The French Revolution was a unique phenomenon in world history, the first revolution facing the future - "we are ours, we will build a new world."

Caricature by Thomas Rowlandson after a design by Lord George Murray: The Contrast 1792 / Which Is Best, showing a contrast of "British Liberty" vs. French Liberty. Overall question, "Which is the best?". Published on behalf of the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, 1792. Hand-coloured etching. British Museum, London. Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827). via

On Left: Britannia with a lion at her feet, holding "Magna Carta" and a pole with a liberty (Phrygian) cap on it (instead of the usual trident), to emphasize British liberty under law. A lion is at her feet, and a ship sails off in the background.

Inscription: "Religion, Morality, Loyalty, Obedience to the Laws, Independence, Personal Security, Justice, Inheritance, Protection, Property, Industry, National Prosperity, HAPPINESS."

On Right: Scrawny ill-clad personification of France with Medusa snakes instead of hair, treading on beheaded corpse with man hanged from lantern-post in background.

Inscription: "Atheism, Perjury, Rebellion, Treason, Anarchy, Murder, Equality, Madness, Cruelty, Injustice, Treachery, Ingratitude, Idleness, Famine, National & Private Ruin, MISERY"

For the October Revolution, the French was completely officially recognized as a prototype revolution - this is in official speeches.

Historian Dmitry Bovykin at PostNauka:

What happened in France more than 200 years ago became a prototype for what happened in completely different conditions in a completely different country, and a prototype on many levels, starting from vocabulary - the same commissars familiar to us appear during the years of the French Revolution - and ending with the fact that during the October Revolution they constantly monitored what stages the French went through, how the political struggle went on in it, so they have terror and we have, and whether we will have Thermidor. This was discussed at the level of the Central Committee of the Party, at the level of major party leaders.

The Bolshevik terror was directly associated with the Jacobin terror, and not at the level of public opinion, but in the speeches of the leaders of the party and government. And Lenin called Dzerzhinsky a Jacobin, and Stalin said that today the organs of the VChK-GPU are conducting terror, just as the organs of the Jacobin dictatorship once were.

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A 1790 cartoon poking fun at the famous British intellectual Richard Price (1723-1791), who actively supported the French Revolution. Through a slit, he watches the attack of the revolutionary elements on the chambers of Marie Antoinette. Price - authorfamousessays “Review of the main issues and difficulties in morality” / Robert Price kneeling on a large crown (with a demon on his back) to look through a peep-hole at a group of ruffians ransacking Marie Antoinette "s bedroom: satirizing a speech by Price which allegedly advocated the French revolution. Colored etching by I. Cruikshank, n.d.. 1790 By: Isaac Cruikshank. Published: 12 December 1790? Wellcome Library, London.

The phrase "enemy of the people" appears during the years of the French Revolution.

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The caricature depicts four figures that symbolize foreign states reacting negatively to the manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg of July 25, 1792. Above at number 5 - Glory, which holds the inscription "French Republic" / Title: Cas du manifeste du Duc de Brunswick. France, 1792. Medium: 1 print: etching and aquatint; 12 x 18 cm (plate), 18 x 27 cm (sheet). Print shows four figures representing foreign nations responding unfavorably to the manifesto issued by the Duke of Brunswick and Lüneburg on July 25 1792. A fifth figure representing Fame (an angel with trumpet) flies overhead holding a sign labeled "Republique Française.". Library of Congress, USA.

What is terror? Purely formally philologically terreur - "horror" in French, that is, any violence that causes horror, as it were, should be called terror. Another thing is that then spontaneous violence also falls into terror, and spontaneous violence begins from the first days of the revolution - the crowd lynched the commandant of the Bastille and before that there were outbreaks of violence in the streets. Therefore, historians more or less agree to call state policy the policy of terror.

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Caricature "Zenith of French Glory". James Gillray (1756/57-1815), British painter. On the caricature, it seems to be (barely visible), it is written that it was on February 12, 1793. On that day, at the lattice of the Convention, one of the leaders of the " mad" on behalf of the 48 sections of Paris read out a threatening petition to the Convention demanding the establishment of a maximum tariff for corn. Louis XVI was beheaded shortly before this - January 21, 1793 / Karikatur "The Zenith of French Glory" von James Gillray vom 02/12/1793. Author James Gillray (1756-1815). via

It is not the Jacobins who start the terror, it starts before them. It is not the Jacobins who begin to violate the human rights they were so proud of in 1789. All this happens before them. But only the Jacobins give terror such a scope, and only the Jacobins, as they said then, put it on the order of the day. This takes place in the early autumn of 1793.

According to the so-called "Decree on Suspicious" of September 17, 1793, it was ordered to arrest and keep in prison until the conclusion of a general peace, as it was then expressed, all suspicious. That is, not those who committed a certain crime, not those who come out with counter-revolutionary slogans or kill revolutionaries, but suspicious ones - those who cannot prove their trustworthiness: former nobles, relatives of emigrants, priests who did not support the revolution, and in general everyone who the authorities on the ground will seem suspicious. Since that time, terror begins, such arrests are taking place throughout the country, they become massive.

The Great Terror begins in May 1794.

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James Gillray, Promis "d Horrors of the French Invasion, -or- Forcible Reasons for Negociating a Regicide Peace, a print. Published in London, England, AD 1796. via

On 22 Prairial of the 2nd year of the Republic according to the revolutionary calendar, or in May 1794 according to the usual calendar, Georges Couton, one of Robespierre's associates, speaks at the Convention. He proposes the following decree: to simplify the legal proceedings, to abolish the adversarial process, that is, no lawyers. There is only one punishment - the death penalty, no imprisonment, there is either justified or guilty.

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Caricature by Englishman George Cruikshank (1792-1878) / The Radical's Arms. Caricature by George Cruikshank. The tricolor ribbon is inscribed "No God! No Religion! No King! No Constitution!" Below the ribbon, and its Phrygian cap with tricolor cockade, are two bloody axes, attached to a guillotine, whose blade is suspended above a burning globe. An emaciated man and drunken woman dressed in ragged clothes serve as heraldic "supporters ", gleefully dancing on discarded royal and clerical regalia… Color engraving. Dimensions 369 × 267 mm. 13 November 1819. via

The verdict is based on "any moral or physical evidence that every reasonable person can understand." The basis for the verdict is the conscience of the jury, that is, not the law, not the criminal code, not the existence of some formal crimes, but the conscience of the jury: if the jury believes that a person is worthy of execution, then he must be executed. Six weeks after the adoption of this decree, more people are executed, in Paris first of all, than 14 months before. This, in fact, is called the "great terror".

Twelve-minute lecture by Dmitry Bovykin on the Jacobin terror at PostNauka:

What was the revolution from the point of view of ordinary people? This was discussed in the issue "Anthropology of revolutions" of the program "Culture of everyday life" on "Snob".

Russian revolution.

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1909 Hotel for the workers of the "City Guardianship of People's Sobriety". Visitors to the hotel in the bedroom. Atelier "Karl Bulla". History of Russia in photographs

Historian Oleg Budnitsky:

From 1917 to 1921, the population of Petrograd declined 4 times. By the beginning of 1921 - 3 times. Why was it reduced?

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October 25, 1917. . October Revolution. The Red Guards at the armored car "Lieutenant Schmidt", captured from the junkers. The name of the armored car was given in honor of the hero of the 1905 revolution in Russia. Petrograd, Code: P-479 b/w. Item number: 479.

People went to the village because it is better to live there. Workers are, as a rule, peasants who came to the city in the first generation. When it became hungry and there was no work, they returned to the village, where, in comparison with the city, it was more or less satisfying. The village, perhaps for the first time in the history of Russia, felt some advantage over the city. The city people went to the village and exchanged some things there for food.

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Vladimir Mayakovsky. ROSTA window No. 426, October, 1920. Scan from Mayakovsky's book. and GlavPolitprosveta. 1919-1921. Compiled by Alexey Morozov. - M.: Publishing house "Contact-culture", 2010.

The bagmen saved Russia. There was a commission to combat profiteering and sabotage, but speculation saved the country from starvation - we can now say this with confidence. And, of course, the peasants who produced bread, which the Bolsheviks did not manage to take away all of.

During the years of the revolution, unprecedented democratization took place in the literal sense of the word - the demos became power. The vast majority of people who became power were not ready for this either in terms of their level of education or in terms of the level of necessary skills.

During the years of the revolution, on the one hand, there was an amazing incompetence, on the other hand, a phenomenal growth of the bureaucracy. Something could not be done - it is necessary to increase the number of employees in institutions. The number of organizations multiplied unbelievably. There is nothing private, everything turned out to be in the hands of the state - total nationalization, war communism. The number of new officials who deal with any issues is growing exponentially.

French revolution.

Vera Milchina, literary historian and translator - expert on France:

The French Revolution is an outburst of violence. How did it all start? They captured the Bastille, in which, as you know, there were 7 people, of which two were thieves, two were crazy. Then they cut off the heads of two people in their positions and carried these heads joyfully on peaks. This is the beginning.

Issue "Anthropology of revolutions" of the program "Culture of everyday life" on "Snob". Hosted by Irina Prokhorova.

Anthropology of revolutions - Russia and France:

Program "Culture of everyday life". Hosted by Irina Prokhorova.

Almost 100 years have passed since October 1917. But until now, historians have not come to a consensus about what it was. The collapse of the tsarist regime or the end of the entire thousand-year Russian history? A geopolitical catastrophe, after which a consistent degradation began, or a breakthrough in modernization, the beginning of a new era and upward movement? To what extent was the experience of the French Revolution of the 18th century used in Russia? Who benefited from the dramatic changes in France and a little more than a century later in Russia? What was the balance of gains and losses? How has the life of a private person changed? These and other questions will be answered by the guests of Irina Prokhorova’s Anthropology of Revolutions program from the Culture of Everyday Life cycle: Oleg Budnitsky, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Vera Milchina, literary historian and translator, and Dmitry Sporov, historian, founder of the Oral History Foundation, Head of the Department of Oral History of the Scientific Library of Moscow State University.

