"1848" in Germany: here republican forces defend the city of Freiburg in Bresgau (Baden) against royalist troops on April 24, 1848In yesterday's post, I used material from a two-part
De Bow's Review article on the French Revolution of 1848, which appeared at the time the secession of the slave states was beginning to occur. I speculated that the anonymous article would have been read by the planter class very much in terms of the rebellion that they were undertaking. And, at a minimum, it provided them with images of a recent revolution that was generally understood to be in the broad tradition of the American Revolution. It was important for them to show their continuity with the American Revolutionary traditions at the same time they were breaking radically with the United States itself.
There was a German philosopher of the time by the name of Karl Marx who wrote a book about the 1848 French Revolution, called
Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte(English:
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon) (1852). I understand that the author later became quite influential on the topic of revolutions. He made the observation in the first chapter:
Die Tradition aller toten Geschlechter lastet wie ein Alp auf dem Gehirne der Lebenden. Und wenn sie eben damit beschäftigt scheinen, sich und die Dinge umzuwälzen, noch nicht Dagewesenes zu schaffen, gerade in solchen Epochen revolutionärer Krise beschwören sie ängstlich die Geister der Vergangenheit zu ihrem Dienste herauf, entlehnen ihnen Namen, Schlachtparole, Kostüm, um in dieser altehrwürdigen Verkleidung und mit dieser erborgten Sprache die neuen Weltgeschichtsszene aufzuführen. So maskierte sich Luther als Apostel Paulus, die Revolution von 1789-1814 drapierte sich abwechselnd als römische Republik und als römisches Kaisertum, und die Revolution von 1848 wußte nichts besseres zu tun, als hier 1789, dort die revolutionäre Überlieferung von 1793-1795 zu parodieren. So übersetzt der Anfänger, der eine neue Sprache erlernt hat, sie immer zurück in seine Muttersprache, aber den Geist der neuen Sprache hat er sich nur angeeignet, und frei in ihr zu produzieren vermag er nur, sobald er sich ohne Rückerinnerung in ihr bewegt und die ihm angestammte Sprache in ihr vergißt. ...
[Speaking of the rising business class in France in the Revolution of 1789] Ganz absorbiert in die Produktion des Reichtums und in den friedlichen Kampf der Konkurrenz begriff sie nicht mehr, daß die Gespenster der Römerzeit ihre Wiege gehütet hatten. Aber unheroisch, wie die bürgerliche Gesellschaft ist, hatte es jedoch des Heroismus bedurft, der Aufopferung, des Schreckens, des Bürgerkriegs und der Völkerschlachten, um sie auf die Welt zu setzen. Und ihre Gladiatoren fanden in den klassisch strengen Überlieferungen der römischen Republik die Ideale und die Kunstformen, die Selbsttäuschungen, deren sie bedurfte, um den bürgerlich beschränkten Inhalt ihrer Kämpfe sich selbst zu verbergen und ihre Leidenschaft auf der Höhe der großen geschichtlichen Tragödie zu halten. So hatten auf einer andern Entwicklungsstufe, ein Jahrhundert früher, Cromwell und das englische Volk dem Alten Testament Sprache, Leidenschaften und Illusionen für ihre bürgerliche Revolution entlehnt. Als das wirkliche Ziel erreicht, als die bürgerliche Umgestaltung der englischen Gesellschaft vollbracht war, verdrängte Locke den Habakuk.
Die Totenerweckung in jenen Revolutionen diente also dazu, die neuen Kämpfe zu verherrlichen, nicht die alten zu parodieren, die gegebene Aufgabe in der Phantasie zu übertreiben, nicht vor ihrer Lösung in der Wirklichkeit zurückzuflüchten, den Geist der Revolution wiederzufinden, nicht ihr Gespenst wieder umgehen zu machen.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue. ...
