General Marxist consensus on Robespierre?

[Usui]

Just curious.

[Usui]

Anyone?

[The Douche]

Good dude, backed hard?

[Red Commissar]

I know Karl Marx himself was fascinated by the French Revolution- he had seen it as the conflict between feudalism and capitalism, where capitalism had finally triumphed, the bourgeoisie triumphing over the nobility.

Marx said this much at the Festival of nations.


...and a hundred other obvious superficialities already prove, without any more detailed investigation of the facts, how greatly democracy differed at that time from a mere political organisation. As it is it is well known that the Constitution of 1793 and the terror originated with the party which derived its support from the insurgent proletariat, that Robespierre’s overthrow signified the victory of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, that Babeuf’s conspiracy for equality revealed the final consequences of the democracy of ‘93 — insofar as these were at all possible at that time. The French Revolution was a social movement from beginning to end, and after it a purely political democracy became a complete absurdity.

Generally it seems he was acting out of populist angst, the sans-culottes who we could see as the proletariat, whose ideals ran contrary to the more enlightenment-influenced Republican ideals that the other revolutionaries had. Jacobins were by and large the most radical and left-wing of the group, and focused on egalitarian ideals in their interpretation of republicanism.

Though it could be argued that Robespierre was used to let the sans-culottes exhaust themselves, and once he fulfilled his role was disposed of.

Marx also made a parallel of the political situation in France at his time, to what it was in the revolutionary time. In it he compares Robespierre to Louis Blanc, a prominent French socialist who was focused on the downtrodden and underclass, ie proletariat.


Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.


I know you said a "general marxist consensus", but I can't speak for everyone else, so I'd might as well put what Marx felt about it. By and large he saw Robespierre and the Jacobins as acting out of the interests of the disposed and underclass, but fell to excess and ultimately removed by the bourgeoisie.

[Ismail]

The Bolsheviks apparently made a monument dedicated to him.

He was basically seen as signifying class dictatorship. He fought the counterrevolutionary feudal order in order to ensure bourgeois rule over France, and was disposed of when the feudal order was defeated and the radicalism he signified wore out its welcome.