Contenu du sommaire : Dissonances dans la Révolution

Eleni Varikas, Equality and the Excluded In the historiographic controversies that marked the bicentennial of the French Revolution, women's exclusion from citizenship did not imply a re-evaluation of the ideas and political models originated by the Revolution. Yet, the debates on the citizenship of social categories perceived through « their » difference (women, black, slaves, jews) offer a privileged standpoint permitting the tracing of the generality of the problematic relations between the notion of equality and the notion of difference. Those debates help us grasp some of antinomies characterising the social construction of the equality principle and reveal the existence of a dissonant tradition which, already during the Revolution, tried to save the subversive potential which lay in the universalist promise of natural right.

Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Non-citizens in the French Revolution Several weeks after having adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the delegates to the constitutional convention legislated political inequality on the basis of taxes and property. Citizenship defined in this way excluded a number of social categories including « passive citizens » and black people. Tension between proclaimed principles and this legislation bears examination. Who were the « passive citizens », and why were they denied certain civil rights ? And why, in the very « tristes tropiques », was the institution of slavery maintained until 4 February 1794.

René Gallissot, The French Revolution at the limits of Human Rights The three major revolutionary declarations were of liberal inspiration. That of 1789 proclamed citizenship but excluded women, the colonized populations, subordinate classes, and the homeless. In stark contrast to the declaration of 1793, the declaration of 1795 was the first not to be emancipatory, but rather conservative in regards to duties and public morality. Most basically, the rights of man had to be national in character, in the same way political thought today oscillates between citizenship and nationality. In 1989, the commemoration of only the declaration of 1789 was, in effect, an appeal to national consensus. The Bicentennial celebration tended to substitute formal universalism and patriotism for the internationalist conception of human rights that is truely emancipatory of men and women as the real subjects of history.

Michèle Riot-Sarcey, The Community of Peers, or Democracy at Work In the minds of the delegates to the constitutional convention who formulated the declaration of rights, indivisible sovereignty was possible only among free and equal men or peers. Liberty in the civic sense of the term meant to be able to partake of sovereignty to the same extent as national representatives. Two traditions, liberal and republican, contributed to the realization of these principles. Each tended to forge a community of equal men. One led citizens to liberty, the other to fraternity and service to the Nation State. But the liberty of individuals was forgotten. Because they are different, throughout the Nineteenth Century women were able to unmask the mystifications of this form of democracy. Only they understood the real meaning of republican principles.

Christine Planté, The Uses of Charlotte Corday Questions of gender difference obscure an understanding of the two political currents represented by Marat and Charlotte Corday. The figure of Charlotte Corday, in historical and theatrical works, changes throughout the Nineteenth Century. First, she is a monster for the Jacobins, then a humanistic character for the moderates, and eventually the incarnation of French Patriotism, a veritable Joan of Arc of liberty. She reappears especially during times of conflict, such as 1830, 1848 and the Second World War. This celebrity does not, however, contribute to greater clarity about her political significance. Consideration of her reveals attitudes towards women in general which tend to minimize the participation of women in public affairs.

Jean-Patrice Courtois, The Historicity of the Republic in The Spirit of the Laws In Montesquieu's thought, sovereignty in democracy, one of the two forms of the republic, is theorized, and thus historicized, with the help of particular laws. Virtue itself helps reveal a certain social consistancy which contributes to the emergence of a determined type of government. Frugality is also an organizing principle which gives a specific sense to equality and regulates certain inequalities. In addition, political liberty is not strictly attached to a particular regime, even if the English government sees it as such. The French Revolution raises Montesquieu's questions, but it must be kept in mind that The Spirit of the Laws contains thinking about politics more than it does political thought.

Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, Romantic Utopia and the trench revolution The article takes as its point of departure the conception that Romanticism is a critique of the modem world and its bourgeois civilization in the name of values from a pre-modern, pre-capitalist past. Among the Romantics one can find both partisans and adversaries of the French Revolution. In the camp of the partisans there exists an apparently paradoxical current ; politically moderate, but socially radical. Politically, it rejects the « excesses » of the Revolution, its Terror and authoritarianism. Socially, it is more advanced than the Jacobins in that it aspires to a Utopian socialism based on a community of land and goods, Rousseauist in inspiration, it dreams of the return to a Golden Age. The character of Gauvain in Hugo's novel Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-Three), could be seen as its « ideal-typical » figure. Among the political and literary groups that belong to such a configuration, are : the « Social Circle », certain of the « red priests », the French Rousseauists Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Restif de la Bretonne, and the English Romantics Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Blake. The article develops three examples in detail : Nicolas de Bonneville of the « Sodal Circle », Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and Coleridge.

Louis Janover, Daniel Guérin, the kill-Joy According to a famous historian, ex-member of the CP, « the Terror announces in many aspects the nature of communist societies ». In fact, as we are informed through the work of Daniel Guerin published after the war, the Jacobin government aimed from the beginning to stopping the egalitarian aspirations, communist dreams, of grassroot people. Equally, the Terror did not put into question communism, but the modern political state charged to create relationships of domination and servitude according to the reign of bourgeois property. All the phenomena of manipulation and of instrumentalization of the masses which are observed afterwards in party systems have been analysed by Guérin, scrutinizing observer of The Class Struggle under the First Republic (1946). He derived from this analysis the outline of a critical sociology of the forms of the modern political state, showing the character of the antidote of the mecanism of the centralisation and repression restored by the bourgeoisie on the ruins of the Ancien Regime : the organs of direct democracy invented by the « bras-nus » during their autonomous activities.

Denis Berger, The Infernal Heritage - Jacobinism and Politics A major element of the French Revolution, jacobinism was subsequently made into a myth and, thus, a model. Going beyond its ideological references and its social composition, it is necessary to determine what type of political behavior jacobinism represented in a period when the revolutionary process required innovation. Study of the activities and speeches of jacobin leaders hostile to the direct democracy advocated by the sans-culottes reveals a conception of authoritarian centralization designed to create or to reinforce the State. Jacobin rhetoric, especially in its defense of Virtue, was a rationalization intended to justify the substitution of the elite for the people in the name of an ideal conception of the people. In this sense, jacobinism anticipated a certain bureaucratic behavior which, after having influenced the contemporary labor movement, has become a major element of its present crisis.