This book seeks to trace the origins of a faith-perhaps the
faith of our time. Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed
and intense than were the Christians or Muslims of an earlier era.
What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge
from the forcible overthrow of traditional authority.
The revolutionary faith was shaped not so much by the critical rationalism
of the French Enlightenment ( as is generally believed ) as
by the occultism and proto-romanticism of Germany.
The heart of revolutionary faith, like any faith, is fire : ordinary material
transformed into extraordinary form, quantities of warmth suddenly
changing the quality of substance.
some European aristocrats transferred their lighted candles from
Christian altars to Masonic lodges. The flame of occult alchemists,
which had promised to turn dross into gold, reappeared at the center of
new "circles" seeking to recreate a golden age : Bavarian Illuminists
conspiring against the Jesuits, French Philadelphians against Napoleon,
Italian charcoal burners against the Hapsburgs.
With a match one has no need of a lever; one does not lift up the world,
one burns it.
A recurrent mythic model for revolutionaries... - was Prometheus, who stole
fire from the gods for the use of mankind. The Promethean faith of
revolutionaries resembled in many respects the general modern belief
that science would lead men out of darkness into light.
The ideal was not the balanced complexity of the new American
federation, but the occult simplicity of its great seal : an all-seeing eye
atop a pyramid over the words Novus Ordo Seclorum .
"Communism," the label Lenin finally adopted,
was invented not by the great Rousseau, but by a Rousseau du ruisseau
(Rousseau of the gutter) : the indulgent fetishist and nocturnal streetwalker
in prerevolutionary Paris, Restif de la Bretonne.
Revolutionaries also originated other key phrases used
by nonrevolutionary social theorists in our own century : cybernetics, intelligentsia.
Even speculation about "the year 2ooo" began not with the
futurology of the I960’s, but with a dramatic work written in the 1780’s
by the same figure who invented the word communist."
Paris overthrew the mightiest monarchy in Christendom in 1 789-92,
triggered new waves of revolution in 1 830 and 1848, and forged a new
model for social revolution in the Paris Commune of 1 8 7 1 . By then, there
had arisen in St. Petersburg a new type of revolutionary who was to
convulse the largest land empire in the world with terror in the late
nineteenth century and insurrection in the early twentieth. Three Russian
revolutions-in 1905, March 1 9 1 7 , and November 1 9 1 7-brought
the revolutionary tradition out of the wilderness and into power.
The term [revolution] derives from the Latin substantive revolutio,
which was unknown in classical Latin but was used in the early Middle
Ages by St. Augustine and other Christian writers . Translated into
Italian as rivoluzione in the early Renaissance and then into French
and English as revolution, the term initially meant the return of a
moving object to its place of origin-particularly the movement of
celestial bodies around the earth.
"revolutionary" change was still generally seen as a return to an
earlier, temporarily violated norm : a re-volution back to a more natural
order.
Frederick generally used the word "revolution" in the old sense of revolving
back to where nations had been before . But he also began the
trend among German thinkers of applying the word to spiritual as well
as political change.
[...]
Frederick: “a revolution so great and so singular, which changed almost the entire
System of Europe, deserves to be examined with Philosophical eyes”
Later Germans, such as Hegel and Marx were, of course, to use just
such "philosophical eyes"...
[...]
He created in Prussia a sense of new Promethean possibilities
[...]
Radical B avarian Illuminists
urged in the early 1 780s that his secularizing reforms be carried even
further through an "imminent revolution of the human mind."
Thus Germany-not France- gave birth to the sweeping, modern idea
of revolution as a secular upheaval more universal in reach and more
transforming in scope than any purely political change. This concept
was transported to Paris by Count Mirabeau, a former French ambassador
in Berlin ; it helped him to become the leading figure in the early
events of the French Revolution in 1 789. His study of Frederick the
Great in 1 788 had proclaimed Prussia the likely site of a coming
revolution and the German Illuminists its probable leaders.
Mirabeau popularized the Illuminist
term "revolution of the mind," introduced the phrase "great revolution,"
and apparently invented the words "revolutionary," "counterrevolution,"
and "counter-revolutionary."
[...]
He [Mirabeau] subsequently called the National Assembly "the inviolable
priesthood of national policy," the Declaration of the Rights of
Man "a political gospel," and the Constitution of 1791 a new religion "for
which the people are ready to die ."
[...]
French Revolution (...) occurred [in 1789] within a period of exactly
five months-between May 5,... and October 5.
Revolutionary France formally proclaimed a republic in August 1 792...
King Louis XVI was publicly guillotined in January 1 793.
[...]
National Assembly [split] into the original "right" and "left.
The subsequent equation of the left with virtue dramatized
revolutionary defiance of Christian tradition , which had always
represented those on the right hand of God as s aved and
those on the left as damned.
[...]
AS PARIS overthrew the old regime, its citizens felt an almost desperate
need for some new source of authority.
[...]
Frenchmen melded many estates into one state; discarded innumerable
titles for the uniform "citizen," "brother," and "tu" ;
[...]
The appearance of conspiracies within
Napoleon's armies at the height of his power revealed an unsatisfied
revolutionary thirst for something more than pure power.
Violence was part of what revolutionaries sought- and was in many
ways their ultimate form of radical simplification. A thousand hopes
and hatreds could be compressed into a single act of blood ritual, transforming
philosophers into revolutionaries.(...) violence was at first mainly discussed by
reactionary opponents , who s aw the revolutionaries preempting the promise
of ancient religions to provide salut par le sang [a salvation by blood?].
[...]
Revolutionary violence
has been best described metaphorically as a volcanic eruption or the
birth pain of a new order. Because revolutionaries always believe their
violence will end all violence, it might also be described as the sonic
boom at which controls must be reversed, the vortex of a whirlpool
in which a helplessly descending object m ay suddenly be hurled up to
freedom.
Yet the same lava that was t o destroy a decadent Pompeii was also t o
fertilize a new Eden. (...) It begins in the cafes of the Palais-Royal and leads on to the
neglected figure of Nicholas Bonneville.
[...]
Nowhere-the literal meaning of Utopia-first became somewhere in
the Palais-Royal. (...) reform moved through revolt to revolution.
[...]
The palace was transformed into an enclosed complex of galleries, exhibition
halls, and entertainment centers in the early 1780s - and was
opened to the public by the reform-minded Philip of Orleans. His avarice
rapidly converted it into a profitable center of pleasure where "all
desires can be gratified as soon as conceived."
[...]
July I2 , I 789, when Camille Desmoulins climbed up on a table and
cried Aux armes [weapons]! to the milling crowd. He was suggesting
a collective Parisian response to the news that had just come from
Versailles about the king's dismissal of Necker. Within half an hour
of his speech, the crowd began coursing out onto the streets carrying
busts of Necker and the Duke of Orleans.
Royal ownership assured immunity from arrest within the PalaisRoyal;
[...]
September 1 5 , 1 792, Philip of Orleans presented himself to the new communal
Government of Paris with a request to be renamed Egalite, and to have the garden
of the Palais called the "garden of equality." He paid tribute to his experience as a
Freemason for providing him with a "sort of image of equality,"
[...]
When Philip's son, the future King Louis Philippe, defected to the counter-
Revolutionary camp together with General Charles Franc;ois Dumouriez
in the early spring, Philippe-Egalite was arrested-and eventually guillotined
on November 6, 1 793.
[...]
The Cafe du Caveau was a gathering place for
the Girondists who prepared the demonstrations of August 1 0 , 1 792,
that overthrew the monarchy and established the First Republic. The
Cafe It alien was an assembly point for the more radical J acobins who
eventually occupied the National Assembly and established the revolutionary
dictatorship in the early summer of 1 793.
But the Jacobins operated mainly outside the Palais, deriving the name
for their n ationwide organization from the Jacobin monastery where
the Parisian leaders first met. The Jacobin politicians were deeply suspicious
of the Palais-Royal because of its obvious lack of discipline
and at the same time out of contrary fear that it might ultimately fall
subject to the discipline of a potential claimant to the throne : Philip
of Orleans. (...)Thus, during the n ationalistic
mobilization of 1 793, when all Paris became a theater of
political conflict, the J acobin dictatorship of Robespierre curtailed the
freedom of the Palais-Royal.
[...]
But why was the Palais-Royal able to mobilize mass emotions so successfully
during the early years before full state power and military
emergency could be invoked against it ? The truth seems to be that the
cafes provided not just a protected place for political meetings, but also
the intoxicating ambiance of an earthly utopia.
[...]
illusion and fantasy mixed with material gratification and made the ideal
of total secular happiness seem credible as well as desirable. Hedonistic
awakening was combined with political and intellectual discussion in an
atmosphere of social equality and directness of communication that had
been unknown among the aristocratic conventions of the old regime.
The Abbe Sieyes, a denizen of the Palais-Royal and a leading voice
of the Third Estate in 1 789, suggested that the Fourth Estate of journalism
may have been even more important than the Third:
The printing press has changed the fate of Europe ; it will change the
fate of the world . . . .
The press is for the immense spaces of today what the voice of the orator
was on the public square in Athens and Rome.
The Fourth Estate in many ways replaced the First, the Church. In
revolutionary France journalism rapidly arrogated to itself the Church's
former role as the propagator of values, models, and symbols for society
at large.
[...]
ideological revolutionaries depended heavily on literate priests and seminarians becoming
revolution ary journalists. Like church-state relations in an e arlier
era, the relations between the journalists and the politicians of
revolution involved both deep interdependence and periodic conflict.
[...] Hebert [a journalist] had found the secret of arousing the animal instincts of
the mob through the power of the printed page.
[...]
The first issue called La Bouche "a different, superior power," a
"fourth power" 68- a power outside and above the three branches of
government that the American Revolution had taught European reformers
to admire . This "superior power" had a right and obligation
to conduct censorship and denunciation in defence of the revolution. Its
mission was "universal surveillance" on behalf of that "multitude of
good citizens who are not yet enlightened enough to know what they
desire."
[...]
Literate reformers (...) recognized that the new journalists had found
the secret of arousing the masses: “The people, burdened with their
daily work, have neither the ability, time, nor desire to read. This enormous
mass of people could never have been led into the terrible movement of
these past three years by metaphysical, philosophical, or eloquent works.
Other levels were needed... not books, but words: liberty, tyranny, despotism..”
[...]
If words ruled the world, ultimate power could be thought to inhere
in the compilation of the ultimate dictionary.(...) The "universal" language each
sought to create was the language of aspiration in the city both loved,
and of imagination in the section they knew best.
Restif attempted to compile a Glossographe for a new universal language
that would free French from being merely "a dialect of Latin."
Many revolutionary leaders had been trained in rhetoric by the Jesuits
and in oratory as prosecuting lawyers or preaching curates.
the flame of philosophy . . . has been lit and dominates Europe : the
wind of despotism in curbing the flame can only stir it up and billow it into
larger and brighter bursts.
The ultimate keeper of this flame was the most secret inner group
within the Palais-Royal : Bonneville's "Social Circle ."
This organization combined the Masonic ideal of a purified inner circle with the Rousseauian
ideal of a social, and not merely a political, contract.
The Universal Confederation of the Friends of Truth represented one
of the first efforts of a small circle of intellectuals systematically to
propagate radical social ideas to a m ass audience. The Confederation
advocated a grande communion sociale that would provide social benefits,
universal, progressive taxation, and the extension of civic equality...
"Of the Paris political clubs the Cercle Social was the first to advocate
feminism."
In his [Bonneville’s] major work for the Universal Confederation of the Friends of
Truth, Bonneville saw social justice radiating out from "the center of the social
circle," and truth generating the "electricity" of virtuous conduct. He provides
one of the first rationalizations for the rule of an intellectual elite: "In intellectual
organization, truth is the center to which all should gravitate ." The very dedication
to Truth, however , may require the tactical concealment of some truths... not out of
gratuitous cruelty, but in order to secure little by little, universally, the innumerable
steps that must be taken on our ladder.
[...]
Bonneville's concept of rule by "superior intelligences" represents the first
revolutionary equation of abstract intelligence with concrete people claiming
political authority. Thus, Bonneville launched the idea of an inner intellectual
"circle" as the controlling unit of a secret international movement.
[...]
In France, in Italy, in Germany, and above all in Russia, they are cherishing
the hope of one day being admitted into the miraculous secrets by
the beneficent superiors who watch over all the members of the society.
[...]
In a chapter of his work for the Friends of Truth entitled "On the
Theory of Insurrections," Bonneville described how "a beloved magistrate" would
appear before his people in the new order to conduct a naturalistic version of Holy
Communion: “Friends, this is the body of the sun which ripens the harvest. This
is the body OF THE BREAD which the rich owe to the poor!”
He addressed his readers not as Freemasons (franc-maçons) but as
Francs-cosmopolites-an altogether new breed combining the natural
order of the early Franks and the "universal fraternity" of the modern
Enlightenment.
The press became and has remained the core of revolutionary
counter-authority to modern political tyranny
Insofar as words played a unifying role in the early years of the
revolution, it was through the slogans of orators like Mirabeau and
Danton rather than through the structure of arguments.
[...]
But there were also solid symbols that commanded broad allegiance ;
they provided rallying points for popular rituals of unity during the
early years of the French Revolution. First, of course, was the Bastille
itself. This architectural embodiment of unyielding authority provided a
condensation symbol for the old regime
[...]
Many proposals were made to fill it with symbols of a new order, but
the first to be realized was the enormous, sphynx-like statue of Nature
(...) Dame Nature was a rival authority not just to the king, but to the
Church (...) the high altar in Notre Dame had been replaced by a "mountain"
of earth from which an actress dressed in white intoned Gossec's "Hymn to
Liberty" like a Druid priestess. She invoked a kind of secular countertrinity:
Mother (nature), Daughter (liberty), Holy Spirit (popular sovereignty).
the revolutionary imagination soon progressed to positive symbols like
planting a tree of liberty. A tree had the incalculable advantage of being
an organic product of nature : a symbol of regeneration rooted in the earth
but reaching up to heaven. [...]
the tree of liberty was a living totem : an acceptable new form of verticality
amidst the leveling impulses of the revolutionary era.
[...]
If the rituals around trees of liberty were essentially dances, those around the
guillotine were dramas of the highest order. The guillotine was a hypnotic attraction
in the great squares of Paris; it became the leading actor in these open-air theatres.
[...]
The guillotine turned the revolution into a drama that all could understand. It was the
Enlightenment on display, punishing all equally without causing unnecessary suffering.
[...]
Guillotine was the awesome heroine of a morality play; the ending was known, but
there was the perpetual possibility of minor variation in individual performances. This
mass for the masses offered the certainty of blood s acrifice and the promise of
collective redemption. By the end of the Terror, children were being given toy
guillotines and sparrows for practice executions.
With the formal adoption of a new revolutionary calendar by the Convention in the
fall of 1 793 , utopia became temporal. Nowhere became sometime-and time was
just beginning a new march that would be "novel, majestic and simple like equality."
Nature itself sanctified the founding of the new era on the day of the sun's autumnal
equinox : September 22 , 1 792 . At the very moment when "equality was marked in
the skies between days and nights" and "the sun passed from one hemisphere to
another," authority on earth "passed from monarchical to republican government."
[...]
The calendar was divided into the four seasons with new names of months
designed to suggest the mood of each
[...]
The week-based on the religious idea of seven days of creation-was eliminated
altogether. Sundays and saints' days were replaced by feasts consecrating
natural (largely agricultural ) objects : trees, fruits, domestic animals.
[...]
(...) invoking nature in both its senses-as higher law and as simple
countryside-as the supreme authority of the new order. In announcing the
need to complete the "physical" revolution with a revolution in the moral
order, Robespierre had proclaimed "the universal religion of Nature."
Varlet labeled I793 "the first year of truth" and addressed a new Declara-
tion of the Rights of Man "in the social state" to the "people of nature."
[...]
Joel Barlow, imagined that there were "natural" sexual origins for festive
revolutionary symbols . He traced trees of liberty to the phallic symbol of the
Egyptian cult of Osiris-carried thence to Greece and Rome, where "Bacchus was
known by the epithet Liber, so that the Phallus became the emblem of Libertas".
Barlow derived the "Phrygian" red cap of liberty from a Roman symbol
for the head of the phallus
Frenchmen still sought to define their beliefs in words . There was a trend
toward radical simplification, however, as they increasingly tended to
substitute labels for arguments. In attempting to state simply the purpose
of secular society under popular sovereignty, they found three basic answers.
Each was expressed by one of the words of the most important slogan of the
era : liberty, fraternity, and equality.
Each of these three ideals had ancient origins, but each acquired a new mystical
aura during this period. At the beginning of the revolution they had blended into a
trinitarian unity. B ut there were deep, inherent differences between the three concepts,
[...]First came the political ideal of securing freedom through a constitutional republic.
This was the original revolutionary cause of liberty -defined in terms of constitutional
rights and popular legislatures . Property no less than people was t o b e freed from
traditional bondage to nonproductive authority-an idea that made the republican ideal
attractive to entrepreneurs of all sorts.
Second came the emotional ideal of experiencing brotherhood in a new kind of nation.
This was the romantic vision of fraternity : the discovery amidst a struggle against others
that one's immediate neighbours are one's brothers-linguistically, culturally, geographically
-fellow sons of a common fatherland.
(...)equality : the collective sharing of goods within a community free of all social and
economic distinctions.
1st?enlightenment reformism of the 18th century; 2nd? romantic nationalism of the 19th;
3rd? the third with the authoritarian communism of the 20th.
The replacement of a monarchy by a republic was the major accomplishment of the
initial period of the revolution.
[...]
Paine moved to Paris, accepted French citizenship, founded the first "republican"
society in Paris.
[...]
The nation was a militant ideal that was largely discovered on the jour de gloire of
battle and best expressed in the levee en masse of 1793 : the prototype of modern
mass conscription on a "national" scale .
The American Revolution had originated the concept of independence as a political
rather than a philosophical ideal-creating in effect a new nation through a revolution.
But the United States did not call itself a "nation" in the Declaration of Independence ,
or constitute itself as a nation in the modern sense. There was no new language to be
asserted, no mythologized antiquity to be created, no continuing foreign threat bordering
on the new territorial entity. The official designation "United States" was the only formal
name of a major country prior to the creation of the Soviet Union that contained no ethnic
or national designation. In America, a "sense of nationhood was the child, not the parent
of the Revolution."
In the French Revolution, on the contrary, the concept of a "nation" was central even
though no new country was created. The word nation soon predominated over the
older and more paternalistic term patrie. Flags, feasts, and songs were all said to be
"national," and Bonneville, while organizing the Paris militia in the summer of 1789,
Warned against ennemis de la nation.15 Citizens of the old regime were forced to
communicate in the French language, which until then had not been the basic tongue
of many living under the French crown.
The term nation was not widely understood at first [...]
The label was soon understood to define a new type of popular sovereignty
that was territorially and linguistically unified and often more absolute than
monarchical authority. God Himself was reborn in early revolutionary
tracts as the "Savior of the Nations," [...]
The archenemy of the French Revolution, the Abbe B arruel , introduced the term
"nationalism" to denigrate the new form of parochial, secular selfishness that he
felt was replacing universal Christian love as the human ideal.
Militant nationaHsm reached the European masses largely through Napoleon :
"the first ruler to base a political regime exclusively upon the nation . . . the most
powerful purely national symbol that any nation has had.
[...] Nationalism remained the major revolutionary ideal until the final quarter of
the nineteenth century.[...]
In trying to weed out "the verbiage of the defunct French Academy" and "create
a language, make a religion" for la nation, Bonneville drew heavily on Germanisms
and followed the Strasbourg custom of publishing tracts bilingually. "People" (like
"Nation" and other symbolic substantives ) acquired a capital letter in the Germanic
Fashion in new French phrases like Peuple-Roi, Peuple-Dieu, and Peuple-Sauveur.
Cloots's pledge of allegiance to la nation required c apital letters
Saint-Just gave living legitimacy to the revolutionary ideal. He was by far the youngest
member of the twelve-man Committee of Public Safety which exercised executive
authority in Paris.(...) Too young to be anything but a child of the revolution ,
he became in 1793-94 its embodiment.[...]
Saint-Just in effect withdrew from the pettiness and divisions of the old dying order
to develop the central beliefs of the new one. [...] He went beyond Rousseau's social
contract ( contrat social) in his call for a new social order ( etat social ) "founded
solidly only on nature "[...] Saint-Just became the first ascetic of the revolution,
cutting himself off from people in order to serve "the people" totally : I shall speak of
all peoples, of all religions, of all laws as if I myself did not adhere to any... I
detach myself from everything in order to attach myself to everything. [...] Saint-Just quietly
became in October secretary to the main office of the Convention and the most
powerful advocate of regicide on the floor of the Assembly. His argument for
killing the king was totally impersonal and dispassionate. The monarch was not
considered a human being at all, but a universal abstraction, "the King of Kingdoms"
[...]
His posthumously published vision of an ideal society promotes his concept of
Brothers-in-arms into quasi-erotic attachment.
Saint-Just and Le Bas destroyed Schneider (...)Schneider had threatened both the
ethnic and the sexual homogeniety of the French legions ; his wife was executed
along with him in April 1974.
All of this feminine activity vanished along with the Revolutionary Republican
Society, a Parisian society of female sans-culottes, which became "the first
target of the Jacobin assault upon the popular movement” in the fall of 1793.
Its demand for women to wear the red cap of male revolutionaries outraged
the central revolutionary leaders. On October 31 , the Convention outlawed
all female clubs and societies .
As befits the chiarascuro politics of apocalypse, there was one final fabulous
feast of fraternity just before the fall of Robespierre. If the Feast of Federation
in 1 790 had represented "the first day of the sublime dream of fraternity,"
Robespierre's spectacular Feast of the Supreme Being on June 8, 1794,
suggested the beginning of its unending summer. The winter, the foreign
armies, and the guillotine all seemed to have passed; and the last stage
in revolutionary simplification had occurred with Robespierre's election as
president of the Convention and proclamation of a new religion of maximum
simplicity : "the Cult of the Supreme Being." [...]
In hailing the Supreme Being, Robespierre proclaimed that its "true
priest" was "nature": ...its temple, the universe; its cult, virtue; its festivals
the joy of a great people ...renewing the sweet bonds of universal fraternity.
[...]
The passion of Saint-Just was cold rather than hot. It imploded into intelligence
rather than exploding into indulgence. [...]
Saint-Just had the serenity of one who had surrendered himself long before death to a
transcendent ideal, to "the spirit of the revolution ," and realized the goal of human "regeneration."
Within the proud head of Saint-Just as he went to la sainte guillotine may have
lain that most sublime of all contradictions in revolutionary thought : the need for
a tyranny of virtue to prevent the recurrence of tyranny surrounded by vice.
The national ideal of fraternity reached its apogee in the execution of Saint-Just
following the Roman suicide of his younger revolutionary "brother," Le Bas. The
rival ideal of communitarian equality appeared during the Thermidorean reaction
that followed. Its leader, Babeuf, was, like Saint-Just, a native of Picardy with a
similar nostalgia for agrarian simplicity and antique virtue in a corrupted world.
[...]
