Certainly, too many progressives today seem to prefer the elite: they have abandoned the idea that people who are poor, or even those who do ordinary jobs or who have not been to university, have ideas and experience of their own, and an equal right to a political voice.
While, of course, criticising them for not being left wing enough.
What is the ideology of the bourgeoisie?
Genuine question – i’m genuinely curious if the bourgeoisie have an ideology, and what that ideology may be. If it indeed imposes ‘mental chains of a subservience’ (subservience to whom?), it sounds like a fairly powerful and pervasive ideology, yet i cannot identify it as any of the known ideologies.
Last edited 3 years ago by Allons Enfants
Allons Enfants
3 years ago
I like this take by Jacques Rougerie:
the Commune was not the first of a new kind of revolution […] Not an industrial proletariat, but skilled workers in traditional industries (engravers, joiners, cobblers), small businessmen, shopkeepers, clerks. Not looking forwards to Communism, but backwards to self-managed workers’ cooperatives
The bourgeoisie in short; the backbone of society. Skilful tradesmen perfecting their trades, innovating, was the driving force of ‘European civilisation’ as we know it, since prehistory. Persecuted by the marxist left as “enemies of the proletariat” and screwed out of their livelihood by the neoliberal / globalist profiteering “ruling elites” outsourcing pretty much every manufacturing industry to China and suchlike.
The ‘petite bourgeoisie’ would probably be a more precise title. That sneering, dismissive phrase still in circulation from our betters. The sort of person who loves their country, believes in home ownership, runs a small business, accepts tax is necessary for the apparatus of the state to function but doesn’t like being overtaxed, aspires to driving a nice car and washes it on a Sunday. Heavens above maybe even drives a Transit van and enjoys football, is proud to live in suburbia, …….. in other words those who actually make, manufacture, sell, fix and do things, and are continually mocked and reviled by a cynical media, academia and the political classes.
Yes, ‘petite bourgeoisie’ is a much better term, thanks for that. All as you said, “those who actually make, manufacture, sell, fix and do things”. And in the process invent things, methods, techniques – sometimes big, sometimes small and subtle. They used to form guilds, went from apprenticeship to masterhood (often with a “gap year” or two of travelling involved for the apprentice to learn the trade abroad too). Many (if not all) of nowadays’ “big luxury shots” started out like that: the Thierry Hermès of Hermès, the Trudons of Cire Trudon (dating back to 1643, they supplied Marie Tussaud with wax during the revolutionary beheadings), the tea merchants Mariage & Frères, just to stick with Paris. What’s common with them and the car mechanic or carpenter next door is the love, devotion, curiosity and pride in their trade.
I believe that journeyman came between apprentice and master, at least in most guilds. Allons Enfants, can you or anyone else here tell us more about these “self-managed workers’ cooperatives”? I for one don’t know anything about those if one means as a common institution long before the Paris Commune. Well, unless the reference is to the medieval guilds. But those were not exactly a showcase of democracy as I understand it, as the masters seemed to have ruled over the journeymen and apprentices. Anyone care to enlighten me certainly and perhaps others?
The trouble with the petit bourgeois is that their allegiance is to the capitalist status quo and its big bourgeois ruling class. They are not simply dismissed, but considered therefrom an objective enemy of the revolution.
They are, in the original meaning – which is “burgher”, i.e. townpeople doing townpeopleish things for a living. Cobbling, trading, banking, smithing, that sort of thing.
True enough, but etymologies and original meanings aren’t always very helpful! I agree with Steve Wesley that petty bourgoisie would be a better term here.
Tombs should have made clear the French Rev had many factions, from the bourgeois Jacobins to the nihilist Hebertiste. In between was The Conspiracy of Equals led by Gracchus Babeuf and considered a seminal form of Communism.
