Place de la Révolution

“ They have found out a hundred ingenious devices by which they deceive themselves. Sometimes they tell us that the public feeling about Reform was caused by the events which took place at Paris about fourteen months ago; though every observant and impartial man knows, that the excitement which the late French revolution produced in England was not the cause but the effect of that progress which liberal opinions had made amongst us. ”

“ The revolution which was taking place in the government of the kingdom found its counterpart in the municipal government of the City, where the mayor, aldermen and commons bore close analogy to the king, lords and commons of the realm. ”

“ When the revolution broke out, he at once avowed himself the advocate of the popular cause, and opened his house as the place of meeting of the deputies, who assembled to protest against the illegality of the proceedings of the Crown. ”

“ The real achievements of the Revolution, however, will be those of the bourgeois assemblies.
[Sidenote: Rôle of the Urban Proletariat]
In the third place, the artisans and poverty-stricken populace of the cities, notably of Paris, will through bitter years lack for bread. They will expect great things from the assemblies and will revile the efforts of the court to impede the Revolution. They will shed blood at first to defend the freedom of the assemblies from the court, subsequently to bring the assemblies under their own domination. ”

“ Marseille, Bordeaux, Lyon, Rouen, prenez garde, la liberté vous observe sur votre marche dans la révolution; elle ne vous croira jamais contraire à ses vues; mais craignez d’être stationnaires dans le mouvement de l’opinion publique ”

“ The people have valiantly endured them, placing their confidence in the revolution of 1357. The city council, presided over by myself, the 'governors' in short, as the body is called, have been forced to exercise a temporary dictatorship, often to resort to energetic and even terrible measures in order to make front against the English at our gates, and the court party inside of our walls. ”

“ I wish it therefore to be considered as my humble opinion, that what, in political slang, is termed Radical Reform, is, in reality, proximate revolution:—Universal Suffrage, inextinguishable uproar:—and Annual Parliaments, periodical bloodshed. ”

“ The court party, with all its wealth and influence—a wealth and influence which had been accumulating for ages—scattered its emissaries every where to foster discord, to excite insurrection, to stimulate the mob to all brutality, that the Revolution might have an infamous name through Europe, and might be execrated in France. ”

“ These misguided men had not then been taught to look for redress by obtaining a reform in the representation. Those who had urged the people on to commit depredations upon the friends of Liberty, during the early part of the French revolution, the aiders and abettors of Church and King mobs, now began to taste the bitter fruits of their dastardly and cowardly conduct. ”

“ Révolution last January. In a dark and filthy dungeon of that same Conciergerie Marie Antoinette has been immured since August. The walls of the Salle de la Liberté have been newly whitewashed—no voluptuous frescoes or oil painting in this abode of Republican simplicity, if you please: only patriotic lime-whiting and democratic glue—and the almost blinding glare of the stark walls brings out in strong relief the dark green canopy suspended over the heads of the Judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal, who are five in number, the President being one, Hermann. ”

“ A revolution{117} is sometimes necessary, but if revolutions become habitual the country in which they take place is going down-hill. ”

“ These hundred and twenty electors, composed of the most wealthy and influential citizens of Paris, immediately met and passed the night deliberating respecting the anarchy into which the city was so suddenly plunged. There were two foes whom the city had now equally to dread—the court and the mob; the princes, bishops, and nobles of the realm, with the armies and the resources of the kingdom, on the one hand, and the starving multitude, infuriated by misery and brutalized by ages of misrule, on the other. These were the two foes against which the Revolution ever had to struggle. ”

“ Here is an election placard which may serve as a sample:—
“A BAS LA CHAMBRE!
“People, retake your liberty, your initiative, and keep them. The Government is the valet of Capital. Down with the Government! Down with the king, Loubet! To the sewer with the Senate! To the river with the Chamber! To the dunghill with all this ancient social rottenness! Away with the Chamber! Away with the Senate! Away with the Presidency! Away with Capital!
“Vive la Révolution Sociale! Vive l’Anarchie!
“ (Signed) An Anarchist Group.” ”

“ The rapidity and skill with which these municipal committees and their volunteer forces organised themselves, clearly illustrate the readiness of the provinces to act on their own initiative and to take over the responsibilities of the Revolution, and show how completely the people of France at first kept pace with, if they did not outstrip, their leaders in Paris and Versailles. ”

“ The French Revolution, with its dramatic overthrow of tyranny and its splendid watchword, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ made its own appeal to the hope as well as the imagination of the English people, although the sanguinary incidents which marked it retarded the movement for Reform in England, and as a matter of fact sent the Reformers into the wilderness for the space of forty years. ”

“ In large vaults beneath are buried the heroes of 1789, with the victims of the later revolution of 1848. The capital of the column is crowned with an artistic Genius of Liberty standing on a globe, and holding in one hand the broken chains of slavery, and in the other the torch of enlightenment. ”

“ With the evolution of the democratic idea into the second or positive phase, it was recognized that the transfer of the supreme power from king and nobles to people meant not merely a change in the forms of government, but a fundamental revolution in the whole idea of government, its motives, purposes, and functions--a revolution equivalent to a reversal of polarity of the entire social system, carrying, so to speak, the entire compass card with it, and making north south, and east west. ”

“ A new phase of the revolution now opened. The working people, excluded from all share in the government by the first French constitution, became restless, especially in Paris. Assembling on the Champs de Mars, a great open field, they signed a petition calling for another constitution giving them the suffrage. ”

“ Thus the tradesmen, the lawyers, the prosperous artisans, the 'active citizens' of the towns, proud of their rights and places in the new Constitution, in the municipalities, in the National Guard, rejoiced in the success of the Revolution, and only regretted that it gave them so much to do; while the farmers and proprietors in the country districts, set free from the yoke of feudalism, shared the satisfaction of the bourgeois in the towns. ”

