Paul R. Hanson\u27s contribution to  The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions 

Hanson, Paul R,

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Butler UniversityDigital Commons @ Butler UniversityScholarship and Professional Work - LAS College of Liberal Arts & Sciences1998PartiesPaul R, HansonButler University, phanson@butler.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papersPart of the European History Commons, and the Political History CommonsThis Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Digital Commons @ Butler University. It hasbeen accepted for inclusion in Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Butler University. Formore information, please contact fgaede@butler.edu.Recommended CitationHanson, Paul R. "Parties," entry in Jack A. Goldstone, ed., The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions (Washington, D.C.,1998), pp.390-391. Available from digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers/499/390 • PARTIESTHE LEGACY OF THE COMMUNEThe Commune has been variously interpreted. Mostfamously, Karl Marx and his followers hailed it as the dawnof the age of proletarian revolution and the precursor of anew form of popular revolutionary government, the dicta-torship of the proletariat. They praised the courage of its"martyrs," and the song L'Internationale, written byCommune member Eugene Pottier, became a lasting revo-lutionary anthem. Marx and especiallyVladimir Ilyich Leninargued that the Commune's failure proved the need for lessdecency, more ruthlessness, and more disciplined leadershipin the future. The Soviet Union later claimed to have fulfilledthe Commune's aims: as a symbolic gesture, Lenin's body waswrapped in a red Feder€: flag. Later historians have brokenaway from the Marxist interpretation, stressing the specifical-ly French, republican, and Parisian nature of the Commune.It was, writes Jacques Rougerie, the end of an era, "dusk notdawn." Francois Furet concludes that "in this Paris in flames,the French Revolution bade farewell to history." However,some historians and sociologists, especially in America andBritain, have suggested that in certain other ways-as aspecifically urban revolution, for example, in which womenplayed such a prominent part-the Commune can be seenas dawn as well as dusk.See also European Revolutions of 1848; Marx, Karl, andFriedrich Engels.ROBERT TOMBSBIBLIOGRAPHYBarry, David. Women and Political Insurgency: France in the Mid-Nineteenth Celltury.New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.Furct, Prancois, Revolutionary France, 1770-1880. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.Gould, Roger V. Insurgen! Identities: Class, Comnllwity, and Protest itt Paris from1848 to the Comnume. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier. Histoire de la Commune de 1871. Paris: Dentu, 1896.Marx, Karl. n,e Civil Hlar ill Frallce. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1966.Rougerie,Jacques. Paris libre 1871. Paris: Scuil, 1971.Serrnan, William. LA Comnllme de Paris (1871). Paris: Fayard,1986.Tombs, Robert. The Paris Comnume 1871. New York: Longman, 1999.PARTIESA revolution is not a dinner party," wrote MaoZedong in 1927, yet at the time it was axiomaticthat a revolutionarv party was essential to the successof revolution. Six years earlier Mao had participated in thefounding of the Chinese Communist Party at a momentwhen the revolutionary movement was in disarray in Chinaand there were very few communists in the country. Justtwenty years later, in 1948, on the eve of Communist victo-ry in China, Mao would write, "If there is to be revolution,there must be a revolutionary party."THE JACOBINS: PROTOTYPE OF THEREVOLUTIONARY PARTYIt is one of the ironies of history that the prototype of therevolutionary party, the Jacobins of the French Revolution,did not think of themselves as a revolutionary party at all.Inspired as they were by the political writings of Jean-JacquesRousseau, the Jacobins viewed parties as "factions:' morelikely to fragment the "general will" than to assist in its for-mation. The Jacobin Club, founded in 1789 as the BretonClub, soon called itself the Society of Friends of theConstitution and functioned at first more as a reading anddebating society than as a political club. It came to be knownas the Jacobins because its members met in a hall of theJacobin monastic order. Most early members were commit-ted to the ideal of a constitutional monarchy and saw theclub as a vehicle for the enlightenment of the citizenry undersuch a system. Affiliated clubs soon formed in provincialFrench cities and towns. By March 1791, 426 clubs existed;four months later the number exceeded 900.By 1793 the Paris club, known as the "mother society;'stood at the center of an impressive national network, corre-sponding on a regular basis with clubs in virtually everytown and major village of France. The Paris club countedamong its members nearly every radical deputy in theNational Convention and functioned as a sort of shadowparliament. Important issues of the day were discussed first inthe Jacobin Club. The will of the club was then carried tothe National Convention and communicated to affiliatedclubs in the provinces. No true party discipline existed. Forexample, some provincial clubs disagreed with the Paris cluband broke their affiliation in the winter and spring of 1793.But there certainly was a revolutionary elan, and Jacobinsthought of themselves as a revolutionary elite. In the Year II,the year of the Terror, the Jacobin network functioned as aninformal arm of the Montagnard government, carrying outpolicies dictated from Paris. With the £.11 of MaximilienRobespierre in July 1794 the Jacobin clubs went intodecline, and in November the government ordered themclosed. Thus, the ascendancy of the Jacobin Club was coter-minous with the radical phase of the French Revolution, andthe ideals of the Revolution, as well as its excesses, came tobe explicitly associated with Jacobinism.The collapse of the Napoleonic empire in 1814 left theideals