4.

If its action had been limited to attacking the men and institutions of government, without touching economic institutions, would the Great Revolution ever have become what it was in reality -- that is to say, a general uprising of the popular masses -- peasants and workers -- against the privileged classes? Would the revolution have lasted four years? Would it have shaken France to the marrow? Would it have developed that invincible spirit which gave it the strength to resist an alliance of kings?

Certainly not! Let historians celebrate as much as they wish the glories of the "gentlemen of the Third Estate," of the Constituent Assembly, of the Convention; we know what really happened. We know that the revolution would have ended with nothing more than a microscopic constitutional limitation of royal power, without touching the feudal system, if peasant France had not risen from one end of the land to the other and had not, for four years, sustained a true anarchy -- the spontaneous revolutionary action of groups and individuals, independent of all governmental tutelage. We know that the peasant would have remained a beast of burden for the landlord, if the Jacquerie had not raged from 1788 to 1793, up to the time when the Convention was forced to consecrate by a law what the peasants had already accomplished through action: the abolition without compensation of all the feudal dues and the restitution to the Communes of the property that in the past, under the old regime, had been stolen from them by the rich. One might have waited in vain for justice from the Assemblies if the barefooted fellows without breeches had not thrown into the parliamentary balance the weight of their cudgels and their pikes.

But it was neither by agitation against the ministers nor by pasting up in Paris posters directed against the Queen, that the uprising of the small villages could be brought about. This uprising, a result of the general situation of the country, was also prepared by the agitation that went on in the heart of the populace, conducted by men of the people who attacked its immediate enemies: the squire, the landholding priest, the wheat monopolist, the rich merchant.

This kind of agitation is less well known than that we have already described. The history of Paris has been written, but that of the villages has not been seriously begun: history still ignores the peasant, yet even the little we know of the matter is enough to give us a good idea of what happened.

The pamphlet and the broadsheet did not penetrate into the villages; hardly any peasants at that time could read. It was by the image, printed or often daubed by hand, simple and easily understandable, that propaganda was carried on. A few words traced in the margins of crudely made images, and a whole story took shape in the popular imagination concerning the king, the queen, the Count d'Artois, Madame de Lamballe, Charles, Comte d'Artois, was the young brother of Louis XVI and head of the reactionary faction at court. The Princesse de Lamballe was a Piedmontese noblewoman and Marie Antoinette's confidante. Both of them helped to keep the king on the disastrous course he followed. Madame de Lamballe was murdered by the mob during the Terror. The Comte d'Artois escaped and returned, at the Restoration in 1815, to become Charles X in the revived monarchy. Trans. ⁷⁰ the famine pact, the lords -- "vampires sucking the blood of the people"; it ran through the villages and prepared people's minds. A typical poster, made by hand and attached to a tree, would provoke the people to revolt, promising the advent of better times, and telling of the riots that had broke out in provinces at the other end of France.

Under the name of "The Jacks," secret groups formed themselves in the villages, either to set fire to the lord's manor house, or to destroy his crops or his livestock, or in the last resort to execute him; many times a corpse was found in a chateau pierced by a knife with this inscription: "In the name of the Jacks."

A heavy coach would be descending a ravine-broken hillside, taking the lord to his domain. But two peasants helped by the coachman would strangle him and tumble his body into the ravine, and later in his pocket would be found a paper saying: "In the name of the Jacks!" -- and so it went on.

Or one day, at a crossroads, a gallows would appear, bearing this inscription: "If His Lordship dares to collect his dues, he will be hanged on this gibbet. Whoever dares to pay His Lordship will meet the same fate!" And the peasant made his payments no longer unless he was forced to do so by the local police, happy at heart to have found a pretext for not paying. He felt that there was a hidden force that sustained him; he became used to the idea of not paying, of rebelling against the squire, and soon, in fact, he no longer paid anything at all and wrung from the landlord, by means of threats, the renunciation of all feudal dues.

Continually in the villages one saw posters announcing that henceforward there would no longer be any dues to pay, that the chateaus must be burnt and the registers of dues destroyed at the same time, that the Council of the people was about to issue a degree to that effect, etc.

"Bread! No more dues or taxes!" These were the slogans that were spread in the villages -- slogans that were comprehensible to all, that went right to the heart of the mother whose children had not eaten for three days and straight to the mind of the peasant harassed by the constabulary for his back taxes. "Down with the monopolist!" went the cry, and his storehouses were broken into, his convoys of wheat held up, and rebellion was unleashed in the provinces. "Down with the toll-gates!" and the barriers would be burnt, the officials beaten to death, and the towns, lacking money, revolted in their turn against the central power which demanded it of them. "Set fire to the tax registers, the account books, the municipal archives!" and as the musty old documents burned in July 1789, so power disintegrated, the lords emigrated, and the revolution extended ever more broadly its circle of fire.

Everything that was played out on the great stage of Paris was no more than a reflection of what had happened in the provinces during the revolution which, for four years, rumbled through each town, each hamlet, and in which the people concerned itself much less with its enemies in the central government than with its closer enemies: the exploiters and bloodsuckers at home.

To sum it up: The revolution of 1788-93, which offers us on a grand scale the disorganization of the State by popular revolution (eminently economic as all truly popular revolutions must be) can thus provide us with valuable lessons.

Long before 1789, France already presented a revolutionary situation. But the spirit of revolt had not yet sufficiently matured for the revolution to break out. This is why it was towards the development of that spirit of insubordination, of audacity, of hatred against the social order, that the revolutionaries directed their efforts.

While the revolutionaries from the bourgeoisie directed their attacks against the government, the popular revolutionaries, the men of the people whose names history has not even preserved, prepared their uprising, their revolution, by acts of revolt directed against the lords, the revenue officials and the exploiters of every kind.

In 1788, when the approaching revolution made its presence known through serious riots by the mass of the people, the royal party and the bourgeoisie sought to control it by a few concessions. But how could one calm that popular wave by such expedients as the States General, the Jesuitical concessions of the 4th August, or the wretched acts of the legislature? In this way one might appease a political skirmish, but with so little it was impossible to restrain a popular revolt. The wave kept on mounting. But in attacking property, at the same time it disorganized the State, it made all government absolutely impossible, and the revolt of the people, directed against the lords and the rich in general ended after four years, as we all know, in the sweeping away of both the monarchy and absolutism.

Such is the progress of all great revolutions. It will also be the way in which the next revolution will develop and progress if, as we are convinced, it will be not merely a simple change of government, but a true popular revolution, a cataclysm which will transform from top to bottom the system of property.