#french marxism

[lasttarrasque]

France is further trying to Colonize Kanak

France has long held the territory of New Caledonia, or Kanak as its native people call it, as a colonial possession. France is now trying to pass a bill to allow French nationals to vote in New Caledonia elections in order to further marginalize the indigenous Kanak people. We need to support our colonized Kanak comrades in their struggle against French colonalism. Makes some noise spread awareness, educate others!

If anyone knows of active solidarity networks, boycott campaigns or other ways of supporting the Kanak people, pleases share them.

[queerism1969]

What on earth did we do wrong? What harm did we inflict? What did we do to you? Who are you to judge us?

Who gave you the right? Are you the representatives of mankind, or what? Who appointed you? Was it God? Yourselves? You don't care if someone loves to go bowling or shooting! You don't care if someone wants to be a doctor or a flight attendant! So why can't we love someone of the same gender? What makes you say that the way we love is wrong? Because we're not "normal"? Because we don't abide by the provisions of God? The laws of nature?

Well, fuck you. What a load of bullshit. Do you want to create a land for God? Good. Then let's bring back the regulations on sex positions first! Don't use condoms, and only fuck in the missionary position, damn it! Since sex should only be for childbirth, and any other pleasure is against the will of God, am I right? Come to think of it, you guys are fucking disgusting. I mean, I know you all fuck doggy-style and blow each other! So I guess you're all going to hell as well! The same goes for singles who don't copulate at all! If the union of man and woman is what is "normal", singles are the most abnormal of all! You're all going to hell, too! On, and let's just kill all the ugly people, fat people, and poor people while we're at it. Then it'll be heaven on earth, with no abnormal beings! Where the normal are free to kill the abnormal! If you ask me, you uneducated, narrow-minded scumbags are the ones that degrade human nobility! You're fucking revolting! Ignorant morons! Do you feel good? Or pissed off? Mad?

Then come at me! Instead of being fucking cowards, bashing someone that's all tied up. Won't it be more fun to beat up a person of color? Kill me before I infect your brains and turn all of you into homosexuals! Kill me first! Stupid scumbags!

[fharysa]

La Chinoise - 1967

[empirearchives]

“He [Napoleon] remained deeply attached to the refusal of the Ancien Régime, to the refusal of national degradation in the face of the Bourbons and aristocratic Europe. It is from this refusal that he will draw the strength to think and set up this powerful resistance movement which will be the return from the island of Elba in March 1815. This is why the forces of the Holy Alliance reject him, ostracizing him from humanity as an ‘anarchist’. He was in his time ‘the revolutionary emperor’ because his conquest was transformative for the social order.”

— Antoine Casanova, Vive la Révolution: 1789-1989: Réflexions autour du bicentenaire

[valkaryah]

Weekend (1967) dir. Jean-Luc Godard

[almaville]

la chinoise!(1967)

[artfilmfan]

Tout Va Bien (Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972)

"I'm not denying that our society has drawbacks. The hard work and aggressiveness that accompany the drive for efficiency risk dehumanizing everyone and destroying the weaker among us. The desire for possessions can lead to frustration, and too much pleasure can make you nauseous. You have to find a balance, and most people find it - or will find it. They have a natural tendency to find balance and adapt because of their need to streamline all aspects of their lives and surroundings."

[tilbageidanmark]

[eelhound]

"One problem with the charge that the Left is driven by envy is that one person’s envy is another’s justified resentment. That is, to say that someone is envious generally implies that they have a misplaced anger about something that rightly belongs to someone else...

But not every case of being angry about what someone else has is a case of envy. When women felt outrage about being denied the voting rights given to men, or when black Americans were resentful of being excluded from job opportunities and public spaces granted to whites, they weren’t succumbing to envy. These were instances of the oppressed groups feeling warranted indignation at being unjustly excluded from opportunities to which they were entitled.

Socialists argue that, under capitalism, the working class is systematically deprived of the fruits of its labor. Capitalists, by virtue of their monopoly over the means of production, assert ownership over the goods and services that their employees produce, and pay workers less than the value of what they create, keeping the remainder as profit. As the classic labor anthem 'Solidarity Forever' puts it, 'It is we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade / Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid,' while the owners take 'untold millions that they never toiled to earn.'

