Anarchy 89/Reflections on the revolution in France

193

Reflections on the
revolution in France

JOHN VANE

France. The re­vival of the great tradi­tion after nearly a cen­tury—1789, 1830, 1848, 1871—from the storm­ing of the Bastille to the fall of the Com­mune. A re­minder that most of our polit­ical ideas (and the words they are ex­pressed in) come from France. (It makes it easier to under­stand why old Kropot­kin wanted to fight for France in 1914.) But how the tradi­tion has be­come divided! The Tricolour, the Repub­lic, the Mar­seil­laise, the Re­sist­ance—all sym­bols of the estab­lish­ment, of the ex­treme right. But that is nothing new. “Liberty, equal­ity, frat­ern­ity, when what the Repub­lic really means is in­fantry, cav­alry, artil­lery”—said Marx 120 years ago. What is new is that people are sur­prised when the French stu­dents oc­cupy the uni­vers­ities and the French work­ers oc­cupy the factor­ies. The tradi­tion must be part of the French people’s polit­ical edu­ca­tion. We still re­mem­ber our Hunger Marches, our Gen­eral Strike, our Suf­fragettes, our Black Sunday, our chart­ists; surely the French may be ex­pec­ted to re­mem­ber the Re­sist­ance, the sit-in strikes of 1936, the <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: mut­inies

194

of 1917">mut­inies

194

of 1917, the syn­dic­al­ist move­ment before the First World War, the Com­mune, the July Days, the Great Fear. We are hardly in close touch with French af­fairs, but recent issues of anarchy men­tioned “the sort of activ­ism which is en­demic at the bour­geois Sor­bonne” (Peter Redan Black in anarchy 84) and de­scribed the sit-in strike in Besan­con (Proud­hon’s home town!) at the begin­ning of last year (Chris Marker in anarchy 76). After all, the Nan­terre stu­dents have been strug­gling with the au­thor­ities for a year; where have all the ex­perts been?

★

Revolution.