Excavations


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- David Hume



Monday, July 26, 2021

Revolutionary Europe in 1848 and Tiananmen in 1989: A Comparison

The Revolutions of 1848 that spread across much of Europe and the “political turmoil” of 1989 that drew in much of Beijing (as well as society outside the capital) have each been described by historians as a “turning point”.[1]  More importantly, they can each be considered a “turning point which failed to turn”.[2]  This in itself presupposes the notion that history is supposed to turn, that it is intended to go in a particular direction, which implies certain historical bias.  Therein lies the hidden assumption that so-called Western democracy is natural to humankind, or that political repression is not, at least among the underclasses. But given that the movements behind both 1848 and 1989 generated opposite effects indicates that, in each case, an impetus was thwarted.  In fact, 1848 stands as a dividing point in nineteenth century thought.  The period before 1848 was marked by Romanticism, Liberalism and Utopianism.  Following 1848 the period was characterized by Nationalism, Conservatism and Realism. Optimism was replaced by pessimism; idealism with materialism. Much the same can be said about China before and after the infamous nationwide crackdown best symbolized by the Tiananmen Massacre.  This article is an attempt to compare two movements and their respective reactions: revolutionary Europe in 1848 and Beijing in 1989.

In France the Revolution of 1848 can be divided into two distinct stages: first, the liberal or middle-class Republican phase, resulting in the abdication of King Louis Philippe on 24 February; and, secondly, the notorious civil war of the June Days, when the entire nation united against Parisian working class radicals. After the February revolution, the Provisional government had announced what Karl Marx describes as “a republic with social institutions”.[3]  He goes on to say, “The proletarians rightly regarded themselves as the victors of February, and they had made the arrogant claims of victors.”[4] In a less facetious fashion Tocqueville thought of it as a revolution which “bestowed all power on ‘the people’ in the strict sense of the term, meaning the classes that work with their hands”.[5]  They were both correct: hours of work were reduced, the right to work was recognized by the government for the first time in history, and National Workshops were created in order to deal with unemployment.  The Provisional government also introduced universal manhood suffrage, giving every French male over the age of 21 the right to vote. This created a paradox: when it came to the actual elections it led to a more conservative National Assembly, which, when convened on 4 May, ended up reducing the number of radical representatives, because property-owning peasants were not particularly interested in supporting social revolution.[6] Subsequently, the working classes – as Marx put it – “sought in vain to recapture its revolutionary influence” and so invaded the National Assembly on 15 May 1848 (see my separate blog post).[7]  Tocqueville, who was in the Assembly at the time, described it as an attempt “to frighten that body rather than bring it down.”[8] Another problem for the new Assembly was that the National Workshops were over-enrolled: there was work for 10,000 men but the programme was responsible for 50,000.[9]  Thus the decision was made to close the Workshops which was then understood as a betrayal of their right to work. Hence the insurrection of the June Days.

As Marx characterizes it:  “The February revolution was the nice revolution … The June revolution is the ugly revolution”.[10]  In both developments people were killed.  In terms of violence and death, the June Days were surpassed in France by the blood of the Paris Commune of 1871 (about which Marx also writes) but it claimed approximately 4,500 lives. An estimated 2,600 lives were lost in Beijing as a result of the Tiananmen Massacre during China’s own “June Day”.[11] But there are differences.  Both Marx and Tocqueville characterize the June Days as a “civil war”, while the latter goes on to describe it as “not a political struggle … but a class combat, a sort of slave rebellion.”[12]  He also adds that “more than one hundred thousand men were involved in fighting” over four days so the scale of actual combat is different from Tiananmen, which was incredibly lop-sided, given that the Chinese military had literally surrounded the protestors by first going underground to the Great Hall of the People. The June Days were an “uprising of one entire segment of the population against another”; but in China it was an uprising against the political order under the Communist Party.[13] In both events women and men played equally great roles.[14] There is speculation that in China, young women were motivated, in part, by reproductive rights, as birth control was not available to unwed couples, which led to issues with multiple abortions.[15]  In both France and China, the railroads were also important: thousands of men poured in from all over France to Paris, among them “many peasants, many bourgeois, and many landowners and nobles all mixed indiscriminately in the ranks.”[16]  In China following the Massacre, students fled Beijing by train, in any direction possible. Even leading up to Tiananmen thousands of students from outside were coming to Beijing by train, though by late May the situation had reversed.[17] In words that could have been expressed by apologists for the Tiananmen Massacre, Tocqueville (who valued his liberty) depicted the June Days as “necessary and awful … They delivered the nation from the oppression … and placed its fate back in its own hands.”[18]  Compare this with Marx, who wrote: “Only after being dipped in the blood of June insurgents did the tricolor become the flag of the European revolution - the red flag!”[19]       

