A Loss of Revolutionary Tradition? On the Bicentennial of the French Revolution

...On the one hand, they must not be overconfident about their knowledge of the world...

...Are we obliged to share Furet's conviction that the representative parliamentary system in general, and its compromise-ridden form in the second phase of the Fifth Republic in particular, is the ultimate word in statecraft...

...Self-imposed limitations on political imagination introduce conservatism in every area of social life...

...The end result of this model was an outright loss of the very sense of how to construct a constitution...

...Legacies of the Revolution Yet it would indeed be a crime against the future of modernity to stifle, in the name of "permanence," the political inventiveness of the French revolutionary tradition (an inventiveness that had, admittedly, grown out of desperation and a cycle of crises...

...However, no one is more familiar than Furet the historian with the role that "the long memory" of the French bourgeoisie played in the terrible massacres after the June 1848 workers' uprising (which was followed by the ascension to power of Napoleon's nephew, Louis Bonaparte), and after the Paris Commune of 1871...

...And it teaches Europeans, the direct heirs of the Revolution, who increasingly believed that their precious great narrative remained confined to their own culture, a double lesson...

...Nation" may be read as a code for defining our differences from others—that we are "us," not "them," that we are not the sum total of the subjects of a particular sovereign, distinct from other "sum totals," not specimens of a particular race, not members of one or another religion, not a region within the geographical framework of a continent—but a coherent and different whole...

...We know that, as a nation, "we are different" but we have very little idea of what is the common bond that makes us different together...

...His message was that if you want a revolutionary national tradition, you have to buy the whole story, rhyme, chapter, verse...

...Rightist hostility to the memory of the Revolution is hardly a surprise, merely its longevity...

...Ironically, in his "therapeutic reading" of the great story, Furet seems to return to Clemenceau's famous dictum: La Revolution est un bloc (which can perhaps best be rendered in English as "The Revolution is an indivisible whole...

...Furet thus gets in his own way when he refuses to see the process through which the Jacobin past was appropriated by Bolshevik ideology and put to fatal use...

...The main loser is the "common republican front," the conglomerate of moderate leftist as well as centrist parties and political forces and the organizer of FALL • 1989 • 535 the official celebration, which has little to add, beyond republican clichés, to the laudatory speeches...

...Finally, the emerging feminist critique has given relevance to the accusation that, so far, direct democracies have always been communities of equal brothers...

...FALL • 1989 • 539 The French Revolution was the first great political upheaval that replaced a personal sovereign with the sovereignty of the nation, introducing the era of nationalism...

...And it goes without saying that this learning process has negative elements within it...

...But in modern times social issues, just like political forms, present an ongoing process in which the satisfaction of needs generates new demands...

...A second major flaw of Furet's narrative is the complete separation of the social from the political...

...They are "arbitrary" or "artificial" in the sense that they are the product of ongoing inventions, of consciously designed projects, of their drive to explore the unknown continents of statecraft...

...Whenever they gained the upper hand, they invariably abolished rights and constitutions and imposed a command economy based on coercion and, often, on terror...

...Whether nationalist movements were in alliance with the French cause, or implacably hostile to it, whether or not, at a later stage, they were familiar with the Revolution, they invariably imitated this French innovation...

...Virulent remnants of the royalist tradition were customary in the last two decades of the Third Republic...

...One might have expected them to disappear with the fall of Vichy, but these days they thrive on the failures of the Bolshevik regimes...

...First, it was an audacious step on his part to extend the time space of the Revolution, which is normally concluded either with Thermidor or on the eighteenth of Brumaire (November 9, 1799 with Napoleon's first steps to imperial power), or with the first restoration of the Bourbons in 1814, or, at the very least, on the battlefield of Waterloo (1815...

...There is latitude in interpretation...

...Although the (centrist, not rightist) Furet group is numerically insignificant, its interpretations embrace theoretical and political consequences far beyond the sensationalism common to these debates...

