The Language of Revolution
Language is a revolutionary weapon, and the choice of vocabulary used, the choice of either high speech or slang, speaks volumes about who wields the weapon and who they are wielding it against. The Great French Revolution has much to teach us in this regard, and it is within the left of the Revolution, from the Jacobins to the Sans Culottes, that we see how expressive linguistic choice is of political tendencies: the farther left the group, the farther from standard speech. The more slang, the more revolutionary the figure.
There is no clearer way to see this than by comparing the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre and the most outspoken of the ultra-revolutionary Sans Culottes, Jacques Hébert, and his notorious newspaper, “Père Duchesne.” In communist historiography Robespierre has been the voice of the left, a precursor of Lenin: the communist historian Albert Mathiez even produced a pamphlet in 1920 proving that the Incorruptible was a Bolshevik avant la lettre. But Robespierre was a provincial lawyer who had gone up to Paris, defender of the most progressive wing of the nascent bourgeoisie, and enemy of the revolutionary workers of the faubourgs, of whom Hébert was the main spokesman. The audiences of the two men were different, their means and goals were different, and so they spoke differently.
Robespierre, in a speech given on June 22, 1791 at the Jacobin Club on the flight of the king, in the style of the time among the revolutionary political class, referred to Marc Antony’s being “camped around Lepidus,” of there being “nothing left for Brutus and Cassius but to kill themselves.” Of Antony “command[ing] the legions that are going to avenge Caesar! And it’s Octavian who commands the legions of the republic.”
Similarly, in a speech on the death penalty he spoke of how in Athens, “when news was brought that citizens had been condemned to death, people ran to the temples, where the gods were called upon to turn Athenians away from such cruel and dire thoughts.” Later, he refers to Scylla and Octavian and the Roman example. (The speech, ironically for a man known for having sent thousands to the guillotines, was a plea against the death penalty.)
However common these references were at the time, these appeals to the history and righteousness of Antiquity could not have meant much to the working class crowds that pushed the revolution forward on the streets and won the great victories on the battlefield.
They would have found a more familiar voice, a more familiar frame of reference in the pages of “Père Duchesne,” the profane journal edited by the Enragé Jacques Hébert. There are no arcane references to Roman heroes or appeals to abstract principle in Hébert’s writings. Legalistic arguments had no place in his discourse, and pity for the fate of those who had oppressed the people was foreign to him. On the imprisoned Louis XVI: “The crapulous Louis gave himself over to excesses, and with his drunken hiccups vomited his bile and exhaled the boldest insults against the people, his sovereign.” And the issue of sovereignty is not the subject of learned treatises or references to Solon: “Oh fuck; never forget that sovereignty resides in the nations, which makes the laws which the monarch rules by.“
And this “fuck” was his trademark. Hébert’s writing was nothing but a transcription of the speech of the man of the people, which his invented mouthpiece Père Duchesne, was set up to be. So he was in a state of rage over “the fucking slanderers of the ladies of les Halles and the flower sellers” who had dared speak their minds about the king, those who complained of these working women being “fucking asses.” For “isn’t anyone of whatever position a citizen? And doesn’t he or she have the right to speak to his king?” And he had no use for the merchants who were charging the people exorbitant prices for subsistence goods: “Fuck! The merchants have no fatherland, and they only supported the Revolution as long as it was useful to them.” And when a maximum price for goods was imposed and famine struck when merchants held back goods from circulation, he wrote: “Fuck! I see a league formed of those who sell against those who buy!”
It was this directness and extremism of expression, this use of slang and popular speech that brought Hébert to the forefront, helping him to lead the popular masses of Paris. But at the same time it made him vulnerable to the attacks of his enemies, Robespierre and the Jacobins. For his lack of measure in language was an expression of his lack of measure in politics. If Robespierre founded a religion worshiping Reason, Hébert pushed for a radical dechristianization. His choice of how to write showed who and what he chose to represent.
In order to protect himself on his left Robespierre stole elements of Hébert’s program and launched an attack on Hébert and his followers. The differences in style that mirrored their differences in program between Hébert and his Jacobin enemies were even pointed out by Camille Desmoulins in his newspaper when he addressed Hébert saying, “I’m not going to attack you with vulgar insults,” vulgarity and insults of course being Hébert’s trademarks. Disgusted with the tepidness of the Jacobins, Hébert and his supporters preached insurrection against the revolutionary government, against the Jacobins who had “shut the mouths of the patriots of the popular committees.” Robespierre now had his pretext for arresting his enemy. At the end of a four day trial Hébert was executed on March 24, 1794. The people had lost their voice in every meaning of the term.
by Mitchell Abidor