Part 3: The French Revolution's Contribution to Communism
In Its Later Stages, Karl Marx Saw a Vision of True "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité." In Its Reign of Terror, Lenin Saw the Playbook For Winning the Revolution.
Marx and Engels Saw That There Could Be No True Brotherhood Between The Members at the Country Club and Their Caddies, No Matter How Well You Tip.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
In 1848, only months before François Guizot triggered the collapse of France’s constitutional monarchy, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx declared that “the spectre of communism” is haunting “old Europe,” who have entered into a holy alliance to perform the exorcism. Guizot is right there, next to the Pope and Tsar.
Why?
Guizot’s analysis of the French Revolution was that a peaceful and prosperous nation could only exist on a foundation of traditional institutions, governed by a monarch and the slimmest of democratic principles. More than that, and it’s guillotines and student riots and barricades in the streets.
Marx and Engels saw the French Revolution fundamentally differently: How can there be Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité when the wealth of the nation isn’t shared? How can we be free and equal brothers when my labor enriches the men of leisure, who profit off my sweat and blood?
“Marxism” is far too complicated to get into, and from here, I will just refer to writings by “Marx,” but we must acknowledge that Friedrich Engels was, really, his full partner. I will narrow this to Marx’s writings on the French Revolution, even though I really should include a section on French Socialist Louis Blanc, whose 12-volume history of the French Revolution lifts Gracchus Babeuf and The Conspiracy of Equals (we will talk about them below) up from historical obscurity. Blanc also first used the term “capitalism” in its modern context, as well developing the concept of “The Right to Work,” meaning that if a society requires you to work to live, then you have, well, a right to work. Blanc was able to put this theory into practice as part of the Provisional Government of 1848 after the fall of the July Monarchy with the creation of the National Workshops. In this, you can perhaps see a proto-version of the Works Progress Administration and the New Deal.
This discussion of Marx and his followers will be helpful because much of Dickens’ understanding of the French Revolution mirrors Marx’s, even if Dickens thought it was a literal apocalypse and Marx saw the beginnings of a glorious socialist future.
The best source for understanding the intellectual underpinnings of “Marxism” is from the “Revolutions” podcast and Mike Duncan’s The Three Pillars of Marxism episode. Or, as none other than Vladimir Lenin wrote in The Marxist Doctrine: Marx was a genius who synthesized the classical German philosophy of Hegel, the classical English political economy of Adam Smith, and “French socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines” into one cohesive theory.
So, why did Marx hate François Guizot’s analysis of the French Revolution so much that he namechecked him in the first paragraph of The Communist Manifesto?
For Marx, the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution that answered the Political Question. Yes, it broke the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons, but a liberal noble like the Marquis de Lafayette, who drafted (with input from slaver “gentlemen planter” Thomas Jefferson) the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, did not seek to upset the social order. He drafted a set of political rights, similar to the United States’ Bill of Rights, that declared citizens of the nation equal under the law.
To Marx, this was all a ruse to say that we are all free and equal brothers, but without the wealth redistribution that would actually make us free and equal brothers. The rising professional class increasingly held the majority of the nation’s wealth, but because of the ancient feudal order, little power in the affairs of state. So all the Declaration does is break apart the feudal order, held together by an absolute monarch, leaving a power vacuum to be filled…by whom?
The bourgeoisie themselves! The very liberal nobles, professional class, and provincial land-owners who wrote the new rules and toppled the old regime.
Marx Thought This Was a Bunch of Pretentious Bullshit Written to Mythologize the Wealthy’s Hostile Takeover of Inept, Ossified Feudal Monarchies.
This is incredibly important to understanding the roots of the Cold War that dominated 20th Century life across the planet. And it’s based in Marx’s analysis of the French Revolution.
In Marx’s analysis of the French Revolution, they looked past the liberal nobles of 1789 and the Jacobins of 1793. Those first two revolutions were merely political revolutions. For Marx, the first revolutionary to try to answer the Social Question was Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals.
Marx himself called Babeuf “the first modern Communist.”
“Gracchus” Babeuf was François-Noël Babeuf, taking the name of the Roman Gracchi Brothers, who served in the “plebeian tribunates” that were established after the fall of the kings, creating the Roman Republic. The Gracchi probably triggered the Republic’s collapse by instituting wide-scale land reform: They established a commission to survey land, assert state claim, and then redistribute it to the peasants. This move towards equality upended the entire social order of the Republic.
For Babeuf, this was the promise of the French Revolution. As in Rome, the revolutions of 1789 and 1793 merely established political rights. But to truly usher in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, “Society must be made to operate in such a way that it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer, or wiser, or more powerful than others.”
