Sit-in highlights

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again against the Broad Left.

Having failed to stop the occupation, the Broad Lett Executive then issued a leaflet alleging that the occupation's support had "dwindled" , and that the campaign was now nothing but the platform of the "ultra-left"

Such a statement was a scarcely veiled invitation to the administration to move against the occupation.

Nationally and locally the Broad Left within NUS have one aim: "patient negotiation" , backed "if necessary" with empty protest actions, to achieve the non-implementation of tee increases for self supporting students only.

ASTMS p Air:

11495 The 30 week old strike of ASTMS technicians at Birmingham University over the University's refusal to implement a National Agreement with ASTMS for 5 weeks holiday is still on.

NUS President Clarke Part of last week's demonstration Tuesday March 8th saw ASTMS members gathered there from London, Cardiff, Edinburgh and other universities throughout the UK in a mass picket called at short notice on a working day as a follow up to a one day national strike in support of the Birmingham The Middlesex Polytechnic occupation began in only the Church Street administrative site and with a partial occupation at Enfield-but has now spread to engulf all six main sites.

Despite the claims of the directorate that they are on the students side, the canteens at Hendon and Enfield have been closed, minibus services stopped and light and heat cut off of the Bounds Green site.

Meanwhile the Broad Left NUS leadership is not content with doing nothing-but has sallied into members.

ASTMS General Secretary Clive Jenkins was among speakers who addressed the 1,000 strong meeting saying that the strike would be funded indefinitely.

The feeling among the strikers is still adamant-they will stay on strike until they win. Every gate of the University is picketed by no less than 12 pickets every day between 6.30am and 7pm.

Some major publishers with ASTMS membership have now joined in the struggle by blacking Hudsons University Bookshop which is situated on the Campus.

A major question to be raised on this issue is how a public institution such as this takes upon itself the right to brazenly disregard a National Agreement.

Other Universities are looking on with keen interest. If the management in Birmingham defeat ASTMS every other administration will attempt to follow suit-threatening every gain made by unionisation in this sector of the public seTTices. an attack on the London Co-ordinating Committee set up by representatives from occupied colleges.

Yet the Co-ordinating Committee itself suffers from the complete lack of leadership from Socialist Workers Party (IS) members who sit on it. These people formed the main opposition to the demand moved by Middlesex Polytechnic that the occupations be linked to the struggle against all education cuts by calling for public spending to be kept in pace with inflation.

At Kingston Polytechnic, it was members of the 'Militant' group on the union's executive who joined with right wingers to argue for an end to the college occupation, then three days old, to await the outcome of further negotiations with the directorate.

The occupation ended on March 4th with a demonstration through the town centre. But when on the Monday it was clear that no concessions had been made to the students, the union leadership still vigorously opposed any resumption of the occupation.

At Portsmouth Polytechnic over 700 students occupied the main administrative offices following a virtually unanimous decisions at a crowded union meeting.

A later attempt to further occupy the telephone exchange in the engineering block met with violent opposition from some technicians and lecturers who literally broke down the doors with crowbars and sledgehammers, which is an indication of the kind of people students are up against in fighting racism and attacks on education.

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1794: bands of thugs /'Gilded Youth') raid the Jacobin Club in Paris the period after the reaction of Thermidor ¡apoleon's conquest of all Italy (right)

"I should like to see--and this is the last and most fervent of my desires-I should like to see the last king strangled in the entrails of the last priest"

The Will of Jean Messelier, published by Voltaire, 1733.

"From all this, what is my inference? It is, that this new system of robbery. in France, cannot be rendered safe by any art; that it must be destroyed, or that it will destroy all Europe; that to destroy that enemy, by some means or other, the force opposed to it should be made to bear some analogy and resemblance to the force and spirit which that system exerts; that war ought to be made against it in its vulnerable parts. These are my inferences. In one word, with this Republic nothing independent can coexist."

Edmund Burke, On the Genius and Character of the French Revolution as it regards other Nations, (Letters on a Regicide Peace, 1796)

"The French revolution broke the balance of power in Europe: the French republic, from its birth, knew that it could not live safely in friendship with any king, that a democratic government must be the natural enemy of any arbitrary and despotic government, that there would be as much difficulty in calming the hate between them as there would in combining together vice and virtue."

The Italian 'Jacobin' Matteo Galdi, On political and economic relations between free nations (1798).

