THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM

Frequently, when silly partisanship blinds members and they flail one another with words, "left" and "right" are carelessly bandied about. Although it is frequently pointed out to the Americans by our other members that these labels seem absurd to them, the use of them persists. I think it useful to review the political spectrum, therefore, despite the likelihood that some may use such a thread as a soapbox from which to excoriate those with whom they disagree.

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In October, 1789, one of the journées of the French Revolution took place. A journée is a day's work or travel (hence, the english word journey), as opposed to un jour, which is simply a day. In the context of the French Revolution, the term is used by historians to denote days (or a few days) upon which a significant event took place. The revolution was precipitated by a series of events, which began with the failure of the wheat harvest in 1788, due to a wide-spread storm in northern France which had ruined the crop. The financial incompetence of the royal government lead to a crisis in which the King called the Estates to sit, but it is important to remember that successful revolutions require the participation of the people--the middle class cannot accomplish such things on their own. Just as with armies, revolutions need cannon fodder.

On October 3, 1789, aristocratic French officers had held a dinner at which they had ridiculed the new National Assembly (as the Estates had become) and trampled into the ground a symbol of the revolution and the abolition of feudalism, the red and blue cockade (an ornament for hats or coats). Their hosts, unfortunately, were the officers of la garde Française, a regiment which had mutinied even before the storming of the Bastille in the previous July, charging their officers with peculation (the theft of public monies entrusted to an official, in this case, the soldier's pay). Bailly, the mayor of Paris, quickly got word of the event, and the soldiers spread the news through the streets. October 4 was sultry and tension reigned in the city. Early the following morning, the women of the main market in Paris, when trying to buy bread, were told that little was available, because no wheat had been milled, and no flour was available. Charging this to speculators who were hoarding grain (they were absolutely correct), they began to riot, attacking bakeries to take the bread by main force, and turning over the stalls of the hawkers in the streets. This is more significant than a modern person might understand, as bread was literally the staff of life to European peasants of the day--a working man might eat four to six pounds of bread a day, and little else, and rarely any meat. People literally could not feed their families, and members of the very middle class which were leading the revolution were growing rich and fat off the circumstance.

And so October 5, 1789, became the second great journée of the revolution--the Day of the Market Women. Agitators had attempted to arouse the regiments in Paris the day before after word of the officers' dinner had gotten out, but Lafayette and the National Guard had patrolled the streets and kept a lid on trouble. Now the market women began to sing and to march, and they headed to Versailles. The National Guard were not going to stop them, and the agitators (Carlisle alleges that some dressed in women's clothing for the purpose) fell in with the marchers to whip up their anger. Arriving at Versailles, they demanded entry, and when refused, they assaulted the soldiers on guard, killing and mutilating one, and broke into the palace. The Queen and her children were literally lead out one door as the market women broke down the opposite door. They ransacked the room, bouncing on the bed, trying on and then shredding the Queen's night gowns, commenting on how well the "aristos" had it in comparison to themselves.

Finally, after the Queen had come out on to a balcony with her son to appeal for order, and had been driven off with stones and offal thrown at her, a palace official negotiated an end to the riot the following morning, October 6, 1789, when it was agreed that the King and his family would travel to Paris. The King and his family were installed in the Tuileries Palace, and the National Assembly, now the National Constituent Assembly (meaning they were to constitute a new government), was installed in le Manège, the former riding school. The royal color of France, white, was added to the revolutionary cockade, and the red, white and blue flag of France was born (the red and blue had been the heraldic colors of Paris).

From the table of the President of the Assembly, as he looked out over the delegates, the hard line "obstructionists" were to his right, Mirabeau and the "left-center" constitutional monarchists were immediately in front of him, and Danton and the Girondistes, as well as other republicans, were on the left. Hence, our terms for conservatives as on the right, and "radicals" as on the left. (The terms conservative, liberal and radical do not appear in the English language in a political context, however, until after the Peterloo massacre of trades unionists in 1819, and the fight over the reform bill in 1830.)

Significantly, however, the true radicals (Danton and the Girondistes would have been happy simply to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic, ending the revolution) were lead by Marat and Robespierre, and they sat above and behind the factional leaders in front of the President, in the area which became known as The Mountain. It was at this time that the members of the Assembly lost their cohesion (and to a large extent, their focus) and splintered into factions.

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After the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the leaders of the victorious nations assembled at Vienna, and sought ways to contain not only France (with no united Germany, France remained the largest and most militarily formidable nation west of Russia), but the "revolutionary impulse." England was right in there with the idea of clipping French wings, but had little taste for an effort to suppress the people, despite their plutocratic and oligarchic form of government. Russia, Austria and Prussia formed an anti-revolutionary political alliance which they called, with considerable conceit, the Holy Alliance. Discontent simmered. Writing his history of the French Revolution in the 1830's, Carlisle finished the work by noting that working men in Paris in 1835 still could not afford to buy enough bread to satisfy their hunger, and states that he had seen them taking "sardines" (sprats of some kind) from the river to mix with "weeds" to put on their bread. Socialism was as much a product of the successful repression of movements for popular reform of government as they were any putative revolutionary character of the people at large. In 1848, socialist revolt exploded across Europe, at a time when various crop failures had exacerbated what seemed to many people their common existence on the edge of starvation, and especially because of the failure of the potato beginning in 1846. In Italy and many parts of Germany, men from the aristocracy and the middle class whose sympathies lay with the common people lead successful insurrections which took over cities for a time. The Polish, whose nation had disappeared in three partitions by Prussia, Austria and Russia, rose against their masters, as they had before and would do again. The "Holy Alliance" reacted with a vengeance. Peasant armies, well lead, defeated royal armies for a time, but their successes were limited. The socialist uprisings were crushed, and those alleged to have taken part were treated with appalling brutality--tens of thousands were summarily executed, often on the flimsiest of evidence. Many of these "socialists" came to America--ironically, successful farmers fleeing the crop failures had come as well, and both "conservative" and "liberal" politics in the United States were soon being lead by European immigrants--a great many of the "forty-eighters" fought for Mr. Lincoln in our civil war.

