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A German Prometheus

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A German Prometheus 1 A German Prometheus I In 1831 Eugène Delacroix exhibited his extraordinary painting of the 1830 revolution, The 28th July 1830: Liberty Guiding the People. His representation of the fi rst major uprising in Europe since 1789 has now become an iconic image of revolution; indeed it is often mistaken for an image of its more famous predecessor. This is understandable, as the painting, in some respects, showed the 1830 revolution – which toppled the restored post-Napoleonic Bourbon monarchy – as a reprise of 1789. The bare-breasted female fi gure of Liberty, wearing a Phrygian cap and holding a tricolore and a bayonet, is a semi-allegorical fi gure, echoing the classical heroes of the late eighteenth century. The painting was also designed to show the alliance of bourgeois and the poor that had existed in 1789: Liberty leads a rag-bag of revolutionaries, from the top-hatted young bourgeois intellectual to the bare-chested workman and a street child, clambering over the dead bodies of the revolutionary martyrs. However, the painting also showed how views of revolution had changed since David’s day. The workers and the poor fi gure more prom- inently than the bourgeois, and unsurprisingly, given the prevalent fear of the poor, hostile critics complained that lawyers, doctors and mer- chants had been omitted in favour of ‘urchins and workers’. Moreover, the fi gure of Liberty was not entirely allegorical, but clearly a woman of the people; the Journal des Artistes found her dirty, ugly and ‘ignoble’.1 In 1832 the painting was hidden from view for many years, for fear that it would incite disorder, only to re-emerge from the attics during the revolutions of 1848. For Delacroix, at the heart of revolution were not the bourgeoisie in togas but the workers in rags. Delacroix’s painting strikingly illustrates how far the imagination of 16 Excerpted from The Red Flag © 2009 by David Priestland, reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 9780713994810_TheRedFlag_txt_LONG.indd 16 5/5/09 14:58:51 A German Prometheus revolution had moved from David’s ordered and hieratic tableaux. Delacroix’s Liberty may have included the odd classical feature, but his canvas exulted in its high Romanticism. There is a wildness and an elemental energy to the fi gures, far removed from David’s classical restraint. However, Delacroix also inserted into his revolutionary ensem- ble a uniformed student from the École Polytechnique – the institution established by Carnot, Robespierre’s techno-Jacobin rival. The Romanti- cism of revolution was tempered, even if only mildly, by respect for science. Delacroix, though, was only briefl y enthused by the revolution of 1830. He was no political radical, and he soon became disillusioned. Indeed, many have seen in his famous painting a highly ambivalent attitude towards revolutionary violence: the fi gures closest to the viewer are corpses, and despite the title, it is not Liberty who leads the people but a pistol-brandishing child. Karl Marx, by contrast, did not oppose revolutionary violence, though like Delacroix he sought to apply the experience of 1789 to a newly powerful socialist politics. In the later 1830s and ’40s the German-born Marx was as obsessed with the legacy of 1789 as any French intellectual, and he even planned to write the revolution’s history.2 And like Delacroix, Marx was updating the revo- lutionary tradition, ‘declassicizing’ it and placing workers at the fore- front of the mise en scène. The failure of the Jacobins, he insisted, arose precisely from their excessive admiration for the classical city-state. Their nostalgia for ancient Sparta and Rome had led them to oppose the sans-culottes. The political equality they espoused, giving all men full citizenship, was no longer enough; in a modern society true equality and harmony would be realized only with full economic equality, and without support from society, they had been forced to use violence.3 Marx also made even greater efforts than Delacroix to temper his revo- lutionary Romanticism with an appreciation of science and economic modernity. The Jacobins, he argued, had exaggerated the power of morality and political will to transform society, underestimating the importance of economic forces. It is in this remoulding of the French revolutionary tradition that Marx’s originality lies. Marx was forging a new left-wing ideology fi t for the new industrializing societies of the nineteenth century, with their belief in technological progress and their increasingly large industrial working classes. It was also suited to an era when social confl ict – 17 Excerpted from The Red Flag © 2009 by David Priestland, reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 9780713994810_TheRedFlag_txt_LONG.indd 17 5/5/09 14:58:51 