“ Paris works and suffers for all France, whose intellectual, moral, administrative, and economical regeneration she prepares by her combats and her sufferings.... The communal revolution, commenced by the popular initiative of the 18th March, inaugurates a new era. ”

“ I do not mean that you would have found in France two factions, the one of visionaries, the other of practical men; I mean that throughout the Revolution the goal and the method of attaining it reflected this double nature. Consider the decrees and their effects. At the sight of what the Assemblies from 1789 to 1795 are trying to do you would say, “A set of men attempting to build a city of dreams;” there is hardly anything so unnatural but that they will attempt it; they are ready to reconstruct from the foundation. ”

“ In France, and especially in Paris, each overthrow of a dynasty produces a corresponding revolution in the city directory, for all unpopular names must be effaced, and the streets which bore them must be rebaptized in accordance with the political favorites of the hour. ”

“ Thus, before the completion of the Constitution, the whole of the opposition, more than four hundred members, over one-third of the Assembly, is reduced to flight or to silence. By dint of oppression, the revolutionary party has got rid of all resistance, while the violence which gave to it ascendancy in the streets, now gives to it equal ascendance within the walls of Parliament. ”

“ In France, where the soil has been raked up for more than a hundred years by revolution after revolution, where not a single party exists that has not done its part in conspiracies, insurrections and in all other revolutionary actions ”

“ The first French revolution, having as a mission to sweep away all local, territorial, urban and provincial special privileges, with the object of establishing the civic unity of the nation, was hound to develop what the absolute monarchy had begun—the work of centralization, together with the range, the attributes and the menials of government. ”

“ Still lower down than this admirable municipal body, let us try to imagine, from at least one complete example, the forty-eight revolutionary committees who supply it with hands.—There is one of them of which we know all the members, where the governing class, under full headway, can be studied on the spot and in action.3351 This consists of the underworld, nomadic class which is revolutionary only through its appetites; no theory and no convictions animate it; during the first three years of the Revolution it pays no attention to, or cares for, public matters ”

“ There is a wide diversity in social situations, from rock-ribbed stability, to entire communities teetering on the brink or plunging over the brink into the maelstrom of revolution. Such diverse situations have existed again and again during the 1750-1970 revolutionary epoch. 4. When a revolutionary situation develops, a revolutionary leader well-established in a community trembling on the brink of a revolutionary overturn may seize the reins of power and establish a regime founded on opposition principles, dedicated to another set of principles and practices. ”

“ The levy en masse had filled the ranks with young men from good families, well informed, distinctly understanding the nature of the conflict, detesting the old feudal despotism which allied Europe was striving to impose upon them anew, and enthusiastically devoted to the principles of liberty and equal rights which the Revolution was endeavoring to implant. ”

“ But as the Revolution swept beyond the constitutional forms, when the mob broke loose in Paris, when the King's head was cut off, when the heads of men and women who were noble in character as well as rank were carried through the streets on pikes, when the property of the Church was confiscated, and when members of the old nobility of the most splendid nation in Europe exhibited their destitution in every town of England, the bulk of the English people hurried into reaction. ”

“ Is it in the ranks of these empty-headed officers or these brainless, vapid sons of vice and luxury that make up the men of your social circle, you are to be mated? I tell you that this movement means revolution, that within this very week [Pg 190] the long-oppressed people shall be paramount, and we who reap shall rule. ”

“ Such men consider the Revolution as a reform, imperfect indeed, but still most beneficial to the English people and to the human race, as a reform, which has been the fruitful parent of reforms, as a reform, the happy effects of which are at this moment felt, not only throughout our own country, but in half the monarchies of Europe, and in the depth of the forests of Ohio. ”

“ The reformed democratic Parliament of 1832 was itself the reaction after the furious upheaval caused by the Revolution of 1789, and it heralded the social and legislative revolution of the last sixty years. ”

“ Thus it is that the Revolution has become a date in the human mind, and not merely an event in the history of the people. The men of the Constituent Assembly were not Frenchmen, they were universal men. We mistake, we vilify them when we consider them only as priests, aristocrats, plebeians, faithful subjects, malcontents or demagogues. ”

“ During the first struggle, the national assembly and the people were divided into republicans and royalists; but we shall find, from the moment all danger of disturbance appeared to be over, the higher class were receding from the patriots, and recruiting from the royalists, to form for themselves, under the appellation of the impartiaux, the elements of a growing aristocracy. ”

“ The word revolution, in the sense, or at least the aspect, given to it amongst us by contemporary events, points to the overthrow of a certain regimen, and of the ideas and authority predominant thereunder, and the systematic elevation in their stead of a regimen essentially different in principle, and in fact. The revolutions of our day substitute, or would fain substitute, a republic for a monarchy, democracy for aristocracy, political liberty for absolute power. The struggles which from the eleventh to the fourteenth century gave existence to so many communes had no such profound character ”

“ The French Revolution, which had levelled the monarchy, the church, and the nobility, and brought the proletariat in power for a brief season and lifted the hopes of the people toward a government of equality, was hurrying on from the directorate to the consulate to the empire, and finally returning to the old monarchy somewhat worn and dilapidated, indeed, but sufficient in power to smother the hopes of the people for the time being. ”

“ From about the beginning of the second phase of the revolutionary movement, the literature of the times begins to reflect in the most extraordinary manner a wholly new spirit of radical protest against the injustices of the social order. Not only in the serious journals and books of public discussion, but in fiction and in belles-lettres, the subject of social reform becomes prominent and almost commanding. ”