[Speaking of the rising business class in France in the Revolution of 1789] Entirely absorbed in the production of wealth and in peaceful competitive struggle, it no longer remembered that the ghosts of the Roman period had watched over its cradle. But unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless had need of heroism, of sacrifice, of terror, of civil war, and of national wars to establish its place in the world. [Those are summaries of the major events in the first French Revolution.] And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic, their gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, passions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk.
Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making its ghost walk again.
The English translation is from the English version linked above, with some corrections on my part.
I don't know if that description holds up in the historical record. But there's certainly something to it. And it's not unusual that literate and often well-traveled men of the planter class would look to the more recent Revolutions of 1848, which unlike the American Revolution took place in their lifetimes and occurred on a grand scale across France and central Europe, for ways to understand their undertaking of rebellion against the United States. Or, as we might put it today, for ways to frame their project.
Louis Blanc became a radical republican minister in France after the February Revolution of 1848The anonymous author of the French Revolution article certainly displays an ambiguity in perspective toward the revolutionary events and actors. Southern readers of
De Bow's Review would have related this at some level to the complexity of their own attitudes toward revolution. The slaveowners were in the process of making what they saw as a political revolution by seceeding and creating a separate country in defense of slavery. They were terrified of the possibility of slave revolts. And they saw the Abolitionists and Republicans (they called them "Black Republicans") as revolutionaries out to overturn the social order of Southern civilization.
The
De Bow's account of 1848 describes with obvious distaste what happened when the activists entered the abandoned Royal Palace:
Success intoxicated the victorious champions of the republican cause, and they stood in the splendid halls, where kings and princes formerly engaged themselves in wassail and dance, astonished at their own audacity. Political excitement, if not seasonably checked, degenerates into a virulent passion; and it then oversteps every limit of propriety and moral restraint. Nothing is so sacred but is overturned, if accidentally thrust in the pathway of its progress. Every thing becomes the object of its hatred that keeps alive the memory of the enemy and the oppressor. The conquerors of the Palais Royal had nearly reached this dangerous point of political dementation. Their Vandal spirit of destruction became excited, and they spared neither the most celebrated works of art, nor the most, valuable pieces of usefulness or convenience, which wealth and luxury had invented. Pictures and statues shared the same fate with the richest furniture which adorned the capacious saloons [sic]. They were thrown together in one promiscuous heap, and reduced to one undistinguished mass of ashes. [my emphasis]
For many of De Bow's readers, this must have conjured up images of "servile insurrectionists" or marauding Yankees breaking into Southern plantation houses and wreaking havoc.
Describing one period in the 1848 events in which a group of republican leaders took dictatorial powers to restore order, our author puts it in terms that were similar to the justifications that Southerners were using to overthrow the existing American Constitutional order to prevent the "Black Republicans", dead set on social revolution in their eyes, from implementing their nefarious plans:
The law of necessity was the only authority they could invoke to justify their usurpation of dictatorial powers; for only a very small and insignificant fraction of the thirty-five millions of Frenchmen wore consulted with regard to the mode and manner of organizing the new government. In the hour of peril, no man who had the good of his country at heart, could hesitate, for one moment, to rally in support of the new government, which, although revolutionary in its origin, was yet highly conservative in its composition.
These patriots have rendered their names immortal; they saved France from a bloody reign of terror, which would have been inevitable. They seized the sceptre of power, to wrest it from the hands of fanatics, at a time when events were still enshrouded by the ominous gloom of suspense. [my emphasis]
The "fanatics" about which the readers of
De Bow's Review in 1860-61 were most concerned were not those in France 12 years earlier, but the "fanatics" they conceived the Republican Party and the new Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, to be.
And it would actually be a good description of how the slaveowners saw the Confederacy to say "although revolutionary in its origin, [it] was yet highly conservative in its composition". The planters were only "revolutionary" enough to try to remove their Peculiar Institution of slavery from interference by the Constitutional and democratic processes of the United States. But their goals within their own society was imminently conservative in the literal sense, to
conserve their institutions of slavery and white supremacy. The last thing they wanted was a social revolution in the South.