...However, this causes a methodological inconsistency in his work because one of Furet's major contribu** Francois Noel (Gracchus)Babeuf —extreme left of the Revolution, edited Voice of the People, executed in 1797...

...Thus, unwittingly, Furet interprets modern French history as a chronicle of "permanent revolution," though not in the Trotskyist sense...

...Beyond the Boundaries Immanuel Wallerstein remarked recently that the obsessive focusing on the domestic significance of the great event reduces its global relevance...

...The most conspicuously provincial feature of the domestic celebration in France is precisely the absence of any reference to this "unsophisticated" idea...

...540 • DISSENT...

...Hence the intellectual certainty, the emotional emphasis and the inherent irrationality of nationalism, as an offspring of the French Revolution...

...The autonomy of the political is one of Furet's major beliefs in objecting to the Marxist sociology of "base" and "superstructure," and I do not intend to question his judgment on this issue...

...There is irony in Furet's return to Cl6menceau, if only because Furet was an important member of the "revisionist" wave among those historians who decades ago questioned the homogeneity of the story...

...All these rhetorical questions suggest that the "conservative" Furet has, in fact, introduced a highly explosive principle in the historiography of the Revolution, one that he cannot control: the possible extension of the Revolution's history beyond the lifetime of its protagonists...

...But what then prevents France from continuing its political revolution (even if not in a Jacobin-Bolshevik sense) in this century...

...That is why the unresolved dilemma of reconciling the "American" and the "French" models of revolution has moved to the top of the agenda in bicentennial debates...

...Yet the negative definition of nation as "our difference" highlights the very problem that came into the world with 1789 and its aftermath...

...It died with Napoleon and was intermittently awakened for short stretches to more of a symbolic than an actual life in the First International and in Wilson's dream—the League of Nations...

...As we now know, the second alternative is the Jacobin-Bolshevik scenario whose practical and moral consequences are all too familiar...

...Babeuf may have felt justified in dismissing all periods of the Revolution prior to the dictatorship of the Mountain (and Cobb may continue to echo this judgment or prejudice...

...we are not compelled to choose 1789 as against 1793, or vice versa...

...One wonders, however, whether this refined contempt for naive and pious fraternity is indeed confirmed by how the millions of "unsophisticated" men and women feel...

...Has the heartbeat of the revolution come to a standstill...

...But we are not obliged to imitate Babeuf...

...But such a belief can be only a dogma, not a rational certainty...

...Nor are we captive of a dogmatic liberalism for which only 1789 and the Declaration can be accepted as a living heritage while the inchoate struggles around social issues are anathema...

...As Furet himself proves, this "great fear" was one of the major reasons why the bourgeoisie was so reluctant to grant universal suffrage for a century...

...But can dogmatic restraints be imposed on political invention and self-creativity for the sake of stability...

...Immanuel Wallerstein, "The French Revolution and the World System," in "The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity," special issue of Social Research, Spring 1989...

...Furet emphasizes the centrality of will, instead of interest, in this kind of selfgovernment...

...True enough, FALL • 1989 . 537 after World War II this bourgeoisie learned how to handle "the social question" with considerable adaptability...

...And how about the rest of us...

...The first is the relationship between the representative and direct forms of democracy...

...This is the question posed by the advocates of the "French" model...

...The Communist homage was also predictable...

...At the same time, those acting radically in the name and on behalf of the victims of the market system could not care less about the "fraud" of institutionalized democracy...

...Such limitations can only be instituted if we are convinced that modernity has reached, politically and socially, its absolute limits...

...In other words, has the counterrevolution also come to an end...

...they remained indifferent to or suspicious of the "social question...

...Overthrow of Robespierre on 9th Thermidor (July 27), 1794...

...It had its intermittent resurrections in the Paris Commune, in the Soviets of the 1905 and February 1917 revolutions, in the revolutionary workers' councils of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, in the people's councils of the recent Burmese uprising...

...the only relevant narrative is that of 1792-94, the years of popular action and dictatorship, up to the reaction of Thermidor.*** There is an understandable patriotism in Furet's new commitment to the story "in full...

