, the people became agitated, and we decided on a decree that, thanks to its just ideas, calmed matters. We declared in it that it was not allowed to doubt the justice of the sovereign; that as soon as the prisoners were returned twenty-four electors would go to Versailles to request... The night had not yet ended and the prisoners had already been returned to the Abbaye. The crowds had left the Palais Royal and calm rules in Paris.” The president answered with congratulations and the assembly of electors, aggrandized by this national investiture, elevated its role and its courage.

On the 10th, at the Hôtel de Ville, Carra proposed to the electors that they “constitute themselves as the real and active assembly of the Communes of Paris” and as such to assume the rights inherent in this, notably the direct and immediate election of the officers of the Commune, the regulating of the wages of municipal magistrates, and the guarding and defense of the city, of its rights and its properties. But the assembly of electors felt that the most urgent thing needed was the organization of bourgeois guards, It adjourned Carra’s proposal and on the 11th decided that it would call for the immediate establishment of a Parisian armed force.

It was on the afternoon of Sunday July 12 that Paris learned of Necker’s removal from office. The commotion was violent. Paris felt that a coup d’état was being carried out against it, and Necker’s bust, draped in crepe, was carried around the streets. The German regiments of Reinach and Esterhazy were massed on the place Louis XV. The crowd threw stones at them, and they fired in response. Colonel Lambesc entered the Tuileries Gardens with his dragoons, where in the ensuing panic an old man was knocked over and trampled by the horses. That evening the people went to the theaters and the Opera and demanded that every performance be suspended as a sign of national mourning. According to the Venetian ambassador orders were given to the houses to light up their windows in order to prevent any maneuvers by the troops as well as any acts of brigandage, and it was amidst this tumult and illumination that Paris awaited the battles of the morrow. At the same moment the hated gates of the tax farmers were burned.

The people felt that in order for resistance to be effective it had to be organized. They had two goals: they wanted the bourgeois militias to immediately become a legal institution and for the assembly of electors to take the defense of Paris seriously in hand. One of the electors, Doctor Guillotin, deputy of Paris, was sent on the 13th to the Assembly to obtain a decree creating the bourgeois guard of Paris. The revolutionary bourgeoisie of Paris obviously felt it would be stronger in the face of foreign mercenaries if it was the organ of the nation and the law.

The National Assembly, awakened from its torpor of the 11th, raised itself to Paris’ height. The prudent and meticulous Mounier, finding in the feeling of violated legality the noble pride of the fight in the Dauphinois, protested against the dismissal of the patriotic minister and cried out: “Never forget that we love the monarchy because of France, and not France because of the monarchy.”

For a moment Guillotin’s motion inviting the Assembly to assist in the formation of a Parisian bourgeois guard seemed to encounter resistance. Several members of the Assembly had hesitations about arming Paris, as if Paris, in these tragic hours, was not the revolution itself. But Le Chapelier’s strong words swept aside the last timidities: “You must first deliberate concerning the enemy and foreign troops besieging a good and faithful people. Blood is flowing, property is not safe, and the scandal of the rioting Germans is at its height. Only the bourgeois guard can remedy this situation. Experience has taught us that it is the people who must guard the people.” Guillotin, upon his return to Paris, was able to tell the revolutionary bourgeoisie that it was organizing itself with the consent of the nation. At the same time the districts forced the assembly of electors to form a permanent committee. It was a kind of combination of the legal municipality and new revolutionary municipality. It was formed of eight members then in place in the city bureau and fourteen members designated by the electors. This committee’s mandate was to repel the counter-revolutionary invasion of the German hordes in the pay of the king.

What is admirable at that moment about the revolutionary bourgeoisie of Paris, what demonstrates the historical legitimacy of its arrival as a class, is its absolute confidence in itself. It didn’t far being caught between the revolts of the poor and the king’s coup d’état. A few timid souls vainly pointed out to it the sordid crowd of 9,000 workers in the charity workshops. It was not in the least afraid that in the revolutionary earthquake this abscess of poverty would burst over it. It wasn’t afraid to distribute weapons; it knew it was strong enough to watch over their use. It cast aside, disarmed all those who, having no property themselves didn’t give guarantees to property, and on the 14th Bancal des Issarts announced to the National Assembly that the bourgeois militia had disarmed many individuals. In the midst of the revolutionary storm it gave its militia a bourgeois character and it knew that the proletarians dragged along in its wake would not complain: they would throw stones at the counter-revolution if they were unable to fire on it. The ambassador of Venice noted how quickly and decisively the Parisian bourgeoisie was able to organize both revolutionary action and bourgeois order.

On the morning of the 14th the entire Parisian people, bourgeois, artisans, and proletarians, prepared themselves for combat. A detachment of dragoons had crossed the faubourg Saint-Antoine and approached the walls of the Bastille. The people had concluded that the Bastille was going to become the center of a great military gathering, the base of operations of a portion of the troops sent against Paris, that Paris was to be crushed between these troops and those massed on the Champs Elysées. The efforts of the people were thus turned against the Bastille by tactical necessity. The sad, somber castle where so many state prisoners, commoners and nobles, had suffered, and which, in cutting across the lively faubourg Saint Antoine, seemed to cut off life and joy was odious to Paris, to all of Paris. Mercier wanted the new roads that were being planned to finally carry away the hated prison. And in their Cahiers the noble citizens of Paris decided that “His Majesty will be requested to order the demolition of the Bastille.” There was no order, no social class that didn’t have members deep in its dark dungeons. If the Third Estate and the nobility didn’t give the word liberty the same meaning, at least bourgeois and nobles shared a common hatred for this monument of ministerial despotism. And the peoples’ attack on the Bastille was a revolutionary stroke of genius, for even the nobility of the great city couldn’t resist the movement without odiously putting the lie to its words and hatreds of yesterday. And so the court was isolated in its undertaking of a coup d’état, and it wasn’t only the revolution that rose up against the foreign regiments that surrounded the revolution: it was all of Paris.

Above all, arms were needed. Between 9:00 – 11:00 a.m. an enormous crowd went to the Invalides, where there was an enormous storehouse of rifles, and they took 28,000 rifles and five cannons. The Bastille could now be forced. The permanent committee of electors gathered at the Hôtel de Ville tried to prevent a confrontation. And then, ceding to the irresistible passion of the people, they tried to obtain the capitulation of the fortress by peaceful means. But on the second attempt the negotiators were received with gunfire. Was there a misunderstanding? Treason? Governor de Launay would soon pay with his head for this violation of the rules of war. Led by a group of heroes who crossed the moat and cut the chains of the drawbridge the crowd forced the citadel. Hesitant, divided, the soldiers surrendered. The French guardsmen had played a decisive role in the assault. It is difficult to draw up an authentic list of the victors of the Bastille. Starting the following name countless claims were made. The newspaper “Les Révolutions de Paris” gave a short list of those who particularly distinguished themselves: “Sieur Arné, grenadier of the French guards, Ressuvelles Company, a native of Dôle in the Franche-Comté. Twenty-six years old, who was the first to seize the governor, fought everywhere with courage, received several light wounds, and was decorated at the Hôtel de Ville with the civic crown and the Cross of Saint-Louis worn by Sieur de Launay.

“Sieur Hulin, director of the laundry of the queen at La Briche, who had called on the grenadiers of Ressuvelles and the fusiliers of Lubersac to go to the Bastille with three cannons and two others that were soon brought there. This Sieur Hulin was one of the leaders of the action. He exposed himself wherever the need demanded it. He was one of the first to leap on the drawbridge and to enter the Bastille. He was also one of those who took the governor to the Hôtel de Ville.

“Sieur Élie, officer of the queen’s infantry regiment who intrepidly ran under the enemy’s fire to unload carts of manure and set fire to them. This clever ruse marvelously served us. It was also Sieur Élie who received the capitulation and was the first to leap onto the bridge to force the opening of the Bastille, and accompanied by Sieur Tremplement took the perfidious governor to the Grève.

“Sieur Maillard, junior, who carried the flag and placed it in other hands for a moment in order to leap on a plank laid across the moat to receive the capitulation.

“Louis Sébastien Cunivier, twelve years old, son of a gardener from Chantilly, was the fifth person to enter the fortress. He ran to the top of the Bazinière tower where the flag was, grabbed it and boldly paraded it around the platform.

“Sieur Humbert, living on the rue de Hurepoix, who received a dangerous wound.

“Sieur Turpin, fusilier of the company of La Blache, Popincourt barracks, commanded the citizens who were the first ones killed between the two bridges. He also received a ball in his right hand and another in the shoulder.

“Sieur Guinaut received two slight wounds and brought the governor’s silverware to the Hôtel de Ville.