**I hated thee, fallen tyrant! grOan To think that a most unambitious slave, Like thou, shouldst dance and on the grave Of Liberty. Thou mightst built they throne Where it had stood didst prefer A frail and bloody durod which Time has swept In fragments towards Oblivion." Shelley, Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte (1815). contrasted with his rival generals.

The French bourgeoisie of 1789 made their revolution for their own rights and their own property. But the Revolution itself could not remain their own private possession.

It reached out to arouse and rely upon the sans-culottes of Paris-the wage workers, craftsmen and small employers, along with the unemployed and poor-who dragged the revolution forward. And the great mass of the peasantry stood as a roadblock against any attempt to restore all the feudal rights which the lawyers of the National Assembly abolished in August 1789.

HARNESS

Thus, with the one force pulling from the front, and the other placing their shoulders against any rolling back, the French bourgeoisie could move only in uneasy harness with two other classes: the sansculottes of the city, and the millions of peasants who worked the land.

Nor were the French revolutionaries free to contain their revolution within their own country, despite the fact it was made in the name of 'the nation'.

By a process which combined infection, invasion and infiltration, the French revolution inexorably 1796: French army welcomed into ofitan.

Napoleon in 1798 Between 1792 and 1815 four military coalitions were organised to contain and destroy it. But when the powers of Europe met to restore the old order (the 'ancien regime') at the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) they were able to reerect many of its forms, but not its substance.

IRREVERSIBLE

In Italy, Switzerland, the German states, Poland, Holland and Belgium-as well as in France itself, where a Bourbon monarch was replaced on the throne-the basic social relations had been irreversibly aitered.

Across the whole middle of Europe the French revolution had cleared the way for the development of capitalism.

From then on, politics was to take its essential shape from the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

More than two and a half decades of almost continuous war in Europe took the form of conflicts between states. But they were in reality the concealed struggles of social classes-starting between the semi-feudal monarchist aristocracy of Austria and its dominions (egged on by their relatives in the French court) and the thrusting, confidant French bourgeoisie.

Already in April 1792, betore the social struggle in France had reached its climax, nationai revolution flooded over into foreign of Austria's provinces in Belgium.

The French Assembly's decision for war sprang from a tangle of opposing motives and pressures.

One motive was defence-as a continent-wide campaign by the far right for a crusade against revolutionary France took a dangerous turn when the more reactionary and belligerent Francis II succeeded as Emperor of Austria in March 1792.

Other motives flowed from intrigues of the French court-since Louis XVI's failed Flight to Varennes' (June 1791) different The second in our series of four articles the French revolution.

The third and fourth art of 1871.

factions had sought war in the hope that defeats would disintegrate the Assembly and restore the power of the crown.

And within the Assembly the war party, headed by the future Giraudin leader, Brissot, preached 'a crusade of universal freedom' and warned that France 'will never be safe until the whole of Europe is in flames' Brissot's policies, if not his motives, were supported by a substantial body of merchants and manufacturers who anticipated that war would bring fat profits to its camp-followers.

External revolutionary prospects also lent weight to the rhetoric of Brissot and his supporters.

Events in France sharpened revolutionary processes elsewhere.

In Britain circles, (like the London Corresponding Society), sprung up to support and discuss developments across the channel and the tracts, such as Thomas Paine's memorable 'Rights of Man' which defended them.

In Poland a political combination of intellectuals and 'liberal' nobility imposed, in May 1791, a 'Constitution' superficially similar to the French, but lacking its powerful social basis.

Burke, the venomous enemy of the French revolution, unwittingly testified to the anaemic character of its Polish counterpart when he rejoiced that it involved:

"no studied insults on religion, morals or manners" and exhibited "regular progress • • towards the stable excellence British Constitution"!

In fact, even serfdom was not abolished, and Poland very shortly vanis id in a partition by Prussia, Russia and Austria.

AGITATION

In Holland, small but commercially powerful, 1789 revived a cautious agitation by moderate 'Patriots' Belgium began; in 1787, national revolt against the Austrian Emperor. Though it soon took on a revolutionary character its first steps were led, as in France, by the resistance of local aristocrats to the central government.

From 1789 the tiny statelet of Geneva saw a resurgence of middle class agitation against the regime bacing, in 1782. with French military Those who led it were abused as "sectaries of Jean-Jacques Rousseau' (the philosopher was the city's most famous son and the hero of many Jacobins).

In Italy numerous *Jacobin conspiracies' took shape; most were repressed. In Bologna two democrats were hanged for hoisting the tricolour and issuing a call to insurrection.

