by Sibabalwe Oscar Masinyana
The execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793 at the Place de la Révolution
Dawning lessons: the French branch of the Bourbon dynasty and the European Guilds (craft and trade associations) collapsed - interestingly, but not by coincidence, at around the same time - because both institutions failed to adapt to the changing times. To follow the channel or control the flow of the current, to be in tune with the demands of the times. Jane Jacob writing in Dark Age Ahead (2004) asks and answers: "What dooms losers? Losers are confronted with such radical jolts in circumstances that their institutions cannot adapt adequately, become irrelevant, and are dropped." When you have been at something, and more or less succeeding, for nearly or over a thousand years I suppose it's hard to imagine that you can be replaced or overcome by newer and more dynamic power in new (and seemingly inexperienced but) eager hands.
This is the start and the end of all I want to say. But perhaps I should go on...
I do not wish to engage in equivocations or subterfuge, though the lessons I've learnt are difficult to explain or apply. What are these lessons contained in this revolution narrative? Must we always adapt to changing circumstances or be prepared to die? Adaptation usually, but not always, entails survival. Think of the simplified premises of Darwinism. But what if adaptation entails a compromise of one's core being, belief systems or guiding principles? Failure to adapt might leave you a relic if you're lucky or a ruin if not, though adapting might leave you as something other than what you wish to become.
You might think it best to stand by the ways of your familiars, the ways of your kin and fellow folk, the preservation of this or that tradition appearing better to you than the possible rewards that will bear from the betrayal of these attested ways of being and doing things. Yet, it is a (political) fact that “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risqué the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve” (Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution). But in France the circumstances made it very hard for anyone (even those who had benefited immensely from it) to defend the old order without blushing: The army officers had suffered a series of humiliations at the hands of the king, Louis’ court was sinking in luxury whilst the unfed but fed-up population had been agitated to a shrill by years of serfdom, economic recession, unemployment, high food prices, failed harvests, administrative failures and the rising waves of talk about the coming radical redress that would benefit the People. Unbeknown to him, Louis had lost touch with the People years before and could no longer hear them in the way they wanted to be heard or respond appropriately to their voiced and unvoiced needs and demands; when the final hour came, instead of protecting him as their sovereign, they picked up weapons and turned against him.
Nonetheless, a clear lesson: Even if you don’t adapt (and survive), someone of your rank will. From Robert Forster (1980) we read that
The elite that governed France after the Revolution and owed so much to the conscious policies of Napoleon was essentially a notability of landlords and hauts fonctionnaires, with smaller contingents of lawyers, merchants, and manufacturers – smaller in both number and influence. This elite was drawn from the old noble families as well as from newcomers, a successful amalgam of wealth, education, family connections, local influence, and political power. Without legal privileges and placing less weight on birth, it saw itself as a service elite, the rule of the capacités. Drawn from many of the same families who had administered France in the Old Regime, the new notables evolved a common set of social values and attributes that were appropriate to their own time and place. They governed France, with brief interruptions, from 1800 to 1880 and even beyond.
A confouncing lesson: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose... [The more things change the more they stay the same.] Here, in turn, in the case of the professed ideals vs. the subsequent reality of the French Revolution we behold a disaster or at least a failure of ideals – after much bloodshed, necessarily, in the dismantling of old forts. Even the most influential of the Marxist interpretations of this revolution – such as Anatoli Ado’s, Albert Soboul’s and Georges Lefebvre’s; Marx’s own interpretation makes for very embarrassing reading – cannot mask the fact that in the end it become (or from the start was) a revolution shaped and controlled by the nobles and the bourgeoisie for the nobles and the bourgeoisie who craved for more political and economic power which had proved difficult and/or impossible to obtain under the old inherited structures/hierarchies of government. The rhetoric they employed, of course, betrayed nothing of the sort: it sounded like an echo of the voices from below but its end effect conferred greater benefit for the epilimnion of the post-revolutionary, and still stratified society.
A moral lesson: I suppose it’s a good thing then that in South Africa there is never any mention (that I am aware of) of the French Revolution as a model or inspiration for continued struggle against the current status quo. Evoking this revolution as an inspiration for any future radical resistance and change would only work for the ANC government (and that in itself would be an irony of note) as anybody else would be snared in an irresolvable double-bind. The latter would be forced either to admit that a period of over a century of waiting to see ‘radical results’ that turn out to be not that different from those of your neighbours who adhered to old systems of governance is an unreasonably long period to wait and therefore possibly unworthwhile and therefore no revolution is necessary or they would have to accept that 17 years of the South African experiment in democracy is not actually that long a period and that the ANC-led government could actually still improve the state and South Africa could still prosper without resort to a full scale revolution of the French kind. The French Revolution is the most significant and also one of the most radical revolutions in history yet it is also the least useful to any really radical revolutionary in search of heros.
