A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (40 page)

Like the Dutch, English and American revolutions before it, the French Revolution had cut away the great obstacles inherited from the past to a fully market based society. And after the events of 1792-94 there was now no way aristocratic reaction could reimpose them.

Looking back on the revolution 20 years later, the novelist Stendhal observed, ‘In 2,000 years of world history, so sharp a revolution in customs, ideas, and beliefs has perhaps never happened before’.
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The revolutionaries may have been defeated, but much of the revolution’s heritage survived to shape the modern world.

Robespierre was wrong in a second way as well. That was because the revolution did not just consist of the rise of middle class political groups, each one more radical than the one before. Centrally, it also involved the entry into political life of millions of people in the town and country who had never before had a chance to shape history. They had learned to fight for their own interests and to argue with each other over what those interests were. The peasants who had burned down the chateaux of the aristocrats in 1789 and 1792 were not going to let a subsequent government take their land from them. In Paris and other cities the lower classes had risen to fight for their own interests on a scale never before seen in history—and would do so again in 1830, 1848 and 1871, as well as in 1936 and 1968.

Accounts of the revolution which look, quite rightly, at its overall impact on world history are always in danger of understating what happened on the ground, in the narrow streets and overcrowded dwellings of the poorer parts of Paris. It was here that people read and argued over the writings of Marat and Hébert, spent hour after hour at their section ‘meeting in permanence’, hunted out hoarders of grain and searched for monarchist agents, sharpened pikes and marched on the Bastille, organised the risings that replaced the constitutional monarchists by the Girondins and the Girondins by the Jacobins, and volunteered in their thousands to go to the front or to spread the revolution through the countryside.

There were limitations to the popular movements in the cities. They arose from the structures of French society at the time. The great majority of the urban masses still worked in small workshops, where the master and his family would work alongside perhaps a couple of employees whose living standards did not differ markedly from their own. They could come together on the streets or in section assemblies and clubs. But they were not tied to one another organically in the process of production which took up much of their time. Their ideal was the preservation of the individual family unit, with the father in charge, not the collective reorganisation of society. They could rise up against the aristocrats who had humiliated them in the past and the speculators who would see them starve, showing enormous courage and inventiveness, as histories of the revolution by Kropotkin and Guerin
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have shown. And when they rose up they could begin to throw off many of their own prejudices, as shown by the vanguard role played by women in many of the protests, by the call from some of the revolutionaries for women to be able to vote, and by the emergence of revolutionary women’s clubs. Yet in the great crisis of the revolution in 1793-94 they found it difficult to put forward a programme of their own which could lead to victory.

As Albert Soboul has shown, their condition of life meant they could push the Jacobins to take necessary radical measures, but they could not frame a collective, class response of their own which could solve the revolution’s problems. They could fight for maximum prices, but they were not in a position to take over the decisive productive processes. Even their keenness for terror was a sign of their weakness. They had to focus attention on stopping other people sabotaging the revolution because they could not take direct, collective control over its destiny themselves.

Yet it was their action and initiative, as much as the inspiring words of Danton or the steely determination of Robespierre, which overturned the old order in France—inspiring or terrifying all of Europe and beyond for much of the next century. From them also emerged, in the aftermath of the crushing of the popular movement, a group of revolutionaries around ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf (executed in 1796) whose stress on social and economic equality helped lay the ground for the socialist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.

‘Succour to all peoples who want to recover their liberty’ was the promise held out by the Girondin-led convention of 1792. The war which Brissot proclaimed against the monarchs of Europe was not going to be an old-style war of conquest, he claimed, but a war of liberation. There were certainly many people outside France prepared to rejoice at any revolutionary advance:

So the ageing German philosopher Hegel described the impact of the events in France on the world of his youth. His memory was not playing tricks on him. The message of revolution found an echo everywhere the Enlightenment had influenced people.

The English poets Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge enthused about the storming of the Bastille. ‘From the general heart of human kind, Hope springs forth like a full-born Deity’, Coleridge wrote. The poet-engraver William Blake was almost arrested for defending the revolution’s principles in an argument with a soldier. The house of the pioneering chemist Joseph Priestley was attacked by a royalist mob. The German philosophers Kant and Fichte were as enthusiastic as the young Hegel. Even after Thermidor, Kant could say, ‘The misdeeds of the Jacobins were nothing compared to the tyrants of past time’.
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Beethoven incorporated the melodies of revolutionary songs into his music and embodied the spirit of the revolutionary army in his great third symphony, the
Eroica
(although he removed the dedication to Napoleon in disgust after he proclaimed himself emperor). From Ireland, Wolfe Tone of the Belfast middle class and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a member of an old aristocratic family, went to Paris to make contact with the revolutionary government. In Latin America a 16 year old from Caracas, Simon Bolivar, also from an aristocratic family, defended the revolution in an argument with the Spanish viceroy in Panama in 1799; while a Mexican priest, Miguel Hidalgo, won students such as Jose Maria Morelos to the ideals of the revolution.

