Henri Lefebvre

Albert Sobouls work on the Parisian Sans-Culottes in the Year Two of theFrench Revolution1 begins with the victory of the Montagnards over theGirondins, a bloodless political triumph despite the fact that it was won with thesupport of the armed people of Paris: On 2 June 1793, the Montagne tookpower by pressuring the Convention with the threat of the Parisian sans-culottes. It did not, however, intend to let the sans-culottes rule . . . From thevery outset of his book, Soboul focusses on the problem which he intends tostudy: the conflict, at first latent and then open, between the revolutionarygovernment and the masses which had brought it to power. This conflict waseventually to exhaust both the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses and theauthority of those in power. Its final outcome was Thermidor. The authordeliberately limits the object of his research. He ignores or passes over otheraspects of this turbulent period, in particular the foreign policy of the revolu-tion, the subject of a recent debate between Jean-Paul Sartre and Daniel Gurin.2

Soboul confines his study (by a conscious methodological limitation) to the

What is the Historical Past?

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determinant social force in the revolutionary process, the Parisian Sec-tions. Historians, he tells us, know this period well at the level of theState, Institutions and Leadersin other words, from above. AlbertSoboul, on the other hand, following in the steps of Georges Lefebvre,but advancing yet further, seeks to study the Parisian populace in itsgeneral assemblies and socits sectionnaires. To the earlier histories of theevents of the Revolutionof the men, ideas and institutions it pro-ducedand to the economic histories of Mathiez or Labrousse,Soboul has now added a history of the social forces of the FrenchRevolution, in a volume, whose essential concern is sociological. Theresearch this involves is sometimes surprisingly detailed: it includesthe biographies of individuals who played some part in the great drama,however minimal or local. We learn of their social origins, and therebydiscover the social composition of the different Parisian Sections, whichilluminates their respective political roles remarkably, and is in turnclarified by them. Though Soboul purposely avoids other questions,particularly the general political problems of the French Revolution, hedoes not separate his meticulous research from the total movementwhich is the object of his study; the rise, stabilization, reflux and decline ofthe mass movement of the Parisian sans-culottes.

Disturbances

With a rare wealth of documentation, Soboul shows howvery soonafter the Montagne had won powerdisturbances broke out thatpromptly polarized different economic attitudes and political pro-grammes within the victorious camp. These disturbances were pro-voked by apparently trivial and invariably everyday reasons. Thus, bythe end of June 1793, soap was scarce in Paris. Laundresses thereuponstarted to loot soap from the boats docked at the Parisian quays. Ineffect, these women were forcibly taxing a scarce commodity and, bytheir intervention, posing the problems of provisioning in the capital,control of distribution and generalization of the laws of the maxi-mum governing prices and wages: in other words they were raisingthe question of economic equality in a situation of shortages. Soboulpoints out the significance of this intervention by womenhouse-wivesin the political democracy of the time; an intervention spon-taneously pushing the latter towards a directly social form of demo-cracy. He follows its evolution and that of other small disturbances ingreat detail, because they show the depth of the social crisis by puttingin question the foundation of society and not merely its political andideological superstructures. In doing so, Soboul transforms Micheletsprophetic but generic vision of the Revolution as a series of epicdescriptions of the battles of insurgent Paris.

In 1793, the popular masses of Paris manifestly neither wanted nor wereable to go on living as they had previously done. Thisaccording to

1 Albert Soboul, Les Sans-Culottes Parisiens en lAn II, Paris 1958. Shortened Englishtranslation, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution 17934, Oxford 1964.All page references hereafter are to this English translation.2 J. P. Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, Paris 1960, pp. 3340; and DanielGurin, La Lutte de Classes sous la Premire Rpublique 17937, (new edition), Paris1968, Vol. II, pp. 51420.

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Leninis the definition of a profoundly revolutionary period. Soboulshows how the process of radicalization that had begun in 1789, andthen become bogged down in Girondism, gathered momentum again.The upsurge of the masses worsens the economic crisis and this worsen-ing then intensifies their pressure. They push towards goals deter-mined by the demand of a daily life which has become intolerable. Theywant State power to be used for the satisfaction of their needs, right upto outright control of distribution and even of production, if necessarythrough their direct delegates. The Jacobins in power, on the otherhand, want to use the State for very different purposes. They have otherperspectives, and also other responsibilities, particularly those ofnational defence, of the war and how to fight it. Political democracy,which they are willing to make as egalitarian as possible, is enough forthem, particularly since through their actions it rapidly becomes acentralized and dictatorial State power, which uses its legality to sus-pend the rights of individuals and of personal freedom. Objectively,conflict between the Jacobins and the sans-culottes was inevitable. Veryearly, a gulf opened up between the language of leaders who talked ofpatriotism and of masses who more and more spoke of food. By itsvery nature and necessary limits, the Jacobin (bourgeois-democratic)Revolution was incapable of solving this contradiction. A hundred andthirty years later another revolutionqualitatively distinct but notabsolutely separated from itwould try to push democracy in everyfield to its limits, by simultaneously achieving political democracy,economic democracy and social (socialist) democracy.

