The French Revolution established the most advanced democratic republic that the world up to then had seen. This was achieved through an alliance of the revolutionary bourgeoisie with the plebeian sans-culottes. However, the latter, as we have seen, were prepared to go much further than the bourgeoisie in the field of democracy. In some respects, the sans-culottes anticipated the demands which the workers in the Paris Commune were to formulate in 1871 and upon which Karl Marx based his ideas for a democratic workers’ state.
According to the Parisian section la Cité, popular sovereignty was ‘imprescriptable, inalienable, and indelegable’. Albert Soboul comments in his valuable book Understanding the French Revolution: ‘From that the sans-culottes drew the conclusion that constituted one of the levers of popular action: censure, control and recall of elected officials’. The timid leaders of the Labour movement today are put in the shade by the sans-culottes when it comes to democracy. The sans-culottes drew inspiration from Rousseau who had criticised the British parliamentary and electoral system: ‘If the English people think they are free, they deceive themselves; they are only free during the election of members of Parliament; as soon as these are elected, the people are slaves, they no longer count for anything… The deputies of the people thus are not nor can they be the people’s representatives; they are only their commissioners’.
The sans-culottes were even opposed to calling the deputies in the Convention ‘representatives’. Instead they used the term ‘proxies’. That is they held power on behalf, by ‘proxy’, of the people. Thus, the Tuileries Section in 1792 declared that: ‘The deputies must not be called representatives, but proxies of the people’. Leclerc in L’Ami du Peuple in 1793 declared: ‘A represented people is not free… Don’t lavish this epithet of representatives… The will of the people cannot be represented’. When the sans-culottes wrote to their deputies in Year Two of the Revolution, they invariably signed their messages, ‘Your equal under the law’. Some denounced the system of two-tiered elections, with the most advanced Sections demanding universal suffrage. Lacroix, in a paper to the Marseilles section, denounced the two-tiered voting as ‘immoral, destructive to the sovereignty of the people, favourable to intrigues and cabals’. The Quinze-Vignts Section, which was one of the most radical, at one stage approved a plan which stated that: ‘there be no electoral bodies, but that any elections be held in the primary assemblies’.
However, the sans-culottes were not satisfied with opposition to two-tiered elections of upholding the principle of popular sovereignty. They were insistent in demanding the implementation of the principle of control and recall of elected officials by the ‘sovereign people’. Thus, in 1792 the Marche-des-Innocents section demanded that in elections to the National Convention: ‘The deputies will be subject to recall at the will of their departments’, and that ‘Public officials will be subject to recall by those who appointed them, whose deliberations they will be obliged to execute’. Many others such as the Les Halles Section supported them, while the Droits-de-l’Homme declared that it was reserving the right to recall deputies ‘If in the course of the session, they demonstrated signs of lack of patriotism’. In the battle between the Girondins and the Montagnards from the Autumn of 1792 onwards, the advanced Sections demanded the right to censure elected officials and to demand an accounting from them, while according to Soboul, ‘The moderate sections protested against this claim’.
On 10 March 1793, in the struggle against the Girondins in the Convention, the Cordeliers Club demanded the exercise of ‘popular sovereignty’ to replace ‘the members who are traitors to the cause of the people’. The Quatre-Nations Section interpreted this as a call to ‘recall the unfaithful proxies, unworthy of being legislators of the public welfare, since they have betrayed their mandate by voting for preservation of the tyrant and the appeal to the people’. At the same time the sans-culottes completely rejected the bourgeois concept of the ‘inviolability’ of parliamentarians. This they considered ‘as being an odious privilege to betray the interests of the people with impunity, a perfidious cloak with which a corrupt proxy can cover himself’. Not much respect here for ‘Parliamentary privileges’!
Even the Jacobins, the most revolutionary wing of the bourgeoisie, violently denounced and suppressed the ‘direct democracy’ of the sans-culottes once they had taken power. The sans-culottes were way ahead of the present leaders of the Labour movement in voting, also. Thus, according to Soboul:
It was the practice of voting by voice or by acclamation. The sans-culottes felt that the patriot had nothing to hide, neither his opinions nor his actions. Political life thus unfolded in broad daylight, under the eyes of the people; the administrative bodies and the section assemblies deliberated in public sessions, the electors voted by voice with the tribunes watching: one acted in secret only if one had evil designs. ‘Publicity is the safeguard of the people’.
In the Kinnock dominated British Labour Party the practice of ‘secretive ballots’ had become the norm. Of course the ‘secret ballot’ for parliamentary and other elections has historically evolved as a means of avoiding coercion of the voters by the ruling powers, dictatorial governments etc. However, such safeguards against ‘undue pressure’ should not be necessary within the labour movement today. These practices are invariably resorted to by the conservative officialdom which dominates the labour movement in order to preserve their position and cushion themselves against mass criticisms. On the National Executive Committee for instance the previous practice of automatic recorded votes has been watered down. This is not a step in the direction of greater democracy but is done in order to screen the right-wing NEC representatives from the rank and file who elected them. The same practices are commonplace in the Trade Unions. Real democracy would mean voting openly with full accountability to the ordinary members.
Contrast this to the democracy of the sans-culottes. In 1792, one of the Sections in its Assembly elected a new president and declared the voice vote ‘the only ballot appropriate to republicans’. With the voice vote went the ballot by acclamation, with sitting or rising becoming the norm in the Assemblies. As Sobouls comments: ‘It soon seemed the only method of revolutionary balloting’.
Thus, in the Parisian sections, the revolutionary committees were elected in March 1793 by the voice vote, accompanied by sitting or rising. During the election in May 1793 for Chief of the Parisian National Guard, which resulted in the election of Hanriot, the method was by voice vote in the Sections. The moderates (shades of the right wing in the labour movement today) denounced this method and were for the secret ballot! The moderates had the ‘law’ on their side which did not support the idea of the voice vote. The sans-culottes, however, had a greater ‘law’, in the form of a mass movement. Through the method of voice vote the power and influence of the sans-culottes grew enormously. It was not just because of urgency that the sans-culottes adopted these methods: ‘It was, apart from a means of annihilating opponents, a manifestation of revolutionary unity dear to the sans-culottes.’ This practice was the rule until the spring of Year Two. In the General Assembly of the Butte-des-Moulins in November 1793, it was decided ‘to proceed to nominations in a revolutionary manner by sitting and rising; on 15 December it re-elected its officers in a revolutionary manner by acclamation’. At the same time:
Voting by acclamation was finally imposed, under pressure, on the General Council of the Commune. On 20 February 1794, Lubin, its president, asked to be replaced. ‘Lubin! Lubin!’ shouted the members of the Council almost unanimously, and the gallery took up the cry: ‘Lubin! Lubin!’ Lubin observed that such a nomination would not be legal. The laws of the provisional government were consulted; it was determined that the General Council had the right to name and to re-elect its president when it pleased and in the manner in which it pleased. ‘Nominate canvassers, proceed to the ballot? That would take up too much time’. Lubin was proclaimed elected.
However, with the move to the right of the Jacobins and with the suppression of the Cordeliers in February-March 1794, voting by acclamation and voice was outlawed. Thus, even in the bourgeois French revolution, the democratic aspirations of the plebeian masses clashed with even the most revolutionary wing of the bourgeois. The sans-culottes were suppressed, but their demands were once more to arise in the 19th century with the emergence of the French proletariat.
