The French Revolution
By George Rude
Phoenix, 1994. 224 pp., $24.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
"The great appear great to us merely because we are on our knees. Let us rise!" So proclaimed the revolutionary journalist Camille Desmoulins in Paris in 1789 as the French Revolution kicked off with the storming of the Bastille.
George Rude recounts with narrative colour and political insight this and later events in The French Revolution, re-released to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the triumph and defeat of the most radical and democratic phase of the Revolution in 1794. Foremost of Rude's many political insights is the centrality of "the crowd", the popular masses, in any genuine revolutionary upheaval.
Rude offers a corrective to conservatives like Edmund Burke. Burke, the leading English conservative at the time, "dipped his quill in vitriol to blast the Revolution at its birth", taking his venom out on the popular masses as the "mob", the "swinish multitude" who were manipulated in their bestial desires by ogres from the Revolutionary Chamber of Horrors — above all Maximilien Robespierre, who all but drank the blood of his victims from the "respectable" classes at the steps of the guillotine.
Rude's focus on the popular movement — its material roots, heroism, self-sacrifice and growing political consciousness — also challenges those historians of the French Revolution who view it "from above" as the manoeuvrings of political factions and leaders. Rude's history is history "from below": the "common people are the very stuff of history".
In Louis XIV's France, as the capitalist class chafed under the domination of political life by the nobility, which was stopping the free marketeers from expanding their economic wealth, they looked to other classes, who might be allies in their struggle, with their own grievances. They found them in the "sans-culottes", that "social medley" of craftsmen, shopkeepers and labourers ready for intervention in the streets in quest of a guaranteed supply of cheap bread.
Thus did the revolution proceed through an alliance of the bourgeoisie (with their political expression via the Jacobin Clubs) and the poor, one that advanced the revolution "leftwards along courses neither intended nor desired by the men of 1789".
Conservative Jacobins who were frightened of the popular forces unleashed were shed along the way. Each popular upsurge saved the day for the more revolutionary of the Jacobin factions under Robespierre and, in return, the sans-culottes received material benefits in the form of cheap bread under the "Maximum" law, which fixed prices, and they won political rights in the form of adult male suffrage.
Paradoxically, with the exemplary effect of the guillotine in discouraging aristocratic counter-revolution, and with France's victories in the war against counter-revolutionary Europe, the partnership between the revolutionary capitalist class and the poor would, by late July 1794, "lie in ruins and bring down both parties in its fall". With their very success, the Robespierrists' usefulness to the capitalist class had been outlived, and they were to pay the price for having earlier destroyed their support base amongst the insurgent people.
The Robespierrists went a considerable way to bring the popular movement to the rescue of the revolution, though always with the intention of controlling it. They tried to balance "the double danger [to the capitalists] of aristocratic reaction and popular 'licence'". The Robespierrists would "use the popular movement to promote their political ends but had no intention of letting leadership fall to the Enrages, Hebertists and other 'extremists'" who wanted tighter controls on the free market and speculators and hoarders.
This was a bourgeois revolution, after all, and the Robespierrists were cut from the same cloth as their more conservative colleagues in the Jacobins (they closed ranks, for example, on outlawing wage-earners' "coalitions" or trade unions).
The alliance had been "riddled with contradictions" from the start, and, although Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety in Year 11 of the Revolution (1793-94) won the war and saved the republic, "it was the end of popular initiative as well" — the popular militia, the political societies and free press were all ended and "popular participation at street and municipal level" shrivelled up under repression. Estranged from their recent allies, the sans-culottes did not rally to save the Robespierrists.
The masses' absence from the streets was the beginning of the reversal of the revolution — the "popular phase was over", the revolution swung hard right and the capitalists consolidated their victory. The sans-culottes gained little, but they did win for posterity "the legacy of popular revolution".
This is Rude's legacy, too. Rude, who died in January 1993, was an outstanding contributor with his Communist Party comrades Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, in preserving the memory of past struggles for use by the popular movements of today in their struggle against despotisms.