Pablo Iglesias is right to evoke the guillotine and the French revolution

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/18/pablo-iglesias-guillotine-french-revolution

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Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Spanish leftists Podemos, is a man stalked by history. Or, more specifically, the history of the French revolution. Much has been made in the Spanish media about Iglesias’s fondness for guillotine imagery. In June 2012, Iglesias reacted to civil service cuts by tweeting: “Yes we need more cuts … But with the guillotine.” A year later, he published an article entitled A Guillotine on the Puerta Del Sol. The same year Iglesias asked in a TV interview: “Do you know which act symbolises the historic advent of democracy? It is when a king, Louis XVI, had his head chopped off by a guillotine.”

“How many horrors would the Spanish have spared themselves if they had relied on the tools of democratic justice,” he lamented, before quoting Robespierre. “To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is barbarity.” Not a week passes without reference to these statements in the Spanish media: only the other week, the founding editor of the centre-right daily El Mundo sarcastically dubbed Iglesias “The incorruptible senor X”, a reference to Robespierre’s nickname. Iglesias himself has made no effort to renounce these comparisons.

Inviting comparison to Robespierre, one of the most vilified political leaders in history, is a bold move for any politician. And yet, for Iglesias, it is also a wise move, as the way in which we understand the French revolution sheds much light on Europe’s current situation. 

Related: Pablo Iglesias: If the Greek olive branch is rejected, Europe may fall

The conventional view of the revolution evokes a boxer alone in the ring, punching himself to exhaustion. Had it remained under the control of the moderate liberals who initially dominated the national assembly, we are told, the revolution might have been a success: unfortunately they were overtaken by demagogues who raised the stakes of egalitarianism to win the support of the angry mob. This tale of violence unravels when Robespierre, having slaughtered his competitors, is himself engulfed by the anarchy he unleashed – for Iglesias’s critics, a timely reminder about the dangers of populism.

There is, however, an alternative story of the French revolution, no less timely: it reads like a case study of moderate liberals’ ineptitude in times of crisis. On the eve of the revolution, France was caught in a vicious circle of public debt. The monarchy was dependent on a clique of financiers and crushed the population with taxes in a vain effort to repay loans made at exorbitant interest rates. The foundations of the social compact collapsed. The moderate liberals who came into power in 1789 failed to understand what was expected of them and made four errors worth pondering.

The peasantry had unilaterally ceased paying feudal taxes. Rather than endorse their move, the first error of the moderate liberals was to drag their heels: on the night of 4 August it was decreed that peasants should buy themselves out of subjugation. In response, the peasantry rose in nationwide protests. The second error was the implementation of laissez-faire policies. They should have known better: in the 1760s and 1770s attempts at liberalising the grain trade had already led to rising prices and scarcity, triggering large-scale riots. Had laissez-faire policies cause the economic crisis? The question is academic. The key point lies elsewhere: under laissez-faire, scarcity is a blessing for producers, a curse on consumers and a scandal to the poor. When implemented again by the national assembly in 1790, the same policies had the same effects.

Faced with popular discontent, the moderates responded in authoritarian fashion – their third error. Heads on pikes being paraded through the streets may feature prominently in mainstream accounts of the revolution; in fact, 93% of the protests that took place in Paris were non-violent. Yet the government, holding the people collectively responsible for gruesome outbursts of cruelty, declared martial law and decreed that only the wealthy would be eligible for office.

Having thus polarised the country between haves and have-nots, the moderate liberals committed their fourth error. They attempted to unite people against a common foe, using the oldest trick in the book: war. From the beginning, Louis XVI had tried to end the revolution by calling upon foreign countries to invade his own. It was the moderates whose relentless warmongering granted the king his wish, eventually putting France in the most absurd situation: armies marching off to war under the command of a monarch whom everybody knew hoped for defeat.

After the people had petitioned the government to depose the king to no avail, they took matters into their own hands and overthrew the monarchy on 10 May 1792. The king was executed eight months later: ironically, had the moderates deposed the king themselves, he would certainly have lived. Soon after, the war escalated on a continental scale, paving the way for counter-revolutions in the Vendée and Enragés extremism in Paris. By the summer of 1793, the revolution had plunged into such turmoil that it is hard to see how any statesman, no matter how gifted, could have saved the situation. It was at this point, on 23 July, that Robespierre was voted by the convention to the committee of public safety.

Reviled by moderate liberals, Robespierre had made his name as a democrat and a humanitarian. In the early days of the revolution, he had demanded full citizenship for Jews, and the abolition of the death penalty and slavery. He demanded universal (male) suffrage, opposed martial law, and relentlessly campaigned against the war. Who knows what would have come of the revolution had his opinions prevailed from the start?

That France descended into chaos in 1793 is indisputable: it suffered all the horrors of civil and international war. It is not, however, its violence that grants the Terror its unique place in history, but its causes. Glossing over the moderate liberals’ appalling political errors, the standard account traces the Terror to Robespierre’s beliefs: thus emerges the idea that radical democracy, equality and incorruptibility breed violence. Yet these values might very well have opened the revolution’s narrow path to success, had they been upheld early enough.

Radical democrats might have led the revolution to success, but moderate liberals drove it to disaster. This account of the French revolution yields very different lessons to the mainstream version. It shines a worrying light on current European governments’ determination to implement liberal policies in the face of popular opposition, the tendency to shut down protesters by curtailing civil liberties, and the use of religious and racial tensions as a diversion from social criticism.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the French revolution, it is perhaps that in times of crisis, prudence does not call for complacency masquerading as moderation, but for radical measures and exacting virtue. The guillotine’s blade, falling on a regal neck on 21 January 1793, remains a powerful reminder that in the tension between order and justice, there is a breaking point. The Terror that ensued is a warning of the chaos that threatens to engulf all societies that go past this point. By placing the guillotine at the centre of current political debates, Pablo Iglesias aims to shatter the complacent illusion that the current crisis will be resolved by business as usual: to entertain this illusion is blindly to follow the path to violence. Keeping the guillotine in mind should help us prevent its return.