“Sieur de la Reynie, a young litterateur, conducted himself with courage.”

The assembly of representatives of the Commune, having opened an investigation, stated at its August 13 session: “That Messrs. Hulin, Élie, Maillard, Richard du Pin, Humbert, Legry, Ducostel, Georgette, and Marc distinguished themselves in the attack on and conquest of the Bastille,” and decreed that it would be recommended to the districts that “they be invited to employ them in a manner worthy of their courage and patriotism, without consideration as to the district they belong to: citizens who have so effectively contributed to the salvation of the capital should be considered as belonging to all districts.” Naturally the assembly recommended them for employment as officers in the new National Guard.

As we can see, it was professional soldiers, officers like Élie, modest industrialists like Hulin, and petit bourgeois like Maillard, junior who led the movement, but the poorest of proletarians did their duty. On that heroic day of the bourgeois revolution workers’ blood was spilled for freedom. Among the hundred fighters killed before the Bastille there were men so poor, so obscure, so humble that several weeks afterwards their names weren’t known. And Loustalot, in “Les Révolutions de Paris,” sobbed over this obscurity that covered over so much sublime devotion: more than thirty left their wives and children in such a state of distress that immediate assistance was necessary.

Twenty months later, in a letter addressed to Marat, the woodworkers denounced the selfishness of the big entrepreneurs who wanted to retain the benefits of the Revolution but who had hidden on the days of peril. It is certain that the woodworkers played an active role in the assault on the Bastille; skillful at handling an axe they were impromptu sappers, or the engineer corps of the Revolution.

We don’t find on the list of combatants the rentiers, the capitalists for whom the revolution, in part, was made. We find middle and petit bourgeois, law clerks, artisans, and proletarians who delivered the mortal blow to royal despotism on that day. Under the fortress’s deadly fire there was no distinction between active and passive citizens. Those who didn’t pay enough in taxes to be electors were allowed to fight and die for the liberty of all.

The reprisal by the people, who the Bastille had treasonously fired on, fell on governor de Launay and the merchant provost Flesselles, who was assuredly the accomplice of the court, having tricked the combatants by promising them rifles and then sending them trunks full of linen. De Launay, despite Hulin’s heroic efforts, was killed on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville and the provost Flesselles had his head smashed by a pistol blow as he was being taken to the Palais-Royal to be judged.

In truth, these executions were in a sense a continuation of the battle and there is no reason to be surprised by the explosion of anger of a crowd barely escaped from danger and which had been threatened by hordes of barbarous soldiers.

Two guilty parties were missing: state counselor Foulon, who had been charged with provisioning the army of the coup d’état and his son-in-law Bertier. The day of the taking of the Bastille a letter from the ministry of war to Bertier had been intercepted and seized by the people. It left no doubt concerning his complicity with the court. A few days later Foulon, who had had rumors of his death spread and had even prepared his own burial, was arrested and decapitated. In the middle of an immense crowd his head was carried on a pike, and his son-in-law Bertier, led behind the grim trophy, was soon killed as well in a cruel, joyful delirium.

It wasn’t only what is called the populace that savored the joy of murder: according to the testimony of Gouy d’Arsy at the National Assembly, a great number of well dressed citizens and well to do bourgeois exulted in this funereal and savage procession. It was the revolutionary bourgeoisie that had been directly threatened by the royal soldiery, and there was fear mixed in with this sudden ferocity. There was also the ancien régime’s tradition of barbarism. Oh, how well our good and great Babeuf understood and felt all this! And what pride for us, what hope as well in these inhuman hours of the bourgeois revolution, to gather the noble words of humanity and wisdom of the man who created modern communism.

He was there as the procession passed, and on July 25, 1789 he wrote to his wife: “I saw the head of the father-in-law pass and the son-in-law arriving behind it in the hands of more than 1,000 armed men. Exposed to public view, he made the long walk across the faubourg and rue Saint Martin, amidst 200,000 spectators who shouted at him and rejoiced along with the troops of the escort, animated by the sound of the drum. Oh how this joy caused me pain. I was both satisfied and dissatisfied; I said it’s all for the better but also too bad. I understand that the people should mete out justice; I approve that justice when it is satisfied by the annihilation of the guilty. But can’t it not be cruel? Punishments of all kinds: drawing and quartering, torture, the wheel, the stake, the gallows, and executioners have done so much harm to our morality. The masters, instead of rendering us orderly have made us barbaric, because that is what they themselves are. They reap and will reap what they have sowed, for all of this, my poor little wife, will have horrible after effects: we are only at the beginning.”