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1918. . Demonstration on the first anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Moscow. Code: P-375 b/w. Item number: 375. RGAKFD.

Sources and additional materials:

Notes:

With howling “brilliant idea” of fighting against the existing system, former Manchester United and France player Eric Cantona tossed fans in a November interview with Presse Océan magazine.

Answering a question about the pension reform and public disagreement with it, he said that in the current situation, protests are not suitable. “Instead of going out into the street and stomping for miles (at demonstrations and rallies), you can go to the bank of your locality and withdraw your money,” he suggested. The algorithm of actions is simple. “The entire political system is built on banking power. And if there are 20 million people who are ready to withdraw their money from the banks, then the system will collapse: without weapons and without blood. And then they will listen to us, ”the football player explained. “Three million, ten million people - and now this is a real threat. And then there will be a real revolution. A revolution brought about by banks,” he added.

Canton's call to withdraw money from banks in a matter of days caused a great resonance not only in his homeland, in France, but throughout the world. And through the Internet, the action plan has spread to other European countries.

The Belgian Geraldine Feyen and the Frenchman Jan Sarfati created the bankrun2010.com website to support Canton's idea. There's a group on Facebook called "December 7th we're all going to take our money out of the banks."

According to the French Midi Libre, on the eve of X-day, more than 38,000 netizens confirmed their desire to take part in this action, and another 30,000 said they might join the activists. The residents of the United Kingdom, where Cantona still remains the king of football, responded especially zealously to the call of the football player.

In France, there are about 9 thousand like-minded people on the Facebook page " Revolution! On 12/07 Let's go everybody to withdraw our money!” (“Revolution! 7/12 take our money”) they say they will withdraw money from their accounts. “Banks always hit us when we are already falling to the ground. Let's hit them too, emptying our accounts,” one Facebook page urges.

Eric Cantona himself also followed his advice. According to boursier.com, the former Manchester United striker did apply on Tuesday to the local branch of BNP Paribas, where he keeps his savings, with a request to give him the opportunity to withdraw money. However, the bank only confirmed that he was going to withdraw an amount exceeding 1,500 euros.

However, not everyone supports the player. Opponents of the call remind that "for this game to be fun, you must belong to the middle class and have a fairly large account, albeit not as large as Mr. Canton's." “What to do with the withdrawn money? Put them under the mattress? Or put them in "tax heaven"?" - others are interested, calling the call of the football player "simple pathos."

At the same time, as the French Le Point writes, “a lively debate between bank leaders, their most loyal lawyer Christine Lagarde (French Economy Minister) and Eric Cantona proves that the threat to take the deposits of French citizens from banks is the only thing that can frighten the financial system."

Earlier, Christine Lagarde, in a not very polite manner, sent Eric Canton "to play ball on the football field." “This is not only contempt for the eminent football player, but also ignorance, a desire not to reckon with the reality that all citizens face when they have banking difficulties,” one of the deputies of the French parliament explained to the newspaper.

Historical parallels are always instructive: they clarify the present, make it possible to foresee the future, and help to choose the right political line. It is only necessary to remember that it is necessary to indicate and explain not only similarities, but also differences.

In general, there is no expression more absurd and contrary to truth, reality, than the one that says "history does not repeat itself." History repeats itself as often as nature, repeats too often, almost to the point of boredom. Of course, repetition does not mean identity, but identity does not exist in nature either.

Our revolution is in many ways similar to the great French revolution, but it is not identical with it. And this is especially noticeable if you pay attention to the origin of both revolutions.

The French Revolution took place early - at the dawn of the development of industrial capitalism, the machine industry. Therefore, being directed against the absolutism of the nobility, it was marked by the transfer of power from the hands of the nobility to the hands of the commercial, industrial and agricultural bourgeoisie, and a prominent role in the formation of this new bourgeoisie was played by the dispersion of the old noble property, mainly landownership of the nobility, and the robbery of the old bourgeoisie, purely commercial and usurious, which managed and had time to adapt to the old regime and perished with it, since its individual elements did not degenerate into a new bourgeoisie, as the same thing happened with individual elements of the nobility. Namely, the dispersal of property - land, household and movable - created the possibility of rapid capitalist concentration and made France a bourgeois-capitalist country.

Our absolutism proved to be much more flexible, more adaptable. Of course, general economic conditions, which to a large extent had a global scale and scope, helped here. Russian industrial capitalism began to emerge when in the advanced countries of the West - England and France - the development of capitalist industry was already so powerful that the first manifestations of imperialism became noticeable, and in relation to our backward country this was reflected in the fact that the falling autocracy of the nobility and its rotting social support found support in foreign financial capital. Serfdom, even after the formal abolition of serfdom, survived for a long time as a result of the agricultural crisis that befell the entire old world, and above all Western and Eastern Europe, with an influx of cheap overseas American, Australian, South African bread. Finally, domestic and industrial capitalism to a large extent found support and nourishment for its grossly predatory appetites in the flexible policy of the autocracy. Two major facts testify particularly to this flexibility: the abolition of serfdom, which to some extent strengthened the tsarist illusions in the peasantry and made friends with the autocracy of the bourgeoisie, and the industrial, railway and financial policies of Reitern, especially Witte, which cemented the community of the bourgeoisie and the autocracy for several more decades, and this the commonwealth was only temporarily shaken in 1905.

Thus, it is clear that both here and there - both here and in France - the edge of the weapon and its first blow were directed against the autocracy of the nobility. But the early onset of the French Revolution and the belatedness of ours are such a deep, sharp feature of the difference that it could not but be reflected in the character and grouping of the driving forces of both revolutions.

What in the social sense, in relation to the class composition, were the main driving forces of the great revolution in France?

The Girondins and the Jacobins are the political, accidental, as we know, in their origin, names of these forces. Girondins - peasant and provincial France. Their domination began during the revolution by the ministry of Roland, but even after August 10, 1792, when the monarchy finally collapsed, they retained power in their hands and, led in fact by Brissot, defended the power of the province, the countryside against the predominance of the city, especially Paris. The Jacobins, led by Robespierre, insisted on a dictatorship, mainly urban democracy. Acting together through the mediation of Danton, a supporter of the unity of all revolutionary forces, both the Jacobins and the Girondins crushed the monarchy and resolved the agrarian question, selling cheaply the confiscated lands of the clergy and nobility into the hands of the peasants and partly the urban bourgeoisie. In terms of the predominant composition, both parties were petty-bourgeois, and the peasantry naturally gravitated more towards the Girondins, while the urban petty bourgeoisie, especially the metropolitan, was under the influence of the Jacobins; The Jacobins were also joined by the relatively few workers then in France, who constituted the extreme left wing of this party under the leadership first of Marat, then, after his assassination by Charlotte Corday, Geber and Chaumet.

Our revolution, being belated, having arisen under the conditions of a greater development of capitalism than it was during the great French revolution, precisely for this reason has a very strong proletarian left, the power of which was temporarily strengthened by the desire of the peasants to seize the landowners' land and the thirst for "immediate" peace by the masses of soldiers. exhausted by the protracted war. But for the same reason, i.e. due to the belatedness of the revolution, and the opponents of the left, the Bolshevik communists - the Menshevik Social Democrats and groups of Social Democracy more or less close to them, as well as the Socialist Revolutionaries - were more proletarian and peasant parties than the Girondins. But despite all the differences, no matter how significant or deep they are, one common, great similarity remains, is preserved. In fact, perhaps even against the wishes of the fighting revolutionary forces and parties, it is expressed in the strife of interests between urban and rural, rural democracy. The Bolsheviks are in fact the exclusive dictatorship of the city, no matter how much they talk about reconciliation with the middle peasant. Their opponents stand for the interests of the peasantry—the Mensheviks and Social Democrats. In general, for reasons of expediency, from the firm conviction that the proletariat can win only in alliance with the peasantry, the Socialist-Revolutionaries - on principle: they are a typical peasant, petty-bourgeois party headed by the ideologists of utopian but peaceful socialism, i.e. representatives of the urban petty-bourgeois intelligentsia from the penitent nobles in part, but in particular from the penitent commoners.

And the similarity and difference in the origin, and driving forces of both revolutions also explains their course.

We shall not here deal with the history of the National and Legislative Assembly in France at the end of the eighteenth century, which was in essence only a prelude to the revolution, and for our purposes it is now only of secondary interest. What is important here is what developed and happened in France after August 10, 1791.

Two formidable dangers confronted the revolution at that time: the threat of an external attack, even the outright failure of the revolutionary troops in the struggle against the military forces of European reaction, and the counter-revolutionary internal movement in the Vendée and elsewhere. The betrayal of the commander-in-chief, General Dumouriez, and the successes of the rebels equally poured water on the mill of Robespierre and the Jacobins. They demanded the dictatorship of urban democracy and merciless terror. The Convention did not dare to resist the onslaught of the Parisian workers and the petty bourgeoisie of the capital. The Girondins surrendered their position in the cause of the king, and on January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was executed. On June 29, the Girondins were also arrested, and the guillotine was also waiting for them. Girondin uprisings in the south and in Normandy were pacified. July 10, 1793 Robespierre became the head of the Committee of Public Safety. Terror was built into a system and began to be carried out consistently and ruthlessly by both the Committee and the commissioners of the Convention.

