The Red Flag: A History of Communism (6 page)

Even so, the Jacobins still tried to combine this technocratic approach with popular enthusiasm, and there is some evidence it had an effect. Soldiers were aware that they were fighting in an army that was much more democratic than any other in Europe; as one song of the period went:

The Jacobins’ mass army brought success abroad, at least for a time. The French defeat of the Prussians at the Battle of Valmy in September 1792 had demonstrated the power of citizen armies and the disadvantages of the old aristocratic way of war. As Goethe, present at Valmy, famously declared, ‘From this place, and from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world, and you can all say that you were present at its birth.’
²⁶
By the end of 1793, the Jacobins’ reforms had strengthened the army further, and brought new victories. The regime was now supplying an army of almost one million soldiers with food and weapons, whilst inspiring its soldiers with its egalitarian principles. Pierre Cohin, fighting in the Armée du Nord, sent letters back to his family which were full of the Jacobins’ messianic message of revolutionary internationalism:

By May 1794 the French were no longer fighting a defensive war, but were spreading the revolution to their neighbours. Europe was riven by a new type of ideological struggle – an earlier, hotter version of the Cold War.

Success abroad, however, was not matched by stability at home. In France itself the Jacobins found it much more difficult to reconcile revolutionary enthusiasm with discipline. The Revolutionary Armies, charged with collecting taxes and suppressing the Revolution’s opponents in the provinces, were a particular source of disorder.
²⁸
Collaborating with radical representatives of the National Convention they often used violence against the rich and the peasantry, and brought chaos to the regions. In many places the wealthy were arrested, their wealth confiscated and chateaux demolished, to the severe detriment of the local economy.

Robespierre and the Jacobins, anxious that the ‘
ultra
’ radicals were alienating vast swathes of the population, especially in the countryside, soon decided to restore order and rein in the
sans-culottes
. In December 1793 the governing Convention abolished the Revolutionary Armies, and established more centralized control over the regions. However, Robespierre also remained apprehensive that without the ‘
ultra
’ left, the revolution would lose momentum. He mistrusted the technocrat Carnot and his ally Danton, convinced that they were not real revolutionaries, but were planning to return to some form of the old order.

In March 1794, caught between the desire to keep the momentum of the revolution going, whilst saving it from the radicals and class division, Robespierre moved against both left and right. Both the
ultra
Hébert and the less radical Danton were arrested and guillotined. Having outlawed both
ultras
and moderates, Robespierre was left with an ever-shrinking base of support. In his efforts to continue the revolution without mass support, he turned to methods that had echoes in later Communist regimes: the persecution of those suspected of being ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and
propaganda, or, in Jacobin language, ‘Terror’ and the promotion of virtue. As Robespierre famously put it:

Robespierre energetically set about establishing his new reign of virtue. He set up a Commission for Public Instruction, designed to take control of all propaganda and moral education. As Claude Payan, the brother of its boss Joseph, said, the state had hitherto only centralized ‘physical government, material government’; the task was now to centralize ‘moral government’.
³⁰
The Commission produced revolutionary songs, censored plays, and staged political festivals. It also promoted one of Robespierre’s most ambitious projects: the founding of a new, non-Christian state religion – the ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’.

Robespierre also spent a great deal of his time checking up on officials’ ideological purity. Those with ‘patriotic virtue’ were promoted; ‘enemies’ – vaguely defined – removed and arrested. On 10 June the famous draconian law of 22 Prairial began what became known as the ‘Great Terror’. Repression was now directed not only against actual conspirators, but anybody with ‘counter-revolutionary’ attitudes. The law created a new criminal category, one which was to be revived in the future: the ‘enemy of the people’. Anybody who might threaten the Revolution – whether by conspiring with foreigners or behaving immorally – could be arrested, and the law had a marked effect on the use of political repression. From the beginning of the Terror in March 1794 to the law of 10 June, 1,251 people were guillotined on the orders of the Revolutionary Tribunal, whilst in the much shorter period between 10 June and Robespierre’s fall on 27 July, 1,376 were killed.
³¹

Robespierre saw this moralistic purging as a permanent method of rule. Other Jacobins, however, saw it as a wartime expedient, unnecessary now that the French armies were victorious. They were also becoming increasingly anxious about its arbitrariness, for Robespierre alone had the power to decide on the measure of virtue and vice. The deputies understandably became worried that they could be the next targets, and
began to plot his removal. When Robespierre was finally arrested on the orders of the Convention on 9 Thermidor (27 July), he had little support. By abandoning the
sans-culotte
left, Robespierre had left himself vulnerable to the moderates in the National Convention. When Robespierre died, the victim of the guillotine, so too did the radical phase of the French Revolution. The subsequent ‘Thermidorian’ regime ended arrest on suspicion, and many of those formerly denounced as nobles and counter-revolutionaries were rehabilitated.

Looking at engravings of David’s elaborate political festivals, one might be forgiven for assuming that he was the propagandist for a backward-looking, conservative regime. The classical style and static, allegorical scenes suggest a love of order and stability. But the events which David’s festivals were celebrating were revolutionary: they involved heroism, social conflict and assaults on tradition. The contrast between David’s images and the reality of the revolution shows how unprepared the Jacobins were for the politics they ultimately practised.
³²
At first they had planned to transpose the unity and archaic simplicity of ancient Sparta to eighteenth-century France: David even designed a range of pseudo-classical costumes for the new revolutionary nation.
³³
Instead they found themselves involved in war and class conflict, and in order to fight effectively, they sought to build a modern state, army and defence industry. In trying to reconcile their ideal of classical republicanism with the demands of modern warfare, they brought together many of the elements that were eventually to make up the Communist amalgam.

