In the conditions which then obtained in France, the Conspiracy of Equals could only be a glorious anticipation of the future movement of the proletariat. The crushing of the conspiracy moved the political pendulum to the right. The royalists once more raised their heads. The mere denunciation of ‘suspect’ functionaries was sufficient for their removal from office, to be replaced by royalist sympathisers. Thus the royalist, Willot, was put in command of Provence, where he again permitted the ‘white terror’ to be unleashed. Even the guard of the Directory was discovered to be involved in a plot with the agents of Louis XVIII for the overthrow of the regime. Beseiged from both right and left, the Directory faced enormous difficulties in financing the war against the coalition. This was only achieved by further sale of national property, diamonds and other valuables, quite apart from land. Loans were raised with difficulty from war contractors, who practiced corruption on a large scale. One of the directors, Barras, was widely known as an embessler. Bond holders were cheated by the state, with peasants and others being forced to sell them to bidders at next to nothing.
The whole of the country was in a state of decay: the highways were walling apart, courts and schools were neglected by impoverished local administrations, and even the constabulary were forced to sell their horses because they could not feed them! The Directory hoped to stave off popular discontent by basking in the military victories of Napoleon Bonaparte. But they were to be cruelly disappointed in the election of April 1797. Sitting Thermidorean candidates were defeated. Only one-third of the seats were up for election, but out of a total 216, only 11 former deputies, supporters of the Thermidoreans were returned. In an effort to exploit their victory, the right sought to cripple the Directory by taking away its power to control the government and the direction of the war. If successful, this would have opened the flood gates to the Right and the eventual restoration of the monarchy. On 18 June 1797, the right managed to effect the transfer of all financial administrations from the Directory to the treasury, which was stuffed with reactionaries. The ‘elders’ rejected the recommendation, but the growth in support for the Right, now with a majority of royalists in their ranks, convinced most of the Directors that they must strike a decisive blow.
Enter Napoleon Bonaparte
However, there was no question of resorting to popular force. One of the Directors, La Revellière-Lépeaux, refused to sanction even the limited measures of mobilising the sans-culottes, as had been done to crush the royalist uprising during the Vendémiaire. But if the Thermidorean bourgeoisie could not appeal to the people only one reliable force remained: the army. Therefore, Bonaparte, fresh from victories in Italy, together with Hoche marched on Paris to save the Directorry. During the night of 17-18 Fructidor (3 and 4 September 1797), the troops occupied the city. The royalist leaders were arrested – it was quite clear that they were preparing a new Vendémiaire uprising. Carnot, who, as a Director, had been collaborating with the royalists, fled. 214 deputies were purged from the councils, and 65 conspirators were deported to French Guiana.
Aiming its blows against right as well as left, a proclamation that advocates of either the monarchy or the constitution of 1793 would be shot without trial. Foreign refugees were forced to leave France, and hundreds of priests were deported or forced to take new oaths of loyalty. Throughout Fructidor, it was clear that, despite the ‘liberal’ constitution, the army was the real power upon which the regime ultimately rested. Bonaparte in particular, victorious in Italy and saviour of the Thermidoreans in Fructidor, saw his authority enormously enhanced.
Having crushed the right, the Directors now turned to the danger from the left. The Jacobins, in the absence of the royalists, were the main catalyst of the opposition in the elections in May 1798. However, the Thermidorean Assembly then merely passed a law excluding 106 Jacobin deputies from taking their places in the Chamber. Yet a combination of internal factors – chaotic tax collection, a fall in the price of grain as well as the continuing naval war with England – resulted in a situation of chronic instability. The Directory attempted to solve its problem by the plundering of the resources from conquered or satellite territories. Conditions were therefore laid for a further outbreak of war with the second Coalition, which this time involved Britain, Austria, Russia, Turkey and Sweden.
To begin with, the war proceeded badly for the French. Once more a ‘defensive war’ against European reaction resulted in a further swing to the left within the country. Despite the Directors’ denunciations of both royalism and ‘anarchy’, two-thirds of the government’s candidates in the 1799 election were defeated and the Jacobins increased their strength.
