Dialectics, a weapon of the French Revolution

Dialectics, a weapon of the French Revolution

In the following text, we do not simply intend to report historical observations on a revolution, namely the one that took place in France from 1789 to 1795. Our aim is far more general. We wish to point out that when the working people are so outraged that they cease to censor themselves, to break their silence, to abandon passivity, pessimism, fatalism, and submission, they express a historical necessity, a profound need of all human society—that is to say, something philosophical. This is the meaning of the radical dynamic of societal transformation, its dialectic, which we call "revolution." Historians often acknowledge the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, or the Spanish Revolution, but "revolution" as a profound, philosophical phenomenon remains foreign to them, and the propertied classes, as well as their rulers, are careful to ignore its existence. Millions of men, women, and children seizing upon an idea of ​​radical change, transforming it into a force, putting it into practice, and suddenly the dynamics of a society seemingly destined for stagnation emerge. The capacities of the oppressed and exploited, previously unrecognized by those directly affected, become evident to all. What appeared to be an immutable order appears as mere absurdity, and that it was accepted for so long seems incredible. Yes, revolution is millions of human beings coming together to do… philosophy, and even to write a new chapter in the philosophy of history !

From its very beginnings, the French Revolution was the union of opposites, of men and women, of the poor and the rich, of the bare-armed and the bourgeois, of liberty and dictatorship, of war and peace, of force and law, of the young and the old, of the haves and the have-nots, of nationalism and internationalism, of love and hate, of institutional power and of the base committees of the working people outside of any institution, of order and chaos, etc.

Dialectics manifested themselves in a thousand ways during the French Revolution (1789-1794) : internal dialectical contradictions of France under the Ancien Régime, dialectical contradictions within the revolutionary camp, dialectical contradictions within the Republic, the revolution and the counter-revolution relying on political forces and classes with opposing interests, on contradictory national and foreign interests, the dialectical nature of the revolutionary dynamic transforming the negative into the positive (the war into counter-revolution, then into revolution, then back into counter-revolution), the dialectic of the transition between political revolution (and counter-revolution) and social revolution (and counter-revolution), numerous shifts from quantity to quality, particularly during the two major revolutionary offensives, the dialectic of the interaction of the three estates of the Ancien Régime, the dialectic of class struggle within the revolution and within the counter-revolution, the dialectic of the relationship between religion and politics, between the social and the political, between war and peace, the coexistence and struggle of the negative and the positive (which is (negation of the negation), dialectic of the duality of power (notably the duality of loyalty/Republic and the duality of bourgeois power/popular power), dialectic as a weapon of war of the revolution that transforms every weapon of reaction into a weapon of revolution (and vice versa for the popular counter-revolution), dialectic between historical reality and the consciousness of the leaders and the people, dialectic between feudal, bourgeois, and popular thought, dialectic between the leaders and the masses, etc. Without dialectic, the French Revolution could never have been capable of such radical and profound ideological, social, and political transformations in such a short time, transforming, in a very small number of rapid and brutal transitions, a people crushed, dominated, divided, exploited, oppressed, unorganized, lacking awareness of their own strength, submissive, fearful, and rather respectful of royal and noble power into the exact opposite. The French Revolution is the most compelling manifestation of Hegel’s dialectical assertion that everything that exists deserves to perish, because nothing it fought against, destroyed, or built was eternal. The harsher the oppression suffered and felt by the people, the stronger, deeper, and more enduring the revolutionary fervor of the masses. The transformation they achieved, while having to contend with a formidable counter-revolutionary resistance, is almost unbelievable. Of course, the propertied classes’ efforts in the years that followed were to erase this lesson so that the people would never repeat it.

Where do we find the famous negation of the negation of dialectics ? France’s debts, the European war, religion, misery, everything has been transformed ultra-rapidly from a means of denying the revolution into a means of denying the counter-revolution and vice versa.

The Ancien Régime denied the rights of individuals in order to give all power to kings and feudal lords. The Revolution used this to magnify the rights of the people by denying the rights of kings.

The Ancien Régime divided the people into small regional units, the provinces, without common law, without a common language, without common interests. The Revolution did the opposite, unifying, with extraordinary rapidity, the people into a national unity founded on an ideology of popular interests, the common good of the people, which no counter-revolutionary reaction, however victorious, can destroy.

By allying itself with all the royal and feudal dictatorships of Europe, the Ancien Régime had secured powerful foreign defenders whose armies were intended to crush the revolution. The revolution, in turn, used these allies to accuse the monarchy and nobility of national treason and to portray them as criminals.

The monarchy pushed France from the beginning of the revolution to war in Europe in order to destroy the revolutionary force of the people. The people turned the tables : they defeated the European armies of reaction allied with the French nobles ! The war, far from killing the revolution, gave it extraordinary momentum and drove it to completely uproot the nobility in France.

But it was from the very beginning of the French Revolution that she turned the monarchy’s weapons against herself. The king claimed he could use the debts of the French state to force the Third Estate to back down and pay. Instead of whining, negotiating amendments, a reduction in sacrifices, instead of yielding on the substance, the Third Estate chose not to deny the magnitude of the debts, not to deny the importance of the necessary sacrifices, but to deny the monarchy itself, its right to decide, its right to manage, its right to dominate, its right to govern. You’re bankrupt, get out ! That was the first revolutionary act ! And that is the whole dialectical weapon of the negation of the negation : destroying by using the very weapon that was used to destroy you, whether it be debt, war, religion, poverty, or even terror ! We must turn the enemy’s weapons against them instead of whining defensively !

Yes indeed ! This is a great lesson for the world today ! The working people of 1789 turned the weapon of debt against the power of exploiters and oppressors ! They transformed the declaration of bankruptcy into an indictment of the government. They transformed the people from victims into victors. They transformed the king into the accused and the condemned. They did not destroy just a king. They destroyed the very principle of monarchy. They made the people the sole king, the sole government, the sole legislator, the sole ruler. Yes, it is a negation of the negation, since monarchy and feudalism denied the rights of the people, the rights of individuals, the rights of the common people.

Yes, self-organization is a weapon of negation of negation. From the very first step, by refusing to be dissolved by the king, the assembly of the Third Estate denied the power’s right to authorize or not authorize the people to assemble. And this act would lead to all forms of self-organization of the people, from the poorest to the pike committees, to the unarmed, to the popular sections.

By taking the lead in a revolutionary war in Europe, the working people did not merely defend the nation ; they called all peoples to the struggle for freedom. They had barely begun to construct, to invent, national unity, and they dialectically negated it, surpassing it by founding the union of the peoples of Europe !

By taking the lead in the dechristianization struggle, the oppressed people denied the link between power and the Church. By endorsing royal power and the feudal order, the Catholic Church in France denied the people’s right to obey no state ideology, to follow only their own individual or family beliefs. The people rejected this order that denied their own rights. They destroyed the Catholic order that claimed to reinforce the royal and feudal order. This rejection of the rejection radicalized the French Revolution. The people seized the Church’s property that had been accumulated at their expense ! They forbade priests who did not recognize their Republic from practicing their religion !

It is sad to note that not only do the propertied classes and their historians no longer know anything about the revolutionary power of dialectics, but that the false revolutionaries, opportunists and reformists in reality, do not know the first word of it either…

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4937

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article2828

Dialectics is inseparable from social revolution.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4774

Yet, even today, the strategy of the proletariat cannot do without dialectics !

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article8300

Indeed, by negating the negation, we must transform debts, wars, poverty, religious oppression, national, racial, gender, and age-based oppressions—all the enemy’s weapons—into weapons of revolution, by radically (at their root) denying any right to capitalist power, capitalist property, capitalist morality, the capitalist state apparatus, the global capitalist order, and imperialism.
The rulers, the propertied classes, and the authors may try to conceal this reality, but there is no force superior to the dialectic of the social revolution of the self-organized masses. They toppled all the bastions of reaction, they soundly defeated, with revolutionary enthusiasm, the nobility and the superiorly organized and armed regular armies of all Europe, they destroyed centuries of Church-induced obscurantism, they turned the tables on fear, they transformed slaves into free men, the voiceless into spokespeople for all the peoples of the earth. There is no change more radical than social revolution. Its dynamic is almost unbelievable and, at the same time, perfectly natural. The relationship between resistance to change and the state is equally dialectical : the revolution could only build liberty by destroying liberty, could only demolish the monarchy by recreating a monarchy, could only abolish unequal laws by constructing new unequal laws, and yet, post-Revolutionary France will never be able to reverse the profound transformations achieved, will never be able to reinstate feudalism, the nobility, the old mode of production, the old laws, the Ancien Régime. The entire world was no longer the same after the French Revolution, and the greatest minds of the time recognized this.

Goethe, amazed by the 1792 victory of the French revolutionary volunteer army at Valmy against the Prussian army, the strongest professional army in Europe, which he had witnessed from the German side and which would be the beginning of the victories of the French Revolution against the feudal and royal reaction of Europe :

"From today and from this place begins a new era in the history of the world !"

Hegel in "Reason in History" :

"No power can destroy the spirit of a people, either from without or from within, unless it is already lifeless, unless it has already perished."

"Around the time of the French Revolution, it seemed that the universe had suddenly expanded infinitely : beyond the emancipatory work accomplished by the Enlightenment, a new world was being discovered, overflowing : like a spring flood, the landscape was formed and arranged like the garden of traditional humanism."

In a letter to Schelling in 1795, Hegel offered this assessment of the French Revolution : "Instead of begging for their trampled rights, the people will appropriate them."

Let us recall that dialectics is the law of change through the development of contradictions and leaps in dynamics, a law in which opposites combine and transform into one another, the negative into the positive, which is a negation of the negation. Negative and positive are not the only possibilities ; the two can construct numerous combinations by linking and interacting. For Hegel, the positive is nothing other than the negation of the negation.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5126

Hegel in his "Lectures on the History of Philosophy" :

“We must acknowledge the negative aspect… We must recognize the contradiction inherent in existence. The old institutions, which no longer had a place in the developed sense of conscious self-freedom and of humanity, which had their foundation and support in the apathy… of conscience, which no longer corresponded to the Spirit that had established them, and which, despite the new scientific culture, continued to be considered sacred and just in the eyes of reason, were overthrown by the French philosophers… This aspect behaved destructively against what was destroyed within itself… The French Revolution was rendered inevitable by the rigid obstinacy of prejudices, pride, the total absence of thought, and greed. The philosophers had only general thoughts, an abstract idea of ​​what should be…”

Hegel, in "Science of Logic" :

“The only thing necessary to achieve scientific progress, and toward the understanding of which we must essentially strive, is the knowledge of this logical proposition : the negative is also positive ; that which is contradicted does not resolve itself into zero, into abstract nothingness, but essentially into the negation of its particular content… It is a new concept, but higher, richer than the previous one, because it has been enriched by its negation, in other words, by its opposite ; it therefore contains it, but also more than it, it is the unity of itself and its opposite.”

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article567

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article3895

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article2175

Hegel’s (and later Marx’s) dialectic is capable of understanding revolutions because it is a revolutionary thought.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4912

Hegel, unlike many modern intellectuals, knew that revolution brings about novelty, that the world changes radically and qualitatively, that what seems eternal to us is merely an illusion, and that the force of change is not to be found outside but within the old society itself. And this is what is most astonishing, and therefore most revolutionary, in Hegel’s thought : the existence of revolutionary forces within an order that seems solid, stable, and lasting. Not even a rock is solid, and neither is human society. This is Hegel’s main message : radical change potentially exists within the most seemingly solid order.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4912

Hegel in his "Lectures on the Philosophy of History" :

“Thought, the concept of law, suddenly asserted itself, and the old edifice of iniquity could not withstand it. Within the framework of law, a constitution was then built, everything resting on this foundation… It was a magnificent sunrise. All thinking beings celebrated this era. A sublime emotion reigned at that time ; the enthusiasm of the spirit thrilled the world…”

Referring to the work of the French revolutionaries, Hegel writes in "Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences" :

“In the midst of the revolutionary storm, their understanding manifested itself in the firmness with which they succeeded in bringing about the ethical order of the new world against the powerful alliance of the partisans of the old order ; in the firmness with which they realized, one after the other, and in their most extreme determination and opposition, all the constitutive moments of the development of the new political life. It is precisely by carrying each of these moments to the extreme point of its unilateralism, by pushing each unilateral principle to its ultimate consequences, that they were led by the dialectic of world historical reason to a political situation in which all the previous unilateralisms of political life appear to have been lifted.”

"...led by the dialectic of world historical reason..." that is what Hegel brilliantly remarks about the French revolution which led to the world revolution !

A dialectic that produces creative novelty—that is what Hegel observes, realizing that every day in France brings astonishing new developments, to the point that one cannot imagine what will happen next. He replies to those who ask what will happen next in France : “Wait until I receive the latest gazette to find out. It is impossible to imagine, as it could be yet another incredible event.”

The newspaper "Les révolutions de Paris" wrote the day after the proclamation of the Republic : "We are the first and only ones to base our revolution on the sacred laws of equality, in this respect differing from the English charter which admits a king, a nobility and two Chambers, upper and lower."

A revolutionary of that era proudly declared : "We are creating what has not existed."

Nothing is more dialectical than revolutions, and among these, the French Revolution (or rather the two revolutions of 1789 and 1793).

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4774

Indeed, the revolution is a good example of the fact that "all order must give way to disorder leading to a new order" and that "everything that exists deserves to disappear and die."

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4176

Yes, the revolution suddenly reveals that the old social order has become unreal, founded on lies, and this situation is a brutal discovery for both the powerful and the powerless. The old order is brutally severed from economic and social reality.

Engels in "Ludwig Feuerbach" :

“Now, according to Hegel, reality is by no means an attribute that belongs by right in all circumstances and at all times to a given social or political state of affairs. Quite the contrary. The Roman Republic was real, but the Roman Empire that supplanted it was no less so. The French monarchy of 1789 had become so unreal, that is to say, so devoid of all necessity, so irrational, that it necessarily had to be abolished by the great Revolution, which Hegel always speaks of with the greatest enthusiasm. Here, the monarchy was therefore the unreal and the Revolution the real. And so, in the course of development, everything that was previously real becomes unreal, loses its necessity, its right to exist, its rational character ; a new and viable reality replaces the dying one, peacefully if the old state of affairs is reasonable enough to die without resistance, violently if it rebels against this necessity.” And so Hegel’s thesis, through the workings of Hegelian dialectic itself, turns into its opposite : everything that is real in the realm of human history becomes, with time, irrational, is therefore already irrational by its very nature, tainted in advance with irrationality ; and everything that is rational in the minds of men is destined to become real, however much this may contradict apparently existing reality. The thesis of the rationality of all reality resolves itself, according to all the rules of Hegelian dialectic, into this other : Everything that exists deserves to perish.

The first of the dialectical contradictions is that of the Ancien Régime. It was designed to prevent any change that would be detrimental to the nobility, and the first social class to destabilize it, before the bourgeoisie, before the common people, was… the nobility ! The aristocratic counter-revolution marked the beginning of the pre-revolutionary period.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%A9r%C3%A9volution_fran%C3%A7aise

The contradictions of the Ancien Régime :

https://www.gauchemip.org/spip.php?article4071

Jacques d’Hondt writes : “The French Revolution was the explosion of economic, social, and political contradictions. It was because the regime was entangled in its contradictions and no longer knew how to extricate itself that Louis XVI convened the Estates-General. Among other things, a clear political contradiction then emerged : it was because he felt powerless in a difficult situation, and primarily because he no longer knew where or how to find money to resolve the financial crisis, that Louis XVI de facto acknowledged his dependence on the Estates-General. He presented himself before them, in this respect, as a supplicant. And at the same time, contradictorily, he claimed to speak to them as their master ! (…)
What initially appeared cruelly negative becomes a positive factor for those who know how to use it. The financial deficit that burdened the nation in 1789, and which was to be borne by the Third Estate, became for the latter a formidable weapon against the absolute monarchy. (…)

In 1789, Hegel drew the lesson from this : "How blind are those who can believe that institutions, constitutions, laws which no longer agree with the customs, needs and opinions of the people, which the spirit has left in flight, can continue to maintain themselves.

