French Revolution, Terror, and Romanticism
We're grappling with Romanticism now. Romanticism began simultaneously with the optimistic first phase of the French Revolution, when France seemed to be becoming a constitutional monarchy like England. Crane Brinton noted long ago that the test of every revolution since has been whether the educated, moderate middle-class types who create revolutions can keep control of it.
But if there is a great backlog of injustice; if there is too large an oppressed underclass; an uneducated, impoverished underclass; they will-- once the revolution succeeds and the oppressors are weakened-- understandably rise up demanding revenge, not justice.
Then some politicians inevitably will be tempted to go over to this angry mob and promise to fulfill their vengeful fantasies, in return for their support. Can the moderates keep control?
In France, Robespierre stole the Revolution, as later Stalin and Mao stole theirs. When Robespierre began the Terror, Romanticism changed in response. The second stage of Romanticism has seen that human beings have more inside them than peaceful, rational desires. Victor Hugo's play, Le roi s'amuse, The King Takes his Pleasure, transformed by Verdi's music into Rigoletto, takes place in a terrifying, amoral, godless world.
Read John Keke's article, "Why Robespierre Chose Terror."
Marat: the first Che Guevara
So much for Robespierre. But who was Marat, the man David painted stabbed in that bathtub, the martyr of the Revolution? He was Che.
We're living in times continuous with the Romantic revolutionary era, and this, in a way, is proof.
A violent revolution needs a martyr, and if later the revolution has become dictatorship, the nostalgic sympathizers need him to be someone who was a Purist; someone who, had he lived, would have kept the revolution pure. That phase is perfectly captured in the second verse to the song below. Such a belief, almost faith, means the revolution's decline into tyranny is no judgement on Revolution Itself.
Marat was a bloodthirsty fanatic but after David turned him into a beautiful Christ who died for our sins, he filled that purist martyr role for a hundred years. After the Russian Revolution, there was Trotsky (the inspiration for Orwell's Snowball in Animal Farm). In Sixties Left circles you can still find people who call themselves Trotskyites to this day.
The Marat role survives in your generation, I just realized-- think of that photo of Che Guevara, beautiful as a David. The real Che was as bloodyminded as the real Marat but we're talking about the persistence of an image, of a powerful picture.
Here is the European Left's hymn to Marat during the anti Vietnam years. It appeared in a show which played on Broadway, with the wonderful title, "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade." He actually did use the inmates to stage plays when he was confined there!
I swear the music is better than you'd expect for propaganda. Judy Collins has a version on iTunes but I don't see the right clips from the original obscure movie on Youtube. Next year. Viva technology.
HOMAGE TO MARAT
From "Marat / Sade"
(Adrian Mitchell / Richard Peaslee)
Peter Weiss
[Racing, rapid marching music:]
Four years after the revolution
and the old king's execution
Four years after I remember how those courtiers took their final bow
String up every aristocrat
Out with the priests Let them live on their fat
Four years after we started fighting
Marat keeps on with his writing
Four years after the Bastille fell
HE still recalls the old battle yell
Down with ALL OF THE RULING CLASS
THROW ALL THE GENERALS OUT ON THEIR ARSE
Good old Marat!!
by your side we'll stand or fall
You're the only one
that we can trust at all!
Four years he fought and he fought unafraid
Sniffing down traitors by traitors betrayed
Marat in the courtroom Marat underground
Sometimes the otter and sometimes the hound
Fight ing all the gentry and fighting every priest
Businessman the bourgeois the military beast
Marat always ready to stifle every scheme
of the sons of the arse licking dying regime....
We've got new generals our leaders are new
They sit and they argue and all that they do
Is sell their own colleagues and ride upon their backs
And jail them and break them and give them all the axe
Screaming in language that no one understands
Of the rights that we grabbed with OUR OWN BLEEDING HANDS
When we wiped out the bosses and stormed through the wall
Of the prison they told us would outlast us all
{Music changes to the eerie dirge, they throng around the writing Marat like
zombies, haunting him as they sing:}
Ma---rat
we're Poor......
And the poor,
stay poor
Marat
don't make....
Us wait anymore
We want our rights
AND WE DON'T CARE HOW
WE
WANT OUR REVOLUTION
NOW!!!
[Rapid, crescendo:]
Why do they have the gold
Why do they have the power
Why why why
Do they have the friends at the top
Why do they have the jobs at the top
We've got nothing!
Always had nothing!
Nothing but holes
--and millions of them!
Living in holes dying in holes
Holes in our bellies and holes in our clothes....!
{Music changes to the dirge:}
Ma---rat
we're Poor......
And the poor,
stay poor
Marat
don't make....
Us wait anymore
Poor old Marat they hunt you down
The bloodhounds are sniffing all over the town
Poor old Marat you work til your eyes turn as red as rust
poor old Marat
We trust in you ....