In England, the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 had badly scared and angered the propertied classes, but thoughtful politicians had taken note. In 1832, a reform bill was passed which expanded the electorate (although it was still pitifully small by our standards), and the terms conservative and liberal replaced tory and whig. England was spared the socialist uprising, and in fact opened its doors to many refugees.

In France, at the time of the revolution, the Duke of Orleans had renamed himself "Philippe Égalité" (Phillip Equality) and had supported the revolution, as had his son, Louis-Philippe. When the King was executed, however, Louis-Philippe had left the revolutionary army, and joined the Austrians. He became an exile and wandered the continent, ending up in America, where he resided in Philadelphia for four years, and where his sister married an American. With the fall of Napoleon, he had returned to France, which had a monarchy imposed on it by the Congress of Vienna. Louis-Philippe took the part of the "liberal" citizens, however, which was in keeping with his stand early in the French revolution. Louis XVIII was unpopular with the French, who didn't particularly want a new monarchy. His successor was even more unpopular, as Charles X tried repression to stifle opposition. Louis-Philippe openly lead opposition to Charles, and became more and more popular, until finally, in the July, 1830 revolution, he became "the Citizen King." But in 1847, France was suffering from a bad economy and crop failures like the rest of Europe, and another revolution broke out. Louis-Philippe abdicated in favor of his grandson, and then fled France for England. Although his grandson was initially accepted, a good deal of behind the scenes political skullduggery lead to the proclamation of a second empire, a republican empire. Crucial in all of this was Louis Bonapart, a nephew of Napoleon Bonapart. With the socialist uprisings of 1848, the middle class, who had opposed Louis-Philippe's monarchist regime, became alarmed. Louis Bonapart, carefully scenting "reaction" in the wind (this is the era when the term "reactionary" begins to be applied to extreme conservatism), began to cultivate conservative middle class leaders, and finally, in December, 1851, lead a coup d'etat which established him as the Emperor Napoleon III.

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Never liking or trusting one another, the English and French governments were nevertheless increasingly pushed together by their opposition to the reactionary and repressive conservatism of the Holy Alliance. Palmerston, an arch-conservative, still found it useful to have the French as allies in his many successful diplomatic conferences which helped to keep the general peace in Europe for more than fifty years (roughly 1815 to 1870, if one does not count the socialist uprisings as a war). Napoleon III was a politician and schemer more than an emperor, and he was able not only to goad the Turks into defiance of the Russians in 1853, he was able to convince Austria and Prussia that it was not their quarrel and that they risked another general European War. The English minister at Constantinople hated the French, but he hated the Russians more, and with his influence, the English and French eventually went to war on Turkey's side against the reactionary emperor Nicholas I ("one Tsar, one Church, one Russia"), in what became known as the Crimean War. Napoleon III became convinced of his own military ability (a dangerous trait in most monarchs) and the invincibility of the French Army, and therefore invaded northern Italy in 1859 to oppose the Austrian oppression of Italian nationalists. The French won, but paid a horrible price. Napoleon III was appalled to think that he had supported true revolutionaries, and withdrew, but it was too late for the Austrians, and Cavour and Garibaldi eventually established a constitutional monarchy in Italy. Parts of Europe were moving toward liberalism, while other parts sank deeper into reaction. Austria's humiliation by the French signaled to Bismark both that Austria was weak and could be knocked off its pedestal as abitror of German politics, and that France was a dangerous political and military enemy. Having beaten up the Danes in 1864, Bismark turned to Austria, and the Prussians definitively defeated them in 1866. Bismark had his empire, and France was his next target, in 1870.

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I don't think it necessary to rehearse the stories of the the two world wars. Suffice it to say that the two events lead Europe into a nightmare wilderness of political strife, with revolution and counter-revolution, the rise of fascism, and the rebirth of liberal politics after the defeat of Hitler. The middle class established center-right parties to attempt to enshrine their privilege, and level-headed socialists established center-left parties to appeal to the working class without alarming the middle class too much. Extreme left wing parties languished because of the obvious comparisons to the Warsaw Pact countries' poverty and discontent. Extreme right wing parties languished because of their association in the poplular mind with fascism. Both the far left and the far right have been "rehabilitated" in Europe, and have made great electoral strides, the one trading on the discontent of the working class, the other using communist scare tactics and crypto-racism.

This is a very superficial analysis, and i don't expect it to go unchallenged. The point however, is to discuss the political spectrum, how it came about, what its constituent parts are, and most particularly, the extent to which these differ in North America from the situation in Europe.

I solicit your thoughts. Try not to start any fires which will get out of control.