O leaders of today: think on these words and put as much humanity as possible in morality and laws today in order to be able to find them on the inevitable day of revolution!

And you, proletarians, remember that cruelty is a leftover of servitude, for it attests to the fact that the barbarism of the oppressive regime is still present in you.

Remember that in 1789, when the working-class crowd gave itself over for a moment to a cruel and murderous intoxication that it was the first communist, the first of the proletariat’s great emancipators, who felt a tightening in his breast.

The Consequences of the Taking of the Bastille

The effects of the taking of the Bastille were immense. It seemed to all the peoples of the world that humanity’s jail had fallen. It was more than the Declaration of the Rights of Man: it was the declaration of the people’s might in service to human right. It was not only light that reached the oppressed of the universe from Paris, it was hope. And in the millions upon millions of hearts held by servitude’s dark night was seen, at the same hour, liberty’s first dawning.

Paris’ victory put a decisive end to the offensive by royalty and the court. Pushed by the queen and the princes, the king had marched against the Assembly and against the Revolution at the royal session of June 23. He had just marched against Paris and the revolution on the hesitant and violent days of July. Everywhere repelled, he closed himself in in an underhandedly defensive position, and it was he who would now suffer repeated assaults: on October 6 with the flight to Varennes, on June 20, and on August 10 he would leave the offensive to the revolutionary people. The main gear of royal power was broken on July 14, or at least so damaged that it would never fully spring back. And already, on those days of coup d’état and aggression, a kind of paralysis could be felt.

While the Bastille was invested neither Besenval nor Marshal de Broglie risked taking the people from behind. What were they waiting for and why did they give de Launay the order to hold out instead of going to his assistance?

Obviously a new fear of responsibility had gripped these hearts that were set in their ways, that were used to only one form of peril, and the vast uprising of an entire people, without wiping out their courage, at the very least disconcerted it. Their instructions also must have been vague. On the 14th Louis XVI answered the envoys of the Assembly that it was impossible for the events in Paris to have been the result of orders given the troops. What then was the king’s plan?

Perhaps, in order to reassure his conscience, he had systematically refused to foresee the possible course of events. Perhaps he imagined that Paris, laid low by the mere presence of a vast military apparatus, would cease to be a tumultuous aid and the latter, feeling the dead weight of the immobilized capital, would walk uncertainly and stumblingly, ready to fall at the least shock.

The king, warned by the events of the 14th, learned that he had to take the force of the revolution into account. He would exercise cunning against it or would call foreign armies against it, but from that day forward he renounced any form of direct aggression, any declared offensive.

The Assembly, having still to foil intrigues but no longer having to fear or repel royal force, was able to undertake a fight against another great power of the past, the church.

At the same time that it thus liberated the National Assembly, the events of July 14 made the people aware for the first time of its strength and conscious of its role in Paris. The Assembly remained important. During these stormy days the permanent committee of electors deputized them, and the Parisian revolution only felt itself truly strong and legitimate through its contact with the national revolution.

What is more, the assembly itself had set a noble example of firmness and even of heroism. Its Tennis Court Oath, its serene and invincible resistance after the session of June 23, had electrified hearts and the most intrepid of Paris’ combatants had no other ambition than that of showing themselves to be worthy of the bourgeois revolutionaries who, without weapons and solely through the force of right and courage, had emerged victorious. It is nonetheless true that alone and without the assistance of the people of Paris the National Assembly would have ended up succumbing. And so the Revolution, which until then had had but one base, one center: the Assembly, from that point on had two corresponding centers, the Assembly and the people of Paris.

A few days after July 14 sieur Bessin, orator of the faubourg Saint Antoine, presented himself at the bar of the Assembly to request monetary aid for the workers of the faubourgs whose salaries had been suspended during the three days of agitation: “Messieurs, you are the saviors of the fatherland, but you too have saviors.” The transcript says that this energetic opening fixed the attention of the Assembly, and I fully believe this. It was the very meaning of the great event of July 14 that was appearing before it. Whatever its strength, whatever its majesty, it suddenly felt itself under the protectorate of Paris, and perhaps some unease was mixed in with the joy of the recent victory.