Revolution at bayonet point

Such enthusiasm meant advancing French armies found many local allies, at first, as they crossed the borders into Belgium, Holland, northern Italy and southern Germany. Middle class opponents of monarchist or oligarchic governments described themselves as ‘Jacobins’—and even after the Jacobins had fallen from power this remained the general name for supporters of the revolutionary forces. Whenever the French army advanced, these forces would work with it to carry through from above reforms similar to those enforced, from below, in France—abolition of serfdom and feudal dues, separation of church and state, confiscation of church lands, abolition of internal customs posts, and the establishment of more or less democratic assemblies. But problems soon began to arise.

One of Robespierre’s arguments against Brissot had been that the peoples of other countries would not welcome foreign invaders, however well intentioned. He was soon to be proved right, despite the initial enthusiasm of many intellectuals and some sections of the middle class. The victorious French army could only maintain itself by pillage and by imposing tribute on countries it conquered. What began as a war of liberation passed through a bitter period as a war of revolutionary defence, and ended up as a war of imperial conquest. Napoleon carried the process to its logical conclusion by annexing Belgium, Savoy and German statelets south of the Rhine, replacing democratic assemblies by monarchies and installing his brothers as kings in Italy, Westphalia, Holland and Spain.

Even under Napoleon the French army bulldozed away the remnants of feudalism and, in some cases at least, prepared the ground for the advance of capitalist production. But, without the
sans-culottes
and peasant risings that had been so important in France, its local allies lacked any base among the mass of people. The peasants and urban lower classes gained nothing from the French occupation to make them identify with the new order, since tribute paid to France and the costs of providing for the French army constituted a burden as great as the old feudal payments. The local ‘Jacobins’ were left high and dry whenever the French army was forced to withdraw.

This happened everywhere in 1812-14. Napoleon over-extended his empire on two fronts, by trying to place his brother on the Spanish throne and by marching across the north European plain to Moscow. It was a disastrous strategy. His troops managed to put down a popular uprising in Madrid, but from then on were harassed by guerilla fighters as British troops led by Wellington fought their way across the Iberian Peninsula. Meanwhile, the occupation of a deserted Moscow turned into a disaster as enemy troops and harsh winter conditions destroyed his 1,000 mile supply lines. So unpopular were the French armies in the occupied territories that Spanish and Prussian liberals allied themselves with monarchist forces to drive them out in what seemed like wars of ‘national liberation’—only to find themselves betrayed by victorious kings and driven down into the depths of oppression and depression expressed in the paintings of Goya’s ‘dark period’.

Napoleon’s defeat (or rather his two defeats, since he staged an amazing 100 day comeback in 1815 before being defeated at Waterloo) allowed all the kings, princes and aristocrats to return in style, creating a weird half-world in which the old superstructures of the 18th century
ancien régimes
were imposed on social structures which had been transformed—at least in France, northern Italy and western Germany. This is the world brilliantly portrayed in the novels
The Red and the Black
and
The Charterhouse of Parma
by Stendhal (a former commissary in Napoleon’s army), as well as
The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexander Dumas (whose father, the son of a black slave, had been a general under Napoleon).

Britain: the birth of a tradition

It was not only in continental Europe that the revolution had a profound impact on political life. It had a mighty influence in Britain. The most important sections of the bourgeoisie had obtained a significant influence over political affairs before 1789 and saw no reason to play with revolution. But the French events stirred wide sections of the masses in the rapidly expanding cities and towns—the ever increasing numbers of craftspeople, journeymen and small shopkeepers, and along with them, some of the new industrial workers of the factories.

Tom Paine’s two part defence of the revolution and call for similar constitutional principles in Britain,
The Rights of Man,
sold 100,000 copies. In Sheffield at the end of 1791, ‘five or six mechanics…conversing about the enormous high price of provisions’ and abuses in government, formed the Sheffield Constitutional Society, dedicated to universal suffrage and annual parliaments. By March 1792 it was 2,000 strong and organised a street celebration involving up to 6,000 after the revolutionary victory at Valmy in the autumn.
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Similar societies were launched in Manchester, Stockport, Birmingham, Coventry and Norwich, with varying degrees of success.
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The London Corresponding Society, founded by shoemaker Thomas Hardy at the beginning of 1792, mushroomed until it had 5,000 members organised in 48 ‘divisions’ (branches)
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and was establishing a national network with the provincial societies.

The movement was big enough to worry the British government as it prepared for war against the French Revolution at the end of 1792. Local bigwigs in Birmingham had already incited a mob to attack a dinner of local reformers commemorating the fall of the Bastille in 1791, sacking houses, burning down meeting places and driving people like the chemist Joseph Priestley from the city.
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Now the government encouraged the anti-Jacobin agitation nationally. Loyalist societies were set up in each locality to whip up a nationalist war fever.