The third new ideal to arise out of the French Revolution was that of communaute:
a new type of social and economic community based on equality. (...)The revolutionary
egalitarianism of Babeuf, Marechal, and Restif de la Bretonne is the progenitor of modern
Communism- and of revolutionary socialism, the rival ideal of revolutionary nationalism.
The new egalitarian communalism was rooted in Rousseau's call for a social contract that
would repudiate inequality among men and legitimize authority by permitting the "general
will" to unify the community on a new basis.[...] The proto-communist idea that "common
happiness" might be realized at the expense of private property ownership began to appear
relatively early in the cosmopolitan Parisian circles that ultimately proved anathema to the
nationalistic Jacobin leaders. A petition on "the agrarian laws" by an Anglo-Irishman James
Rutledge, who called himself a "citizen of the universe," urged in 1 790 the establishment of a
social order ( etat social ) with "no ownership of property. This idea (...) was systematically
propagated at the same time by Bonneville's principal collaborator in the Social Circle , the
Abbe Fauchet.(...) The Abbe Cournand went even further, declaring that "in the state of
nature, the domain of man is the entire e arth" and arguing that all landowners
should have plots equal in size, non-hereditary, and non-transferrable (...)This universal
ideal found local roots in the grievances of the French countryside. These were brought
to Paris in M ay 1 79 0 by Francois Noel Babeuf (...) the Universal Confederation, which gave
an ideological cast to his earlier primitive ideas about a "collective lease" ( ferme collective ) and
the redistribution to the poor of confiscated church lands.
[...] Babeuf began to discover posthumously in Robespierre "the genius in whom resided
true ideas of regeneration"
[...]
At the head of each issue stood the italicized phrase, "The aim of society is
the happiness of the community."
Babeuf rejected the "right of property" guaranteed in the Declaration of Rights
of Man in favor of the "state of community", arguing that society should provide
"common happiness" through "perfect equality."
[...]
All government-and not just some governments-would somehow be destroyed
by a true revolution. (...) "May everything return to chaos, and out of chaos
may there emerge a new and regenerated world." The conspiracy envisaged
the establishment of a "great national community" in which all goods were
owned in common and shared equally. This "community" was eventually to
supplant-by either attractive example or coercive force-all other systems of
political and economic authority.
Imperceptibly within Babeuf's conspiracy arose the myth of the unfinished
revolution : the idea that the political upheaval in France was only the forerunner
of a second, more portentous social revolution. [...]
Already in his Plebeian Manifesto, Babeuf had begun to develop a sense of
messianic mission, invoking the n ames of Moses, Joshua, and Jesus, as well
as Rousseau, Robespierre, and Saint-Just. He had claimed Christ as a "co-
athlete" and had written in prison A New History of the Life of Jesus Christ.
The strength of the red curates within the social revolutionary camp intensified
the need to keep Christian ideas from weakening revolutionary dedication.
[...]
Marechal wrote for Babeuf's group: “The French Revolution is but the precursor
of another revolution, far greater, far more solemn, which will be the last.”
[...] Few accepted Babeuf's egalitarian ideal; but m any were haunted by
his example. There were, moreover, some grounds for fearing that the
conspiracy had foreign links. [...]
Hupay (...) believed "to put into practice the beautiful laws of the Republic
of Plato," to create ''an entire city of philosophers "which would "be called
Platonopolis." Such an ideal community would be easier to establish in
Russia than in the West precisely because it was an authoritarian society.
[...] Hupay made... the social theories of "the new world and the new Eloise"
[...] a Spartan people, the true nursery of a better race of men than
Ours (...) it might most easily be realized in Russia.
This section of Restif's work concluded with a model statute for a bourg
commun [...] “All must be common among equals. Each must work for the common
good. All must take an identical part in work.” [...]
[Restif] introduced the term "community of goods" and suggested the "manner of
Establishing equality" in "all nations of Europe." 201 Thus, Restif was able to refer
his correspondent , the self-proclaimed "communist author," [...]
Restif spoke of the coming of a supranational community that would end "the puerile
rivalry which confounds states and drags all of them together into ruin and crime." [...]
In February 1 793, Resti£ used the term communism as his own for the first time to
describe the fundamental change in ownership that would obviate the need for any further
redistribution of goods and property. His detailed exposition of communism (and regular use
of the word) began the following year with a "Regulation... for the establishment of a
general Community of the Human Race" (...)But it was a lonely vision; and Restif had to
print many of his own books in his basement in such small editions that many have been lost.
[...]
The question of whether Restif was alluding to, or in some way connected with, Babeuf's
concurrent conspiracy takes us deeper into the occult labyrinths of Paris where modern
revolutionary organization began.
[...]
AFTER the fall of Robespierre, and especially after the trial of Babeuf, the French
Revolution in some sense ended. Those who sought to keep alive the high hopes
of the early revolutionary era no longer focused their faith on the ongoing process
of innovation in society as a whole, but instead retreated to the secure nucleus
of a secret society where intense conviction need not be compromised by the
diffuse demands of practical politics.
Their myth of the unfinished revolution lent to such secret societies the special
aura of an elect anticipating the Second Coming. [...]
secret societies tended to move even further underground. Thus under Napoleon,
conspiratorial societies with hierarchical discipline became the dominant form of
revolutionary organization, and in the 1820s under the conservative restoration
they produced a wave of revolutions throughout Europe.
Historians have never been able to unravel the tangled threads of this tapestry-
and in recent times have largely given up trying. The most important recent study
confines itself to tracing the history of what people thought about the secret
societies rather than what the societies in fact were. But the problem will not go
away simply because we lack documentation on the numbers and the nature-
and at times even the very existence-of these organizations.
The plain fact is that by the mid- 1810s there were not just one or two but
scores of secret revolutionary organizations throughout Europe- extending
even into Latin America and the Middle East. These groups, although largely
unconnected, internationalized the modern revolutionary tradition and provided
the original forum for the general debate in the modern world about the
purposes of political power in a post-traditional society.
modern revolutionary tradition as it came to be internationalized under
Napoleon and the Restoration grew out of occult Freemasonry ; that
early organizational ideas originated more from Pythagorean mysticism
than from practical experience; and that the real innovators were not so
much political activists as literary intellectuals, on whom German romantic
thought in general-and Bavarian Illuminism in particular-exerted great
influence.
Filippo Giuseppe Maria Lodovico Buonarroti. Largely unknown until in
1828 at the age of sixty-seven he published his History of the Babeuf
Conspiracy, thereafter he was the patriarch to a new generation of
revolutionaries until his death in 1837. Filippo Giuseppe Maria Lodovico
Buonarroti. Largely unknown until in 1 828 at the age of sixty-seven
he published his History of the B abeuf Conspiracy, thereafter he was
the patriarch to a new generation of revolutionaries until his death in
1 837. He is largely remembered today as a kind of Plato to Babeuf's
Socrates-recording the teachings and m artyrdom of the master for
posterity.
But he was also the first apostle of a new religion: the first
truly to become a full-time revolutionary in the modern sense of having
total dedication to the creation by force of a new secular order.
was a direct descendant of Michelangelo. He showed an early aptitude for
French and for music: the two languages used by Italians to express
hopes higher than those they found in their own vernacular. French
was the language of philosophy and progress for the aristocratic Enlightenment
in Tuscany as elsewhere , and music, of course, was the
language of longing.
he refined into modern form the two central myths of the revolutionary tradition :
belief in an uncompleted revolution and faith in a perfect alternative rooted in
nature. The first myth he established through cultivating the memory of Babeuf
and by pioneering a new approach to revolutionary organization. And he refined
the myth of nature by carrying it beyond sentimentality into revolutionary practicality.
[...]
Buonarroti j oined the Babeuf conspiracy in an effort to realize "this sweet community."
He was rearrested with Babeuf and the other conspirators in 1797, imprisoned in
Cherbourg, then sent to the Island of Re under close scrutiny before being permitted
by Napoleon to move to Geneva in July 1 806.
Buonarroti remained in Geneva for the next seventeen years except for fourteen
months he spent in Grenoble during 1813-14. He became the first in a long line
of revolutionaries-culminating in Lenin-to use Switzerland, "the land of Jean-Jacques"
as he called it, as a secure mounting base for revolutionary activity.
The precise history of Buonarroti's activities during this period will probably never
be known. He conceived of two successive secret organizations to command the
international revolutionary movement: the Sublime Perfect Masters and Monde.
(...) Buonarroti's unremitting efforts inspired and at times guided the resistance
to Napoleon.
The Masonic lodges of Geneva provided the ambiance in which Buonarroti
formulated in 1811 his first full blueprint for a new society of revolutionary
republicans: the Sublime Perfect Masters. Both the society's name and
the three levels of membership proposed for it had been adopted from
Masonry. Indeed, Buonarroti sought to work through existing Masonic
lodges: to recruit through them, influence them, use them as a cover,
and ( if necessary ) even undermine them. [...]
The society was secret and hierarchical. Only those in the inner circle
were told that the organization sought radical social change as well as
a republican constitution. Elaborate precautions of secrecy were increasingly
taken. Printed forms signifying the grade of membership were to be burned-
or if necessary swallowed-in case of detainment or danger.
Masonry imparted to the revolutionary tradition at birth the essential metaphor
that revolutionaries used to understand their own mission down to the mid-
nineteenth century: that of an architect building a new and better structure
for human society. Masons believed they were recreating in their fraternal
societies the "natural" condition of cooperation that prevailed among those
earlier, artisan masons who shaped stones for a common building.
The progression of each "brother" from the stage of apprentice through
journeyman to master required philosophical and philanthropic accomplishment
rather than social status. "Free" masonry was, thus, a moral meritocracy-
implicitly subversive within any static society based on a traditional hierarchy.
Men of intelligence and ambition in the eighteenth century often experienced
within Masonic lodges a kind of brotherhood among equals not to be found in
the aristocratic society outside.
The rituals leading to each new level of membership were not, as is sometimes
suggested, childish initiations. They were awesome rites of passage into new
types of association, promising access to higher truths of Nature once the
blindfold was removed in the inner room of the lodge. Each novice sought
to become a "free" and "perfected" Mason capable of reading the plans of
the "Divine Architect" for "rebuilding the temple of Solomon," and reshaping
the secular order with moral force. [...]
Philip of Orleans was the titular head of French Masonry (the Grand Orient);
and most of the pro-revolutionary denizens of the cafes of the Palais-Royal
were his Masonic "brothers."
To be sure, most French Masons prior to the revolution had been "not
revolutionaries, not even reformers, nor even discontent"; and, even during
the revolution, Masonry as such remained politically polymorphous: "Each
social element and each political tendency could 'go masonic' as it wished."
[...]
Most important for our story, Masonry was deliberately used by revolutionaries
in the early nineteenth century as a model and a recruiting ground for their first
conspiratorial experiments in political organization. [...]
If Freemasonry provided a general milieu and symbolic vocabulary for revolutionary
organization , it was Illuminism that provided its basic structural model. The
organizational plan that Buonarroti distilled from two decades of revolutionary
experience in Geneva ( and basically remained faithful to for the rest of his life ) was
simply lifted from the Bavarian Order of Illuminists. This radical and secular occultist
movement was organized on three levels in a secret hierarchy: church, synod, and
areopagite. Buonarroti's revolutionary version of this structure defined the "church"
as the local cell headed by a "sage," who was alone linked with the regional "synod."
The members of e ach synod ("the sublime elect") were headed by a "territorial
deacon," who supervised the activities of all "churches" in the region. The highest
"areopagite" grade ( also called "the Great Firmament" ) sent out its own "mobile
deacons" to control the synods and supervise propaganda and agitation. [...]
The Order of Illuminists was founded on May 1 , 1776, by a professor of canon
law at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, Adam Weishaupt, and four
associates. The order was secret and hierarchical, modeled on the Jesuits
(whose long domination of Bavarian education ended with their abolition by the
Papacy in 1 773 ) and dedicated to Weishaupt's Rousseauian vision of leading
all humanity to a new moral perfection freed from all established religious and
political authority. [...]
The purpose of ascending the Illuminist hierarchy was not so much to attain
wisdom as to be remade into a totally loyal servant of a universal mission.
"We cannot use people as they are, but begin by making them over."
The Illuminists attempted to use the ferment and confusion in Freemasonry for
their own ends. Weishaupt joined a Masonic lodge in Munich in 1 777; and
attempted to recruit "commandos" ( groups of followers ) from within the lodges
of the Bavarian capital. Late in 1780, Weishaupt's campaign spread to all of
Germany and to the pseudoknightly higher orders of Masonry with the entrance
into Weishaupt's inner circle of Baron Adolph Knigge. He was a native of Hanover
and a leader of occultism in Frankfurt, which soon replaced Munich as the leading
"colony" of the movement. For five intensive years ( until Knigge left the order in
July 1 785 ) , the Illuminists recruited largely among those who had belonged to
the most popular of the German higher Masonic orders, the Strict Observance.
The Illuminist technique was, first of all, to discredit the more conservative rival
order by fair means ( helping the conference of occult orders at Wilhelmsbad in
1782 to determine that the Strict Observance Lodges were not in fact descended
from the Knights-Templars ) and foul ( arguing that the Strict Observance
Lodges were secretly controlled by "unknown superiors" who were in fact
Jesuits in disguise ) .
The Illuminists coopted the organizational structure of their conservative
Masonic rival ; in the process, they acquired some of the mysterious allure
that they had not possessed as an arid cult of rationalistic intellectuals.
Illuminism also became much more political.
Weishaupt appears to have initially seen Masonry as a kind of intermediate training
ground for Illuminists-after they had entered the order but before they joined the
secret inner circles ." Then, under Knigge's guidance, he developed a system
of three successive "classes" that incorporated all existing "grades" of Masonry
as preliminary to a higher class of Illuminist grades. The first two classes (the
preparatory and the middle) incorporated the three traditional grades and the
higher symbolic grades of Masonry respectively.
The 3rd or "administrative" class was the most original-and indicated by its very
name the political implications of Weishaupt's plan for the moral renovation of humanity.
[...]
This promise of total liberation terrified the German-speaking world, and the order
was subjected to ridicule, persecution, and formal dissolution during 1785-87.
Weishaupt was banished to Gotha and kept under surveillance. But the diaspora
of an order that had reached a membership of perhaps two thousand five hundred
at its height in the early 1780s led to a posthumous impact that was far greater
throughout Europe than anything the order had been able to accomplish during
its brief life as a movement of German intellectuals. In France, the publication
by the Bavarian police of Weishaupt's correspondence and other documents in
1787 created more fascination than fear.
The decisive book in popularizing the Illuminist ideal was Count Mirabeau's
The Prussian Monarchy under Frederick the Great, which also appeared
in 1788. Written in large part by a former Illuminist , Jakob Mauvillon,
Mirabeau's work distinguished rationalistic Illuminists from "mystical"
occultists, hailing the former as leaders of a movement the "great aim"
of which was "the improvement of the present system of governments
and legislations." Mirabeau took much of his new, totalistic concept
of "the revolution" directly from Illuminist models;
Bonneville saw popular liberation as a kind of blindfolded mass entry into an
Illuminist sanctuary: “Take away from the people the bandage that covers their
eyes... Place the hand of the People on the veil...it will soon be torn aside”
Accused by contemporaries of making "the title of Citizen a grade of
Illuminism," Bonneville argued in Illuminist terms that "the integral
man is God," and that from the center of the social circle there will:
“emanate a circle of light which will uncover for u s that which is hidden
in the symbolic chaos of masonic innovations”.
In his massive study of 1788, The Jesuits Driven from Free Masonry,
Bonneville developed the basic idea of Weishaupt and Bode that Masonry
had been infiltrated by Jesuits, who had to be driven out by
some new order opposed to tyrants and priests. (...) Occult-possibly Illuminist-
influence is detectable in Babeuf's first clear statement of his communist
objectives early in 1795-inviting a friend to "enter into the sacred mysteries
of agrarianism" (...) Babeuf's subsequent first outline for his conspiracy spoke
of a "circle of adherents" "advancing by degree" from les pays limotrophes to
transform the world. Babeuf's secret, hierarchical organization resembled that
of the Illuminists and of Bonneville. The strange absence of references by Babeuf
and the others to the man who formulated their ultimate objectives , Sylvain
Marechal, could be explained by the existence of an Illuminist-type secrecy about
the workings of the inner group. The conspirators may have viewed Marechal
as the "flame" at the center of the "circle." As such, he would have had to be
protected by the outer circle against disclosure to profane outsiders. His mysterious
designation of Paris as "Atheopolis" and himself as l'HSD ( l'homme sans dieu )
represented precisely the ideal of Weishaupt's inner Areopagites : man made perfect
as a god-without-God.
The first issue praised the Weishaupt-Mirabeau concept of a "revolution of the
mind" as the proper objective of the "century of the illuminated." It identified this
type of revolution with the Bavarian Illuminists (...) and distinguished their ideal
from spiritualist distortions.
Whether or not Buonarroti was in effect propagating an Illuminist program during
his revolutionary activity of the 1790s, he had clearly internalized a number of
Illuminist ideas well before the massive borrowing in his revolutionary blueprint
of 1810-11 . He had adopted the Illuminist pretension of recovering a natural
religion known only to "Illuminated" sects in the past . He saw himself as
"reintegrating" "in its ancient forms the religion of nature, reason" by reviving
the legacy of a bizarre genealogy: "the Persians of Cyrus, the initiators of
Egyptian priests , the holy Hermandad of Spain, the apostolate of Jesus, the
Anabaptists, and above all the Jesuit order." He followed Weishaupt and
Bonneville in attaching special importance to the Jesuits, whom he sought both
to imitate and to liquidate. His secret ideal was from the beginning, according to
Prati, the egalitarian Illuminist one of breaking down all "marks of private property."
Illuminist ideas influenced revolutionaries not just through left-wing proponents,
but also through right-wing opponents. As the fears of the Right became the
fascination of the Left, Illuminism gained a paradoxical posthumous influence far
greater than it had exercised as a living movement.
As we have seen, a vast array of labels and images was taken from classical
antiquity to legitimize the new revolutionary faith. Two relatively neglected names
were central to the development of an ideal identity among revolutionary intellectuals:
the image of the revolutionary as a modern Pythagoras and of his social ideal as
Philadelphia. These two labels illustrated the proto-romantic reaching for a distant
Greek ideal as a lofty alternative to the Roman images of power and conquest that
had dominated France as it moved like ancient Rome from republic to empire under
Napoleon. Pythagoras and Philadelphia represented a kind of distillation of the high
fraternal ideals common both to the occult brotherhoods of Masonry and Illuminism
and to the idealistic youthful mobilization to defend the revolution in 1792-94. The two
labels recur like leitmotifs amidst the cacophony of shifting ideals and groups during
the recession of revolutionary hopes at the end of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth.
Pythagoras allegedly founded a religious-philosophical brotherhood to transform
society. Radical intellectual reformers throughout antiquity periodically revived and
embellished this tradition. (...) Pythagorean ideas recurred in medieval Christianity,
which for a time represented Pythagoras as a hidden Jewish link between Moses and
Plato.
An undercurrent of fascination with Pythagorean thought in the High Renaissance and
Enlightenment came to the surface during the French Revolution. (...) as extremists
sought some simple yet solid principles on which to rebuild society, they increasingly
turned for guidance to Pythagorean beliefs in prime numbers and geometric forms.
Early, romantic revolutionaries sought occult shortcuts to the inner truths of nature,
and repeatedly attached importance to the central prime numbers of Pythagorean
mysticism : 1, 3, 7, and above all 5. Pamphleteers of the Right suggested that prime
numbers provided a secret organizational code for revolutionaries ; one particularly
ingenious effort of 1797 derived the entire structure of revolutionary history from
the number 17.[...]
the search for simple forms of nature to serve as a touchstone for truth amidst the
crumbling authority of tradition. The increasingly manic search for simple, geometric
harmonies within Masonry in the I 770s and I 780s reveals the radical thirst for
revolutionary simplification at its purest.
This quest for legitimizing simplicity spilled out of closed lodges into open assemblies
in I 780. Occultists became politicians, and made special use of the two most important
Pythagorean geometric symbolsthe circle and the triangle-in dramatizing their challenge
to established power. These two forms became symbols of divinity in medieval
Christianity. They increasingly dominated the hieroglyphics of the higher Masonic orders
-and the imagination of prerevolutionary utopian architects who often sought to build only
with "geometric figures from the triangle to the circle."
Eighteenth-century Pythagoreans were specially excited by the Illuminist idea of
progressive human purification from the lower cycles of animal nature to the heavenly
spheres of pure intelligence. The Illuminists' hierarchy of circles-moving inward from
"church" to "synod" to the Areopagite center-suggested the concentric circles in the
universe itself. The flame at the center of the final, inner circle was assumed to be an
image of the inner fire of the universe around which the earth and all planets revolved.
Occultists may not have always believed in such images literally, but they did usually
feel that some secret inner circle held out the promise of both personal redemption
and cosmic understanding. [...]
Weishaupt appears to have been the first to use the term "circle" to designate a
new type of political organization making both individual moral demands and
universal ideological claims. [...]
Bonneville even before the revolution had traced the Illuminist ideal to Pythagoras,
(...)Mter the demise of his effort to "square the social circle" via his organizations
of the early 1 790s, Bonneville wrote verses on "the numbers of Pythagoras,"
proclaiming that "man is God" and will "become angelic" by widening the circle
of universal brotherhood [...]
Thomas Paine, who lived in a menage a trois with Bonneville and his wife from
1797 to 1802, believed that the Druids and Pythagoreans had combined to provide
an occult ideological alternative to Christianity. An Essay on the Origin of Free
Masonry, written after his return to America ( with Bonneville's wife ) and immediately
translated into French by Bonneville, insisted that the natural sun worship of the Druids
had not been destroyed but merely diverted into Masonry.[...]
Early Russian radicals often argued in terms of rival laws of Pythagoras- some stressing
the "two laws of Pythagoras" forbidding private property and requiring shared ownership;
others stressing the "rule" that weapons and friendship could conquer all; others insisting
on the primacy of moral perfection over legal reform : "Do not create laws for the people;
create people for the laws."
Seeking some secure way to enlist those outside their inner circles, revolutionaries
found inspiration in another key Pythagorean symbol : the triangle. If the circle
suggested the objective-the egalitarian perfection of nature-the triangle suggested
the way to get there. The triangle, a key symbol for all Masons, had particular meaning
for Pythagoreans as the simplest means of enclosing a surface with straight lines.
The triangle expressed harmonic relationships ( such as that of the Pythagorean
theorem) and became a key symbol in revolutionary iconography. The revolutionary
trilogy (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) and the tricolor (red, white, and blue) each adorned
one side of the Omnipresent triangle on seals and stamps.[...]
Marechal introduced the occult idea of triangular harmonies into his "CHARTER OF
THE HUMAN RACE" in 1793 , announcing the threefold duties of man to be a father,
son, and husband as "traced by Nature on man": "a triangle beyond which he dare not
pass with impunity." This seemingly traditional ideal is revalidated for the liberated "man
without God" by seeing him as a kind of secular trinity: 3 persons in his own substance.
[...]
The new secular revolutionary, then, found a model in Pythagoras (the action-oriented
intellectual), a starting place in the circle (the microcosm of perfection), and a building
tool in the triangle ( the basic unit of organization ) . But what was he building? What
was the macrocosm that the next and final revolution would reveal?