In the remaining part of my discussion of this article, it will be useful to keep in mind that in the period of the revolution on which this article focuses, there were conservative republicans, radical republicans and socialists of various sorts. In practice, the latter two groups considerably overlapped. Both of them horrified our anonymous author.
Here is how he describes the scene at the time of the formation of the provisional government, which included both conservative and radical republicans:
Extreme socialists, denounced in blasphemous execrations, and with fearful emphasis; the system of economy of the existing society, as oppressively unjust, and ignominiously degrading - proposing complete subversion, and radical extirpation, as the only effectual remedy.
Since in the fevered minds of the Southern secessionists at this time the "Black Republicans" intended exactly that for the slave states, it's impossible not to think the readers if not the writer were identifying those scary French socialists with Abraham Lincoln's party.
There were the dregs and drainings of prisons and jails, the votaries of every crime forbidden by the decalogue, claiming their natural and inherent right of sharing, not only the dangers, but also the privileges, of the new government which was about to be inaugurated. The honest tradesman was there, and the peaceable artisan and mechanic, who looked upon the undulating waves of human beings with secret hatred; for the revolution had starved their purses, and cut short their means of subsistence. There was the needle-woman and the huckstress, the scum of the brothel and the bagnio, commingling their coarse vituperations with the more labored arguments of the orator of communism.
This was how good Southern planters would have pictured Jacksonian democracy run wild.
Men, frantic with the delirium of intoxication, were brandishing their arms with careless audacity over the heads of thousands of their more calm and more moderate countrymen, intimating, by their violent gesticulations, that they were ready to wage a war of extermination.
Oh my Lawd, Beuregard! John Brown has come back from the day-ed!!
Our chronicler describes with evident relief the establishment of a government full of reliable men, who, apparently unlike mere mortals, were "influenced by no other motive than that of patriotism and a sense of duty." The writer seems to be practicing his polemics for the coming Confederate "revolution". But, meanwhile:
Society was completely unhinged in the capital. Anarchy, with its Titan progeny, its hideous monster of crime and terror, was unchained. Combustible materials were heaped up in the streets of Paris, agitated by the ardor of revolutionary excitement, which, had they not been seasonably managed and controlled, might have set the whole civilized world on fire.
Here we see the writer's intense ambiguity about this whole revolutionary project. He celebrates the provisional revolutionary government as though it were composed of Olympians. But at the same time, the whole notion of a revolution seems to fill him with horror.
France was a republic sustained by military power - restraining the licentiousness of democratic anarchy - while public virtue, the moral influence of patriotism, and the educated intelligence of the people, are the only foundation stones upon which republicanism can successfully build its temple.
It's again difficult not to hear the echoes here of Southern attempts to place their emerging slave republic into the context of republic theory and symbolism, uncomfortably aware of the radical incompatibility of representative government and democratic freedoms for whites, on the one hand, and the institution of black slavery on the other.
Lamartine was the leader of the conservative majority of the provisional government. His popularity throughout France was, at that time, universal. He was the idol of the nation. His powers were dictatorial, which he may have wielded, at times, with an unsteady hand; but his motives were pure, his patriotism was unsullied by the selfishness of ambition, and the corrupting influences of political charlatanism and intrigue.
In the writer's image of the provisional government, functioning at some level among his readers as an ideal for the new government of an independent South, they were fortunate enough to have angels rather than mere mortals ruling them.
It is true, he accepted the republic, not from natural predilection, but from philosophical reasons, because the republican form of government could alone stem the current of anarchy which was threatening to overwhelm the existing social order, and submerge the institution of law and property beneath the tidal wave of its mighty torrents. To relieve the necessities of the laboring classes, to calm the agitation and hush the clamor of republican declaimers, to present a firm front to the hostile attitude of the desperate conspirators of socialism - those terrible image-breakers of modern society - prudence, if not policy, suggested the adoption of measure which, under ordinary circumstances, would have been regarded as phantom spectres of a distempered brain and deluded fancy. ...