Institutions, Hegel said, are no longer in harmony with customs ; whereas previously they were. Where there was no contradiction, a contradiction gradually emerged. This is the living and active contradiction, the process of becoming contradictory, the birth, the sharpening, then the bursting forth and resolution of contradiction in things and in ideas.

And this is what the dogmatic interpreters of classical logic can neither understand nor admit. Therefore, they are unable to understand or admit a revolution. For them, what is, is ; what is not, is not—and there can be no third term. Yet, between feudalism and capitalism, between monarchy and republic, there must be a transition. And it is this transition that is revolutionary. (…)

In revolution, everything is constantly becoming. And it is this becoming, this fluidity, that must be grasped and, if possible, controlled. As Hegel said, "Everything is, and also is not. For everything flows, is in perpetual change."

Source :

https://www.persee.fr/doc/cafon_0395-8418_1991_num_63_1_1565

The French Revolution demonstrated that an order seemingly as solid as a rock can shatter brutally… like a rock. The country that had been one of the strongest pillars of feudal reaction in Europe, a monarchy seemingly irrevocably bound to the name of France, broke so completely that the monarchy died there, feudalism vanished overnight, and the country transformed itself into the most formidable enemy of feudalism in Europe. It drove out, at the bayonets of its volunteer soldiers, the most formidable of European armies, that of Prussia, presumed invincible for its trained professional armies, and forced European heads of state to recognize the new revolutionary power, even though these same heads of state had proclaimed their intention to crush this revolution in blood and reinstate the King of France and the French nobility. From the absolute right of the monarch, we move directly to the absolute right of the people. From absolute monarchy, we move to absolute republic. From the lettre de cachet to the people’s right to self-determination. From the reign of the Catholic Church to republican secularism. From feudal rights to individual rights and individual liberty. The universe suddenly ceased to revolve around the Sun King, and the center was everywhere ! A reversal of the apparent absolute order… and the creation of a completely new order. From a France unthinkable without its monarchy to a new France unthinkable with a monarchy, there was but one step.

The dialectical transition from order to disorder and then to a new order is proven, and this is far from being the only dialectical manifestation of the French Revolution.

Yes indeed ! It’s the dialectic of order and disorder that we find at many other levels and in other areas…

https://www.matierevolution.org/spip.php?article6814

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5028

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article25

Thus, the French revolution was simultaneously bourgeois and proletarian (in the sense of the committees and sections of unarmed workers), simultaneously libertarian and authoritarian, simultaneously anti-statist and constructive of a new state, simultaneously

https://shs.cairn.info/revue-annales-historiques-de-la-revolution-francaise-2015-3-page-254?lang=fr

https://journals.openedition.org/chrhc/13302

Within the context of the French Revolution, all historical observations are inherently dialectical. The interplay of opposites leads to an extraordinarily innovative dynamic, resulting in the emergence of new developments.

This is the contradiction between the spontaneous and tumultuous nature of self-organization and the structured and manipulated nature of power from above during the revolution.

Self-organization was a constant feature of the French Revolution, even if it was always in contradiction, in a power struggle with the State : local electoral assemblies, the grievance lists, and the Estates-General refusing to dissolve in 1789 ; sections that were permanently established in 1792 ; clubs, the sans-culottes movement, popular societies in 1793, the Enragés, the Legions of Volunteers, surveillance committees, revolutionary organizations, pike committees, women’s associations, revolutionary committees, insurrectionary communes in 1794, and so on. The Jacobin bourgeoisie more or less accompanied, guided, and manipulated this mass movement, but it never truly supported it and constantly worked to re-establish a strong bourgeois State, the antithesis of popular power.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5794

In the French Revolution, bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the popular masses were in dynamic contradiction…

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article244

Within the revolution, class collaboration between the bourgeoisie and the exploited, and also radical struggle between them, are intertwined in a contradictory manner.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1082

In fact, there is a bourgeois revolution within the revolution of the most destitute, of the unemployed, and a quasi-proletarian revolution within the bourgeois revolution. Nothing is more dialectical than the permanent revolution, which constantly pushes its social radicalism further.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1398

These internal, dialectical, and violent contradictions explain why the change was so brutal and dramatic. Even today, we are struck by the speed and radical nature of the transformation. The king, who was adored and admired by the people, was beheaded, and his descendants were deposed. The monarchy was uprooted, and feudalism abolished overnight. Feudal and religious properties were sold off.

From an extremely divided France, which was a juxtaposition of provinces, regions, administrative entities with diverse rules, dialects, local powers, regional rules and laws, and peoples of diverse origins, the revolution created in record time a unified nation, conscious of itself, from Paris to Marseille, and speaking politically and socially with one voice.