...Or, alternatively, was the French Revolution only the first explosion in a chain reaction of explosions that will reduce the present world to pulp and from which a brand-new and brave one will emerge...

...Direct democracy cannot be discussed cavalierly...

...It was with reference to the latter, and only in this limited sense, that I concluded my book on Jacobinism with the proposition that it is about time to close the French Revolution.' All the analysts who contend that the flames of the Great Revolution are not entirely extinguished—that one or several aspects of the legacy still live—are really saying that we have to revisit that event periodically...

...His answer is, predictably, in the negative...

...And without doubt, "permanent political revolutions," with their complete lack of elementary stability, generate the worst political neuroses...

...Even those for whom human rights are crucial, and who do not believe that the politics of the terror would alleviate mass suffering, may still (unlike Hannah Arendt) hail the memory of the great Revolution that brought "the social question" to a just place on the modern political agenda...

...There are countless critics of direct democracy...

...The meaning of the historian's dictum reads as follows: The French Revolution has come to an end insofar as its great task has been completed...

...In Arendt's view, the major characteristics of the "American" model, apart from its dismissal of social issues, was constitutio libertatis —the fundamentals of liberty as expressed in the Constitution, in the rule of law...

...For while May 1968 undoubtedly was revolutionary theater, it was certainly not without an audience...

...In order to understand this, it is important to see the precise shades of clashing opinions...

...Its only novel feature is a fading self-confidence...

...From which feminists quite properly conclude that women need to have their rights guaranteed outside their immediate milieu...

...We are not confined to the actual chronology of the events...

...For Kant it was proof positive of "progress in nature...

...And yet, behind the cacophony of shrill voices and a visible public indifference toward the celebration and its theatricality (occasional pop "for and against" demonstrations), a very serious discussion is gradually emerging that reflects major issues of the modern age...

...asks Jurgen Habermas in a recent contribution to the debate...

...In modern public life, democracy, the representative system, has been given life as the only conceivable establishment for rational politics...

...6 L'Espresso, January 29, 1989, p. 49...

...The central issue is, not surprisingly, very close to what concerns the French...

...The emptiness of republican rhetoric makes the skeptical questions of Francois Furet and his circle (who reside in the Institut Raymond Aron) relevant and challenging...

...It is immortal...

...Foreign observers have noticed a sharp contrast between the republican glamour of the 1889 centennial and this year's routine celebration in which some hostile reactions have appeared...

...At the same time, the "French" model, whose major actors bent rules and shelved constitutions on behalf of what they deemed the "happiness of the people,"wrought havoc on French (as well as European) history and politics...

...With the aid of fraternity they could feel themselves different and common at the same time...

...Rightist authors use and abuse analytic license: They characterize the Revolution as an early version of the Gulag...

...Even the major tenet of the Marxist philosophy of history—historical evolution—is called into question across left and right...

...In an interesting exchange of roles, it is now the far left that is warming up the theory of the plurality of revolutions within the Revolution...

...he asked defiantly...

...In all probability, there is no universal answer to the dilemma, no grand theory that can guide us in all of our future political options...

...536 • DISSENT tions to political theory is his insistence on the learning processes through which modernity repeatedly creates and recreates itself...

...This bourgeoisie was created by the Revolution and it learned to close its ranks by the recollection of sans culotte terror and the economy of maximization (whose modern name is command economy...

...The only advice the political actor can extract from history at this point is to bear in mind the negative consequences resulting from too sharp a contrast between the "French" and the "American" models...

...But since the century-long "primal scene" of political modernity was particularly traumatic, forgetfulness after analysis is the best therapy Furet can recommend...

...Paradoxically, it was this recognition of differences that became almost the only universally accepted political innovation of the French Revolution...

...and Jacques Sole, La Revolution en questions (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988...

...Therefore, he concludes, direct self-government cannot be the medium of rational politics...

...French booksellers report that the Vendee* has become le dernier cri: popular fiction sympathetic to the Vend6ans sells more than at any time in the last forty years...