The answer was, quite simply, a universal community of brotherly love, which
revolutionaries designated by its Greek name, Philadelphia.[...]
The word Philadelphia entered French Masonry during a rising tide of occult influx from
Germany with the founding of a Primitive Rite of Philadelphians in Narbonne in 1780.
The Germanic order of Strict Observance, with its chivalric imagery and hermetic
Teachings, had swept into France through Strasbourg on to Bordeaux in the late
1770s;and the German-sponsored Rectified Scottish Rite established itself in Lyon as
the leading occult order in France, [...]
The attempt of the Narbonne group to proclaim a primitive rite was pressed farthest in
Paris in the remarkable, proto-romantic lodge of the Nine Sisters. German influences
again predominated through the founder of the lodge, a Swiss Protestant pastor, Court
de Gebelin.(..) In 1773 he published the first of nine volumes of a megalomanic
inventory of sounds, signs, and symbols (...) By the third volume, he moved from
lamenting man's lost happiness to insisting that unity "among nations" could be
rediscovered through a primordial language (...) by the eighth volume Court advocated
"a single political order . . . a single grammar of physics and morality . . . an eternal and
immutable religion which creates perfection in man."
The occultism of the Old World blended with the revolutionism of the New through two
of Court's closest associates in Paris : Benj amin Franklin and M. L. E. Moreau de
Saint-Mery. Franklin, who arrived in Paris from the real Philadelphia just before
Christmas in the revolutionary year 1776, was initiated by Court into the Nine Sisters,
became its Venerable Master, and collaborated with Court on the lodge's fifteen volume
collection of political miscellany.The Nine Sisters subsequently printed the constitutions
of all thirteen American states and became, in effect, "the first school of
constitutionalism that ever existed in Europe." [...]
Moreau and his brother-in-law founded the Circle of Philadelphians, praising the city of
Franklin (...) They used the language of occult Masonry in referring to the "last degree
of perfection," and the restoration of an "ancient knighthood (chevalerie)" "to unveil the
truth." [...]
Cloots , Court's closest collaborator, had foreseen already in 1781 that the Nine Sisters
would create "citizens of the world" by "forming an immense circle whose center is in
Paris, but whose rays penetrate everywhere."
Yet another geometric model for revolutionary organization was suggested by the
occult symbol for the universal love of humanity: the pentagon. This five-sided object
provided the image of five-man cells for the first organization of opposition to arise
within Napoleon's army-which is what the Philadelphians were.
Their plan of organization was conceived in 1797 by Nodier, exiled from Paris of the
Directory to his native Besancon, which he renamed "Philadelphia." His organizational
plan developed to the point of mania the Pythagorean fascination with the number 5.
Five is the mean number between 1 and 9, and the mystic figure that emerged when
these and intervening odd numbers were added together and divided by the number
of digits. The number acquired revolutionary significance in the new calendar [...]
The pentagon was their sign of friendship and recognition; a five-pointed star with the
number five engraved on it was their seal. Initiations took place at five o'clock on the
fifth day of the month, when members were to face the setting sun-wherever they
happened to be-for five minutes to renew their vows to the brotherhood. Power
to revise the statutes was confided in "the five oldest brothers."
The concept of a nationwide network of five-man cells controlled by a central "five"
would be revived in the Land and Liberty organization of the early I860s and
dramatized a decade later in Dostoevsky's The Possessed. The idea was to
spread back to the western and southern Slavs through a series of organizations
which saw the four ordinary members of each cell as the "fingers" of a single hand,
with a single leader ("the thumb") as the sole connecting link with the next, higher
level. This image would appear in the name of the South Slav revolutionary "Black
Hand," whose assassination of the Hapsburg Archduke in 1914 was to bring on
World War I, which would in turn give birth to the October Revolution in Russia.
The original Philadelphians achieved no such prominence, and Nodier's vision of
an army secretly transformed from within into a revolutionary brotherhood of fives
never developed. But an organization did gradually emerge and involve itself in
anti-Napoleonic plots [...]
Nodier noted an affinity of spirit between the extremes of Left and Right [...]
A single, melodramatic hero leading a simple organization-this was the Phila-
delphian fantasy: the radical, sublime simplification that would lead to revolution.[...]
Malet returned to Nodier's original idea for the Philadelphians of a fusion between
Jacobin and royalist foes of Napoleon into a conspiracy that was "properly speaking
neither royalist nor republican." [...]
The newly found Slavs now represented primitive, natural purity, the Sparta of his
(Nodier’s) dreams, the "last and touching shelter of the ancient ways." [...]
[(Off topic):"Songs without words" were for the Pythagoreans the ultimate form of conversation of
the cosmos with itself. The "music of the spheres" was the highest form of discourse,
expressing "the harmony of creation, or rather of the world as it should be." [...]
Fascination with music as the lost language of liberation led Buonarroti's friend, Luigi
Angeloni, to publish in Paris a dissertation on the medieval origins of musical notation
even as he was organizing his Adelphian revolutionaries. For the romantic mind, music
was the realm of freedom: the most spiritual of the arts, releasing emotion yet creating
order in the dimension of time.[...]
The text for Buonarroti's "songs without words" was to be provided by the leader of the
last important revolutionary organization he directly founded : the Flemish Society of
Brotherhood, of Jacob Kats in the 1830s. Kats, who lived on to influence the German
emigres in Brussels who gathered around Karl Marx to create the Communist League,
chose Pythagoras as his revolutionary pseudonym and projected the Pythagorean
ideal in his revolutionary mystery drama The Earthly Paradise. He flooded music into
the play- and later into the Flemish lower classes broadly, creating the first theater for
popular Flemish music in Brussels during the Revolution of 1848.
This was , as we shall see, the wave of the future. For music became the handmaiden
of ethnic rather than class consciousness , of fraternity rather than equality. The medium
of music found its message in the romantic era on the operatic stage in the service of
national rather than social revolution. But the belief in the liberating power of music
derived from the occult fascination of the Pythagorean pioneers of the revolutionary
tradition with discovering the lost harmony of nature.They sought a language that went
beyond words to sounds- a legitimacy that moved beyond space to time.]
He (Nodier) was anticipating a fateful fact about the early revolutionaries and a
reappearing reality of revolutionary dynamics : the affinity and unconscious borrowings
between the extremes of Right and Left.
The interaction of extremes affected the revolutionary tradition in two ways: dialectically
and symbiotically. Dialectically, the radical, secular Illuminists on the Left developed their
sense both of universal, pedagogic mission and of secret, hierarchical method from the
conservative Christian Jesuit order on the Right. The Illuminist strain represented the
hard, ideological core of the revolutionary faith as it developed from Bonneville through
Babeuf to Buonarroti.[...]
The dialectic of Left-Right interaction began as we have seen-like so much else in the
"French" Revolution-in Germany well before 1789. Adam Weishaupt had derived his
concept of hierarchical organization in pursuit of a global mission directly from the
Jesuits, and Knigge had described the Illuminist program as one using Jesuit methods
To combat Jesuit objectives, a "counter-conspiracy of progressive, enlightened forces."
Subsequent Illuminist propaganda contended that there was a secret Jesuit conspiracy,
and that the nominally abolished order had established underground links between
Bavarian Jesuits and Berlin Rosicrucians. As the conspiracy mania grew, Weishaupt
Himself was accused of being a secret Jesuit. The Illuminists became more revolu-
tionary in the course of the 1780s precisely in the process of winning converts from
conservative Masonic lodges of Strict Observance.[...]
The dialectical interaction of Right and Left was also a factor in the prerevolutionary
popularization of the ideas of Rousseau and Court de Gebelin within France. [...]
Extremists tended to share a common opposition to moderation that was more
intense than their opposition to one another. This attitude was a legacy of the
revolutionary era and its basic drive toward radical simplification. Moderate
positions tended to complicate political calculation-and they inspired a special
contempt among activists on both sides.
IN THE POST-NAPOLEONIC ERA, the 'evolutionary tradition broke out from
the cocoon of conspiracy and into flight on the wings of nationalism. Though
they generally rejected the universalist rhetoric of the French revolutionary era,
the new nationalists were following the French example of a militant, musical
mobilization of the masses against foreign foes during 1 792-94.[...]
The national revolutionary c ause was identified almost everywhere with liberal
constitutionalism up until the Revolution of 1830. Thereafter, however, the nationalist
ideal of fraternite was increasingly dissociated by revolutionaries from the liberte of
the liberals-particularly in central and eastern Europe. And in western Europe,
constitutional liberalism lost some of its earlier links with revolutionary nationalism
-becoming an experimental, evolutionary alternative to the revolutionary path which
increasingly emphasized ideology and violence. In the I840s a new generation of
revolutionaries turned to socialist rather than nationalist ideals-reviving the banner of
egalite as a rival to the fraternite of national revolutionaries.[...]
The resurgence of revolutionary activity during the restoration reached far beyond
occult conspiracies within France. Indeed, the decade I8I5-25 saw a new generation
of liberal, constitutional revolutionaries for the first time mobilize m ass followings
behind national rather than universal goals. [...]
Napoleon's messianic reappearance from Elba for the "hundred days" prior to his final
defeat at Waterloo had restored the image of Napoleon as revolutionary rather than
tyrant. He had adopted the constitutional banners of civil liberties and a federal
distribution of power. He had at last brought to his side the Marquis de Lafayette, the
symbol of successful constitutional revolution in both America and France. [...]
The romantic world view of the young revolutionaries was shaped not just by the spell
of Napoleon but also by the experience of camaraderie within their own small groups.
These exclusively masculine fraternities (...) - providing dislocated young men in a
turbulent era with a simple community of faith that suggested some earlier, less
complicated time. (...) a revolutionary Second Coming was the destination.
The most important movement of the era was the Italian Carbonari: the first to mobilize
the masses for a national cause through a secret organization. Attracting in a short
space of time an unprecedented membership of at least three hundred thousand, they
presented a danger to the conservative restoration that reached far beyond Italy. They
posed a direct challenge to both the stability and the legitimacy of Hapsburg rule, the
linchpin of the post-Napoleonic order. The Carbonari threatened the twin pillars of the
Metternichean order, traditional borders and monarchical authority, precisely where
their hold was weakest: in the divided Italian peninsula.[...]
When Buonarroti's key collaborator spoke of the revolutionary movement during the
restoration as "this p arty of the Jura," he provided insight into the genealogy as well
as the geography of the revolutionary tradition. (...) From the Jura at the beginning
of the nineteenth century came the first purveyors of the dream to arouse the masses:
the society of Good Cousins, Charcoal Burners. This rural mutation of Masonry from
Besancon was transplanted by the Napoleonic armies to southern Italy (...) This new
ritual order drew on the same type of extended family structures and protective loyal-
ties that was later to produce the Mafia. It attracted lesser aristocrats and untitled
professional people who had not become as extensively involved in traditional
Masonic lodges as their counterparts in northern Italy. The Carbonari increasingly drew
a hitherto quiescent populace into civic activity, and posed an immediate threat to the
traditionalist Bourbon King Ferdinand I (...) Carbonari ritual in the South was far more
effective in mobilizing the masses than traditional Masonic ritual in the North. Naturalistic
and familiar symbols replaced the occult and mathematical language of Masonry. The
charcoal burners were an artisan brotherhood in the woods, not an esoteric order in a
temple; they met in a bourgeois shop (the literal meaning of VENDITA, the term used
for their local cells) rather than an aristocratic lodge ; and they bade their members
follow a patron saint (Theobald, who allegedly renounced civilization for the simple life
of the charcoal burner) rather than to seek out the esoteric secrets of Solomon,
Pythagoras, and the like.
the fantasies of reactionaries played a role in determining the identities of revolu-
tionaries. The Carbonari account of the group's origin appears to have been adopted
from the account given in Abbe Barruel's counterrevolutionary expose, according
to which Scottish fugitives had been seeking liberty in the forests as charcoal
burners. King Francis I of France was allegedly aided by them when he got
lost on a hunting mission, was then initiated into their rites, and became their
protector.
By 1812, the Carbonari had assumed their characteristic structure of secret local
cells ruled by a higher one: the Alta VENDITA. The Carbonari became, in effect, a
pyramidal counter-government in the Kingdom of Naples, with a self-appointed
mandate to assemble a legislative body from other tribes ( the ethnic-territorial
subdivisions of the Carbonari). Carbonari organizations soon spread into the papal
states and other Italian provinces, melding a new constitutional ideal with the age-old
dream of a united Italy.[...]
The Grand Master used an axe as his gavel on a wooden block, the symbolic trunk of
a tree to which all branches of the society were organically related. These branches all
shared common roots in the earth, and were part of a great common tree, whose
leaves reminded the secret fraternity (...) Secrecy became almost a way of life for the
Carbonari, with their meetings concealed from public view, secret handclasps,
passwords, and pass-signs. Hierarchical discipline was also important. (...) Bundles
(fasci) of sticks also lay on the table of the master-a symbol that harked back to
ancient Rome and would be revived in the Rome of Mussolini. For the Carbonari
the bundles signified "the members of our respectable order, united in peace."
In order for each piece of wood to be transformed symbolically into the purer,
more useful form of charcoal, each meeting was conceived of as a ritual
purification by fire in the furnaces of a secret grotto within a forest. (...)The
members sat in triangular lines in a triangular room under three over-hanging
candles symbolizing the three sources of enlightenment in the great firmament
(sun, moon, and northern star).
Nevertheless , the uprising that began in Greece in March 1821, revived hope
for revolution elsewhere, stimulating the romantic imagination with the ideal of
liberating shrines of classical antiquity and appealing even to conservatives as a
crusade of Christian solidarity. Greek independence was finally achieved only after
the great powers installed a conservative monarch; and the entire Greek struggle
became in many ways a safety valve for the revolutionary impulses of the age.
Even conservative monarchs subscribed to the "revolutionary" cause of fighting
the Turkish Sultan.
Using Masonic organizations for revolutionary mobilization through the Friends of
Truth, the students converted the journal The French Aristarchus into a legal outlet
for revolutionary ideas in 1819. The same group attempted to organize a
revolutionary "directorial committee" and a classical conspiratorial web of five-man
cells ("brigades"). Little direction was given, and these brigades often resorted to
uncoordinated violence; but they represented the first large-scale deployment
in France outside of military organizations of this cellular type.
The French students of 1820 introduced the typical modern justification of
revolutionary violence as a necessary defensive measure against the forcible
undermining of their constitutional rights (...) The innumerable mini-revolts
of the French Carbonari were born of the belief that making manifest what
was secret would somehow trigger revolutionary change. There was an
exaggerated faith in the power of a demonstration (manifestation) or
proclamation (manifeste). This faith related directly to the belief that some
new spiritual power was being generated within the secret society. [...]
Revolution was related directly to spiritualism by Barbes, one of the key
figures in the secret revolutionary societies of the 1830s.Robert Owen, who
influenced both Rey and Buonarroti, eventually became a full-time spiritualist.
In this atmosphere, revolutionaries turned to Buonarroti as "an occult power
whose shadowy tentacles extended over... Europe." Buonarroti sought to
use the Carbonari organizations as he had Masonic ones earlier, [...]
Buonarroti's associates formed a triumvirate in eastern Switzerland in April
I820 to recruit twelve men from different countries to act as leaders of the
coming republican revolution and to organize a web of supporting secret
societies among soldiers, craftsmen, and students.[...]
The last echo of the constitutional rebellions came in distant Russia with
the Decembrist revolt late in 1825, in which major themes of the earlier
rebellions in western and southern Europe were played back in reprise.[...]
The Turgenev brothers, the first to form plans for a secret society, (...) followed
the familiar revolutionary pattern of deriving their organizational ideas not
directly from an earlier revolutionary group, but rather from conservative
attacks on a previous secret society. (...) young Russians dreamed of bringing
spiritual rebirth to Europe by consummating Alexander I's marriage of "religion
and liberty." They sought to use Masonic lodges, beginning with the Lodge
Astrea-named for the Goddess of Justice, who had been the last to
leave the Elysian fields before the end of the Golden Age.
In December 1825, the more revolutionary faction of the movement, the so-
called Southern Society, mounted a doomed uprising in the Chernigov Regiment.
The leading theorist of this group, Paul Pestel, was one of the most inventive
revolutionary thinkers of his time anywhere in Europe. He was one of the few to
argue for an authoritarian, centralized revolutionary state that would consciously
create a single nationality and press for egalitarian social reforms. He followed
the Buonarrotian pattern of making extensive use of Masonic lodges and symbols,
and anticipated Buonarroti in calling for an immediate provisional government after
a revolution. [...]
Revolution inside Russia might lead to international war. After Napoleon's experience,
no one would dare invade Russia, so revolution there "will spread safely and
immediately to other countries whose people are even more bent on revolution." [...]
The Decembrists may also have been more closely related to other European
revolutionary movements than has yet been realized. The original Union of Salvation
was formed in 1816 among Russian officers traveling back and forth to France at
precisely the time Rey founded his model Union. Once again, the Russians
developed similar plans for working through Masonic lodges with a secret, three-
stage hierarchy.[...]
Whatever the specific connections, the general fascination of young Russians with
western revolutionary movements-and above all the Carbonari-is undeniable. Russians
had many contacts with Italian revolutionaries, and tried to establish links early in 1819.
[... ]The Carbonari had been the first secret organization to lead a large-scale revolution
in modern Europe. Despite its failure and disintegration, the Carbonari awakened
enthusiasm for a united Italy; and provided a model for others.
THE PERIOD between 1 830 and 1 848 witnessed the most fundamental internal conflict
within the modern revolutionary tradition, that between national revolution and social
revolution (...) Should revolutionaries rely on the emotional appeal of nationalism or the
intellectual appeal of social equality?
As early optimism faded, French revolutionaries began to ask if the fulfilment of their
stalled revolution lay in fraternite or egalite: the building of a grande nation as
Napoleon urged or of a new social communaute as called for by Babeuf. The more
popular idea was - and has generally remained-that of a nation, and of what the
Spaniards were the first to call "national revolution." [...]
The picture of nations rising in arms against foreign rule provided new hope for national
and social revolutionaries alike. But nationalists were far more numerous, and Italians
led the way.[...]
He (Buonarroti) and a younger Frenchman of Italian ancestry, Auguste Blanqui, created
there in the 1830s the modern belief in a coming social revolution. In contrast, Mazzini
set up a series of revolutionary nationalist organizations –Young Italy and Young Europe-
precisely to oppose the "Parisian principle": the dependence of an entire continent on
one French city.[...]
Socially, the new nationalists were almost all displaced people. Whatever their class
status, they had generally lost the sense of structured expectations that traditional
societies had hitherto provided. [...]
The man who did the most to incite the peoples of Europe against their kings was
the Genoese Giuseppe Mazzini. A veteran of the Carbonari... [...]
Mazzini's nationalist International was the first of many attempts throughout the
nineteenth century to draw revolutionary nationalists together in a common struggle
against traditional monarchies. [...]
Indeed, it is well worth pondering the actual, if surprising, way in which opera itself,
this most Italian of art forms, interacted with and even helped to shape-revolutionary
nationalism in Europe generally and Italy in particular.[...]
Opera so far had been written only for the few and rich, but in the future, it must
"awaken and excite" the masses for social transformations- taking advantage of the
large audiences to spread ideas through agitators [...]
A new genre of "rescue operas" glorified "the liberation of foreign peoples or individuals
suffering under absolutism.[...]
“the type of opera all Germans want : a self-contained work of art in which all artistic
elements cooperate, disappear and reemerge to create a new world” [...]
The mature Wagner weaved pagan myth and a seductive new musical idiom into a
unique vehicle of modern German nationalism. [...]
The premiere of this latter work in Milan on March 9, 1842, brought Giuseppe Verdi
into the center of the real-life drama of Italian unification. Verdi, whose very name
was to become an acronym for Italian nationalism
The national song, of course, had its accompanying flag. In some cases, the song was
about the flag (the Romanian "Tricolor," "The Star Spangled Banner"). In some, it was
simply identified with a banner: La Marseillaise with the tricolor, which became the
official flag of France after 1830.
To the fourteen-year-old Eugene Pottier, the future author of the "Internationale," the
tricolor was "the signal of happiness" when first raised over Paris in July 1830. Each
nation suddenly seemed to feel the need for some such signal. A true nation was now
thought to require a tricolor-freed of all crosses, crowns, and heraldic reminders. [...]
the idea of one unifying color was most fully developed by social revolutionaries in their
search for a banner to rival the tricolors of national revolutionaries. [...]
The revolt of I846 in Cracow inspired the Polish Democratic Society to plan rapidly
(if vainly) for a general levee en masse of the entire Polish peasantry. The Polish
uprising inspired even the British working class, and provided the first hint of the
national uprisings that were to become epidemic in I848.[...]
It was in 1794, as the Terror reached its peak in Paris, that the modern theory of
revolutionary violence began to emerge in places distant from that capital. [...]
The wounded leader of the defeated Polish uprising, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, saw
the liberation of Poland opening the "epoch of general pacification" to end all
human conflict. In exile, he developed the characteristic belief that revolutionary
violence would end all other violence. [...]
He (Bianco) called for a nationwide network of guerrilla bands that would avoid
direct combat but raid armories , seek camouflage, and deny the occupying
Hapsburgs any local sustenance. [...]
The secret of success for a war of peoples rather than kings lay in the political and
moral mobilization of the entire country. Arguing implicitly against the dominance of
Parisian thinking in the revolutionary tradition, Bianco contended that the
possession of a major-or even a capital-city is not important in the early stages of a
national insurrection.[...]
The insurrectionary movement was thus seen as a kind of rural-based moral revival
of the nation.
The rival tradition of social revolution, as we have said, was less successful than that
of national revolution throughout the I830-48 period. Social revolutionary leaders
were usually lonely emigre intellectuals divorced from the masses. [...]
There were two main stages in the birth of a social revolutionary tradition, that is, in
the transition from the republican conspiracies of the early twenties to the Marxist
Communism of the late forties. First came the perfection of the idea of revolutionary
dictatorship by Buonarroti in his last decade from 1828 to 1837. During this period,
the revived Babeuvist ideal of equality was linked with the proletarian class struggle
by some of Buonarroti's followers... [...]
The second phase, lasting from the late 1830s to 1848, was dominated by emigres,
who both internationalized the impulse towards social revolution and linked it with
the working class. This progression of the social revolutionaries from conspiracy to
ideology took place in Paris, London, Brussels, and Geneva. In these cities, relatively
free expression was possible, and the critical intellect was forced to confront the
reality of a new industrial order.[...]
(...) Babeuf: The Conspiracy for Equality. It provided at last both an ancestry and a
model for egalitarian revolution by publicizing the all-but-forgotten Babeuvists. [...]
The failure of all revolutions since 1789 had, in Buonarroti's view, been caused by
a lack of strong leaders prepared in advance to give power to "a revolutionary
government of sages."
Buonarroti urged that the revolutionary regime not submit itself to popular elections
while initial revolutionary changes were being effected; but fulfill three functions
instead: (I) "direct all the force of the nation against internal and external enemies,"
(2) "create and establish the institutions through which the people will be
imperceptibly led really to exercise sovereignty," and (3) "prepare the popular
Constitution which should complete and close the revolution." [...]