Ledru-Rollin was the chieftain of the radical republicans. He was the Polyphemus of that band of Cyclops, who, with the hammer of equality, mercilessly belabored the anvil of their political workshop, to shape into form that system of social levelling which reduces both the governors and the governed into a soulless, heartless, and headless herd of beggarly, slaves, and into vile, degraded, and spiritless vagabonds, without intelligence to contrive, and without energy to execute. [my emphasis]
Scary people, those
Abolitionists socialists.
Napoleon IIIThe socialists were recognized as a power in the state. As a measure of self-preservation and safety, it was deemed expedient to appoint wolves to co-operate with the more conservative shepherds of the flock.
It's also likely that some of the
De Bow's Review readers were understanding passages like this in terms of the struggles within the Southern states between "fire-eaters" (militant secessionists) and more cautious reactionaries.
Louis Blanc, an enthusiast and a man of letters, and Albert, a simple mechanic and a representative of the secret societies, were permitted to complete the magic circle of patron-genii who were expected to usher into the world the milennial age of social and political regeneration. The apostles of socialism were neither the friends nor the advocates of any specific form of government.
Louis Blanc was, in fact, a utopian socialist. His career in the French republican government was relatively brief, beginning in late February, 1848, and ending after the failed workers revolt of June, 1848.
Liberty and the equality of political rights were with them [the socialists] merely means to attain a more remote and more important object. Absolute democracy, or organized anarchy, was the dream of their visionary minds. They hated, abhorred, and spurned, as an abject and vile contrivance, the prevailing system of social order. They regarded the old family tree as decrepit, degeneratd, and about falling to decay, producing but bitter and poisonous fruit. The imagined that the evils of society might be cured by striking at the root of the tree. They fancied that if the seed were planted upon more fertile soil, it might yeild a more abundant and more excellent harvest, and might reproduce itself, in its primeval perfection, during perennial cycles of successive generations. ...
It is ... not too much, perhaps, to assume that, if the socialists had wielded the sceptre of authority, which was fortunately in the trusty hands of the conservative republicans, confiscation of the property of the rich, banishment, exile, and the scaffold, would have ruled, for a season, the destinies of the French nation, with the iron hand of terror. [my emphasis]
The secessionists feared that the Republicans really would in short order "confiscate the property of the rich" slaveowners: their human property in the form of slaves. Again, it's hard to imagine that the audience at the time wasn't reading this on various levels: of history, of projective mythology for their secessionist project, and of their fears of the "revolutionary" intentions of slaves and John Browns and Lincoln's Republicans.
It is a remarkable fact, which philosophy has not yet satisfactorily explained, that political, no less than religious zeal, when carried to its utmost limits, unfetters the evil passions of men, and produces results subversive of all the ends, aims, and purposes, for the accomplishment of which it started out on its journey of progress and development.
The slaveowners reading
De Bow's Review might have done well to reflect on that passage in terms of historical analysis, not just propaganda phrases against the feared Abolitionists and "Black Republicans". Because secession and civil war in fact did destroy the power of the old planter class in the South and it did put an end to the institution of slavery: the thing they were trying to save by their revolt against the United States.
It's hard to know exactly how the audience of the time perceived this article, of course. But it does provide a good example of the concepts and vocabulary around revolutionary hopes and fears with which leading Southerners were working at the time.
The author might have also done his readers a favor by extending his tale beyond the election of the National Assembly in May of 1848 in France. That was really only the first phase of that revolutionary process. It can meaningfully be said to have come to an end with the plebescite accepting Napoleon III as Emperor in November of 1852. The revolution that began by establishing a republic and universal male suffrage ended by turning their republic into an Empire and strangling the political and social hopes that motivated the original movement. Revolutions and rebellions can be tricky things. They don't always turn out like their initiators hope. The Confederate revolt certainly did not.
Tags:
confederate heritage month 2009,
revolutions of 1848