As early as July 1793, the leader of the Parisian masses, Jacques Roux,was politically defeated. His fate was a fore-shadowing of what was tofollow, but nobody in July 1793 realized this. In this respect, Soboulsbook has the suspense of a great novel: destiny is decided, declared,presaged and yet none of the actors or characters is aware of it. He whoknowsthe historianshows their uncertainty, ignorance and lack ofconsciousness. It is to be noted that in July 1793, both Hbert andMarat participated in the Jacobin operation against Jacques Roux;however, the force behind the popularity of the leader whom they hadeliminated, in other words, the pressure of the masses, was to sweep themup in their turn and impel them farther, too far, along the same road.

Soboul provides us with an impressive account of how, in this period,politics were conducted. Those whom the people already called states-men invented or perfected all the devices of modern politics; theymanipulated the masses, utilized them and confiscated their energies tomobilize, repress or break them. The Jacobins, those great (bourgeois)revolutionaries, created and employed every contemporary means ofmaintaining power: the communications system, newspapers andrumour, informers and police, mystification and slander. (Hbert wasattacked as an English agent.) Manoeuvring was constantand utterlyunscrupulous. For example, the Moderates set the Sections against theCommune and the Jacobins by whipping up agitation over the foodcrisis; after which, pretending to deal with the shortages, the Govern-ment dissolved (from above) the Provisioning Commission set up bythe Sections, which was an expression of direct democracy and repre-sented an aspiration towards greater social and economic equality.

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Economic freedom thereby triumphed: in other words, the exactopposite of what the militants in the Sections had wanted! The man-oeuvre thus concluded with a victory of the most powerful and domin-ant economic tendency at that moment, amidst fluctuations caused bydemagogic initiatives and clashes of contradictory currents of opinionand action. Another example of the same type can be cited from a laterepisode of the Revolution. When the Jacobin revolutionary govern-ment struck at the extreme-left opposition which had sought to appealto the masses, it fabricated a remarkable amalgam; it tried and con-demned a sizable contingent of Moderates together with a crowd ofHbertists.

Wider Implications

In this respect Sobouls book has a very wide significance, perhapsgreater than its author intended. Far better than in any previous work onthe French Revolution, the reader can follow here the birth of modernpolitics, both in their ignominy and their tragic grandeur (when exe-cutioners become victims). For all its size, the book could serve as abreviary for many different people, some of them to learn politics, theothers to feed their hatred for political mystifications and trickery, evenwhen these are historically effective.

To sum up: according to Soboul, for several months in 1793 thereexisted in Paris a form of dual power. On the one hand there was thepeoples power of the socits sectionnaires and the comits, and on theother a Government which had originated from this popular move-ment, but was now attempting to break away from it; a terrible andcomplex political struggle ensued. The Jacobin Government was onlymaintained in power by the support of a social base that it could onlydisappoint. A right opposition and a left opposition emerged and cry-stallized. They fought each other and at times became confused withone another. The right opposition pulled the administration backwardstowards the interests of the propertied classes (the bourgeoisie). Theleft opposition, without making socialist demands (an anachronisticterm avoided by Soboul), sought to outflank the Jacobin Governmentand to draw it beyond a politically egalitarian republic. The Govern-ment hit out in both directions; a new crisis then developed which wasonly resolved with the overthrow of Robespierre, partly abandoned bythe masses. This political crisis was never distinct from an economiccrisis, which was already beginning to pose problems with which weare now very familiar. In 1793 and 1794, of course, they were not posedin the same terms as in the mid twentieth century, if only because of thesocial composition of the sans-culottes: the Sections were essentiallyrecruited from petty shopkeepers and artisans, together with a fairlylarge number of wage-earners.

Who, then, did the Jacobins and Robespierre represent? The militantwing of a bourgeoisie which was learning to become a ruling class inthe midst of a revolutionary process, which was seeking by successive(and bloody) approximations to discover its politics, its perspectives,its institutions, its ideologies. This militant wing was petty bourgeoisby origin and initially close to the leading elements of the popular

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masses; it accepted an advanced political democracy as long as it re-mained within the limits of (bourgeois) political democracy. It had nocompunction in exercising dictatorial power under the ideologicalbanner of Freedom and Democracy, in the name of the Nation. Itsprimary objective was to win the war, and it got rid of Robespierre assoon as he had won it and because he had won it. Robespierre repre-sented the politics of a class, the audacious section of the bourgeoisie.Thus, the political objectives of the Montagne were to mobilize popu-lar forces and to wear them out, to canalize sans-culottes energies andto exhaust them, to slow the movement down without bringing theGirondins back to power, to reassure bourgeois notables andespecially the new rich, without bringing on an insurrection of themasses. These contradictions were to bring Robespierre and Saint-Justto the scaffold.

We have so far deliberately emphasized (with a certain insistence) ex-pressions and phrases which have a very modern meaning. Somesuch as dual powerare directly borrowed from Lenin. There ishardly a page in Sobouls book that does not evoke present memoriesof some kind in a reader who is versed in the political life of thetwentieth century. These echoes between past and present multiply theinterest of reading this history, particularly given the often astonishingexactitude of parallels and the intimate correspondence between thescholarly accuracy of the historian and his implicit reference to modernpolitical experience.

The Historians Stance

Very cleverly, and instinctively constructing his book like a skilfulnovelist (whereas he is, in fact, essentially concerned with precisedocumentation), Soboul does not reveal his true thoughts at the be-ginning of the work. At the end, after he has provided his argumentsand established his proofs, he says everything (or nearly everything).Every historian of the French Revolution has contributed somethinga new set of facts, or a new light on themout of his own period andhis own experience. The historians of the Restoration, who inspiredTaine, recorded the class struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism;they portrayed its last battles, drew up a balance-sheet and traced itshistory backwards into the remote past (Augustin Thierry). For thenascent socialist movement, the Revolution appeared in a differentlight: it was a premonitory explosion, a movement that was a pre-cursor and harbinger of a new revolutionfor some, intimately linkedwith the latter, for others, separated from the proletarian revolutionby a radical discontinuity. When economic research became wide-spread, economic histories of the revolution came to the forefront, andso on.

What is, according to Soboul himself, his own contribution? He sum-marizes it at the end of his book. There, he condenses into a few lineshis account of the internal contradictions (economic, social, ideologicaland political) of the sans-culottes, who constituted neither a class, northe party of a class, but a coalition. He shows how these contradictionsexploded, and yet were not the only elements in the revolutionary

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crisis: The disintegration of the popular movement was inscribed inthe dialectical march of history itself.3 Why? Firstly, for a reason of abiological nature. Badly fed, constantly on the alert, the sans-culottemilitants inevitably suffered physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion.Five years of revolution had drained the physical resources of thesectionary personnel who provided the cadres of the popular movement.This physical exhaustion . . . also affected the militants, always in thethick of the battle. Moreover, the end of the civil war, the halt to theinvasion, and finally, the realization of victory led to an understandablerelaxation of tension. . . . The people were anxious to reap the benefits ofall their effort. . . . Since victory was at last in sight, they expected, if notexactly abundance, then, at least, less difficulty in being provided withfood as well as a daily supply of bread. In fact, victory led to the de-mobilization of the popular movement.4

There was a second reason. The younger, more active, and more en-thusiastic men of the Sections left for the front. The result of plebeianenlistment in the army was to age the whole popular movement inParis: the inevitable effect on the revolutionary enthusiasm and com-bative keenness of the Parisian masses can readily be appreciated.5 Thiswas not all: Finally, the dialectical effect of success led to a gradual dis-integration of the framework of the popular movement.6 Numeroussans-culottes joined the State apparatus, the bureaucracy: Manysectionary militants, even if they were not motivated by ambition alone,regarded an official position as the legitimate reward for their militantactivity. The stability of the popular movement largely depended uponthe satisfaction of these personal interests which happened to coincidewith the need for purging the various committees. But, in such cases,success breeds a new conformity.7

The reader may savour the phrase in such cases: sole perceptible in-trusion of the subjectivity of Soboul the individual into the objectivemovement studied by Soboul the historian. It is true that these threeshort words speak volumes. They are enough. They emphasize thesignificance of the lines that follow: At the same time, the democraticideal was being weakened in the sections, the process of bureaucratiza-tion gradually paralyzing the critical spirit and activity of the masses.The eventual outcome was a relaxation of the control exercised by thepopular movement over the Revolutionary Government, which be-came increasingly authoritarian in character.8 There could be no betterway of saying that a mass political movement, and its historical efficacy,presuppose a number of different conditions, among them physiological,moral, and ideological conditions. Such a movement constitutes a con-juncture; it is in no way permanent and does not possess an immediateand stable link with the structural characteristics of this or that class.It is thus that it enters into history and becomes a history. Time playsan essential role in its being.

3 The Parisian Sans-Culottes, p. 257.4 Ibid. p. 258.5 Ibid.6 Ibid. p. 259.7 Ibid.8 Ibid.

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Past and Present

In this dramatic picture of a rise and a decline, of a growth and an ex-haustion, who can fail to perceive certain features of the proletarianmovement in the last forty years of our own century: the effects oflassitude, age, sclerosis, conformism and the integration of militantsinto bureaucratic apparatuses?

But then, the methodological problem of the writing of history is posedin a new and intense way. Is it in the final analysis the subjectivity ofthe historian which triumphs, even if it lies hidden, even (and especi-ally) if it lurks concealed beneath impeccable scholarship? Is thehistorian cheating when he accumulates documents? Does Soboulswork, restored to its contextthe sum total of recent works on theFrench Revolutionfinally and arrestingly confirm this ruse? Alter-natively, does history depreciate like a literary genre, the interest ofeach work lying essentially in its organization of texts and documents,its composition, prose and style?

Or must one accept absolute relativismthe thesis that there arealways new approaches and new points of view (on the past as well asthe present), which are equally valid? Discussion and polemic are thenreduced to virtually superfluous games. For the arrested and frozenhistoricity of dogmatism, closed and definitive, is merely replaced by anindeterminate, shifting and floating historicity, in which historians andperiods proceed by projecting themselves onto the past and interpretingit in terms of themselves.

Or (a last hypothesis? there is nothing to prove it so!) must we evenreturn to Raymond Arons views? For him, real development is notimmediately intelligible; the historian alone gives form to groups ofideas as well as to social groups; the totality of a historical process canonly be attained through a plurality of understandings, hence aplurality of independent histories and interpretative systems. Thehistorian and historical study differ but they belong to the sametotality. Therefore the historian puts history in perspective, and aplurality of interpretation is legitimated by a plurality of perspectives.9As Daniel Gurin has rightly remarked, such a theory justifies outrightanachronisms.10 For Arons limited relativism, history is necessarilyfiltered through a philosophy and a philosophy of history: Philosophyand history, philosophy of history and total philosophy are insepar-able.11

Sobouls work, however, suggests a different hypothesis, which can beformulated in two phases:

1. The French Revolution was a total phenomenon, resulting from atotal social and historical process, that was simultaneously economic,

9 Raymond Aron, Introduction la Philosophie de lHistoire, Paris 1938, pp. 134, 146,147, 151.10 Gurin, op. cit. Vol. II, p. 494.11 Aron, op. cit. p. 344.

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sociological, ideological and so on. This total phenomenon, as such,appears to be inexhaustible. Consequently new aspects of it perpetuallyemerge, or are uncovered; and these are not only historical aspects inthe narrow sense of the word; they are also economic, sociological andideological, while no one of them can be accorded an absolute causalprivilege. Thus, the works of successive historians are not incom-patible; nor do they merely constitute novel approaches, interpretationsor perspectives. They bring to light real historical contents which hadpreviously been concealed, masked and unseen in the explosive mass ofthe total phenomenon.

2. The French Revolution made a certain number of events possible,through a process of which it was either the origin or a decisive ele-ment. Each time one of these possibilities is realized, it retroactivelysheds a new light on the initial event. Thus the revolutionary event, asa totality, belongs not only to so-called narrative history but to adeeper historicity, which reveals itself slowly with the realization ofsuch possibilities and the advent of new possibilities, in the course ofthis realization itself. Thus, when historians take into account their ownexperience in their research into the past, they are profoundly right todo so. They do not mistakenly project the present onto the past; theydo not each merely elaborate a personal philosophy of history. For theintroduction of the concept of the possible should not be confused withany merely philosophical interpretation of history. This concept,although philosophical in origin, has been adopted in all fields of thesocial sciences and therefore now has a very general methodologicalcharacter. It is thus in no way an external importation into historicalmethod, but the formulation of a principle hitherto absent yet inherentin it.

We can thus arrive at an objective relativism, or rather a theory of adeeper objectivity which does not exclude a certain relativity. The pastbecomes present (or is renewed) as a function of the realization of the possibilitiesobjectively implied in this past. It is revealed with them. The introductionof the category of the possible into historical methodology permits usto conceive the objectivitywhile yielding its due to the relativity,novelty and inexhaustibilityof history, without collapsing into purerelativism. It restores historical actions and personages to the effectivemovement of history, without falling into subjectivism.

If this is so, anachronism is neither to be recommended, nor to betolerated. Rather, it represents the necessary risk which research mustaccept, but proceed immediately to eliminate by the exactness of itsdocumentation, the careful collation of its evidence and sources. Con-troversies such as those which oppose Daniel Gurin to other contem-porary historians of the French Revolution, and in particular to Soboul,have their own utility; they tend to eliminate anachronisms. The historyof the French Revolution has thus not come to an end with the work ofAlbert Soboul, any more with that of Daniel Gurin, Ernest Labrousse,or Georges Lefebvre. Further research is precisely suggested by readingSoboul. We may ask ourselves, for example, what exactly was going onamong the nouveaux riches and the careerists of the Revolution, how theywere living while the militants were rushing to the local offices of theSections: how they were preparing themselves for power and ease?

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