But these were but imperceptible nuances, and when on July 15 the Assembly sent its delegates to the capital to consecrate and legalize the Revolution it was with an enthusiasm mixed with respect that they were received by an immense crowd. Mounier, the touchy and rich bourgeois, always armed with suspicion of democracy, was won over by the respectful and cordial fervor of this reception.

From that day Paris was emancipated, and in the heat of events it improvised its municipal constitution before the Assembly was able to organize the municipalities through a general law, before it was able to elaborate the national constitution.

The former city bureau, whose counter-revolutionary spirit we saw in the person of provost Flesselles, was swept away. Bailly was named mayor by acclamation; Lafayette was named commandant general of the Parisian bourgeois guard. Through these two names Paris attached itself to the two greatest memories of liberty: Bailly represented the tennis Court Oath and Lafayette was the American Revolution.

Paris, with its revolutionary and humane instincts, at the very moment that it organized itself municipally opened itself wide to the liberty of the two worlds. Like ramparts that can be seen against the light of deep space, the city’s walls were silhouetted against the great light of universal liberty. It was concentric with the human horizon, and it could be felt that this circle of municipal life would expand until it took in all of humanity. Following Paris’ example countless communes were to be established throughout France, to administrate and to fight, to crush any attempt at counter-revolution, and to make up for the failings of royal executive power suddenly annihilated or reduced. And all these communes, born in the same commotion of liberty and need for order, were to federate with that of Paris. From the first weeks numerous bourgeois guards affiliated with the Parisian bourgeois guard and fraternal addresses were sent from all corners to the Paris municipality.

It is not surprising that one year later the festival of the federation was celebrated on July 14. For it was on July 14, 1789 that the federation of the communes of France was truly born. The same instinct warned all groupings of citizens, all the cities at the same time that liberty would be precarious and weak as long as it only rested on the National Assembly, and that it must have as many centers as there were communes. Mixed in in this way in the daily life of citizens, animated and renewed by boundless energy, the Revolution would be invincible.

But all these spontaneous and multiple energies had the Assembly as their political center, Paris as their dominant seat, and the Revolution as their ideal center. They were naturally and necessarily federated. These were great days when in the ardor of combat a clear and decisive idea affirmed itself. The storm’s lightning flashes seemed to melt into the splendid light of a summer’s day.

By reviving municipal life July 14 brought to the foreground of the action a proletariat that had been relegated to the background. To be sure, the workers, the poor were far from putting their hands on municipal power. As we will soon see, they will be excluded from the bourgeois guard and they will not sit in the district assemblies. Parisian municipal life will for quite some time continue to be marked by a more narrowly bourgeois character than the central action of the Assembly. But it was impossible to organize in Paris the legal power, at first of sixty districts, then of forty-eight, without a certain number of these districts and sections vibrating with popular strength and passion. While Robespierre’s voice was half stifled and repressed at the National Assembly Danton’s voice resounded in the district of the Cordeliers. Multiplying the points of power meant multiplying the points of contact between power and the people. It was thus, despite all legal barriers, increasing the possibilities and occasions for poplar intervention and tilting the Bourgeois revolution, not towards socialism – the idea for which has not yet been born – but towards democracy. Had there been a complete dispersal, if each commune had been a tiny closed world, the bourgeois oligarchy would have finished by laying hands on all these separate mechanism of mediocre vigor.

But when this multiplicity of local activities combines with a great general movement that inspires all the gears, then the continuity and vehemence of action little by little give power to the most ardent, the most active, and the most robust. This is why July 14, at the same time that it was a great bourgeois victory, was a great popular victory. Of course the fighting peoples’ direct participation on that great day did not have immediate consequences for the proletariat. The Revolution’s origins were so profoundly bourgeois that a few weeks after July 14 when the National Assembly, freed by the people from the court’s attacks, set up the electoral regime and excluded millions of the working poor from the vote, not a single deputy, not even the most democratic of them, remembered that at the Bastille the workers of Paris conquered the title of active citizens for the poor of France. This immediate participation of the people in the great events of the Revolution seemed an accident both glorious and fearsome that must not become the rule in the regular workings of a free and ordered society.

And yet it wasn’t in vain that from its first steps the bourgeois revolution had to have recourse to the vehemence of workers’ hearts and the might of workers’ muscles. When the war against the Vendéens, against the émigrés, against the foreigners would drive revolutionary tension to its highest point, when the people would, alongside the heroic bourgeois, all the gates of the revolution, they finally had to be given the rights of the city. Like the slaves of antiquity who conquered their liberty on the battlefield, the proletarians would conquer the right to vote and a few brief hours of political sovereignty on the bourgeois revolutions fields of combat.