The objective tasks facing the revolution after July 10, 1793, boiled down to eliminating external danger, establishing internal order, combating high prices and economic disruption, streamlining the state economy, primarily upset by the issues of paper money circulation. External attacks were repulsed; uprisings within the country were suppressed. But it turned out to be impossible to destroy anarchy - on the contrary, it grew, increased, spread more and more widely. It was unthinkable to reduce the high cost, to keep the price of money from falling, to reduce the issuance of banknotes, to stop the economic and financial ruin. Factories worked very poorly, the peasantry did not give bread. It was necessary to equip the village with military expeditions, forcibly requisitioning bread and fodder. The high cost reached the point that 4,000 francs were paid for lunch in restaurants in Paris, the cab driver received 1,000 francs for the end. The dictatorship of the Jacobins could not cope with the economic and financial ruin. The position of the urban working masses therefore became unbearable; the Parisian workers rose in revolt. The uprising was crushed, and its leaders Geber and Chaumette paid for it with their lives.

But this meant alienating the most active revolutionary force - the capital workers. The peasants have long since passed into the camp of the discontented. And so Robespierre and the Jacobins fell under the blows of reaction: on Thermidor 8 they were arrested, and the next day on Thermidor 9 (July 27, 1794) Robespierre died under the knife of the guillotine. In fact, the revolution was over. Only reaction, and most of all, Napoleon managed to cope with economic disruption by crude means: by robbing European countries - directly, through military requisitions, confiscations, robberies, territorial seizures, and indirectly - by introducing a continental blockade, which gave enormous benefits to French industry. In one respect, the Jacobin dictatorship prepared Napoleon for his economic success: it contributed to the creation of a new bourgeoisie, which turned out to be quite energetic, enterprising, dexterous, adapted to speculation in an era of high prices and therefore replaced the old bourgeois henchmen of the nobility and the noble autocracy, who from the time of Colbert were accustomed to eating handouts from the master's table. In the same direction in the formation of the capitalist bourgeoisie - only not industrial, but agricultural - the agrarian reform of the times of the great revolution also influenced.

Similar in many respects, with some differences, were the objective tasks of our revolution, which took shape and became fully developed after the collapse of our monarchy. It was necessary to suppress the internal counter-revolutionary forces, to contain the centrifugal currents, brought up by the oppression of the nobility of tsarism, to abolish the high cost, financial and economic ruin, to solve the agrarian question - all similar tasks. The peculiarity of the moment at the beginning of the revolution was that the need arose for the speedy elimination of the imperialist war: this was not the case in France at the end of the 18th century. There was another feature due to the belatedness of our revolution: being among the advanced capitalist countries, having tasted the fruits of the capitalist tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Russia was a convenient fertile soil for the growth of the theory and practice of immediate socialism or communism, socialist maximalism. And this soil gave magnificent shoots. This, of course, was not, or almost was not, except for the attempt of Babeuf, and then later - in 1797 - in the great revolution in France.

All revolutions were spontaneous. Their normal, usual, routine course is directed towards the discovery, the revelation by the masses of the population of their entire class essence at that stage of social development which they have reached. Attempts to consciously intervene in the course of events contrary to this usual trend in the Russian revolution were made, but they were unsuccessful partly due to the fault of those who made them, partly - and even mainly - because it is difficult, almost impossible to overcome the elements. The realm of freedom has not yet come, we live in the realm of necessity.

And above all, the elements, the blind class instinct proved to be all-powerful among the representatives of our capitalist bourgeoisie and its ideologists. Russian imperialism - dreams of Constantinople and the straits, etc. - is an ugly phenomenon caused by the predatory economic and financial policy of the noble autocracy, which exhausted the purchasing power of the peasantry and thereby reduced the domestic market. But our capitalist bourgeoisie continued to cling to it even at the beginning of the revolution, and therefore interfered in every possible way, both under Milyukov and under Tereshchenko, with the peaceful aspirations of those socialist groups that entered into a coalition with it. The same blind class instinct dictated to our zemstvo liberals intransigence on the agrarian question. Finally, for the same reason, the triumph of the class element could not be convinced of the need to sacrifice 20 billion (4 billion gold) by establishing an emergency income and property tax, without which the struggle against economic and financial ruin was unthinkable.

To tell the truth, the enormous significance of this tax was not properly understood by both the Social Democrats and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, who entered into a coalition with the capitalist bourgeoisie. They did not find enough energy and determination in the struggle for peace. This was joined by ideological disputes that prevented us from thinking of a democratic revolution without the bourgeoisie. In general, it turned out to be marking time both in domestic and foreign policy.

The economic and financial questions remained unresolved, the agrarian question hung in the air, the war continued and suffered defeats. Kornilov played the role of Dumouriez, and the role of the head of the government, Kerensky, remained very doubtful.

All this helped those who indulged the elements with demagogy - the Bolsheviks. The result was the October Revolution.

It succeeded, of course, because the workers, the soldiers, and even the peasants were dissatisfied with the policy, or rather, with the inaction of the provisional government. Both those and others, and the third, after October 25, 1917, received what they were striving for: the workers - an increase in rates and a syndicalist organization of a nationalized industry with the choice of commanders and organizers themselves working in this enterprise, the soldiers - an early peace and the same syndicalist organization of the army, peasants - a decree on the "socialization" of the land.

But the Bolsheviks indulged the elements, thinking of using it as a tool for their own goals - the world socialist revolution. Leaving until the end of the article the question of species for the realization of this goal on an international scale, it is necessary first of all to give a clear account of what this led to within Russia.

The nationalization of the banks destroyed credit, while at the same time not giving the government an apparatus for managing the national economy, for our banks were backward institutions, mainly speculative, in need of a radical, systematically conceived and consistently implemented reform in order to become a real instrument for the correct regulation of the economic life of the country.

The nationalization of factories led to a terrible drop in their productivity, which was also facilitated by the syndicalist principle underlying their management. The syndicalist organization of factories on the basis of elective administration from the workers excludes the possibility of discipline from above, any coercion emanating from an elected administration. There is no working self-discipline, because it develops only under developed, cultural capitalism as a result of a long class struggle under the influence and external pressure from above, and, more importantly, strict disciplinary control by the trade unions, and this is due to the oppression of tsarism, which persecuted the trade unions. , was not before and is not now either, because what is the use of free trade unions when communism is being planted? As a result, from a producer of surplus value, the proletariat turned into a consumer class, largely supported by the state. Therefore, he lost his independence, found himself in direct economic dependence on the government, and directed his main efforts to expanding his consumption - to improving and increasing rations, to occupying bourgeois apartments, to obtaining furniture. A significant part of the workers went to the communist administration and was subjected there to all the temptations associated with a position of power. "Socialism of consumption", dilapidated by the day, long ago, it seemed, handed over to the archive, flourished in full bloom. For the unconscious elements of the proletariat, the situation created such a crude understanding of socialism: "socialism means to collect all wealth in a heap and divide it equally." It is not difficult to understand that in essence this is the same Jacobin egalitarianism, which in its time served as the basis for the formation of the new French capitalist bourgeoisie. And the objective result, since the matter is limited to purely internal Russian relations, is portrayed as the same as in France. Speculation under the guise of socialization and nationalization is also creating a new bourgeoisie in Russia.

The same egalitarianism, and with the same consequences, was planned and carried out in the countryside. And the acute need for food led to the same plan as in France, pumping bread out of the countryside; military expeditions, confiscations, requisitions began; then “committees of the poor” appeared, “Soviet farms” and “agricultural communes” began to be built, as a result of which the peasantry lost confidence in the stability of the landed estates they seized, and if the peasantry has not yet completely and not everywhere broken with the Soviet power, then only the madness of the counter-revolutionary forces, which, at the very first successes, lead the landlords and install them. Violence in the countryside had to be abandoned, but, firstly, only in theory, - in practice, they continue, - secondly, it’s too late: the mood has been created, you can’t destroy it; Real guarantees are needed, but there are none.

Our terror is no more, but no less than the Jacobin. The nature of both is the same. And the consequences are the same. Of course, not one of the fighting parties is guilty of terror, but both of them. The murders of the leaders of the Communist Party, the mass executions of Communists where their opponents incite them, the extermination of hundreds and thousands of "hostages", "bourgeois", "enemies of the people and counter-revolutionaries", disgusting grimaces of life like a greeting to a wounded leader, accompanied by a list of forty executed "enemies of the people" , are all phenomena of the same order. And how inexpedient and senseless is single terror, because one person will always find a replacement for himself, especially when, in fact, it is not the leaders who lead the masses, but the elements control the leaders, so is mass terror ineffective for both sides: blood", and with the blood shed for it, it will be established. One soldier somehow confidently declared that the French Republic did not become a people's republic because the people did not massacre the entire bourgeoisie. This naive revolutionary did not even suspect that it was impossible to massacre the entire bourgeoisie, that in place of one head cut off from this hundred-headed hydra, a hundred new heads grow, and that these newly grown heads come from the very midst of those who are engaged in cutting them off. Tactically, mass terror is just as much nonsense as individual terror.

The Soviet government has new beginnings. But, in so far as they are actually carried out, for example, in the field of education, this is done in the overwhelming majority of cases by non-Communists, and here the main, fundamental work is still ahead. And then how much formalism, bureaucracy, paperwork, red tape have been revived! And how clearly the hand of those numerous "fellow travelers" from the Black Hundred camp, with whom the Soviet power has become so heavily overgrown, is visible here.

And as a result, the same tasks: both external war, and internal, civil strife, and famine, and economic and financial ruin. And even if it were possible to stop all wars, to win all victories, the economy and finances could not be improved without external, foreign help: this is the feature that distinguishes our situation from the French end of the 18th century. But even there they could not manage without foreign countries: they only forcibly robbed it, which cannot be done now.

True, there is an international counterbalance: revolutions in Hungary, Bavaria, Germany. The Soviet government longs for and expects a world, all-world socialist revolution. Let us even assume that these aspirations will come true, even if in the very form in which they are drawn to the communist imagination. Will this situation save us in Russia?

The answer to this question is undoubted for those who are familiar with the laws governing the course of revolutions.

Indeed: in all revolutions, in their turbulent period, old ones are demolished and new tasks are set; but the realization, the solution of them, is a matter for the next, organic period, when the new is created with the help of everything that is viable and in the old classes that previously dominated. Revolution is always a complex and lengthy process. We are present at the first act of this drama. Even if it has not yet passed, may it still last. So much the worse. Russia is tired of economic ruin. No more strength to endure.

The outcome is clear. As long as the world revolution flares up (if only it flares up), ours will go out. Complete collapse can be prevented, the building of the new can be preserved and strengthened only by the union of all democracies - urban and rural. And the union must be realistically expressed. The nearest, urgent measures to this are complete non-intervention in the question of land, granting the peasantry unlimited freedom to dispose of the land as they wish; refusal of requisitions and confiscations in the countryside; giving freedom to private initiative in the matter of supply while continuing and developing intensified, active work and the existing state and public supply apparatus; the consolidation of all this by direct, equal and secret voting of all working people in elections to councils and by all civil liberties; cessation of internal and external war and an agreement on economic and financial support from the United States and England.

Then and only then can one endure, endure to the end, hold out until the time of the organic construction of a new order, or rather, begin this construction, for the time has come for it, and there is no force that would avert the beginning of this process. The whole question is in whose hands the steering wheel will be. Every effort must be made to keep it for democracy. There is only one path to this, now indicated. Otherwise - an open reaction.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Rozhkov (1868 - 1927) Russian historian and politician: member of the RSDLP (b) since 1905, since August 1917 member of the Central Committee of the Menshevik Party, from May to July 1917 - Comrade (Deputy) Minister of the Provisional Government, author of a number of works on Russian history, Russian agricultural economics, economic and social history.

Visiting systematically for decades now bookstores, I noticed the lack of literature on the French Revolution in our country. Moreover, even in the curricula of the USSR, there is absolutely no mention of Lenin's attitude towards this phenomenon. But this is strange. After all, we are the first country of victorious socialism. Shall we not study the first revolution of the world, which is the French one? Of course, I didn’t expect our timid Soviet leaders to publish with us, especially then, in the USSR, the works of theoreticians and practitioners of the French Revolution, such as Robespierre, Marat, Danton, so that we would publish memoirs of active participants those events. We were afraid to print the speeches of the secretaries of the communist parties of the “fraternal countries” at home. But you could at least give a Soviet interpretation. But no, we didn't have that, and we don't. Of course, you never know what books are missing in our stores. For example, in our country, even in the largest bookstores, it is impossible to see books on setting up factory equipment, working on machine tools, in particular, on CNC machines. And this despite the fact that our factories at the present time are a very miserable sight, reminiscent rather of the workshops of a seedy collective farm. Intellectual stupidity in general is a characteristic feature of socialism and remains this feature of ours to this day.

But, I will not digress. Be that as it may, such a strange silence about such a grandiose event as the first world revolution interested me and I decided to analyze the reason for our muteness a little more closely and at the same time compare how the French revolution differs from the Russian one. Of course, I mean the so-called Great October Socialist. Well, let's start.

So, despite the fact that the French revolution did not establish socialism, but only put an end to feudalism, it has much in common with the Russian one. So what?
Let's start with the most noticeable phenomenon - the liquidation of tsarism.
The Russian Tsar was immediately arrested and sent to the Urals. Louis and his wife for a long time remained not only at large, but also actively participated in the public life of the country. For example, Marie Antoinette even had the opportunity to work for the enemy and inform him of the military plans of the campaigns.
The deputies of the convention debated for a long time how to judge the king. And although the king was arrested in August 1792, his first interrogation took place only on December 11.
The convention held an open vote on the guilt of the king.
Each deputy had the right to motivate his opinion.
The king even had a lawyer.
The King appeared before the Convention several times before being executed in January 1793.
Marie Antoinette was also openly tried before she was executed in October.
And what's interesting. The ten-year-old son of the king was not killed, as happened here in Russia with his almost the same age. The boy was given to be raised by a foster family. Yes, strangers had bad care for him. So bad that the boy eventually contracted tuberculosis and died. Everything is so, but he was not shot in the basement by unknown persons. But we still don’t know anything about our executioners. So, something about some.
And interestingly, the rest of the relatives of the royal family emigrated safely and lived quite quietly abroad. No one was going to kidnap or kill them.
Moreover, after the execution of Louis 16 and Antoinette, the rest of the Bourbons could safely return to France.
In Russia, as we know, all the Romanovs were destroyed to the root, along with infants. Over a hundred people in total.
That is, they were secretly taken to the Urals, secretly executed, and then brazenly claimed that they did not even know where the grave was. Although they really could not know anything about the grave, because, like there was no grave. People were buried like dogs, even the place was tamped down by a car. In the end, even the house of engineer Ipatiev was demolished, where the family of Nikolai himself was kept before execution. And where the rest were executed and who exactly we still do not know with accuracy. As if the Cheka and the archives do not.
And if I spoke about kings, then it is necessary to say about the attempts to save the crowned especially, as these attempts are depicted in our literature.
In the little literature that is available in Russia on this issue, they are trying to convince us that foreigners, in particular England, did not sleep right through the night, thinking about how to save the dynasty of France or the dynasty of Russia, arrange an escape from the country of Louis 16 or Nicholas 2 . Bullshit. In my opinion, these Englishmen, on the contrary, sought to make sure that both the king and the tsar were executed by the revolutionaries. The lives of these individuals did not play any role, but death paid dividends in the form of compromising these "bloodthirsty degenerate revolutionaries."
And it does not matter that Louis was a relative of Leopold and Nicholas was also related to the lords.

Well, if we are talking about foreigners, then it is not superfluous to say about their interference in the internal affairs of France and Russia. In our country, any foreign intervention is shown as an attempt to maintain stability and the old order. Yes, bullshit. It is necessary to understand the time and actors. England at the height of the revolution in France was most actively involved in the war with the nascent United States of America. And the fact that inside her main competitor on the mainland, in France, there was unrest, it was very beneficial for England. What's wrong with a competitor who can't take advantage of your difficulties. So the revolution in France was simply beneficial for England. And here is what the French scholar Albert Mathieus, the author of several monographs on the French Revolution, says about foreign intervention.
Foreign gold was intended not only to ferret out military secrets, but also to excite unrest and create all sorts of difficulties for the government.
And here is what the deputy Fabre d. Eglantin said before the members of the Committee of Public Safety.
There are conspiracies in the republic of its external enemies - Anglo-Prussian and Austrian, which lead the country to death from exhaustion.
It must be understood that any turmoil within the country is a boon for enemies, and the fact that all these revolutionaries bawl loud slogans is not at all scary.
No wonder the deputy Lebas wrote to Robespierre:
- Let's not trust cosmopolitan charlatans, let's rely only on ourselves.
Because the traitors of the revolution were at all levels of power. Actually, these were most often not even traitors, but slippery adventurers who went into the revolution for the sake of personal gain.

As for Russia, the power of this giant worried everyone. Nobody wished her well, they were afraid of her. Therefore, unrest within a country like Russia, which throws the economy back hundreds of years, was very desirable for all countries.

It seems to be similar events, but how much dissimilarity is here.
Although the two revolutions have many parallels. There are some funny ones too.
For example, the revolutionary names that began to be given to children here in Russia. Type Krasarmiya, Delezh (Lenin's case is alive).
In France, no one gave children such names. But something similar happened there. During the French Revolution in Poland, the famous storyteller Hoffmann was the revolutionary governor. At that time he was the Prussian administrator of Warsaw. When the division of Poland took place, in the Russian part the Jews received surnames according to their native towns or the surnames of their employers. In Prussia and Austria, Jews were given surnames by officials. Here is the revolutionary official Hoffmann, and was outcast to the best of his literary fantasy. Many Jews at that time received very wild surnames, for example, Stinky or Koshkopapy translated into Russian.
Or take such a thing as "enemy of the people." It has also been around since the French Revolution. Even the post of commissioner was in France and in Russia. However, the assistants of the inquisitor were also called so in ancient times, even before all revolutions. The inquisitor had two kinds of assistants - some were given to him by his superiors, others he selected himself. Some of them were called commissioners.
However, the status of state commissioners was not only in France and Russia, but also in Nazi Germany. Yes, and members of the Nazi Party in Germany addressed each other in the same way as our comrade.

By the way, the French were the first to send workers to collective farms for agricultural work. Of course, there were no collective farms then, but threshing of bread existed. It was for the threshing of bread that the Committee of Public Salvation mobilized the workers of the city, since the peasants refused to work for nothing.
There are parallels that no one knows about now. For example, no one knows that immediately after the revolution of the seventeenth year we canceled the old calendar and introduced our own revolutionary one, following the example of the French, where there were no names of the days of the week, and the seven-day week itself was canceled. And we replaced the names of the days with numbers. In general, we began the countdown of the new revolutionary time from 1917. That is, we in the USSR did not have, say, 1937 or 1938, but there were years 20 and 21 of the new revolutionary era, respectively.
There is another somewhat mystical parallel. For example, a friend of the people, Marat, was killed by a woman, Charlotte Corday.
Lenin, according to the official version, was also shot by a woman, blind Kaplan.
And take our cruiser "Aurora", from which we fired at Zimny.
Oddly enough, but the French have something similar. The Jacobins at one time declared an uprising against the bribed deputies. But the signal for such an uprising was a shot from a signal gun. Not a cruiser, of course, but not bad either.