Buonarroti's History was a model for modern revolutionary polemics in its
Manichean simplification of a complex story into a clear, cosmic struggle of evil
against good: "egoism" vs. "equality." He immediately relegated to the camp of
egoism ("among the parties... there is one on which the wise man should rivet his
gaze"; and this party is presented as a kind of ultimate Masonic order, "the sincere
friends of equality.") [...]
Blanqui developed not only a theory of social revolution based on class conflict, but
also the rationale for leadership by an intellectual elite. Blanqui insisted that mental
intelligence and physical labor were interdependent needs for a successful revolution.
[...] The Outlaws were the first international organization of social revolutionaries.[...]
NATIONAL REVOLUTIONARIES had offered the romantic imagination a new sense
of fraternity. Social revolutionaries had provided the early industrial era with a new call
for equality. But there were still those concerned primarily with liberty: the third part of
the revolutionary Trinity.[...]
Marquis de Lafayette - a dashing freedom fighter in America, the first ambassador to
the United States, and perhaps the most lionized foreign visitor to early America on
his triumphal return in 1824-25-was to prove as much a political failure in France as he
had been a success in America. His tolerant deism, his belief in natural rights and
constitutional propriety, which had earned him so much admiration in America, were
to win more enemies than friends in France.
Despite secure social roots in the aristocracy and ample personal wealth, Lafayette
believed that there were revolutions yet to be made. But they were to be limited,
constitutional revolutions designed to initiate popular sovereignty and release individual
initiative. [...]
He presented himself as both the successor to and the antithesis of "the false liberation
of Napoleon." [...]
His aristocratic remoteness from direct participation in conspiracy made him even more
invulnerable as a hero when the conspiracies failed. [...]
Like his friend Thomas Jefferson, Lafayette continued to believe in renewal through
perpetual re-examination and periodic revolution. But whereas Jeffersonians envisaged
such revolutions as taking place within the system, the young French radicals who
looked to Lafayette during the restoration were not so sure. Lafayette always viewed
himself as working through the system even when cooperating with clandestine
revolutionary groups. Like many an aging reformer in later times, he thought he could
elevate and educate the young extremists- and perhaps also recover something of
his own youth amidst an army of adonis-liberators.
(In 1833) he (Lafayette) was killed off as a revolutionary symbol with the publication
of Political Life of Lafayette, written by Buonarroti (...) (according to Buonarroti) He
(Lafayette) was an example of what to avoid- a false friend being more dangerous
than a declared enemy. [...]
Bonneville had, already in the early 1790s, anticipated these new attacks on
Lafayette by characterizing him as a "temporisateur; a double personality," who,
being "nothing in either one party or the other, will be doubly nothing." [...]
Lafayette was said to espouse "egoism" rather than "equality" because of his
infatuation with the American rather than the French Revolution. America did not
have a real revolution because of "the egoistic character of its leaders" who did
not include "a single proletarian" [...]
Perhaps no role is more difficult to play in modern times than that of the moderate
revolutionary: the man who honestly shares both the radical hope for a new start
and the conservative concern for older values and continuity. [...]
His ideal was always liberty, rather than equality and fraternity. He linked the old
virtues of enlightened rationality with the new techniques of constitutional guarantee
and parliamentary debate. [...]
With his death in 1834, the revolutionary tradition lost its major surviving link with the
aristocratic Enlightenment. As the Masonic enconium at his funeral put it: “the death
of Napoleon was the extinction of a volcano; the death of Lafayette was the setting
of the sun”. [...]
The one successful revolution in Europe between 1830 and 1848 occurred in
Switzerland. In the space of a few years, the Swiss moved from semi-feudal division
under Hapsburg dominance into a federal republic with a bicameral legislature closely
approximating the United States. The most important revolutionary leader was James
Fazy (...) Fazy's own interest in political journalism led him to write a criticism of the
Bank of France. [...]
Fazy's imagination was fired by long conversations about the American
experience with Lafayette.[...]
announcing in 1831 his belief that only something like the "federal system of the
USA" would "fulfill the constitutional needs of Switzerland." Having sheltered
Buonarroti in the early 1820s his household became the gathering place of
Mazzini and other nationalist revolutionaries in the early 1830s. [...]
From radical journalism , he turned to radical politics in the late 1830s,
producing in 1837 the first draft of an American-type, federal constitution similar
to that finally adopted by Switzerland a decade later. [...]
He broke sharply with Buonarroti's Swiss followers when they tried to transform
Young Europe into an organ of social rather than political revolution. [...]
Ideologically, he articulated as well as anyone what could be described as the
progressive, evolutionary alternative to both revolution and reaction.
America provided Europe with no important revolutionary leadership, ideology,
or organization.[...]
The fact of a successful past revolution and a measure of popular representation
does not altogether explain why Switzerland, England, and America proved so
immune to the formation of indigenous new revolutionary organizations or
ideologies. The central example of France proves that a relatively successful
revolution and a measure of suffrage were not necessarily an antidote to the
development of a professional revolutionary tradition . France, the site of
victorious "bourgeois" revolutions in both 1789 and 1830, became the
principal breeding grounds for fresh revolutionary ideas and organizations.
[...]The key difference appears to lie in two common features of the way in
which change and opposition developed in England, America, and
Switzerland. These were nations that, first of all, had previously experienced
and legitimized ideological opposition to medieval Catholicism. They were,
in short, nations in which Protestantism was, if not the dominant creed as in
America, at least a venerable and coequal one as in Switzerland. Secondly,
each of these nations in different ways had found ways to institutionalize
political opposition through an effective system of parties. [...]
The institutionalization of ideological and political opposition was in some
sense interrelated with-and expressive of- a peculiar type of dynamic and
exploitative economic development taking place in all three countries. [...]
Much experience in nineteenth-century Europe supports the argument
that Protestantism and parliamentarianism provided a kind of alternative
equivalent to revolution. The countries perhaps most immune in all Europe
to native revolutionary movements were the totally Protestant nations of
Scandinavia, which even developed an elastic, simultaneous tolerance for
welfare socialism and monarchy. The low countries also provide a validating
case. Although Holland had experienced an ideological revolution against
Spain in the late sixteenth century, a political one in the late eighteenth, and
a revolution for independence in 1830, the low countries were tranquil,
thereafter, accommodating into the twentieth century both a monarch and
a high degree of social controls. All of this was accomplished incrementally
with tolerance for legal opposition and vocal dissent. [...]
America essentially realized in practice the reformist ideas of the
Enlightenment through a process of evolution. Continental Europe remained
throughout the nineteenth century more authoritarian politically than the
British Empire had been under George III in the eighteenth century. Thus,
Europeans continued to develop in theory the more revolutionary, Illuminist
concept of realizing total enlightenment through a coming upheaval.[...]
THE RISE of revolutionary movements in the first half of the nineteenth
century was directly related to the development of a new class of intellectuals
in continental Europe. This new class created original systems of thought
which may be called ideologies, and eventually developed a new sense of
identity ( and a term to describe themselves ) as an "intelligentsia." [...]
Ideologies are in many ways a modern form of religion [...]
two systems (made by Saint-Simon and Hegel) provided the principal
sources of modern revolutionary ideology.[...]
The crucial link in the apostolic succession from the Babeuf Conspiracy to the
birth of ideology under Saint-Simon is provided by a minor revolutionary
playwright and editor, Jacques Rigomer-Bazin, with whom Saint-Simon lived in
Paris at several important points during this decade. Bazin may have been linked
with Bonneville's Social Circle and was almost certainly connected to the Babeuf
Conspiracy while still working as a revolutionary journalist in provincial Le Mans
[...] Bazin was living with Saint-Simon at the time of his arrest; and the latter
clearly borrowed extensively from Bazin in his writings of this period. His Letter
of an Inhabitant of Geneva (1802-3) called for twenty-one men of genius to open
a subscription before the tomb of Newton and begin the scientific reorganization
of society. His next work of 1 804 adopted the very title of Bazin's confiscated
work, adding to Bazin's previous call for a scientific elite an idea shortly to be
developed more fully by Bazin : the artist should be the moralist of the new
scientific era; and a new type of writer, the litterateur, its propagandist. [...]
Bazin clearly provided in this formative period both a personal and an
ideological inspiration for Saint-Simon's vision of an elite of intellectuals
transforming not just politics, but all of human society and culture
Following the invocation in his final work, The New Christianity, Saint-Simon's
disciples created a fantastic new secular religion with global perspectives that
foreshadowed many aspects of twentieth-century thought. [...]
Having spent eleven months in prison during the Reign of Terror, expecting
death at any moment, Saint-Simon had a deep fear of revolution. (...) Thus,
ironically, this aristocrat of the ancient regime seeking to provide (in the words
of one of his titles ) the means for bringing an end to the revolution, ended up
popularizing the most revolutionary of all modern ideas: there can be a
science of human relations. [...]
In a sense, Saint-Simon was only reviving the Enlightenment vision of humanity
advancing through three successive stages to a scientific ordering of life (in
Turgot's Discourse on Universal History of 1760); and of universal progress
towards rational order (in Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the
Progress of the Human Mind, written in hiding shortly before his death in 1794).
[...] Napoleon, who had helped inspire the quest for a science of man, also began
the process of driving it into social revolutionary paths. Believing that the scientific
method should be applied to the body of society as well as to the individual body,
Saint-Simon proceeded to analyze society in terms of its physiological components:
classes. [...]
he envisaged an end to revolution through a new religion with a single commandment:
"All men must work." (...) Saint-Simon was the prophet of meritocracy [...]
Saint-Simon turned to one last force for revolutionary support in his last years,1824-25:
"the most numerous and poorest class." He addressed to the self-proclaimed spiritual
leaders of the "holy alliance" his final plea for a "New Christianity" of morality without
metaphysics, technology without theology. [...]
Saint-Simon was a truly seminal intellectual force: a father of socialism as well as
sociology, and a John the Baptist of revolutionary ideology [...]
Political authority was to be replaced by social authority in his technocratic
utopia. [...]
Saint-Simon's final call for a new religion represented the culmination of the ideologiste
attempt to supplant all religion by absorbing it into a progressive scheme of secular
evolution.[...]
Saint-Simon viewed his New Christianity as just such a necessity for the masses. His
death left it unclear whether this faith was designed to provide the moral basis for the
new social order or merely an interim faith until the masses were educated to accept
a totally scientistic system.
the greatest Saint-Simonian influence lay within France, first of all ON THE POSITIVIST
TRADITION DEVELOPED BY HIS FRIEND AND SOMETIME PUPIL AUGUSTE COMTE.[...]
More important than Saint-Simon's influence on sociology was his impact on socialism.
His followers in the 1830s first gave widespread use (...) to the word "socialism," [...]
Social revolutionary Saint-Simonianism was begun by two young students from the
Ecole Polytechnique: Olinde Rodrigues, the son of a Jewish banker from Bordeaux,
and his young mathematics student, who had fought for Napoleon in the Hundred
Days and spent 1821 -23 in St. Petersburg, Barthelemy Prosper Enfantin. [...]
Enfantin in his last work, La Vie eternelle. He lifted the older Saint-Simonian idea of
transmigration (palin-genesis) of souls to its highest level, prophesying both the
technological transformation of the earth and the biological creation of a new,
androgynous humanity. [...]
God himself was feminine as well as masculine, drawing people in to reunion with
nature (and a share of divinity) by a kind of universal libido [...]
The Saint-Simonians who went east in 1833 in search of a "feminine messiah" [...]
Physical labor wedded a masculine humanity with a feminine earth [...]
The Saint-Simonians viewed the c ouple-pretre of man and woman as the new
social microcosm, replacing the atomized individual, and they extended sexual
imagery to the macrocosm, the entire world. [...]
The "Young" or "Left" Hegelians transformed the vague historicism of Saint-
Simonians and others into hard revolutionary conviction. [...]
Saint-Simon provided a vision of material paradise: Hegel, a method for
attaining it. [...]
Herzen wrote from exile in Vladimir in July 1839 that he was contemplating a
dissertation on "How is our century a link between the past and the future ?"
when he came upon the radical treatise of a Polish Hegelian who answered
his question with a "philosophy of action." [...]
The new university at Berlin was the intellectual heart of the Prussian revival
after Prussia's humiliation by Napoleon. Hegel was central to its intellectual
life not only as professor of philosophy from 1818 until his death in 1831, but
for many years thereafter. Founded in 1 809, the University of Berlin was in
many ways the first modern university-urban, research-oriented, state-
supported, free from traditional religious controls.[...]
For it was a creation of the state, pledged to train a new Prussian elite. [...]
Marxist intellectuals continue to insist on the revolutionary impact of Hegel:
as the first major thinker to dwell on both the Industrial and the French
Revolutions, as a key influence on Lenin as well as on Marx. [...]
He had begun as a student of theology, in search of a theodicy, a
justification of the ways of God to man; he ended up instead creating a new
God: the "World Spirit." [...]
Hegel found (...) Eternal contemplation of the self was, he discovered, the
old idea of hell (...) The world of the spirit ( or mind, the German Geist
meaning both ) provided a way out, because the mind finds satisfaction in its
own activity. Charting the life of the spirit-the "phenomenology of mind" as he
called it- appeared as a kind of compensation for defeat in battle. Hegel's
"science of consciousness" was seen as the controlling force of the universe
(...) Thesis generated antithesis and was resolved in a higher synthesis
following the pattem of thought itself. Like history thought moved upward through
such tensions toward the pure life of the spirit-the old Greek ideal of
contemplating contemplation. [...]
Hegel gave a compelling urgency to knowledge about how history worked. All
truth was realized in history, and any part of reality was intelligible only in historical
context. Hegel's fragmentary attempts to decode the historical process inspired a
bewildering variety of movements. [...]
the most important aspect of Hegel's immense influence was that which he exercised
on the so-called Young or Left Hegelians. This new generation of radicals drew from
his legacy a belief in the dialectical inevitability and revolutionary direction of history.[...]
Hegel no more than Saint-Simon intended to start a new revolution; he meant only to
resolve the conflicts of the old. But the sedentary Berlin professor with his snuff box and
haute bourgeois style of life hatched the most revolutionary idea of all: the dialectical
method. By suggesting that history like thought proceeds progressively through
contradiction and conflict [...]
Since the essential content of history was thought, the key elements in its dynamic
development were ideas. [...]
History was transforming abstract ideas into concrete form [...]
Cieszkowski, too, moved from ideology to cosmology in order to sustain an image of
worldwide social transformation. (...)In his enormous, unfinished work of the I840s,
Our Father, he argued that the Kingdom was literally about to come "on earth as it is
in heaven." A reintegrated "organic humanity" was to usher in a new age of "the Holy
Spirit" in which all national identities would disappear before the Central Government
Of Mankind, the Universal International Tribunal, and the Universal Council of the
Peoples [...]
In 1843, B . F. Trentowski invented the word "cybernetics" to describe the new form of
rational social technology which he believed would transform the human condition. In
his neglected work, The Relationship of Philosophy to Cybernetics; or the art of ruling
nations, he also invented the word "intelligentsia." In a passage challenging the
leadership of the nationalist poet Adam Mickiewicz, Trentowski called him out of touch
with "the new generation and the new spirit," [...]
Ogarev, studying in Germany, pointed the way with his declaration that "not all that is
real is rational, but all that is rational should become real. The philosophy of action is
at present the best trend . . . a theory according to which irrational reality changes into
a rational one. [...]
None of the leading Young Hegelians had seriously suffered at the hands of the
European authorities; and most of them (including Marx) appear never to have even
been inside a factory. Theirs was a mental and spiritual revolt-born of new vision rather
than old grievances. They spoke from exile-Russians in Berlin or Paris, Prussians in
Geneva or Brussels, Poles everywhere . They spoke with many tongues – but always
in the language of prophecy. Just as Christian prophets had identified oppressive rulers
with the Antichrist in order to heighten expectations of deliverance by the True Christ,
so the Young Hegelian prophets now proclaimed [...]
Bakunin proclaimed late in 1842 that "the joy of destruction is a creative joy"; and his
friend Proudhon, then under Hegel's influence, began his major work of the mid-1840s
with the motto: "I destroy in order to build." [...]
Early in 1848, a wave of revolutions struck Europe. It reached further and lasted longer
than that of 1830. But it failed everywhere [...]
When the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe collapsed in Paris late in February,
French approval seemed assured for national revolt elsewhere. (...) Even before the
new French government had acquired political form, it justified itself "by natural right
and by national right," appealing to the nations rather than the sovereigns of Europe.
[...] the German-speaking world brought to center stage the second revolutionary
doctrine of the romantic era: liberalism. [...]
Socialism along with communism and other slogans of social revolution came to
dominate the European imagination, particularly after open class warfare bloodied the
streets of Paris in June 1848.
Proletarian unrest following the depression of 1847 had helped precipitate the original
February Revolution. [...]
The counter-revolutionary resurgence throughout Europe in 1 849-50 benefited not just
from the inexperience of intellectuals as political leaders.[...]
German liberals were unnerved by the rise of a workers' movement, and the specter of
communism that this movement raised helped turn older liberals into new conservatives.
Napoleon III returned the Pantheon to the archbishop of Paris, who renamed it (for the
third time) the Church of Saint Genevieve-thus dooming to oblivion a unique artistic effort
to express the general faith underlying all the ism's. For more than three years, a
dedicated team of revolutionary painters under Paul Chenavard had been working on a
vast set of designs to redecorate the Pantheon. It was perhaps the most ideologically
ambitious artistic project of the 1848-51 era-and a worthy reprise of those first efforts
after the death of Mirabeau in 1791 to turn the church into a secular shrine for great
men which might inspire revolutionaries to "make the world into a Pantheon." [...]
The central element in Chenavard's revolutionary iconography was a vast mural in
heroic classical style representing real and mythical figures in a circular panorama of
progressive "palingenesis" (continuous rebirth) leading towards universal
brotherhood among androgynous supermen. [...]
MORE THAN any other movement within the revolutionary tradition, communism was
born with its name. When the word first appeared publicly in 1840, it spread throughout
the continent with a speed altogether unprecedented in the history of such verbal
epidemics. Unlike earlier revolutionary labels, communism was a new word, associated
from the beginning with a new concept. [...]
Rapid dissemination of the term throughout Europe was made possible by accelerated
means of communication (mail service regularized by means of the steamboat and steam
engine, and the first telegraphy). Those who spread the word were a small group of young
journalists whose sole occupation was verbal craftsmanship. Unlike the operatic voices of
romantic nationalism, social revolutionaries communicated most naturally in printed prose-
the social novel, the critical review, the polemic pamphlet. Out of a veritable ocean of such
prose, the word communism emerged as a telegraphic label for an essentially verbal vision.
The idea, first popularized in the pages of a novel (Cabet's Voyage to Icaria ), was refined
and finally made manifest by Marx on the eve of revolution in 1848. [...]
The word communism spread before there were any communists. Indeed, the term was
most prominently and insistently used by conservative opponents- demonstrating once
again the symbiosis between the fears of one extreme and the hopes of the other. [...]
The first new isms to create their own new ists were socialism and communism. These
verbal talismans appeared with timetable punctuality at the beginning of the 1830s and
1840s respectively. But, unlike the liberalism of the 1820s, socialism and communism
produced self-proclaimed socialists and communists. [...]
it is worth asking why the far more numerous and successful national revolutionaries
of the same period produced no comparable verbal in novations. Nationalisme, a word
coined in Barruel's widely read treatise of 1797, was rarely used by subsequent national
revolutionaries, and does not appear in any major European lexicon until the Larousse
of 1874 [...]
Social revolutionaries (...) needed visibility visibility, which could be attained even through
negative publicity. This, and a slogan that inspired outrage in the nonrevolutionary, mass
press, could be profoundly useful in attracting fresh attention to their ideal of radical social
change.
The secret "Society of Flowers" of I836-38 has been called "the first Communist society"
[...] Likewise in Paris, after the failure of the Blanquist insurrection in May 1839, a small
and exclusively working-class organization was founded, the Society of Workers .[...]
Communism as a political ideal and verbal talisman originated, however, not among
workers but among intellectuals who provided leadership through smaller groups that
arose within or out of these larger organizations. [...]
Laponneraye developed (...) a class-oriented view of the French Revolution and a
totalistic conception of popular education. He provided a new view of the one historical
event that had meaning for even the most illiterate worker, that is, the French Revolution.
He helped create a mythic view which has dominated subsequent communist
historiography: the simultaneous glorification of both the political leadership of
Robespierre and the socio-economic aspirations of the Parisian proletariat. These
two elements had in fact often been in conflict, but they were unified retroactively in
order to validate Laponneraye's own desire to provide elite leadership for proletarian
power. [...]
But he (Laponneraye) went further, suggesting that the mission of the contemporary
revolutionary was to combine Robespierre with Babeuf: authoritarian means with
egalitarian ends. [...]
For him (Laponneraye) education was a means not just of spreading knowledge, but
also of building a new type of human being "in the midst of a society that has turned
gangrenous with egoism and corruption." This new type of education sought "the
annihilation of egoism" within man and the destruction within society of "this moral
anarchy in which intelligences are drowned." [...]
Dezamy He imbued a tempestuous outpouring of pamphlets with an intensified
Belief in universalism and atheism, the antitheses of the dominant nationalism
and religiosity of the age. [...]
Dezamy developed a polemic style that was qualitatively different from previous
petty wrangling over the details of utopias or the motives of personalities. He
stressed the need to discipline intellect for the task of revolution. Leaders of the
coming revolution would be neither "believers" (croyants) in any religion nor
the "wise men" (savants) to whom even Buonarroti had looked, but a new type of
engaged intellectual: the "knowing ones" (sachants) for whom "the aim of
philosophy ... is to conduct men to happiness... by science." [...]
Dezamy sought to expunge religiosity from the communist label [...]
Dezamy revealed once again the recurring impulse of the revolutionary mentality
for radical simplification . In the society of the future there would be one global
congres humanitaire, a single language (preferably a neutral, dead language like
Latin), and a single form of service as "industrial athletes," [...]
The logic of radical simplicity led Dezamy to insist that just as communism was
"unitary," its victory would be universal. "Finished Communism" would exist only
in a "universal country” (...) There would be no "new holy alliance against the first
government embracing Communism ," because its ideological appeal would spread
rapidly and create "the universal community." (...) "Communitarian principles"
contained "the solution to all problems." [...]
Dezamy's last three major works argued in the course of 1845-46 for a materialist and
atheist worldview to supplant Catholicism for "the organization of universal well-being."
[...] For Dezamy-as for his admirer Karl Marx-the atheism of his mature years was not
"just an historical or biographical accident," but "an essential premise of his whole theory."
Communism was transnational as well as antinationalist. [...]
England had become important in the repressive atmosphere of the late 183os as a
secure place for revolutionary emigres to meet each other and publish freely. [...]
Cabet spent most of the 1830s in exile in England, where he first published clandestinely
in 1839, his enormously influential Voyage to Icaria. [...]
His (Owen’s) Association of All Classes of All Nations, founded in 1835, was "the first
organized socialist movement in England" [...]
Barmby first popularized the term communism in England {...} upon arrival in Paris,
Barmby was soon caught up in a whirl of Fourierist activities including socialist
discussion groups, Fourierist concerts, and lectures on phrenology and "societarian
science" in "community coffee houses." [...]
faith of our time. Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed
and intense than were the Christians or Muslims of an earlier era.
What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge
from the forcible overthrow of traditional authority.
The revolutionary faith was shaped not so much by the critical rationalism
of the French Enlightenment ( as is generally believed ) as
by the occultism and proto-romanticism of Germany.
The heart of revolutionary faith, like any faith, is fire : ordinary material
transformed into extraordinary form, quantities of warmth suddenly
changing the quality of substance.
some European aristocrats transferred their lighted candles from
Christian altars to Masonic lodges. The flame of occult alchemists,
which had promised to turn dross into gold, reappeared at the center of
new "circles" seeking to recreate a golden age : Bavarian Illuminists
conspiring against the Jesuits, French Philadelphians against Napoleon,
Italian charcoal burners against the Hapsburgs.
With a match one has no need of a lever; one does not lift up the world,
one burns it.
A recurrent mythic model for revolutionaries... - was Prometheus, who stole
fire from the gods for the use of mankind. The Promethean faith of
revolutionaries resembled in many respects the general modern belief
that science would lead men out of darkness into light.
The ideal was not the balanced complexity of the new American
federation, but the occult simplicity of its great seal : an all-seeing eye
atop a pyramid over the words Novus Ordo Seclorum .
"Communism," the label Lenin finally adopted,
was invented not by the great Rousseau, but by a Rousseau du ruisseau
(Rousseau of the gutter) : the indulgent fetishist and nocturnal streetwalker
in prerevolutionary Paris, Restif de la Bretonne.
Revolutionaries also originated other key phrases used
by nonrevolutionary social theorists in our own century : cybernetics, intelligentsia.
Even speculation about "the year 2ooo" began not with the
futurology of the I960’s, but with a dramatic work written in the 1780’s
by the same figure who invented the word communist."
Paris overthrew the mightiest monarchy in Christendom in 1 789-92,
triggered new waves of revolution in 1 830 and 1848, and forged a new
model for social revolution in the Paris Commune of 1 8 7 1 . By then, there
had arisen in St. Petersburg a new type of revolutionary who was to
convulse the largest land empire in the world with terror in the late
nineteenth century and insurrection in the early twentieth. Three Russian
revolutions-in 1905, March 1 9 1 7 , and November 1 9 1 7-brought
the revolutionary tradition out of the wilderness and into power.
The term [revolution] derives from the Latin substantive revolutio,
which was unknown in classical Latin but was used in the early Middle
Ages by St. Augustine and other Christian writers . Translated into
Italian as rivoluzione in the early Renaissance and then into French
and English as revolution, the term initially meant the return of a
moving object to its place of origin-particularly the movement of
celestial bodies around the earth.
"revolutionary" change was still generally seen as a return to an
earlier, temporarily violated norm : a re-volution back to a more natural
order.
Frederick generally used the word "revolution" in the old sense of revolving
back to where nations had been before . But he also began the
trend among German thinkers of applying the word to spiritual as well
as political change.
[...]
Frederick: “a revolution so great and so singular, which changed almost the entire
System of Europe, deserves to be examined with Philosophical eyes”
Later Germans, such as Hegel and Marx were, of course, to use just
such "philosophical eyes"...
[...]
He created in Prussia a sense of new Promethean possibilities
[...]
Radical B avarian Illuminists
urged in the early 1 780s that his secularizing reforms be carried even
further through an "imminent revolution of the human mind."
Thus Germany-not France- gave birth to the sweeping, modern idea
of revolution as a secular upheaval more universal in reach and more
transforming in scope than any purely political change. This concept
was transported to Paris by Count Mirabeau, a former French ambassador
in Berlin ; it helped him to become the leading figure in the early
events of the French Revolution in 1 789. His study of Frederick the
Great in 1 788 had proclaimed Prussia the likely site of a coming
revolution and the German Illuminists its probable leaders.
Mirabeau popularized the Illuminist
term "revolution of the mind," introduced the phrase "great revolution,"
and apparently invented the words "revolutionary," "counterrevolution,"
and "counter-revolutionary."
[...]
He [Mirabeau] subsequently called the National Assembly "the inviolable
priesthood of national policy," the Declaration of the Rights of
Man "a political gospel," and the Constitution of 1791 a new religion "for
which the people are ready to die ."
[...]
French Revolution (...) occurred [in 1789] within a period of exactly
five months-between May 5,... and October 5.
Revolutionary France formally proclaimed a republic in August 1 792...
King Louis XVI was publicly guillotined in January 1 793.
[...]
National Assembly [split] into the original "right" and "left.
The subsequent equation of the left with virtue dramatized
revolutionary defiance of Christian tradition , which had always
represented those on the right hand of God as s aved and
those on the left as damned.
[...]
AS PARIS overthrew the old regime, its citizens felt an almost desperate
need for some new source of authority.
[...]
Frenchmen melded many estates into one state; discarded innumerable
titles for the uniform "citizen," "brother," and "tu" ;
[...]
The appearance of conspiracies within
Napoleon's armies at the height of his power revealed an unsatisfied
revolutionary thirst for something more than pure power.
Violence was part of what revolutionaries sought- and was in many
ways their ultimate form of radical simplification. A thousand hopes
and hatreds could be compressed into a single act of blood ritual, transforming
philosophers into revolutionaries.(...) violence was at first mainly discussed by
reactionary opponents , who s aw the revolutionaries preempting the promise
of ancient religions to provide salut par le sang [a salvation by blood?].
[...]
Revolutionary violence
has been best described metaphorically as a volcanic eruption or the
birth pain of a new order. Because revolutionaries always believe their
violence will end all violence, it might also be described as the sonic
boom at which controls must be reversed, the vortex of a whirlpool
in which a helplessly descending object m ay suddenly be hurled up to
freedom.
Yet the same lava that was t o destroy a decadent Pompeii was also t o
fertilize a new Eden. (...) It begins in the cafes of the Palais-Royal and leads on to the
neglected figure of Nicholas Bonneville.
[...]
Nowhere-the literal meaning of Utopia-first became somewhere in
the Palais-Royal. (...) reform moved through revolt to revolution.
[...]
The palace was transformed into an enclosed complex of galleries, exhibition
halls, and entertainment centers in the early 1780s - and was
opened to the public by the reform-minded Philip of Orleans. His avarice
rapidly converted it into a profitable center of pleasure where "all
desires can be gratified as soon as conceived."
[...]
July I2 , I 789, when Camille Desmoulins climbed up on a table and
cried Aux armes [weapons]! to the milling crowd. He was suggesting
a collective Parisian response to the news that had just come from
Versailles about the king's dismissal of Necker. Within half an hour
of his speech, the crowd began coursing out onto the streets carrying
busts of Necker and the Duke of Orleans.
Royal ownership assured immunity from arrest within the PalaisRoyal;
[...]
September 1 5 , 1 792, Philip of Orleans presented himself to the new communal
Government of Paris with a request to be renamed Egalite, and to have the garden
of the Palais called the "garden of equality." He paid tribute to his experience as a
Freemason for providing him with a "sort of image of equality,"
[...]
When Philip's son, the future King Louis Philippe, defected to the counter-
Revolutionary camp together with General Charles Franc;ois Dumouriez
in the early spring, Philippe-Egalite was arrested-and eventually guillotined
on November 6, 1 793.
[...]
The Cafe du Caveau was a gathering place for
the Girondists who prepared the demonstrations of August 1 0 , 1 792,
that overthrew the monarchy and established the First Republic. The
Cafe It alien was an assembly point for the more radical J acobins who
eventually occupied the National Assembly and established the revolutionary
dictatorship in the early summer of 1 793.
But the Jacobins operated mainly outside the Palais, deriving the name
for their n ationwide organization from the Jacobin monastery where
the Parisian leaders first met. The Jacobin politicians were deeply suspicious
of the Palais-Royal because of its obvious lack of discipline
and at the same time out of contrary fear that it might ultimately fall
subject to the discipline of a potential claimant to the throne : Philip
of Orleans. (...)Thus, during the n ationalistic
mobilization of 1 793, when all Paris became a theater of
political conflict, the J acobin dictatorship of Robespierre curtailed the
freedom of the Palais-Royal.
[...]
But why was the Palais-Royal able to mobilize mass emotions so successfully
during the early years before full state power and military
emergency could be invoked against it ? The truth seems to be that the
cafes provided not just a protected place for political meetings, but also
the intoxicating ambiance of an earthly utopia.
[...]
illusion and fantasy mixed with material gratification and made the ideal
of total secular happiness seem credible as well as desirable. Hedonistic
awakening was combined with political and intellectual discussion in an
atmosphere of social equality and directness of communication that had
been unknown among the aristocratic conventions of the old regime.
The Abbe Sieyes, a denizen of the Palais-Royal and a leading voice
of the Third Estate in 1 789, suggested that the Fourth Estate of journalism
may have been even more important than the Third:
The printing press has changed the fate of Europe ; it will change the
fate of the world . . . .
The press is for the immense spaces of today what the voice of the orator
was on the public square in Athens and Rome.
The Fourth Estate in many ways replaced the First, the Church. In
revolutionary France journalism rapidly arrogated to itself the Church's
former role as the propagator of values, models, and symbols for society
at large.
[...]
ideological revolutionaries depended heavily on literate priests and seminarians becoming
revolution ary journalists. Like church-state relations in an e arlier
era, the relations between the journalists and the politicians of
revolution involved both deep interdependence and periodic conflict.
[...] Hebert [a journalist] had found the secret of arousing the animal instincts of
the mob through the power of the printed page.
[...]
The first issue called La Bouche "a different, superior power," a
"fourth power" 68- a power outside and above the three branches of
government that the American Revolution had taught European reformers
to admire . This "superior power" had a right and obligation
to conduct censorship and denunciation in defence of the revolution. Its
mission was "universal surveillance" on behalf of that "multitude of
good citizens who are not yet enlightened enough to know what they
desire."
[...]
Literate reformers (...) recognized that the new journalists had found
the secret of arousing the masses: “The people, burdened with their
daily work, have neither the ability, time, nor desire to read. This enormous
mass of people could never have been led into the terrible movement of
these past three years by metaphysical, philosophical, or eloquent works.
Other levels were needed... not books, but words: liberty, tyranny, despotism..”
[...]
If words ruled the world, ultimate power could be thought to inhere
in the compilation of the ultimate dictionary.(...) The "universal" language each
sought to create was the language of aspiration in the city both loved,
and of imagination in the section they knew best.
Restif attempted to compile a Glossographe for a new universal language
that would free French from being merely "a dialect of Latin."
Many revolutionary leaders had been trained in rhetoric by the Jesuits
and in oratory as prosecuting lawyers or preaching curates.
the flame of philosophy . . . has been lit and dominates Europe : the
wind of despotism in curbing the flame can only stir it up and billow it into
larger and brighter bursts.
The ultimate keeper of this flame was the most secret inner group
within the Palais-Royal : Bonneville's "Social Circle ."
This organization combined the Masonic ideal of a purified inner circle with the Rousseauian
ideal of a social, and not merely a political, contract.
The Universal Confederation of the Friends of Truth represented one
of the first efforts of a small circle of intellectuals systematically to
propagate radical social ideas to a m ass audience. The Confederation
advocated a grande communion sociale that would provide social benefits,
universal, progressive taxation, and the extension of civic equality...
"Of the Paris political clubs the Cercle Social was the first to advocate
feminism."
In his [Bonneville’s] major work for the Universal Confederation of the Friends of
Truth, Bonneville saw social justice radiating out from "the center of the social
circle," and truth generating the "electricity" of virtuous conduct. He provides
one of the first rationalizations for the rule of an intellectual elite: "In intellectual
organization, truth is the center to which all should gravitate ." The very dedication
to Truth, however , may require the tactical concealment of some truths... not out of
gratuitous cruelty, but in order to secure little by little, universally, the innumerable
steps that must be taken on our ladder.
[...]
Bonneville's concept of rule by "superior intelligences" represents the first
revolutionary equation of abstract intelligence with concrete people claiming
political authority. Thus, Bonneville launched the idea of an inner intellectual
"circle" as the controlling unit of a secret international movement.
[...]
In France, in Italy, in Germany, and above all in Russia, they are cherishing
the hope of one day being admitted into the miraculous secrets by
the beneficent superiors who watch over all the members of the society.
[...]
In a chapter of his work for the Friends of Truth entitled "On the
Theory of Insurrections," Bonneville described how "a beloved magistrate" would
appear before his people in the new order to conduct a naturalistic version of Holy
Communion: “Friends, this is the body of the sun which ripens the harvest. This
is the body OF THE BREAD which the rich owe to the poor!”
He addressed his readers not as Freemasons (franc-maçons) but as
Francs-cosmopolites-an altogether new breed combining the natural
order of the early Franks and the "universal fraternity" of the modern
Enlightenment.
The press became and has remained the core of revolutionary
counter-authority to modern political tyranny
Insofar as words played a unifying role in the early years of the
revolution, it was through the slogans of orators like Mirabeau and
Danton rather than through the structure of arguments.
[...]
But there were also solid symbols that commanded broad allegiance ;
they provided rallying points for popular rituals of unity during the
early years of the French Revolution. First, of course, was the Bastille
itself. This architectural embodiment of unyielding authority provided a
condensation symbol for the old regime
[...]
Many proposals were made to fill it with symbols of a new order, but
the first to be realized was the enormous, sphynx-like statue of Nature
(...) Dame Nature was a rival authority not just to the king, but to the
Church (...) the high altar in Notre Dame had been replaced by a "mountain"
of earth from which an actress dressed in white intoned Gossec's "Hymn to
Liberty" like a Druid priestess. She invoked a kind of secular countertrinity:
Mother (nature), Daughter (liberty), Holy Spirit (popular sovereignty).
the revolutionary imagination soon progressed to positive symbols like
planting a tree of liberty. A tree had the incalculable advantage of being
an organic product of nature : a symbol of regeneration rooted in the earth
but reaching up to heaven. [...]
the tree of liberty was a living totem : an acceptable new form of verticality
amidst the leveling impulses of the revolutionary era.
[...]
If the rituals around trees of liberty were essentially dances, those around the
guillotine were dramas of the highest order. The guillotine was a hypnotic attraction
in the great squares of Paris; it became the leading actor in these open-air theatres.
[...]
The guillotine turned the revolution into a drama that all could understand. It was the
Enlightenment on display, punishing all equally without causing unnecessary suffering.
[...]
Guillotine was the awesome heroine of a morality play; the ending was known, but
there was the perpetual possibility of minor variation in individual performances. This
mass for the masses offered the certainty of blood s acrifice and the promise of
collective redemption. By the end of the Terror, children were being given toy
guillotines and sparrows for practice executions.
With the formal adoption of a new revolutionary calendar by the Convention in the
fall of 1 793 , utopia became temporal. Nowhere became sometime-and time was
just beginning a new march that would be "novel, majestic and simple like equality."
Nature itself sanctified the founding of the new era on the day of the sun's autumnal
equinox : September 22 , 1 792 . At the very moment when "equality was marked in
the skies between days and nights" and "the sun passed from one hemisphere to
another," authority on earth "passed from monarchical to republican government."
[...]
The calendar was divided into the four seasons with new names of months
designed to suggest the mood of each
[...]
The week-based on the religious idea of seven days of creation-was eliminated
altogether. Sundays and saints' days were replaced by feasts consecrating
natural (largely agricultural ) objects : trees, fruits, domestic animals.
[...]
(...) invoking nature in both its senses-as higher law and as simple
countryside-as the supreme authority of the new order. In announcing the
need to complete the "physical" revolution with a revolution in the moral
order, Robespierre had proclaimed "the universal religion of Nature."
Varlet labeled I793 "the first year of truth" and addressed a new Declara-
tion of the Rights of Man "in the social state" to the "people of nature."
[...]
Joel Barlow, imagined that there were "natural" sexual origins for festive
revolutionary symbols . He traced trees of liberty to the phallic symbol of the
Egyptian cult of Osiris-carried thence to Greece and Rome, where "Bacchus was
known by the epithet Liber, so that the Phallus became the emblem of Libertas".
Barlow derived the "Phrygian" red cap of liberty from a Roman symbol
for the head of the phallus
Frenchmen still sought to define their beliefs in words . There was a trend
toward radical simplification, however, as they increasingly tended to
substitute labels for arguments. In attempting to state simply the purpose
of secular society under popular sovereignty, they found three basic answers.
Each was expressed by one of the words of the most important slogan of the
era : liberty, fraternity, and equality.
Each of these three ideals had ancient origins, but each acquired a new mystical
aura during this period. At the beginning of the revolution they had blended into a
trinitarian unity. B ut there were deep, inherent differences between the three concepts,
[...]First came the political ideal of securing freedom through a constitutional republic.
This was the original revolutionary cause of liberty -defined in terms of constitutional
rights and popular legislatures . Property no less than people was t o b e freed from
traditional bondage to nonproductive authority-an idea that made the republican ideal
attractive to entrepreneurs of all sorts.
Second came the emotional ideal of experiencing brotherhood in a new kind of nation.
This was the romantic vision of fraternity : the discovery amidst a struggle against others
that one's immediate neighbours are one's brothers-linguistically, culturally, geographically
-fellow sons of a common fatherland.
(...)equality : the collective sharing of goods within a community free of all social and
economic distinctions.
1st?enlightenment reformism of the 18th century; 2nd? romantic nationalism of the 19th;
3rd? the third with the authoritarian communism of the 20th.
The replacement of a monarchy by a republic was the major accomplishment of the
initial period of the revolution.
[...]
Paine moved to Paris, accepted French citizenship, founded the first "republican"
society in Paris.
[...]
The nation was a militant ideal that was largely discovered on the jour de gloire of
battle and best expressed in the levee en masse of 1793 : the prototype of modern
mass conscription on a "national" scale .
The American Revolution had originated the concept of independence as a political
rather than a philosophical ideal-creating in effect a new nation through a revolution.
But the United States did not call itself a "nation" in the Declaration of Independence ,
or constitute itself as a nation in the modern sense. There was no new language to be
asserted, no mythologized antiquity to be created, no continuing foreign threat bordering
on the new territorial entity. The official designation "United States" was the only formal
name of a major country prior to the creation of the Soviet Union that contained no ethnic
or national designation. In America, a "sense of nationhood was the child, not the parent
of the Revolution."
In the French Revolution, on the contrary, the concept of a "nation" was central even
though no new country was created. The word nation soon predominated over the
older and more paternalistic term patrie. Flags, feasts, and songs were all said to be
"national," and Bonneville, while organizing the Paris militia in the summer of 1789,
Warned against ennemis de la nation.15 Citizens of the old regime were forced to
communicate in the French language, which until then had not been the basic tongue
of many living under the French crown.
The term nation was not widely understood at first [...]
The label was soon understood to define a new type of popular sovereignty
that was territorially and linguistically unified and often more absolute than
monarchical authority. God Himself was reborn in early revolutionary
tracts as the "Savior of the Nations," [...]
The archenemy of the French Revolution, the Abbe B arruel , introduced the term
"nationalism" to denigrate the new form of parochial, secular selfishness that he
felt was replacing universal Christian love as the human ideal.
Militant nationaHsm reached the European masses largely through Napoleon :
"the first ruler to base a political regime exclusively upon the nation . . . the most
powerful purely national symbol that any nation has had.
[...] Nationalism remained the major revolutionary ideal until the final quarter of
the nineteenth century.[...]
In trying to weed out "the verbiage of the defunct French Academy" and "create
a language, make a religion" for la nation, Bonneville drew heavily on Germanisms
and followed the Strasbourg custom of publishing tracts bilingually. "People" (like
"Nation" and other symbolic substantives ) acquired a capital letter in the Germanic
Fashion in new French phrases like Peuple-Roi, Peuple-Dieu, and Peuple-Sauveur.
Cloots's pledge of allegiance to la nation required c apital letters
Saint-Just gave living legitimacy to the revolutionary ideal. He was by far the youngest
member of the twelve-man Committee of Public Safety which exercised executive
authority in Paris.(...) Too young to be anything but a child of the revolution ,
he became in 1793-94 its embodiment.[...]
Saint-Just in effect withdrew from the pettiness and divisions of the old dying order
to develop the central beliefs of the new one. [...] He went beyond Rousseau's social
contract ( contrat social) in his call for a new social order ( etat social ) "founded
solidly only on nature "[...] Saint-Just became the first ascetic of the revolution,
cutting himself off from people in order to serve "the people" totally : I shall speak of
all peoples, of all religions, of all laws as if I myself did not adhere to any... I
detach myself from everything in order to attach myself to everything. [...] Saint-Just quietly
became in October secretary to the main office of the Convention and the most
powerful advocate of regicide on the floor of the Assembly. His argument for
killing the king was totally impersonal and dispassionate. The monarch was not
considered a human being at all, but a universal abstraction, "the King of Kingdoms"
[...]
His posthumously published vision of an ideal society promotes his concept of
Brothers-in-arms into quasi-erotic attachment.
Saint-Just and Le Bas destroyed Schneider (...)Schneider had threatened both the
ethnic and the sexual homogeniety of the French legions ; his wife was executed
along with him in April 1974.
All of this feminine activity vanished along with the Revolutionary Republican
Society, a Parisian society of female sans-culottes, which became "the first
target of the Jacobin assault upon the popular movement” in the fall of 1793.
Its demand for women to wear the red cap of male revolutionaries outraged
the central revolutionary leaders. On October 31 , the Convention outlawed
all female clubs and societies .
As befits the chiarascuro politics of apocalypse, there was one final fabulous
feast of fraternity just before the fall of Robespierre. If the Feast of Federation
in 1 790 had represented "the first day of the sublime dream of fraternity,"
Robespierre's spectacular Feast of the Supreme Being on June 8, 1794,
suggested the beginning of its unending summer. The winter, the foreign
armies, and the guillotine all seemed to have passed; and the last stage
in revolutionary simplification had occurred with Robespierre's election as
president of the Convention and proclamation of a new religion of maximum
simplicity : "the Cult of the Supreme Being." [...]
In hailing the Supreme Being, Robespierre proclaimed that its "true
priest" was "nature": ...its temple, the universe; its cult, virtue; its festivals
the joy of a great people ...renewing the sweet bonds of universal fraternity.
[...]
The passion of Saint-Just was cold rather than hot. It imploded into intelligence
rather than exploding into indulgence. [...]
Saint-Just had the serenity of one who had surrendered himself long before death to a
transcendent ideal, to "the spirit of the revolution ," and realized the goal of human "regeneration."
Within the proud head of Saint-Just as he went to la sainte guillotine may have
lain that most sublime of all contradictions in revolutionary thought : the need for
a tyranny of virtue to prevent the recurrence of tyranny surrounded by vice.
The national ideal of fraternity reached its apogee in the execution of Saint-Just
following the Roman suicide of his younger revolutionary "brother," Le Bas. The
rival ideal of communitarian equality appeared during the Thermidorean reaction
that followed. Its leader, Babeuf, was, like Saint-Just, a native of Picardy with a
similar nostalgia for agrarian simplicity and antique virtue in a corrupted world.
[...]