For a time, the very contradictions within the Jacobins’ project were an advantage. They could use the language of classical virtue and morality to mobilize the
sans-culottes
, whilst employing technically efficient methods in the army and industry. Also, as a strategy for building a strong state and military, Jacobinism’s combination of central authority and mass participation had its advantages. Indeed, it was under the Jacobins that revolutionary France recovered its military élan after a long decline. The Jacobins showed how effective equality could be in forging a modern nation in arms.

Ultimately, however, the Jacobins failed to deal with these conflicting forces. They could not reconcile the demands of the
sans-culottes
with the interests of the propertied, nor could they marry the rule of virtue (or ideological purity) with the power of the educated and expert. Confronted with these difficulties, the Jacobins split, and then split again and again, until Robespierre was left with a pitifully small network of the loyal and the trusted. His solution was the inculcation of ‘virtue’ combined with Terror.

As will be seen, the Communists of the future had to deal with similar contradictions: they often sought to satisfy or exploit a populist egalitarianism and anger towards the upper classes and an urban rage against the peasantry, whilst at the same time they sought unity and stability; and they tried to build effective modern, technologically sophisticated economies whilst also believing that emotional inspiration was the best way of mobilizing the masses. At times they, like Robespierre, tried to solve these contradictions by trying to impose strict discipline, or by imposing a reign of virtue with propaganda and violence against unbelievers. Yet the Communists had no qualms about destroying property rights, and so could, for a time, secure the support of the poor. They could also learn from the history of the revolutionary movement, and of the French Revolution itself. The Jacobins had nothing to look back to, except a classical past that was of dubious value.

Robespierre remained unloved for some time, spurned by the left as well as the right; it was only in the 1830s, as socialist ideas became more fashionable, that his rehabilitation began. But the ideas and forces he and the Jacobins had unleashed were enormously influential on the Communism of the future. For the next half-century, the example of the French Revolution and its failures loomed large over the left. And the events of 1793–4 exerted a particular pull over the imagination of one young radical, born in a Rhineland that had only recently been occupied by revolutionary France. For Karl Marx, the Jacobins had made serious mistakes, but the Jacobin era was still ‘the lighthouse of all revolutionary epochs’, a beacon that showed the way to the future.
³⁴
Marx, like many other nineteenth-century socialists, was to construct his theory of revolution by learning the lessons of the Jacobins and their bloody history.

In 1831 Eugène Delacroix exhibited his extraordinary painting of the 1830 revolution,
July 28: Liberty Leading the People
. His representation of the first major uprising in Europe since 1789 has now become an iconic image of revolution; indeed it is often mistaken for an image of its more famous predecessor. This is understandable, as the painting, in some respects, showed the 1830 revolution – which toppled the restored post-Napoleonic Bourbon monarchy – as a reprise of 1789. The bare-breasted female figure of Liberty, wearing a Phrygian cap and holding a
tricolore
and a bayonet, is a semi-allegorical figure, echoing the classical heroes of the late eighteenth century. The painting was also designed to show the alliance of bourgeois and the poor that had existed in 1789: Liberty leads a rag-bag of revolutionaries, from the top-hatted young bourgeois intellectual to the bare-chested workman and a street child, clambering over the dead bodies of the revolutionary martyrs.

However, the painting also showed how views of revolution had changed since David’s day. The workers and the poor figure more prominently than the bourgeois, and unsurprisingly, given the prevalent fear of the poor, hostile critics complained that lawyers, doctors and merchants had been omitted in favour of ‘urchins and workers’. Moreover, the figure of Liberty was not entirely allegorical, but clearly a woman of the people; the
Journal des artistes
found her dirty, ugly and ‘ignoble’.
¹
In 1832 the painting was hidden from view for many years, for fear that it would incite disorder, only to re-emerge from the attics during the revolutions of 1848. For Delacroix, at the heart of revolution were not the bourgeoisie in togas but the workers in rags.

Delacroix’s painting strikingly illustrates how far the imagination of
revolution had moved from David’s ordered and hieratic tableaux. Delacroix’s Liberty may have included the odd classical feature, but his canvas exulted in its high Romanticism. There is a wildness and an elemental energy to the figures, far removed from David’s classical restraint. However, Delacroix also inserted into his revolutionary ensemble a uniformed student from the École Polytechnique – the institution established by Carnot, Robespierre’s ‘techno-Jacobin’ rival. The Romanticism of revolution was tempered, even if only mildly, by respect for science.

Delacroix, though, was only briefly enthused by the revolution of 1830. He was no political radical, and he soon became disillusioned. Indeed, many have seen in his famous painting a highly ambivalent attitude towards revolutionary violence: the figures closest to the viewer are corpses, and despite the title, it is not Liberty who leads the people but a pistol-brandishing child. Karl Marx, by contrast, did not oppose revolutionary violence, though like Delacroix he sought to apply the experience of 1789 to a newly powerful socialist politics. In the later 1830s and 1840s the German-born Marx was as obsessed with the legacy of 1789 as any French intellectual, and he even planned to write the revolution’s history.
²
And like Delacroix, Marx was updating the revolutionary tradition, ‘declassicizing’ it and placing workers at the fore-front of the
mise en scène
. The failure of the Jacobins, he insisted, arose precisely from their excessive admiration for the classical city-state. Their nostalgia for ancient Sparta and Rome had led them to oppose the
sans-culottes
. The
political
equality they espoused, giving all men full citizenship, was no longer enough; in a modern society true equality and harmony would be realized only with full
economic
equality, and without support from society, they had been forced to use violence.
³
Marx also made even greater efforts than Delacroix to temper his revolutionary Romanticism with an appreciation of science and economic modernity. The Jacobins, he argued, had exaggerated the power of morality and political will to transform society, underestimating the importance of economic forces.