Long would be the effort and short the victory. But that the proletariat was able, by the daring ladder of events, to climb for a moment to the leadership of the bourgeois revolution – or at least participate in it alongside the most daring bourgeois – was for it a title and a promise for the future. And so it is that we have without any difficulty glimpsed countless workers among the enormous mass that on July 14 first invested the Invalides and then the Bastille. They weren’t dupes when they mounted their assault. Though disarmed the next day by the distrustful bourgeoisie, then executed on the Champ de Mars two years later, they nonetheless marked the great revolutionary day with their courage and their strength. And thanks to these valiant men there is nothing under the sun today that belongs wholly to the bourgeoisie, not even its Revolution.

The Great Fear

But it was in the countryside, among the peasants, that the taking of the Bastille had its most resounding effect. Since the opening of the Estates General the peasants had been waiting: when would the Assembly think of their sufferings? They followed from afar – though kept informed by those who had helped them prepare their Cahiers – the fight of the Third Estate against the privileged and the court. If only the Third Estate could emerge victorious, how quickly we’d bring down the tyranny of the nobles. And so July 14 was decisive. Paris had taken its Bastille; it was left to the peasants to take theirs, all the feudal Bastilles, all the châteaux with their watchtowers and dovecotes that loomed over the villages and the plains.

Suddenly, like a spring that is released, the countryside rose up. And in this prodigious movement there were apparently two distinct and even contradictory movements. There was a general movement of fear. The old royal authority, which for centuries had sheltered the peasant while squeezing him, appeared to have been shaken. And since it was the only visible form of authority for the people of the countryside, it at first seemed to the peasants that society itself was collapsing and that they were going to surrendered to all forms of brigandage if they didn’t defend themselves. In this power vacuum there grew a legend of terror. “Here come the brigands! They’re coming to burn down the woods, to cut down the wheat. Let’s get ready and arm ourselves.” From one end of France to the other the peasants armed themselves and beat the countryside to uncover these famous “brigands,” who incidentally could not be found.

This period of panic left a profound and durable impression on the spirit of the peasants. In the countryside of the south they still speak of “l’annado de la paou,” the year of fear; one would think that memory has erased all others. But what was the occasion, the immediate and concrete cause of this universal fright? It isn’t enough to say that the vast social upheaval of which the taking of the Bastille was the prologue disposed spirits to mysterious terrors, and that as a society ends, as when a day ends, vague and terrifying phantoms arise.

Because of this mystical interpretation people have failed to seek the true reasons of the phenomenon. Was there a watchword issued by the aristocracy, by counter-revolution seeking to spread fear everywhere? The Assembly seemed to believe this, or at least it attempted to explain the panic in this way.

It said in the considerations contained in its decree of August 10: “The National Assembly considers that the enemies of the nation, having lost the hope of preventing public regeneration and the establishment of liberty by violence and despotism appear to have conceived the criminal project of reaching the same goal by means of disorder and anarchy; that among other methods they have at the same moment and almost on the same day, spread false alarms in the different provinces of the kingdom.”

In fact, the movement did not have the suddenness of a conspiracy, and the Assembly itself used the words “almost on the same day.”

If these terrors would have broken out everywhere at the same time as the result of a watchword, they would have ended everywhere on the same date after having their futility was revealed. But I note that at the end of August the fair at Beaucaire was delayed a few days “from fear of brigands,” who in fact could have carried out quite an operation there. This was thus not simply a counter-revolutionary maneuver.

Had the peasants frightened themselves? Were the assemblies they formed in villages to march on chateaux and burn feudal property titles perceived from afar as gatherings of brigands? And was the panic a result of reciprocal misunderstandings? This is possible and even certain. But it is also certain that alongside this movement of peasant proprietors marching against the nobles to free their land of all feudal charges, at that moment of universal commotion there was also a movement of those without property, of the poor, of vagabonds, of the hungry. In more than one place they organized themselves in bands, crying out that they had the right to eat and live.

Several municipalities advised the National Assembly that on the night of July 25 “brigands had cut down unripened wheat.” On that date, and even in the north, it couldn’t have been far from being ripe, and those that were called “brigands” operating in behalf of the counter-revolution were probably the hungry who didn’t want to wait for the ripened harvest to fall beneath the sickle of the landlord and be hidden away in granges.