The third new ideal to arise out of the French Revolution was that of communaute:
a new type of social and economic community based on equality. (...)The revolutionary
egalitarianism of Babeuf, Marechal, and Restif de la Bretonne is the progenitor of modern
Communism- and of revolutionary socialism, the rival ideal of revolutionary nationalism.
The new egalitarian communalism was rooted in Rousseau's call for a social contract that
would repudiate inequality among men and legitimize authority by permitting the "general
will" to unify the community on a new basis.[...] The proto-communist idea that "common
happiness" might be realized at the expense of private property ownership began to appear
relatively early in the cosmopolitan Parisian circles that ultimately proved anathema to the
nationalistic Jacobin leaders. A petition on "the agrarian laws" by an Anglo-Irishman James
Rutledge, who called himself a "citizen of the universe," urged in 1 790 the establishment of a
social order ( etat social ) with "no ownership of property. This idea (...) was systematically
propagated at the same time by Bonneville's principal collaborator in the Social Circle , the
Abbe Fauchet.(...) The Abbe Cournand went even further, declaring that "in the state of
nature, the domain of man is the entire e arth" and arguing that all landowners
should have plots equal in size, non-hereditary, and non-transferrable (...)This universal
ideal found local roots in the grievances of the French countryside. These were brought
to Paris in M ay 1 79 0 by Francois Noel Babeuf (...) the Universal Confederation, which gave
an ideological cast to his earlier primitive ideas about a "collective lease" ( ferme collective ) and
the redistribution to the poor of confiscated church lands.
[...] Babeuf began to discover posthumously in Robespierre "the genius in whom resided
true ideas of regeneration"
[...]
At the head of each issue stood the italicized phrase, "The aim of society is
the happiness of the community."
Babeuf rejected the "right of property" guaranteed in the Declaration of Rights
of Man in favor of the "state of community", arguing that society should provide
"common happiness" through "perfect equality."
[...]
All government-and not just some governments-would somehow be destroyed
by a true revolution. (...) "May everything return to chaos, and out of chaos
may there emerge a new and regenerated world." The conspiracy envisaged
the establishment of a "great national community" in which all goods were
owned in common and shared equally. This "community" was eventually to
supplant-by either attractive example or coercive force-all other systems of
political and economic authority.
Imperceptibly within Babeuf's conspiracy arose the myth of the unfinished
revolution : the idea that the political upheaval in France was only the forerunner
of a second, more portentous social revolution. [...]
Already in his Plebeian Manifesto, Babeuf had begun to develop a sense of
messianic mission, invoking the n ames of Moses, Joshua, and Jesus, as well
as Rousseau, Robespierre, and Saint-Just. He had claimed Christ as a "co-
athlete" and had written in prison A New History of the Life of Jesus Christ.
The strength of the red curates within the social revolutionary camp intensified
the need to keep Christian ideas from weakening revolutionary dedication.
[...]
Marechal wrote for Babeuf's group: “The French Revolution is but the precursor
of another revolution, far greater, far more solemn, which will be the last.”
[...] Few accepted Babeuf's egalitarian ideal; but m any were haunted by
his example. There were, moreover, some grounds for fearing that the
conspiracy had foreign links. [...]
Hupay (...) believed "to put into practice the beautiful laws of the Republic
of Plato," to create ''an entire city of philosophers "which would "be called
Platonopolis." Such an ideal community would be easier to establish in
Russia than in the West precisely because it was an authoritarian society.
[...] Hupay made... the social theories of "the new world and the new Eloise"
[...] a Spartan people, the true nursery of a better race of men than
Ours (...) it might most easily be realized in Russia.
This section of Restif's work concluded with a model statute for a bourg
commun [...] “All must be common among equals. Each must work for the common
good. All must take an identical part in work.” [...]
[Restif] introduced the term "community of goods" and suggested the "manner of
Establishing equality" in "all nations of Europe." 201 Thus, Restif was able to refer
his correspondent , the self-proclaimed "communist author," [...]
Restif spoke of the coming of a supranational community that would end "the puerile
rivalry which confounds states and drags all of them together into ruin and crime." [...]
In February 1 793, Resti£ used the term communism as his own for the first time to
describe the fundamental change in ownership that would obviate the need for any further
redistribution of goods and property. His detailed exposition of communism (and regular use
of the word) began the following year with a "Regulation... for the establishment of a
general Community of the Human Race" (...)But it was a lonely vision; and Restif had to
print many of his own books in his basement in such small editions that many have been lost.
[...]
The question of whether Restif was alluding to, or in some way connected with, Babeuf's
concurrent conspiracy takes us deeper into the occult labyrinths of Paris where modern
revolutionary organization began.
[...]
AFTER the fall of Robespierre, and especially after the trial of Babeuf, the French
Revolution in some sense ended. Those who sought to keep alive the high hopes
of the early revolutionary era no longer focused their faith on the ongoing process
of innovation in society as a whole, but instead retreated to the secure nucleus
of a secret society where intense conviction need not be compromised by the
diffuse demands of practical politics.
Their myth of the unfinished revolution lent to such secret societies the special
aura of an elect anticipating the Second Coming. [...]
secret societies tended to move even further underground. Thus under Napoleon,
conspiratorial societies with hierarchical discipline became the dominant form of
revolutionary organization, and in the 1820s under the conservative restoration
they produced a wave of revolutions throughout Europe.
Historians have never been able to unravel the tangled threads of this tapestry-
and in recent times have largely given up trying. The most important recent study
confines itself to tracing the history of what people thought about the secret
societies rather than what the societies in fact were. But the problem will not go
away simply because we lack documentation on the numbers and the nature-
and at times even the very existence-of these organizations.
The plain fact is that by the mid- 1810s there were not just one or two but
scores of secret revolutionary organizations throughout Europe- extending
even into Latin America and the Middle East. These groups, although largely
unconnected, internationalized the modern revolutionary tradition and provided
the original forum for the general debate in the modern world about the
purposes of political power in a post-traditional society.
modern revolutionary tradition as it came to be internationalized under
Napoleon and the Restoration grew out of occult Freemasonry ; that
early organizational ideas originated more from Pythagorean mysticism
than from practical experience; and that the real innovators were not so
much political activists as literary intellectuals, on whom German romantic
thought in general-and Bavarian Illuminism in particular-exerted great
influence.
Filippo Giuseppe Maria Lodovico Buonarroti. Largely unknown until in
1828 at the age of sixty-seven he published his History of the Babeuf
Conspiracy, thereafter he was the patriarch to a new generation of
revolutionaries until his death in 1837. Filippo Giuseppe Maria Lodovico
Buonarroti. Largely unknown until in 1 828 at the age of sixty-seven
he published his History of the B abeuf Conspiracy, thereafter he was
the patriarch to a new generation of revolutionaries until his death in
1 837. He is largely remembered today as a kind of Plato to Babeuf's
Socrates-recording the teachings and m artyrdom of the master for
posterity.
But he was also the first apostle of a new religion: the first
truly to become a full-time revolutionary in the modern sense of having
total dedication to the creation by force of a new secular order.
was a direct descendant of Michelangelo. He showed an early aptitude for
French and for music: the two languages used by Italians to express
hopes higher than those they found in their own vernacular. French
was the language of philosophy and progress for the aristocratic Enlightenment
in Tuscany as elsewhere , and music, of course, was the
language of longing.
he refined into modern form the two central myths of the revolutionary tradition :
belief in an uncompleted revolution and faith in a perfect alternative rooted in
nature. The first myth he established through cultivating the memory of Babeuf
and by pioneering a new approach to revolutionary organization. And he refined
the myth of nature by carrying it beyond sentimentality into revolutionary practicality.
[...]
Buonarroti j oined the Babeuf conspiracy in an effort to realize "this sweet community."
He was rearrested with Babeuf and the other conspirators in 1797, imprisoned in
Cherbourg, then sent to the Island of Re under close scrutiny before being permitted
by Napoleon to move to Geneva in July 1 806.
Buonarroti remained in Geneva for the next seventeen years except for fourteen
months he spent in Grenoble during 1813-14. He became the first in a long line
of revolutionaries-culminating in Lenin-to use Switzerland, "the land of Jean-Jacques"
as he called it, as a secure mounting base for revolutionary activity.
The precise history of Buonarroti's activities during this period will probably never
be known. He conceived of two successive secret organizations to command the
international revolutionary movement: the Sublime Perfect Masters and Monde.
(...) Buonarroti's unremitting efforts inspired and at times guided the resistance
to Napoleon.
The Masonic lodges of Geneva provided the ambiance in which Buonarroti
formulated in 1811 his first full blueprint for a new society of revolutionary
republicans: the Sublime Perfect Masters. Both the society's name and
the three levels of membership proposed for it had been adopted from
Masonry. Indeed, Buonarroti sought to work through existing Masonic
lodges: to recruit through them, influence them, use them as a cover,
and ( if necessary ) even undermine them. [...]
The society was secret and hierarchical. Only those in the inner circle
were told that the organization sought radical social change as well as
a republican constitution. Elaborate precautions of secrecy were increasingly
taken. Printed forms signifying the grade of membership were to be burned-
or if necessary swallowed-in case of detainment or danger.
Masonry imparted to the revolutionary tradition at birth the essential metaphor
that revolutionaries used to understand their own mission down to the mid-
nineteenth century: that of an architect building a new and better structure
for human society. Masons believed they were recreating in their fraternal
societies the "natural" condition of cooperation that prevailed among those
earlier, artisan masons who shaped stones for a common building.
The progression of each "brother" from the stage of apprentice through
journeyman to master required philosophical and philanthropic accomplishment
rather than social status. "Free" masonry was, thus, a moral meritocracy-
implicitly subversive within any static society based on a traditional hierarchy.
Men of intelligence and ambition in the eighteenth century often experienced
within Masonic lodges a kind of brotherhood among equals not to be found in
the aristocratic society outside.
The rituals leading to each new level of membership were not, as is sometimes
suggested, childish initiations. They were awesome rites of passage into new
types of association, promising access to higher truths of Nature once the
blindfold was removed in the inner room of the lodge. Each novice sought
to become a "free" and "perfected" Mason capable of reading the plans of
the "Divine Architect" for "rebuilding the temple of Solomon," and reshaping
the secular order with moral force. [...]
Philip of Orleans was the titular head of French Masonry (the Grand Orient);
and most of the pro-revolutionary denizens of the cafes of the Palais-Royal
were his Masonic "brothers."
To be sure, most French Masons prior to the revolution had been "not
revolutionaries, not even reformers, nor even discontent"; and, even during
the revolution, Masonry as such remained politically polymorphous: "Each
social element and each political tendency could 'go masonic' as it wished."
[...]
Most important for our story, Masonry was deliberately used by revolutionaries
in the early nineteenth century as a model and a recruiting ground for their first
conspiratorial experiments in political organization. [...]
If Freemasonry provided a general milieu and symbolic vocabulary for revolutionary
organization , it was Illuminism that provided its basic structural model. The
organizational plan that Buonarroti distilled from two decades of revolutionary
experience in Geneva ( and basically remained faithful to for the rest of his life ) was
simply lifted from the Bavarian Order of Illuminists. This radical and secular occultist
movement was organized on three levels in a secret hierarchy: church, synod, and
areopagite. Buonarroti's revolutionary version of this structure defined the "church"
as the local cell headed by a "sage," who was alone linked with the regional "synod."
The members of e ach synod ("the sublime elect") were headed by a "territorial
deacon," who supervised the activities of all "churches" in the region. The highest
"areopagite" grade ( also called "the Great Firmament" ) sent out its own "mobile
deacons" to control the synods and supervise propaganda and agitation. [...]
The Order of Illuminists was founded on May 1 , 1776, by a professor of canon
law at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, Adam Weishaupt, and four
associates. The order was secret and hierarchical, modeled on the Jesuits
(whose long domination of Bavarian education ended with their abolition by the
Papacy in 1 773 ) and dedicated to Weishaupt's Rousseauian vision of leading
all humanity to a new moral perfection freed from all established religious and
political authority. [...]
The purpose of ascending the Illuminist hierarchy was not so much to attain
wisdom as to be remade into a totally loyal servant of a universal mission.
"We cannot use people as they are, but begin by making them over."
The Illuminists attempted to use the ferment and confusion in Freemasonry for
their own ends. Weishaupt joined a Masonic lodge in Munich in 1 777; and
attempted to recruit "commandos" ( groups of followers ) from within the lodges
of the Bavarian capital. Late in 1780, Weishaupt's campaign spread to all of
Germany and to the pseudoknightly higher orders of Masonry with the entrance
into Weishaupt's inner circle of Baron Adolph Knigge. He was a native of Hanover
and a leader of occultism in Frankfurt, which soon replaced Munich as the leading
"colony" of the movement. For five intensive years ( until Knigge left the order in
July 1 785 ) , the Illuminists recruited largely among those who had belonged to
the most popular of the German higher Masonic orders, the Strict Observance.
The Illuminist technique was, first of all, to discredit the more conservative rival
order by fair means ( helping the conference of occult orders at Wilhelmsbad in
1782 to determine that the Strict Observance Lodges were not in fact descended
from the Knights-Templars ) and foul ( arguing that the Strict Observance
Lodges were secretly controlled by "unknown superiors" who were in fact
Jesuits in disguise ) .
The Illuminists coopted the organizational structure of their conservative
Masonic rival ; in the process, they acquired some of the mysterious allure
that they had not possessed as an arid cult of rationalistic intellectuals.
Illuminism also became much more political.
Weishaupt appears to have initially seen Masonry as a kind of intermediate training
ground for Illuminists-after they had entered the order but before they joined the
secret inner circles ." Then, under Knigge's guidance, he developed a system
of three successive "classes" that incorporated all existing "grades" of Masonry
as preliminary to a higher class of Illuminist grades. The first two classes (the
preparatory and the middle) incorporated the three traditional grades and the
higher symbolic grades of Masonry respectively.
The 3rd or "administrative" class was the most original-and indicated by its very
name the political implications of Weishaupt's plan for the moral renovation of humanity.
[...]
This promise of total liberation terrified the German-speaking world, and the order
was subjected to ridicule, persecution, and formal dissolution during 1785-87.
Weishaupt was banished to Gotha and kept under surveillance. But the diaspora
of an order that had reached a membership of perhaps two thousand five hundred
at its height in the early 1780s led to a posthumous impact that was far greater
throughout Europe than anything the order had been able to accomplish during
its brief life as a movement of German intellectuals. In France, the publication
by the Bavarian police of Weishaupt's correspondence and other documents in
1787 created more fascination than fear.
The decisive book in popularizing the Illuminist ideal was Count Mirabeau's
The Prussian Monarchy under Frederick the Great, which also appeared
in 1788. Written in large part by a former Illuminist , Jakob Mauvillon,
Mirabeau's work distinguished rationalistic Illuminists from "mystical"
occultists, hailing the former as leaders of a movement the "great aim"
of which was "the improvement of the present system of governments
and legislations." Mirabeau took much of his new, totalistic concept
of "the revolution" directly from Illuminist models;
Bonneville saw popular liberation as a kind of blindfolded mass entry into an
Illuminist sanctuary: “Take away from the people the bandage that covers their
eyes... Place the hand of the People on the veil...it will soon be torn aside”
Accused by contemporaries of making "the title of Citizen a grade of
Illuminism," Bonneville argued in Illuminist terms that "the integral
man is God," and that from the center of the social circle there will:
“emanate a circle of light which will uncover for u s that which is hidden
in the symbolic chaos of masonic innovations”.
In his massive study of 1788, The Jesuits Driven from Free Masonry,
Bonneville developed the basic idea of Weishaupt and Bode that Masonry
had been infiltrated by Jesuits, who had to be driven out by
some new order opposed to tyrants and priests. (...) Occult-possibly Illuminist-
influence is detectable in Babeuf's first clear statement of his communist
objectives early in 1795-inviting a friend to "enter into the sacred mysteries
of agrarianism" (...) Babeuf's subsequent first outline for his conspiracy spoke
of a "circle of adherents" "advancing by degree" from les pays limotrophes to
transform the world. Babeuf's secret, hierarchical organization resembled that
of the Illuminists and of Bonneville. The strange absence of references by Babeuf
and the others to the man who formulated their ultimate objectives , Sylvain
Marechal, could be explained by the existence of an Illuminist-type secrecy about
the workings of the inner group. The conspirators may have viewed Marechal
as the "flame" at the center of the "circle." As such, he would have had to be
protected by the outer circle against disclosure to profane outsiders. His mysterious
designation of Paris as "Atheopolis" and himself as l'HSD ( l'homme sans dieu )
represented precisely the ideal of Weishaupt's inner Areopagites : man made perfect
as a god-without-God.
The first issue praised the Weishaupt-Mirabeau concept of a "revolution of the
mind" as the proper objective of the "century of the illuminated." It identified this
type of revolution with the Bavarian Illuminists (...) and distinguished their ideal
from spiritualist distortions.
Whether or not Buonarroti was in effect propagating an Illuminist program during
his revolutionary activity of the 1790s, he had clearly internalized a number of
Illuminist ideas well before the massive borrowing in his revolutionary blueprint
of 1810-11 . He had adopted the Illuminist pretension of recovering a natural
religion known only to "Illuminated" sects in the past . He saw himself as
"reintegrating" "in its ancient forms the religion of nature, reason" by reviving
the legacy of a bizarre genealogy: "the Persians of Cyrus, the initiators of
Egyptian priests , the holy Hermandad of Spain, the apostolate of Jesus, the
Anabaptists, and above all the Jesuit order." He followed Weishaupt and
Bonneville in attaching special importance to the Jesuits, whom he sought both
to imitate and to liquidate. His secret ideal was from the beginning, according to
Prati, the egalitarian Illuminist one of breaking down all "marks of private property."
Illuminist ideas influenced revolutionaries not just through left-wing proponents,
but also through right-wing opponents. As the fears of the Right became the
fascination of the Left, Illuminism gained a paradoxical posthumous influence far
greater than it had exercised as a living movement.
As we have seen, a vast array of labels and images was taken from classical
antiquity to legitimize the new revolutionary faith. Two relatively neglected names
were central to the development of an ideal identity among revolutionary intellectuals:
the image of the revolutionary as a modern Pythagoras and of his social ideal as
Philadelphia. These two labels illustrated the proto-romantic reaching for a distant
Greek ideal as a lofty alternative to the Roman images of power and conquest that
had dominated France as it moved like ancient Rome from republic to empire under
Napoleon. Pythagoras and Philadelphia represented a kind of distillation of the high
fraternal ideals common both to the occult brotherhoods of Masonry and Illuminism
and to the idealistic youthful mobilization to defend the revolution in 1792-94. The two
labels recur like leitmotifs amidst the cacophony of shifting ideals and groups during
the recession of revolutionary hopes at the end of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth.
Pythagoras allegedly founded a religious-philosophical brotherhood to transform
society. Radical intellectual reformers throughout antiquity periodically revived and
embellished this tradition. (...) Pythagorean ideas recurred in medieval Christianity,
which for a time represented Pythagoras as a hidden Jewish link between Moses and
Plato.
An undercurrent of fascination with Pythagorean thought in the High Renaissance and
Enlightenment came to the surface during the French Revolution. (...) as extremists
sought some simple yet solid principles on which to rebuild society, they increasingly
turned for guidance to Pythagorean beliefs in prime numbers and geometric forms.
Early, romantic revolutionaries sought occult shortcuts to the inner truths of nature,
and repeatedly attached importance to the central prime numbers of Pythagorean
mysticism : 1, 3, 7, and above all 5. Pamphleteers of the Right suggested that prime
numbers provided a secret organizational code for revolutionaries ; one particularly
ingenious effort of 1797 derived the entire structure of revolutionary history from
the number 17.[...]
the search for simple forms of nature to serve as a touchstone for truth amidst the
crumbling authority of tradition. The increasingly manic search for simple, geometric
harmonies within Masonry in the I 770s and I 780s reveals the radical thirst for
revolutionary simplification at its purest.
This quest for legitimizing simplicity spilled out of closed lodges into open assemblies
in I 780. Occultists became politicians, and made special use of the two most important
Pythagorean geometric symbolsthe circle and the triangle-in dramatizing their challenge
to established power. These two forms became symbols of divinity in medieval
Christianity. They increasingly dominated the hieroglyphics of the higher Masonic orders
-and the imagination of prerevolutionary utopian architects who often sought to build only
with "geometric figures from the triangle to the circle."
Eighteenth-century Pythagoreans were specially excited by the Illuminist idea of
progressive human purification from the lower cycles of animal nature to the heavenly
spheres of pure intelligence. The Illuminists' hierarchy of circles-moving inward from
"church" to "synod" to the Areopagite center-suggested the concentric circles in the
universe itself. The flame at the center of the final, inner circle was assumed to be an
image of the inner fire of the universe around which the earth and all planets revolved.
Occultists may not have always believed in such images literally, but they did usually
feel that some secret inner circle held out the promise of both personal redemption
and cosmic understanding. [...]
Weishaupt appears to have been the first to use the term "circle" to designate a
new type of political organization making both individual moral demands and
universal ideological claims. [...]
Bonneville even before the revolution had traced the Illuminist ideal to Pythagoras,
(...)Mter the demise of his effort to "square the social circle" via his organizations
of the early 1 790s, Bonneville wrote verses on "the numbers of Pythagoras,"
proclaiming that "man is God" and will "become angelic" by widening the circle
of universal brotherhood [...]
Thomas Paine, who lived in a menage a trois with Bonneville and his wife from
1797 to 1802, believed that the Druids and Pythagoreans had combined to provide
an occult ideological alternative to Christianity. An Essay on the Origin of Free
Masonry, written after his return to America ( with Bonneville's wife ) and immediately
translated into French by Bonneville, insisted that the natural sun worship of the Druids
had not been destroyed but merely diverted into Masonry.[...]
Early Russian radicals often argued in terms of rival laws of Pythagoras- some stressing
the "two laws of Pythagoras" forbidding private property and requiring shared ownership;
others stressing the "rule" that weapons and friendship could conquer all; others insisting
on the primacy of moral perfection over legal reform : "Do not create laws for the people;
create people for the laws."
Seeking some secure way to enlist those outside their inner circles, revolutionaries
found inspiration in another key Pythagorean symbol : the triangle. If the circle
suggested the objective-the egalitarian perfection of nature-the triangle suggested
the way to get there. The triangle, a key symbol for all Masons, had particular meaning
for Pythagoreans as the simplest means of enclosing a surface with straight lines.
The triangle expressed harmonic relationships ( such as that of the Pythagorean
theorem) and became a key symbol in revolutionary iconography. The revolutionary
trilogy (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) and the tricolor (red, white, and blue) each adorned
one side of the Omnipresent triangle on seals and stamps.[...]
Marechal introduced the occult idea of triangular harmonies into his "CHARTER OF
THE HUMAN RACE" in 1793 , announcing the threefold duties of man to be a father,
son, and husband as "traced by Nature on man": "a triangle beyond which he dare not
pass with impunity." This seemingly traditional ideal is revalidated for the liberated "man
without God" by seeing him as a kind of secular trinity: 3 persons in his own substance.
[...]
The new secular revolutionary, then, found a model in Pythagoras (the action-oriented
intellectual), a starting place in the circle (the microcosm of perfection), and a building
tool in the triangle ( the basic unit of organization ) . But what was he building? What
was the macrocosm that the next and final revolution would reveal?