All these parallels are, of course, a curiosity. A revolution is the movement of property and social strata. So how was the transfer of property in France?
The French Revolution did not envision a wide transfer of property from one political class to another.
Community property was divided according to a law specially issued for this purpose.
Even the property of emigrants, those who fled from the revolution, was not taken away. The property of emigrants was sold under the hammer. Moreover, the poor were given an installment plan for ten years when buying.
In general, in France there was a sale of national property, while in Russia this property was simply taken away by force on a completely “legitimate basis of a revolutionary moment.”
Bread was not taken away from the peasants, as we have in Russia, but bought. Another thing is that the peasants did not want to give away grain for depreciated paper money, but that is another matter. No one took bread cleanly from the peasant.
The Revolutionary Assembly even intended to create a section to ensure the inviolability of the person and property.
"Person and property are under the protection of the nation," said the French.
However, attempts to introduce a general nationalization of food in France were made and even quite successfully. And interestingly, these ideas about the nationalization of property were spread mainly by priests, revolutionary-minded priests. For example, the Parisian abbot Jacques Roux toyed with the idea of ​​creating public stores where there would be rigidly fixed prices, as we later had.
However, the ideas of nationalization remained not only ideas. At the most critical moment for the French Republic, when foreign armies were advancing on all fronts, and this was August 1793, not only was a general mobilization carried out, but in general the government began to dispose of all the resources of the country. For the first time in history, all goods, food, people themselves were at the disposal of the state.
Saint-Just even passed a decree on the confiscation of the property of suspicious persons.
Well, I think there is no need to repeat what we had in Russia with personal property and inviolability of the person in general.

Although it is still worth talking about terror. After all, no revolution is complete without terror. Naturally, the French Revolution was not without terror. Above, I have already mentioned such a category of citizens as suspicious. What did they mean in France.
The suspects were:
1) Those who, by their behavior or their intercourse, or by their speeches and writings, have shown themselves to be in favor of tyranny or federalism and an enemy of liberty;
2) Those who could not prove the legitimacy of their livelihood;
3) Those who were denied a certificate of citizenship;
4) Persons who have been removed from office by the Convention or its commissions;
5) Those of the former nobles who did not show devotion to the revolution;
6) Those who emigrated between July 1 and the publication of the decree of March 30, 1792, even if they returned to France on or before the date indicated by that decree.
About the French law on suspicious people, the well-known French historian Albert Mathiez wrote that this decree was a threat to everyone who in one way or another interfered with the government, even if they did nothing. If a person did not take part in the elections, for example, then he fell under the article of the law on suspicious persons.

We didn't have any laws about suspicious people in Russia. Just any financially secure person was automatically considered an enemy. In general, when we talk about the Red Terror, they always add that, after all, the Whites carried out terror. But, however, there is an essential difference between the red and white terrors. The Red Terror meant, in fact, political genocide. People were persecuted not for faults, not for crimes, but because they belonged to a certain social class. Whites did not kill people just because a person was a loader or a peasant. White terror is, in the end, just a response of self-defense, but by no means genocide against one's own people. But we had a genocide. By the way, the fact that a political genocide was taking place in France at that time, the French quite openly admit, but we stubbornly deny this obvious fact today, as well as denied many other things. For example, we stubbornly refused to recognize the authenticity of party archives seized by the Germans in Soviet territories during World War II. Well, it's fake. Such monstrous documents cannot belong to the humane Soviet authorities. We denied the execution of more than twenty thousand, for example, Polish officers for fifty years. Well, how do we know who shot whom there and why these corpses have bullet holes in their skulls.
In general, the scale of the Red Terror in our country and in France of that period can be judged, if only because the French used the guillotine for executions. Yes, later it was replaced by executions from rifles and cannons, but still, the French terror did not reach such a scale as we have in Russia. There is no comparison here. But what do the French themselves write about their terror.
For example, they boldly admit that freedom itself was killed under the pretext of freedom. Yes, and terror itself has become rampant.

What then to say about Russia?
We in Russia were killed by the millions and not in prisons, but simply in homes. They were not killed by a court order. But simply because the person was a nobleman, a priest, simply wealthy. In addition, in Russia, all criminals were released from prisons. They also became both judges and executioners on completely legal grounds, joining the ranks of the Cheka and the workers' militia. A normal person just does not go to kill others.
We must not forget that Stalin himself was, after all, primarily a criminal authority, famous in the criminal environment as a robber of collectors. Moreover, during the robberies, bombs were used, and not small arms. During the explosions, not only collectors died, but also innocent people, random passers-by who, like the collectors, also had children and wives. However, women and children also fell under the explosions of Russian revolutionaries. She's a bomb, she doesn't know who's in front of her. The people throwing it, of course, understood, but they just did not care at all about the fate of others.
Let us once again draw a parallel between our terror and the French terror.
In August, September 1792, the destruction of prisoners was carried out in the prisons of France.
Here, for example, is Albert Mathiez's account of murders in French prisons.
“The intoxication with murder was so great that criminals and political criminals, women and children were killed indiscriminately. Some corpses, such as those of the Princess de Lamballe, were terribly mutilated. The number of those killed, according to rough estimates, fluctuated between 1100 and 1400.
I repeat, in Russia, criminals were not killed en masse in prisons, except for 1941, when we exterminated all the prisoners before leaving the city. By the way, it was precisely such executions that the NKVD could not hide that the Germans very skillfully took advantage of, showing people the executed poor fellows whom the communists destroyed before retreating, or, more precisely, before fleeing. But these were wartime measures. And so, as Shalamov repeatedly asserted, and if he didn’t know if a person had swelled in the Gulag for twenty years, criminals in the camps were considered “friends of the people” for the Soviet authorities. With the help of criminals, the Chekists kept discipline in the camps. For example, on the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal there were only four hundred Chekists. I don't consider security. Until the fifties, in our country, the guards consisted of civilian shooters. So these four hundred people controlled a huge mass of prisoners precisely with the help of criminals. And so it was everywhere. That is, power and criminality have grown together in our country already at that time quite firmly. Yes, and why would she not grow together, if the revolutionaries themselves were the same criminals. The most striking example is Stalin himself.
And here is another fact of the French Revolution.
In Nantes, the revolutionary and terrible drunkard Carrier organized mass sinkings on ships, barges, and boats. There were up to two thousand victims of drowning.

If we take the Russian revolution, we can see the discrepancy between the scales of terror. The dimensions of our GULAG surpass not only everything French, but have no analogues at all in their atrocities and gigantomania. But terror in the USSR is not only the years of the revolution. This and the subsequent persecution of people for their origin, for the fact that people have relatives abroad, for the fact that a person was in captivity, simply in the occupied territory, was taken to Germany. I know a woman who was taken to Germany as an infant with her mother. Then the path for a career and professional growth was closed to her. It doesn't matter that she was a baby in Germany. Anyway, she no longer had the right to enter the university. That is why this woman graduated from a technical school. And then she was told that she should consider this fact as happiness. Terror in the USSR, in general, took the most diverse forms, and often completely invisible to others. But that didn't make him any better.
Even today, though, we try to carefully conceal the extent of terror. For example, few people know about a burial found in the USSR near Chelyabinsk, where eighty thousand corpses with bullet holes in the skull were found in a common pit. By the way, the number of victims only in this secret burial of communists exceeds the number of victims in the infamous Babi Yar. These people were simply shot, according to the authorities, in the thirties. Of course, people killed the poor fellows "without fear and reproach", that is, our glorious NKVD officers. Moreover, there were many children's skeletons in the pit. Let's not forget that in the USSR, full criminal liability came from the age of thirteen. This law was repealed only in the mid-fifties. However, as they say, there were skeletons and people of a younger age. This fact suggests that people were not arrested in their homes. Otherwise, they would all be sorted by gender and age: women and men would be in different camps, children in orphanages. In this burial, all the victims were in one common grave. Most likely, this whole mass of people were internees from the Baltic states or from Western Ukraine, or from Moldova, or from Poland divided between the Germans and the Soviets. For some reason, they decided not to sort them by age and gender, but simply killed them. And interestingly, the then authorities of our humane USSR immediately banned further research in this area. This can only mean one thing - there were other similar burials nearby, just as large.
This is, of course, a very sad topic. Let's talk about human origins. I don't mean Darwin's theory or the racist rantings of the Nazis. In this case, I am most interested in our attitude to the class roots of man. We simply could not do without accusing a person of his class affiliation. But to impute to a person his origin or circumstances that have not developed according to his will, means simply being guided by thoughtless fanaticism. Is not it? But in the case of the Chelyabinsk burial, this is not so much fanaticism as simple criminal fanaticism of people endowed with state power.
If in France terror, as the French themselves admit, was permanent, then in our country it was generally all-encompassing.

The Parisian newspaper publisher of the time, Jacques Roux, wrote that one cannot demand love and respect for a government that exercises its power over people through terror. Our revolution will not be able to conquer the world through revolt, destruction, fire and blood, turning the whole of France into one huge prison.
This is what happened to the humane USSR. The country turned into one big concentration camp, where people were divided into executioners and their victims.

Yes, there are many, many similarities between the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, but I would like to point out some serious differences. In this case, I mean the main actors of the revolution. The fact is that in the French Revolution there were no leaders from the proletariat. All deputies were noblemen. There was one Jacques Bednyak from the peasants. That's all. We in Russia had a lot of non-nobles. And in public positions in Russia after the revolution, in general, there were many people who were completely illiterate. Even among the ministers there were many people with two grades of education. What can I say about the time of the revolution and soon after it. Suffice it to recall the level of education of our members of the Politburo already in the eighties. Even such a vaunted intellectual, allegedly an intellectual, as Andropov had only a river technical school behind him. But this man occupied the highest echelons of power.

Of course, if we are looking for similarities between these two revolutions, then we cannot ignore such a phenomenon as the abolition of titles, coats of arms, the demolition of monuments to kings and their associates. We are more vulgar than the French in this matter. We not only destroyed all the monuments in the cities, but even in the cemeteries. But what about, since a person was a "minion of tsarism", then his grave must be torn down, razed to the ground. What we have in the glorious USSR and was done very diligently. And if in all civilized countries there are very ancient graves now, then we cannot find them anywhere. The communists tried, they tried very hard. Such diligence is especially clearly seen in the example of the former socialist countries, where since the First World War there were military cemeteries of soldiers of the enemy army everywhere. Nobody destroyed these cemeteries until the countries turned socialist after the Second World War. Socialism destroyed all the old military cemeteries in the socialist countries. The graves of famous people have disappeared. In this matter, the communists also showed a completely class approach, rejecting not only faith, but also conscience.

But, if I started talking about faith, it would not be superfluous to compare our attitude to religion and the French. In France, by the way, many revolutionary deputies were either bishops or simply curates.
Of course, all the priests in France fell into the category of "suspicious". Moreover, if they did not lay down their rank, then they were simply imprisoned. Although theoretically in France at that time there was freedom of religion. The convention, for example, approved even the freedom of worship. Moreover, such an active figure in the revolution as Robespierre seriously believed that the persecution of the Christian religion was organized by foreign agents in order to arouse hatred of the revolution among the believing population. Robespierre considered the persecution of religion to be a new fanaticism, growing out of the struggle against the old fanaticism. Moreover, Robespierre was also of the opinion that the destroyers of churches are counter-revolutionaries operating under the guise of demagogy.
Yes, churches in France were closed by the thousands, often becoming revolutionary temples. For example, Notre Dame was turned into a temple of the mind. But, nevertheless, the French tried to somehow streamline this process, some kind of revolutionary reforms were carried out. In our country, in the USSR, churches, if not destroyed, turned not into temples of the mind, but into warehouses or workshops, while priests were declared in bulk "enemies of the people" and simply destroyed. And this process of cannibalism and vandalism in our country has been going on for decades.

Of course, speaking about these two revolutions, it is impossible not to mention such a common phenomenon for socialism as the shortage of everything, speculation, global theft, bribery. Let's not forget that the ominous abbreviation VChK itself stands for the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Profiteering and Crimes by Position. In this regard, I would like to note such a detail as the absence of such severe institutions in the countries of "decaying capitalism." This whole bunch of phenomena: sabotage, corruption, speculation, looting, a global shortage of everything, a bribe as a way of life are characteristic on such a gigantic scale only for humane socialism. Naturally, the French already had this whole set of ulcers.
Yes, the French have introduced fixed food prices. And what are the consequences? Yes, empty shelves, like in our native USSR.
Just like with us, the French introduced a rationing system for essential products; for bread, for sugar, for meat, for soap, and so on and so forth. Complete match. What they have is what we have.
And what is especially interesting. In a country that has always been famous for its wines, its winemakers, vineyards, fake wines suddenly began to spread widely. The scale of the disaster acquired such proportions that special positions of commissioners for tasting wine were even introduced. And this is in wine France! We did not have such commissars, but counterfeit wines are still in great use to this day.
But how is the French deficit, that chaos in trade and economy, different from ours? The short answer is scale. For example, in France, armed force was never used to carry out requisitions, only administrative centralization was strengthened. Our CHONovtsy raked everything.

Well, if we are talking about theft, then it is not superfluous to say about the revolutionary police structures.
In France, the Assembly established an emergency criminal tribunal, whose judges and juries were appointed by the Convention itself, and not chosen by the people.
Pay attention to the presence of the jury. In Russia, people were generally shot without trial or investigation simply for belonging to the class of "exploiters and world-eaters."
In France, the property of those sentenced to death went to the Republic. At the same time, financial assistance was provided to the insolvent relatives of the convicts. Pay attention to such a delicate detail as caring for the relatives of the convicts who received material assistance. Our Chekists would simply consider these crazy Frenchmen fools for being so soft-hearted. But, as a rule, the Chekists were illiterate people and simply had no thoughts on this matter.
And the French? Well, what to take from them. These abnormal prisoners even had defenders, moreover, both defenders and the defendants could freely express their opinions. Liberty is unheard of.
Although by the time of Thermidor, both the institution of defenders and the preliminary interrogations of the accused were nevertheless eliminated.
These Frenchmen spoke differently by that time.
To punish the enemies of the fatherland, it is enough to find them. It is not so much about their punishment as about their destruction.
These speeches are already more like our Russian ones.
Even the very concept of "enemies of the revolution" was eventually expanded to such an extent that it meant everyone who tries to mislead public opinion, hinder public education, corrupt morals and public conscience.
This is closer to Lenin and even to Stalin.
"Let terror be put on the order of the day," said the deputy Royer.
Now this is much closer and clearer to us.
And deputy Shomet directly suggested organizing a revolutionary army like our CHONs. About special purpose units, I already added this myself, because humanity does not have a time machine. Simply by the similarity of the tasks. These detachments were supposed to deliver requisitioned bread to Paris. And then the deputy said: "Let the guillotine follow each such detachment." A completely sane person who fully understands that no one will give their bread to someone else's uncle so easily.
Perhaps that is why the French still began to realize that terror is not a temporary remedy, but a necessary condition for the creation of a "democratic republic". Maybe not everyone thought so, but the deputy Saint-Just thought so.
In general, although the French themselves believe that a political genocide was taking place at that time, I, as a person born in our humane USSR, are simply struck by the softness of these frogs. Think for yourself, Danton, this architect of the revolution made sure that not a single general, minister or deputy could be brought to trial without a special decree of the Convention.
What court? What special decree? Yes, these French are just crazy. Personally, the softness of these Frenchmen simply amazes me. For example, the chairman of the Tribunal Montana even tried to save Marat's murderer Charlotte Carde.
Well, who stood on ceremony with us for so long with this blind hysterical Kaplan, who allegedly shot at Lenin. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t see a person two meters away, the main thing is that she was caught. And that means you need to shoot her quickly.
In general, what the hell was going on with the French punitive authorities. For example, in the tribunal appointed by the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of Public Safety, there was not a single worker among judges and juries.
Well, what good is this?
And among the appointed members of the tribunal, these French even had the highest nobles, for example, marquises.
Is it at the marquise's tribunal? This is horror! In Russia, of course, this was not the case.
Yes, these French people are strange people. They even judged kings openly. For example, the political trial of the queen was open and lasted several days.
The mind is incomprehensible. No, to execute secretly, as we did, in some basement, so they take everything out to the public. Well, aren't they abnormal?
In general, a completely spineless people, no revolutionary firmness. True, they had a law on the acceleration of sentences, which even led to an increase in death sentences. But numbers, but numbers.
From August 6 to October 1, 1794, only 29 people were sentenced to death.
This is just some kind of mockery of revolutionary justice. Even if you consider that in the next three months, 117 prisoners were sentenced to death.
Is this the scale?
And the worst thing is that many of those convicted were acquitted altogether. Some were sentenced to exile, some to prison, for some the arrests did not even have any consequences.
This is just a mockery of the revolution!
Although not everything is so sad in this soft-bodied France. They did get smarter.
The Committee of Public Safety organized the Bureau of Administrative Supervision and the Police General.
These French even began to act decisively. For example, on the orders of Bonaparte, the Duke of Enghien is seized abroad and brought to France for execution.
The Duke, of course, was executed. But, interestingly, Murat, the governor of Paris at that time, for a long time did not agree to put his signature on the duke's death warrant. Murat had to be persuaded and even given him after the execution of the duke a tidy sum of one hundred thousand francs for his signature on the verdict. But this does not surprise me, but the fact that in the USSR no one would persuade Murat in such a case, he would simply be executed along with the kidnapped duke.
Yes, the French are strange people. And they talk about some kind of genocide. Although the revolution nevertheless destroyed several hundred thousand of them. But can this figure be compared with our scale?

In general, even in the similarity of events there are many differences. Take, for example, the revolutionary army. The French soldiers were paid, that is, they received a salary. The French even tried to fight unemployment with the help of the army. For example, the deputy Chalier proposed to form an army of the unemployed and pay them twenty sous a day for their service.
In Russia, no one paid for the service. Even now, our soldiers actually serve for free, that is, we do not consider service as a profession. Feed you, clothe you and what else? In our opinion, this is sufficient.
And in general, we were more resolutely mobilizing. Among the French, for example, a rich man could pay off the army, as we have today. Although there is a very significant difference in methods. The sons of wealthy parents could pay off the service by hiring another person for themselves. Now with us no one hires another person for themselves, but money still decides everything.
Although, during the revolution in Russia, it was impossible to pay off the army. We forcibly mobilized the old career officers who had not yet been killed, taking the relatives of these people hostage. To not be particularly twitchy.
The similarity with the phenomena in the army is also manifested in the exodus of officers. But there are also differences. French officers en masse had the opportunity to immigrate from the country. Our officers were simply killed en masse. For example, the Neva was red from the blood of naval officers.
Delusions of illiterate people - anyone can lead. And in the revolutionary armies, the soldiers themselves chose people for command positions.

Naturally, with the help of the army, both revolutions produced a permanent policy, that is, they expanded revolutionary expansion, expanded beyond the borders of the country.
The French, like the Russian revolutionaries, imagined that all the peoples only longed to establish a revolution in themselves.