THE RED FLAG between workers and employers supported by the state – was sharpen- ing. Moreover, Marx sought to relocate the centre of socialism from the ‘backward’ France of the late eighteenth century to a new home – the new ‘backward’ nation, Germany. II After the guillotining of Robespierre in 1794, the gaols of France dis- gorged thousands of prisoners imprisoned by the revolutionary regime. Amongst them were three radical thinkers: François-Noël Babeuf, Comte Henri de Saint-Simon, and Charles Fourier. All three had been traumatized by the preceding ‘Terror’, and had tried to learn from it, though their conclusions about what had gone wrong and how to re- animate the radical tradition were very different. Babeuf condemned Robespierre for betraying the artisans and peasants of France, and became the leader of one of the fi rst Communist movements. Saint- Simon, by contrast, was heir to the ‘techno-Jacobins’; for him it was Robespierre’s neglect of the needs of production and modernity that was most culpable. Fourier differed from both in envisaging a future where the priority was neither equality nor productivity but creativity and pleasure. Each, then, founded a particular strain of socialism – egalitarian Communism, ‘scientifi c’ socialism and a more Romantic socialism – all three of which would be incorporated by Marx into a grand, if never wholly coherent, synthesis. Babeuf’s ‘Communism’ became more fully egalitarian during his second spell in prison after Robespierre’s fall. He now developed a more radical condemnation of property than he had under the Jacobins.4 He no longer thought that the agrarian law and the end of more obvious forms of inequality were enough; a radical form of ‘absolute equality’ had to be pursued. In the new society, money would no longer exist; everybody would send the products of their labour to the ‘common storehouse’, and then they would receive an equal proportion of the national product in exchange for their labour. Work would not be a chore because men would want to work out of patriotism and love of the community. In essence, his was an egalitarian version of the sans-culotte utopia of hard work and strict social justice, implemented by recourse to a super-effi cient version of the Jacobin food supply administration. 18 Excerpted from The Red Flag © 2009 by David Priestland, reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 9780713994810_TheRedFlag_txt_LONG.indd 18 5/5/09 14:58:51 A German Prometheus On his release from prison in October 1795 he decided to take a revolutionary course. He helped to organize an ‘Insurrectionary Com- mittee of Public Safety’, which issued a ‘Manifesto of the Equals’. Babeuf and his comrades were planning an insurrection for May 1796, but the authorities discovered the conspiracy and he and several others were arrested and executed. Yet their strain of revolutionary politics and puritanical egalitarianism lived on. Filippo Buonarroti, who took part in the original conspiracy, wrote a history of the Equals in 1828, a time far more receptive to Babeuf’s ideas than previous decades. Buonarotti ensured that Babeuf’s broader ideas reached a wider public, and they became the core of what became known as ‘Communism’: communal ownership, egalitarianism and redistribution to the poor, and the use of militant, revolutionary tactics to seize power. It was to this revolutionary egalitarian tradition that one of the best- known Communist fi gures of the 1840s belonged, the German itinerant tailor Wilhelm Weitling. Weitling was a highly accomplished auto- didact, who taught himself Latin and Greek and was able to quote Aristotle and Homer, as well as the Bible – from which he extracted much of his social theory. Weitling arrived in Paris in 1835, and whilst there joined the League of Outlaws, a republican secret society which followed the teachings of Babeuf and Buonarotti but infused this Com- munism with a Christian apocalyptic vision. For Weitling, the ideal society, the outcome of a violent revolution, would be a return to the Christian community of goods. Like Babeuf, his principal concern was equality (though he was prepared to concede the odd luxury to those who did extra work). He did try to solve the problem of monotony, but his main proposal was that workers had to be taught to enjoy work by doing three years of compulsory service in a quasi-military industrial army. Weitling was probably the most infl uential socialist in Germany, and his ideas infl uenced a generation of German workers living in exile in London, Brussels, Paris and Geneva. The League of the Just, one of the largest of these German radicals’ secret societies, adopted Weitling’s ideas in its offi cial manifesto in 1839, and members of the group took part in an insurrection in Paris in the same year, led by the conspira- torial, Jacobin-infl uenced August Blanqui.
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