Revolutionary Cultures and their Literatures: A Comparative Analysis

On revolution, scholarship, and methodology

Much of the scholarly literature on revolutions seeks to answer the question: why there and at that time, rather than most other places at most other times? Oppression, inequality, poverty, and arbitrary rule have been aspects of human societies near-ubiquitously for centuries, yet the vast majority of the time those conditions alone are not enough to lead people to revolution. Thus, when revolutions do occur, it is difficult to think about them in terms of their local context alone – scholarly approaches to revolution, therefore, tend to have some element of justifying (in the causal sense, not the moral sense) why a revolution happened there and then.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1856) noted that as the old feudal order deteriorated, the English nobility assumed tax “burdens in order to enjoy the power of governing; here [in France] they steadily refused to pay taxes, as their only consolation for the loss of political power” (125), leading to the dissatisfaction of a wide variety of classes forced into bearing the weight of archaic feudal structures nothing in return. For Hannah Arendt (1963), revolutions could not happen without the addition of the imagination of a post-scarcity New World to the western canon. For Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1858), revolutions could not happen without a suitably antagonistic relationship between two classes. Charles Kurzman’s (2004) account of the Iranian revolution is in terms of “viability:” the reason it reached the critical mass of demonstrators involved was because of a (contingent) public perception of the revolutionary movement as viable.

Whereas all these scholarly approaches to revolution may seem very different – Tocqueville and Marx focus on class relations; Kurzman denies the assumption that revolutions are written in inevitable sociological forces and provides an “anti-explanation” (5) of revolution as being contingent on people’s experiences and perceptions; Arendt is concerned with where the imagination of revolution comes from – they still share this fundamental similarity. As shown by Kurzman’s case, the question is not necessarily: why did it have to be there and then? For him, it didn’t. The questions are: why there? Why then?

The approach here does not seek to answer such questions, though it does not seek to discount their importance in any way. Instead, it looks to identify the characteristics of and differences between revolutionary cultures (particularly in their relationship with literature) in France and in Russia. It is an examination of the merits of several possible accounts on the nature of cultural paradigms, rather than an attempt at one causal explanation (though could potentially be put into conversation with the latter). It is an approach that conceives of those at the forefront of the revolution – its leaders and primary actors – as a cultural group with its own set of practices and internal logic worth understanding (and potentially, as only being understandable through multiple different accounts.)

Literature as describing what should be enacted

While an account of revolutionary cultures as seeking to translate to reality the visions of their founding authors may initially seem intuitive, such an account falls apart fairly quickly. Voltaire advocated a constitutional monarchy, whereas Rousseau believed the will of the people could not be expressed through representatives and that a direct democracy was therefore necessary. Neither of those contradicting visions were put into practice by French revolutionaries: how are the actions of the revolutionaries from Louis XVI’s death at the guillotine to Thermidor to be understood as such?

This framework is not particularly useful for understanding the Bolsheviks’ actions, either. Despite the strong body of literature written by Bolsheviks on correctly putting Marx into practice, Russia did not correspond to an orthodox Marxist vision. Marx’s dialectic requires many steps prior to a proletarian revolution: feudalism must be abolished by a bourgeois revolution; the bourgeoisie, pursuing profit, must simplify class antagonisms by congregating people of all lower classes as their urban labor force and bring about an industrial revolution of the means of production in the process (Marx and Engels, 15-21). Unfortunately for this account, Russia did not fulfill a single one of these prerequisites: it was still a feudal nation; the vast majority of its population were peasants. If Russian revolutionary culture’s goal really was to put into practice, as Lenin put it, “what Marx really taught us” (5), then Russian revolutionary culture would not yet exist!

Literature as providing language: France

Perhaps a more useful account of these nations’ revolutionary cultures and their relationship with their respective literatures is as follows: revolutionary cultures were not necessarily looking to enact the teachings of their literary predecessors, but their literary predecessors gave them a language they used to conceive of themselves and their goals. François Furet’s analysis (1981) of French revolutionary culture is a compelling case for such an account. For him, “French society… was desperately searching for responsible spokesmen” (36) – it could not find such a spokesmen in the parlements, as they “throughout the century, gave repeated proof of their conservatism, since they condemned the Encyclopédie” (36), among other offenses (given they were, after all, a body composed of nobles) so French society turned to the philosophes. This phenomenon can even be conceived of as a structural tendency: the steady loss of political function of the nobility in the years leading to the revolution (a fundamental shift corresponding to the decline of feudalism) without the Ancién Regime allowing for a new ruling class “set up the writers as imaginary substitutes for that ruling class” (36).

