The Red Flag: A History of Communism (5 page)

However, Rousseau’s ambitions went far beyond the remodelling of the political order: he urged that all spheres of human relationships be transformed, social, personal and cultural. The discipline of traditional, patriarchal family life had to yield to a benign paternalism. His most popular work,
Julie, or the New Héloïse
, told the story of an aristocratic young woman who falls in love with her bourgeois tutor, Saint-Preux, much to the horror of her harsh and status-obsessed father. Rather than abandon family ties and follow her immature passions, she embarks on the creation of a new, non-despotic community. She marries a wise father-figure, Wolmar, and they both live in a chaste
ménage à trois
with Saint-Preux and their servants, on a model estate. Wolmar is shown as a moral guide and educator, who persuades his ‘children’ – his wife and servants – to do what is right.
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Rousseau’s vision of the state bears some resemblance to later Marxist ideals. However, there was one major difference. Rousseau, unlike most Communists, hated modernity, complexity and industry. Virtue, he believed, was more likely to flourish in small-scale, agrarian societies.

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:

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.’
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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.

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.
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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:

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:

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 faculties’.
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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.
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