The Third Revolution : Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era

Bibliographic Essay
Bibliographical Essay GENERAL WORKS It would be difficult to gain an understanding of the revolutions discussed in this book without placing them in the general context of nineteenth-century European history. The range of historical works covering this immensely important period, of course, is enormous, but several general histories are exceptional. The latter half of R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton’s A History of the Modem World (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1965) and particularly David Thomson’s Europe Since Napoleon, 2nd edn revised (New York McGraw-Hill, 1982), are invaluable sources for the social environment in which the classical nineteenth-century revolutions occurred. An excellent overall history of the first half of the century is William L. Langer’s Political and Social Upheaval, 18321852 (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), in the Rise of Modem Europe series. Among the economic h... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Volume 2, Part 6, Chapter 33
Chapter 33. The Social Democratic Interregnum Despite the considerable public reputation Karl Marx acquired as the “red terrorist doctor” who guided the International during the Paris Commune, his most important writings and theories had only limited influence during his lifetime. By the time of his death in 1883 in London, Capital had been translated into only two languages—Russian and French—and Marxism as a credo was largely unknown except among small groups of radical intellectuals. Virtually ignored in England, it was popularized to a limited extent in France due to the efforts of the indefatigable Guesde. For the rest of the continent, Marxism was too exodc to gain wide acceptance. Italians, Spaniards, and Russians were more strongly influenced by anarchism, as were a sizable number of French syndicalists, who, around the turn of the century, formed the most militant and impressive working-class movement in Europe. (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Volume 2, Part 6, Chapter 32
Chapter. 32 The Rise of Proletarian Socialisms In the wake of the Commune, French socialism would never be the same. The Jacobin mystique, which had lingered among workers and radical intellectuals for so many decades, disappeared almost completely, and the antiroyalism and andclericalism that had formerly been the province of the Jacobins were absorbed by the more conventional republican parties— notably the so-called Radicals—who commanded a considerable following among shopkeepers, professionals, well-to-do peasants, and even workers. Proudhon’s individualistic “mutualism,” with its hostility to associations, strikes, and even trade unions, also lost its popular following, to be replaced by syndicalism—an explicitly collectivistic form of federalism structured around trade unions and the most sweeping of working-class initiatives, the general strike. This shift, as we have seen, had been under way well in advance of the Paris... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Volume 2, Part 6, Chapter 31
Chapter 31. The Paris Commune of 1871 The peace treaty between Bismarck and the National Assembly, it has been noted, permitted the Prussian army to stage a formal march into the French capital on March 1 and “occupy” it (more as a symbolic gesture than a reality) until the first payment on the indemnity was met—which the national government prompdy proceeded to pay. Prior to the parade, Parisians furiously debated whether they should violendy resist this military insult to the city or treat it with disdainful indifference. After much discussion in the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements, it was wisely decided not to provoke the Prussians, who, after their parade, confined their occupation of Paris to the north of the capital’s perimeter. At the same time, the more radical sectors of the populace were mindful that Thiers and his government were only too eager to disarm Paris,... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Volume 2, Part 6, Chapter 30
Chapter 30. Prelude to the Paris Commune The Franco -Prussian War marked the clash of two contrasting but hitherto parallel developments in nineteenth-century Europe. In 1870 both France and Germany—in its various stages of unification— were still predominandy rural. Although both countries were on the threshold of the industrial revolution, nearly seventy per cent of the French population and sixty per cent of the German population lived in rural areas. In the two decades that Louis Napoleon sat on the throne, as we have seen, he did not decisively alter this basic economic landscape: even when the Second Empire came to an end, artisanal labor still produced the bulk of French goods, and the peasants still accounted for the great majority of the French population. Unskilled proletarians producing machine-made commodities were becoming much more numerous, but in 1870 French artisans still occupied a considerable place in the economic life... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 23. From Restoration to Revolution France was to enjoy pride of place in producing the principal, indeed the legendary revolutions of the nineteenth century, virtually overshadowing uprisings elsewhere on the European continent. The French knew it— particularly the Parisians—and so did other peoples, who either loved or detested the city of the Great Revolution accordingly. Among those who loved it was Arnold Ruge, the German publicist and coeditor with the young Marx of the Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrbucher, who exclaimed at the outset of a journey to Paris in 1846: We are going to France, the threshold of a new world. May it live up to our dreams! At the end of our journey we will find the vast valley of Paris, the cradl... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

PART III. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Chapter 9. “A Kind of Revolution” The men and women who rallied to the Leveler cause in the late 1640s faded away with the rise of Cromwell’s interregnum. But their political ideal of “an agreement of the people acceptable to the general will,” as H.N. Brailsford observes, did not disappear. “It crossed the Atlantic ... and bore ripe fruit. Defeated in Europe, the English Revolution found its triumph and its culmination in America.” Until recently, there has been a tendency among historians to deprecate the migration of radical ideals to colonial America and the radicalism of the American Revolution generally. Its revolutionary character has been slighted by histori... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

PART IV. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Chapter 15. The Ancien Regime If the American Revolution has been too often seen as merely a genteel disagreement over colonial independence, the French Revolution of 1789–95 has been widely seen as the classical revolution par excellence. This interpretation became so deeply ingrained in revolutionary social thought during the nineteenth century that it immensely influenced the behavior of revolutionary leaders thereafter, so that the French Revolution became a kind of template for revolutionary movements in the century and a half that followed. Revolutionary leaders of all kinds expected the course of events to duplicate those of the French Revolution, and they drew upon its history for an understandin... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 2. The German Peasant Wars One of the great culminating points in the premodern uprisings of oppressed peoples has been broadly described as the “German Peasant War”, a sweeping conflict that exploded in central Europe early in the sixteenth century. The war stemmed in part from economic problems that arose within the patchwork of principalities known as the Holy Roman Empire. As the empire began to fall apart, feudal domination intensified enormously, even as serfdom was declining elsewhere in Europe, and many of the ruling princes, lay and ecclesiastical, attempted to aggrandize themselves in their sovereign principalities at the expense of the peasantry. Whether owing to growing economic needs or in pursuit of greater... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

PART V. THE RISE OF ARTISANAL SOCIALISM Chapter 22 From Jacobinism to Socialism The influence of the French Revolution did not end with the fall of the Robespierrists on July 28, 1794—or, by the revolutionary calendar, with the tenth of Thermidor in Year Two of the Republic. Among a minority of radical conspirators, the Great Revolution, as it came to be called, was to haunt the Napoleonic era and the Bourbon Restoration that followed it. Although it was given a grisly image by the returning monarchy and nobility and clergy as the incarnation of terror and bloody civil war, the Revolution lived on among beleaguered republicans, and later among socialists, as a valiant attempt to create a new era of freedom for the oppressed masses of ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)