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Wednesday, September 26, 2012

The Two Declarations, Evolution of Revolt

This is admittedly-late and gets into some pretty general, non-French history, but I wanted to compare the context of the 1789 and 1793 Declarations of the Rights of Man to other moments when the nature of social upheaval was being contested.

The National Assembly that ratified the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man had come out of the Estates-General assembly. As a Third-Estate-lead group, it broke away from the Estates General- a body supposed to represent all three estates- because the more-elite First and Second Estates, though in the minority, still tried to dominate the meetings. The Estates General quickly dissolved, and First and Second Estate people came over to join the National Assembly.

What's interesting to me is that, as the timeline of the revolution shows, the Estates-General itself was called by Notables who themselves had been gathering to Royal power. (am I getting that right??) So, people from the ruling class were saying, "we are not adequate representatives of the people" and calling for the creation of a democratically-elected body of common people and their representatives, to replace them as a deciding force? I wonder what the motivation was behind that particular maneuver, it seems so unlikely...

Anyway, by the time the 1789 Declaration was issued, the National Assembly had replaced the Estates General as the deciding force. The year had already seen the Tennis Court Oath and the destruction of the Bastille, but the Declaration still used language like "property rights," and "social (class) distinctions" being "for the common good," and seemed to lean heavily on some platonic ideal of "the nation." As Olchar pointed out, the assembly, at that point, was not in a position where it could condemn the existence of aristocracy and social class itself.

So I'm interested in why society has sometimes been able to re-imagine itself as a radically different thing, and make comprehensive, militant efforts to rid itself of class structures altogether, and other times has only been able to advocate "fairness" within existing structures- the (tangled, non-linear) evolution of revolt.
Guns, Germs, and Steel describes the transition to settled, surplus-agricultural communities, where the first class distinctions rose up around control of surplus and land. A pattern in Polynesian chiefdoms, pre-colonization, that was typical for societies in that early, proto-state stage of development:
"Kleptocracies with little public support run the risk of being overthrown, either by downtrodden commoners or by upstart would-be replacement kleptocrats seeking public support by promising a higher ratio of services rendered to fruits stolen. For example, Hawaiian history was repeatedly punctuated by revolts against repressive chiefs, usually led by younger brothers promising less oppression. This may sound funny to us in the context of old Hawaii, until we reflect on all the misery still being caused by such struggles in the modern world.
 But in other pre-capitalist, still quite feudal, societies, things evolved to the point where large parts of the population started to reorganize their lives around anarchic, communal production. For instance, over a hundred years before the French revolution, the English peasantry lead non-violent movements to "work the land in common" and abolish the "sin of Property." They were powerful because lots of peasants enlisted as soldiers were on their side.

The Diggers and the Levellers were the best known of these groups, the first turning land into communes to free people from the lot of tenant-farmers, and the latter engaging in army mutinies against the colonization of Ireland, in some pretty solid international solidarity. I'm personally fascinated by a lesser-known group, the Ranters, doing communism before communism was a thing, and adding undeniable vivacity to the mad history of spiritual anarchism. (Check these guys out, for real.)

The English peasants themselves were drawing on a history of revolt in mainland Europe- again, over a century earlier, the German Peasants' War had been a massive effort to get free from aristocracy- and had extended from Germany, into northeastern France. What social memory, if any, was there among French commoners two and a half centuries later? Did this at all influence their concepts of what was possible through joining the Revolution? Did the inspiration, in some way, work its way over to Britain while it was crushed on the mainland, and then echo back later?

So we see the second Declaration, four years later after the Revolutionary regime has taken power, still talking about property rights but focused much more on public control of taxation, the establishment of social welfare programs, while also preluding the Terror:
"Let any person who may usurp the sovereignty be instantly put to death by free men."

What do we make of the way the Third Estate label described peasants, wage workers and the urban poor, and the bourgeoisie merchants alike? What caution did the emerging bourgeoisie have to take, since they were not yet the ruling class and had to navigate an uncertain relationship with the feudal aristocracy? Was it ultimately a capitalist revolution they made, with the rise of powerful merchants being uniquely able to get France out of financial crisis? Or did underclass forces effectively advance their interests in some ways, giving us something of a bastion in the ongoing struggle?

3 comments:

  1. Big questions, for sure. Much depends on very local circumstances and cultures. The case of Sendero Luminoso in Peru in the 1980's is quite interesting here. The Senderistas proposed a maoist-like return to communal a communal society (with no outside contacts or modern social artifacts; but that's another can o' worms) which they imagined is what the peasants wanted: a return to a "golden age". But those peasanta wanted no part of all that: they wanted roads, electricity, markets, and to be left alone to run their own affairs. The golden age the Senderistas proposed never existed, and if it did in some way, it was never in the form they imagined.