In the period after the elections, the Directory was besieged on all sides. According to a police report, ‘Everything was falling apart’. One of the directors, Reubell, left the Directory, and was replaced by Sieyès, an open enemy of the Directors. This laid the basis for what was in effect the parliamentary coup d’etat on 30 Prairial (18 June 1799), with Sieyès and his supporters evicting the Directors opposed to him. Sieyès appointed as Minister of Finance, Robert Lindet, one of Robespierre’s collaborators and also involved in the Babeuf conspiracy. Jacobin strength was increased, newspapers re-appeared, clubs were opened and freedom of the press re-established. Drouet, one od the leaders of the Babeuf conspiracy, was able to open the Manège Club. The influence of the Left seemed to be reaffirmed, with even echoes of the ‘revolutionary government’ of 1793-4. A new levée en masse was introduced and the National Guard was reorganised. The Jacobin revival seemed unstoppable as a repressive law of hostages was introduced whereby relatives of emigrés and rebels were interned. It was stipulated that the murder of one supporter of the regime would result in four from the Right being deported!
Summary execution was decreed for any ‘rebel’ possessing arms. Forced loans were decreed by the assembly and the Jacobins were pressing for a reawakening of the old revolutionary ardour amongst the people. However, the bourgeoisie, which provided the bedrock of support for the Directory and the Assembly took fright at this. One observer at the time commented: ‘Some want to employ popular force, that is to say, they fear the mass of the republicans more than the hordes from the north’.
In the face of forced loans, the bourgeoisie in effect went on strike, with the wealthy dismissing servants and leaving Paris, while others announced the closure of factories. Clashes between the ‘gilded youth’ and the Jacobins and their sympathisers took place in several towns such as Rouen, Amiens, Caen and Bordeaux as well as in Paris itself. Yet the masses, discouraged since the Prairial uprising, were largely indifferent to the appeasl of the Jacobins. Moreover, the bourgeoisie were alarmed at their agitation. Through the newly installed police chief Fouché, the government closed down the Jacobin Clubs. This did nothing to mollify the royalists, who organised an insurrection on 5 August 1799. At one stage, the city of Toulouse was completely surrounded. Eventually, however, the royalists were beaten back and dispersed. When this news reached Paris, Sieyès deported the staff of 34 of the remaining royalist newspapers but ‘balanced’ this with an order for the arrest of the staff of 16 other papers, with Jacobin publications on the list.
It was a fresh outbreak of the war which had led to the partial revival of Jacobinism. But as with the victory at Fleurus, which hastened the downfall of Robespierre, so the victory of French armies in Italy and Holland lifted the threat of invasion and in turn led to the demise once more of the Jacobins. Bonaparte had landed at Frejus and was moving towards Paris. This unleashed a wave of enthusiasm everywhere. Lefebvre comments:
The return of the ‘Invincible’ finally gave the assurance that the republic was safe. Since the outset of the war the pattern had always been the same. Defeat produced extreme measures, and victory made them unnecessary. In times of danger the Jacobins won control because of their daring and intransigence. Once the danger was passed, the moderates triumphed easily, and the reaction was then consolidated.
And yet France remained chronically unstable.
The 18 Brumaire
The bourgeoisie, having completely lost confidence in their own political capacity, took refuge in the corruption of the Directory, and finally sought shelter under the wing of Napoleonic despotism. In the words of Frederick Engels, ‘The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest’. Bonapartism is a bourgeois variety of Caesarism. In essence, it is a military dictatorship, ‘rule by the sword’. Such a regime is only possible when the struggle between the classes almost cancels each other out. In this situation of class deadlock, the state is able to raise itself above the classes to balance between them, only in the final analysis representing the economically dominant class in society.
The bourgeoisie had garnered the fruits of the revolution as we have seen. However, it still appeared to be menaced on all sides. It confronted the ever-present threat of royalist counter-revolution together with reactionary Europe on the one side, and the bugbear of Jacobinism on the other. For the time being, the bourgeoisie was reassured by the power which Sieyès, its political high priest, wielded within the Directory. Sieyès was, however, planning his own coup d’etat to establish a stable government. But the Assembly now possessed a republican majority, and therefore, as in 18 Fructidor, the army would have to be relied upon. Sieyès’ plan involved the neutering of the Assembly and the councils. They were bound to resist, and therefore the conspirators turned towards Napoleon Bonaparte. The latter was enormously popular, had an outstanding military record and limitless ambition – and moreover had a Jacobin past which would bestow ‘revolutionary’ authority upon the plotters.