...Did not the French Revolution (in 1793, in 1871, perhaps even in 1848) give life to another major form of democratic rule, that is, to direct (grassroots) democracy...

...An "academically respectable" counterrevolution is also rampant.' Nor could Marie Le Pen and his ultraright National Front miss the opportunity...

...Whose View...

...But the world is neither a cheering squad nor a debating club, and the problems posed by the memory of that great event have remained very serious if also very ambiguous...

...In an interview, Le Pen contributed to historical wisdom the observation that what was beneficial in the Revolution had already been realized in the monarchy...

...When Furet calls the public celebrations of the republican mainstream, as well as the rightist reactions to them, "theatre without an audience," his words make a sociological point...

...4 As with its domestic effects, the worldwide debate on the French Revolution is not so much abating as it is changing...

...and meanwhile Italian statesmen and philosophers cheer the birth of modernity in discussing 1789...

...6 This statement is important because it could not have been made by the Ayatollah Khomeini...

...In an interview, Yassir Arafat, a politician hailed, hated, and suspected alike, declared his movement a "daughter of the French revolution," and he emphasized the undying presence of 1789 in what we now call "the Third World...

...Richard Cobb, the excellent historian and apologist of popular violence, returns, in a remark made on the occasion of the bicentennial, to an interpretation first put forward by Babeuf.** For Cobb, 1789 is an insignificant year...

...And it will remain with us for a long time...

...Have we finally, despite the obvious and incessant need for drastic social changes, come home...

...Even the great historian Francois Furet, author of La Revolution, 1770-1880 and (with Mona Ozouf) co-editor of the monumental Dictionnaire critique de la Revolution Francaise, which are the only original works published for the bicentennial, remarked that the anniversary is the burying of the Revolution...

...As attested most recently by the debate among German historians, we have never ceased pondering this particular riddle given us by the sphinx of the Revolution...

...This is the question posed by the partisans of the "American model," who believe in permanent solutions and stable institutions...

...Is the characterization of 1968 as a social protest against an overly authoritarian state, in the name of social autonomy, not acceptable as a possible interpretation of this complex event...

...Imposing the great drama of the past on a present life can have only one, undesirable outcome: the erosion of the democratic consensus that French society (and modern society in general) has bought at such an exorbitant price...

...And the answer, a fairly surprising one, comes from an unexpected quarter...

...also, because he is vehemently antiJacobin...

...This argument is, however, not the same as transforming the narrative of the Revolution into an unshakable canon...

...Fraternity, the third constituent of the Revolution, appeared to the participants as the solution to the riddle in the events of 1789...

...5 Ferenc Feher: The Frozen Revolution (An Essay on Jacobinism), (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 154...

...and he adds that, while interest is fully rational, will is only partially so...

...Nor has right-wing influence on the cultural scene gone unnoticed...

...So the Revolution may not be alive, but neither is it dead...

...Is it not rather more appropriate, once we operate with so extended a concept of the "French Revolution," to interpret the storms of the Third Republic around the turn of the century as a preparation for Vichy, the rightist revolution, or as the continuation of a counterrevolution that attacked representative parliamentary democracy...

...Hence its surprising political stability...

...Could this hostility be the offspring of a rampant philosophical hostility against all kinds of universalism...

...Liberal European activists were exclusively interested in free institutions and the free market...

...But neither is it a closed system to which nothing can be added...

...This underground world had its excellent Marxist historian, Albert Soboul...

...This sharp contrast has remained till quite recently imprinted on the fabric of European politics...

...He has so much admiration for the Revolution, the paradigm of modern politics, that he does not want to hear about its protototalitarian features...

...It was the lasting merit of Hannah Arendt to have highlighted the significance of the subterranean life of direct democracy in the Paris districts, a whole continent of political imagination...

...2 He contends that there is no longer any risk in playing at revolution or counterrevolution since the French Revolution has come to an end...

...There are at least three major areas where the French Revolution has passed on to us a crucial but unclear, therefore onerous, legacy...