The answer was, quite simply, a universal community of brotherly love, which
revolutionaries designated by its Greek name, Philadelphia.[...]
The word Philadelphia entered French Masonry during a rising tide of occult influx from
Germany with the founding of a Primitive Rite of Philadelphians in Narbonne in 1780.
The Germanic order of Strict Observance, with its chivalric imagery and hermetic
Teachings, had swept into France through Strasbourg on to Bordeaux in the late
1770s;and the German-sponsored Rectified Scottish Rite established itself in Lyon as
the leading occult order in France, [...]
The attempt of the Narbonne group to proclaim a primitive rite was pressed farthest in
Paris in the remarkable, proto-romantic lodge of the Nine Sisters. German influences
again predominated through the founder of the lodge, a Swiss Protestant pastor, Court
de Gebelin.(..) In 1773 he published the first of nine volumes of a megalomanic
inventory of sounds, signs, and symbols (...) By the third volume, he moved from
lamenting man's lost happiness to insisting that unity "among nations" could be
rediscovered through a primordial language (...) by the eighth volume Court advocated
"a single political order . . . a single grammar of physics and morality . . . an eternal and
immutable religion which creates perfection in man."
The occultism of the Old World blended with the revolutionism of the New through two
of Court's closest associates in Paris : Benj amin Franklin and M. L. E. Moreau de
Saint-Mery. Franklin, who arrived in Paris from the real Philadelphia just before
Christmas in the revolutionary year 1776, was initiated by Court into the Nine Sisters,
became its Venerable Master, and collaborated with Court on the lodge's fifteen volume
collection of political miscellany.The Nine Sisters subsequently printed the constitutions
of all thirteen American states and became, in effect, "the first school of
constitutionalism that ever existed in Europe." [...]
Moreau and his brother-in-law founded the Circle of Philadelphians, praising the city of
Franklin (...) They used the language of occult Masonry in referring to the "last degree
of perfection," and the restoration of an "ancient knighthood (chevalerie)" "to unveil the
truth." [...]
Cloots , Court's closest collaborator, had foreseen already in 1781 that the Nine Sisters
would create "citizens of the world" by "forming an immense circle whose center is in
Paris, but whose rays penetrate everywhere."
Yet another geometric model for revolutionary organization was suggested by the
occult symbol for the universal love of humanity: the pentagon. This five-sided object
provided the image of five-man cells for the first organization of opposition to arise
within Napoleon's army-which is what the Philadelphians were.
Their plan of organization was conceived in 1797 by Nodier, exiled from Paris of the
Directory to his native Besancon, which he renamed "Philadelphia." His organizational
plan developed to the point of mania the Pythagorean fascination with the number 5.
Five is the mean number between 1 and 9, and the mystic figure that emerged when
these and intervening odd numbers were added together and divided by the number
of digits. The number acquired revolutionary significance in the new calendar [...]
The pentagon was their sign of friendship and recognition; a five-pointed star with the
number five engraved on it was their seal. Initiations took place at five o'clock on the
fifth day of the month, when members were to face the setting sun-wherever they
happened to be-for five minutes to renew their vows to the brotherhood. Power
to revise the statutes was confided in "the five oldest brothers."
The concept of a nationwide network of five-man cells controlled by a central "five"
would be revived in the Land and Liberty organization of the early I860s and
dramatized a decade later in Dostoevsky's The Possessed. The idea was to
spread back to the western and southern Slavs through a series of organizations
which saw the four ordinary members of each cell as the "fingers" of a single hand,
with a single leader ("the thumb") as the sole connecting link with the next, higher
level. This image would appear in the name of the South Slav revolutionary "Black
Hand," whose assassination of the Hapsburg Archduke in 1914 was to bring on
World War I, which would in turn give birth to the October Revolution in Russia.
The original Philadelphians achieved no such prominence, and Nodier's vision of
an army secretly transformed from within into a revolutionary brotherhood of fives
never developed. But an organization did gradually emerge and involve itself in
anti-Napoleonic plots [...]
Nodier noted an affinity of spirit between the extremes of Left and Right [...]
A single, melodramatic hero leading a simple organization-this was the Phila-
delphian fantasy: the radical, sublime simplification that would lead to revolution.[...]
Malet returned to Nodier's original idea for the Philadelphians of a fusion between
Jacobin and royalist foes of Napoleon into a conspiracy that was "properly speaking
neither royalist nor republican." [...]
The newly found Slavs now represented primitive, natural purity, the Sparta of his
(Nodier’s) dreams, the "last and touching shelter of the ancient ways." [...]
[(Off topic):"Songs without words" were for the Pythagoreans the ultimate form of conversation of
the cosmos with itself. The "music of the spheres" was the highest form of discourse,
expressing "the harmony of creation, or rather of the world as it should be." [...]
Fascination with music as the lost language of liberation led Buonarroti's friend, Luigi
Angeloni, to publish in Paris a dissertation on the medieval origins of musical notation
even as he was organizing his Adelphian revolutionaries. For the romantic mind, music
was the realm of freedom: the most spiritual of the arts, releasing emotion yet creating
order in the dimension of time.[...]
The text for Buonarroti's "songs without words" was to be provided by the leader of the
last important revolutionary organization he directly founded : the Flemish Society of
Brotherhood, of Jacob Kats in the 1830s. Kats, who lived on to influence the German
emigres in Brussels who gathered around Karl Marx to create the Communist League,
chose Pythagoras as his revolutionary pseudonym and projected the Pythagorean
ideal in his revolutionary mystery drama The Earthly Paradise. He flooded music into
the play- and later into the Flemish lower classes broadly, creating the first theater for
popular Flemish music in Brussels during the Revolution of 1848.
This was , as we shall see, the wave of the future. For music became the handmaiden
of ethnic rather than class consciousness , of fraternity rather than equality. The medium
of music found its message in the romantic era on the operatic stage in the service of
national rather than social revolution. But the belief in the liberating power of music
derived from the occult fascination of the Pythagorean pioneers of the revolutionary
tradition with discovering the lost harmony of nature.They sought a language that went
beyond words to sounds- a legitimacy that moved beyond space to time.]
He (Nodier) was anticipating a fateful fact about the early revolutionaries and a
reappearing reality of revolutionary dynamics : the affinity and unconscious borrowings
between the extremes of Right and Left.
The interaction of extremes affected the revolutionary tradition in two ways: dialectically
and symbiotically. Dialectically, the radical, secular Illuminists on the Left developed their
sense both of universal, pedagogic mission and of secret, hierarchical method from the
conservative Christian Jesuit order on the Right. The Illuminist strain represented the
hard, ideological core of the revolutionary faith as it developed from Bonneville through
Babeuf to Buonarroti.[...]
The dialectic of Left-Right interaction began as we have seen-like so much else in the
"French" Revolution-in Germany well before 1789. Adam Weishaupt had derived his
concept of hierarchical organization in pursuit of a global mission directly from the
Jesuits, and Knigge had described the Illuminist program as one using Jesuit methods
To combat Jesuit objectives, a "counter-conspiracy of progressive, enlightened forces."
Subsequent Illuminist propaganda contended that there was a secret Jesuit conspiracy,
and that the nominally abolished order had established underground links between
Bavarian Jesuits and Berlin Rosicrucians. As the conspiracy mania grew, Weishaupt
Himself was accused of being a secret Jesuit. The Illuminists became more revolu-
tionary in the course of the 1780s precisely in the process of winning converts from
conservative Masonic lodges of Strict Observance.[...]
The dialectical interaction of Right and Left was also a factor in the prerevolutionary
popularization of the ideas of Rousseau and Court de Gebelin within France. [...]
Extremists tended to share a common opposition to moderation that was more
intense than their opposition to one another. This attitude was a legacy of the
revolutionary era and its basic drive toward radical simplification. Moderate
positions tended to complicate political calculation-and they inspired a special
contempt among activists on both sides.
IN THE POST-NAPOLEONIC ERA, the 'evolutionary tradition broke out from
the cocoon of conspiracy and into flight on the wings of nationalism. Though
they generally rejected the universalist rhetoric of the French revolutionary era,
the new nationalists were following the French example of a militant, musical
mobilization of the masses against foreign foes during 1 792-94.[...]
The national revolutionary c ause was identified almost everywhere with liberal
constitutionalism up until the Revolution of 1830. Thereafter, however, the nationalist
ideal of fraternite was increasingly dissociated by revolutionaries from the liberte of
the liberals-particularly in central and eastern Europe. And in western Europe,
constitutional liberalism lost some of its earlier links with revolutionary nationalism
-becoming an experimental, evolutionary alternative to the revolutionary path which
increasingly emphasized ideology and violence. In the I840s a new generation of
revolutionaries turned to socialist rather than nationalist ideals-reviving the banner of
egalite as a rival to the fraternite of national revolutionaries.[...]
The resurgence of revolutionary activity during the restoration reached far beyond
occult conspiracies within France. Indeed, the decade I8I5-25 saw a new generation
of liberal, constitutional revolutionaries for the first time mobilize m ass followings
behind national rather than universal goals. [...]
Napoleon's messianic reappearance from Elba for the "hundred days" prior to his final
defeat at Waterloo had restored the image of Napoleon as revolutionary rather than
tyrant. He had adopted the constitutional banners of civil liberties and a federal
distribution of power. He had at last brought to his side the Marquis de Lafayette, the
symbol of successful constitutional revolution in both America and France. [...]
The romantic world view of the young revolutionaries was shaped not just by the spell
of Napoleon but also by the experience of camaraderie within their own small groups.
These exclusively masculine fraternities (...) - providing dislocated young men in a
turbulent era with a simple community of faith that suggested some earlier, less
complicated time. (...) a revolutionary Second Coming was the destination.
The most important movement of the era was the Italian Carbonari: the first to mobilize
the masses for a national cause through a secret organization. Attracting in a short
space of time an unprecedented membership of at least three hundred thousand, they
presented a danger to the conservative restoration that reached far beyond Italy. They
posed a direct challenge to both the stability and the legitimacy of Hapsburg rule, the
linchpin of the post-Napoleonic order. The Carbonari threatened the twin pillars of the
Metternichean order, traditional borders and monarchical authority, precisely where
their hold was weakest: in the divided Italian peninsula.[...]
When Buonarroti's key collaborator spoke of the revolutionary movement during the
restoration as "this p arty of the Jura," he provided insight into the genealogy as well
as the geography of the revolutionary tradition. (...) From the Jura at the beginning
of the nineteenth century came the first purveyors of the dream to arouse the masses:
the society of Good Cousins, Charcoal Burners. This rural mutation of Masonry from
Besancon was transplanted by the Napoleonic armies to southern Italy (...) This new
ritual order drew on the same type of extended family structures and protective loyal-
ties that was later to produce the Mafia. It attracted lesser aristocrats and untitled
professional people who had not become as extensively involved in traditional
Masonic lodges as their counterparts in northern Italy. The Carbonari increasingly drew
a hitherto quiescent populace into civic activity, and posed an immediate threat to the
traditionalist Bourbon King Ferdinand I (...) Carbonari ritual in the South was far more
effective in mobilizing the masses than traditional Masonic ritual in the North. Naturalistic
and familiar symbols replaced the occult and mathematical language of Masonry. The
charcoal burners were an artisan brotherhood in the woods, not an esoteric order in a
temple; they met in a bourgeois shop (the literal meaning of VENDITA, the term used
for their local cells) rather than an aristocratic lodge ; and they bade their members
follow a patron saint (Theobald, who allegedly renounced civilization for the simple life
of the charcoal burner) rather than to seek out the esoteric secrets of Solomon,
Pythagoras, and the like.
the fantasies of reactionaries played a role in determining the identities of revolu-
tionaries. The Carbonari account of the group's origin appears to have been adopted
from the account given in Abbe Barruel's counterrevolutionary expose, according
to which Scottish fugitives had been seeking liberty in the forests as charcoal
burners. King Francis I of France was allegedly aided by them when he got
lost on a hunting mission, was then initiated into their rites, and became their
protector.
By 1812, the Carbonari had assumed their characteristic structure of secret local
cells ruled by a higher one: the Alta VENDITA. The Carbonari became, in effect, a
pyramidal counter-government in the Kingdom of Naples, with a self-appointed
mandate to assemble a legislative body from other tribes ( the ethnic-territorial
subdivisions of the Carbonari). Carbonari organizations soon spread into the papal
states and other Italian provinces, melding a new constitutional ideal with the age-old
dream of a united Italy.[...]
The Grand Master used an axe as his gavel on a wooden block, the symbolic trunk of
a tree to which all branches of the society were organically related. These branches all
shared common roots in the earth, and were part of a great common tree, whose
leaves reminded the secret fraternity (...) Secrecy became almost a way of life for the
Carbonari, with their meetings concealed from public view, secret handclasps,
passwords, and pass-signs. Hierarchical discipline was also important. (...) Bundles
(fasci) of sticks also lay on the table of the master-a symbol that harked back to
ancient Rome and would be revived in the Rome of Mussolini. For the Carbonari
the bundles signified "the members of our respectable order, united in peace."
In order for each piece of wood to be transformed symbolically into the purer,
more useful form of charcoal, each meeting was conceived of as a ritual
purification by fire in the furnaces of a secret grotto within a forest. (...)The
members sat in triangular lines in a triangular room under three over-hanging
candles symbolizing the three sources of enlightenment in the great firmament
(sun, moon, and northern star).
Nevertheless , the uprising that began in Greece in March 1821, revived hope
for revolution elsewhere, stimulating the romantic imagination with the ideal of
liberating shrines of classical antiquity and appealing even to conservatives as a
crusade of Christian solidarity. Greek independence was finally achieved only after
the great powers installed a conservative monarch; and the entire Greek struggle
became in many ways a safety valve for the revolutionary impulses of the age.
Even conservative monarchs subscribed to the "revolutionary" cause of fighting
the Turkish Sultan.
Using Masonic organizations for revolutionary mobilization through the Friends of
Truth, the students converted the journal The French Aristarchus into a legal outlet
for revolutionary ideas in 1819. The same group attempted to organize a
revolutionary "directorial committee" and a classical conspiratorial web of five-man
cells ("brigades"). Little direction was given, and these brigades often resorted to
uncoordinated violence; but they represented the first large-scale deployment
in France outside of military organizations of this cellular type.
The French students of 1820 introduced the typical modern justification of
revolutionary violence as a necessary defensive measure against the forcible
undermining of their constitutional rights (...) The innumerable mini-revolts
of the French Carbonari were born of the belief that making manifest what
was secret would somehow trigger revolutionary change. There was an
exaggerated faith in the power of a demonstration (manifestation) or
proclamation (manifeste). This faith related directly to the belief that some
new spiritual power was being generated within the secret society. [...]
Revolution was related directly to spiritualism by Barbes, one of the key
figures in the secret revolutionary societies of the 1830s.Robert Owen, who
influenced both Rey and Buonarroti, eventually became a full-time spiritualist.
In this atmosphere, revolutionaries turned to Buonarroti as "an occult power
whose shadowy tentacles extended over... Europe." Buonarroti sought to
use the Carbonari organizations as he had Masonic ones earlier, [...]
Buonarroti's associates formed a triumvirate in eastern Switzerland in April
I820 to recruit twelve men from different countries to act as leaders of the
coming republican revolution and to organize a web of supporting secret
societies among soldiers, craftsmen, and students.[...]
The last echo of the constitutional rebellions came in distant Russia with
the Decembrist revolt late in 1825, in which major themes of the earlier
rebellions in western and southern Europe were played back in reprise.[...]
The Turgenev brothers, the first to form plans for a secret society, (...) followed
the familiar revolutionary pattern of deriving their organizational ideas not
directly from an earlier revolutionary group, but rather from conservative
attacks on a previous secret society. (...) young Russians dreamed of bringing
spiritual rebirth to Europe by consummating Alexander I's marriage of "religion
and liberty." They sought to use Masonic lodges, beginning with the Lodge
Astrea-named for the Goddess of Justice, who had been the last to
leave the Elysian fields before the end of the Golden Age.
In December 1825, the more revolutionary faction of the movement, the so-
called Southern Society, mounted a doomed uprising in the Chernigov Regiment.
The leading theorist of this group, Paul Pestel, was one of the most inventive
revolutionary thinkers of his time anywhere in Europe. He was one of the few to
argue for an authoritarian, centralized revolutionary state that would consciously
create a single nationality and press for egalitarian social reforms. He followed
the Buonarrotian pattern of making extensive use of Masonic lodges and symbols,
and anticipated Buonarroti in calling for an immediate provisional government after
a revolution. [...]
Revolution inside Russia might lead to international war. After Napoleon's experience,
no one would dare invade Russia, so revolution there "will spread safely and
immediately to other countries whose people are even more bent on revolution." [...]
The Decembrists may also have been more closely related to other European
revolutionary movements than has yet been realized. The original Union of Salvation
was formed in 1816 among Russian officers traveling back and forth to France at
precisely the time Rey founded his model Union. Once again, the Russians
developed similar plans for working through Masonic lodges with a secret, three-
stage hierarchy.[...]
Whatever the specific connections, the general fascination of young Russians with
western revolutionary movements-and above all the Carbonari-is undeniable. Russians
had many contacts with Italian revolutionaries, and tried to establish links early in 1819.
[... ]The Carbonari had been the first secret organization to lead a large-scale revolution
in modern Europe. Despite its failure and disintegration, the Carbonari awakened
enthusiasm for a united Italy; and provided a model for others.
THE PERIOD between 1 830 and 1 848 witnessed the most fundamental internal conflict
within the modern revolutionary tradition, that between national revolution and social
revolution (...) Should revolutionaries rely on the emotional appeal of nationalism or the
intellectual appeal of social equality?
As early optimism faded, French revolutionaries began to ask if the fulfilment of their
stalled revolution lay in fraternite or egalite: the building of a grande nation as
Napoleon urged or of a new social communaute as called for by Babeuf. The more
popular idea was - and has generally remained-that of a nation, and of what the
Spaniards were the first to call "national revolution." [...]
The picture of nations rising in arms against foreign rule provided new hope for national
and social revolutionaries alike. But nationalists were far more numerous, and Italians
led the way.[...]
He (Buonarroti) and a younger Frenchman of Italian ancestry, Auguste Blanqui, created
there in the 1830s the modern belief in a coming social revolution. In contrast, Mazzini
set up a series of revolutionary nationalist organizations –Young Italy and Young Europe-
precisely to oppose the "Parisian principle": the dependence of an entire continent on
one French city.[...]
Socially, the new nationalists were almost all displaced people. Whatever their class
status, they had generally lost the sense of structured expectations that traditional
societies had hitherto provided. [...]
The man who did the most to incite the peoples of Europe against their kings was
the Genoese Giuseppe Mazzini. A veteran of the Carbonari... [...]
Mazzini's nationalist International was the first of many attempts throughout the
nineteenth century to draw revolutionary nationalists together in a common struggle
against traditional monarchies. [...]
Indeed, it is well worth pondering the actual, if surprising, way in which opera itself,
this most Italian of art forms, interacted with and even helped to shape-revolutionary
nationalism in Europe generally and Italy in particular.[...]
Opera so far had been written only for the few and rich, but in the future, it must
"awaken and excite" the masses for social transformations- taking advantage of the
large audiences to spread ideas through agitators [...]
A new genre of "rescue operas" glorified "the liberation of foreign peoples or individuals
suffering under absolutism.[...]
“the type of opera all Germans want : a self-contained work of art in which all artistic
elements cooperate, disappear and reemerge to create a new world” [...]
The mature Wagner weaved pagan myth and a seductive new musical idiom into a
unique vehicle of modern German nationalism. [...]
The premiere of this latter work in Milan on March 9, 1842, brought Giuseppe Verdi
into the center of the real-life drama of Italian unification. Verdi, whose very name
was to become an acronym for Italian nationalism
The national song, of course, had its accompanying flag. In some cases, the song was
about the flag (the Romanian "Tricolor," "The Star Spangled Banner"). In some, it was
simply identified with a banner: La Marseillaise with the tricolor, which became the
official flag of France after 1830.
To the fourteen-year-old Eugene Pottier, the future author of the "Internationale," the
tricolor was "the signal of happiness" when first raised over Paris in July 1830. Each
nation suddenly seemed to feel the need for some such signal. A true nation was now
thought to require a tricolor-freed of all crosses, crowns, and heraldic reminders. [...]
the idea of one unifying color was most fully developed by social revolutionaries in their
search for a banner to rival the tricolors of national revolutionaries. [...]
The revolt of I846 in Cracow inspired the Polish Democratic Society to plan rapidly
(if vainly) for a general levee en masse of the entire Polish peasantry. The Polish
uprising inspired even the British working class, and provided the first hint of the
national uprisings that were to become epidemic in I848.[...]
It was in 1794, as the Terror reached its peak in Paris, that the modern theory of
revolutionary violence began to emerge in places distant from that capital. [...]
The wounded leader of the defeated Polish uprising, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, saw
the liberation of Poland opening the "epoch of general pacification" to end all
human conflict. In exile, he developed the characteristic belief that revolutionary
violence would end all other violence. [...]
He (Bianco) called for a nationwide network of guerrilla bands that would avoid
direct combat but raid armories , seek camouflage, and deny the occupying
Hapsburgs any local sustenance. [...]
The secret of success for a war of peoples rather than kings lay in the political and
moral mobilization of the entire country. Arguing implicitly against the dominance of
Parisian thinking in the revolutionary tradition, Bianco contended that the
possession of a major-or even a capital-city is not important in the early stages of a
national insurrection.[...]
The insurrectionary movement was thus seen as a kind of rural-based moral revival
of the nation.
The rival tradition of social revolution, as we have said, was less successful than that
of national revolution throughout the I830-48 period. Social revolutionary leaders
were usually lonely emigre intellectuals divorced from the masses. [...]
There were two main stages in the birth of a social revolutionary tradition, that is, in
the transition from the republican conspiracies of the early twenties to the Marxist
Communism of the late forties. First came the perfection of the idea of revolutionary
dictatorship by Buonarroti in his last decade from 1828 to 1837. During this period,
the revived Babeuvist ideal of equality was linked with the proletarian class struggle
by some of Buonarroti's followers... [...]
The second phase, lasting from the late 1830s to 1848, was dominated by emigres,
who both internationalized the impulse towards social revolution and linked it with
the working class. This progression of the social revolutionaries from conspiracy to
ideology took place in Paris, London, Brussels, and Geneva. In these cities, relatively
free expression was possible, and the critical intellect was forced to confront the
reality of a new industrial order.[...]
(...) Babeuf: The Conspiracy for Equality. It provided at last both an ancestry and a
model for egalitarian revolution by publicizing the all-but-forgotten Babeuvists. [...]
The failure of all revolutions since 1789 had, in Buonarroti's view, been caused by
a lack of strong leaders prepared in advance to give power to "a revolutionary
government of sages."
Buonarroti urged that the revolutionary regime not submit itself to popular elections
while initial revolutionary changes were being effected; but fulfill three functions
instead: (I) "direct all the force of the nation against internal and external enemies,"
(2) "create and establish the institutions through which the people will be
imperceptibly led really to exercise sovereignty," and (3) "prepare the popular
Constitution which should complete and close the revolution." [...]