But, unlike the Russians, the French believed that the main figures of the revolution would be the intelligentsia, writers, and thinkers. After all, in France, the revolution was the work of the bourgeoisie. The workers were not leaders.
Like the French, we also drew up plans for the revolution abroad.
Dantom, for example, spoke quite definitely about this.
"In our person the French nation has set up a great committee of the general revolt of the peoples against the kings."
The convention even adopted a draft decree proposed by La Revelier-Lepeau: "The National Convention, in the name of the French nation, promises fraternal assistance to all peoples who wish to regain their freedom."
We also constantly stuck our nose, or rather the muzzle of the Kalashnikov, where it was necessary and where it was not necessary.
The revolutionaries of France were going to raise an uprising throughout Europe.
Our scale was much wider, we dreamed of a world revolution, of fanning a "global conflagration". No more, no less.
Although, if you look at it, then we and the French were talking about a world war, intending to destroy the old world.
As Albert Mathiez said:
“Like the old religions, the revolution was going to spread its gospel with a sword in hand.
The monarchy needs peace, the republic needs militant energy. The slaves need peace, but the republic needs the strengthening of freedom, the French argued. Did we say something else?
Here we have a complete coincidence of views and deeds with the French.
The French began to establish revolutionary regimes abroad very, very actively. However, so do we.
Usurping power, imposing revolutionary orders in other countries, both we and the French used the populist slogan - "peace to huts, war to palaces."
In fact, this policy turned into ordinary violence, nothing more.
In general, both of them actively pursued an ordinary policy of conquest from which the local population was not at all enthusiastic.
Let us recall, for example, how many millions of people fled from the socialist paradise. Several million people went west from the GDR alone. It was the only country in the socialist camp where the population of the country was catastrophically reduced due to mass exodus.
But they fled from all the countries of socialism. Sometimes the flight took the form of simply extremist. Only here in the USSR, since the mid-fifties, there have been one hundred hijackings of airliners. This is for some forty years.

And if I started talking about revolutionary expansion, then it is not superfluous to recall that the French had not only numerous agitators abroad, but also actively subsidized newspapers.
We, with the help of the Third International, also carried out all sorts of expansion into the internal affairs of other countries. And pretty annoying.

But if we compare these two revolutions, then it is necessary to compare the leaders of the revolution. This is very curious.
Let's start with Napoleon.
In his youth, Napoleon, like a true Corsican, harbored a hatred for the French.
And I wonder what feelings young Dzhugashvili experienced, either a Georgian or an Ossetian, for the Russians?
Napoleon had very few women according to Soviet standards, although he had an illegitimate son from a Pole, whom no one ever recognized as king. At least his victories on the sexual front do not even come close to the all-encompassing Beria. Yes, and youngsters, like Stalin, he also never had.
Napoleon, like Hitler, was very well-read. Napoleon thoroughly studied Plutarch, Plato, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Reynal.
I may be asked why, when comparing the French and Russian revolutions, I mention Hitler? But how is it possible, speaking of Stalin, not to mention Adolf at the same time? Absolutely unthinkable. They, like two boots, make up an invariable pair in history.
But let's continue about Napoleon.
Napoleon felt a deep disgust for the crowd storming the Tuileries, calling them a notorious rabble and scum.
And I wonder what feelings Stalin had when he sent millions of innocent people to their deaths?
Napoleon personally went on the attack. But at that time, all attacks were hand-to-hand combat. What is hand-to-hand combat? It is best said about this by Yulia Drunina. Napoleon was wounded with a bayonet in one of the attacks. It was a combat officer.
Stalin never flew on airplanes, he was afraid for his precious life.
Napoleon took great care of his large family. Even when he received a very modest salary, even then he did not stop supporting his relatives.
We know how Stalin treated his relatives. All his wife's relatives were personally destroyed by him.
For his extremist views, Napoleon was nicknamed the terrorist.
Nobody called Stalin that, although he got into the Guinness Book of Records as the most mass murderer. But even without this, Stalin may well be ranked among the cohort of terrorists. Didn't he organize attacks on collectors, as a result of which random passers-by also died from bombs?
Napoleon flirted with the sans-culottes, borrowing their jargon and curse words.
Stalin did not borrow anything, he was simply a boor by nature.
During the revolution, Napoleon, as a supporter of Robespierre, was arrested and spent several weeks awaiting execution.
Nobody arrested Stalin after the victory of the revolution.
Napoleon, after the execution of Robespierre, could not find a job for some time and even tried to get a job with the Turks as an officer.
For our revolutionaries such a biography would cost a man his life.
In general, as far as humanity is concerned, Hitler, however strange it may sound, was, in my opinion, more humane than Stalin. For example, Hitler helped his mother's doctor to emigrate from the country, despite his Jewish origin.
What really unites Hitler with Stalin is the writing of poetry. True, Hitler composed for a particular girl, and what Stalin composed to the common people is unknown to this day.
Both Napoleon and Hitler were in great need at one time. But, neither one nor the other even thought to engage in robberies, as Stalin did.
Hitler was declared unfit for combat by a military commission, but he petitioned King Ludwig 3 with a request to serve in a Bavarian regiment and after that he was called up for military service.
Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross, first and second class.
Stalin had never been in the trenches.
Napoleon married Josephine Beauharnais, who was a widow and five years older than Bonaparte.
Stalin, as you know, chose youngsters.
Napoleon carefully controlled the newspapers, making sure that the press created his image for the people in a favorable light.
Stalin surpassed him in this. It's not even worth talking about. No wonder Stalin was subsequently accused of creating his own cult of personality.
Napoleon, like Stalin, appeared everywhere in modest clothes. But, if Stalin wore a military uniform, then Napoleon appeared everywhere in modest civilian clothes. If he put on a military uniform, then without any gold embroidery.
Napoleon, although he ordered at one time to shoot four thousand captured Turks near Jaffa, was still not as bloodthirsty as Joseph. It's not even worth talking about.
Members of the Directory in Paris were frankly despised for their arrogant, shameless theft, bribery, for luxurious everyday sprees.
Stalin behaved more modestly. He arranged carousing at night, but also every night, and this at a time when people were literally dying of hunger in the streets, as was the case in the thirties. We now know about such a depressing situation from the reports of German intelligence of that time, which have been preserved in the archives.
And again I will jump to the Nazis.
In Germany, under the Nazis, a single ideology was introduced, a one-party system was introduced.
It was the same with us.
The foreign policy of both revolutionary France and Soviet Russia was extremely aggressive. However, the same as in Germany.
Napoleon did not stand on ceremony with women. For example, there is a case with one actress, to whom he immediately said: “Come in. Get undressed. Lie down."
And how did our members, who are the Politburo, behave during the night sprees? What, Beria sat, drank the best cognac, ate black caviar and did not use his subordinates, I mean female servants, servants? I doubt. If it cost him nothing to grab any woman he liked from the street, then what can we say about subordinates. Did Stalin stop loving youngsters? Didn't pay attention to women at all? I doubt. With such and such grubs and the dead will get up.
The emigrants were allowed to return to France. With us, if anyone returned, then at best a concentration camp awaited them for many years.
Napoleon had a very respectful opinion about religion. He said that if faith is taken away from people, then in the end nothing good will come of it, and they will only turn out to be robbers from the high road.
Stalin did not care about such problems. He himself was a robber, a robber, a raider on collectors.
Fouche organized a very skillful and effective network of police espionage that covered the whole country.
Was our political police worse or what? Fewer? In addition, it was already equipped at that time with efficient electronics, albeit largely purchased abroad.
Desmond Seward, an English historian, in his book "Napoleon and Hitler" describes the police methods of that period in France in this way.
Arrests for psychological reasons were carried out mainly at night, they did not stand on ceremony with the arrested and, if necessary, they unleashed their tongues by torture.
If I didn’t know that this was talking about revolutionary France, I would have decided that we were talking about the glorious USSR, where even children were tortured, because full legal responsibility came in the USSR from the age of 13. This means that with a person already at this age they could do everything: torture, execute. And this age of thirteen years, the age of full legal responsibility, was preserved in the glorious USSR until the fifties.
Napoleon had absolute power, both civil and military, and was above the law. This is how the English historian Desmond Seward writes about Napoleon.
What kind of power did Stalin have? Absolute or not absolute?
Several assassination attempts were made on Napoleon. One of them in 1804 was successfully prevented by the police. The main performer, Georges Cadoudal, a man of extraordinary strength, was captured by the police. During his arrest, Cadoudal killed and maimed several police agents. He was beheaded, of course, after all. But, here's what's interesting, the main organizer of that failed terrorist act received only two years in prison and then, after being expelled from France, he lived safely in America.
In the Soviet Union, a person received a death sentence even for a mistake in spelling Stalin's last name, or rather, his nickname.
Napoleon was very abstemious in food. His usual lunch consisted of chicken, broth, a cup of coffee and a small amount of wine.
Everyone now knows how our members of the Politburo drank at night. Revelers and members of regional committees. The revelry of comrades from the Smolny Palace during the blockade gained particular popularity. They did not experience food shortages at all. For them, even the entire period of the blockade of Leningrad did not stop baking cakes.
On December 2, 1804, Napoleon was crowned Emperor of the French.
Nobody crowned Stalin. But was his way of life different from the royal? Yes, Joseph himself confessed to his mother that he was a king. After all, no one pulled his tongue. In the same way as no one pulled the tongue and Brezhnev, who also considered himself the king in all seriousness.
Although the French Revolution abolished all titles, Napoleon subsequently created a new nobility. There were also princes, and barons, and dukes, and counts. But let's ask ourselves a question, but weren't our party leaders the nobility? Weren't all these secretaries of the regional and city committees, in the end, in fact, ordinary appanage princelings? They had their own supplies, their own doctors, their own sanatoriums. And all this at a much higher level, obviously not at the national level.
Our Soviet director Sergei Gerasimov is quite right in his film "Journalist", arguing that our society, although classless, is not without castes.
Describing the merits of the Soviet government, they usually say that it gave people apartments and built stadiums. But after all, under Adolf Hitler in Germany, huge housing estates and stadiums were built for workers.
Yes, as far as Hitler is concerned. After all, he also wore a quite modest uniform without insignia. Like the great Stalin, like Bonaparte.
Describing Hitler's ruthlessness, it is usually said that he destroyed not only real opponents, but simply potential ones. Yes, just in case. At the same time, Adolf did not destroy the families of opponents. The Soviet government destroyed everyone, to the root.
And, if I inadvertently, by the way, mentioned Germany, then it’s worth saying a few words about concentration camps. In 1937, there were just over thirty-seven thousand prisoners in the whole of Germany.
In the same year, our political police, this oprichnina of Stalin, killed more than forty thousand officers alone. Millions were in the camps.
And if I'm already talking about Hitler, then it's worth mentioning his culinary tastes, which were very modest, like Napoleon's. Yes, he loved cakes and buttercream cakes, but otherwise he was quite moderate in food. Vegetable soups, nut cutlets. I have no information whether Hitler refused black caviar when he found out its cost, but if he did not refuse, he always remembered this price. Stalin, like his entourage, did not care at all about the cost of caviar, as well as the cost of other delicacies that these members of the Politburo consumed daily and, of course, nightly.
And if I inadvertently mentioned Hitler, then it is worth saying a little about the Fuhrer's literacy.
Hitler spoke French and English. May not be perfect. But he watched films without translators, read foreign magazines himself, without resorting to the services of translators. And, in general, Adolf read a lot, like Napoleon.
The British believed that in this French Republic people live worse than slaves. Here is how one Englishman spoke about that time.
Parisian society looks very miserable - everyone is afraid of spies of the secret police, and Napoleon deliberately cultivates general suspicion, "considering this the best way to keep the population in obedience."
And what horror did our political police inspire on people? But this is just a tiny part of the activity of the all-encompassing NKVD-KGB.
By the way, Napoleon also said: "I rule with the help of fear."
Modern historians unanimously agree that Imperial France was no less a police state than Nazi Germany. I would like to ask another question in this connection. To what extent was the USSR a police state?
Evidence from the time indicates that censorship in France was unbearable. Only four newspapers were published in Paris, compared with seventy-three in 1799. Each issue of the newspaper was read by the Minister of Police before publication.
All British newspapers were banned from sale.
I think that there is no need to talk about Soviet censorship. Even now, there are no foreign magazines and newspapers in our newsstands, and under “developed socialism” they were even more so.
Since, due to universal military service, there were not enough workers in the countryside, Napoleon began experiments with slave labor, using Austrian prisoners of war for agricultural work. In our country, as you know, they used their own, internal "enemies of the people." And there were significantly more of them, these enemies, than foreign prisoners.
The police were ubiquitous. All around were provocateurs hunting down opponents of the regime.
This is about the French police. But, if this fact is not known, then it is quite possible to think that we are talking about our police.
Napoleon liked to be defiant. In these cases, he could see his opponents, and it was easier for him to break their resistance.
I think Joseph was no less an intriguer, moreover, a very, very hypocritical intriguer. Before his arrest, he caressed all his victims, said something laudatory to the victim. And then he destroyed the man.
Here is what Napoleon wrote to his brother Joseph, appointed king of Naples: "I would like the Neapolitans to try to revolt." In other words, he advised his brother to provoke an uprising in order to identify the enemies, whom he would then destroy.
But this method is the most beloved in the USSR. Of course, I do not have access to the Soviet archives, but I am simply convinced that the uprising in Hungary, and the uprising in Germany, and the uprising in Czechoslovakia and other socialist countries were artificially provoked by the Soviets. For what? There are many reasons. I'll try to name the most popular ones.
First, to identify the enemies of the Soviet government in order to have a reason to destroy them.
Secondly, under the guise of sending your agents into the camp of the enemy. Among the thousands of immigrants and even millions, it is very difficult to identify KGB agents. Correctly?
Yes, and there is no need to name other reasons. The value of provocation is already visible from these two.
There is nothing new in such methods. As for the French, more than two hundred years ago the Prime Minister of Great Britain accused the French of deliberately provoking the people of Venice to revolt in order to have a pretext for an invasion.
The advice required only a little knowledge of history, no innovation.