Marx explains that the February revolution had elicited “universal sympathies”.[20] Similarly, Jules Michelet’s empathetic and highly anticipatory work The People (1846) helps encapsulate the Romantic tendency to want to pull disparate parts together.[21]  In order to get a textual account of the original promise of optimism in 1848, it is best to look to Germany, in particular the Reminiscences of Carl Schurtz, who eventually fled the country upon the defeat of the revolution to become an eminent statesman in the United States. I quote at considerable length here. Pay attention to the sense of idealism (and the religious overtones) when comparing the events of Berlin following the February Revolution, while keeping in mind the public square central to Beijing, in 1989:

On the afternoon of the fateful 18th of March an immense concourse of people assembled on the open square in front of the royal palace, hoping to hear the authoritative announcement that the popular demands had been granted. The king appeared on the balcony and was received with enthusiastic cheers. He attempted to speak, but could not be heard. In the belief, however, that he had granted all that was asked for, the people were ready for a jubilee. Then a cry arose for the removal of the bodies of troops surrounding the palace and appearing to separate the king from his people. It seemed to be expected that this would be granted, too, for an effort was made to open a passage for the soldiers through the dense crowd, when a roll of drums was heard. This was regarded as a signal for the departure of the soldiery; but, instead of the troops withdrawing, heavy bodies of infantry and cavalry pressed upon the multitude for the evident purpose of clearing the square. Then two shots rang from the infantry line and the whole scene suddenly and frightfully changed. Frantic cries arose: "We are betrayed! We are betrayed!" In an instant the mass of people who but a moment before had joyously acclaimed the king, dispersed in the adjoining streets with the angry shout, "To arms, to arms!" In all directions the thoroughfares were soon blocked with barricades. The paving-stones seemed to leap from the ground and to form themselves into bulwarks surmounted by black-red-gold flags, and manned by citizens, university students, tradesmen, artists, laborers, professional men — hastily armed with all sorts of weapons, from rifles and shotguns down to pikes, axes and hammers. There was no preparation, no plan, no system, in the uprising; everybody seemed to follow a common instinct. Then the troops were ordered to the assault. When, after a fierce fight they had taken one barricade, they were at short distances confronted by another and another. Behind the barricades women were busy bringing food and drink for the fighters and caring for the wounded. During the whole night the city resounded with the roar of cannon and the rattle of musketry.

The king seemed at first sternly determined to put down the insurrection at any cost; but as the street battle proceeded he became painfully conscious of its terrible character. Reports arrived in rapid succession. He would now give an order to stop the fight and then an order to go on. Shortly after midnight he wrote with his own hand an address to "My dear Berliners." He began by saying that the firing of the two shots which had caused the excitement had been a mere accident, that a band of miscreants, mostly foreigners, had taken advantage of this misunderstanding to goad many of his good subjects into this fratricidal fight. Then he promised to withdraw the troops as soon as the insurgents would remove the barricades, and he implored them "to listen to the fatherly voice of their king, to which the grievously suffering queen joined her affectionate and tearful prayers." But the address failed to produce the desired effect. It was accompanied with the roar of cannon and the rattle of musketry, and the fighting citizens rather resented being called "a band of miscreants."

At last, on the afternoon of Sunday, the 19th of March, when one of the high commanders of the troops, General Möllendorf, had been captured by the citizens, the withdrawal of the troops was resolved upon. Peace was concluded on the understanding that the army should leave Berlin, that there should be freedom of the press, and that Prussia should have a constitution on a broad democratic basis. When the soldiery had marched off something happened that in dramatic force and significance has never been surpassed in the history of revolutions. From all parts of the city solemn and silent processions moved toward the royal palace. They escorted the bodies of those of the people who had been killed in the battle; the corpses of the slain were carried aloft on litters, their gaping wounds uncovered, their heads wreathed with laurel branches and immortelles. So the processions marched into the inner palace court, where the litters were placed in rows in ghastly parade, and around them the multitude of men with pallid faces, begrimed with blood and powder smoke, many of them still carrying the weapons with which they had fought during the night; and among them women and children bewailing their dead. Then the king was loudly called for. He appeared in an open gallery, pale and dejected, by his side the weeping queen. "Hat off!" the multitude shouted, and the king took off his hat to the dead below. Then a deep voice among the crowd intoned the old hymn, "Jesus, meine Zuversicht" — "Jesus, my Refuge," in which all present joined. The chorus finished, the king silently withdrew and the procession moved away in grim solemnity.

This was a terrible humiliation to the crown, but at the same time a pointed answer to the king's address in which the fighters had been denounced as a band of miscreants, or as the seduced victims of such a band. Had there really been such miscreants, or persons answering our present conception of anarchists, among them, Frederick William IV. would hardly have survived that terrible moment when he stood before them, alone and defenseless, and they fresh from the battlefield with guns in their hands. But at that moment their cry was not "Death to the king!" nor "Down with royalty!" but "Jesus, my Refuge!"[22]

Here is an impressive account of revolutionary fervor mixed with relative political tolerance, despite the unfortunate deaths, which were actually honoured.  “Citizens, university students, tradesmen, artist, laborers, professional men” had manned the bulwarks. There was also spontaneity: “no preparation, no plan, no system … everyone seemed to follow a common instinct.” Again, there was cooperation between the genders: “Behind the barricades women were busy bringing food and drink.”  The February effect as viewed from the German (and French) perspective suggests the excitement of unpremeditated activity and sense of ‘the people’ considered as a whole, the unity of multiple sectors of society working together, selflessly, towards a common goals.  Tocqueville remarks that walls in Paris were covered with countless posters.[23]  This too happened at Tiananmen.  As students marched from their universities to the centre of Beijing, they were joined or applauded by ‘the people’, who suspended their work and freely contributed water bottles and watermelon to the thirsty and hungry.  By the end, both in 1848 and 1989, there is resistance by means of street violence, barricades, protests against troops - and death, which in Beijing went unacknowledged and suppressed, and is now almost forgotten.  All across China today, people continue to live with state-enforced amnesia, unlike Europe after 1848 which nonetheless still experienced profound disappointment.[24]

1848 had been precipitated by economic problems: the potato blight and crop failures of 1845, as Marx noted, and the international financial crisis in the years that followed.[25]  The unrest in China, however, was exacerbated by the death among the gerontocracy, which is more typical of feudal society. Reformist Hu Yaobang passed away in April, 1989: he had been forced out as general secretary by Deng Xiaoping more than two years previously, blamed as he was for previous student unrest in 1986. European aspirations were guided by thoughts of constitutions and, notably, freedom of the press (of which there were glimmers of hope in Beijing). 1848 was also more instrumentally legalistic in nature, save for the tragedy of the June Days, which drove the revolutionary thinking of Karl Marx.  Both England and France had a more pronounced middle class than did China in 1989.  After the failure of 1848 Germany’s fledgling middle class developed its well-known apolitical posture making it predisposed to authoritarianism, not unlike China’s middle class today.  One significant difference was the hunger strikers in Beijing, students were inspired by Gandhi’s notion of passive resistance (in other words – not necessarily moved by Marxist rhetoric), which amounted to a direct challenge to the Communist Party. In France, working-class husbands and wives had fought alongside each other because they had little or nothing to eat, and certainly not much work, while in Beijing students were even provided with food by the Communist authorities – and still refused to eat, only to leave Tiananmen in ambulances, accompanied by the wailing of sirens. 

In the post-1848 period, idealism was considered vain; life was about facing facts, and faith in the self was replaced by the science of man.  Boosted by Darwin, naturalism found expression in literary fatalism (for example: Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden”) effectively enforcing European imperialism which emerged later in the nineteenth century. While Western society today wrestles with its colonial legacy, and remains haunted – especially in Canada, China (no stranger to social Darwinism) embraces the forcible assimilation – or rather cultural genocide - of Uyghurs, other minorities, and, of course, the re-colonialization of Hong Kong.  Both Europe after 1848 and China post-1989 discarded any discourse of human rights and turned to dwelling in profound materialism.  Both the late half of the nineteenth century in Europe and China after 1989 experienced tremendous growth in manufacturing. Historians describe the European experience as ‘the second industrial revolution’, while China’s growth as an economic powerhouse is today altering the course of the planet as we know it. 

Turning again to France we see that the concept of democracy became sullied – except perhaps among those enamored by a name - when Louis Napoleon (the great Emperor’s nephew) was voted into office overwhelmingly, becoming President of the Republic on 10 December 1848.  In Louis Napoleon, later known as Napoleon III, we see how democracy can degenerate into authoritarian rule, if not dictatorship.  In his words, he desired “democracy without liberty”.[26]  Wary observers would inevitably have recalled the eternal example of Socrates – the gadfly – whose fate ended in the hands of the demos (or people) of ancient Athens with the cup of hemlock.  Louis Napoleon’s subsequent coup d’etat of 1851[27] traded on the legend of his uncle, who demanded submission, not unlike Deng Xiaoping, whose legitimacy derived from being cadre of the Long March.  It was he who authorized the People’s Liberation Army to shoot the people.

To be clear, the Tiananmen protests were originally inspired by thoughts of countering or correcting corruption, as the student version of “democracy” held lesser regard for the peasants, who at the time, composed 75% of China’s population.[28]  Certainly aware of demography, Chinese students were nowhere near thinking about votes for peasants.  They had also read enough of Marx to know this would make those who worked the soil the arbiters of the nation.[29]  In terms of degree, the idealism of 1848 appears to have greater intellectual foothold and a longer pedigree than in China, but the overall sense of disenchantment, post-1848 and post-1989, is very evident to both developments.  Consider the words of a prominent, once-imprisoned figure in the student movement on the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen when he despaired to the New York Times: “You can raise pigs to be very strong and fat. But a pig is still a pig.  And a pig has no rights.”[30]  It was not just students at Tiananmen who had been crushed by tanks, or shot - even bayonetted – but ordinary people too, among them children and those whose apartment building were strafed by gunfire.  Some student leaders, including a famous Uyghur, Orkesh Dölet (his Chinese name was Wuerkaixi: Tiananmen was an era characterized by greater cultural tolerance), managed to escape from China, aided by others, including “counterrevolutionary” peasants.  In other words, while the events of 1848 may have been international in nature, or pan European, the happenings surrounding Tiananmen encompassed virtually every province of China and constituted the most serious threat to Communist Party rule to this day.  Hence the repression.

It would be meaningful to ask Marx, whose ideology was so propelled by the events of 1848, what he would think of the Tiananmen Massacre.  His animus was class struggle by means of the proletariat, which did not feature at Tiananmen, unless, however, one considers the Communist Party of China itself as its own ruling class. Party cadres – those who fought alongside Mao leading up to his victory in 1949 – were given privileged roles in China’s social and political life in the years that followed. Jan Wong in Red China Blues has pointed out how senior party members benefitted from the prevalence of state executions, as they were the ones who originally could afford organ transplants.[31] Communist China was not - and is not - a classless society.  Poor peasants, not the “proletariat”, had made the difference in Mao’s own struggle against Chiang Kai-sheck but Marx did figure a role for the former. He described the policy of universal male suffrage in the February revolution as a “magic wand” which “possessed the incomparably higher merit of unchaining class struggle.”[32]  In any event, for Marx the “exploiting class” (meaning the bourgeoisie) was the enemy.[33]  Moreover, Marx disdained the nirvana-like “cult of the people” as an “imaginary” feeling that Citizens everywhere could share the same interests and understanding.[34]   What he disparaged in 1848 could easily have been adapted by the Communist Party for use in 1989.  

It is also worthwhile examining contemporaneous thoughts on Karl Marx’s character, whom Carl Schurtz had met around 1848. He writes in his Reminiscences: “I have never seen a man whose bearing was so provoking and intolerable. To no opinion, which differed from his, he accorded the honor of even a condescending consideration. Everyone who contradicted him he treated with abject contempt ….”[35]  Theoretical thinkers are not always best for mass leadership, and following suit Marx in his time repelled many of his potential followers, according to Schurtz.[36]  Given that today an entire nation of over 1.4 billion people officially still indulges in his name suggests that Marx might have wanted to retain this legacy for reasons of his apparent intellectual vanity. While history did not wait for Marx to realize his own dogma, the world has been greatly shaped by his similarly contempt-filled interpreters: Lenin, Stalin and Mao – even though their versions of Marxism are malignant perversions of the original inflammatory doctrine.[37]  But at the root of it, one detects in in Deng Xiaoping’s handling of Tiananmen Karl Marx’s similar disrespect for ‘the people’.

The events of 1848 and 1989 are important “turning points”, each figuring at about the half-century mark, or so, after the respective epoch-making Revolutions of 1789 and 1949.  But as Tocqueville has pointed out, the French Revolution did not turn off the propensity for centralization. Here Tocqueville corrects Marx: “Centralization is safe …. The enemies of government love it, and governments themselves cherish it.”[38]  This holds true in China after the Communist Revolution.  We see it in the striking example of Xi Jinping, who, along with the rest of his family suffered terribly for years under Mao’s Cultural Revolution precisely because of his father’s formerly elevated status within the Party. Today President Xi is glad to invoke a neo-Maoist personality cult of himself, all thanks to centralization and the largest political party mankind has ever known, despite what he had endured during the chaos of Mao’s system itself. [39] Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s comrade in arms, had also not thought of Tocqueville when he announced in his famous maxim the end to the dialectic of class struggle: “the state is not ‘abolished’, it withers away”.[40]  In other words, such revolutionary thinking was far more utopian than allegedly scientific. Perhaps the religious dimensions behind what might be a secular façade (Marx came from a family of rabbis) would be the next step towards examining some of the aspirations of 1848.  In China, “God is Red”, as the dissident Liao Yiwu explains, which the devoted people are supposed to know.[41]  Those who still do know of Tiananmen also realize that the machinery of government shot the people – and won, for now.

 



[1] Jeremy Brown, June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and the Beijing Massacre of 1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. x.

[2] Melvin Kranzberg, Problems in European Civilization: 1848 – A Turning Point? (Boston: D.C. Heath and Co., 1959), p. ix.  This work is a collection of short, condensed essays authored by a number of notable historians. G.M. Trevelyan originated the pronouncement: “1848 was the turning point which modern history failed to turn.”

[3] Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (Moscow Progress Publishers, 1979), p. 52.

[4] Ibid., p. 53.

[5] Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), p. 51.

[6] J.P.T. Bury, “The Second Republic” in 1848 – A Turning Point?, p. 19.  Cf. Tocqueville, Recollections, p. 71.

[7] Marx, Class Struggles, p. 53.

[8] Tocqueville, Recollections, p. 82.

[9] J.P.T. Bury in 1848 - A Turning Point?, p. 21.

[10] Marx, Class Struggles, p. 55.

[11] Brown, June Fourth, p. 101.

[12] Tocqueville, Recollections, p. 97.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Brown, June Fourth, pp. 20, 21.

[16] Ibid., p. 109.

[17] Brown, p. 175.

[18] Tocqueville, Recollections, p.188.

[19] Marx, Class Struggles, p. 57.

[20] Ibid., p. 57.

[21] Jules Michelet, The People, tr. John P. McKay (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978), p. xxv.

[22] Downloaded from Wikisource. See: Carl Schurtz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurtz, Vol I, 1829-1852, Chapter 5 “Revolutionary Days.” Cf. Carl Schurtz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurtz, Vol I, 1829-1852 (New York: McClure Company, 1907), pp. 119-121. [Forgotten Books Reprint, 2018]

[23] Tocqueville, Recollections, p. 53.

[24] Louisa Lim, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

[25] Marx, Class Struggles, p. 35.

[26] Benedetto Croce, History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, tr. Henry Furst (London: Routledge, 2019), p. 204.

[27] Pope Pius IX was quick to congratulate Louis Napoleon for the coup with the remark: “Heaven has paid the debt that the Church owed to France”.  Bishops were even allowed to call him “the man sent by God.” See Croce, History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, p. 203.

[28] Brown, June Fourth, xiv.

[29] Marx, Class Struggles, p. 38.

[30] Brown, June Fourth, p. 240.

[31] Jan Wong, Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now (Toronto: Doubleday/Anchor, 1997), p. 316.

[32] Marx, Class Struggles, p. 51.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Schurtz, Reminiscences, pp. 139-140.

[36] Ibid., p. 140.

[37] Ibid., p. 163.

[38] Tocqueville, Recollections, p. 121.

[39]  Edward Luttwak, “Goethe in China” London Review of Books Volume 43, No 11 (3 June 2021), pp. 32,33.

[40]  Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dührung; Herr Eügen Duhring’s Revolution in Science, tr. Emile Burns (New York: International Publishers, p.. 315 [Nabu Press Reprint, 2010]

[41] See Liao Yiwu, God is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China, tr. Wenguang Huang (New York: Harper Collins, 2011).


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