Babeuf worked as a land surveyor at the Revolution’s beginning, so he saw the actual, material effect on the peasantry literally in his daily work. Later, he founded Le Tribun du Peuple, a political journal where Babeuf advocated for what, today, would be considered bedrock socialist principles: a progressive income tax, land redistribution, the abolition of private property, and others.
Babeuf was executed as part of the Conspiracy of Equals, a failed coup against the French Directory that ruled after the execution of Robespierre. The Conspiracy’s Manifesto of Equals unmistakably reads today as the first pronunciation of Marxist principles: Denunciation of the “gutless and rich landowners,” “the new political Tartuffes seated in place of the old,” “the goal of society is the common happiness.”
Perhaps the most important idea Marx borrowed from Babeuf was the Two-Stage Theory of Revolution. In the words of Babeuf’s co-conspirator and actual author of the Manifesto, Sylvain Maréchal, “The French Revolution is nothing but the precursor of another revolution, one that will be greater, more solemn, and which will be the last.” Basically, the Bourgeois Revolution ushers in the democratic political rights, creating the space for the Socialist Revolution of wealth redistribution that will create true Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité.
According to None Other Than Karl Marx Himself, Gracchus Babeuf Was the First Communist.
Marx fleshed this out in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Of all the articles linked to, this is the one worth taking the five minutes to read in full. Marx opens with his famous quotation that the great historical figures occur twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Here, he lists the tragic figures of the original French Revolutionary period (Danton, Robespierre, Napoleon Bonaparte), and says, look, the Second Empire of Napoleon III is a joke, a sad parody of what happened from 1789-1814.
So, what happened from 1789-1814? In Marx’s view, the original French Revolution was capitalism overthrowing feudalism, with the “Rule of Law” and the “Rights of Man” as the legal foundation for rule by the capitalist bourgeoisie.
The rest of Marx’s essay employs an historical analysis to create this political theory, based in German philosophy (he borrows the “second as farce” quotation from the greatest of German philosophers, Hegel), British economics (he develops his theory around economic class), and grounded in the history and politics that played out in France.
Marx even dabbles in a bit of literary theory, saying that:
“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future…Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. There, the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase.”
In other words, the French Revolution was a pathetic cosplay of the Roman Republic.
To Marx’s point, the author of The Declaration of the Rights Of Man, the Marquis de Lafayette, drew from his greatest influences: George Washington, the father figure in his life, and Thomas Jefferson, his intellectual guiding light. As we know, the Founding Fathers in the United States self-consciously modeled their new republic on Rome (that’s why it’s called the “Senate,” for example). In France, Lafayette modeled this thought, and even his political antithesis Maximillian Robespierre modeled his “Republic of Virtue” on the ideals of the Romans.
It’s why the Panthéon looks like that, it’s why our dollar bill looks like that, it’s why Napoleon said “I am a true Roman Emperor, I am of the best race of the Caesars–those who are the founders.”
The Best of the Race, in the Grand Tradition of Trying to Conquer All of Europe to Prove Yourself the Master of the Master Race.
Georges Lefebvre and the Marxist Tradition
The most influential historian who later worked in the Marxist tradition is Georges Lefebvre, whose The Coming of the French Revolution, was published in 1939 and, yes, it’s hard to see his analysis outside the context of Communism and Fascism rising out of the economic degradation of Europe after World War I. Lefebrvre is history’s foremost expert on the French peasantry, writing several histories of the Revolution from the 1920s through World War II. As such, Lefebvre–who grew up working class, educated in public schools–introduced the concept of History From Below: “history seen from below and not from above.”
This is the historiographical stance that history is best understood through the lives and social conditions of the vast majority of common people, rather than through the lives and actions of the “Great Men” of history–which often simplifies conflicts into hagiographical hero’s journey or tragic figure narratives. In the United States’ context, you may recognize this as the Howard Zinn A People’s History of the United States approach to history, whose narrative is grounded in the struggle of marginalized people fighting and gaining rights, rather than “Great Men” bestowing them from upon high.
This will become very important when we get to Dickens’ source material for A Tale of Two Cities, Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History. As we will see, Thomas Carlyle invented the “Great Man” theory of history. In many ways, the “history wars” of today are still a battle between “People’s History” and “Great Man” theories. Progressives tend to be “People’s History,” grounding the nation’s narrative in the various “grassroots” struggles for equality. Conservatives tend to be “Great Man,” seeing authority figures pronouncing great decrees based on traditional values from upon high. The struggle between these approaches often decides which textbooks get state contracts.
As for A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens seems to be at war with his own source material: His novelist’s instinct is to humanize people, especially the poor. But he is also damning of the people! So, A Tale of Two Cities sometimes reads like A People’s History of the Reign of Terror, In Which The People Created a Literal Hell on Earth.