...Yet Arendt, in her famous and controversial On Revolution, did formulate a fundamental dilemma: the contrast between the "American" and the "French" models of revolution...

...the rest was just savage butchery, a historical training ground for communism and nazism...

...We live amid our own limitations, but we are not obligated to accept the limitations of past actors...

...3 When Furet declared that the "subject is cold," many were needlessly shocked...

...Challenging Furet Two major objections of political relevance can be made to Furet's reading of the Revolution...

...Has modernity really developed fully...

...But if, as Furet assumes, the French Revolution continued far beyond the natural lives of all the actors who had initiated and participated in it, then Marx was right in at least one respect: France was the classic country of political revolution in the nineteenth century...

...The ineptitude of self-government in cost-effective economic management has been emphasized by both the Kremlin and Wall Street...

...After all, today it is quite a difficult job to extol the grandeur of 1793 because there are those who see in it the forerunner of Stalin's dictatorship...

...The politically committed and rational reader is at liberty to follow in Furet's footsteps by deciding how far to take the story, and what to include in it...

...The contrast between the two models of permanence versus instability remains a correct and profound observation even if one thoroughly 538 • DISSENT dissents from Arendt's hostility to the political relevance of social issues...

...But the discussion, as well as the social experimentation with new forms of self-government, will certainly continue the tradition of the revolutionary districts of Paris...

...Today, it is entirely out of fashion...

...On the other, they must not be so skeptical as to believe that the heartbeat of their greatest revolution has indeed come to a complete standstill...

...He constantly emphasizes that modem societies, especially modern political systems, are not "natural" or "organic...

...but, with the sole exception of Cornelius Castoriadis, it has had no theoretical champions...

...2 When Furet mentions "theatre," he refers to works by Max Gallo on the left (Lettre ouverte de Maximilien Robespierre sur les nouveaux muscadins [Paris: Albin Michel, 1988]) and to several polemical statements and prefaces by Pierre Chaunu on the right...

...In this sense, did the Great Revolution give us a vision of how to transform our world without aspiring to transcend it...

...Whereas there was an enormous risk, both for actors and audiences, in "playing the Mountain or the Gironde"* in the Second Republic of 1848, or in "playing the neoJacobin" in the Paris Commune since the French Revolution was then still alive in the consciousness of the people...

...reference to Raymond Aron's profound observation that French society lost even its minimal consensus after 1789 and did not find it again for almost two centuries...

...3 The most complete statement about the Revolution having come to an end is Furet's important new book, La Revolution, De Turgot a Jules Ferry, 1770-1890 (Paris: Hachette, 1988...

...But we are all familiar with the very short political biography of fraternity...

...He also recommended to the Pope the sanctification of the executed King Louis XVI...

...Can whole nations survive a process in which their political institutions, which also determine the way they live, are forever changing...

...See for example, Lire, N. 137, February, 1987, p. 34...

...Furet's emphasis on this newly born democratic consensus is a clear *Representing various revolutionary factions in the revolution's legislative assembly and in the Convention, those seated at the highest level (hence, the Montagnards) and those whose leaders came from the Department of the Gironde...

...Clemenceau attacked those who tried to take their pick among the distinct periods and protagonists of the Revolution...

...Further, is it empirically true that the French Revolution ended with the parliamentarism of the Third Republic...

...Other critics point to the absence of liberal checks and balances in direct democracy, hence the ubiquity of violence in all of its appearances...

...Of course, his interpretation is not "boundless," with space for any poisonous myth of political romanticism...

...Reynald Secher, Le genocide franco -français, La Vendee - Vengee (Paris: PUF, 1988...

...A royalist uprising from 1793 to 1796 originating in the Vendee region and completely pacified only by Napoleon...

...These are complex issues, with no readymade answers...

...Is it so certain that the propertied classes of today have shed their "long memory" altogether...

...If it is, was not 1968 a continuation of the French Revolution in its "extended" sense...

...This is, indeed, the question...