ton. the Third Period in the Comintem. or, at a local level, about the failure of the S.D.F. or the defeat of the General Strike, so in the 1920s the great debates in the Russian Party were gies taken from the great French Revolution Terror. In France itself the legacy of 1789 has dominated the political evolution of the subsequent years, in the passages reproduced below one can see something of the way in which the traditions of the French Revolutionespecially the most radical elements within itwere being taken up by student revolutionaries on the eve of the Commune.
The passage below is taken from the worknow tragically unfinished-of Arielle Aberson, a young Ruskin student from Geneva, who was killed in a car crash three weeks ago. The impassioned exchange between Longuet and Rigault will recall to those who knew her, whether in Women's Liberation or the student movement, something of the generosity and enthusiasm which she brought to everything she did, and the way in which her own socialism was inspired by profound identification with the Communards of 1871. Raphael Samuels Gareth Stedman-Jones The Idea of the Revolution was born to a new life, in the Latin Quarter, through the rehabilitation and exaltation of the Paris Commune of 1793 and through the cult of revolutionary figures like Hebert, Clootz, Chaumette, Marat, Saint-Just, etc., whom respectable historians had castigated as inhuman and blood-thirsty terrorists. One example may be seen in Les Hebertistes, a pamphlet of 1864. Its subtitle was "Appeal against a calumny of history" and its aim the rehabilitation of the "Damnes de l'histoire", the revolutionaries of 1793. The actual pamphlet appeared in August but passages of it had already been published in a student newspaper: Les Ecoles de France. Its author, Gustave Tridon (also known as Raoul student and poet, Vermersch. Its first number was dated Floreal 79 and it ended with the crushing of the Commune.
A leading propagandist for Hebert's cult was Raoul Rigault, the most flamboyant student leader of the Quartier Latin. He knew whole passages of the Pere Duchesne by heart and would declaim them in cafes. He would spend hours at the Bibliotheque Nationale, usually sitting on one of the first benches on the left, reading memoirs, newspapers, and public records of the 1790s; a passion for revolutionary research which he shared with a number of other enthusiasts. For Rigault, identification with Hebert and with the spirit of the Revolution went very far: Hebert was "substitut du procureur" of the 1793 Commune and Rigault prophesied everywhere that he would occupy the same post in the next Commune; he addressed everyone he met as "citoyen", and to those whom he did not know would use such forms as "citoyen proletaire", "citoyenne prostituee", etc.; he had expunged the word "saint" from his vocabulary, even from familiar place-names which became "Boulevard Michel" "la rue Jacques" *la place Sulpice", "Le Chateau Cloud", etc.; he signed his letters with the traditional revolutionary greeting "Salut et Fraternite", or "Salut et Egalite". To the "Marseillaise". which he found too patriotic and too bourgeois, he preferred the "Ca ira", and often, on his way back from a dance-hall, he would dance the "Carmagnole" in the streets in front of Marshal Ney's statue. He even created a new choreography on revolutionary themes representing either "the Sectarian" (the "pas du cavalier seul") or the "Great Joy of the Pere Duchesne in front of the guillotine" or his "Great Anger" or the "People's Justice". One day he was said to have come into a brasserie, very cheerful, and to have announced a big discovery: he had contrived a plan for a new scientific version of the guillotine operated by an electric battery and which could do away with "five hundred reactionaries per minute."
Here is a description of the way in which Rigault debated questions of revolutionary tactics with Longuet (Marx's future son-in-law), provincial bourgeois, reactionaries, and are good for the guillotine. It was the revolutionary Commune which ensured the triumph of the Republic!
Longuet: Go to school, my dear, and read Proudhon!
Rigault: Proudhon is a bourgeois whom I would be pleased to have executed alongside all the federalists like you.
Longuet: You are mad and will never execute anyone, for you will be sent to a lunatic asylum.
Rigault: I shall be delegate to the general security and "procureur-syndic" of the Paris Commune.
And so he was...
The interpretation of the French Revolution in general and of the 1793 Commune in particular was a vital issue for the student revolutionaries; in long heated arguments they fought the old battles again, each arguing for the correctness of his particular hero's position:
*One would feel alive in himself the soul of the Great Vergniaud, another one would uphold the tradition of Hebert and a third one would aspire at starting FouquierTinville all over again."
A further illustration of this can be given by the example of a law student who, asked about his political opinions by a non-initiated solicitor, replied: - I am a "Pachist", Sir. - I beg your pardon? - A "Pachist". Don't you know Pache, Sir? - Hardly, Sir, as a matter of fact... - But the Mayor of Paris! Haven't you read... and what he meant of course was the Mayor of Paris in 1793...
More than a revival, this had become a direct projection into the present, and for many, a fully-lived anticipation of the Paris Commune of 1871.
writings to appear in English, this book is a concise and and personality on a philosopher and revolutionary. 30s In June 1868, the ban on public meetings was lifted and the Idea of the Commune left the confines of Latin Quarter cafes and brasseries to be spread at crowded meetings all over Paris. The agendas of these meetings ranged from subjects such as "On Social Education" "On the Emancipation of Labour and Labourers" "On the Equality of Social Conditions", to the defence of "Free Cohabitation" and attacks on religious education. Debates on the Commune were prominent among them. On December 23rd 1869, a meeting took place at the "Salle des Martyrs", 4 bd Clichy, at 8 p.m., on "The Organisation of the Social Commune", and on January 22nd 1870, Salle du concert du Chalet des Postes, 54 rue Lhomond, a meeting was announced on "The Social Commune, ways and means of achievement". And from December 1869 onward, the idea of the Commune was fully and regularly debated in the columns of the Marseillaise.
In the winter of 1870-71, after the downfall of the Empire, when Paris was besieged by Prussian forces, and when revolutionaries were gathering strength, the question of the Commune was transformed from a memory of anuient grandeurs into an immediate political issue. Every night the Red Clubs held their meetings, in dance-halls and theatres, on university premises, on the street corners of the quartiers, and every night more and more of them ended with the audience taking up the insurrectionary cry, "Vive La Commune!" First dreamt of in the darkness of student garrets and of prison cells, fostered by tiny groupuscules of dedicated revolutionaries, it had finally groped its way to the surface. In the spring of 1871 a Commune was declared once again, and on the proletarian heights of Menilmontant and Belleville it was to find a theatre of action more heroic than the most romantic of the revolutionaries had been able to imagine, more bloody in the vengeance it called down on the working men of Paris than the June days of 1848, and more profound in its repercussions than the revolutionary Commune of 1793. Arielle Aberson NLB announce their first two titles, available from all good bookshops: