This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I share some of what I’ve been reading and watching.
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My book, When the Clock Broke, is out in paperback in the US and UK, with copies turning up as far afield as Kuala Lumpur and Christchurch.
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The Verso event for A.J.A. Woods’s The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy tomorrow night is full! Looking forward to seeing everyone who could snag a ticket, and hopefully there will be audio or video available.
“It is a good thing, and a sign of health, that those in a free country who represent contrasted social theories should freely air their differences. Society today being what it is, class interests are bound to be at odds. Antagonisms there must be, and it is well that they should be recognized. It is only when this state of social friction ceases to be regarded as normal and legitimate that the country as a whole begins to suffer.”
—Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat
“But what a lack of judgment it requires to declare the Commune sacred, to proclaim it infallible, to claim that every burnt house, every executed hostage, received their just dues to the dot over the i! Is not that equivalent to saying that during that week in May the people shot just as many opponents as was necessary, and no more, and burnt just those buildings which had to be burnt, and no more? Does not that repeat the saying about the first French Revolution: Every beheaded victim received justice, first those beheaded by order of Robespierre and then Robespierre himself! To such follies are people driven, when they give free rein to the desire to appear formidable, although they are at bottom quite good-natured.”
—Friedrich Engels, “The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune”
From his Recollections of 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville, right before “the June Days” insurrection:
Milnes placed me next to Madame [George] Sand. I had never spoken to her, and I doubt whether I had ever seen her (I had lived little in the world of literary adventurers which she frequented). One of my friends asked her one day what she thought of my book on America, and she answered, ‘‘ Monsieur, I am only accustomed to read the books which are presented to me by their authors”’. I was strongly prejudiced against Madame Sand, for I loathe women who write, especially those who systematically disguise the weaknesses of their sex, instead of interesting us by displaying them in their true character. Nevertheless, she pleased me. I thought her features rather massive, but her expression admirable: all her mind seemed to have taken refuge in her eyes, abandoning the rest of her face to matter ; and I was particularly struck at meeting in her with something of the naturalness of behaviour of great minds. She had a real simplicity of manner and language, which she mingled, perhaps, with some little affectation of simplicity in her dress. I confess that, more adorned, she would have appeared still more simple. We talked for a whole hour of public affairs ; it was impossible to talk of anything else in those days. Besides, Madame Sand at that time was a sort of politican, and what she said on the subject struck me greatly ; it was the first time that I had entered into direct and familiar communication with a person able and willing to tell me what was happening in the camp of our adversaries. Political parties never know each other : they approach, touch, seize, but never see one another. Madame Sand depicted to me, in great detail and with singular vivacity, the condition of the Paris workmen, their organization, their numbers, their arms, their preparations, their thoughts, their passions, their terrible resolves. I thought the picture overloaded, but it was not, as subsequent events clearly proved. She seemed to be alarmed for herself at the popular triumph, and to take the greatest pity upon the fate that awaited us. ‘“Try to persuade your friends, monsieur,”’ she said, “not to force the people into the streets by alarming or irritating them. I also wish that I could instil patience into my own friends for if it comes to a fight, believe me, you will all perish.”
With these consoling words we parted, and I have never seen her since.
Some great commentary on the present protests in France from David A. Bell:
….the French do have a very long, very dense, very particular history of protesting. People in my field of French history can reel off a long list of classic works on the subject: Charles Tilly’s The Contentious French; Jean Nicolas’s La rebellion française; George Rudé’s The Crowd in the French Revolution; John Merriman’s Massacre, on the Paris Commune of 1871; etc. etc., not to mention a host of memoirs and literary treatments. When Paris descends into violence, I think not only about the Commune, and the Revolution, but all the way back to the year 1588, when outraged Parisians drove the erratic and vainglorious King Henri III out of the city in the so-called “Day of the Barricades.” Seven months later, after the King brazenly assassinated his chief rival, the Duc de Guise, leader of the Catholic League, the city again revolted and resisted a siege for many years. Armed priests and friars led processions through the streets on an almost daily basis to keep Parisians in a state of fervent. zealous mobilization. Preachers delivered vehement sermons on street corners declaring the King a devil in disguise, and printing presses churned out scorching pamphlets at a rhythm never before seen.
Today’s protestors have almost nothing in common with these fanatical predecessors, and I doubt many of them know much if anything about Henri III and the Catholic League. Even so, the awareness of the long history of French protest, however dim in the specifics, does provide them with a sense of legitimacy. That is where the history matters. More than in most other European countries, French protestors have a sense that protest itself is deeply legitimate. And not just peaceful protest. The history also gives a sense of the legitimacy, in certain circumstances, of violence. “When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.” These words were written by Maximilien Robespierre in 1793 as the last article of his never-implemented revision of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. It encapsulates a deep sense, connected to the long history I’ve just described, that faced with a stubborn, defiant, oppressive government, violence has its place. And it is a sense that the far right possesses just as deeply as the far left. On February 6, 1934, a right-wing mob tried to storm the National Assembly and overthrow the moderate Third Republic, and that event still has its place of honor in the collective memory of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party.
