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.