The best history class I ever took was in high school, with Mrs. Lee, one of the many brilliant and somewhat underemployed women I was blessed to learn from early in life. She had us host a costume tea party where we played characters on the eve of World War I. (I was Isadora Duncan.) She cut into my teenage arrogance by giving me a D- on a test where I shrugged off Aquinas's proofs for the existence of God.
But my favorite memory of Mrs. Lee is from a day when we were talking about the French Revolution and this kid Geoff was saying this generic stuff about how Robespierre "went crazy" and "just started killing everyone." And Mrs. Lee, bless her, went off on him. You can't just say things like that she said. What was happening? What was the context? What was at stake? How is a revolution made and preserved? How many people did Lincoln execute to protect the union?
Many years later, my ten year old spent a lot of early pandemic listening to Mike Duncan's Revolution podcast and became a mini-Mrs. Lee, wondering why everyone talks about the terror but not the crimes of the monarchy and the counter-revolution.
This summer we were able to visit Paris, and at the top of his list were the visit to Napoleon's tomb and a walking tour about the French Revolution. The tour met at the statue of Danton. I've had statues on my mind since the summer of 2020, when Confederate statues fell across the country, so it was very striking how there aren't too many statues or markers for the revolutionaries. The kings, of course, are everywhere. The tour was mostly stuff like the cafes where the revolutionaries hung out, or little things you would need a tour guide to notice, like places where you could see "St" scratched off of street names. According to our guide, this was an official job in the revolutionary government. It reminded me of a radical walking tour you might go on in New York, visiting where Emma Goldman spoke, or the murals of Dorothy Day in the East Village - not a tour about those who, if ever so briefly, took the reins of state power.
There were only two other families on the tour, a couple from Austin and a middle aged tech guy from Seattle. When it came to the part about the terror, the tech guy got emotional. He said the terror kept him up at night, because he was a student of history, and he could feel it coming again. I found this fascinating - what in the many horrors on our landscape might lead one to see revolutionary virtue as our greatest threat?
The guide told us that if we visited Versailles, we’d find “closet royalists” there. I asked if he meant the tour guides, sensing a bit of professional rivalry, but he said no, he meant the townspeople. I’ll admit I hadn’t thought about Versailles as a town where people lived.
Versailles was a weird place to visit. It’s a hard place with little kids - big, spread out, lots of stairs, not a lot of modern bathrooms. The little fake farm Marie Antoinette escaped to so she could play peasant was too far for our tired band to make it. The tour guide was, in fact a bit of a royalist. Her main obsession was rococo. (She kept telling a joke about the German fondness for rococo that the Germans on the tour did find funny). She reminded me of older female professors I'd known as a student, whose strategy, conscious or otherwise, for making a place for themselves when male domination was absolute was to become antiquarians tending to fineries far from ideology. But the ideology is there of course - the guide told us that just by looking at Louis XVI's face on a bust, you could tell his problem was being "too nice."
The names of the donors on the wall seemed awfully royalist as well. Of course, these statues weren’t coming down anytime soon. I kept trying to think what the American parallel to this old magic box was - Graceland? The Neverland Ranch? And then, when the embarrassing question of the lack of desks and any discernible evidence that any business of state was being conducted there - I thought no - we’re in Trump Tower, a sad little world of big bad taste where overgrown children cosplay - Marie in her peasant garb, Ivanka as a “working woman.”
On the plane home, I watched Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. It lived up to its reputation as a fun candy fever dream that only a nepotism baby could have made, delighting in its ability to have no illusions about its subject matter, but unable not to love it just the same.
Back in the states, with backlash in the air, I tried hard to remember how heady the summer of 2020 felt for so many, how real the possible of some kind of transformation or reckoning felt. I remember that when I look at this photo of the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia.
In the summer of 2020 it was the last confederate statue on Monument Avenue. That summer it became a gathering place for activists, and Dustin Klein illuminated it with messages for BLM, and with images of Taylor and George Floyd along with historical figures and messages.
I still wonder if they'll ever take some of the Louis statues down, or what it would mean for that to even be a possibility. At the start of the masterpiece essay film about revolution, A Grin without a Cat, Chris Marker's narrator tells the story of a man beaten for not taking off his hat and bowing to the czar. He says, never forget, wherever revolutions go, however much they fail, that this is where they start: with the world where you are beaten for not taking off your hat. I wonder what it would mean, and what it would take for my tour mates to be more afraid of those who can (to take a random example from my inbox) use explosives to blow down your door with the full support of the law, than of the Dantons under their bed.
As for the Richmond statue, it did finally come down, to cheers from the crowd. The New York Times reported that a the company run by a Black contractor named Devon Henry had gotten the job and become something of a specialist in Confederate statue removal, because so few contractors across the South wanted the job.
Hi Lorraine! Thanks for your thoughtful comment. That's so interesting about your experience in Spain. I wonder a lot what memorials to struggle can and should look like. Once they become official, are they watered down? Luxemburg is an interesting model to point to. I've been thinking a lot about this in terms of what more progressive teaching especially for younger kids and teens looks like - a lot of emphasis on non-violent struggles and even civil disobedience, which is great as far as it goes, but at some point you have to learn the history of these bloodier and more complicated struggles and I feel like even progressive education often struggles with that - there's an implicit kind of moralism, to say that the Russians or the French "betrayed" the revolution which isn't necessary or wholly wrong but a real answer - if we can acknowledge that a the Civil War or WWII were at a certain historical juncture the last and least bad way to defeat slavery or fascism, it seems you have to be able to have those conversations about revolutions - it seems like for most leftists those conversations often take place in sectarian contexts which don't make for the best conversations. I'm not sure how relevant this is to where we are now, where we still (for now) have some democratic means to resist fascism, and are maybe mostly failing to do so, but I do find my mind go there where you have political violence on one side and the other side's answer is "vote more"
Thanks for the comment! Let's find a time to have coffee in the neighborhood soon.
Laura, I found this entry very interesting. I think you are asking the right questions about how to evaluate the "ethics of revolution." As your teacher said, without understanding context it is impossible to judge. Yet we come back to the old philosophical problem, does the end justify the means? This is why I am such a big fan of Rosa Luxemburg. She understood that every revolution involved some form of violence. The ruling class does not give up its power without a fight, but for her this is only a phase, the real revolution is the restructuring of social relations. She believed that premature revolulutions, such as the Russian Revolution would face horrendous problems because the majority of the working class including the peasantry had not yet reached a level of class consciousness that would lead to a democratically elected leadership making policy. Of course she supported the revolution, and admired Lenin and the Bolshevik's willingness to seize power. Yet in the final analysis without creating the conditions for socialist democracy, the leadership would become a dictatorship, with a reliance on fear and coercion to implement it policies. Finally, I was very much struck when I went to Spain how lacking in monuments, historical markers, and museums on the Spanish Civil War. I may have been in the wrong cities or places, but I did not see anything. I hope to go to Chile where there is a museum on the military right wing coup that overthrew Salvador Allende.