‘Bandits’ vs. A Civil Militia: What Protestors and Counter-Protestors in Ottawa can learn from the ‘Great Fear’ of July 1789

Rural unrest in the last weeks of July 1789 in Revolutionary France was fueled by rumours surrounding the King and his court at Versailles.  After the fall off the Bastille – a hated prison and symbol of the Ancien Régime – Louis XVI withdrew troops surrounding Paris, thus bowing to the National Assembly (and popular resistance).  His acquiescence was considered a signal that emboldened the King’s subjects who thought they could act on their own against enemies so considered.  Hungry and suspicious peasants took to burning manor houses, destroying in their wake the feudal registers that recorded tithes and dues owed to local lords.  However, peasants came to believe that aristocrats were uniting forces to attack peasants: it was this ‘Great Fear’ that never actually happened.  It was all rumour, but the result was that even more peasants took up arms to fight those believed serving the aristocracy.  As the following letter reveals, civil militia were eventually organized to counter these marauders and peasant ‘bandits’.

Letter from the Commissioners of the Estates of Dauphine to the Committee of Twelve (July 31, 1789)

Our province has been most violently agitated for the last several days; bourgeois militia have been formed in all the cities, towns, and villages because the fear of bandits has spread everywhere; the watch is carried out with care and all suspicious-looking persons are stopped.

An alliance from the side of the cultivated lands has spread a general terror throughout the province.  On Monday the 2th, a bandit no one knew came to announce to Aoste that the village of Morestel was being attacked and burned; at the same time, other bandits announced to Morestel that the village of Aoste was being looted and burned.  The warning drew closer and closer, and the alarm was rung in all the villages; fear seized every heart and it was rumored that twenty thousand troops entered Dauphiné from the side of Bugey.

A letter written from Monferra to the lord of Voiron, giving him news of the arrival of these supposed twenty thousand men, was carried village to village and on to Grenoble, arriving there at eleven o’clock at night; it was supposed that it was only a couple of bandits chased from around Lyon by the city’s troops, so it was possible to dispel the fright caused by this letter.  But because the same warning had been given in every vicinity, even in St. Marcellin, all the people of the countryside quickly armed themselves with guns, pitchforks, and scythes, and ran to where it had been announced that the troops were to enter.  Several couriers followed one another through the night to bring the same news to Grenoble.

The commission convened very early in the morning; the municipality of Grenoble joined them along with several notables, citizens, to deliberate on the means of defense against this supposed invasion; it was decided that it was necessary to create a state of preparedness and to beg the commander to obtain rifles; Mr. Dufort sadly agreed to allow arms to be placed in the people’s hands; the conditions according to which they promised to return  six thousand guns which caused this abusive project to fail.

Tuesday was calm enough, thanks to the precautions of the village watch, which had sounded the alarm in the night, to announce that it was a false alert.

On Wednesday morning, the courier brought the most deplorable news that he had seen the château of Montferra, whose portal had already been destroyed; the people of the château handed over the wine cellar to the arsonists, who contented themselves with burning a businessman’s house.

A troop of these bandits went to the château of Césarges, which they also wanted to burn; they were stopped by the same means used at Montferra; but they urged suspicion of the villagers of the plain, who were supposed to come to loot the following day; the event itself proved the truth of this advice; Césarges has been looted and stripped with the help of carts; everything was taken, right down to the hinges of the doors; there was money there that did not escape the thieves’ foraging; the inhabitants of the neighboring village were themselves accomplices to the looting, mingling with the bandits; only some papers were saved.

The châteaux of Loras and Belaceuil were pillaged or burned as well; that of M. de Meyrieu was ruined; the furniture was broken or carried away but the fear of setting the village on fire saved the building from flames.

In light of this horrible disorder, the Parlement proposed to the Commission on the 29^th to join with it … and to include some deputies from the municipality, to confer together on means to reestablish the public peace.…

Courier followed upon courier throughout the day of Thursday the 30^th to bring news of châteaux that had been burned or ruined; the list is immense….

All good citizens hastened to volunteer to stop the disorder.  The committee requested M. de Durfort’s troops; consequently one hundred men of the Swiss regiment set out on the night of 30-31, as well as a similar number of bourgeois militia taken from the grenadiers and chasseurs.  These two companies were considerably augmented by young nobles and by the best bourgeois, who were put in step under the orders of M. de Frimont, who commands the attachment….

Meanwhile, couriers have been dispatched to Vienne, Lyon, and Valence to bring troops of the artillery and to surround the bandits.

The city of Lyon, having taken the same precautions of those of Grenoble, sent two hundred bourgeois militia with troops in pursuit of these incendiary thieves; M. Reynaud, Major of Sonnenberg, in the detachment from Lyon, has just told M. de Durfort that thirteen of these bandits were killed, nineteen taken prisons; they were taken to the prisons of Lyon; the provost conducting their trial there; they will be executed there or a reliable guard of troops will escort them.  A consul of the community and residents of the area have been found among the convicts.[1]

 

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[1] Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo, eds. and trs., The French Revolution: A Document Collection (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pp. 67, 68. Translated by Laura Mason. 

Karl Marx on religion – and the French Revolution: President Xi’s source on ‘cultural genocide’

Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in China’s western province of Xinjiang are being detained in huge internment camps.  Estimates range from the hundreds of thousands to 3 million, the latter figure coming from the U.S. State Department.[1]  More recently, the BBC reports (with the aid of satellite images) that numbers of mosques are being demolished, and that children are being separated from their parents en masse in an effort to re-educate them (thereby re-engineering humanity apart from the family unit) by means of giant boarding schools.  There are no other words for this than cultural genocide.

For China and the Communist Party, which is officially atheist, this is part of (as Marx would have it, see below) the “permanent revolution” since revived following Xi’s ascension to uninterrupted power.  We see it in Xi’s other activities vis-à-vis China’s Extradition Treaty with Hong Kong and in the not infrequent threats to Taiwan, considered a rogue province representing the ‘unfinished revolution’.  The persecution of Christians in China following Mao’s victory in 1949 has also been a core interest as the Communist Party asserted its totalitarian power over “western influence” in the forms of freedom of conscience and the closely-linked (but insidious) freedom of association.[2]

Below are several selections from Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”.  Ethnically Jewish, Marx is famous for his depiction of religion as “the opium of the people”.[3]  Historically, he derived much inspiration from the example of Jacobin dechristianization during of the French Revolution when an atheist “Cult of Reason” replaced Catholicism, and when – among other things - the 12-month calendar was abolished, only to be replaced by a more ‘rational’ system.  This all ended with Robespierre himself at the guillotine on the Ninth of Thermidor (27 July 1794).  The paratotalitarianism of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, as discussed here by Marx, still serves as a model for Xi and the Communist Party of China, particularly in regards to religion – and today’s Uyghurs.[4]

The decomposition of man into Jew, protestant and citizen, religious man and citizen, this decomposition is no trick played upon political citizenship, no avoidance of political emancipation.  It is political emancipation itself, the political manner of emancipating oneself from religion  Of course, in times when the political state is born violently as such out of civil society, when man’s self-liberation tries to complete itself in the form of political self-liberation, the state must go as far as abolishing, destroying religion, but only in the same way as it goes as far as abolishing private property, at the most, by declaring a maximum, by confiscation or a progressive tax, or in the same way as it abolishes life, by the guillotine.  In moments of particular self-consciousness political life tries to suppress its man.  However, this is only possible through violent opposition to its own contradictions, by declaring the revolution to be permanent.  The political drama therefore ends necessarily with the restoration of religion, private property, and all the elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace.[5] ….

The abstraction of the political man is thus correctly described by Rousseau: ‘He who dares to undertake the making of a people’s institutions ought to feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual, who is by himself a complete and solitary whole, into part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it; and of substituting a partial and moral existence of the physical and independent existence nature has conferred on us all.  He must, in a word, take away from man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him, and incapable of being made use of without the help of other men.’[6] ….

The actual individual man must take the abstract citizen back into himself and, as an individual man in his empirical life, in his individual work and individual relationships become a species being, man must recognize his own forces as social forces, organize them, and thus no longer separate social forces from himself in the form of political forces.  Only when this has been achieved will human nature be complete.[7] ….

…. And the question is no longer: which gives freedom, Judaism or Christianity?  It is rather the reverse: which gives more freedom: the negation of Judaism or the negation of Christianity.[8]

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[1] See Charles Burton, “How Xi trumped Trump at the G20 summit,” The Globe and Mail, Monday July 1, 2019, p. A11.

[2] See the fascinating accounts by exiled dissident Liao Yiwu, God is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China (New York: HarperCollins, 2011).

[3] Karl Marx, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed., David McClellan (Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 64.

[4] See Pierre Manent’s philosophical discussion of Jacobinism and Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” in Pierre Manent, Modern Liberty and Its Discontents, ed. and tr. Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Sexton (Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), pp. 129-133.

[5] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” in Selected Writings, p. 47.  Note: this work was printed in Hong Kong.

[6] Ibid., pp. 56,57. See “The Legislator” in Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Book 2, Chapter 7.  The original translation is by G.D.H.Cole.  Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, tr. G.D.H. Cole, revised J.H. Brumfitt and John G. Hall (New York: Dutton/Everyman’s Library, 1973), p. 194.

[7] Karl Marx, Selected Writings, p. 57.

[8] Karl Marx, “The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to become Free” in Selected Writings, p. 57.