A few partial movements of this kind sufficed to spread terror in a countryside, where the fear of beggars was already chronic. I am ready to believe that “the great fear” was above all the exaggeration of this chronic fright. If we read the Cahiers of the rural bailiwicks and parishes we see the cultivators everywhere complaining of being at the mercy of beggars. They had to house them, feed them, give them succor. If not, they made threats, and nothing was easier for them than setting fire to farm buildings and the harvest.

The great economic evolution of the second half of the eighteenth century, the growth of industry and cities, and the transformation of the rural economy had uprooted many existences. The roads and the countryside were covered with wandering men, the fear of whom obsessed the cultivators. The latter speak of them with anger, fright, and contempt. Nothing is more poignant than to see the peasants, in the same Cahiers where they complain of the oppression and theft of lords, and where they demand the right to harvest the grass of the forests for their livestock, denounce the vagabonds as a peril or, as they said “the dregs of society.”

Beneath orderly poverty there is a wandering poverty, and the latter is an object of contempt and terror for the former. We should recall the complaints of the peasant landowners against the masses of gleaners who invaded the newly harvested fields. I wonder if it is not these men and women who, impelled by hunger and excited by the revolutionary ferment, didn’t form themselves into troops and cut the wheat. It was thus that the poorest of each village, the landless, were mixed in with vagabonds and wanderers.

The newspaper “Les Révolutions de Paris,” in its news from the provinces from the beginning of September, said the following: “The letters from Geneva announce that individuals from the neighboring mountains have advanced en masse on Ferney. The Geneva garrison backed by a large number of volunteers has marched there. Cannons were sent there and the mountaineers fled. The ignorance or rather the ineptitude of the people of a few provinces led them to believe that equality and liberty allowed them to share property. It is from this that flowed most of the ravages that desolated our provinces.”

It thus seems evident that in the days that followed the upheaval July 14 there was a rising of the poor. The Revolution would not cease to be haunted by the fear of the “agrarian law.”

There is no question that this fear dates from the first days of the revolution, which were the most tumultuous, the most agitated. We have almost no precise information on this movement of the rural proletariat. It was in all likelihood purely instinctive: we nowhere find a clear formula and it doesn’t seem there were any conscious leaders.

For the most part it was limited to the nocturnal and furtive pillaging of crops harvested before their time, or else it was simply mingled with the revolutionary movement of peasant property. When the peasants of the Mâconnais and the Lyonnais for example set the chateaux on fire and burn the papers of land registry offices it’s impossible for me not to recall that it was often the case that in the Cahiers of the parishes “the rich and sterile bourgeois” was named alongside the noble. And it would doubtless require little for the angry mobs armed with pitchforks who attacked the nobles’ chateaux to also go after large scale bourgeois property.

Pretty much everywhere the bourgeoisie understood the peril, and the bourgeois guard of the cities rushed to the countryside to contain and repress the peasants. On the days of July 27, 28, and 29 people could see from Lyon the chateaux of Loras, Leuze, Comba, Pusignan, and Saint-Priest in flames. The bourgeois guard marched against the peasants, and when it returned to the city it was attacked with stones and tiles by the workers of la Guillotière, who took the side of the insurgent peasants. It appeared for a moment as if the entire poor proletariat, workers and peasants, was going to rise against the old feudal regime and the new bourgeois regime and that a profound and formidable class struggle, a struggle of all the have-nots against the haves was going to substitute itself for the superficial revolution of bourgeois and peasant property against the privileges of the nobles. Impotent impulses! Confused and vain attempts!

The time wasn’t right, and these first unplanned uprisings were symbolized by the furtive night robberies of unripe wheat by wandering bands. But there was a moment when the established peasants, the small landowners, the inhabitants of the villages who had an enclosure, a garden, a bit of a field, felt from down below the movement of the poor.

How is it possible to fully commit to the revolution, how can one attack the feudal Bastilles if one risks being overwhelmed by a mendicant and threatening proletariat?

What’s the good of wresting for the lord sheaths of wheat he takes by feudal right if the humble gleaners of yesterday, become rebellious harvesters today, carry away all the sheaths? And will people expose themselves to losing their property because they wanted to liberate it?