By banging the ‘terrorist’ drum once more, they persuaded the councils to meet outside of Paris. The ‘ancients’ or elders (the body of 250 members which translated the resolutions of the Council of 500 into laws if appropriate) were soon won over, but the Council of 500 (the ‘lower house’ which merely proposed legislation) was obstinate. When Napoleon entered without being summoned, he was attacked furiously by the assembled deputies and was forced to leave the chamber with the cries of ‘Outlaw him’ ringing in his ears. Bonaparte then attempted to appeal to the grenadiers defending the chamber, but it was only the intervention of his brother Lucien on horseback that saved him. Lucien, denouncing the representatives as agents of England who had attacked Bonaparte with daggers, succeeded in winning them over. They in turn forced the evacuation of the 500. The Directory was dissolved, and power was vested in a provisional ‘consulate’ of Sieyès, Roger-Ducos and Bonaparte himself.
The consuls were supposed to be equal, but it was Bonaparte himself who emerged as the victor on 18 Brumaire. Soon he was to eclipse the two other consuls and establish a military dictatorship. Thus, ten years after the revolution, the bourgeois republic was terminated. Three weeks after 18 Brumaire, a new dictatorial constitution was implemented. At the same time, the organs of popular control and involvement, imperfect as they were under the Directory, were abolished and replaced by an administration of prefects. In the proclamation that accompanied the new ‘Caesarian constitution’, the consuls declared: ‘The revolution is established upon the principles which began it: It is ended’. Sieyès and his supporters were prepared to lean on Bonaparte to achieve their aims – and drop him at the first convenient opportunity.
However, they had reckoned without the immense popularity of Bonaparte and his adroit ability to manoeuvre and intrigue, which matched and even outstripped that of Sieyès himself. By playing off one group against another, Bonaparte achieved the acceptance of a constitution which, while retaining the Senate and Tribunate (with reduced legislative initiative), designated a first consul who was to be elected for ten years, with powers to overrule the other consuls. Naturally, this first consul would be Bonaparte himself.
The constitution was put to a plebiscite, which henceforth became a typical method of Bonapartism, and was overwhelmingly accepted in February 1800. Sieyès and his supporters believed that they would still be able to use the Tribunate and Legislature to check Napoleon. But Bonaparte ruled without it and often against it through a Council made up of the most experienced legislators. Gradually, he elbowed all his opponents aside, becoming, by means of another plebiscite, a Consul for Life.
This was followed in 1802 with an amended constitution which gave him virtually complete dictatorial powers. Finally, he was crowned emperor, receiving the blessing of the Pope in Notre Dame Cathedral in 1804. Under Napoleon, the great work undertaken in progressive legislation during the revolution was consolidated. The greatest achievement was perhaps the Code Civil, a perfect expression of juridical relations corresponding to the rule of the bourgeoisie. As Frederick Engels pointed out, it was ‘so masterly that this French revolutionary code still serves as a model for reforms for the law of property in all other countries, not excepting England’. The Code preserved the legal egalitarian principles of 1789, but sharply insisted on the rights of property and on the ‘authority’ of parent and husband. The democratic principles of 1793 were rejected of course. But the destruction of feudalism and feudal privileges were endorsed as were, rather hypocritically, liberty of conscience and employment.
Reflecting the views of the bourgeoisie, the rights of women were curtailed, with divorce severely restricted and almost impossible for a wronged wife. One clause read, ‘A husband owes protection to his wife, a wife obedience to her husband… Married women are incapable of making contracts’.
The restrictions against the trade unions embodied in the Le Chapelier laws were reinforced by a ban in 1803 which outlawed unions and forced workers to carry a pass book stamped by their employers. In the sphere of religion, Bonaparte was sceptical, but, like his former mentor Robespierre, considered that it was necessary to use religion to keep the masses in check. He wrote ‘In religion I do not see the mystery of the incarnation, but the mystery of the social order’. He stated further, ‘Society is impossible without inequality, inequality is intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion’.
The Napoleonic wars
One the one hand, the regime of Bonapartism represented reaction compared to the heroic period of the revolution. But as against the rest of the feudal and semi-feudal Europe, Bonaparte’s regime represented a mortal threat. Despite his jettisoning of his earlier Jacobin past, his ascendancy to the throne and his embracing of the Catholic religion, he nevertheless was an object of hatred to the whole of reactionary Europe because he rested on and defended the property system which had issued from the revolution. Therefore, a resumption of war with the Coalition was inevitable. This broke out in 1803 and was to stretch right up to the overthrow of Napoleon himself in 1815.
