A MICROCOSMIC ADDENDUM

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EVEN RIGHTER!

In the recent “Importance of Being Right” post, exploring the vicissitudes of the terms right and left, I briefly mentioned that both free marketers and advocates of monist sovereignty stood together on the left of the National Assembly during the French Revolution. It strikes me though that it's worth fleshing out this offhand remark a bit, since the tumultuous events of the historical moment captured by the broad umbrella term of the French Revolution actually provides both a striking illustration of what I've been arguing over the last year or two, and a microcosm of the intellectual and ideological forces which have molded the current Overton window.

If you know your French Revolution history well, this post may read as pedantic. If you're a bit rusty on that history, though, it may be of interest, particularly as a function of further appreciating the arguments I've made both on this Substack and in my most recent book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars. I've been doing a bit of a dive into the nuances of the French Revolution. In the process, to my delight, I've realized that my undergrad course on the revolution, way back in the 80s (hail good old Concordia U!) was very good and served me well. But that was all a long time ago. So in case like me any of you might well benefit from a refresher, I'd just point out what a remarkable microcosm of our current plight of spatialist ideological hegemony is found in a close reading of some of the French Revolution’s sectarian details.

Along with the infamous sans culottes, a primary driver of the French Revolution, once it got rolling, was of course, the Jacobins, so named for the club that they formed. The Jacobin clubs had the important political and strategic function of allowing politicians and political theorists to share common revolutionary views, and forge the revolutionary vision which drove the French Revolution. However, it's worth noting that, from the beginning, there was not ideological uniformity among the Jacobins. Within their revolutionary culture, among other areas of dispute, there were differences between those who adhered to each end of the spectrum of what I call the mass society closed circuit.

Some were more interested in promoting free markets and others were more interested in promoting monist sovereignty. However, in the early years of the revolution, they put these differences aside in shared struggle against their common enemy: the corporate pluralism of the ancient regime, with its appeal to the medieval constitution. As such, they stood side by side, these free marketers and monist sovereigntists, under the banner of Jacobinism, on the left side of the National Assembly.

That's part of why I’ve insisted they're both properly understood as being just different expressions of a leftwing, mass society, world view. This is of course not to deny that they had real differences between them, which gradually emerged into open conflict. By 1791 these fault lines within the Jacobins became formally expressed with their fracturing into the free market Girondins and the monist sovereigntists Montagnards. And indeed, by 1793 their conflict boiled over into mass murder, as the Montagnards formed the Committee of Public Safety and unleashed the Reign of Terror upon the Girondins, among others.

However, and this is the key point I want to emphasize here, notwithstanding their very real differences, it is noteworthy that this final eruption between the two camps of the Jacobins, who’d originally stood together on the left side of the National Assembly, only came once, working together, they’d almost completely vanquished their common enemy: the ancient regime’s corporate and legal pluralism.

By the time of the Terror, the Jacobins had succeeded in effectively eliminating both the noble and clerical estates; abolishing the monarchy; crippling the local parishes, along with the peasants’ moral economy; outlawing the monastic orders and the guilds; eradicating the ancient provinces, with their own unique histories, identities, loyalties, traditions and customs, while imposing a generic homogenized set of symmetric, uniform departments organized for strictly administrative purposes; regulating the political clubs and popular societies; homogenizing the French language (which is to say, Parisian French) across the country, erasing particularistic rural and regional dialects and languages; and at least beginning the process of unifying civil law, toward eliminating the plurality of ancient customary law of the provinces, expressed through the perceived mishmash of Roman, Gothic and Saxon laws.

All of this relentless assault upon the pluralism of the ancient constitution had been achieved before the Montagnards finally moved decisively against the Girondins. Yes, they had real conflict in their idea of what the revolution should be, but resolving those conflicts took a back seat to the shared Jacobin project of destroying heterarchical pluralism.

There are a couple wrinkles of interest worth mentioning here, too. The free market Girondins were, as might be expected, less (these things being relative, of course) centralist and monist, and so enjoyed support in certain regions of the country which were ambitious to maintain aspects of their local particularity. Once the Reign of Terror was unleashed upon them, then, many of those regions participated in what historians of the French Revolution call “the federalist revolt.”

Hanson assures his readers that this turn of phrase should not mislead; the regions were not promoting a formal federalist organization of France, along the lines of what occurred in the United States, and would follow with the likes of Switzerland and Canada. The term probably was better understood as a more general appeal for greater regional autonomy.¹ Still, even that is an interesting wrinkle, which (along with the peasant revolts) stands a bit in contrast to the conventional telling of the French Revolution as agent of homogenization and unification toward the ideal of a Rousseauean General Will.

And the other interesting wrinkle to which I’d draw attention is that, following the defeat of the last gasp of royalty preservation, with the neutralization of the Feuillants, and their project of a constitutional monarchy, it was the free market Girondins who moved over, as it were, to become the new right of the – now called – National Convention. Hence, no doubt, we see the grounds upon which some would appeal as legitimacy for describing free marketeers as rightwing. My objection of course would be, as we’ve seen, that particular configuration only could be, and only was, constructed following the effective political removal of the original rightwing, defending the ancient constitution, with its long tradition of corporatism and pluralism.

And, of course, as I’ve emphasized repeatedly, including in the post to which this one is an addendum, free markets and monist sovereignty are only rivals within a constrained arena, which they mutually construct out of the ruins of the defeated world of corporate pluralism. But that point has been made sufficiently there and elsewhere.

In closing, I’ll just conclude by acknowledging that these were not the only issues dividing the Girondins and Montagnards. They are though issues that point to the heart of such disagreements, as well of course as being the ones most telling for purposes of recovering the history of the lost original right, the project in which I’ve been engaged here in recent years.

And as this little bit of historical tale reminds us, that erasure of the original right was not an incidental or organic product of the churn of time. Rather, from the start, it was central to the political project of the French Revolutionary left, and it remains central to our current manifestation of spatialist modernism. And that’s why I’ve been engaged in this project over the current year of recovering the history of political and legal pluralism. And that project continues in the next with post, with the fifth installment of our series on Guilds, Old and New. So, if you don’t want to miss out on that, and haven’t yet, please…

And, if you know of someone else who’d be interested in the discussions we have hereabouts, please do…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you!

1. Paul R. Hanson, The Jacobin Republic Under Fire: The Federalist Revolt in the French Revolution, 1st edition (University Park, Pa: Penn State University Press, 2003).