From a country long subjected to feudalism and royalty, he does exactly the opposite, the people brutally becoming an enemy of everything that represents nobility and royal power.

From a country deeply divided socially and politically, the revolution cemented a people. But this people, who believed themselves to be united, continued to harbor contradictions within themselves.

Daniel Guérin in "The Class Struggle under the First Republic" :

"In an article from January 1849, Engels pointed to the ’permanent revolution’ as one of the characteristic features of the ’glorious year 1793’. Marx was the first to realize that in France, in the midst of the bourgeois revolution, the Enragés, and then the Babouvists, had introduced an embryo of proletarian revolution." As early as 1845, therefore before Michelet, Marx observed, in "The Holy Family," that "the revolutionary movement, which had as its principal representatives, in the middle of its evolution, Leclerc and Roux and finally succumbed for a moment with the Babeuf conspiracy, had given rise to the communist idea (...)" And, two years later, regarding the Babouvists, he emphasized that "the first appearance of a truly active communist party occurred within the framework of the bourgeois revolution." (...) Engels added : "When, later, I read Bougeart’s book on Marat, I realized that in more than one respect, we had only unconsciously imitated the great authentic model of the Friend of the People (...) and that he, like us, refused to consider the Revolution as over, wanting it to be declared permanent." “
Marx and Engels, in fact, drew inspiration from this historical concept of permanent revolution, making it a rule of conduct for future revolutions. (…) Thus, in March 1850 (…), they wrote to the Communist League : ‘It is in our interest and our duty to make the revolution permanent, until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from power, until the proletariat has conquered public power (…).’ And they concluded their appeal with this ‘battle cry’ : permanent revolution ! In April of the same year, Marx and Engels, together with the Blanquists, founded a Universal Society of Revolutionary Communists, whose first article pledged to maintain ‘permanent revolution until the realization of communism.’” It was in the same vein that Lenin – who knew the March 1850 circular almost by heart and quoted it frequently – would write in 1905 : "We are for the uninterrupted revolution."
Trotsky, who deepened and developed Marxist thought on this point, wrote : “The idea of ​​permanent revolution was put forward by the great communists of the first half of the 19th century, Marx and his followers, to counter the bourgeois ideology which, as is well known, claims that after the establishment of a ‘rational’ or democratic state, all questions could be resolved through the peaceful path of evolution and reform. (…) Permanent revolution, in the sense that Marx gave to this concept, means a revolution that refuses to compromise with any form of class domination, that does not stop at the democratic stage but proceeds to socialist measures and war against external reaction, a revolution in which each stage is contained in germ within the preceding stage, a revolution that ends only with the total liquidation of class society.” (in "The Permanent Revolution")
(...) As Trotsky wrote : "The distinction between bourgeois revolution and proletarian revolution is the alphabet. But, after learning the alphabet, one learns the syllables, which are formed of letters. History has combined the most important letters of the bourgeois alphabet with the first letters of the socialist alphabet." (...) As early as 1905, he wrote : "A general sociological definition, ’bourgeois revolution,’ in no way resolves the problems of politics and tactics, the antagonisms and difficulties posed by the very mechanism of this bourgeois revolution. Within the framework of the bourgeois revolution of the late 18th century, whose objective aim was the domination of capital, the dictatorship of the sans-culottes proved possible." In the early 20th-century revolution, which also proved bourgeois in its immediate objectives, the inevitability, or at least the probability, of the political domination of the proletariat is clearly emerging in the very near future. (from "History of the Russian Revolution")
(...) The two perspectives from which the French Revolution must be considered—one relating to the objective conditions of the time (bourgeois revolution), and the other to the internal mechanism of the revolutionary movement (permanent revolution)—are only superficially contradictory. I will now explain why.
The fact that, even during a bourgeois revolution, the internal dynamics of the Revolution lead the proletariat to become more or less aware of its own class interests and to seek, more or less confusedly, to seize power does not contradict the materialist conception of history according to which material relations imperatively condition the evolution of societies. It does not justify a "voluntarist" thesis which, neglecting what is objectively possible, would imagine that will alone is enough to make it possible. The theory of permanent revolution remains firmly grounded in historical materialism. It explains the attempt to transcend the bourgeois revolution, not through psychological reasons, not through the "idealistic" intervention of the human will, but through certain purely "material" circumstances. Here’s how. A society, and consequently the material relations existing within it, is never homogeneous because the entire historical process is founded on the law of the unequal development of the productive forces. Lenin highlighted one aspect of this law when, in his analysis of imperialism, he emphasized the "disproportion in the speed of development of different countries," the "differences between the speed of development of the different elements of the world economy," and stated : "Under capitalism, there can be no equal development of enterprises, trusts, branches of industry, or countries."
Trotsky showed that "from this universal law of unequal rhythms arises another law which, for lack of a more suitable name, can be called the law of combined development," in the sense that a society in the process of evolution is "an original combination of the various phases of the historical process," "of backward elements with the most modern factors." The author of "History of the Russian Revolution" illustrated this law very strikingly by applying it to early 20th-century Russia. But it has a much broader scope. It applies to all modern societies. Marx had already applied it to Germany in 1847. He had observed that “in this country, where the political misery of the absolute monarchy still exists with all its attendant castes and decaying semi-feudal conditions, there already exists, on the other hand, partially, as a consequence of industrial development and Germany’s dependence on the world market, the modern oppositions between the bourgeoisie and the working class, with the resulting struggle.” And he based his conception of permanent revolution on “this contradictory situation” : “The German bourgeoisie thus finds itself already, too, in opposition to the proletariat, even before it has politically constituted itself as a class.” Trotsky merely elaborates on Marx’s thought when he emphasizes that “the theory of permanent revolution was founded on this law (…) of the inequality of historical development.”
Applying the law of combined development to the French Revolution allows us to understand why the great Revolution took on the dual character of a bourgeois revolution and a permanent revolution. It explains why, despite the fact that the objective conditions of the time still only allowed for the victory of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois revolution already contained within it the embryo of a proletarian revolution. This is because France in 1793 was, from the perspective of the evolution of forms of production and property, a heterogeneous combination of retrograde and modern elements, of factors that lagged behind the bourgeois revolution and others that tended to leapfrog it. The archaic conditions of land ownership and cultivation in certain regions, such as the Vendée and Brittany, had contributed to keeping these provinces mired in serfdom. However, technological progress, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, and the economic developments that had concentrated a considerable mass of workers in cities, and especially in the capital, in the face of an already wealthy and powerful bourgeoisie, had given the sans-culottes (and particularly the Parisian sans-culottes) a centuries-long advantage over the peasants of the West and the South. Paris already had over 700,000 inhabitants by 1793.
