It challenged the old, rotten stagnant order and shook it to its foundations. The French revolution had stirred up the whole of Europe. Having lost confidence in itself, the bourgeoisie took refuge first in the Directorate and then in the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. After the Thermidorean counter-revolution, the pendulum swung steadily to the right. Inevitably, reaction began to set in, as the bourgeoisie became frightened of the "excesses" of the masses and began to call for "Order". But by this time the Revolution had already exhausted all its possibilities as a bourgeois revolution. The French Revolution reached its flood tide in 1793 with the plebeian dictatorship of Robespierre and the Jacobins, the most revolutionary section of the middle class who leaned on the semi-proletarian masses of Paris for support. This revolutionary spirit was what enabled France to stand against the whole of monarchist Europe and defeat it. In every revolution, ordinary men and women discover their sense of dignity and pride in themselves they begin to see themselves as human beings, not slaves. A revolution stirs up society to the depths, arousing a new spirit of freedom in the most downtrodden layers of society. It reveals powers of creativity the existence of which are unsuspected by the dominant classes and their intellectual eunuchs. The hidden wellsprings of human energy that lie dormant in the masses are released by revolution. The minds of men and women were changed forever and in a most fundamental way. No aspect of life remained untouched: military, economic, political, philosophical or literary. Like a heavy stone dropped into a silent lake, it caused waves that disturbed the most distant shores. The French Revolution was a fundamental turning point in world history. This profound observation of Leon Trotsky applies not just to the development of the productive forces but equally to that of culture in its most general sense.
Revolution in general acts as the locomotive of history. It struck Britain like a thunderbolt affecting all layers of society and this was reflected in its artists and writers. This article by Alan Woods looks at how the French Revolution affected British poets.
0 kommentar(er)
