History Lesson: Concentrated Power will Hang On to the Bitter End

Non-violent Civil Disobedience and Constitutional Action on its own Doesn’t Ever Acheive Fundamental Change

Sadly, I don’t think marching, petitions and voting is going to do much. Let’s start by looking at the French Revolution from two perspectives, anarchist and Jacobin.

Anarchist: Don’t Underestimate the Power to Break Shit

Before the Revolution, France had almost no police and no military draft. True, on paper, de jure, the same person who owned most of the land in a given district was also the local judge in many cases. This aristocrat had privileges and power. He could exploit the local population in various ways. But in fact, de facto, there were limits to the amount of goods and services the local power could extract. While the peasants couldn’t engage in armed uprisings very effectively, they could sabotage the master’s property, find ways to avoid work, poach, steal, and otherwise make things difficult if the degree of repression exceeded their collective tolerance. Also, because each area had a different language or dialect, different weights and measures, customs, laws and other traditions, the local labor force in any specific region could not be easily replaced or displaced. After the Revolution, instead of a landowner with family connections to local people, the ruler was a steely-eyed bureaucrat who could care less who your father may have been. So the peasants who joined the counter-revolutionary forces and fought the Jacobin armies after 1790 were not crazy: the increase is state power was likely to be more oppressive than the system of aristocratic privilege. They weren’t fighting for the noble, they were fighting for their local community.

Jacobin: The Only Way to Make Real Change is to Cut off Somebody’s Head

On the other hand, the Jacobin government elected in 1792 was the most democratically elected national government in the history of the world, with the franchise far broader than in the United States or anything in the United Kingdom. Rather than accept the results of a democratic election, the anti-revolutionaries in France sided with the foreign enemies of France like Austria and Prussia and waged war on their own government. They didn’t think this was treason, as they weren’t loyal to France as an abstraction but to the person of the king. They didn’t think the fact that the Jacobins won an election fair and square meant anything much: they didn’t like elections. Then, when their heads got chopped off, they were surprised. If you challenge a democratically elected government with the support of the nation’s foreign enemies, that’s what you get. No counter-revolutionary aggressive, anti-democratic war, no terror. Don’t blame Robespierre. Blame the Catholic and Royal Army of Vendée.

These two points of view seem to be in direct opposition to each other. One supports increasing democracy and one is skeptical about the increase in state power that resulted from the revolution. Yet both points of view contradict the mainstream narrative

Historians have often pulled the terror out of the context of simultaneous anti-democratic international and civil war and said, “See, the revolution eats its own.” Bad Jacobins! But if the other side had accepted the results of the Jacobin election victory, no one would have been guillotined.

This point about the refusal to relinquish power is relevant today and always. Slave owners in the South, aristocrats in France, even White South Africans at the end of apartheid: no entrenched elite has ever relinquished power without violence or the threat of violence. Nelson Mandela never gave up his right to wage war to achieve a non-racial South Africa.

The above anarchist take on the French Revolution (one of many anarchist points of view, of course) emphasizes that much of what drives history is not available for historians to study. Sabotage, stealing, riots, poaching, robbing, a knife in the back: neither the perpetrator nor the victim want the full scope of the problem or the details to find their way into the official narrative. If you bring a nobleman to his senses with some criminal activity, you aren’t going to write down what you did, and he isn’t going to let anyone know how much trouble his own peasants can cause him when they get pissed. But this kind of stuff — breaking shit — actually is a significant force in history. The French Revolution, by creating police forces and conscription armies, was a step back in terms of human freedom. The local de facto power to break shit was important and lost in the efficiency of the new and more homogenized state.

Both of these points of view might be skeptical of a political movement that only takes the moral high road. The American Civil Rights Movement under Martin Luther King, as the most obvious example, was steadfastly moral. The goals of the movement were a substantial transformation in the power balance between the peoples of the United States. In that aim, the Civil Rights movement failed, at least economically. The movement was too moral to actually be effective. If you want to break down the imperialism, racism, and exploitation of the American system, you will need either a guillotine or to break a lot of shit. At least, that might be the lesson of the French revolution.

Or, I’m wrong. Hope so.