Regardless of whether this perception was a question of the contingent dispositions of French revolutionary culture or a structural tendency in French society, it serves as a framework to understand revolutionary culture from 1789 to Thermidor. For Furet, the revolution operated by “appropriat[ing] for its own benefit the interpretation of what was meant by the ‘people’s will’” (43). As such, Sieyès’ famous “What is the Third Estate?” conceived of the nobility as existing outside of the people, therefore legitimizing the ostracization of nobles and the symbols associated with them. Later, each successive government relied on the language of the people’s will for its legitimacy. On Robespierre from 1793-1794, Furet writes:

he [Robespierre] was the people to the national representative body; it was continually necessary to establish, control and restore the perfect fit between the people and the various assemblies that claimed to speak in its name (above all the Convention), for without that perfect fit there could be no legitimate power, and the first duty of power was to maintain it: that was the function of Terror. (60)

In terms of the initial hypothesis, the language of “the people’s will” and later “the people” in the discourse of French revolutionary culture can be thought of as a derivative of Enlightenment writing. Sieyès and Robespierre used language they learned from Enlightenment philosophes’ conception of universal human dignity and the social contract, and the system of legitimation this practice ended up creating led to the violent aspect of French revolutionary culture. In Furet’s words: “Each successive political group pursued the same objective: to radicalise the Revolution, by making it consistent with its discourse,” (70) even to the point of violence. It didn’t matter what the philosophes’ actually thought or wrote, what mattered was the process by which members of the revolutionary culture appropriated their language for their own purposes, creating the self-radicalizing paradigm that Furet describes.

Such an account of the role of French revolutionary culture may help us understand Sieyès and Robespierre’s rhetoric in certain places, but is by no means an exhaustive framework to understand French revolutionary culture. Dan Edelstein (2012) points this out: what is to be made of the fact that “the Montagnards refused any appel au peuple?*” There was clearly a perceived difference between revolutionary authority and Enlightenment-derived “people’s will.” Hence, for Saint-Just:

Les lois sont révolutionnaires, ceux qui les exécutent ne le sont pas… Il est impossible que le lois révolutionnaires soient exécutées, si le gouvernement lui-même n’est pas constitute révolutionnairement (Saint-Just,“Rapport sur la nécessité,”1984, 520).

(The laws are revolutionary; those who execute them are not… it is impossible for revolutionary laws to be executed if the government itself is not constituted revolutionarily)

Here, the fact of being revolutionary in itself is the token of legitimacy. This could mean two things: that French revolutionary culture had a relationship with literature in the way that this account posits, but its discourse grew beyond that through the process of self-radicalization described by Furet and Edelstein to include elements with no apparent connection with the original literature, or that this account misses another aspect of the role of literature in French revolutionary culture.

Literature as creating the revolutionary culture: France

Thus far, both of these accounts have made an a priori assumption that the most relevant pre-revolution literature to examine in relation to a revolutionary culture is high brow. Roger Chartier (1991) points out that empirical realities may suggest otherwise. Whereas the philosophes liked to conceive of themselves as having a dichotomous relationship with “gutter Rousseaus” (les Rousseau des ruisseaux)**, “High Enlightenment” treatises, common libel, and pornography were commercialized and repressed in the same ways. The increase in literacy in France meant that the demand for all sorts of books exceeded what book ownership alone could meet, leading to new commercial formulas based on borrowing like cabinets de lectures (which operated on a subscription basis). These spaces contained philosophical texts, pornography, satire and scandalmongering sensationalist libel, all of which were actively sought after by police and largely printed by presses outside of France (Chartier 1991, 71-74). Furthermore, genre distinctions were far blurrier than previous accounts’ a priori high brow favoritism might have implied:

even the best-known authors did not hesitate to use the forms most common to low literature…genres were by no means clearly separated. Not only did philosophic discourse often invade pornographic texts (at times even infiltrating titles, as with Thérèse philosophe, ou Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du P. Dirrag et de Mile Eradice); the Philosophes themselves indulged in the licentious genre (as in Voltaire’s La Pucelle ďOrléans)... This free circulation of forms and motifs doubtless reinforced the perception of… [all these types of] books as a unified set of texts. (Chartier 1991, 81)

It would seem that the amalgamated nature of all these types of literature – in the economic processes of their production and exchange in addition to the nature of the works themselves – opens the door to conceiving of a revolutionary culture’s relationship with literature not just in terms of how they engaged with the contents of the works of the philosophes, but in terms of how they engaged with all the types of literature circulated in cabinets de lectures. From pornography to philosophy, the illegal commercial borrowing economy of books individualized reading and moved it to private, casual, and subversive sphere: books were no longer associated with “patriarchal, biblical reading… in which the book was revered and authority was respected” (Chartier 1991, 91); the previously divine authority of the monarchy was desacralized and a space for critical discussion not tolerated by the Ancién Regime was created.

Under this account, the salient relationship was not an active intellectual choice by members of the revolutionary culture to draw from the contents of pre-revolutionary literature. Instead, it was the spaces and dispositions created by the sociological, economic, and legal relationships with that literature that created a place for revolutionary culture.

Interestingly, both of the accounts that have not suffered from internal contradictions thus far have taken agency away from individual members of the French revolutionary culture. The first (and self contradictory) account described them as active interpreters of high brow literature seeking to translate theory into practice; the second gives revolutionaries the autonomy of actively appropriating certain linguistic elements from that literature into their discourse but then shifts control away from them and to the paradigm of self-radicalization that discourse creates; this third account positions revolutionary culture as being created by dispositions which themselves were created by sociological relations that the revolutionaries-to-be had no control over. Of course, this is not a decisive claim about the autonomy of revolutionaries in their revolutions, just a feature of two useful accounts on the nature of revolutionary cultures’ relationships with literature – there is potential for an account in which revolutionaries are not given significant autonomy in regard to this particular relationship but are in other areas, though that is beyond the scope here.

