7 - Revolution? Reaction? Revolutionary Reaction?

Summary

On 14 July 1789 the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt gave Louis XVI the news of the fall of the Bastille. ‘C’est une révolte’, cried the King. ‘Non, Sire,’ Rochefoucauld-Liancourt corrected him, ‘c’est une révolution.’ Debates in the two centuries since have focused on the nature of the event to which the King and the Duke were referring, the place of the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution and, following that, the place of the French Revolution in modern history. This focus has obscured the fact that in describing the event in this way the Duke was using the word ‘revolution’ in a very modern sense. The King thought that the fall of the Bastille was part of a revolt, requiring only a reassertion of his authority as king to quash it. The Duke was informing the King that what had happened was irreversible and thus beyond the power of the King. In describing the event as a revolution Rochefoucauld-Liancourt was implying that reversal of the event was impossible: it had a forward movement rather than a cyclical one.

The point is crucial for understanding the way Marx and Engels use the concept of revolution and, concomitantly, the concept of reaction in the Manifesto. Relatedly, the point is also important in getting to grips with the way the word ‘revolution’ has been used to describe events which we might also wish to describe as reactionary, namely fascism.

Fascism presents itself as a revolutionary doctrine and its seizure of power as a revolution. Mussolini and Gentile insisted that fascism is revolutionary, and leading Nazis referred to their movement as revolutionary and the regime itself as constituting a national or national socialist revolution. Many commentators have taken these claims at face value, although there is little agreement about the actual nature of the revolution: in some cases it refers to fascist ideology, in others to the seizure of power, while in yet others it is taken to refer to a social revolution said to have occurred in Italy and Germany once power had been seized. Nazism, for example, has been variously described a ‘revolution of nihilism’, a social revolution and a revolution of destruction.