Sull’interpretazione di Marx ed Engels della Rivoluzione francese

“The term permanent revolution first appears in Marx’s writings in ‘The Jewish Question’, written in late 1843. Marx acquaints his readers with an aggressive but weak Jacobin state that takes recourse to ‘the ‘guillotine”, while all the time ‘declaring the revolution to be ‘permanent” (23). In ‘The Holy Family’, written in 1844, Marx and Engels once again associated ‘the ‘permanent revolution’ with Robespierre’s ‘revolutionary terrorism’ (24). In January 1849 Engels openly congratulated the Hungarian revolutionary leader Kossuth for following the example of 1793 and establishing a ‘terreur rouge’ and a ‘revolution in permanence’ (25). In these case permanent revolution did not refer to the rapid bourgeois-proletarian sequence discussed above but to the progressive radicalization of the French Revolution that had ended in the Terror (26). However, the two uses of the term would remain mutually consistent, should we assume that Marx and Engels interpreted the radical, terrorist stage of the French Revolution as its proletarian stage. This in not something most students of Marx and Engels would easily agree to. It is acknowledged in the literature that Marx and his friend attributed an important role to the urban plebeian element, of whom the Jacobins had in some way been representative, and that they had on occasion, indeed, suggested that the Jacobin dictatorship represented a form of proletarian rule. But the consensus remains that in Marx and Engels’ eyes the French Revolution represented a bourgeois phenomenon (27). To my knowledge only Daniel Guérin suggested in 1946 that Marx conceptualized the French Revolution as a sequence of a bourgeois and an ‘embryonic’ proletarian stage (28). This is the interpretation that I hope to restore. My aim is neither to establish whether Marx and Engels’ interpretation of the French Revolution was historically accurate, nor to contribute to the debate among historians about the concept of ‘bourgeois revolution’. My aim is merely to establish what Marx and Engels’ interpretation of the French Revolution was. For Marx and Engels Robespierre did not qualify as a proletarian political leader. Whereas they on occasion referred to Gracchus Babeuf as a communist ideologue, they would never have honoured Robespierre in that way (29)” (pag 547-548-549) [Erik Van Ree, ‘Marxism as Permanent Revolution’, (in) ‘HPT, History of Political Thought’, London, n. 3 autumn 2013]