Jeff Mason
3 years ago
The first Paris Commune of the early 1790’s is much more of a cautionary tale. When the monarchy was abolished and the Assembly adjourned, the Commune filled the power void and radicals like Danton, Marat and Robespierre became the de facto leaders, not just of Paris, but the entire country. The results was the September Massacres in which thousands were slaughtered in the most gruesome and barbaric ways. It wasn’t the Royalists who were to primary victims but non-juring priests, nuns, inmates of insane asylums, and petty criminals. This then grew into the Terror in which a person could be denounced as traitor in the morning and guillotined in the afternoon. The Terror is the extreme version of ‘mob rule’ but it always starts as ‘the will of the people.’ That ‘will’ is legitimate but only within a firm framework of the rule of law. We are seeing a mild version of it today with ‘cancel culture’ where people are deprived of their employment, their friends and their social standing in response to accusations of evil behavior which is usually holding opinions contrary to those of the accuser. This is why we should actively fight against ‘cancel culture.’ All the ‘social justice’ nonsense and ‘critical race theory’ where all whites are racist simply because they are white is reminiscent of the Terror where people were accused of ‘counter revolutionary’ thoughts simply because they were not sans-culottes or had once supported the monarchy, or the Girondists, or any other group that the radicals hated that week. Let’s not go there again.
This then grew into the Terror in which a person could be denounced as traitor in the morning and guillotined in the afternoon. The Terror is the extreme version of ‘mob rule’ but it always starts as ‘the will of the people.’
We had a brief “taster menu” of that in Hungary in 1919: the “red terror”, lasting 133 days; the ‘revolutionary’ terror groups executing whoever they could land their hands on. (And only 26 years later it became the main course for almost half a century… Never again.)
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
WWG1WGA, as it were. Just look at the great ‘Selfi Revolution’ of 2021 where the Redneck Populists took Congress, took selfies, walked about within the rope paths set for tourists, did no actual harm, and left, and were then to be hounded by the raging, and vengeful Government thugs and if the Gov. in office can, will be martyred for it.
Yes, I think we all understand the Commune of Paris a bit.
‘Did no actual harm’. Interesting when 5 (?) died, dozens were assaulted, and doors and furniture smashed. ‘…walked about within the rope paths set for tourists’ – apart from the ones lounging in offices and climbing all over the chambers etc. What actual planet are you on dude?
Weren’t four of those five who died Trump protesters and hasn’t the alleged assault with a fire extinguisher on the officer who died been called into question and isn’t the autopsy into the actual cause of his death still highly unusually yet to be published so many months after the event?
I also believe that Judicial Watch has applied to a court for the release of the autopsy report into Officer Sicknick’s death after repeated FOI requests from it were denied.
So 5 died. The first was a unarmed protester/rioter shot by a nervous Capital policeman, the second was a women protester trampled as police forced people out. Two police officers seem to have committed suicide for unknown reasons. One police officer (Sicknick) died at home, perhaps because of the riot, but seemed to have a fatal stoke. There was some incidental property damage but no fires. There were a lot of police and protesters injured in the melee.
Compared to recent protest activity, the Capital activity was mild. None compare to the Paris discussion.
The Question is. Will Ms. Babbitt shot by that panicky ‘excuse’ for a Policeman, be in line for a $27 million handout like than late criminal George Floyd?
the ones lounging in offices and climbing all over the chambers
There’s no harm in either activity. Out of curiosity, what’s your take on last year’s massive BLM looting / burning / destruction spree? Good many more got killed / maimed / hospitalised, and that’s not even counting the immense damage to property & environment.
They dared to sit in the evil Pelosi’s chair and steal her sacred gavel. Of course had it been Antifa/BLM they would have burnt the place to the ground.
Only it wasn’t. In fact, if you gather a mob of any ideological flavor, the results are going to be similar. The Paris Commune at least exhibited some self-organization and self-discipline.
Drahcir Nevarc
3 years ago
“Rougerie was brutally attacked by the Communist Party for his suggestion that the Communards were the descendants of the sans-culottes of the 1790s.” That’s peculiar, because I’ve always seen the sans-culottes of the 1790’s as the forerunners of the Communists of the 20th century, given their shared penchant for terror, torture, and mass murder.
Charles Stanhope
3 years ago
As Paris goes into Lockdown yet again perhaps it is now the time to ‘try again’, before it is too late?