A synthesized account: Russia

Given the insights of the latter two accounts, it would seem that a synthesis would be useful: the spaces around literature created room for revolutionary culture and within those spaces, members of the revolutionary culture took the language of that literature and used it to understand the world and guide their actions. In Russia, Yuri Slezkine (2017) provides a description of members of the revolutionary culture’s scholarly beginnings, starting with young students “sitting… [in] the low attic room lit up by a kerosene lamp…The portraits of Kautsky, Engels, Marx, Mikhailovsky, Uspensky, Korolenko, and Tolstoy look[ing] down protectively” (63). From there – prior to deciding whether to affiliate themselves with a particular party – many would go on a rigorous scholarly journey, “they read, took notes, and wrote long letters to each other. Those were not letters, but theoretical position papers and counter-papers, a sort of written exam on material covered” (68). Osinsky, a revolutionary, decided to become a Marxist upon spending months attempting to write a paper that provided a non-Marxist explanation of the Decembrist movement to no avail, and upon being easily “routed” in debate, took the Marxist path (67). The paradigmatic narrative of the revolutionary and his (these groups were overwhelmingly male) relationship with literature in Russia was different from his French counterpart: whereas in France, it was the illegal, commercial (and therefore desacralized and private) spaces created by the book trade that were salient, in Russia, the salient factor seemed to be the act of study. Literature could still be conceived of as creating the revolutionary culture, but in this case, it was the act of scholarship that mattered. This was true to the extent that “[a] conversion to socialism was a conversion to the intelligentsia, to a fusion of millenarian faith and lifelong learning***. It was an immediate step up socially and intellectually, as well as spiritually. The student preachers of Bolshevism were asking the workers to become students while remaining workers” (75). If the relationship with books in France created dispositions, the relationship with books in Russia was a way of living. It created worldviews and therefore directly defined action.

The class-based worldview in both Bolshevik (Marx-derived) and Socialist Revolutionary (Russia-distinct, peasant communal living-informed) doctrines meant that members of each of these groups did not have a universalist message: they exclusively proselytized to the classes they saw as relevant in bringing about socialism in Russia – the proletariat and the peasantry, respectively (Slezkine 2017, 74). The Bolsheviks were particularly adamant about this:

By being the most skeptical of “spontaneity” (“class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without,” according to Lenin), they were the most intent on proselytizing. And proselytizing demanded organizational rigor. As the agitator’s instructions put it, “explicating the role of our party as the most advanced detachment of the working class, you must not forget that our party is a fighting army, and not a debating society. (Slezkine 2017, 75)

This essential cultural component of the Bolsheviks – their self-conception as an army that worked towards the end of bringing about socialism – came from (rather ironically, given their contempt for the “debating society”) an assessment of how the sociological concept of “class consciousness” operated in reality; it came from an understanding of literature. The major Russian revolutionary parties all understood themselves, to some degree, in this way – the conventional definition of parties as organizations that seek power within the legal structure of their state or society did not apply to any of the Russian revolutionary parties of the early 20th century, they were instead groups who (based on the principles they derived from the act of scholarship) pursued a (at least in their own rhetoric) a classless society through means outside of the existing state. This class-based and militarized self-conception – not difficult to derive from the notion that “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle (Marx and Engles 1848, 14) – created a worldview in Russian revolutionary cultures in which subjecting entire classes to “concentrated violence” (Bukharin 2013, 163) could be justified. Bukharin goes as far as listing “the technical intelligentsia and intelligentsia in general (engineers, technicians, agronomists, veterinarians, doctors, professors, lawyers, journalists, most teachers, etc.) and “the well-off peasantry” as deserving such violence.

Whereas it is difficult, in the French case, to find an account that traces the violent tendencies of the revolutionary culture directly back to its relationship with its literature (it seems that emerged more from the paradigms of legitimation during the revolutionary period,) such an account seems to hold water in the Russian context. If the violent elements of French and Russian revolutionary cultures can be understood as having different sources and being contingent on different aspects of each individual revolutionary culture, what does that mean for the place of violence in revolutions in general? Does it mean that violence is not a paradigmatic feature of revolutionary authority, but emerged as a result of contingencies distinct to the French and Russian revolutionary cultures? Or is there an underlying fundamental tendency towards violence in revolutions that might be reached through different sorts of individual actions, but reached nonetheless?

Whatever the answers to these questions may be, it is worth noting the methodology that prompted them: an exploration of the merits of various accounts of the patterns of revolutionary culture. At first glance, such an approach might seem to favor a narrative of individuals as having significant agency in the revolutionary moment, but the above accounts show that this is not necessarily the case. Beyond the innate interest in understanding the logic (or lack thereof) of revolutionary cultures, such accounts might provide a fresh framework for understanding those aforementioned questions of contingency, agency, and historical explanation.