Happy Bastille Day!
By Dave Fryett
15 July, 2011
Countercurrents.org
Some 200 years ago, the French king, having bankrupted his country with expensive colonial intrigues and lavish personal spending, convoked the Estates General. He wanted to raise more money through taxation of the nobility, but they were exhausted by Louis' impositions and were having none of it. So in desperation, the king decided on the risky move, employed by former French monarchs with some success, of summoning the leadership of all ranks of society to discuss France's fiscal predicament. He hoped that under such pressure, the nobility would then accede to his request.
Big mistake.
Of the Estates, which we might call classes, the First was the clergy, the Second the nobility. Between them they comprised about two or three percent of the population. The Third Estate was everybody else: the newly ascendant bourgeoisie, and all the laboring classes.
As the entire enterprise was a public relations ploy on Louis' part, he instructed his finance minister to seek advice from the population as to how to organize the Estates General. The responses revealed a seething public with radical ideas. The most portentous reply was written by a clergyman whose sympathy for the poor was so profound that he eschewed the First Estate and joined with the Third. Abby Sieyes' pamphlet, What Is the Third Estate, famously asked three questions:
What is the Third Estate? Answer: everything.
What is it in the political order? Answer: nothing
What does it want? Answer: to be something.
Sieyes, drawing from Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, and the excitement created by the American Revolution, suggested the unthinkable: France didn't need the First and Second Estates. They were superfluous, and should be abolished.
As these ideas gained traction, Louis began to recognize the enormity of his miscalculation, and tried to disrupt the Estates General.
Meanwhile, revolutionary spirit swept through France. The Third Estate, buoyed by the universal hostility towards Louis and his extravagant queen, Marie Antoinette, who was as frugal and chaste as a drunken sailor on shore leave, did the unthinkable: Following Sieyes' lead, they declared themselves the National Assembly of France. The revolution had begun.
Now terrified, Louis instituted a lockout of the Third Estate. They moved to a nearby tennis court and there vowed that they would not be dissolved.
Louis then called in the army to surround the city. In response, the revolutionaries called for a people's militia. Soon a large force had assembled and their first order of business was the acquisition of munitions. On July 14, 1789, the militia made its way to a prison called the Bastille which doubled as an armory. The site had symbolic meaning as well as a handful of political prisoners were held there. After a lengthy battle, the revolutionaries prevailed. It was the greatest moment in the history of social justice, it may still be.
While it was a triumph of an alliance of bourgeoisie and the working class, an alliance, as Trotsky put it, of a condemned man with his executioner, it was nevertheless the first time in history where everyday working people seized power. The contradictory nature of the class composition of the revolutionary contingent would soon become manifest. And would recur in France in the clashes of 1793, 1830, 1848, 1871, and again in the struggles of the 1930s, '60s, and '90s. Nevertheless, the revolutionaries declared universal suffrage, abolished slavery, and instituted maximum prices on essential foodstuffs which eliminated hunger overnight. Most importantly, it freed the genie of revolution from her bottle, and the world has never been the same.
The American Revolution came first, but it was largely a colonial war and the bourgeoisie soon brought the masses under control. After the Constitution was written and implemented, millions were still enslaved and less than fifteen percent of the population had the right to vote. By contrast, the French revolution was not merely a separation from a distant colonial ruler, it was the overthrow of an existing order. It upended France, and the tremors were felt the world over.
So for the first time in history the hand that steered the plow, that wielded the hammer, that pulled the loom, reached up and seized control. The hand that jibbed the mast, that slopped the hogs, that dug the redoubts, that kneaded the dough, the hand that emptied the king's chamber pot, the hand that power never shook, on that day shook power.
So I wish you, dear brothers and sisters, a happy Bastille Day. It is a time most worthy of remembrance and celebration.
Dave is an activist in Seattle, and can be reached at his blog saveourcola.blogspot.com
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