Enough Humble Pie

Enough now I say, for I have become full on humble pie.

I have tiptoed too long in the gentle field of make believe.

For this world is not, nor will it ever become what I want it to be.

I longed only for peace and love for our fellow man,

Yet all I see is the taking of bread from the children

And never once a sincere lending of a nurturing hand.

Overbearing greed, and the fulfillment of self need,

Is all, yes all that now I ever see.

So enough is enough, and I won’t take it anymore,

As this love and nurturing for all has become quite the chore.

For it is now this way that I am beginning to see,

That like unto the French Revolution is the sum of our need.

Aristocrats of that time not so long ago… of the best did they dine,

Whilst the peasants were left to starve and watch their children die.

So it is becoming once again…like it was back then.

However they have given themselves over to different names.

What was once King, or Nobleman, is now a Politician or CEO.

And their crimes now, were as then, the same.

Yet when push came to shove, and the masses backs were against the wall,

there came a rallying cry that soon caused the haughty and the mighty to fall.

So it is now, as it was back then.

Arise I say, arise…

take back your land and bring about their demise.

For we have taken all that can be

and we like the French peasants will soon be free.

J. Allen Wilson © three 2006

*Notes On The French Revolution*

In rhetoric and institution, the French Revolution was a liberal revolution, in which the liberty of the individual was proclaimed, private property was respected. Yet it should not be assumed that revolutionary practice directly followed revolutionary principle. The exigencies of the time--war, counterrevolution, factionalism within the various governments--combined to tempt the revolutionary leaders to shelve most of the ideals until peace and calm were restored.

The problem of war against France--England had joined Prussia and Austria in April of 1793--and the problem of provisioning the home population with sufficient staples--again the issue of "bread"--complicated government and allowed another social element to play an important role in the Revolution. This element was the multitude, variously called the "crowd," "the mob," or the "rabble." Thomas Carlyle, trying to paint a fiery-bright picture of the Revolution, described Paris in the second week of July 1789 as already a city in which "the streets are a living foam-sea.... Mad Paris is abandoned altogether to itself." From his mid-nineteenth-century perspective, Carlyle viewed the crowd as an uncontrolled mob, blood-thirsty and wild-eyed.  Far from wishing to be part of a "spontaneous anarchy," as a French contemporary of Carlyle's saw the situation, the Parisian crowds were set upon relieving the unsatisfactory living conditions they felt had resulted from a government both mismanaged and insensitive. This urban crowd was made up of the sans-culottes, the craftsmen, skilled and semi-skilled workers who wore no knee breeches (culottes ), hence who enjoyed few of the benefits of the wealthy and the aristocratic. They were interested in having their immediate grievances righted; high-flung ideological considerations were of no concern to them.

In a way, therefore, the revolutionary forces that disturbed France in the summer of 1789 were coincidental: the coming together at a particular time of people protesting their economic plight and people seeking fundamental governmental reform. As many critics have asserted, it was the weight of the urban crowds and the direction of the reform-minded bourgeoisie that gave the French Revolution its force. At no time was the importance of the sans-culottes more obvious than in the years 1792 and 1793, in that extended moment of transition from constitutional monarchy to republican government. According to the eminent French historian Albert Soboul, the sans-culottes were representative of popular democracy. They disdained the aristocrats and viewed with contempt the airs and manners of the rich and well-born. In a public display without precedent in Paris, they strolled the fashionable boulevards where before would have been seen only the knee-breechered gentleman with gold-headed walking stick and fair-headed companion in hand.

It was during the Reign of Terror, 1793-1794, that revolutionary tribunals meted out hasty justice. Opponents of the regime, revolutionaries themselves, fell beneath the blade of the guillotine. This was the awful period in which "the Revolution devoured its own." Some eleven thousand individuals died as enemies of the state, and their deaths added up to a new, horrendous activity of modern Western civilization: institutionalized violence, the harsh elimination of political opposition by the state. Later, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany would cause the figures of the French Revolution to seem small. Unfortunately, the mass age would also mean mass annihilation.

The Terror was spent by the summer of 1794, when reaction against it set in. The end was reached at the moment the individual most frequently identified with the harshness of revolutionary retribution, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794), was himself beheaded on July 28, 1794. It is important to note that Robespierre came closest to being the revolutionary "hero." A lawyer and one of the first declared republicans, Robespierre was a man of determination, anxious to see the Revolution realized according to his lights. Many say that Robespierre was Rousseau's translator, taking the philosopher's ideas on equality and civil government and making them public policy. Yet Robespierre's political behavior was far from democratic. Elected to the Committee of Public Safety in July 1793, he soon came to dominate that group, hence dominate the revolutionary government. He exhibited himself as a ruthless individual, incorruptible, dictatorial, impersonal, and determined to sweep away all who opposed the Revolution. He urged the war on against the monarchical powers of France, and he encouraged the Reign of Terror. He was feared and unloved. He was the image of the modern revolutionary whose profession and passion are political.

But for all this, Robespierre was not of the heroic dimensions of a George Washington or a V. I. Lenin. The French Revolution did not support such a person. It almost seemed as if individuals followed the Revolution, did not lead it. Some French historians of a romantic bent have insisted that the real hero of the revolutionary decade was the French people, a collectivity then acting with one mind, feeling with one heart.