Paris, in the winter of 1791-92, thus contained a large number of political exiles and emigres seeking French help for their own 'demo(1794 1, and the intel idles will deal with the revolutions of cratic' or revolutionary purposes.

Together they seemed to provide a human refutation of the warnings of Robespierre, and Jean-Paul Marat, isolated on the left in the Assembly; that the peoples of Europe would not welcome 'armed missionaries' › and that France should not therefore take the initiative in war.

The foreign wat which Robespierre opposed was in fact inevitable.

The sans culottes were made up fror a cobbler and a joiner.

It was to last almost continuously until 1815.

It was also, long before that, to promote his rise and the downfall of the Girondins. In March 1793 the opportunist French commander -in-Chief, Dumouriez, was defeated in the Netherlands and (having failed to persuade his troops to march on Paris and 'destroy Jacobinism' he deserted to the enemy.

By this time the forces against France had swollen to a general coalition including Austria, Prussia,. Russia, England, Spain and several Italian states.

It appeared that, despite the guillotine which had removed his head in January, Louis XVIs intentions were about to be. realised: disarray in the Nationals Convention seemed to prelude ther destruction of the newborn French. republic.

The Pope, in one of those speculations which infallibly let the political cat out of the religious suggested that the headless.

Lousi might well be made a saint!.

But the hoped-for miracle was::

thwarted. The rising of the Paris. sans-culottes on September 4-Sth 1793 concentrated power in the : hands of the Jacobin government.

If the Committee of Public Safety was a regime of balance at home, it was single-minded in the foreign war.

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SUZANI TRESS.

Stalin ON history of France deals with national wars which followed 1848 and the Paris And to a very great extent it was able to mobilise all the lower classes in support of this.

Along with economic controls conceded to the sans-culottes went election by the army's ranks of their own combat officers.

France's armies thrust back their enemies as much by flexible tactics and revolutionary enthusiasm as by growing forces and supplies.

"We shall". declared a spokesman of the Committee of Public (left) idealised Safety in April, "stop fighting as soon as the moment arrives when the death of another enemy soldier will not serve the cause of liberty."

By the early summer of 1794 the immediate military danger had been thrust back. And its retreat became, in its turn, one of the factors in the fall of Robespierre and Thermidor.

In the previous article (SP54) we drew a comparison between the French revolution and the Russian Revolution of 1917.:

Each displayed the permanent, combined character of ary processes.

TEMPORARY

In each case the opposition to the old autocracy by bourgeois 'democrats' and working masses coincided, but cutting across their temporary alignment was also the struggle between the rising capitalists and those that they exploited.

•But these two divisions were at very different levels of development, giving rise to quite opposite results.

In Russia there was the seizure of power by the Soviets in October 1917, in France there was the counter-revolution and white terror which followed Thermidor July 1794).

The parallel between the two revolutions foos not end there.

In both cases the revolurion had a momentum that carned it. and the new property relations it had established, far beyond its own borders.

This remained true even after political reaction at home had crushed the most revolutionary torces, and physically annihilated most of those who led the initial struggles.

In the case of Russia, Stalin's armies and agents, after 1945, imposed a transformation of the economies, and the states, of Eastern Europe into lesser images of the Soviet Union.

And similarly the armies and diplomacy of the Directorate and Thermidorians, then of Napoleon ploughed up the soil of feudal Europe, forming states where the bourgeoisie ruled, states that allsome more, some less directly -had their political capitals in Paris.

War and diplomacy in those days, without radio or the internal combustion engine, was a much slower, more seasonal and confused business than today.

The political substance emerges more clearly from the tangle of march and counter-march, battles and treaties, partitions and coalitions, if we single out one strand.

MOMENTUM

Italy highlights many of the general issues in the European wars -starting as the defensive response of a revolutionary nation under threat, but then acquiring (as in Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812) a momentum of its own as the spearhead of imperial policy by the major capitalist state on the continent.

In a short articlè such as this, the Italian events must serve to exemplify forces that were also at work in countries as different as Prussia, Ireland and Russia.

Northern Italy formed the runway on which the military career of ns culotte, left Napoleon Bonaparte really off.

But he assumed command there (April 1796) already blooded in a political, as well as a military, sense.

He directed the action which crushed the royalist revolt of Vendimiare (October 1795). Not long after, leading the army of the interior, he took the initiative in forcibly closing the Jacobin clubs in Paris (February, 1796).