There was also a vicious crackdown against any attempt to propagandise democratic ideas. Tom Paine, charged with treason for
The Rights of Man
, was forced to flee the country. Two leaders of the Scottish Friends of the People, the young lawyer Thomas Muir and the English Unitarian preacher Thomas Palmer, were sentenced to transportation after a notoriously biased trial,
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as were three delegates to a ‘Scottish constitutional convention’. Thomas Hardy and a dozen other London leaders were put on trial for treason and Hardy’s wife died as a mob attacked their home. When a sympathetic jury acquitted the defendants, parliament suspended
habeas corpus
so that activists could be imprisoned without facing a jury.

At certain points the agitation of the English and Scottish Jacobins met with a wide response among the urban classes. They could gather thousands to open air meetings, and some of the leaders of the great naval mutinies which shook the British navy in 1797 were clearly under the influence of their ideas. But the mass of the middle class were prepared to unite with the landowning class in defence of the profitable status quo, giving the government a free hand to crush the movement. By the late 1790s it was very difficult for anyone to express sympathy for revolutionary ideals.

Yet the agitation of the Sheffield Constitutional Society, the London Corresponding Society, the Scottish Friends of the People and others did have one important effect. As Edward Thompson showed in his
The Making of the English Working Class
, it helped create a tradition that was to have great effect in the years 1815-48.

Ireland’s Republican rising

The example of France had an even greater direct impact in Ireland, Britain’s oldest colony, giving birth to a revolutionary nationalist tradition that persists today.

English governments had consolidated their hold over the island after smashing resistance in the 1650s by settling Protestant peasants (mainly from Scotland) on land taken from native Catholics in the province of Ulster. The descendants of these peasant settlers lived in fear of being driven from the land by a Catholic rising, leading them to feel a community of interest with the great Anglo-Irish landowners, who were also Protestants. They were frightened to challenge the policies imposed on them by British governments in case it encouraged the dispossessed Catholics. The Protestant parliament in Dublin acted, until the 1770s, as a rubber stamp for policies made in London.

Attitudes began to change in the last quarter of the 18th century. The American War of Independence gave the Dublin parliament increased bargaining power, since British governments wanted a militia of Irish volunteers to ward off any French attack. For a time, it seemed the Irish parliament could act in the interests of Irish landowners and businessmen. But these hopes were dashed once the war ended, and there was much bitterness against Britain, especially among the growing Protestant commercial middle class of Belfast.

These feelings coalesced in an enthusiastic response to the French Revolution. Volunteers began to drill, demand a constitutional convention and back Catholic emancipation. In 1792 ‘the town of Belfast, now foremost in the fight for democracy, celebrated by a grand procession and festival the anniversary of the French Revolution…A republican spirit pervaded the whole atmosphere.’ Posters attacked religious sectarianism: ‘Superstitious jealousy, that is the cause of the Irish Bastille: let us unite and destroy it’.
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One of the organisers of this event, the young Protestant lawyer Wolfe Tone, formed a new radical organisation, the United Irishmen, at a dinner in Belfast with a dozen men, mainly businessmen (a draper, a linen manufacturer, a tanner, a clerk, an apothecary, a watchmaker, and three merchants).
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In Ireland, as in Britain, there was an attempt to destroy the new Jacobinism with repression. Laws passed on English orders by the Irish upper class forbade the carrying of arms and outlawed the United Irishmen. Forced underground, the organisation became increasingly revolutionary. Its aim became the overthrow of British rule, which had kept Ireland economically backward and riven it along religious lines. There had to be a revolutionary rising to create a modern nation, as in France. The United Irishmen took it for granted that this would be a capitalist nation, but one which had thrown off the dead weight of foreign rule and native aristocracy. Achieving this, Tone increasingly saw, depended on the middle class, mainly Protestant United Irishmen rousing the Catholic peasantry, which had a long tradition of anti-landlord agitation through armed, underground ‘defender’ groups.

The numbers prepared to back a rising were greater than those at the disposal of the British government—100,000 compared with about 65,000.
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But they were much less well trained and armed. Success seemed to depend on getting military support from France.

The rising took place in 1798. But the French support was too little and came too late, with the landing of 1,100 troops in Mayo in August. By then the authorities had been able to arrest the leaders of the movement and forced those rebels who were already armed into premature action. Risings in Wexford and Antrim were crushed. The repression which followed made the terror of the French Revolution seem like a child’s game. Reprisals against those suspected of supporting the rising cost an estimated 30,000 lives.
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That was not the end of the story. As tension had mounted in the three years before the rising, the authorities had deliberately encouraged groups of Protestants to organise hate campaigns against Catholics. Local clashes between Catholic and Protestant peasants in the village of Diamond in Antrim in the autumn of 1795 had been followed by the founding of a semi-secret Protestant organisation, the Orange Order. The Anglo-Irish landlords despised peasants of any sort and stood aside from the new body at first. But they soon saw it as invaluable in warding off the threat of revolt: