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MESSAGE OF THE COMINTERN (SH)
ON OCCASION OF THE 225th ANNIVERSARY
OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
July 14, 1789 - July 14, 2014
Today, 225 years ago, the Bastille was seized by the popular masses during the famous French Revolution that put an end to the feudal dominance of aristocracy. Although this occurred in France, this revolutionary fire rapidly spread across the entire European continent and it became clear that aristocratic rule and its feudalist socio-economic basis and production forces were perishing.
The Bastille was a well-known prison in Paris where the opponents of feudal-monarcho-aristocratic tyranny were imprisoned under unspeakable conditions. When the king Louis XVI was overthrown, the infuriated masses, tired of centuries of feudal oppression, invaded the prison, liberating all prisoners in an episode that is remembered until nowadays.
Stalin said in his interview with H. G. Wells in 1934:
"Take France at the end of the eighteenth century. Long before 1789 it was clear to many how rotten the royal power, the feudal system, was. But a popular insurrection, a clash of classes was not, could not be avoided. Why? Because the classes which must abandon the stage of history are the last to become convinced that their role is ended. It is impossible to convince them of this. They think that the fissures in the decaying edifice of the old order can be repaired and saved.
That is why dying classes take to arms and resort to every means to save their existence as a ruling class.
Was the great French Revolution a lawyers’ revolution and not a popular revolution, which achieved victory by rousing vast masses of the people against feudalism and championed the interests of the Third Estate? And did the lawyers among the leaders of the great French Revolution act in accordance with the laws of the old order? Did they not introduce new, bourgeois-revolutionary law?
The rich experience of history teaches that up to now not a single class has voluntarily made way for another class. There is no such precedent in history. The Communists have learned this lesson of history. Communists would welcome the voluntary departure of the bourgeoisie. But such a turn of affairs is improbable, that is what experience teaches. That is why the Communists want to be prepared for the worst and call upon the working class to be vigilant, to be prepared for battle."
The French Revolution of 1789 had very positive features: it represented an enormous step forward in the necessary evolution of productive relations from feudalism to capitalism, it was the beginning of the end of aristocratic class dominance, it ensured certain formal “rights” that popular masses had never enjoyed until then. However, this cannot make us forgetting its many and profound limitations. It is true that French Revolution decisively contributed to the annihilation of feudal-aristocratic order, but only to replace it by another kind of exploitation and oppression – that of capitalist-bourgeois wage slavagist order. At the same time, those formal “rights” were denied in practice to the popular masses, remaining a privilege of the new bourgeois dominators as much as feudal prerogatives had been of the aristocratic lords. The 1789 French Revolution was of bourgeois nature, the total and definitive liberation of labourers was still not at issue in it. Only almost a century after, with the emergence of Marxist scientific materialism and later with the 1917 October Revolution, the door for its accomplishment was opened.