(…) Two worlds overlapped : in the very carriage that was taking Louis, king by the grace of God, to the scaffold, sat the fervent Jacques Roux, a (still fledgling) pioneer of the proletarian revolution, representing the Paris Commune.
Did a proletariat even exist ?
Let us consider for a moment the sans-culottes of Year II : we will be struck by the composite nature of their traits. They themselves are the product of combined development. If the question were posed in a simplistic form : did a proletariat exist in 1793 ? The answer would have to be both no and yes. Undoubtedly, there was no proletariat in the sense that this word acquired in the 19th century, that is to say, large masses of workers who had lost ownership of their means of production and were concentrated in vast enterprises. (…) Moreover, the differentiation within the Third Estate was already pronounced and continued to deepen during the five years of the Revolution. The bourgeois of 1789 was already a figure of considerable importance. Landowner, wealthy merchant, industrialist, holder of an office (judicial, financial, etc.), his lifestyle, manners, even his attire, aligned him far more closely with the aristocracy than with the working class. Inflation and the high cost of living, on the one hand, and on the other, the lucrative acquisitions of nationalized property and the enormous profits made on war supplies, began to create a rift between the bourgeoisie and the sans-culottes. The poor grew poorer, while the wealth of the rich became more blatant.
The distinction already existed, albeit to a lesser degree, between the petty bourgeoisie and manual laborers. To lump together, as is sometimes done, all the social strata that constituted the vanguard of the Revolution under the term "petty bourgeoisie" or "democracy" is, in my opinion, too simplistic. The petty bourgeoisie of that era already played, albeit in an embryonic form, an intermediary role between the bourgeoisie and the workers. (...) The Jacobin party, both petty-bourgeois at its head and popular at its base, reflected this contradiction. (...) Thus, the demonstration of September 4, 1793, was specifically workers’ ; it brought together almost exclusively journeymen, and the petty bourgeoisie seem to have felt some unease : the incident between Chaumette and the worker Tiger is significant in this regard. The strikes of winter and spring 1794 were also, by their very nature, specifically proletarian movements from which the Jacobin petty bourgeoisie distanced themselves and which they slandered, calling them "counter-revolutionaries." Finally, during the Prairial Days (May 1795), we will see the small business owners of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine play a role distinctly different from their comrades : while the latter, of their own accord, would have continued the struggle, the former, frightened by the class character it had taken on, pushed for a compromise with the Thermidorian bourgeoisie (a compromise that proved fatal to the insurgents). (...) Wishing to use a term that marks, without exaggerating, the relative difference existing between petty bourgeois and workers, I have borrowed from Michelet the expressive term "bare arms." The historian observes that if the defense of Nantes against the Vendéans had been solely bourgeois, Nantes would have been lost. “It was necessary,” he writes, “that the bare arms, the rough men, the workers violently take sides against the brigands.” (…) The composite nature of the “sans-culottes” of 1793 must never be lost sight of if one wants to understand the complex mechanism of the final phase of the Revolution. (…)
Marx showed in “On the Jewish Question” how the revolutionary movement, “by declaring the revolution permanent,” had placed itself “in violent contradiction” with the objective conditions of the bourgeois revolution, which ultimately resulted in “the restoration of religion, private property, and all the elements of bourgeois society.”
Engels offered various analyses of this setback, common to all revolutions of the old type (that is, of periods when proletarian revolution was still objectively impossible). After showing how an embryonic proletariat, grouped around Thomas Müntzer in Germany at the beginning of the 16th century, formulated the rudiments of communist demands, he wrote : “But, at the same time, this anticipation, beyond not only the present, but even the future (…) was bound, at the first attempt at practical application, to fall back within the narrow limits permitted only by the conditions of the time.” “It was not only the movement of that time, but its entire century that was not yet ripe for the realization of the ideas that it itself had only begun to glimpse very dimly. The class it represented, far from being fully developed and capable of subjugating and transforming the whole of society, was merely in its infancy.” The social upheaval that vaguely presented itself to his imagination had so little basis in existing material conditions that these conditions were even preparing a social order that was absolutely the opposite of the social order he dreamed of. It was therefore easy for the bourgeoisie, led by Luther, to crush the movement. (…) Elsewhere, regarding the revolutions in Paris, Engels describes the ebb as follows : “The proletariat, which had bought victory with its blood, appeared after the victory with its own demands. These demands were more or less obscure and even confused, according to the corresponding degree of development of the Parisian workers, but, ultimately, they aimed at the suppression of the class antagonism between capitalists and workers. (…) But the demand itself, however indeterminate it still was in its form, contained a danger to the established social order ; the workers who made it were still armed ; for the bourgeois who were at the helm of the State, the disarmament of the workers was therefore the first duty.” Hence, after each revolution in which the workers were victorious, a new struggle arises, which ends in the defeat of the workers.
And, in another text, Engels elaborates : “After the first major success, it was the rule that the victorious minority would split in two : one half was satisfied with the result obtained, the other wanted to go even further, making new demands. (…) These more radical demands did prevail in some cases, but frequently only for a moment : the more moderate party regained supremacy, the latest gains were lost again in whole or in part ; the vanquished then cried treason or blamed the defeat on chance. But in reality, this was most often the case : the gains of the first victory were only secured by the second victory of the more radical party ; once this was achieved, that is to say, what was momentarily necessary, the radical elements disappeared again from the scene of operations, and their success with them.” All the great revolutions of modern times, beginning with the great English Revolution of the 17th century, exhibited these traits, which seemed inseparable from any revolutionary struggle.
(...) The precise point at which the Revolution reaches its zenith and where the decline begins (...) I place at the end of November 1793. (...) From 1789 until the date just proposed, the revolutionary movement, I will show, advanced in successive leaps, constantly because the objective limits of the bourgeois revolution had not yet been reached. (...)