A brilliant strategist and improviser, under his leadership and that of the new generals who had emerged because of the revolution, the French armies carried the bourgeois revolution to the rest of Europe. Marx and Engels commented in The Holy Family that Napoleon ‘Perfected the terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution’. He tore up by the roots the old regime in parts of Europe and introduced equality before the law, civil marriage, secular education, the abolition of privileges, corporate bodies, tithes and feudal views. However, at no time did the French army invoke the example of 1793, and it was not the sans-culottes or the small peasants in the countries occupied but the bourgeoisie who would benefit from the intervention of French armies. His contempt for the masses was summed up by his rejection of a proposal from one of his lieutenants that the right to vote should be conceded in a occupied territory: ‘It is ridiculous that you should quote against me the opinions of the people of Westphalia. If you listen to popular opinion, you will achieve nothing. If the people refuses its own happiness, the people is guilty of anarchy and deserves to be punished’. Despite the differences in the social systems upon which they rested, there are many similarities between the attitude of Stalin and the occupation of the Red Army in Eastern Europe in the post war period, and that of Napoleon 140 years previously. Both had issued from revolutions, and were covered in the authority of ‘revolutionaries’. Stalin was a grey mediocrity, Napoleon a brilliant improviser. Nevertheless, there were certain common features in their regimes. When they occupied other countries, the model they turned to was not the heroic period of the revolution with the self-conscious organisation of the masses, but the bureaucratically controlled state in the case of Stalin, and the dictatorial regime in Napoleon’s case. The bourgeoisie however had ceded power to Napoleon at a heavy price. On the one hand, as Marx and Engels pointed out:
He fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety, but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest. If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois society – the political idealism of its daily practice – he showed no more consideration for its essential material interest, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his political interests. His scorn of industrial homes d’affaires was the compliment to his scorn of ideologists. In his home policy, too, he combated the bourgeois society as the opponent of the state which in his own person he still held to be an absolute aim in itself. Thus he declared in the State Council that he would not suffer the owner of extensive estates to cultivate them or not as he pleased. Thus, too, he conceived the plan of subordinating trade to the state by appropriation of roulage (road haulage). French businessmen took steps to anticipate the event that first shook Napoleon’s power. Paris exchange brokers forced him by means of an artificially created famine to delay the opening of the Russian campaign by nearly two months and thus to launch it too late in the year.
Thus, while the regime of Napoleon rested on the bourgeoisie, he was not averse to striking blows at this class. The social base of Napoleon and the backbone of his army were the peasants. This army swept through Europe and, as is well known, right up to Moscow itself. The tale of Napoleon’s military campaigns, its successes and his eventual defeat had been detailed many times. It is true that the retreat of the French armies from Russia back to la patrie in 1815 left in its wake a situation whereby the semi-feudal regimes remained intact. And yet the French conquering armies had shaken the old social order to its foundations and in turn laid a solid basis for the modern bourgeois state.
Thrown back on to the resources of France in 1814, he contemplated a revolutionary appeal to the people, the arming of the masses and the revival of the old cru of the ‘Fatherland in danger’. However, after twelve years of virtually uninterrupted war, with the masses cowed and dispirited, they offered no resistance to the advancement of allied troops until the peasants were goaded into retaliation by the rapacious activities of the Cossacks and the Prussians who were advancing on Paris. Bordeaux surrendered without a fight to the English, and royalist agents were active everywhere. Finally, deserted by the Senate and Legislature and even by his own marshals who refused to serve him any longer, he was deposed. Louis XVIII, who promised a liberal charter, was invited to fill the throne. Bonaparte was exiled to Elba, but managed to keep in touch with events in France.
The king was installed on his throne with a marked lack of enthusiasm from the French people. The bourgeoisie, which had initially welcomed the return of Louis XVIII, were alarmed by the rumours which abounded that the monarch was about to restore the sequestrated church and aristocratic property to their former owners. The army was also in a state of disaffection, with the dismissal on half pay of many of its officers. This created the conditions which allowed Napoleon to return to France on 20 March 1815. The king fled, and thus began Napoleon’s famous ‘one hundred days’.
