French Revolution (Marxists Vs Revisionists)

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The French Revolution: Marxism versus revisionism A review of G Kates (ed), The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies (Routledge, 1997), £14.99 By Paul McGarr 'One's stance on the French Revolution inevitably reveals much about one's deepest ideological and political convictions'.1 Gary Kates' comment, in his introduction to this collection of essays on the 1789 French Revolution, is certainly correct-though his claim is true of other great revolutions too. Even as the French Revolution was being fought out 200 years ago it was the subject of fierce arguments, which were centrally about the protagonists' own views on contemporary politics. The English reactionary Edmund Burke first took up the cudgels in 1790 with his Reflections on the Revolution in France. In it he dammed the revolution and all its works. He attacked the whole notion of social change and reserved his worst venom for the 'swinish multitude'. Thomas Paine's famous The Rights of Man was written in reply to Burke and was enormously influential in the English radical and embryonic working class movements. But reaction then had the upper hand in England, and Paine had to flee to France to avoid arrest. Though the arguments today are conducted in a more subdued and academic manner, they remain as much about the politics of the participants as about the facts of the revolution. For much of this century the idea that the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, driven by class conflict, which swept away the political structures of feudalism and cleared the way for the development of capitalism, was generally accepted. Not all those who advocated this view considered themselves Marxists but their interpretations of the revolution drew heavily on Marxism. The Marxist approach began with the Second International leader Jean Jaures and was developed by people like Georges
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