The theory of permanent revolution has a corollary which, for the sake of clarity in my analysis, I have only touched upon in the preceding exposition. Because revolution is permanent—that is, because the problem of proletarian revolution already arises (albeit in a more or less embryonic form) during the bourgeois revolution—the revolutionary bourgeoisie, for its part, is not solely preoccupied with liquidating the class it has succeeded. It is also concerned about what is happening on its left. It is alarmed to see that the working masses, whose active participation is essential to putting an end to the old regime, and into whose hands it has had to place weapons, are trying to take advantage of the circumstances to obtain satisfaction of their own demands. The fear inspired by the popular vanguard makes it refrain from striking too swiftly and brutally at the counter-revolution. It hesitates at every moment between the solidarity that unites it with the people against the aristocracy and that which unites all the propertied classes against the non-property-makers. This pusillanimity renders it incapable of completing the historical tasks of the bourgeois revolution.
The popular vanguard must therefore force the monarchy’s hand, push it forward, literally wrest from it the radical measures whose necessity it keenly feels but which frighten it. (…)
On the eve of 1789, the bourgeoisie, let us repeat, was no longer, to a very limited extent, a lower class. It was quite closely linked to royal absolutism and the class of large landowners. It already held a considerable share of economic power. Moreover, it had been allowed to pick up the crumbs from the feudal feast (many bourgeois had received titles of nobility, enjoyed feudal rents, held offices, and wore breeches and stockings like the nobles). (…) The violence with which the popular masses attacked the old regime frightened the bourgeoisie from the outset.
Georges Lefebvre observes, in his "Great Fear of 1789" : "Exasperated by hunger, the peasant threatened the aristocracy with an irresistible assault. But the bourgeoisie itself was not safe. It did not pay its share of taxes either ; it owned many lordships : it was the bourgeoisie that provided the lords with their judges and stewards ; it was the bourgeoisie who leased the collection of feudal dues." (...)
On a purely political level, we note the same hesitation on the part of the bourgeoisie in fulfilling its historical duties. Thus, on July 14, 1789, it was literally forced into action. (...) "Thus, the signal for the violent conquest of the Bastille was not given by the bourgeoisie. It was despite its efforts at conciliation that the people seized the old prison." If the sans-culottes hadn’t forced the bourgeoisie’s hand, the National Assembly would have ultimately succumbed in its rebellion against the royal bayonets. Similarly, without the march on Versailles on October 5th, with its starving, bare arms, and without their irruption into the Assembly, the Declaration of the Rights of Man would not have been ratified. Without the groundswell of August 10, 1792, the bourgeoisie would have retreated before the Republic and universal suffrage.
At the beginning of 1793, we will see the largest and wealthiest wing of the bourgeoisie (the Girondins) back down out of fear and hatred of the sans-culottes, hesitate before the radical measures that alone could save the Revolution, and ultimately slide toward royalism. We will then see the most audacious faction of the bourgeoisie (the Mountains), which supplanted those who had betrayed the cause of the Revolution, hesitate in turn to push the struggle to its conclusion. It will take the intervention of the suburbs for them to decide to punish the leaders of the Girondins and rid the army of reactionary officers. (…) Thus, for society to be entirely purified of feudal and absolutist vestiges, the intervention of the proletariat itself was already necessary at the end of the 18th century. The bourgeois revolution would not have been carried to its conclusion if it had not been accompanied by the embryo of a proletarian revolution. (…) Engels, drawing from his comparative study of the English and French revolutions, concludes that “without the plebeian element in the cities, the bourgeoisie alone would never have carried the battle to a decisive conclusion,” and he adds : “it seems that this is, in fact, one of the laws of the evolution of bourgeois society.”
We will now consider the French Revolution from the perspective of the forms of popular power. The theory of permanent revolution will help us to uncover certain aspects that have too often escaped republican historians. These historians have been content to present the great Revolution as the cradle of parliamentary democracy. They have not perceived (or have chosen not to perceive) that, precisely because it was, at the same time as a bourgeois revolution, an embryo of a proletarian revolution, it carried within it the germ of a new form of revolutionary power whose features would become more pronounced during the proletarian revolutions of the late 19th and 20th centuries. They have not sufficiently marked the historical lineage which, from the Commune of 1793, leads to that of 1871, and even less, of course, that which from the Commune of 1793 and 1871 leads to the soviets (councils) of 1905 and 1917. They have not seen that the essential data of the problem of power as it arose for the proletariat during the Russian Revolution (duality of powers, revolutionary constraint of the proletariat) were already manifesting themselves, although in an embryonic form, during the French Revolution, and in particular, in its last phase.
(…) We see the first symptoms of a dual power structure as early as July 1789. On the eve of the Revolution, there was a dual power structure not only between the king and the National Assembly, but also between the National Assembly, interpreting the will of the upper bourgeoisie, and the Paris Commune, the latter relying on the lower strata of the Third Estate in the capital. (…) The dual power structure manifested itself much more markedly during the insurrection of August 10, 1792. As early as the second half of July, the sections had appointed delegates who met at the Hôtel de Ville. (…) On August 10, the assembly of sections replaced the legal Commune and constituted itself as the Revolutionary Commune. It presented itself to the bourgeois Assembly as the organ of the popular will. (…) But the dual power structure is a revolutionary, not a constitutional, phenomenon. It can last for a while, but not very long. (…) Sooner or later, one of the powers ends up eliminating the other. (…) “The duality of powers is, in its essence, a regime of social crisis : marking an extreme fragmentation of the nation, it entails, potentially or openly, civil war.” In the aftermath of August 10, the powers of the revolutionary Paris Commune and those of the Assembly were momentarily balanced. This situation, which provoked an acute political crisis, lasted only a few weeks. One of the two powers ultimately had to give way to the other, and that was the Commune.
On May 31, 1793, the duality of powers once again took on an open form. As on August 10, a revolutionary Commune had replaced the legal Commune and, facing the Convention and its Committee of Public Safety, had emerged as a new power. But this time, the duality lasted only for a morning. The official authorities, as we shall see, hastened to erase the insurrectionary Commune from history.
After the fall of the Girondins, the struggle between the Convention and the Commune, between bourgeois power and the power of the masses, continued in a muted fashion. (…) The struggle took on a sharper character once again in November 1793, when the Commune, replacing the Convention, led the country into a campaign of dechristianization and imposed the Cult of Reason on the Assembly. The bourgeoisie retaliated by curtailing the powers of the Commune, which, by the decree of December 4, was placed under strict control of the central government.
In February-March 1794, the struggle between the two powers reignited. During this final phase, as we shall see, the power of the masses was represented more by the popular societies of the sections, grouped into a central committee, than by the Commune itself. But the leaders of the latter, spurred on by the movement of the masses, harbored thoughts of a coup d’état. This was the supreme episode of the duality of power. The bourgeoisie accused the supporters of the Commune of wanting to "debase national representation" and it crushed popular power, thus delivering the final blow to the Revolution.

