The Red Flag: A History of Communism Read online

  Even so, French revolutionaries believed that Rousseau’s Spartan ideal had a great deal to teach a large, modern state like France, because it showed how its unity and strength could be restored. As Guillaume-Joseph Saige, one of Rousseau’s disciples enthused, writing in 1770:

  The constitution of Sparta seems to me the chef d’oeuvre of the human spirit… The reason why our modern institutions are eternally bad is that they are based on principles totally opposed to those of Lycurgus [Sparta’s ancient legislator], that they are an aggregate of discordant interests and particular associations opposed to one another, and that it would be necessary to destroy them in their entirety in order to recover that simplicity which creates the force and duration of the social body.16

  Rousseau’s cult of Sparta and classical heroism appealed to many during the revolutionary period, but it was especially popular amongst those radicals who were particularly sensitive to the plight of the poor. No enemy of property, nonetheless he still maintained, unlike most of his contemporary philosophes, that virtue – ‘the sublime science of simple souls’ – was more likely to be found amongst the poor than the rich.17 One of those radicals was a young lawyer from Arras, Maximilien Robespierre, the strongest critic of the liberal vision. In his Dedication to Rousseau, written in 1788–9, he declared: ‘Divine man, you have taught me to know myself. As a young man you showed me how to appreciate the dignity of my nature and to reflect on the great principles of the social order.’18 It was Robespierre and the Jacobins who transformed Rousseau’s Romantic ideas of moral regeneration and small-scale communities into a political project for transforming the state.

  Robespierre was elected to the Estates General in 1789, and soon became a member of the revolutionary Jacobin Club. From the very beginning he was on the radical wing of the Jacobins – the ‘Mountain’ group – more suspicious of the aristocracy and more sympathetic to the poor than the moderate majority. And as internal opposition to the revolution became stronger from late 1790, Robespierre became more radical, as did many other Jacobins. Fearful of conspiracies and attacks by royalists (both aristocrats within and their foreign allies) Robespierre and the Jacobins became increasingly obsessed with ‘enemies’ amongst the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Suspicious of the loyalty of the old aristocratic military officers, the republic had for some time recruited third-estate volunteers to fight alongside the regular army, explicitly following the model of classical citizen-armies. But the revolutionaries were now forced to look to a wider public – including the sans-culottes. As Robespierre explained, ‘Internally the dangers come from the bourgeois. In order to convince the bourgeois, it is necessary to rally the people.’19 It was, then, the needs of war that made a closer alliance with the poor a necessity. And in June 1793 a coup against the moderate Girondins mounted by the sans-culottes helped the more radical Robespierre and the Mountain faction into power.

  III

  In October 1793 a new play was performed in Paris, The Last Judgement of Kings, written by Sylvain Maréchal, a radical Jacobin intellectual and comrade of the proto-communist François-Noël Babeuf. Intended for a broad popular audience, the play combined spectacle with audience participation and clear, if not crude, political messages. The action takes place on a desert island, complete with erupting volcano. The players included the Pope and the kings of Europe, alongside a number of allegorical figures: a group of Rousseauian primitives, representing human contentment before the coming of evil civilization; an old French exile, standing for the dissidents of the past; and sans-culottes from all over Europe, the people of the future. The sans-culottes loudly list the crimes committed by the monarchs, whilst the monarchs themselves greedily squabble over bread. The old exile, the sans-culottes and the ‘primitives’ show how the new people, living simply, can work together. The play then loudly exhorts the audience to renounce monarchy for ever.20

  In a rather crude way, the play encapsulated the Jacobins’ outlook. The sans-culottes are moral; the ‘enemies’ are specifically monarchs (not the rich in general). However, The Last Judgement of Kings was in sharp contrast to other plays of the period, which adopted the restrained, classical style favoured by the Jacobins. This was burlesque, a garish pantomime. Whilst not written by a sans-culotte, it evoked their cultural world far more closely than the neo-classical festivals and plays of David and his lofty-minded colleagues. It suggested that Robespierre may have forged an alliance of sorts between the Jacobins and the sans-culottes, but it was a potentially fragile one.

  The sans-culottes were not a ‘working class’ in the Marxist sense. Though most worked, or had worked, with their hands they were a mixed group, including some who were quite comfortably off alongside very poor artisans. The sans-culottes’ politics was radical and collectivist, their loyalties attached to the ‘people’, an entity that excluded the rich. The main demands of their local councils (sections) focused on material matters, especially the state regulation of the economy. Food prices, they insisted, had to be controlled, so that everybody, including the poor, could survive. And though they did not want the end of property, they did want it to be more widely spread. Their vision of society was therefore a levelling one. Fundamentally, they were partisans of ‘class struggle’ avant la lettre. In their world, the rich and the speculators were just as much the ‘vampires of the fatherland’ as the aristocrats.

