Opinion of the French Revolution

[TNF]

I'm sure you and your I-Phone, your Netflix account, your four bedroom gated subdivision home, and your fathers 2012 Subaru will be among the first of the "bourgeoisie" up against the wall, Phwezer.

What is this nonsensical "IF YOU'RE A LEFTIST AND DON'T GO TOTALLY OFF THE GRID YOU'RE A BIG FAT HYPOCRITE" argument...

The middle class were an integral part of the French Revolution. Nothing contradictory about me.

Want world equality? Give up your life of upper middle class luxury and go out among the poor and lead the revolution. 99% of the world envies you and Senior Porsche’s life, and would do anything to have it.

UNTIL THEN YOU'RE A BIG FAT HYPOCRITE.

Of course, if phwezer did all these things, you would still be calling him a hypocrite because you still consider him a member of the middle class. By your logic, he's damned if he does what you say and damned if he doesn't. But this is of course a very poor, inept line of argument that you are using to attack phwezer. Plenty of privileged people have been involved in revolutionary movements and have contributed to great leaps forward in society. Engels was a member of the bourgeoisie for example, and yet was still active in the socialist movement and ghost-wrote a lot more than he is given credit for.

Just because someone doesn't fit your stereotype of what a revolutionary is or what his or her background is does not mean that they are not eligible to participate in a revolutionary movement or speak on behalf of those that are unable to speak. If phwezer is a middle class person who wants to help those who aren't as fortunate, why would you tear him down for doing so? If anything, that kind of thing is something that needs to be encouraged, rather than shouted down by persons in (presumably) the same class like yourself. Of course in your case this likely stems from your own reactionary politics, which seek to turn back the wheel of history to an era that only existed in the bourgeois imagination: a despoiled America, a virgin land free from such curmudgeons and middle class revolutionaries (along with all the rabble) you so despise.

Anyway, the French Revolution was a massive Freedom Revolution. Arguing otherwise is the domain of the lunatic fringe of the far-right, which seeks to undo the centuries of progress made since the initial bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th Centuries that really all started with the French in 1789 and the Americans in 1776. The Reign of Terror was a necessary and practical means of eliminating class enemies that wanted to strangle the revolution in it's birth. The only thing that I can really say negative about that is that yes, some of those executed were likely not counterrevolutionaries at all (notably many among the lower classes who were executed) and that it is unfortunate that more class enemies were not eradicated in the process. It is rather depressing that the French Revolution really did not live up to it's full potential and finish off what remained of feudalism across Europe; we're still stuck with the trash left over from that failure today (the Monarchies and nobility of Europe, state religion, etc.).

[TNF]

A revolution was probably needed, but it didn't need a Reign of Terror to achieve it.

You can't really have a revolution without eliminating those elements that warrant having a revolution in the first place.

[TNF]

A revolution was probably needed, but it didn't need a Reign of Terror to achieve it.

You can't really have a revolution without eliminating those elements that warrant having a revolution in the first place.

The reign of terror was primarily directed against other revolutionaries deemed insufficiently radical or a threat to Robespierre's power.

If they were insufficiently radical at that stage of the revolution, they were in effect counter-revolutionaries, because the revolution had progressed beyond the initial stages that many erstwhile class enemies (that is, the liberal sections of the nobility that initially backed the movement for a constitutional monarchy) felt comfortable with. So I hold no sympathy for them. They were holding up the revolutionary process and the sweeping away of the decrepit feudal system. The revolutionaries were in the right. The Reign of Terror is miniscule in comparison to generation after generation that died at the hand of the repressive, rigid, reactionary feudal system and it's Kings, Queens, Noblemen, and clerics.

[TNF]

TNF is making a perfect case for its horribleness. The idea that being a "class enemy" or "counterrevolutionary" - however it is convenient for a council of fanatics to define those terms at any given time - makes one justly eligible for the death squads, is one of the most pernicious ideas in the history of mankind.

Again, the choice was between a temporary Terror against those who had inflicted a generations-long Terror against everyone in Europe or allowing that generations-long Terror to continue. The idea that all violence is equal is stunningly idiotic. The French people were absolutely justified in lopping off the heads of those who had tormented them for centuries and kept them ignorant and in a state of privation. The enemies of mankind deserve nothing less than absolute Terror for their role in enslaving and exploiting the bulk of the population.

You all want what never was and never will be: a peaceful resolution to class struggle. Either one class wins in the course of the class struggle and eradicates the previous exploiting class (as was the case of the emerging bourgeoisie against the feudal parasites) or both classes are mutually destroyed in the process in the class struggle (as in the transition from the slave society of Rome to the feudal society of Europe). There can be no victory of one revolutionary force over a reactionary force, or even a staying action of a reactionary force over a revolutionary force without bloodshed. Those of you arguing against the Terror paint yourselves as high-minded and above it all, but in doing so you ultimately choose the side of those who were punished for exploiting the masses, that is, you take the side of the feudal reactionaries. This is a two way street. Embracing the Revolution means embracing the Terror, for the Terror was both necessary for the Revolution to succeed and an integral part of sweeping away the decrepit foundations of feudal society in order to unleash the bourgeois revolution.

Of course the irony here is that so many of those opposed to the French bourgeois revolution are arch-capitalists, and capitalism would have stalled as a system without continual expansion in the form of these bourgeois revolutions. The Terror played out in a microcosm in other bourgeois revolutions as well, from the execution of Charles in England to the confiscation of the land of the traitors during the American Revolution and whatnot. But I don't see a lot of hemming and hawing about those.

[TNF]

Exactly. I mean, the revolution helped to impede the progress of parliamentary reform in the UK for roughly 40 years. I really don't understand why some of our revolutionary leftists have such sympathy for the French revolution though. I mean, sure, you had packs of working class people running around killing and thieving wherever, but the revolution was very much directed by middle-class intellectuals (along with a few turncoats from the nobility) for their own ends (I believe, though don't quote me on this, that the Robespierre regime restricted the formation of trade unions by the working classes).

At least from a Marxist standpoint, there's not really any reason not to have sympathy for the French Revolution because at that time the bourgeoisie was the revolutionary element in society. There was no proletariat as we conceptualize it now, and indeed, there could not be a generalized proletariat without first the success of the bourgeois revolutions and the ascent of bourgeois liberalism and bourgeois democracy to the halls of power across Europe. Anarchists of course might disagree, but they don't all subscribe to historical materialism/dialectical materialism so that might be cause for some of the friction there.