Faced with a choice between appealing to the revolutionary traditions of the French nation and invoking the heroic period of 1793-94, or basing himself on the bourgeoisie, he chose the latter. This did nothing to rally the republican and Jacobin tradition, still strong in France, to his side. However, 700,000 men were quickly mobilised and 120,000 took the field against the combined English and Prussian force led by Blucher and Wellington. Initially, he was successful in defeating Blucher’s Prussians, but, confronted by Wellington at Waterloo, he was quickly defeated. This in turn led to his second abdication, with the return of the king on 8 July in the baggage train of the Prussian army.
This time, savage reparations were inflicted on the French by the allied. Napoleon was subsequently exiled to St Helena, 5000 miles away from France where he died in 1821.
Obscuring the French revolution
Thus the French revolution, from its heroic beginnings and the overthrow of the monarchy and the institution of a democratic republic, had ended in the establishment of a military dictatorship, its subsequent defeat, the restoration of the monarchy and prostration at the feet of its European enemies.
Sages, bourgeois historians and their reformist shadows, will point to this as they do with all revolutions, as a means of discrediting the very concept of revolution itself as the locomotive of history. When confronted with a revolution, the dispossessed ruling class uses force – bullets, cannons and bayonets – in order to suppress and defeat it. Yet, once the revolution triumphs, the offensive against it assumes a different but not always a more subtle form! ‘Intellectual’ assaults on the revolution temporarily take the place of force or arms. Whole ‘industries’ spring up, armies of professors, whose sole purpose is to throw dust in the eyes of future generations as to the real meaning, impact and relevance of the revolution.
This applies not only to the French revolution but also to the British revolution of 1648. They point to the great French revolution as an example of the ‘failure’ of revolution in general as a method of taking society forward. It is true that, up to now, revolutions have never preserved all the gains won at the time of their highest peak. Following the making of the revolution by certain classes, groups, or individuals, others appear to profit from it. It appears that the reaction triumphs all along the line, in the case of France leading as we know to the restoration of the Bourbons. And yet, the revolution never goes back to its starting point. Thus, despite the return to the monarchy, the ancien regime had been shattered beyond the point of no return.
While the king created new titles and found new estates to reward returning emigrés, the land confiscated from the church and emigré nobles remained largely untouched. The new aristocracy under the Bourbon monarchy fused with the bourgeoisie in a new financial aristocracy. The gains of the bourgeois revolution remained intact.
The processes of the French revolution
The property relations established by the revolution allowed for the unfettered development of the bourgeoisie, which in turn created the proletariat which was to shake France to its foundations in the nineteenth century. Thus the French revolution passed through many phases and through many sharp turns.
The revolution of 1798 was the work primarily of the people of Paris and the other towns of France, backed up by a peasant war in the countryside. However, the revolution was not carried through to a conclusion and a period of dual power existed, between a weakened monarchy on the one side, and the revolutionary power on the other. The interregnum is maintained until 1791, coming to an end with the attempted flight of the king to Varennes in June of that year. This is followed by the massacre in the Champs de Mars in July 1791. The revolution is driven forward by the whip of counter-revolution. The mass movement in turn raises the Gironde to power in early 1792. The Parisian masses invade the Tuileries and force the king to wear the red bonnet and to drink the health of the nation. They are protesting against the use of his veto to check the revolutionary legislation. This is a dress rehearsal for the insurrection later in the year.
In August, 47 of the 48 sections in Paris demand the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic. The sans-culottes, in conjunction with the petit bourgeois democrats in the Jacobins, organise the 10 August ‘second French revolution’. The Assembly in turn votes to establish a National Convention and to draw up a new constitution.
Later in the month, allied troops enter France and Lafayette deserts to the enemy. They are halted in September at Valmy as the Legislative Assembly holds its last session and is replaced by the National Convention. On 21 September, the Convention votes unanimously to abolish the monarchy. Thus begins Year 1 of the republic.
In January 1793, the king is executed, but the Gironde, representing the big bourgeoisie, had compromised themselves by seeking an accommodation with the monarchy. They attack the Paris Commune, dominated as it is by the sans-culottes-Jacobin alliance. This in turn leads to the demonstrations of 31 May and June 2 which topple the Gironde from power.
The mass movement had raised on its back the Jacobin dictatorship, which lasts from June 1793 to 27 July (9 Thermidor) 1794. The revolution reaches its highest peak in Year 2 of the revolution.