Terence Fitch
3 years ago
I recommend a read of Zola’s ‘The Debacle’. Tremendous account of the war and the commune and how the pretensions and past glories of a country can come crumbling down very quickly. Incredible that 40ish yrs later in the mass slaughter of the Battle of the Frontiers in 1914 and the retreat the French showed flexibility and immense resilience when in 1871 they were brittle.
The only explanation for 1940 is considerable infiltration by Nazis, other fascists, and the fascistic Soviet-oriented Communist Party, none of whom wanted France as it was (somewhat democratic and egalitarian) to survive. I don’t know what the reasons for 1871 might be, although Nap III seems to have been pretty goofy.
Steve Gwynne
3 years ago
I’m sure like anarchists, the Communards would have soon been faced with the difficulty of how to deal with non-Communards.
Peter Scott
3 years ago
As always from Professor Tombs, a piece both very interestingly, usefully informative and seminally suggestive.
The world economy is going to collapse, completely. (Reason no. 1. It is $600 trillions in debt – yes, there is a ‘t’ there, in the denomination of the sum. There are other vast interlocking reasons.)
When that happens, do you think people will mostly turn to Far-Left Socialism, like the Latin Americans who never seem to learn anything from being promised solutions and then being entirely betrayed by Marxian kleptocrat demagogues?
Or will most populaces, as Prof. Tombs here hints, turn against both Left and Right and give the order of the boot to the elites who have mismanaged everything (in their own interests) for so long?
The Tribunes of the Plebs will ultimately triumph.
Vae Victis.
Howard Medwell
3 years ago
I found this piece surprisingly moving, although I should imagine I am on the opposite wing of politics to Professor Tombs. The only bit I would disagree with is his insistence that the skilled craftsmen who he rightly says were a key social group in the Commune, were somehow opposed to the “grey moustached proletariat” of Socialist Realist mythology.
There wasn’t much of a grey moustached proletariat in Paris in 1871 – the great majority of people worked in small workshops and other mini-workplaces – I think I read somewhere that the average ratio of “workers to bosses” was about 2:1!
Apart from people like the railway workers, who I believe also played an important role in the Commune, there must have been a huge number of ordinary Parisians who worked in what we call the “gig economy”.
Two questions present themselves: firstly night it not be possible for a left-wing ideology, not exactly that of 20th century working-class movements, to appeal to such people; secondly, can you think of a present-day country in which this state of affairs pertains?
robert scheetz
3 years ago
I like this essay, though Prof. Tombs sympathy seems to resonate with petit bourgeois idealism.
LCarey Rowland
3 years ago
Based on your description here, Professor Tombs, it seems as if the Paris Communard was the only uprising in which Left and Right collaborated.
One wonders if such an event could even happen nowadays. . . perhaps in . . . Myanmar?
Certainly not in this West that we now inhabit. The distance now between Populist and Libertine motivations is as wide as the English Channel.
Chauncey Gardiner
3 years ago
I appreciate this essay.
Many thanks.
tomiller2011
3 years ago
Very interesting and useful. Your description of the spirit of the Commundards reminds me of that of many who were on the ‘red’ side before and during the Spanish Civil War, and why their memory still weighs so much in domestic Spanish politics. If channelled by able leaders -rather than being exploited by left-wing authoritarians and their fellow-travellers for their own purposes as usually happens- the democratic spirit of the people can do wonders.
Once serious violence is employed, social organization reverts to the most efficient form of violence, militarism, by a process of elimination and evolution. You could possibly defend a democracy or other egalitarian arrangement militarily, but the tendency will be toward authoritarianism, regardless whether the rhetoric is of the Left or the Right, as we observe in the Commune, the Russian revolution(s), China, and so on, as well as the more openly authoritarian regimes of unfortunately recent memory.
Jurek Molnar
3 years ago
That was a great piece. Thanks a lot.
Charles Stanhope
3 years ago
“By the standards of humanity as a whole, England over the centuries has been among the richest, safest and best governed places on earth, as periodical influxes of people testify. Its living standards in the 14th century were higher than much of the world in the 20th… We who have lived in England since 1945 have been among the luckiest people in the existence of Homo sapiens, rich, peaceful and healthy.”
Thus wrote Professor Tombs seven years ago.
This present article is to be similarly applauded. Than you.
Charles Stanhope
3 years ago
..
Last edited 3 years ago by Charles Stanhope
aahkendall
3 years ago
Wonderful piece, thank you Professor Tombs, a delicious mix of socio-political, historical and philosophical commentary to feed the mind.
Very interesting piece.
While, of course, criticising them for not being left wing enough.
Criticizing their “false consciousness” in the way of liberating them from the mental chains of a subservience imposed by bourgeois ideology.
What is the ideology of the bourgeoisie?
Genuine question – i’m genuinely curious if the bourgeoisie have an ideology, and what that ideology may be. If it indeed imposes ‘mental chains of a subservience’ (subservience to whom?), it sounds like a fairly powerful and pervasive ideology, yet i cannot identify it as any of the known ideologies.
I like this take by Jacques Rougerie:
The bourgeoisie in short; the backbone of society. Skilful tradesmen perfecting their trades, innovating, was the driving force of ‘European civilisation’ as we know it, since prehistory. Persecuted by the marxist left as “enemies of the proletariat” and screwed out of their livelihood by the neoliberal / globalist profiteering “ruling elites” outsourcing pretty much every manufacturing industry to China and suchlike.
I’m not sure engravers, joiners, cobblers, small businessmen, shopkeepers, and clerks are what is usually meant by the bourgeoisie!
The ‘petite bourgeoisie’ would probably be a more precise title. That sneering, dismissive phrase still in circulation from our betters. The sort of person who loves their country, believes in home ownership, runs a small business, accepts tax is necessary for the apparatus of the state to function but doesn’t like being overtaxed, aspires to driving a nice car and washes it on a Sunday. Heavens above maybe even drives a Transit van and enjoys football, is proud to live in suburbia, …….. in other words those who actually make, manufacture, sell, fix and do things, and are continually mocked and reviled by a cynical media, academia and the political classes.
Yes, ‘petite bourgeoisie’ is a much better term, thanks for that. All as you said, “those who actually make, manufacture, sell, fix and do things”. And in the process invent things, methods, techniques – sometimes big, sometimes small and subtle. They used to form guilds, went from apprenticeship to masterhood (often with a “gap year” or two of travelling involved for the apprentice to learn the trade abroad too).
Many (if not all) of nowadays’ “big luxury shots” started out like that: the Thierry Hermès of Hermès, the Trudons of Cire Trudon (dating back to 1643, they supplied Marie Tussaud with wax during the revolutionary beheadings), the tea merchants Mariage & Frères, just to stick with Paris. What’s common with them and the car mechanic or carpenter next door is the love, devotion, curiosity and pride in their trade.
I believe that journeyman came between apprentice and master, at least in most guilds. Allons Enfants, can you or anyone else here tell us more about these “self-managed workers’ cooperatives”? I for one don’t know anything about those if one means as a common institution long before the Paris Commune. Well, unless the reference is to the medieval guilds. But those were not exactly a showcase of democracy as I understand it, as the masters seemed to have ruled over the journeymen and apprentices. Anyone care to enlighten me certainly and perhaps others?
I don’t know – i took it as a reference to guilds, can’t think of any other institutions.
The trouble with the petit bourgeois is that their allegiance is to the capitalist status quo and its big bourgeois ruling class. They are not simply dismissed, but considered therefrom an objective enemy of the revolution.
They are, in the original meaning – which is “burgher”, i.e. townpeople doing townpeopleish things for a living. Cobbling, trading, banking, smithing, that sort of thing.
True enough, but etymologies and original meanings aren’t always very helpful! I agree with Steve Wesley that petty bourgoisie would be a better term here.
Tombs should have made clear the French Rev had many factions, from the bourgeois Jacobins to the nihilist Hebertiste. In between was The Conspiracy of Equals led by Gracchus Babeuf and considered a seminal form of Communism.
The first Paris Commune of the early 1790’s is much more of a cautionary tale. When the monarchy was abolished and the Assembly adjourned, the Commune filled the power void and radicals like Danton, Marat and Robespierre became the de facto leaders, not just of Paris, but the entire country. The results was the September Massacres in which thousands were slaughtered in the most gruesome and barbaric ways. It wasn’t the Royalists who were to primary victims but non-juring priests, nuns, inmates of insane asylums, and petty criminals. This then grew into the Terror in which a person could be denounced as traitor in the morning and guillotined in the afternoon. The Terror is the extreme version of ‘mob rule’ but it always starts as ‘the will of the people.’ That ‘will’ is legitimate but only within a firm framework of the rule of law. We are seeing a mild version of it today with ‘cancel culture’ where people are deprived of their employment, their friends and their social standing in response to accusations of evil behavior which is usually holding opinions contrary to those of the accuser. This is why we should actively fight against ‘cancel culture.’ All the ‘social justice’ nonsense and ‘critical race theory’ where all whites are racist simply because they are white is reminiscent of the Terror where people were accused of ‘counter revolutionary’ thoughts simply because they were not sans-culottes or had once supported the monarchy, or the Girondists, or any other group that the radicals hated that week. Let’s not go there again.
We had a brief “taster menu” of that in Hungary in 1919: the “red terror”, lasting 133 days; the ‘revolutionary’ terror groups executing whoever they could land their hands on. (And only 26 years later it became the main course for almost half a century… Never again.)
WWG1WGA, as it were. Just look at the great ‘Selfi Revolution’ of 2021 where the Redneck Populists took Congress, took selfies, walked about within the rope paths set for tourists, did no actual harm, and left, and were then to be hounded by the raging, and vengeful Government thugs and if the Gov. in office can, will be martyred for it.
Yes, I think we all understand the Commune of Paris a bit.
‘Did no actual harm’. Interesting when 5 (?) died, dozens were assaulted, and doors and furniture smashed. ‘…walked about within the rope paths set for tourists’ – apart from the ones lounging in offices and climbing all over the chambers etc. What actual planet are you on dude?
Weren’t four of those five who died Trump protesters and hasn’t the alleged assault with a fire extinguisher on the officer who died been called into question and isn’t the autopsy into the actual cause of his death still highly unusually yet to be published so many months after the event?
I also believe that Judicial Watch has applied to a court for the release of the autopsy report into Officer Sicknick’s death after repeated FOI requests from it were denied.
And Enrique Torria, a leader of the Proud Boys who urged them onto the Capital, turned out to be an FBI informer.
Typical!
I think the fire extinguisher thing has been more or less abandoned.
Really so the score is 5-0?
Some Coup d’Etat!!!
So 5 died. The first was a unarmed protester/rioter shot by a nervous Capital policeman, the second was a women protester trampled as police forced people out. Two police officers seem to have committed suicide for unknown reasons. One police officer (Sicknick) died at home, perhaps because of the riot, but seemed to have a fatal stoke. There was some incidental property damage but no fires. There were a lot of police and protesters injured in the melee.
Compared to recent protest activity, the Capital activity was mild. None compare to the Paris discussion.
The Question is. Will Ms. Babbitt shot by that panicky ‘excuse’ for a Policeman, be in line for a $27 million handout like than late criminal George Floyd?
There’s no harm in either activity.
Out of curiosity, what’s your take on last year’s massive BLM looting / burning / destruction spree? Good many more got killed / maimed / hospitalised, and that’s not even counting the immense damage to property & environment.
They dared to sit in the evil Pelosi’s chair and steal her sacred gavel. Of course had it been Antifa/BLM they would have burnt the place to the ground.
Only it wasn’t. In fact, if you gather a mob of any ideological flavor, the results are going to be similar. The Paris Commune at least exhibited some self-organization and self-discipline.
“Rougerie was brutally attacked by the Communist Party for his suggestion that the Communards were the descendants of the sans-culottes of the 1790s.”
That’s peculiar, because I’ve always seen the sans-culottes of the 1790’s as the forerunners of the Communists of the 20th century, given their shared penchant for terror, torture, and mass murder.
As Paris goes into Lockdown yet again perhaps it is now the time to ‘try again’, before it is too late?