Read more :

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4728

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4708

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article3033

https://www.persee.fr/doc/cafon_0395-8418_1991_num_63_1_1565

And terror ?

https://www.matierevolution.org/spip.php?article6636

The dialectical nature of the strategy of the revolutionary proletariat

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article8300

Why has the Yellow Vest movement been compared to the French Revolution ? Because this movement didn’t just demand change, fight against, and denounce the government ; it rejected the entire political and social power of the exploiters, their control of the state and society. And the French Revolution demonstrated to them that the working people can dialectically decide to reject the right to exploitation and the right to oppression. If the circumstances are right, their decision alone can change reality.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5281

What role does dialectical philosophy play in the politics of revolutionaries ?

https://www.matierevolution.org/spip.php?article3617
Expropriate the expropriators, use wars and debts, like all forms of oppression, to turn them against the capitalist warriors and oppressive imperialists, annihilate those who want to eradicate humanity, declare war on the warmongers, seize the finances of those who cut off our financial resources, eliminate all political rights of those who deny us our political rights, dismantle the organizations of those who want to prevent us from organizing, shoot the generals who shoot at us, requisition the trusts that are driving us into bankruptcy, silence the priests linked to power and the pedophile manipulators of children, fire the firefighters, suppress the right to pollute public opinion for the media that refuse to broadcast our opinions, deny the exploiters who deny us our democratic rights the right to participate in our democracy, disarm the capitalist armies and arm the working people, put internationalists at the head of the peoples who suffer national oppression and turn it against them Imperialism, decapitalizing the accumulators of capital, that is indeed the negation of revolutionary negation !