The socialist response is to demand collective, democratic ownership of society’s productive resources so that the ultrarich are no longer able to hoard the wealth generated by the working class. This will allow society to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met, and to make more rational decisions about investment and production — prioritizing ecological sustainability, for instance, over the destructive pursuit of profit at all costs.

This vision is not an expression of covetousness or 'hate' of the better off. It is a demand for a world where basic principles of justice and decency prevail. By chalking up the socialist desire for a redistribution of wealth and power to envy, the Right dodges the fundamental moral question at issue between socialists and their opponents: Who deserves what? Are the 'idle drones' entitled to the wealth the working class produces, or does the world belong to the workers?"

- Nick French, from "No, Socialism Isn’t About Envying the Rich." Jacobin, 14 April 2023.

[comradeupdog]

The Terror is a needed part of every revolution, not because revolutionaries like violence but because the old order was based on violence and the defenders of that order will use violence to challenge the work of building the new order. A revolutionary state will have to use violence because it will be a state, a revolution that does not attempt to establish a state will die in infancy because everyone around that revolution would have a state which is the most efficient way to organize “armed bodies of men” as Engels says.

There is not one (1) historical example of a genuine revolution that did not require mass violence or threat of mass violence to establish itself. I would love a revolution that is all about good feelings and requires no violence, which goes straight into a classless, stateless society, but that is not what history teaches us about revolutions. Revolutions are about destroying the previous state of one class and establishing a state of another class.

[karl-says]

Lenin said, without a theory of revolution it is not possible to have a revolutionary movement. I say, theory and practice are one in the same comrades!

[shapesofculture]

SHAPES OF TOLERANCE

good morning, ٱلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ, કેમ છો?

Can you believe it is nearly the end of June and I have finally managed to draft a second post?

By the way, it seems as if EURO 2024 has just started, but let me tell you, it will finish in a blink of an eye.

Staying on the subject, it is not difficult to notice that socio-cultural layer of the tournament tend to evoke as many emotions as game results; let’s take the ‘No to Racism’ campaign as a starting point. Online and offline discussions about race and, more recently, gender discrimination in sport may, to some, be of equal or higher importance than the idea of the championship itself.

I believe that tolerance is one of the core values learned (or not) in the childhood and teen years, which plays a significant role in moulding personal point of view on various social and cultural aspects of the past, present and future. 

Tolerance, similarly to pacifism, has many facets and can present some limits, which are more likely to be set by authority, on a public and private level. 

French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser¹, defined such institutions as repressive and ideological state apparatuses, which hold a substantial control over maintaining a refined ideology, reproduced through mass media. 

‘Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’

¹ Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review P, 2001.

² https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/marxism/modules/althusserideology.html

[cult-of-the-girl-offensive]

Read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Seriously, just read it if you haven't already. It's available online for free, and it's not even that long!

Not only will you gain a greater understanding of Marx's understanding of history, that viewpoint we call "Historical Materialism", but it's also just a really fun read with some excellent turns of phrase. So go on, read it.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: You don’t hear much about leftist French intellectuals these days. In your considered opinion are they a spent force? Do you follow them?

Yes, I think you are correct. Not only are they a spent force but they are also intellectually and morally bankrupt. In many ways today’s french intellectuals are but a pale shadow of their past. Arguably, I think it’s a reflection in general of France’s relative decline (alongside other European countries) on the world stage as well.

But I should also say no, I think you are incorrect. Because bad ideas never die, they just get imported and recycled out of America. Unwittingly the woke are the heirs of these post-war French intellectuals. 

No, I don’t follow them per se. But I do try to follow their arguments. I think it’s a mark of my intellectual curiosity to want to grapple with their ideas and try and see where they are coming from. That way if and when I reject an argument I know why I’m doing so rather than dismissively paint a broad brush caricature without even honestly engaging with their ideas.

There is no question French intellectual life conjures up potent imagery in the naive imaginations of some Anglo-Saxons, especially those on university campuses in both the US and Britain. The smell of Gauloises cigarettes and crowded Parisian cafés as well as pretty girls hanging on every word of the gnomic philosophe as he feels up their skirts and earnest bourgeois young men agitating for the next social revolution in turtle necks and Burberry scarves.

Philosophy really matters in France - and that actually is a good thing in experience. It has a central part in public life. It is taught to all schoolchildren. Anglophones know about René Descartes, the ‘Father of Modern Philosophy’ with his flowing locks and his cogito (“I think, therefore I am”). They know about Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus and the stylish literary existentialism they created on the Left Bank in the years after the War. But they know precious little else. The ideas seem opaque and the writing incoherent but no one wants to say so for fear of being cast out of the herd.

Writing shortly after the end of the second world war, the French historian André Siegfried claimed (with a characteristic touch of Gallic aplomb) that French thought had been the driving force behind all the major advances of human civilisation, before concluding that “wherever she goes, France introduces clarity, intellectual ease, curiosity, and ... a subtle and necessary form of wisdom”. This ideal of a global French rayonnement (a combination of expansive impact and benevolent radiance) is now a distant and nostalgic memory.

French thought is in the doldrums. French philosophy, which taught the world to reason with sweeping and bold systems such as rationalism, republicanism, feminism, positivism, existentialism and structuralism, has had conspicuously little to offer in recent decades. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, once the engine room of the Parisian Left Bank’s intellectual creativity, has become a haven of high-fashion boutiques, with fading memories of its past artistic and literary glory. As a disillusioned writer from the neighbourhood noted grimly: “The time will soon come when we will be reduced to selling little statues of Sartre made in China.”

To understand this lament one has to understand the particular place of French intellectualism have carved within cultural and political discourse in every day French society. Intellectuals in France are not just experts in their particular fields, such as literature, art, philosophy and history. They also speak in universal terms, and are expected to provide moral guidance about general social and political issues. Indeed, the most eminent French intellectuals are almost sacred figures, who became global symbols of the causes they championed - thus Voltaire’s powerful denunciation of religious intolerance, Rousseau’s rousing defence of republican freedom, Victor Hugo’s eloquent tirade against Napoleonic despotism, Émile Zola’s passionate plea for justice during the Dreyfus Affair, and Simone de Beauvoir’s bold advocacy of women’s emancipation.

Above all, intellectuals have provided the French with a comforting sense of national pride. As the progressive thinker Edgar Quinet put it, with a big dollop of Gallic self-satisfaction: “France’s vocation is to consume herself for the glory of the world, for others as much as for herself, for an ideal which is yet to be attained of humanity and world civilisation.”

This French intellectualism has also manifested itself in a dazzling array of theories about knowledge, liberty, and the human condition. Successive generations of modern intellectuals - most of them schooled at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris - have hotly debated the meaning of life in books, newspaper articles, petitions, reviews and journals, in the process coining abstruse philosophical systems such as rationalism, eclecticism, spiritualism, republicanism, socialism, positivism, and existentialism.

This feverish theoretical activity came to a head in the decades after World War Two in the emergence of structuralism, a grand philosophy which underscored the importance of myths and the unconscious in human understanding. Its leading exponents were the philosopher of power and knowledge Michel Foucault and the ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, both professors at the Collège de France. Because he shared the name of the famous brand of American garments, Lévi-Strauss received letters throughout his life asking for supplies of blue jeans.

The ultimate symbol of the Left Bank intellectual was the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who took the role of the public intellectual to its highest prominence. The intellectuel engagé had a duty to dedicate himself to revolutionary activity, to question established orthodoxies, and to champion the interests of all oppressed groups. Integral to Sartre’s appeal was the sheer glamour he gave to French intellectualism - with his utopian promise of a radiant future; his sweeping, polemical tone, and his celebration of the purifying effects of conflict; his bohemian and insouciant lifestyle, which deliberately spurned the conventions of bourgeois life; and his undisguised contempt for the established institutions of his time - be they the republican State, the Communist party, the French colonial regime in Algeria, or the university system.

As he put it, he was always a “traitor” - and this contrarian spirit was central to the aura which surrounded modern French intellectuals. And even though he detested nationalism, Sartre unwittingly contributed to the French sense of greatness through his embodiment of cultural and intellectual eminence, and his effortless superiority. Indeed, Sartre was undoubtedly one of the most famous French figures of the 20th century, and his writings and polemics were ardently followed by cultural elites across the globe, from Buenos Aires to Beirut.

But Sartre’s star dimmed once the truth came out. He looked either woefully naive or just in love with being close to power (depending on who you believe). It’s clear Jean-Paul Sartre’s political commitments were perverse and even imbecilic - this talented philosophe and littérateur defended the most vile tyrannies as long as they were left-wing. He saw authenticity and emancipation at work in Stalin’s murderous despotism, Castro’s brutal Caribbean tyranny and Mao’s terroristic assault on human freedom and the life of the mind. Most perversely of all, in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), he provided a “philosophical” defence of “fraternity terror” as a means of overcoming inauthenticity and bourgeois individualism. The radical existentialist could only find fleeting moments of hope in the bloodlust of revolutionary terror. Roger Scruton rightly calls Sartre’s political choices and judgments “degraded”, owing as much to Robespierre as Marx.

Even his detractors can admit that Sartre was a writer of talent and a keen, if one-sided, observer of the human condition when he was not deformed by ideology. The same cannot be said of others like Althusser who degraded both political judgment and the very possibility of a thoughtful encounter with our humanity. “Structuralist” Marxism, à la Althusser, was not even particularly faithful to the Marxism of Marx.

The Paris “nonsense machine”, as the late Roger Scruton bitingly called it, was committed to a reckless assault on common sense, moderation and decency. In addition, it displayed fierce hostility to even a residual conception of a (normative) human nature. To be sure, Michel Foucault had his moments of genius. But he shared, and radicalised, his generation’s obsession with sex and power relations, seeing domination everywhere, except in Tehran (in 1979) and in Mao’s China, where he perversely discerned avatars of liberation.

Today’s Left Bank is but a pale shadow of this past. Fashion outlets have replaced high theoretical endeavor in Saint-Germain-des-Près. In fact, with very rare exceptions, such as Thomas Piketty’s book on capitalism, Paris has ceased to be a major centre of innovation in the humanities and social sciences.

The dominant characteristics of contemporary French intellectual production are its superficial, derivative qualities (typified by figures such as Bernard-Henri Lévy) and its starkly pessimistic state of mind. The pamphlets which top the best-selling non-fiction charts in France nowadays are not works offering the promise of a new dawn, but nostalgic appeals to lost traditions of heroism, such as Stéphane Hessel’s “Indignez Vous!” (2010), and anti-immigration and self-pitying tirades echoing the message of Marine Le Pen’s Front National about the destruction of French identity.

Two recent examples are Alain Finkielkraut’s “L’Identité Malheureuse” (2013) and Eric Zemmour’s “Le Suicide Français” (2014), both suffused with images of degeneration and death. A more recent work in this vein had been Michel Houellebecq’s “Soumission” (2015), a dystopic novel which features the election of an Islamist to the French presidency, against the backdrop of a general disintegration of Enlightenment values in French society.

How is France’s loss of its bearings to be explained? Changes in the wider cultural landscape have had a major impact on Gallic self-confidence. The disintegration of Marxism in the late 20th century left a void which was filled only by postmodernism.

But the writings of the likes of Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard if anything compounded the problem with their deliberate opaqueness, their fetish for trivial word-play and their denial of the possibility of objective meaning. The hollowness of postmodernism was brilliantly satirised in Laurent Binet’s biting novel, “La septième fonction du langage,” a murder mystery framed around the death of the philosopher Roland Barthes in 1980.

But French reality is itself far from comforting. The overcrowded and underfunded French higher education system is fraying, as shown by the relatively low global rankings of French universities in the Shanghai league table. The system has become both less meritocratic and more technocratic, producing an elite which is markedly less sophisticated and intellectually creative than its 19th and 20th century forebears: The contrast in this respect between Sarkozy and Hollande, who could barely speak grammatical French, and their eloquent and cerebral presidential predecessors was striking. Macron was an improvement as he was strongly influenced by Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy. But not much of an improvement, critics on both left and right would say.

Arguably the most important reason for the French loss of intellectual dynamism is the growing sense that there has been a major retreat of French power on the global stage, both in its material, “hard” terms and in its cultural “soft” dimensions. In a world dominated politically by the United States, culturally by the dastardly ‘Anglo-Saxons,” and in Europe by the economic might of Germany, the French have struggled to reinvent themselves.

Few of France’s contemporary writers - with the notable exception of Houellebecq - are well known internationally, not even recent Nobel-prize winners such as Le Clézio and Patrick Modiano. The ideal of Francophonia is nothing but an empty shell, and behind its lofty rhetoric the organisation has little real resonance among French-speaking communities across the world.

This explains why French intellectuals appear so gloomy about their nation’s future, and have become both more inward-looking, and increasingly turned to their national past: As the French historian Pierre Nora put it even more bluntly, France is suffering from “national provincialism.” It is worth noting, in this context, that neither the collapse of communism in the former Soviet bloc nor the Arab spring were inspired by French thought - in stark contrast with the philosophy of national liberation which underpinned the struggle against European colonialism, which was decisively shaped by the writings of Sartre and Fanon.

My view of French intellectuals - those on the left anyway - is not charitable at all as much I appreciate french culture. Like the Russian nihilists of old, the representatives of cultural repudiation set out to destroy the remnants of the natural moral law and all authoritative institutions necessary to free and civilised life.

Today, Alain Badiou is their self-parodic heir. This French “philosopher” combines secular messianic effusions about “the Event”, an eruption of revolutionary bliss and destruction, with apologies for Stalin and Mao. In the Chinese tyrant’s violent discourses during the murderous Cultural Revolution, Badiou finds the voice of philosophy at the service of the world-transforming Event.

As a British conservative it does intrigue me that French intellectual life has tended to adopt the ways and manners of the Jacobins. This is also true of right wing or conservative intellectuals down the ages. Even the exceptions – Chateaubriand, de Maistre, de Tocqueville, Maurras – have focused their attention on the standard of revolution, hoping to glimpse some strategy that would fortify their restorationist designs. And every movement away from the left – Ultramontanism, Action Franacise, Nouvelle Droite – has felt called upon to match the theoretical absolutism of its opponents. It has taken up the socialist challenge to present a rival system, a rival intellectual machine, with which to generate answers to all the problems of modern man.

No doubt this desire for ‘system’, and for universalist answers, shares some of the character of Roman Catholicism. But that is a discussion for another time. 

For many in the Western intellectual world, these iconic intellectual figures on the left - Sartre, Beauvoir, Delueze, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida etc - are the only intellectual France they know. Sophisticated nihilism is lauded by academics and literati throughout the world. Their legacy unwittingly has been taken on by the children of woke today. I’m pretty sure both Foucault and Derrida would have loved today’s social media because they embody the idea of the self as a performance.

The roots of being woke then lie with these French intellectuals. It was their ideas American leftists in academia gleefully took up as a mark of intellectual sophistication to hide their intellectual inferiority complex. They then proceeded to either misunderstand or misuse or take it the nth degree those very ideas to create their own toxic ideologies that plague Western culture today. Ironically they have gained little currency in France who across both the left and the right of the political spectrum have mercifully rejected wokeism as a purely American cultural import. If it’s American the knee jerk default position of the French (as a society) is to reject it. But time will tell how long the French can hold the barbarians at the gate.

There is much to admire about the French intellectual tradition and there are many intellectual and thinkers I would happily sit in a café and read (but never in the Left bank). But they tend to be classical thinkers whose wisdom is timeless such as Montaigne, Voltaire, de Tocqueville, or de Maistre.

I have a soft spot for Albert Camus too. Catherine Camus, the daughter of Camus put her finger on it when she said, “French intellectuals could never address themselves to the working classes. They don't know what it means, and that gives them a bad conscience about it. Albert Camus has a greater proximity to those in poverty.” The post-war French intellectuals on the left were very much the educated bourgeois whether they cared to acknowledge it or not, just like the woke today.

But these are all pre-modern thinkers (with the exception of Camus of course). There are modern conservative thinkers like Alain de Benoist and others with the Nouvelle Droite. And as interesting as they are, I don’t think they are in the same league as their intellectual French forebears. 

Much of French conservative thought is alien to my English conservative way of thinking which is rooted in the ideas of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott. But that is to be expected as conservativism by default seeks to conserve the traditions an customs of that specific society and can’t be transplanted abstractly onto another culture as say Marxism or Socialism can be (a sort of one size fits all).

Since the Dreyfus affair, the intellectual left reigned almost unchallenged in the life of ideas. This hegemony had become almost total after the war, following the discredit cast on conservative thought by the Vichy regime. Maurras is no longer necessary and Sartre crushes Camus. The great masters of thought were called Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault. Only the centrists François Mauriac, Raymond Aron and Jean-François Revel were tolerated on an ideological folding seat.

That is, mercifully, no longer the case as I’ve tried to show.

I, for one, do not weep at their passing.

Thanks for your question.

[empirearchives]

Mentions of Napoleon in Vive la Révolution: 1789-1989: Réflexions autour du bicentenaire, by the Marxist historians Antoine Casanova and Claude Mazauric

The Austrian Chancellor Metternich said: “Bonaparte is Robespierre on horseback.” And we know that Bonaparte deeply admired Robespierre. There are obviously important differences between the two men, between the times and conditions of their exercise of power. When it comes to democracy, the figure of Robespierre challenges us and tells us deeper things today. Coming after Thermidor and the Directory, Bonaparte certainly governed without hesitating to also use the most cynical forms of power, from schemes to compromises of all kinds, usual practices of the European courts which he reinvested even in the dynastic illusion.

But at the same time he remained deeply attached to the refusal of the Ancien Régime, to the refusal of national degradation in the face of the Bourbons and aristocratic Europe. It is from this refusal that he will draw the strength to think and set up this powerful resistance movement which will be the return from the island of Elba in March 1815. This is why the forces of the Holy Alliance reject him, ostracizing him from humanity as an “anarchist”. He was in his time “the revolutionary emperor” because his conquest was transformative for the social order. Marx saw this clearly by emphasizing the immense difference thus existing between Bonaparte and Napoleon III.

We must add this: the campaign which devalues ​​Bonaparte today is the same one that denies Robespierre recognition of his central role in the Revolution. Why is this? Because in the context of the single European market, it’s very important to forget what lies at the root of the very notion of a legitimate state in France, namely the national sovereignty born of the Revolution these men made.

— Antoine Casanova

Sieyès, the “inventor” of the Third Estate, then became the leader of a campaign to “revise” the Institutions. He advocates a strong executive, the government of elites supported by a very broad national consensus expressed by plebiscite or referendum, a government which would thus have the freedom to act. Bonaparte will spearhead this constitutional revision during the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (November 9, 1799). It will be institutionalized by the Consulate and the Constitution of Year VIII.

Is it still the Republic? It is, to say the least, the survival of the republican idea. The Republic remains as a name but ceases to be a regime in which representation takes place directly, from the body of citizens recognized as such by census suffrage, to the Assembly, which directs and sets the essential directions. From now on, the regime is plebiscitary, that is to say that the consensus of citizens gives power to someone who exercises it freely. The republican myth has been transformed, but what has remained from the Revolution is the idea that all authority can only be legitimately exercised on the basis of a national consensus, the principle of sovereignty from below not being called into question. This is an irreversible achievement.

— Claude Mazauric

This is why, among other things, the comparison between Bonaparte and Hitler is nonsense. Hitler tried to set up a reactionary and conservative Europe against all the ideas of the French Revolution, precisely. Bonaparte did exactly the opposite. His march across Europe, the conquest, even the oppression of the peoples who lived there, were not intended to lock them into the feudal regime, but of getting them out of it. He was “an armed missionary” as Robespierre said. Bonaparte contributed to the birth of democratic nations and states where they did not exist, such as in Poland, Italy, and Germany. He forced the transformation, albeit against his will, of ultra-reactionary states such as Prussia, in such a way that the vast coalition movement that was to prevail was in some ways his child.