I recommend a read of Zola’s ‘The Debacle’. Tremendous account of the war and the commune and how the pretensions and past glories of a country can come crumbling down very quickly. Incredible that 40ish yrs later in the mass slaughter of the Battle of the Frontiers in 1914 and the retreat the French showed flexibility and immense resilience when in 1871 they were brittle.
And fatally “brittle” again in June, 1940.
The only explanation for 1940 is considerable infiltration by Nazis, other fascists, and the fascistic Soviet-oriented Communist Party, none of whom wanted France as it was (somewhat democratic and egalitarian) to survive. I don’t know what the reasons for 1871 might be, although Nap III seems to have been pretty goofy.
I’m sure like anarchists, the Communards would have soon been faced with the difficulty of how to deal with non-Communards.
As always from Professor Tombs, a piece both very interestingly, usefully informative and seminally suggestive.
The world economy is going to collapse, completely. (Reason no. 1. It is $600 trillions in debt – yes, there is a ‘t’ there, in the denomination of the sum. There are other vast interlocking reasons.)
When that happens, do you think people will mostly turn to Far-Left Socialism, like the Latin Americans who never seem to learn anything from being promised solutions and then being entirely betrayed by Marxian kleptocrat demagogues?
Or will most populaces, as Prof. Tombs here hints, turn against both Left and Right and give the order of the boot to the elites who have mismanaged everything (in their own interests) for so long?
The Tribunes of the Plebs will ultimately triumph.
Vae Victis.
I found this piece surprisingly moving, although I should imagine I am on the opposite wing of politics to Professor Tombs. The only bit I would disagree with is his insistence that the skilled craftsmen who he rightly says were a key social group in the Commune, were somehow opposed to the “grey moustached proletariat” of Socialist Realist mythology.
There wasn’t much of a grey moustached proletariat in Paris in 1871 – the great majority of people worked in small workshops and other mini-workplaces – I think I read somewhere that the average ratio of “workers to bosses” was about 2:1!
Apart from people like the railway workers, who I believe also played an important role in the Commune, there must have been a huge number of ordinary Parisians who worked in what we call the “gig economy”.
Two questions present themselves: firstly night it not be possible for a left-wing ideology, not exactly that of 20th century working-class movements, to appeal to such people; secondly, can you think of a present-day country in which this state of affairs pertains?
I like this essay, though Prof. Tombs sympathy seems to resonate with petit bourgeois idealism.
Based on your description here, Professor Tombs, it seems as if the Paris Communard was the only uprising in which Left and Right collaborated.
One wonders if such an event could even happen nowadays. . . perhaps in . . . Myanmar?
Certainly not in this West that we now inhabit. The distance now between Populist and Libertine motivations is as wide as the English Channel.
I appreciate this essay.
Many thanks.
Very interesting and useful. Your description of the spirit of the Commundards reminds me of that of many who were on the ‘red’ side before and during the Spanish Civil War, and why their memory still weighs so much in domestic Spanish politics. If channelled by able leaders -rather than being exploited by left-wing authoritarians and their fellow-travellers for their own purposes as usually happens- the democratic spirit of the people can do wonders.
Once serious violence is employed, social organization reverts to the most efficient form of violence, militarism, by a process of elimination and evolution. You could possibly defend a democracy or other egalitarian arrangement militarily, but the tendency will be toward authoritarianism, regardless whether the rhetoric is of the Left or the Right, as we observe in the Commune, the Russian revolution(s), China, and so on, as well as the more openly authoritarian regimes of unfortunately recent memory.
That was a great piece. Thanks a lot.
“By the standards of humanity as a whole, England over the centuries has been among the richest, safest and best governed places on earth, as periodical influxes of people testify. Its living standards in the 14th century were higher than much of the world in the 20th… We who have lived in England since 1945 have been among the luckiest people in the existence of Homo sapiens, rich, peaceful and healthy.”
Thus wrote Professor Tombs seven years ago.
This present article is to be similarly applauded. Than you.
..
Wonderful piece, thank you Professor Tombs, a delicious mix of socio-political, historical and philosophical commentary to feed the mind.