The hasty and unsuccessful plans for insurrection (May 1796) by Babeuf's 'Conspiracy of Equals' were precipitated by Napoleon's repression.

Imprisoned in 1794 as a Robespierrist, Napoleon came to a fully independent command in Italy as the instrument of a sharp shift to the right by the Directory in Paris.

The 'soldier of the revolution" paused momentarily in Paris to marry the aristocratic Josephine de Beauharnals, and took command early in April 1796.

At that time Italy was not one nation but a jig-saw puzzle of small states. In a swift series of actions Napoleon took Savoy and Piedmont in the east (April-May), entered Milan (May 15th), surrounded Mantua (beseiged till it fell in February 1792), and forced surrender from the rulers of Parma, Modena and Bologna.

By Juge ibe I. Tear old General effectively commanded the North Italian plain t the Po valley) as far as the borders of Venice, and the Pope was suing for peace.

Echoing his victories against the Austrian armies, city after city came to the boil in republican and 'jacobin' demonstrations, forming assemblies, adopting constitutions based on the French model, calling for a free and unified Italy.

SELECTIVE

Napoleon, however, was selective in his support for these movements.

At Alba (near Turin, in Piedmont) 'patriots' proclaimed a republic, but Napoleon repudiated them; he had already agreed that the king of Sardinia should continue to rule the area.

In the spring of 1797, turning north, Napoleon's Army of Italy threatened Austria itself, and crowds rioted when the Bank of Vienna shut its doors.

Napoleon did in fact enter Venice where a revolutionary government had replaced the old oligarchy, abolishing slavery and the ghetto.

But the city was handed back to Austria as part of the overall carve-up of Italy at the Treaty of Camp Formio (October 1797).

Part of the deal was that Austria (secretly) recognised French rights west of the Rhine.

The barter of Venice, therefore, was not only a stepping-stone in Napoleon's career.

It was also an essential element of the Directory's efforts to safeguard 'Republicanism in one country' To do this they tried to secure France's 'natural frontiers' announced as being, approximately, the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees.

YALTA Like alt later, Napoleon negotind a halt later,. ated his victories not as a revolutionary, broker And a sequel to this 'settlement' universally unpopular among Italian democrats, was the rising against France's annexation of Piedmont, in the early months of 1799.

Before they were put down by the French army, the Jacobins of Piedmont marched to the slogan of 'national sovereignty' carrying portraits of French revolutionary martyrs, such as Marat, the sansculottes' spokesman for 'the despotism of liberty', murdered by a royalist in 1793.

Their-only apparent-inconsistency foreshadowed that of the Hungarian workers and students in 1956, who marched to confront Kruschev's tanks beneath portraits of Lenin.

Throughout the afterbirth of the French revolution, the Italian peninsula was taken and retaken by France and the various coalitions ranged against her.

In the general counter-revolutionary offensive of 1799 Jews were burned alive, along with the Liberty tree, in the main square of Sienna in central Italy.

And the six-month-old Neapol-. itan Republic fell to a Austrian-Turkish army, backed by the British fleet.

The restored Bouton asted Admiral Nelson to treat Naples 'like a rebel Irish town' . He eagerly obliged, presiding (along with his mistress, Lady Hamilton) over a blood-letting in which during the next six months almost the entire intelligentsia of the city were hanged or beheaded.

In this he reflected to the full, British foreign policy, which persistently allied itself with the most reactionary enemies of France.

The British bourgeoisie-having long ago accomplished their own revolution-were not hostile to the politics of the French revolution as such. But they were determined to prevent the spread of French Europe.

The British bourgeoisie had no natural affinity with the powers of old Europe, with which they formed such a devious and brutal series of agreements.

BEYOND LIMITS

But they were hostile both to the permanent character of the French revolution, going beyond the social limits desired by the bourgeoisie, and to the rise of a rival modern state in Europe.

Within the international civil war that involved Italy right up to 1815 the puntuation marks provided by the formal occasions accurately reflect Napoleon's increasingly reactionary role,, especially after his Brumaire coup d'etat in Paris (November 1799).

In July 1801 the Pope retrieved most of his territory and authority in Italy, in return for giving-under the Concordat, ratified in 1802effective supervision over the French clergy to Napoleon.

Soon French (and Italian) pulpits were being employed for sermons on the virtues of taxation and the delights of conscription. One early result of this 'detente' was that Napoleon was installed in January 1802 as President of an Italian Republic-his former Cisalpine Republic, in the Po valley.

