Publication: Daedalus
Publication Date: 01-JAN-07
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Michnik, Adam
Article Excerpt
We need a moral revolution! (1)
Do we really need one?
But of course! Replied an ultrarevolutionary, a Jacobin.
But of course! Replied an ultrareactionary, a partisan of the Counterrevolution.
Radicals, adherents of extreme solutions, Ultras of all the colors of the rainbow, have a need for revolutionary upheavals, because only upheavals that turn the world upside down allow them to fulfill their dream of a great cleansing.
I
The Jacobin, the revolutionary Ultra, says:
We need a moral revolution because we are surrounded by 'souls of mud'--reactionaries, hidden royalists, petty individuals, one-day patriots--who are conspiring against our revolutionary government. We need a moral revolution because vice is spreading. Reactionary newspapers are sowing lies; so one has to force them into silence. Corruption is spreading; so we must look carefully at the rich. "I regard wealth," said Robespierre, "not only as the price of crimes, but as a punishment for them; I want to be poor, so as not to be unfortunate." France is surrounded by traitors--those poisonous insects sowing shamelessness, deceit, meanness. It is they who caused the collapse of a state and society functioning according to one system of values, discovered in 1789, with rules that allowed us to maintain a dignity and a brotherhood founded upon the need to do good. We need a moral revolution today, now that we have a chance to leave the crisis of nonmemory and the curse of a fresh start. We need a cleansing, a capacity to do good for the Revolution. It also means a recognition of one's own errors--one's fatal tolerance for 'moderates,' for the forgiving and the temperate.
The conservative, the reactionary Ultra, says:
We need a moral revolution because now, after the return of the Bourbons, the tide of revolution has receded. The time has passed when vice ruled triumphant over France; when regicide was a law unto itself; when those responsible for regicide dictated their own laws; when virtue was humiliated, loyalty persecuted, and property confiscated. It's true that a cruel despotism and the omnipotent guillotine, that revolution--this huge gutter of filth--polluted France. Nevertheless, France still has many virtues; so one can, wrote Joseph de Maistre, "start the nation anew." France, washed clean from the dirt of Jacobinism, restored to its monarchic and Catholic roots, will become a symbol of reconciliation between the King and his subjects. We need a moral revolution in order to restore the dream of a state and society functioning according to one system of values, with rules that allow us to maintain the loyalty and dignity befitting royal subjects, always inclined to do good. We need a moral revolution because today everything is possible, 'even the resurrection of the dead,' not to mention the resurrection of 'our own moral subjectivity.' One must avoid at all costs a compromise with the bastards of Jacobinism and Bonapartism, who want a constitutional monarchy, that is, a king without royal power--they don't understand that 'every constitution is regicide.'
II
What familiar voices despite such different historical costumes. I hear them continuously today--with mounting sadness and amazement. After all, those who echo them ought to know where it all leads.
Does history repeat itself? Karl Marx once wrote, paraphrasing Hegel, that each historical fact repeats itself twice--the original drama turns into farce. Marx was wrong: history repeats itself much more frequently. The world is still full of inquisitors and heretics, liars and those lied to, terrorists and the terrorized. There is still someone dying at Thermopylae, someone drinking a glass of hemlock, someone crossing the Rubicon, someone drawing up a proscription list. And nothing suggests that these things will stop repeating themselves.
We like to reiterate that history is a teacher of life. If this is indeed true, we listen very poorly to its lessons. That is why I am reflecting today on the Ultras of the Revolution and the Ultras of the Counterrevolution, who dreamt about a Big Cleansing and a Moral Revolution--not so that the language of that reign of terror may never repeat itself, but because I'm convinced it will inevitably do so.
III
After a victorious civil war, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the Roman dictator, began his rule by taking revenge on his opponents. He did it with an exacting method, namely, by ordering the drawing up of proscription lists, that is, lists of outlawed enemies--and designating a reward for their heads. "With nerve-racking premeditation," write historians Max Cary and Howard Hayes Scullard, "Sulla prolonged the listing of new victims, announcing from time to time additional proscription lists. Terror reigned. This modernized system of mass murders was aimed with particular viciousness at those adversaries who were wealthy. Their property was confiscated, and the cities of Italy became theaters of execution." (2) This was the purpose of the proscription lists Sulla announced: it was terrifying to find one's name on such a list.
For centuries the list of names has been an irremovable element of social history: the lists of witches burned at the stake; the lists of heretics examined by the Inquisition; the lists of Jesuits condemned to exile; the lists of Masons; the lists of Jews; the lists of Christians suspected of Jewish background; the lists of Communists and those suspected of having Communist sympathies; the lists of royalists and other enemies of revolution; the lists of agents of Tsarist Okhrana; the lists of hostages; and the lists of those beheaded by guillotine or axe, or those who were shot.
Executions were usually preceded by the lists of suspects--those suspected of revolutionary or subversive activities, of a sinful past or present, of betrayal. Suspicion marched ahead of accusation and execution.
IV
The French Revolution overturned an absolute monarchy and established a constitutional monarchy. "This constitution was also vitiated," wrote Hegel, "by the existence of absolute mistrust; the dynasty lay under suspicion, because it had lost the power it formerly enjoyed.... Neither government nor constitution could be maintained on this footing, and the ruin of both was the result."
Hegel later writes:
A government of some kind, however, is always in existence. The question presents itself then, Whence did it emanate? Theoretically, it proceeded from the people; really and truly, from the National Convention and its Committees. The forces now dominant are the abstract principles--Freedom, and, as it exists within the limits of the Subjective Will--Virtue. This Virtue has now to conduct the government in opposition to the Many, whom their corruption and attachment to old interests, or a liberty that has degenerated into license, and the violence of their passions, render unfaithful to virtue. Virtue here is a simple abstract principle and distinguishes the citizens into two classes only--those who are favorably disposed and those who are not. But disposition can only be recognized and judged of by disposition. Suspicion therefore is in the ascendant; but virtue, as soon as it becomes liable to suspicion, is already condemned. Suspicion attained a terrible power and brought to the scaffold the Monarch, whose subjective will was in fact the religious conscience of a Catholic. Robespierre set up the principle of Virtue as supreme, and it may be said that with this man Virtue was an earnest matter. Virtue and Terror were the order of the day; for Subjective Virtue, whose sway is based on disposition only, brings with it the most fearful tyranny. It exercises its power without legal formalities, and the punishment it inflicts is very simple--Death.
V
And it had begun so beautifully. The Revolution began under a hopeful sign of Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood. The Bastille--a bastion and symbol of tyranny--was captured. King Louis XVI chose a path of compromise with the revolutionary camp; absolutism collapsed. It looked like 'the King with the people, the people with the King.'
Speaking parenthetically: in July of 1789, the Bastille, where opponents of the King had been imprisoned, had only seven prisoners--four counterfeiters, two mentally ill, and one imprisoned at the request of his father. Such was this bastion of tyranny. Such a bastion; such a tyranny. It was already absolutism with broken teeth.
In spite of that, an historic event took place, the event of an epoch: in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen it was proclaimed that people are born and remain free and equal under the law. The words of Marie Joseph La Fayette were repeated: "People become free as soon as they want to be free." And the revolutionaries repeated: "It was different in England, where so much blood was shed; our revolution triumphed almost without bloodshed." And they repeated that the Revolution opened the...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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