2024-12-31
Marxists in Europe (and its periphery) have been attributing an equivalent in the French Revolution to every figure or event even vaguely implicated in the history of communist political action (the ‘Arbeiters-Weltgeist’) since Marx himself. These subtle motifs always arrive after the fact, and they never aim to flatter. Invoked history can do nothing but diminish the present.
“Second as farce…” so it goes.
The most shameless example of stolen French nostalgia is found in Trotsky. Not only do his writings, following Lenin’s death, reflect his desperate attempts to cope with his incredible failure to secure power for his Bolshywik-Leninist clique, but also the grim atmosphere within the revolutionary party at the time.
For instance, in “The ‘Clémenceau Thesis’ and the Party Regime” Trotsky quotes the ‘Agitprop of the Central Committee and of the Moscow Committee’:
In its attacks on the party and the Comintern, the Opposition has advanced the following assertions: (a) At the present time the leadership of the CPSU is passing through the period of Thermidorian degeneration. (b) The replacement of this leadership is inevitable, after the manner of Clémenceau’s overturn in France in 1914.
Look also to his writing in the Platform of the Joint Opposition:
[...] It is these consequences of the policy of the majority, of the majority of the Central Committee, and not its intentions, that the Opposition had in view when it raised the question of the danger of a Thermidor – that is, a departure from the rails of the proletarian revolution on to petty-bourgeois rails.
On and on he goes, up until his unfortunate interaction with Ramón Mercader.1 But before this, his francophilia crescendos in The Revolution Betrayed. See Ch. V:
The consecutive stages of the great French Revolution, during its rise and fall alike, demonstrate no less convincingly that the strength of the “leaders” and “heroes” that replaced each other consisted primarily in their correspondence to the character of those classes and strata which supported them. [...] In the successive supremacy of Mirabeau, Brissot, Robespierre, Barras and Bonaparte, there is an obedience to objective law incomparably more effective than the special traits of the historic protagonists themselves.
...
Answering the bewildered questions [...] where is its revolutionary initiative, its spirit of self-sacrifice and plebian pride – why, in place of all this, has appeared so much vileness, cowardice, pusillanimity and careerism – Rakovsky referred to the life story of the French revolution of the 18th century, and offered the example of Babuef, who on emerging from the Abbaye prison likewise wondered what had become of the heroic people of the Parisian suburbs. A revolution of the heroic people of the Parisian suburbs.
...
To superficial minds it seemed to be a mere matter of personal rivalry, a struggle for the “heritage” of Lenin. But in the conditions of iron dictatorship social antagonisms could not show themselves at first except through the institutions of the ruling party. Many Thermidorians emerged in their day from the circle of the Jacobins. Bonaparte himself belonged to that circle in his early years, and subsequently it was from among former Jacobins that the First Consul and Emperor of France selected his most faithful servants. Times change and the Jacobins with them, not excluding the Jacobins of the twentieth century.
I’ll stop there. You can do your own followup research if you’d like, but he’s just one dismal symptom of something larger.
It’s important to read into the French origins of these French terms. Two, most interesting, are ‘opportunism’—dating back to the Third Republic—and ‘Bonapartism’—dating back to Napoleon’s followers and detractors.
Zeldin, in A History of French Passions 1848-1945:
Opportunism meant that though one should be bold in one’s ideas, one should be prudent in executing them. [Freycinet] was too wily to make the mistake Ferry made, of pushing his reforms through quickly, because he thought they were right. He saw danger in the multiplicity of innovations and in excessive haste in bringing them forward. Priorities should be established and the more controversial measures postponed. For, correcting Ferry’s other mistake, he saw the greatest danger of all to be the disintegration of the republican party. Controversy and haste would kill it.
And a little earlier:The result of this was an approach to problems which Freycinet summarised in two words—opportunism and union. This was what guided his whole political career.
I quote this latter fragment because it contextualizes the passage I cited from Chapter 1 of the Platform of the Joint Opposition, “Against Opportunism – For the Unity of the Party”. Opportunism and union are unquestionably themes to be explored in further research.
Carrying on, Zeldin also comments on Bonapartism:
Bonapartism aspired to preserve the work of the [French] Revolution, by affirming the equality of men, careers open to talent, and the abolition of the privileges of castes and corporations. […] André Siegfried, one of the ablest of commentators, distinguished between ‘true’ Bonapartism, which was that of Napoleon I, and Bonapartism as it evolved, ‘and in my view became corrupted', under Napoleon III and Eugénie, for in this second phase it was clerical, aristocratic and reactionary.
It seems that neither ‘opportunist’ nor ‘Bonapartist’ were insults in their day… But now that they’ve been (at least consciously) swept into the dust-bin of history, they’ve grown into something quite dangerous. Their weaponization also seems to come with an unintended assumption that every losing party of the French Revolution was deserving of its loss, even the victor! In the deployment of this metaphor, I’m confused as to who the partisans-in-question (Trotskyists, for instance) identify with. There isn’t a label left that hasn’t become derogatory. Perhaps this would make a good case study for a dialectic of pejoration.
1With this assassination, Ramón (preemptively) struck back at NAFTA neocons with a passion Neo-Zapatistas could only hope to emulate.