But Napoleon and his ministers and relatives not only sought to make their peace with the old order, they donned its very garb.

Early in 1805 Napoleon, freshly crowned 'Emperor of France', in the presence of the Pope was preparing to leave italy for the campaign in which he destroyed the archaic feudal patchwork of the Holy Roman Empire, and cleared the ground for the modern German state.

'KING ITALY'

But on his way the 'soldier of the revolution' paused in Milan Cathedral to have himself annointed 'King of Italy'-explaining, by way of republican excuse, that both his brothers had declined the throne!

And Italy, on the eve of the disastrous Russian campaign, was itself to be absorbed into the 'Grand Empire'.

To this day the French revolution and its aftermath divides those who speak of it. There is scarcely a line written on-for example-Robespierre or Napoleon which is not partisan.

The same was true at the time. Books could be written (many have been) on the intellectual results of the revolution.

Any thinker worth his salt (and a number who were not) felt obliged to take an attitude. Even the cautious Immanuel Kant fell into disfavour in Germany, and in Budapest the authorities publicly burned his books.

RESPONSIBLE

They seem to have felt that, having deprived God of His philosophical props, Kant must also somehow be responsible for the fall of Kings.

Napoleon (like Stalin) repelled many who initially greeted the Shelley, born in the week that the revolutionary Commune was established in Paris (August 4th, 1792) possessed not only great poetical gifts but an acute historical intuition.

He was one of the relatively few (unlike for example, Wordsworth) who cursed the Napoleonic dictatorship, but without ever going over to the side of the old order.

In his last major poem he pictures the revolution as a chariot, rushing onwards under its own ... a Shape So safe within, as one whom years deform, dusky hood and double cape, Crouching within the shadow of a tomb"

And Shelley asks:

... Who is he with chin Upon his breast, and hands crossed on his chain?" "The child of a fierce hour; he sought to win The world, lost all that it did contam Of greatness, in its hope destroyed"

(The Triumph of Life, 1822)

The violent combination of revolution and reaction in the Napoleonic regime was one that Shelley could only grasp through images.

We see it through the lens of our own times. But the histories of the Russian revolution and its degeneration, and of the French revolution, mutually illuminate one another.

That was the reason why Trotsky, to understand the roots of the Stalinist dictatorship in the Soviet Union, reached back to an analogy with Napoleon and his Trotsky.

Trotsky explained that, in each case, it was a question of political counter-revolution imposing itself upon, but not reversing, revolutionary social conquests:

'Was Thermidor counter-revolutionary? The answer to this ques tion depends upon how wide a significance we attach, in a given case, to the concept of 'counterThe social overturn of 17891793 was bourgeois in character. In essence it reduced itself to the replacement of fixed feudal property by 'free' bourgeois property. The counter-revolution, corresponding to this revolution, (our emphasis) would have had to attain the re-establishment of feudal property.

But Thermidor did not even make an attempt in this direction. Robespierre sought his support among the artisans-the Directory among the middle bourgeoisie. Bonaparte allied himself with the banks.

All these shifts-which had, of course, not only a political but a social significance-occurred, however, on the basis of the new bourgeois society and state." (The Workers State and the Question of Thermidor and Bonapartism, 1935).

The analogy between Stalinism and Thermidor was an essential part of the Fourth International's defence of the Soviet state, even when the crimes of Stalin put those of Napoleon Bonaparte utterly in the shade.

And, echoing the ostracism of Shelley, the Trotskyist movement's objective assessment of its own period has earned it the combined hatred of the old order and of the new usurpers.

The French revolution produced some of the basic symbols of modern politics. The red flag (earlier used by the authorities as a warning that they were about to fire on demonstrators) was first flown by revolutionaries in Paris, in July 1792.

Sewn on it were the words: 'Martial Law of the Sovereign People against Rebellion by the Executive Power' After Thermidor the red flag was eclipsed by the French tricolor.

Napoleon surrounded himself with a nauseating 'cult of personality', ', draped in the French flag and capped with the Imperial Crown But in the 1848 revolution both appeared again: the red flag on the barricades erected by the Paris workers, and Napoleon as a pathetic caricature-his nephew Louis Bonaparte.

The struggle of the working class in 1848 will be the subject of the next article.

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PICKET IN OFFICIAL DISPUTE

military and economic strength t balance of power' in a divided