Yes, a few more words about the difference between the two revolutions.
When an anti-revolutionary uprising broke out in Lyon, after the suppression of the houses of the rebellious rich, the French decided to demolish. Abnormal. We would have made large communal apartments out of these houses.

The Great French Revolution was engendered by the most acute contradictions between the various strata of French society. So, on the eve of the revolution, industrialists, traders, merchants, who were part of the so-called "third estate", paid significant taxes to the royal treasury, although their trade was fettered by many government restrictions.

The domestic market was extremely narrow, since the impoverished peasantry bought almost no manufactured goods. Of the 26 million French, only 270 thousand were privileged - 140 thousand nobles and 130 thousand priests, who owned 3/5 of the arable land and paid almost no taxes. The main burden of taxation was borne by the peasants, who were living below the poverty line. The inevitability of the revolution was also predetermined by the fact that absolutism in France did not meet the national interests, defending medieval estate privileges: the exclusive rights of the nobility to land, the guild system, royal trade monopolies.

In 1788, on the eve of the revolution, France entered into a deep economic crisis. The financial and commercial and industrial crisis, the bankruptcy of the state treasury, ruined by the wasteful spending of the court of Louis XVI, crop failure, resulting in the high cost of food, exacerbated the peasant unrest. Under these conditions, the government of Louis XVI was forced to convene on May 5, 1789, the Estates General, which had not met for 175 years (from 1614 to 1789). The king counted on the help of the estates in overcoming financial difficulties. The states-general consisted, as before, of three estates: the clergy, the nobility and the "third estate". The deputies of the "third estate" demanded the abolition of the old procedure for voting separately by chambers and the introduction of voting by a simple majority. The government did not agree with this and tried to disperse the Constituent Assembly (in June the States General were renamed by their deputies). The people of Paris supported the Assembly and on July 14, 1789, they stormed the royal fortress-prison Bastille.

The French Revolution was led by the bourgeois class. But the tasks that confronted this revolution could only be accomplished thanks to the fact that its main driving force was the masses of the people - the peasantry and the urban plebeians. The French Revolution was a people's revolution, and therein lay its strength. The active, decisive participation of the masses of the people gave the revolution the breadth and scope that it differed from. other bourgeois revolutions. French Revolution at the end of the 18th century remained a classic example of the most completed bourgeois-democratic revolution.

The French Revolution took place almost a century and a half later than the English. If in England the bourgeoisie opposed the royal power in alliance with the new nobility, then in France it opposed the king and the nobility, relying on the broad plebeian masses of the city and the peasantry.

The aggravation of contradictions in the country caused the demarcation of political forces. In 1791, three groups were active in France:

Feuillants - representatives of the big constitutional-monarchist bourgeoisie and the liberal nobility; Representatives: Lafayette, Sieyes, Barnave and the Lamet brothers. Several representatives of the current were ministers of France during the period of the constitutional monarchy. In general, the policy of the Feuillants was conservative and aimed at preventing further revolutionary transformations. After the overthrow of the monarchy on August 9-10, 1792, the Feuillants group was dispersed by the Jacobins, who accused its members of betraying the cause of the revolution.

Girondins - mainly representatives of the provincial commercial and industrial bourgeoisie.

Supporters of individual freedom, admirers of the democratic political theory of Rousseau, who very soon began to express themselves in a republican spirit, ardent defenders of the revolution, which they wanted to transfer even beyond the borders of France.

Jacobins - representatives of the petty and part of the middle bourgeoisie, artisans and peasantry, supporters of the establishment of a bourgeois-democratic republic

The course of the French Revolution 1789 - 1794 conditionally divided into the following stages:

1. Period of constitutional monarchy (1789-1792). The main driving force is the big aristocratic bourgeoisie (represented by the Marquises Mirabeau and Lafayette), the Feuillants hold political power. In 1791 the first Constitution of France (1789) was adopted.

2. Girondin period (1792-1793). On August 10, 1792, the monarchy fell, King Louis XVI and the royal family were arrested, the Girondins came to power (name from the Gironde department, in which the city of Bordeaux is located, many Girondins, such as Brissot, came from there), proclaiming France a republic. In September 1792, instead of the Legislative Assembly of France provided for by the abolished Constitution of 1791, a new Constituent Assembly, the National Convention, was convened. However, the Girondins were in the minority in the Convention. Also represented in the Convention were the Jacobins, who professed more leftist views than the Girondins, spokesmen for the interests of the petty bourgeoisie. The majority in the Convention was the so-called "swamp", on the position of which the fate of the revolution actually depended.

3. Jacobin period (1793-1794). On May 31-June 2, 1793, power passed from the Girondins to the Jacobins, the Jacobin dictatorship was established, the republic was strengthened. The French Constitution, drafted by the Jacobins, was never put into effect.

4. Thermidorian period (1794-1795). In July 1794, the Thermidorian coup deposed the Jacobins and executed their leaders. The French Revolution marked a conservative turn.

5. Period of the Directory (1795-1799). In 1795, a new French Constitution was adopted. The convention was dissolved. The Directory was established - the collective head of state, consisting of five directors. The Directory was overthrown in November 1799 as a result of the Brumaire coup led by General Napoleon Bonaparte. This marked the end of the French Revolution of 1789-1799.

The main results of the French Revolution:

1. It consolidated and simplified the complex variety of pre-revolutionary forms of ownership.

2. The lands of many (but not all) nobles were sold to the peasants with an installment plan of 10 years in small plots (parcels).

3. The revolution swept away all class barriers. It abolished the privileges of the nobility and clergy and introduced equal social opportunities for all citizens. All this contributed to the expansion of civil rights in all European countries, the introduction of constitutions in countries that did not have them before.

4. The revolution took place under the auspices of representative elected bodies: the National Constituent Assembly (1789-1791), the Legislative Assembly (1791-1792), the Convention (1792-1794). This contributed to the development of parliamentary democracy, despite subsequent setbacks.

5. The revolution gave rise to a new state structure - a parliamentary republic.

6. The state was now the guarantor of equal rights for all citizens.

7. The financial system was transformed: the class character of taxes was abolished, the principle of their universality and proportionality to income or property was introduced. The publicity of the budget was proclaimed.

More on the topic Features of the French bourgeois revolution of the 18th century: background, driving forces, main political currents, results and historical significance:

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