Part Three

Historically speaking, the great French Revolution that broke out in 1789, through its effects on Europe, restored the vitality of a Germany that had degenerated in the swamp of feudalism.

In this revolution, the warring classes and parties stripped off for the first time all religious disguise and struggled against one another in purely secular forms, openly proclaiming their purely secular aims. Thus Christianity entered its last phase as a world-historical phenomenon. Incapable of serving any longer as the ideological banner of any historically progressive class, it became more and more the exclusive possession of the ruling classes. From then onwards they used it as a naked instrument of rule, in which sense it made no difference to them whether or not they believed in the religion they insisted on preserving amongst the people.

In the very period that absolute monarchy revealed itself in Germany as merely a deterrent caricature, it developed in France from 1648 to 1789 the highest form it ever achieved historically. In it, state power did not appear as a direct instrument of class rule but led an existence apparently independent of the economic classes and political parties, none of which was strong enough to seize power for itself. Absolute monarchy held each of the existing classes in check by the others, offered them all a truce and made use of all of them.

All the same, its independence was only apparent. For all that it played the feudal classes off against the modern and the modern classes off against the feudal, it remained as dependent on the former as it was on the latter. It could permit none to become too powerful, but for that very reason it could condemn none to become too completely powerless. It had to encourage agriculture, trade and industry, all the capitalist forces of production, if only to sustain its own bureaucratic apparatus and standing army, but it was also not permitted to break with the feudal estates that it needed as a counterweight to the bourgeoisie, particularly since the absolute monarch was usually the greatest landowner in his country and thus had interests in common with the other great landlords, the aristocracy and the Church.

Thus absolute monarchy was to a certain extent a body with two souls, one enlightened, bourgeois, which took pains to develop the capitalist forces of production as much as possible, and one feudal, medieval, which only thought of extracting as much as possible out of the nation in order to consume the booty in the interests of the feudal classes of society. But in the long term these two souls could not coexist. The absolute monarchy could not satisfy the aristocracy without harming the bourgeoisie and, vice versa, the more historical progress altered the balance between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie to the detriment of the aristocracy and the benefit of the bourgeoisie, the more the absolute monarchy tottered, since it rested on precisely this balance between the ruling classes.

The absolute monarchy became completely intolerable for the lower classes. The rural and urban workers lived in the most terrible misery under French absolutism even in its golden age. According to bourgeois historiography, the absolute monarchy arose out of the protection it afforded the weak against the strong. All this meant, however, was the intervention of the absolute monarchy in economic conditions, an intervention that was intended to increase the so-called national wealth, that is, commodity production. This intervention did not benefit the working classes but the capitalist mode of production, partly directly through monopolies, protective tariffs and financial support, partly indirectly through the abolition or the mitigation of serfdom, the improvement of schools and so forth. For the working classes as such absolutism never spared a thought. Insofar as it did appear to show a certain interest in them, it was never a question of making slaves into men, but much more of converting feudal objects of exploitation into capitalist ones.

Condemned to lifelong hunger, the peasants soon learned to stop trying. Ever greater stretches of cultivable land were left fallow; by 1750 a quarter of the arable land was already no longer cultivated. The town labourers lived in similarly degrading conditions. Throughout the realm industry and trade were under the strict legal control of the guilds. Bit by bit even the simplest branches of employment were bureaucratically converted to guild crafts. The monopolization of the crafts made it impossible for countless journeymen ever to become masters. They travelled all over France without finding a place to settle down, until in the end they returned home to work at their trade secretly and furtively, harassed and persecuted by the police. In the end it simply had to be accepted that loopholes were constantly being made in this unjust and senseless organization of national labour, and this acceptance came in a highly characteristic manner. Just as there were sanctuaries for debtors and even criminals, where the writ of the law did not run, so it seemed appropriate to set up sanctuaries for homeless and outlawed labour. In Paris there were two such refuges, the Temple area and the Faubourg St. Antoine. In the Faubourg particularly 70,000 workers had settled before the outbreak of the revolution. Here every hole and corner was thickly sown with the disinherited, who could find no space in the soil of official society. The Faubourg St. Antoine became the real hearth of the revolution; from its womb streamed the stormers of the Bastille, and it was the rampart that broke every blow of the counterrevolution.

If the condition of the rural and urban workers sufficiently characterizes absolutism’s so-called paternalism, it also shows why the bourgeoisie benefited less and less from this form of state. The progressive decay of agriculture hindered the development of the so-called national wealth, whose continuous increase was a vital question for the bourgeoisie, and the ever-increasing ossification of the guild system limited their free access to the labour force from which they extracted their surplus value. While they were thus hindered in developing their productive forces, the absolute monarchy increased its claims upon the purses of the bourgeoisie to a degree that was unparalleled and unheard of in the conditions of the time. The longer they went on, the less the French Kings were able to recognize the bourgeois side of absolute monarchy. They became more and more caught up with the feudal estates, the aristocracy and the church, and pursued a courtly extravagance that brought the French state to the verge of bankruptcy.

To avoid this bankruptcy, the monarchy was forced, early in 1789, to convene the Estates General, the representatives of the aristocracy, the clergy and the bourgeoisie. But here the bourgeoisie had already such an overwhelming predominance that they were very soon able to transform the corporation of feudal estates into a modern National Assembly, in doing which, it is true they were admirably assisted by divisions among the aristocracy and clergy. It is a familiar experience that the more reactionary classes and parties decay internally, the more they are driven apart externally, which as a rule makes the advance of the revolutionary parties easier. In the night of August 4-5, 1789, the National Assembly swept aside all the rottenness of feudalism and of the guilds, along with serfdom, seigneurial courts, tithes, surplice fees, the purchase of offices etc.

That night has gone down in history, as indeed it deserves to, since in a few hours it removed the junk Germany has needed no less than sixty years to clear away. On the other hand, it is wrong to talk of the ‘spirit of sacrifice’ that the privileged estates are supposed to have manifested on the night of August 4. They were only giving up what the hundreds of peasant revolts that raged throughout the country in the summer of 1789 had already completely destroyed, and they only did so to preserve at least some claim for compensation.

It is true that the peasants on their own were not enough to assure victory for the bourgeoisie. They were too scattered, too badly organized, too distant from Paris, where political movements were concentrated, to be able to intervene at times of sudden decision. Thus the Paris suburbs became the main camp of the revolution. Here the most relentless and active elements in the country were packed tightly together: petty bourgeois and workers and also a lumpen proletariat that still possessed enough primitive strength to throw itself with enthusiasm into the revolutionary stream.

For polemical purposes this revolutionary mass has been compared with modern Social Democracy. This is, in itself, complete nonsense, since all the prerequisites of a proletarian workers’ movement were missing in those days. But Social Democracy has no need to be ashamed of this comparison. Even if the sans-culottes, so called because of their proletarian dress, or the Jacobins, as they were named after their most powerful organization, were not modern socialists, they were indeed true revolutionaries.

They annihilated all the counter-revolutionary assaults of the court and of the feudal estates and saved France when the European powers carried war into the country to strangle the revolution.