— Antoine Casanova

Our ancestors began to act and, as we have seen, for the first time in a conscious and organized way. Napoleon said of the peasant masses that they were “ignorant but intelligent”. We must understand the reasons for such a paroxysm in the social and political struggles, in the civil and foreign war.

— Antoine Casanova

Sans-Culottes in the cities and countryside discovered the contradictions of a society where the figure of the “citizen” was now fading behind that of the “bourgeois”. But royalist upheavals, seen as an intolerable concession to the Ancien Régime, were treated with equal vigor. The army was called in, and in particular Bonaparte, nicknamed “General Vendémiaire” at the time, to put down the royalist uprising of October 5, 1795. Two years later, part of the Directory did not hesitate to resort to a coup d'état to eliminate the monarchist right.

— Claude Mazauric

[The Civil Code] establishes, in all areas of human life, a spirit of law which is that of the new society. The careful study of the long preparatory sessions leading up to the drafting of the law would illuminatingly show through the debates and discussions that went into the process of defining the relationships between people in all areas, in terms of a contract. I will only give a brief example here. It is the discussion between Portalis and Bonaparte on divorce, one hostile to this new procedure, the other favorable to “mutual consent”.

“Marriage is not a social pact but a fact,” says Portalis. “It is the result of nature which destines men to live in society.” To which Bonaparte responds, masterfully: “Marriage takes its form from the morals, customs, religion of each people. It is for this reason that it is not the same everywhere. There are countries where wives and concubines live under the same roof, where slaves are treated like children. The organization of families therefore does not derive from natural law...”

This transformation of morals and the resulting refinement of sensitivities lead to a new conception of the human being seen henceforth as an individual existing concretely in society.

— Antoine Casanova

From year V (1797), a revival began to occur on new foundations. Despite the war, it continued until 1809. This was the first phase in France's industrialization, anticipating that which would begin in 1825. It was a real start.

Admittedly, the production levels of 1789 were not reached, mainly because sectors that had been held at arm’s length in 1793 and 1794 were abandoned, but the rate of growth in productivity and industrial establishment corresponded to the expectations of the bourgeoisie since the start of the Revolution. This was the period when the ci-devant Comte de Saint-Simon, who would later become the great thinker we know, launched a public transport company in Paris “by horse-drawn omnibuses”. The press also began to advertise goods in a modern way. The countryside was also equipped. With the abolition of feudal rights, the head of a peasant family now has an additional ten to fifteen percent of gross income, taxes paid. Farm plots expanded, as did communal areas. Better use is made of more efficient tools. Wages improve. A great deal of construction is taking place. Many of the fine homes still dotting the French countryside date from this Directory and Consulate era. In short, overall, and especially among the “haves”, life was better.

The continuation of the war, the defeat of 1814-1815 and the return to power of the landowners brought this development to a temporary halt. But the new momentum of the first years of the 19th century is undeniable.

— Claude Mazauric

But it nonetheless remains true that this era is that of a compromise which, against the aristocracy, ensures the hegemony of a republican bourgeoisie governing with the consensus of owners small and large and therefore of a very broad part of the popular strata. We can clearly see the transformations brought about by the Revolution. Certainly, there were splits, political oscillations and perpetual instability, which meant that this period was experienced as “the time of coups d'état”. But this did not mean that France was dictated to by a minority.

Ultimately, the military will play a big role in maintaining this compromise. An army that should not be seen in the image of what it will become in the following century. Its soldiers and cadres, who came from it, saved the Revolution. They bore the brunt of the struggle against the aristocracy. It is from her that “the good sword” will emerge, as Sieyès said, the man capable of putting an end to the dangerous political instability of the post-Thermidor period, with the agreement of the notables and the popular masses. And this man, on 18 Brumaire, was Bonaparte, a Bonaparte who always knew how to distinguish, as he put it, “between the ideology of the Revolution and the deep interests of this Revolution” and who proclaimed: “Citizens! The Revolution is fixed on the principles which began it. It is finished!”

— Antoine Casanova

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La France Insoumise