  The sans-culottes did not develop a coherent political philosophy, but one of their most thoughtful sympathizers, François-Noël Babeuf, did. Babeuf had been a ‘feudiste’, an agent who researched feudal archives and tried to maximize nobles’ income by enforcing their ancient rights. He was ambitious, and even employed the latest bureaucratic methods, all the better to exploit the peasantry. However, he had become disillusioned even before the Revolution of 1789. He was moved by the plight of poorer peasants, victims of both feudal dues and intense competition from wealthier peasants, who benefited from a developing capitalism. As he explained later:

  I was a feudiste under the old regime, and that is the reason I was perhaps the most formidable scourge of feudalism in the new. In the dust of the seigneurial archives I uncovered the horrifying mysteries of the usurpation of the noble caste.21

  He read what he could of the new Enlightenment literature, and looked back to the classical past, renaming himself ‘Gracchus’, after the brothers who, as Roman tribunes, redistributed land to the poor.

  The revolution may have destroyed Babeuf’s business, but it gave him the opportunity to put his ideals into practice. He helped to organize peasant resistance to taxes, and from 1791 he became committed to the ‘agrarian law’ – the land redistribution which the Gracchus brothers had introduced into ancient Rome. Babeuf joined the Jacobins and became a secretary to the Food Administration of the Paris Commune. The job entailed finding supplies to feed Paris, enforcing the Jacobins’ price controls and punishing speculators. Babeuf saw his work in visionary terms, writing enthusiastically to his wife:

  This is exciting me to the point of madness. The sans-culottes want to be happy, and I don’t think that it is impossible that within a year, if we carry out our measures aright and act with all the necessary prudence, we shall succeed in ensuring general happiness on earth.22

  Although Babeuf was working for the Jacobins, his vision was closer to the levelling paradise of the sans-culottes. His utopia was a society in which everybody would be fed, and the immoral rich would be brought under strict control.

  The fact that the Jacobins were employing people like Babeuf showed how radical Parisian politics had become. The army was particularly affected. Authority was democratized and the harsh discipline of the past was replaced by judgement by peers; meanwhile officers were appointed on the basis of ideological commitment rather than expertise. The revolutionary general Charles Dumouriez argued that this was the best way to motivate the troops: ‘a nation as spiritual as ours ought not and cannot be reduced to automatons, especially when liberty has just increased all its faculti
es’.23 The War Ministry, under the control of the radical Jean-Baptiste Bouchotte, distributed Le père Duchesne, a newspaper published by the journalist Jacques Hébert, written in the voice of a crude, violent sans-culotte. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers read it or heard it read.

  Conflict between the Jacobins and the sans-culottes seemed inevitable. Whilst the Robespierrists envisaged France as a classical city-state populated with high-minded, self-sacrificing citizens, the sans-culottes wanted a land of good-cheer, bawdy fun and violent class retribution. But the Jacobins needed the sans-culottes to fight for them, and so compromise was necessary. Various sans-culotte demands were conceded: price controls were imposed, and the death penalty for hoarders of grain introduced. Meanwhile ‘revolutionary armies’ of militant sans-culottes were sent to the countryside to seize food from recalcitrant peasants, thus supplying the towns. The new levée en masse, the universal military draft, which included all males, of whatever social background, also satisfied the sans-culottes’ desire for equality.

  However, whilst willing to make concessions, the Jacobins had no intention of being led by the untutored masses. Their goal was to mobilize and channel mass energies behind an increasingly centralized state. This was the meaning of the Festival of the Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic held in August 1793, when the figure of Hercules became the dominant allegorical figure. During the festival, pikes, the sans-culottes’ weapon, were brought from every locality and bound together into a giant fasces. Ordinary people were to be players in the drama of politics, but the state was going to bind and discipline them. To this end, the Jacobins limited the powers of the Revolutionary Armies and constrained the powers of the sans-culotte sections.

  The Jacobins were also intent on reducing the power of the sans-culottes because they were convinced that they needed people with expertise to help them win the war against their European enemies. Lazare Nicolas Carnot, a former engineer, reorganized the army along more professional lines. He protected aristocratic officers who had the right skills and brought back some of the old-style discipline of the Ancien Régime army. It was no longer enough that officers were enthusiastic republicans; they had to be literate and have some knowledge of military science.

  This technocratic approach was also applied to the economy. Carnot’s ally, Claude-Antoine Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, was put in charge of the Manufacture of Paris, a huge (for the time) collection of arms workshops built up by the state in an extraordinarily short space of time. By the spring of 1794, about 5,000 workers were labouring in workshops of 200–300 men, many of them housed in old monasteries or the houses of expelled aristocrats, and they were producing most of France’s munitions. They were organized by Prieur and a small group of engineers and technicians – the ‘techno-Jacobins’ as they have been called.24

  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:

  No coldness, no haughtiness,

  Good nature makes for happiness;

  Yes, without fraternity.

  There is no gaiety.

  Let us eat together in the mess.25

  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:

  The war which we are fighting is not a war between king and king or nation and nation. It is a war of liberty against despotism. There can be no doubt that we shall be victorious. A nation that is just and free is invincible.27

  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.

  IV

  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:

  If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, its basis in the time of revolution is both virtue and terror – virtue, without which terror is disastrous, and terror, without which virtue has no power… Terror is merely justice, prompt, severe, and inflexible. It is therefore an emanation of virtue, and results from the application of democracy to the most pressing needs of the country.29

  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 i
n 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.

  V

  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.