The first period of Year 2 is characterised by a cementing of the alliance between the sans-culottes and the Jacobins, with the most democratic republican constitution yet seen. At the same time, the sans0culottes exercise the power in the Parisian sections, and collaborate with the Jacobins in the organisation of the revolutionary power throughout the country.
Due to their pressure, the Jacobin dictatorship accepts the famous maximum général, regulating food and other prices. However, the alliance between the sans-culottes and the Jacobins breaks down with the execution of the Hébertists and the weakening of the maximum, leading to widespread disillusionment and apathy. This is a factor which leads to the overthrow of Robespierre.
Far more critical, however, is the victory of French forces in occupied Belgium in the latter part of 1793. This is followed by other victories against the Spanish armies. Soon after the invasion of Italy and Savoy begins. With la patrie secured, the bourgeoisie turns against the emergency measures of the terror and its main proponent, Robespierre. With his execution the revolution goes into a descending curve.
The downswing is characterised, as with the upward curve, by outbreaks of civil war as the masses heroically attempt to cling to the gains which have accrued to them during the revolution. This is what the Germinal and Prairial uprisings in April and May 1795 respectively represent. Thermidor is a step along the road to the veiled dictatorship of the Directory, which in turn lays the basis for the establishment of the military-police dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Bonapartism represents the triumph of the bourgeois counter-revolution, but on the basis of the gains of the revolution itself. The Bonapartist regime is liquidated in 1815 by the entry of British and German troops into Paris and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.
Towards the socialist revolution!
In the manner in which bourgeois historians approach the French revolution, it represents merely an inexplicable jumble of events without any pattern of rhythm. Above all, the processes of the revolution are obscured. The reformists merely echo the bourgeois historians. Thus, a recent book, Citizens by Simon Schama, who claims to stand on the ‘European left’, writes:
I am very bleak about 1789. As I encountered 1789 and 1790, I got more alarmed. For example, no sooner was the ink dry on the Declaration of the Rights of Man [in 1789] than the National Assembly – not the revolutionary Convention, remember, set up committees to report on potential counter-revolutionary plots and to open mail, stop people without warrant, detain people without due process and prevent freedom of movement.
He mournfully laments the execution of the governor of the Bastille:
How do you explain the Governor of the Bastille’s head being sawn through with a pen-knife and stuck on a pike?
Passed over are the hundreds who were shot down by the troops of this very governor. Incredibly, this method is, it seems, ‘a liberating thing. You are so much more empowered to attack Mrs Thatcher or to say “Of course there is an alternative to the Right” if you are honest with your own history.’ Thus ‘honesty with your own history’ is equal to Schama’s book with agreeing with the bourgeois calumniators of the French masses. Completely ignored is the ferocious and bloody counter-revolutionary attacks on the revolution which were entirely the cause of any counter-violence by the masses themselves. Only Marxism is capable of tracing the thread of the French revolution, the processes which evolve at each stage, and the interconnection between the great personalities of the revolution and how they affect and are in turn affected by the revolutionary process itself.
Schama is not at all original in lamenting the ‘excesses’ of the masses, while passing over in silence the crimes of the counter-revolution. Plekhanov, who wrote a brilliant critique of the French revolution, nevertheless lectured the Russian masses in 1905 and bemoaned their resorting to ‘arms’. This attempt of Schama, only the latest in a long litany of attacks on the revolutionary masses in the French revolution, cannot obscure their great progressive and historical mission.
When their descendants, the mighty French proletariat, moved in their millions in 1830, in 1834-35, in 1848 and in 1971, and in the earth-shattering revolutionary events in France in the twentieth century, it would be to the giants of the French revolution to whom they would turn for inspiration.
It is only through the mighty labours of the Parisian sans-culottes that the ground was cleared for the development of industry and society, of the working class and of the mighty modern labour movement. Therefore, in every sense, the working class movement today stands on their sturdy shoulders. They yearned and struggled mightily for a society where want and privation would be abolished. The material means were not at hand 200 years ago. Now, the colossal development of the productive forces makes it possible for the first time in history to abolish poverty, despoliation of the environment and misery from the whole of the planet. In forging the weapons to create such a world, could enormously benefit by studying the great French revolution and the role of the masses in that mighty event.