Back to Lefebvre, many of the French Revolution’s early histories left the Sans-culottes and the French peasantry voiceless: They were described and chronicled, but from the outside. Lefebvre’s extraordinary contribution, which started as his doctoral thesis, was actually collecting the existing documentation on the material conditions of the peasants’ lives. Lefebvre synthesized these documents into existing sources and analyses, creating a more total picture of the Revolution: Imagine a prestige “limited series” on the French Revolution, where each episode gives a perspective, and you see other events and characters from other episodes intersect from totally different perspectives, and that’s Lefebvre’s work.
Which is, largely, what Dickens accomplishes in A Tale of Two Cities. But where Lefebvre worked with the tools of a historian, Dickens borrowed from existing histories, synthesizing them through his novelist’s instincts, to create his total picture. Working in the Marxist tradition (though Lefebvre was much more of a social democrat than a communist) Lefebvre’s narrative sees the French Revolution as class struggle, where Dickens sees it as a Christian morality play.
Georges Lefebrve’s Chief Contribution to the French Revolution Historiography Was His Pain-staking Documentation of The Great Fear of 1789, In Which the French Peasants Generally Panicked About Everything Across Rural France.
Lenin, Stalin, and the Communists
There is way too much to cover, just know this: Much of this Marxist class struggle analysis is the foundation for Lenin’s Bolshevism, and his literal playbook for how to pull off the Russian Revolution, when it finally came, was firmly rooted in his understanding of the French Revolutions and the Paris Commune.
Literally, Lenin wrote extensive histories of the French Revolution, and deeply analyzed the contemporary political events in France to develop his playbook. And then the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 came, and he emerged the winner—largely by not making the mistakes of those revolutionaries who came before him.
It is, in no way, too much to say that the rise of Communism and the Cold War resulted from the historiography of the French Revolution.
Let’s briefly identify some insights–from Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and others–that became part of Communist theory and practice. Some of these are described in detail by Dickens before Marx published his analysis, almost as if Dickens looked through a microscope to see the beginnings of Communism in a petri dish labelled “Class Conflict.” Really, most of Dickens is itself Class Conflict.
First is the identification of the Proletariat as the “Revolutionary Class.” Marx’s “discovery” of the revolutionary class, the “Proletariat” grows directly out of his analysis of the French Revolution. It wasn’t just the bourgeoisie who toppled the regime: The urban working class Sans-culotte tipped the scales with direct action in the streets, marching on Versailles, and organizing on their own, apart from the salon radicals and liberal nobles. More than just their poverty, the urban workers’ proximity to power is the special ingredient that gives them revolutionary power.
This is precisely who Dickens personifies in the poor neighborhoods of eastern Paris, and describes how the Sans-culotte were able to radicalize their brethren in the countryside. Dickens describes several seminal events of the French Revolution from the perspective of the Sans-culottes, without naming them, of course, because “The Women’s March on Versailles” wasn’t The Women’s March on Versailles while the women were marching on Versailles.
Second is Dekulakization. The kulaks are the sub-class of wealthy peasants and provincials who stood to lose the most by the redistribution of land and nationalization of the economy. Stalin identified them as enemies of Communism and killed about 5 million of them. Dickens identifies this class (the “Farmer-Generals”) in Cities, and describes how they merged noble titles and actual wealth to create the counter-revolutionary reactionary class. If you understand Stalin’s great terror campaign, you’ll immediately recognize this in Dickens.
Third is Terror as a Political Tactic. Lenin and Dickens came to the same conclusion about why the French Revolution basically invented “terror” as a political tactic: Poverty itself is dehumanizing, so the aristocrats got exactly what they deserved and should have expected—and once old authority is broken, and there’s nothing to constrain people’s behavior, this opens the door to terror. In literatures, this is Joseph Conrad’s explanation for genocide in Heart of Darkness. As for Lenin, he downplayed the violence of the Reign of Terror as either necessary or justified—you can’t have a revolution without a revolution.
Dickens saw poverty as inflicting a cycle of violence, which stops only when the poverty stops…or just wears itself out. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens seems to anticipate Stalin, that revolutionary violence only leads the oppressed to become the oppressors. If you want to boil Cities down to a thesis, Roger Daltry pretty much nails it.
They Assessed the Incomplete Work of the French Revolution and Paris Commune, and When Their Time Came, They Chose Ultra-Violence to Finish the Job. And Started the Cold War, And Killed 20 Million of Their Own People, and Brought the World to the Brink of Nuclear Annihilation. In 1859, Charles Dickens Also Assessed the French Revolution, Saw an Apocalypse, and More or Less Predicted This Future.