Lenin on the French Revolutions

As he sought to measure progress of the Russian Revolution, Lenin often compared it to the Great 18th Century French Revolution. Speaking to a congress on adult education in May 1919, he said, "Take the great French Revolution. It is with good reason that it is called a great revolution. It did so much for the class that it served, for the bourgeoisie, that it left its imprint on the entire nineteenth century, the century which gave civilisation and culture to the whole of mankind. The great French revolutionaries served the interests of the bourgeoisie although they did not realise it for their vision was obscured by the words “liberty, equality and fraternity”; in the nineteenth century, however, what they had begun was continued, carried out piecemeal and finished in all parts of the world."

"Everybody who studies history seriously will admit that although it was crushed, the French Revolution was nevertheless triumphant, because it laid down for the whole world such firm foundations of bourgeois democracy, of bourgeois freedom, that they could never be uprooted."

The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen was quoted later by the revolutionaries of Vietnam, including Ho Chi Minh, when they made their own "Declaration of Independence from French colonialism in 1945.

Lenin emphasized that in Russia they had carried the process of revolution a big step further: "In a matter of eighteen months our revolution has done ever so much more for our class, the class we serve, the proletariat, than the great French revolutionaries did."

The difference, to Lenin, was due to the development during the intervening century of a the working class (proletariat), and a revolutionary theory based on the proletariat. As he said in November 1918 to a meeting of poor peasants' committees, "Every European revolution ended in failure because the peasants could not cope with their enemies. In the cities the workers overthrew their kings (in England and France they executed their kings several centuries ago; it was only we who were late with our tsar), yet after a certain interval the old order came back. That was because in those days even in the cities there was no large-scale industry which could unite millions of workers in the factories and weld them into an army powerful enough to withstand the onslaught of the capitalists and the kulaks even without peasant support ... Now the situation is different. During the last two hundred years large-scale production has developed so powerfully and has covered all countries with such a network of huge factories employing thousands and tens of thousands of workers that today everywhere in the cities there are many organised workers, the proletarians, who constitute a force strong enough to achieve final victory over the bourgeoisie, the capitalists."

Writing in a pamphlet, The Achievements and Difficulties of the Soviet Government" in March 1919, Lenin emphasized the struggle to defend the revolution, which at that time was fighting back against invading armies on all sides, and he recalled the example of the French Revolution: "The French revolution, against which the old powers hurled themselves at the beginning of the nineteenth century in order to crush it, we call great precisely because it succeeded in rousing the vast masses of the people in defence of its gains and they resisted the whole world; this was one of its greatest merits."

Like Marx and Engels before him Lenin also appreciated the great significance of the French Revolution of 1871, the Paris Commune. Speaking to the Second All-Russia Trade Union Congress on January 20, 1919, he said "The Soviet movement has ... become the second step in the world-wide development of the socialist revolution. The first step was the Paris Commune, which showed that the working class cannot arrive at socialism except by way of dictatorship, by the forcible suppression of the exploiters. That is the first thing the Paris Commune showed, namely, that the working class cannot get to socialism via the old, bourgeois-democratic parliamentary state, but only via a new type of state, which will smash both parliamentarism and the bureaucracy from top to bottom."

In 1921, commenting on the Theses on the Agrarian Question adopted by the Communist Party of France, Lenin supported the call for a new socialist revolution in France, "The workers and peasants of France proved that they were capable of waging a legitimate, just and revolutionary war against their feudal aristocracy when the latter wanted to crush the great French Revolution of the eighteenth century. They will be able to wage a similarly legitimate, just and revolutionary war against the French capitalists..."

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