Bolsheviks of the Bastille - comparison of French and Russian revolutions

National Review, July 14, 1989 by Leon Steinmetz

WELL BEFORE 1917, the Russian anarchist Kropotkin said, "What we learn today from . . . the Great Revolution . . . is that it was the source and origin of all the present Communist, anarchist, and socialist conceptions . . . absolutely nothing [was added] to the ideas that were circulating among the French people between 1789 and 1794." Lenin spoke of himself and his comrades as "glorious Jacobins," Trotsky warned of "Thermidorian reaction," and Stalin wrote of "Girondist treachery." To many people for whom the French Revolution is the "Glorious Explosion which regenerated men," this comparison has always been repugnant. The Bolsheviks, however, had a point.

The French sought "une nouvelle race," the Soviets a "new man." In France people named their childrenand even renamed themselves-after martyrs such as Marat and Le Peletier, as well as taking more elaborate first names like Pas-de-Bon-Dieu (No-Godthe-Father). Russian women took names like Electrification and Industrialization; men became Tractor and Melor (an acronym for Marx Engels Lenin, Organizers of the Revolution). A Frenchman could no longer address someone as monsieur or madame: the new forms were citoyen[ne]. Tovarishchcomrade was of course the proper Soviet form of address. But these are some of the milder reforms.

"The Republic is the destruction of everything which opposes it," declared Robespierre. Can rare animals oppose the Republic? Apparently they can, because Chaumette, a Convention deputy and the head of the Paris Commune, called for the killing of all rare animals in the Museum of Natural History. Hanriot, Commander of the National Guard, wanted to burn the Bibliothbque Nationale: "We will burn all thelibraries, for only the history of the Revolution and the [revolutionary] laws will be needed." Even the dead were not spared: the magnificent royal tombs of Saint-Denis were smashed to pieces, the coffins opened and bones sold as souvenirs. Dialectical materialism in its Soviet version, of course, has given us Museums of Atheism where churches once stood.

Memos and protocols of the Revolutionary Tribunals read like excerpts from the Gulag Archipelago. In Soviet Russia, a peasant was shot for carrying a bust of Stalin "disrespectfully, holding it by the neck," or a cabdriver for using a newspaper with Lenin's picture to cover a hole in the sole of his shoe. In revolutionary France a certain Brille was guillotined for "having wrapped a pound of butter in newly issued paper money," thus showing

disrespect for the Revolution"; Antoine Brasseur, a clockmaker, for "being arrogant . . . and speaking ironically about the Revolution."

Chassant, a former priest-turned-educator, wrote that children were obliged to denounce even their parents' deviations from the revolutionary road. A century and a half later, Pavlik Morozov, the 12-year-old son of a collective-farm chairman, denounced his father to the GPU for failing to expropriate the peasants' entire harvest. The old man was arrested and shot; the boy was long praised as a model for all Soviet youth.

Like the Bolsheviks, the Convention declared hoarding a capital offense, and imposed confiscatory prices-enforced by special "appropriation units" accompanied by mobile guillotines. Naturally, there was a food shortage, the bread lines and ration cards in Paris in the 1790s remarkably resembling those in Petrograd in 1918-20. Like their heirs, the French revolutionaries blamed "enemies of the people" for the shortages. The main enemies of the people were of course aristocrats, but here is how a popular orator of the Paris Commune defined that group: "Aristocrats are all the people with money, all the fat merchants, all the monopolists, law students, bankers, pettifoggers, and anyone who has something." This "something" could mean simply a refined appearance, hands with no marks of manual Labor, or well-groomed hair ("to keep one's head on one's shoulders it was advisable that it were unkempt," wrote a contemporary).

To remake the people, Boissy d'Anglas saw the state as a monitor of all the individual's activities, "including his inner and private behavior." And children could not be started too young. A Western traveler in the Soviet Union in the Thirties recalled how, upon his visit to a nursery school, he saw portraits of the Politburo members placed at toddler's eye. level. He was informed that in the Soviet Union "children learn to admire the leaders at a very early age." In revolutionary France children were taught to see political meanings everywhere-a house of cards was but a symbol of the aristocrats' chateaux swept away by the new regime; a high-flying kite symbolized a citizen enjoying his new freedom. Even "bonbons patriotiques" had "lessons in citizenship" printed on their wrappers.

IF THE PEOPLE could not be remade . . . As Stalin starved the restive Ukraine, so the leaders of the French Revolution sought a smaller population, the more easily to remake the nation. Gracchus Babeuf, a student and admirer of Robespierre, wrote that it would be impossible to regenerate such a populous country as France (25 million inhabitants): the Revolution had just begun, but already it was apparent that to divide everything up into equal shares would be impossible-there was not enough money, property, employment, or even bread to go around. Hence Jean Saint-Andre announced from the Convention floor that "in order to establish the Republic securely, the population must be reduced by more than half." Carrier declared that the nation must be reduced to six million; Guffroy, five million; and Robespierre, not to be outdone by his followers, is reported to have thought that four million would be more than enough.