Buonarroti's History was a model for modern revolutionary polemics in its
Manichean simplification of a complex story into a clear, cosmic struggle of evil
against good: "egoism" vs. "equality." He immediately relegated to the camp of
egoism ("among the parties... there is one on which the wise man should rivet his
gaze"; and this party is presented as a kind of ultimate Masonic order, "the sincere
friends of equality.") [...]
Blanqui developed not only a theory of social revolution based on class conflict, but
also the rationale for leadership by an intellectual elite. Blanqui insisted that mental
intelligence and physical labor were interdependent needs for a successful revolution.
[...] The Outlaws were the first international organization of social revolutionaries.[...]
NATIONAL REVOLUTIONARIES had offered the romantic imagination a new sense
of fraternity. Social revolutionaries had provided the early industrial era with a new call
for equality. But there were still those concerned primarily with liberty: the third part of
the revolutionary Trinity.[...]
Marquis de Lafayette - a dashing freedom fighter in America, the first ambassador to
the United States, and perhaps the most lionized foreign visitor to early America on
his triumphal return in 1824-25-was to prove as much a political failure in France as he
had been a success in America. His tolerant deism, his belief in natural rights and
constitutional propriety, which had earned him so much admiration in America, were
to win more enemies than friends in France.
Despite secure social roots in the aristocracy and ample personal wealth, Lafayette
believed that there were revolutions yet to be made. But they were to be limited,
constitutional revolutions designed to initiate popular sovereignty and release individual
initiative. [...]
He presented himself as both the successor to and the antithesis of "the false liberation
of Napoleon." [...]
His aristocratic remoteness from direct participation in conspiracy made him even more
invulnerable as a hero when the conspiracies failed. [...]
Like his friend Thomas Jefferson, Lafayette continued to believe in renewal through
perpetual re-examination and periodic revolution. But whereas Jeffersonians envisaged
such revolutions as taking place within the system, the young French radicals who
looked to Lafayette during the restoration were not so sure. Lafayette always viewed
himself as working through the system even when cooperating with clandestine
revolutionary groups. Like many an aging reformer in later times, he thought he could
elevate and educate the young extremists- and perhaps also recover something of
his own youth amidst an army of adonis-liberators.
(In 1833) he (Lafayette) was killed off as a revolutionary symbol with the publication
of Political Life of Lafayette, written by Buonarroti (...) (according to Buonarroti) He
(Lafayette) was an example of what to avoid- a false friend being more dangerous
than a declared enemy. [...]
Bonneville had, already in the early 1790s, anticipated these new attacks on
Lafayette by characterizing him as a "temporisateur; a double personality," who,
being "nothing in either one party or the other, will be doubly nothing." [...]
Lafayette was said to espouse "egoism" rather than "equality" because of his
infatuation with the American rather than the French Revolution. America did not
have a real revolution because of "the egoistic character of its leaders" who did
not include "a single proletarian" [...]
Perhaps no role is more difficult to play in modern times than that of the moderate
revolutionary: the man who honestly shares both the radical hope for a new start
and the conservative concern for older values and continuity. [...]
His ideal was always liberty, rather than equality and fraternity. He linked the old
virtues of enlightened rationality with the new techniques of constitutional guarantee
and parliamentary debate. [...]
With his death in 1834, the revolutionary tradition lost its major surviving link with the
aristocratic Enlightenment. As the Masonic enconium at his funeral put it: “the death
of Napoleon was the extinction of a volcano; the death of Lafayette was the setting
of the sun”. [...]
The one successful revolution in Europe between 1830 and 1848 occurred in
Switzerland. In the space of a few years, the Swiss moved from semi-feudal division
under Hapsburg dominance into a federal republic with a bicameral legislature closely
approximating the United States. The most important revolutionary leader was James
Fazy (...) Fazy's own interest in political journalism led him to write a criticism of the
Bank of France. [...]
Fazy's imagination was fired by long conversations about the American
experience with Lafayette.[...]
announcing in 1831 his belief that only something like the "federal system of the
USA" would "fulfill the constitutional needs of Switzerland." Having sheltered
Buonarroti in the early 1820s his household became the gathering place of
Mazzini and other nationalist revolutionaries in the early 1830s. [...]
From radical journalism , he turned to radical politics in the late 1830s,
producing in 1837 the first draft of an American-type, federal constitution similar
to that finally adopted by Switzerland a decade later. [...]
He broke sharply with Buonarroti's Swiss followers when they tried to transform
Young Europe into an organ of social rather than political revolution. [...]
Ideologically, he articulated as well as anyone what could be described as the
progressive, evolutionary alternative to both revolution and reaction.
America provided Europe with no important revolutionary leadership, ideology,
or organization.[...]
The fact of a successful past revolution and a measure of popular representation
does not altogether explain why Switzerland, England, and America proved so
immune to the formation of indigenous new revolutionary organizations or
ideologies. The central example of France proves that a relatively successful
revolution and a measure of suffrage were not necessarily an antidote to the
development of a professional revolutionary tradition . France, the site of
victorious "bourgeois" revolutions in both 1789 and 1830, became the
principal breeding grounds for fresh revolutionary ideas and organizations.
[...]The key difference appears to lie in two common features of the way in
which change and opposition developed in England, America, and
Switzerland. These were nations that, first of all, had previously experienced
and legitimized ideological opposition to medieval Catholicism. They were,
in short, nations in which Protestantism was, if not the dominant creed as in
America, at least a venerable and coequal one as in Switzerland. Secondly,
each of these nations in different ways had found ways to institutionalize
political opposition through an effective system of parties. [...]
The institutionalization of ideological and political opposition was in some
sense interrelated with-and expressive of- a peculiar type of dynamic and
exploitative economic development taking place in all three countries. [...]
Much experience in nineteenth-century Europe supports the argument
that Protestantism and parliamentarianism provided a kind of alternative
equivalent to revolution. The countries perhaps most immune in all Europe
to native revolutionary movements were the totally Protestant nations of
Scandinavia, which even developed an elastic, simultaneous tolerance for
welfare socialism and monarchy. The low countries also provide a validating
case. Although Holland had experienced an ideological revolution against
Spain in the late sixteenth century, a political one in the late eighteenth, and
a revolution for independence in 1830, the low countries were tranquil,
thereafter, accommodating into the twentieth century both a monarch and
a high degree of social controls. All of this was accomplished incrementally
with tolerance for legal opposition and vocal dissent. [...]
America essentially realized in practice the reformist ideas of the
Enlightenment through a process of evolution. Continental Europe remained
throughout the nineteenth century more authoritarian politically than the
British Empire had been under George III in the eighteenth century. Thus,
Europeans continued to develop in theory the more revolutionary, Illuminist
concept of realizing total enlightenment through a coming upheaval.[...]
THE RISE of revolutionary movements in the first half of the nineteenth
century was directly related to the development of a new class of intellectuals
in continental Europe. This new class created original systems of thought
which may be called ideologies, and eventually developed a new sense of
identity ( and a term to describe themselves ) as an "intelligentsia." [...]
Ideologies are in many ways a modern form of religion [...]
two systems (made by Saint-Simon and Hegel) provided the principal
sources of modern revolutionary ideology.[...]
The crucial link in the apostolic succession from the Babeuf Conspiracy to the
birth of ideology under Saint-Simon is provided by a minor revolutionary
playwright and editor, Jacques Rigomer-Bazin, with whom Saint-Simon lived in
Paris at several important points during this decade. Bazin may have been linked
with Bonneville's Social Circle and was almost certainly connected to the Babeuf
Conspiracy while still working as a revolutionary journalist in provincial Le Mans
[...] Bazin was living with Saint-Simon at the time of his arrest; and the latter
clearly borrowed extensively from Bazin in his writings of this period. His Letter
of an Inhabitant of Geneva (1802-3) called for twenty-one men of genius to open
a subscription before the tomb of Newton and begin the scientific reorganization
of society. His next work of 1 804 adopted the very title of Bazin's confiscated
work, adding to Bazin's previous call for a scientific elite an idea shortly to be
developed more fully by Bazin : the artist should be the moralist of the new
scientific era; and a new type of writer, the litterateur, its propagandist. [...]
Bazin clearly provided in this formative period both a personal and an
ideological inspiration for Saint-Simon's vision of an elite of intellectuals
transforming not just politics, but all of human society and culture
Following the invocation in his final work, The New Christianity, Saint-Simon's
disciples created a fantastic new secular religion with global perspectives that
foreshadowed many aspects of twentieth-century thought. [...]
Having spent eleven months in prison during the Reign of Terror, expecting
death at any moment, Saint-Simon had a deep fear of revolution. (...) Thus,
ironically, this aristocrat of the ancient regime seeking to provide (in the words
of one of his titles ) the means for bringing an end to the revolution, ended up
popularizing the most revolutionary of all modern ideas: there can be a
science of human relations. [...]
In a sense, Saint-Simon was only reviving the Enlightenment vision of humanity
advancing through three successive stages to a scientific ordering of life (in
Turgot's Discourse on Universal History of 1760); and of universal progress
towards rational order (in Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the
Progress of the Human Mind, written in hiding shortly before his death in 1794).
[...] Napoleon, who had helped inspire the quest for a science of man, also began
the process of driving it into social revolutionary paths. Believing that the scientific
method should be applied to the body of society as well as to the individual body,
Saint-Simon proceeded to analyze society in terms of its physiological components:
classes. [...]
he envisaged an end to revolution through a new religion with a single commandment:
"All men must work." (...) Saint-Simon was the prophet of meritocracy [...]
Saint-Simon turned to one last force for revolutionary support in his last years,1824-25:
"the most numerous and poorest class." He addressed to the self-proclaimed spiritual
leaders of the "holy alliance" his final plea for a "New Christianity" of morality without
metaphysics, technology without theology. [...]
Saint-Simon was a truly seminal intellectual force: a father of socialism as well as
sociology, and a John the Baptist of revolutionary ideology [...]
Political authority was to be replaced by social authority in his technocratic
utopia. [...]
Saint-Simon's final call for a new religion represented the culmination of the ideologiste
attempt to supplant all religion by absorbing it into a progressive scheme of secular
evolution.[...]
Saint-Simon viewed his New Christianity as just such a necessity for the masses. His
death left it unclear whether this faith was designed to provide the moral basis for the
new social order or merely an interim faith until the masses were educated to accept
a totally scientistic system.
the greatest Saint-Simonian influence lay within France, first of all ON THE POSITIVIST
TRADITION DEVELOPED BY HIS FRIEND AND SOMETIME PUPIL AUGUSTE COMTE.[...]
More important than Saint-Simon's influence on sociology was his impact on socialism.
His followers in the 1830s first gave widespread use (...) to the word "socialism," [...]
Social revolutionary Saint-Simonianism was begun by two young students from the
Ecole Polytechnique: Olinde Rodrigues, the son of a Jewish banker from Bordeaux,
and his young mathematics student, who had fought for Napoleon in the Hundred
Days and spent 1821 -23 in St. Petersburg, Barthelemy Prosper Enfantin. [...]
Enfantin in his last work, La Vie eternelle. He lifted the older Saint-Simonian idea of
transmigration (palin-genesis) of souls to its highest level, prophesying both the
technological transformation of the earth and the biological creation of a new,
androgynous humanity. [...]
God himself was feminine as well as masculine, drawing people in to reunion with
nature (and a share of divinity) by a kind of universal libido [...]
The Saint-Simonians who went east in 1833 in search of a "feminine messiah" [...]
Physical labor wedded a masculine humanity with a feminine earth [...]
The Saint-Simonians viewed the c ouple-pretre of man and woman as the new
social microcosm, replacing the atomized individual, and they extended sexual
imagery to the macrocosm, the entire world. [...]
The "Young" or "Left" Hegelians transformed the vague historicism of Saint-
Simonians and others into hard revolutionary conviction. [...]
Saint-Simon provided a vision of material paradise: Hegel, a method for
attaining it. [...]
Herzen wrote from exile in Vladimir in July 1839 that he was contemplating a
dissertation on "How is our century a link between the past and the future ?"
when he came upon the radical treatise of a Polish Hegelian who answered
his question with a "philosophy of action." [...]
The new university at Berlin was the intellectual heart of the Prussian revival
after Prussia's humiliation by Napoleon. Hegel was central to its intellectual
life not only as professor of philosophy from 1818 until his death in 1831, but
for many years thereafter. Founded in 1 809, the University of Berlin was in
many ways the first modern university-urban, research-oriented, state-
supported, free from traditional religious controls.[...]
For it was a creation of the state, pledged to train a new Prussian elite. [...]
Marxist intellectuals continue to insist on the revolutionary impact of Hegel:
as the first major thinker to dwell on both the Industrial and the French
Revolutions, as a key influence on Lenin as well as on Marx. [...]
He had begun as a student of theology, in search of a theodicy, a
justification of the ways of God to man; he ended up instead creating a new
God: the "World Spirit." [...]
Hegel found (...) Eternal contemplation of the self was, he discovered, the
old idea of hell (...) The world of the spirit ( or mind, the German Geist
meaning both ) provided a way out, because the mind finds satisfaction in its
own activity. Charting the life of the spirit-the "phenomenology of mind" as he
called it- appeared as a kind of compensation for defeat in battle. Hegel's
"science of consciousness" was seen as the controlling force of the universe
(...) Thesis generated antithesis and was resolved in a higher synthesis
following the pattem of thought itself. Like history thought moved upward through
such tensions toward the pure life of the spirit-the old Greek ideal of
contemplating contemplation. [...]
Hegel gave a compelling urgency to knowledge about how history worked. All
truth was realized in history, and any part of reality was intelligible only in historical
context. Hegel's fragmentary attempts to decode the historical process inspired a
bewildering variety of movements. [...]
the most important aspect of Hegel's immense influence was that which he exercised
on the so-called Young or Left Hegelians. This new generation of radicals drew from
his legacy a belief in the dialectical inevitability and revolutionary direction of history.[...]
Hegel no more than Saint-Simon intended to start a new revolution; he meant only to
resolve the conflicts of the old. But the sedentary Berlin professor with his snuff box and
haute bourgeois style of life hatched the most revolutionary idea of all: the dialectical
method. By suggesting that history like thought proceeds progressively through
contradiction and conflict [...]
Since the essential content of history was thought, the key elements in its dynamic
development were ideas. [...]
History was transforming abstract ideas into concrete form [...]
Cieszkowski, too, moved from ideology to cosmology in order to sustain an image of
worldwide social transformation. (...)In his enormous, unfinished work of the I840s,
Our Father, he argued that the Kingdom was literally about to come "on earth as it is
in heaven." A reintegrated "organic humanity" was to usher in a new age of "the Holy
Spirit" in which all national identities would disappear before the Central Government
Of Mankind, the Universal International Tribunal, and the Universal Council of the
Peoples [...]
In 1843, B . F. Trentowski invented the word "cybernetics" to describe the new form of
rational social technology which he believed would transform the human condition. In
his neglected work, The Relationship of Philosophy to Cybernetics; or the art of ruling
nations, he also invented the word "intelligentsia." In a passage challenging the
leadership of the nationalist poet Adam Mickiewicz, Trentowski called him out of touch
with "the new generation and the new spirit," [...]
Ogarev, studying in Germany, pointed the way with his declaration that "not all that is
real is rational, but all that is rational should become real. The philosophy of action is
at present the best trend . . . a theory according to which irrational reality changes into
a rational one. [...]
None of the leading Young Hegelians had seriously suffered at the hands of the
European authorities; and most of them (including Marx) appear never to have even
been inside a factory. Theirs was a mental and spiritual revolt-born of new vision rather
than old grievances. They spoke from exile-Russians in Berlin or Paris, Prussians in
Geneva or Brussels, Poles everywhere . They spoke with many tongues – but always
in the language of prophecy. Just as Christian prophets had identified oppressive rulers
with the Antichrist in order to heighten expectations of deliverance by the True Christ,
so the Young Hegelian prophets now proclaimed [...]
Bakunin proclaimed late in 1842 that "the joy of destruction is a creative joy"; and his
friend Proudhon, then under Hegel's influence, began his major work of the mid-1840s
with the motto: "I destroy in order to build." [...]
Early in 1848, a wave of revolutions struck Europe. It reached further and lasted longer
than that of 1830. But it failed everywhere [...]
When the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe collapsed in Paris late in February,
French approval seemed assured for national revolt elsewhere. (...) Even before the
new French government had acquired political form, it justified itself "by natural right
and by national right," appealing to the nations rather than the sovereigns of Europe.
[...] the German-speaking world brought to center stage the second revolutionary
doctrine of the romantic era: liberalism. [...]
Socialism along with communism and other slogans of social revolution came to
dominate the European imagination, particularly after open class warfare bloodied the
streets of Paris in June 1848.
Proletarian unrest following the depression of 1847 had helped precipitate the original
February Revolution. [...]
The counter-revolutionary resurgence throughout Europe in 1 849-50 benefited not just
from the inexperience of intellectuals as political leaders.[...]
German liberals were unnerved by the rise of a workers' movement, and the specter of
communism that this movement raised helped turn older liberals into new conservatives.
Napoleon III returned the Pantheon to the archbishop of Paris, who renamed it (for the
third time) the Church of Saint Genevieve-thus dooming to oblivion a unique artistic effort
to express the general faith underlying all the ism's. For more than three years, a
dedicated team of revolutionary painters under Paul Chenavard had been working on a
vast set of designs to redecorate the Pantheon. It was perhaps the most ideologically
ambitious artistic project of the 1848-51 era-and a worthy reprise of those first efforts
after the death of Mirabeau in 1791 to turn the church into a secular shrine for great
men which might inspire revolutionaries to "make the world into a Pantheon." [...]
The central element in Chenavard's revolutionary iconography was a vast mural in
heroic classical style representing real and mythical figures in a circular panorama of
progressive "palingenesis" (continuous rebirth) leading towards universal
brotherhood among androgynous supermen. [...]
MORE THAN any other movement within the revolutionary tradition, communism was
born with its name. When the word first appeared publicly in 1840, it spread throughout
the continent with a speed altogether unprecedented in the history of such verbal
epidemics. Unlike earlier revolutionary labels, communism was a new word, associated
from the beginning with a new concept. [...]
Rapid dissemination of the term throughout Europe was made possible by accelerated
means of communication (mail service regularized by means of the steamboat and steam
engine, and the first telegraphy). Those who spread the word were a small group of young
journalists whose sole occupation was verbal craftsmanship. Unlike the operatic voices of
romantic nationalism, social revolutionaries communicated most naturally in printed prose-
the social novel, the critical review, the polemic pamphlet. Out of a veritable ocean of such
prose, the word communism emerged as a telegraphic label for an essentially verbal vision.
The idea, first popularized in the pages of a novel (Cabet's Voyage to Icaria ), was refined
and finally made manifest by Marx on the eve of revolution in 1848. [...]
The word communism spread before there were any communists. Indeed, the term was
most prominently and insistently used by conservative opponents- demonstrating once
again the symbiosis between the fears of one extreme and the hopes of the other. [...]
The first new isms to create their own new ists were socialism and communism. These
verbal talismans appeared with timetable punctuality at the beginning of the 1830s and
1840s respectively. But, unlike the liberalism of the 1820s, socialism and communism
produced self-proclaimed socialists and communists. [...]
it is worth asking why the far more numerous and successful national revolutionaries
of the same period produced no comparable verbal in novations. Nationalisme, a word
coined in Barruel's widely read treatise of 1797, was rarely used by subsequent national
revolutionaries, and does not appear in any major European lexicon until the Larousse
of 1874 [...]
Social revolutionaries (...) needed visibility visibility, which could be attained even through
negative publicity. This, and a slogan that inspired outrage in the nonrevolutionary, mass
press, could be profoundly useful in attracting fresh attention to their ideal of radical social
change.
The secret "Society of Flowers" of I836-38 has been called "the first Communist society"
[...] Likewise in Paris, after the failure of the Blanquist insurrection in May 1839, a small
and exclusively working-class organization was founded, the Society of Workers .[...]
Communism as a political ideal and verbal talisman originated, however, not among
workers but among intellectuals who provided leadership through smaller groups that
arose within or out of these larger organizations. [...]
Laponneraye developed (...) a class-oriented view of the French Revolution and a
totalistic conception of popular education. He provided a new view of the one historical
event that had meaning for even the most illiterate worker, that is, the French Revolution.
He helped create a mythic view which has dominated subsequent communist
historiography: the simultaneous glorification of both the political leadership of
Robespierre and the socio-economic aspirations of the Parisian proletariat. These
two elements had in fact often been in conflict, but they were unified retroactively in
order to validate Laponneraye's own desire to provide elite leadership for proletarian
power. [...]
But he (Laponneraye) went further, suggesting that the mission of the contemporary
revolutionary was to combine Robespierre with Babeuf: authoritarian means with
egalitarian ends. [...]
For him (Laponneraye) education was a means not just of spreading knowledge, but
also of building a new type of human being "in the midst of a society that has turned
gangrenous with egoism and corruption." This new type of education sought "the
annihilation of egoism" within man and the destruction within society of "this moral
anarchy in which intelligences are drowned." [...]
Dezamy He imbued a tempestuous outpouring of pamphlets with an intensified
Belief in universalism and atheism, the antitheses of the dominant nationalism
and religiosity of the age. [...]
Dezamy developed a polemic style that was qualitatively different from previous
petty wrangling over the details of utopias or the motives of personalities. He
stressed the need to discipline intellect for the task of revolution. Leaders of the
coming revolution would be neither "believers" (croyants) in any religion nor
the "wise men" (savants) to whom even Buonarroti had looked, but a new type of
engaged intellectual: the "knowing ones" (sachants) for whom "the aim of
philosophy ... is to conduct men to happiness... by science." [...]
Dezamy sought to expunge religiosity from the communist label [...]
Dezamy revealed once again the recurring impulse of the revolutionary mentality
for radical simplification . In the society of the future there would be one global
congres humanitaire, a single language (preferably a neutral, dead language like
Latin), and a single form of service as "industrial athletes," [...]
The logic of radical simplicity led Dezamy to insist that just as communism was
"unitary," its victory would be universal. "Finished Communism" would exist only
in a "universal country” (...) There would be no "new holy alliance against the first
government embracing Communism ," because its ideological appeal would spread
rapidly and create "the universal community." (...) "Communitarian principles"
contained "the solution to all problems." [...]
Dezamy's last three major works argued in the course of 1845-46 for a materialist and
atheist worldview to supplant Catholicism for "the organization of universal well-being."
[...] For Dezamy-as for his admirer Karl Marx-the atheism of his mature years was not
"just an historical or biographical accident," but "an essential premise of his whole theory."
Communism was transnational as well as antinationalist. [...]
England had become important in the repressive atmosphere of the late 183os as a
secure place for revolutionary emigres to meet each other and publish freely. [...]
Cabet spent most of the 1830s in exile in England, where he first published clandestinely
in 1839, his enormously influential Voyage to Icaria. [...]
His (Owen’s) Association of All Classes of All Nations, founded in 1835, was "the first
organized socialist movement in England" [...]
Barmby first popularized the term communism in England {...} upon arrival in Paris,
Barmby was soon caught up in a whirl of Fourierist activities including socialist
discussion groups, Fourierist concerts, and lectures on phrenology and "societarian
science" in "community coffee houses." [...]
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