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The Communist World and the French Revolution
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16026 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1989 |
3,696 Words |
| Author
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Maurice Friedberg
Maurice Friedberg is professor of Russian Literature, Senior
University Scholar and head of the Department of Slavic
Languages at the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign. He
is the co-editor, most recently, of The Red Pencil, a study of
Soviet censorship. |
Viewing itself as the ultimate stage in society's orderly progression from tribalism--through slave-ownership, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism--communism is possessed of an acute sense of history. Hence, the communists view the French Revolution as an event that in many ways prefigured the success of the epoch-making Russian Revolution of November 1917. The French Revolution of 1789 (often referred to in Soviet sources as the Great French Bourgeois Revolution) is regarded as having dealt a mortal blow to feudalism, thus ushering in the era of capitalism. The next step, according to the Marxist blueprint, was capitalism's demise and the establishment of a socialist society free of the antagonistic classes of exploiters and the exploited. This society would, in turn, peacefully evolve into a classless society in which the state, ordinarily defined as a mechanism for the oppression of one class by another, would itself wither away.
Echoes of the French Revolution of 1789 immediately reverberated around the globe, and its impact continued to be felt even in distant lands ever since, including countries that ultimately turned communist. Thus, in China the message of the French Revolution had a strong impact on the ideology of Kuomintang, which Sun Yat-sen organized in 1912. Its program envisaged an independent Chinese republic based on principles of nationalism, democracy, and guaranteed livelihood. In neighboring Vietnam, where French influence was understandably stronger since the country's occupation by France in the mid-nineteenth century, French revolutionary teachings inspired, paradoxically, the nationalist resistance in its struggle against French colonialism. The Society for the Renewal of Vietnam organized in 1904 and strongly Japanese in its orientation, and its successor, Society for Vietnam Renaissance, established in 1912 by émigrés in China, aimed at the establishment of an independent democratic republic along French lines. The radical strain of the revolutionary French tradition was represented by Ho Chi Minh, later the founding head of communist Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh, incidentally, had the distinction of being one of the founders of the French Communist Party in December 1920.
Influences of the French Revolution appear more tenuous in Cuba prior to the communist takeover, though some may be detected in the poetry of Jose Marti, the leader of the 1895 revolt that established the country's independence. By contrast, the impact of the French Revolution on Poland was already apparent in that country's constitution of May 3, 1791, and in the fact that during Tadeusz Kosciuszko's 1794 insurrection (unsuccessful, as it turned out: The general who fought with great distinction in the American
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