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  2. (I have to cut this into two comments, because my response is apparently too long for Blogger)

    Part I:

    It seems like South and Central America is a place where this tradition is still relatively long, largely because it is still thoroughly rural. I'm not familiar yet with Sendero Luminoso; it seems as if the Zapatas in Mexico also come from a similar place, though I've not looked into them nearly as much as I would like to.

    The recourse to an imagined 'golden age' is very common and, yeah, rarely seems to work out. We can probably draw this back to Rousseau's ideas on the State of Nature, and the subsequent cult of the 'Noble Savage'. This 'golden age' idea was really pervasive in the 18th and early 19th century; it's interesting to look at Rousseau's system of Linguistics (and those of many contemporaries) in this context as well.

    I'm currently reading Norman Cohn's 'Pursuit of the Millenium' which examines Medieval popular proto-anarchist millenarian heresies; it doesn't deal directly with the Diggers, Levellers and Ranters because they came along later than the book's purview, but it does discuss the effects on those movements of earlier anti-property heresies. This book was a major resource for Vaneigem's critical history (which I'm also currently reading) of the Movement of the Free Spirit, where he looks at how the bureaucracy, vocabulary, and ideology of the Catholic Church was turned against it by groups producing new forms of dissent and social formation. I'll look in both of those for more specific connections.

    One thing that was happening at the period of the Revolution was a very bumpy and uneven transition from an essentially rural form of activism to an urban form. There was a long tradition of peasant riots in the feudal countryside in France; for several centuries it had been a semi-legitimate form of protest, and played a recognised role in feudal society. These riots were usually temporary, focused on one single issue (usually either property/farming rights, taxes, or inflation). So the bread riots that played such a central role in the Revolution (many of them organised/instigated by women) are a direct continuance of this tradition; even in Paris, most of those involved were proletarian workers or artisans who were seasonal workers raised in the countryside, carrying these traditions into an urban context, where the issue of mass food-supply was exponentially more volatile.

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  3. (Part II)

    Even so, it didn't take long for the differences between urban and rural conceptions of dissent and social change to diverge. Early in the revolution, the peasants of the Third Estate were enthusiastic revolutionaries, taking Revolutionary propaganda as a pretext for the kind of unrest they were familiar with: breaking into factories and granaries to sell bread at prices they set (NOT to steal it however), raiding castles and government buildings to burn all legal and property records relating to their feudal status. But as the Revolutionary government began acting on issues that were more abstract or ideological, and less directly felt by the rural population--in particular the disenfranchisement of the Church, the execution of the King, and the centralization of government and loss of local autonomy--they turned against the Revolution, and throughout the century we find the situation of a radicalized Paris and a conservative (and deeply resentful) countryside; this is still a main factor in the failure of the Paris Commune in 1871. And I suspect the reasons are very similar to why the Sendaristas found little support.

    My hypothesis would be that the major reasons that an urban model took a different route (and I think the perspective of Liberal Aristocrats as well) would be:
    *higher literacy in the cities (greater concentration of the bourgeoisie), a more cosmopolitan atmosphere, closer proximity and familiarity with the mechanisms of government and international trade, all of which would encourage wider global (or at least continental) perspective, more emotional investment in political, philosophical, and economic currents, and a greater awareness of the relationships between abstract ideas and real-world politics and everyday life. Additionally, there would be more job mobility joined to less job security, more concentration of people from different backgrounds and social classes, and an atmosphere generally of greater dynamism and change, all of which would tend to make concrete, fundamental change seem more actually achievable, rather than merely the temporary defense against further encroachments within a status quo that remains more-or-less thought of as a given. Not to mention that most of the concrete, practical measures enacted by the Revolutionary government were of far more benefit to the Parisian metropolis than to the rural provinces that fed it.

    The phenomenon of anti-aristocratic Nobles seems very counterintuitive at first, but then we can keep in mind that the Aristocracy and Clergy, precisely because they were so privileged, were the classes most able to read and digest the intellectual work that was attempting to dismantle the feudal system, and so a small but recognizable minority was likely to be converted, especially as the dissipation of aristocratic money had been going on for centuries so that many nobles were poor and had little power despite their titles. In addition to neither peasants or workers being literate, farming was (and still is) such hard and constant work, and so lacks predictability and security even when it is well done, that few peasants would have the leisure to become revolutionaries, and while the same is true of an urban proletariat, the latter's atmosphere can to a degree compensate for this. As Marx and Engels pointed out, every ruling class will tend to give birth to its own opposition once the system that produced that class begins to unravel. So just as, in the past 200 years, we see people from Bourgeois or Middle-class families turning against their class to become socialist, anarchist, etc., we find the same phenomenon in the earlier epoch, sons and daughters of the aristocracy abandoning their class to join with the Third Estate (and, just as today, rarely succeeding in de-conditioning themselves entirely, despite their best efforts)...

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