The best thing to do then is to confront the “brigands,” to arm oneself, to organize. It was thus that from one end of France to the other village municipalities were formed. And when they realized that there were few if any ‘brigands,” that the proletarians are neither daring enough, conscious enough, nor organized enough to substitute their revolution for the Revolution, they marched light heartedly against the chateaux and they turned against the ancien régime the weapons they’d seized in their instinctive fright.

There was thus a kind of conservative movement of contraction, of tightening, which was followed by a revolutionary expansion. Under the fear of the unknown and before the uprising of the have-nots the communities of the villages withdrew into themselves, elected men of whom they were sure, established a militia, and, having thus guaranteed the order of property within the revolution, fell on the feudal system.

Or rather there were two movements, one conservative and the other revolutionary, which were connected and virtually combined in this prodigious epoch where overexcited aggrandized spirits seemed to suffice to solve all problems. Just as in Paris in the threatening days that preceded July 14 the revolutionary bourgeoisie armed the militias against the court’s regiments and disarmed the men it considered a threat to property, in the countryside the rural Third Estate organized itself both to protect peasant property against any aggression and to bring down feudalism.

The new order stood up against all threats, and this was the sign of its historical legitimacy. But the historian would be superficial if, under the revolution of the bourgeoisie and peasant property that organized themselves and triumph in these fertile days of July and August, he didn’t note the profound disquiet and instinctive revolt of those without a scrap of land. Having no property they didn’t understand the Revolution as a liberation of property freed of feudal levies. They considered it the liberation of man freed from poverty and hunger. Instinctively, with a ferocious ingenuousness, like the mountaineers of the Alps descending on Ferney who were doubtless going to share out the property left by Voltaire, they thought that the moment had come for all men to enjoy the fruits of the earth, and they peacefully settled themselves in the Revolution as if it were their home. But they collided with the cannons of the bourgeoisie and pitchforks of the peasant landowner and they returned to their property, muttering to themselves that they had misunderstood things.

The truth is that they understood too soon. History shut the door on these “beggars” and rudely told them: “You’ll pass this way again.” And in fact they would pass that way again, and the door would one day open, on a day when they would no longer be “beggars,” on a day when they would have property of their own. I mean when they would have an idea, when they would carry in their heads the formula for a new world, when they would be peasant socialists.

While the consequences of July 14 developed in this way in the countryside, the National Assembly sought equilibrium in its victory.

It was at one and the same time saved, enthusiastic, and worried. Necker was recalled. The king, accompanied by a deputation from the Assembly, had to go to Paris on July 17, and though people might have tried to distinguish between the king and his “evil advisors” and grant him a triumphal reception, it was nonetheless a visit paid by the defeated to the victor.

Paris was quickly coming of age and the Assembly felt the rising up of a friendly and rival power. It gathered a bit nervously around the king, seeking to forget Louis XVI’s criminal errors in order to make France forget them. Strange and bothersome solidarity of the revolutionary Assembly and the king of the ancien régime, unwillingly converted to the new regime by the force of the people. Disorders broke out in Saint-Germain; the tax barriers were forced and the tax farmer Thomassin, accused of hoarding, was threatened with death. The moderates of the Assembly, on Lally-Tollendal’s motion, quickly proposed an address to the nation against those who disturbed public order, an address which, through its very exaggeration, was of a nature to spread panic and worsen the peril. In addition, the movement in Saint-Germain was a continuation of the great movement in Paris. Through these oblique proceedings were they going to disavow the magnificent revolutionary devotion of the capital?

The Breton deputies protested, as did Robespierre. He immediately revealed the peril that conservative moderation caused the Revolution, still caught up in intrigues and hatreds. “We must love peace, but we must also love liberty. But is there anything more legitimate that rising up against a horrible conspiracy aimed at destroying the nation? A riot was caused in Poissy under the pretext of hoarding; Brittany is peaceful as are the provinces; the proclamation would spread alarm there and would cause the loss of confidence. We must do nothing hastily. Who dares to say that the enemies of the state are tired of intrigue?”

What constituted Robespierre’s strength, and what would assure it for some time, was that wanting the Revolution he accepted its consequences and conditions, and wasn’t foolishly or hypocritically moved by the disorders that the armed resistance to royal arbitrariness necessarily caused.

The Assembly rejected Lally-Tollendal’s motion, but it had briefly applauded it, and these oscillations revealed that if it needed the people it had also begun to fear them. But this fleeting worry didn’t yet slow down its momentum, and it was with a magnificent faith in reason that it immediately began the elaboration of the Rights of Man and the constitution.

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