(Allow me to clarify: the ‘changes’ that the French Revolution brought after a century’s wait were not that different, after all, from the ways of the Old Regime. The main difference was that there was no longer a king but a parliament with its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, a document which was promptly ignored and subverted up to today by the very luminaries who upheld it as a great achievement of all time.[i] Anyway, getting back to the main point; France was held back, socially and economically, by the revolution that in the end made no fundamental difference to the economic or political picture of France when the country finally did recover. The thing that eventually made a difference to the lives of the People in France - a century later - was the train. Transport - not who was in power. A popular contrasting example with historians is that of Britain – who did not have a revolution like France’s – but was more successful both in the short and long term even though she had a constitutional monarch. The same goes for other European countries that modernised and industrialised much better and quicker than France, despite there being no fundamental changes in the rulers of their political and economic systems. Moreover, France later imitated these very countries' modes of progress years later when she finally did recover. France, for better or worse, was of course also left behind in the European scrabble for colonies in Africa and the Americas, but she eventually made up for lost time and exploited away like the rest of her neighbours, led this time by the descendants of her revolutionaries. From this view, the mother of all revolutions emerges not only as an awkward and unacknowledged failure – so far – but also as an unnecessary one, whose sole achievement was to make capitalism more attractive and successful. A South African, therefore, trying to defend the revolution, might say ‘Oh well, a century or two is actually not that long a wait to see manifest the results of a political change or revolution that was undoing centuries of long-established ways of doing things’ and in that case then, a repartee could be ‘Oh well, 17 years is decidedly not that long either to hold hope for the betterment of a politically corrupt, endlessly greedy and clearly inexperienced party.’ Both options (a failed or successful monarchic/party system and a failed or successful revolution) lead to the same place using different locomotives of different style and class and moving at different speeds and driven by different drivers; the only real choice for the potential passenger lies in their preference for what locomotive they would like to travel in, but no one says that anyone will be on the locomotive of their choice because the People never drive the locomotive even though they might be at times the engines. In France, the People realised they liked neither of the locomotives and exploded on both of their drivers: the key figures of the revolution met with the same end as the king they had ousted a year earlier. Important lesson: the People's anger for being duped is vicious. Despite their anger, however, the road remained the same and led to the same wayward station: capitalism. Life is funny that way.)
Anyway, both these scenarios – emerging in this instance from my study of the origins, progress and aftermath of the French Revolution and thinking through it in relation to pre- and post-1994 South Africa – are unpalatable routes of contemplation for a revolutionary. Yet they are all we have seen emerge from history over and over again - unless it suddenly stops to repeat itself. So it is best then, really, that we don’t talk about the French Revolution at all.
The execution of Robespierre and his supporters on 28 July 1794
also at the Place de la Révolution
[i] For instance, in a popular quote from his Report on the Principles of Political Morality, delivered amidst the revolution’s Reign of Terror on February 1794, Robespierre, the leader of the revolution, justified the ceaseless killing of royalists and the conter-revolutionaries by saying "If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country. ... The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny." To this day, with minor alterations here and there, this is still the rhetoric of democratic rulers carrying out very undemocratic crimes in the name of defending ‘human rights.’
Robespierre’s enduring legacy in terms of political methods, however, is most keenly felt in processes of totalitarian regimes. In a very unflattering portrait of Robespierre (Robespierre: The Fool as Revolutionary – Inside the French Revolution, 1974) the (ultra)conservative Christian historian, Otto Scott, argues that his purge of fellow revolutionaries in the Jacobin Club and, later, nationally against anyone he suspected as being a counter-revolutionary based not just on their actions but also on their opinions – something that marked a definite break with the principles of law in western civilization – was a “perversion of deep-rooted religious practices, in which dissenters were held wrongdoers and the sanction of the group was employed to condemn, to call for self examination, confession, and purification. Recantation, however, did not lead to forgiveness, but at best to an absence of punishment.” Scott is more astonished, however, by how this purge system was “not just a forerunner but the model for later totalitarian methods of self-criticism, public confession, mass brainwashing, purge, and control. If Robespierre had introduced some of this program it would have been remarkable, but the fact that he introduced the entire sequence in such rapid succession and so completely formed that no significant modifications or improvements have ever been found necessary by imitators later makes it a phenomenon worth much deeper and more detailed attention than it has yet received.”
