The culture and history of French republicanism: terror or utopia?

Social Science History, 1990

The Republic is not merely the name of a political institution, but the instrument of moral and social progress . . . of reducing the inequality and increasing the solidarity between men.-Leon Bourgeois (cited in Hayward 1961: 35)' Few today dwell on the significance of republican institutions. In the nineteenth century, however, republicanism was a revolutionary ideology proclaiming the right of all people as citizens to control their lives. While associated with universal suffrage, republicanism was not yet confined to a narrow political sphere, and many still sought to extend its values to economic affairs. They questioned whether citizens empowered to decide political questions should not also make economic decisions that affected their lives, and they warned that governments resting on free citizenship were threatened by concentrations of wealth giving some a disproportionate voice in society's economic life. What sort of republic, one asked, could survive burdened with "this strange

Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales (English edition), 2016

Istoryia, 2020

This article examines the relationship between war, revolution, and citizenship during the Paris Commune of 1871. The event marked a moment in which French radicals began to rethink the nation's revolutionary heritage as they proposed alternative models for a reconstituted republican government and society. War and military conflict were important factors in these ideological considerations, especially as radical republicans grappled with concepts of offensive and defensive revolutionary strategies. As this article suggests, these arguments came to inform novel ideas regarding republican citizenship and state institutions, demonstrating that the civil war of 1871 was conceptualized as a turning point in France's revolutionary tradition in the 19th century.

Theory and Society, 1984

2021

Slavic Review, 2021

Sydney Studies in Society and Culture, 2013

For contemporaries, probably the most striking feature of 1789 was its suddenness and completeness. In a matter of a few months, the most powerful monarchy in the European world, the wealthiest aristocracy, the most complex institutional apparatus, the most sophisticated hierarchy, crumbled, disappeared-and all without significant loss of blood. If it hadn't been 1789, and if they hadn't been brought up to use different linguistic protocols, the writers and talkers of the time might have called it all a miracle, a clear instance of the particular workings of Providence; Mirabeau or Lafayette or even Louis XVI himself might have been dubbed 'the Great Deliverer', the 'man of God's right hand', the instrument of God's benign purpose, as had William of Orange on a similarly bloodless and seemingly miraculous occasion (frequently compared to the events of 1789) a century earlier.! But, it was 1789. And the form of explanation was fundamentally different. Revolutions are, of course, literary events also, and the crumbling of the French state was saturated by words, in print, in conversations and in political meetings. The linguistic explosion was almost as striking as the revolutionary circumstances the writers and speakers grappled with, the new order they tried to explain. Groups hitherto politically inarticulate were suddenly invited to list their grievances so that the good king could put them right. The result was a collection of complaints and aspirations so complicated and voluminous that it still defies the computer. Newspapers and periodicals, few in number, subject to the vagiaries of ancien regime censorship, devoted in the main (as Mornet2 demonstrated) to belles lettres and science, made way for a deluge of politics; political clubs proliferated at every level; electoral, communal, sectional assemblies seemed to meet almost continuously; the various National Assemblies-the 'Constituant', the 'Legislative', and the 'Convention'-leant their enormous prestige to the rhetoric of Revolution. Some words quickly became taboo, mhers sacred: reading simple place names became 'a silent course in ethics'; and uttering terms like 'patrie' ,'nation', 'regeneration', 'virtue', 'terror', a son of revolutionary catechism. It is not too much to claim that the most striking and perhaps the most lasting legacy of the Revolution is indeed its new language of politics: 'its linguisticality', writes Lynn Hunt, 'is its most revealing aspect; its linguistic functions, its linguistic structure and its linguistic status are its most disclosive attributes' .3 Until recently, Revolutionary discourse has not received its proper attention: language has usually been treated as a a screen rather than a sign. Terms like virtue, for example, have made most historians uncornfonable: 'virtue', they have argued, must stand for something else. The opponents of the Revolution from Burke onwards had always argued that such language was invariably a hypocritical cloak, the tool of scoundrels or less frequently the self-delusion of fools. Marx devoted some of his most celebrated pages to what he called the masquerades or camouflages of Revolutionary language; and writers like Soboul or Poulantzas-more reductionist than their master-have written off the moral idioms or the rhetorical tropes of the Revolutionaries as mere ideology or false consciousness. Alben Soboul, for instance, sees in the 'vinue' invoked by Robespierre and St Just an instance of their pre-bourgeois intellectual limitations: 'incapable of analyzing the economic and social conditions of their time ... they believed in appeals to vinue'. Similarly, for Poulantzas, the terrorist idiom of the 'Pere Duchesne' was little more then 'a plebian manner to put an end to the enemies of the bougeoisie'.4 For their pan, revisionists like Cobban or Cobb, yet more materialist than the materialism they denounce, more caught in the polarization of the illusory and the real, simply don't bother

This article is based on a lecture I gave at the Marx Memorial Library. In it, I examined the way that Marx used his understanding of the Paris Commune to formulate his understanding of the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat to start to dissolve the abstracted power of the bourgeois state back into society.