of the French Revolution still flickering in Europe,particularly in those regions in which Napoleon's armies hadawakened nationalist aspirations. In Italy and other parts ofsouthern Europe, a secret society known as the Carbonarikept the Jacobin tradition alive. Among the Carbonaris lead-ers was Filippo Michele Buonarroti, who had been a mem-ber of the Jacobin Club in the 1790s. Buonarrotis writingsinspired August Blanqui, a Frenchman who remained com-mitted throughout the nineteenth century to the idea that adedicated group of revolutionary conspirators, championingthe ideals of social and political equality, could seize controlof the state by launching a successful coup. Blanqui attempt-ed many such coups, all failures, for which he spent manyyears in prison. His heroic failures served both to sustain therevolutionary tradition in Europe and to convince thosewho followed that an organized party was necessary.THE ROAD TO THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTIONMost of the revolutionary upheavals that occurred in Europein the nineteenth century were led by underground parties,and nearly all of them were unsuccessful. Most notable wasthe wave of revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848. Inthat same year, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publishedThe Communist Manifesto, which offered both a theory ofrevolution and a call for the creation of a communist partyto lead a proletarian revolution against bourgeois, capitalistsociety. Marx himself played a leading role in the FirstWorkingman's International, founded in 1864, the first effortto create such a party. But revolutions remained essentiallynational, not international, affairs, and the failure of the ParisCommune in 1871 seemed to provide conclusive evidencethat a proletarian revolution could not succeed without adisciplined revolutionary party in the lead.That lesson was most cogently applied by Vladimir IlyichLenin, the founder and leader of the Russian Bolsheviks, ini-tially rivals to the Mensheviks within the Social DemocraticParty. Lenin argued that a successful revolutionary party mustbase its policies and actions on revolutionary theory, must beled by a narrow elite of disciplined and committed activistswho were linked to the masses, and must be prepared to over-throw the existing political order by violent means. Althoughleadership was to be centralized, decisions were to be collec-tive, a practice described as "democratic centralism." TheMensheviks favored a broader-based party and were open tothe possibility of gaining power through parliamentary elec-tions. It was Lenin and the Bolsheviks who prevailed, howev-er, seizing power in October 1917 by violent revolution.Lenin and the Bolsheviks exported their blueprint forrevolution, to be led by a disciplined, tightly organized party,through the creation of the Communist International(Comintern) in 1919. Communist parties sprang upthroughout western Europe, but the most dramatic develop-ments occurred in China, where in 1905 Sun Yat-sen hadfounded a loosely structured party known as the Revolu-PAHTIES • 391tionary Alliance. Comintern advisers urged Sun, and laterChiang Kai-shek, to form a more disciplined party, whichbecame the Kuomintang. Thereafter, China's revolutionaryhistory was a struggle between the Kuomintang, a national-ist party, and the Chinese Communist Party, led by MaoZedong. Mao built on Lenin's ideas but insisted that thedynamic force in a Chinese revolution would be the peas-antry, not the proletariat. Mao introduced the concept of the"mass line," by which party cadres would draw upon andcultivate the revolutionary potential of the peasantry.Most revolutions in the twentieth century have followedthe Russian or Chinese model, with a revolutionary partytaking the lead. Examples are the Institutional RevolutionaryParty (PRI), which still dominates Mexican politics; theNational Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria; the Sandinistas(FSLN) in Nicaragua; and the Parabundo Marti NationalLiberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. Some revolutions,however, have not been led by a tightly organized party. TheIranian Revolution of 1979 was led by Islamic clerics, andorganized parties played little role in the wave of revolutionsin Eastern Europe in 1989. Solidarity, in Poland, for exam-ple, could more properly be described as a social movementthan as a revolutionary party.Just as the increased repressive power of the modern stateonce made a disciplined, revolutionary party essential to asuccessful revolution, the advent of the computer age mayrender the idea of a revolutionary party obsolete, given thecapacity of computer networks to disseminate informationaround the world almost instantaneously and therefore togenerate and sustain social movements with revolutionarypotential.See also Bl101111rroti,Filippo Michele; Chinese CommunistRevolution (1921-1949); European Revolutions of 1820;European Revolutions if 1848; French Revolution (1789-1815);Italian Risorgimento (1789-1870); Lenin, Vladimir llyich; Marx,Karl, and Friedrich Engels; Paris Connuune (1871); RussianRevolution of 1917.PAUL R. HANSONBIBLIOGRAPHYGoldstone.jack A., cd. Revolutionsr'lhcorctical, Comparative, Illid HistoriCtlI Studies.New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.Gross, Feliks. 771e Revolllti",,,,ry Ptlrty: Essays ill the Sociology of Politics. Westport,Conn.: Greenwood, 1974.Kennedy, Michael L. The jacobill Clubs ill the French R''lJollitioll. 2 vols. PrincetonNJ: Princeton University Press, 1982 and 1988. 'Lenin.V 1. State and Revolution. New York: International Publishers, 1943.Mao Zedong, Selected Horks. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975.Mason, David S. Revolution and'Iiansition ill East-Central Europe. Boulder, Colo.:Westview Press, 1996.Rabinowitch, Alexander. 77,e Bolsheviks COllie to I'OIl"'T. New York: Norton,1976.Schwartz, Benjamin 1. Chinese C,mlll/lll1islII and the Rise of Mao. New York:Harper and Row, 1951.

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