The thesis which was proposed to maintain here was that the French

Revolution and Revolutionary Era in Europe, was a Precursor to Indian

Renaissance and National Movement. This thesis was an attempt to find the links

between two very important and revolutionary events of world history, both doors

to opening a new era in history, both having some very common roots though in

their subsequent development and nature, they did differ in some respects. This

was an endeavour to trace the inspirational linkages between the epoch creating

event of French Revolution and rise of Indian Renaissance and National

Movement. The French Revolution and revolutionary era following it was a very

important motivating factor for rise of Indian nationalism, a linkage not at once

evident or manifest but nevertheless very much and substantially there. French

Revolution was an eye-opener to the newly awakening nationalists of India. In

this era of globalisation, and everything being studied from an international

outlook, it is very essential that whatever research we do, should be relevant

globally or internationally. Our view or vision should be spread out and have an

all time relevance instead of seeing things from an Indian perspective only. I have

endeavoured to make my research relevant not only to an Indian reader but also

to anyone from abroad who will find something interesting in it from his or her

side or to any international body also.

Thomas Paine’s revolutionary tract ‘The Rights of Man and of the

Citizen’ (September, 1789), contains in a nutshell the important principles of the

French Revolution: ‘Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect

of their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility.

The nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty; nor can any individual, or

any body of men, be entitled to any authority which is not expressly derived from

it.’ Property was declared to be a natural right as well as liberty, security and

“resistance to oppression”. Freedom of speech, religious toleration and liberty of the

press were declared inviolable. All citizens were guaranteed equality of treatment

in the courts. No one was to be imprisoned or otherwise punished except in

accordance with due process of law. Sovereignty was affirmed to reside in the

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people and officers of the government were made subject to deposition if they

abused the powers conferred upon them. These very important provisions of the

French Revolution in turn became the guiding principles for the Indian

Nationalist movement. The principles of liberty, equality and fraternity enshrined

by the French Revolution were in turn followed by the Indian Renaissance

movement and enshrined in the constitutions of almost all the countries of the

world.

The difficulties of the limited monarchy of France were complicated

by an embarrassing foreign situation. It should be borne in mind that Europe as a

whole respected the class-society which the French Revolution attacked, and that

every European country, except Great Britain, adhered to absolute monarchy.

Outside of France there appeared as yet no such thing as “public opinion,”

certainly no sign, among the lower classes of any opinion favourable to revolution.

In Great Britain alone there was a constitutional monarchy, and in the early days

of the French Revolution, so long as British statesmen could flatter themselves that

their neighbours across the Channel were striving to imitate their political system,

they sympathised with the course of events. But when it became evident that the

Revolution was going further, that it aimed at a social and democratic

leveling, then even British criticism assailed it.

In this chapter, it was endeavoured to trace the similarities and

relationships between the two, the Revolutionary movement in France and

Revolutionary Era in Europe and the Indian National and Renaissance

Movement and I have tried to prove in this thesis that the former was the

precursor of the latter. Broad points have been given before, in this Chapter, I will

give in a nutshell the different points making the former the precursor of the

latter and the similarities, relationships and differences if there, between the two.

Firstly, the French Revolution and Revolutionary Era in Europe was the precursor

as is obvious from the first apparent view that the French Revolution movement

was prior in time compared to Indian Renaissance and National Movement. Being

the first out of the two as far as the time factor is concerned, it can be doubly

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and emphatically said that it was the precursor of Indian Renaissance and

National Movement. Thus so far as the time factor is concerned, no one can

dispute this fact.

Secondly, it was the precursor so far as its overall impact and

enlightening and motivating factor is concerned. The whole world was affected by

it and its principles, particularly India so far as my topic is concerned. No one

could escape its inspirational grasp. It motivated us to awaken ourselves from our

stupor and think about progressing ourselves in every way which would happen

only when we were free from bondage.

Thirdly, like the French Revolutionary Movement, Indian National and

Renaissance Movement also passed through different phases with their distinctive

characteristics. Though both occurred in different time periods, there was somewhat

resemblance in their phases.

Phases of the Two Movements (Their position concurrently or viceversa

concerning time or period in the two places).

French Revolution & Revolutionary Era Indian National & Renaissance

Following it Movement

(1) At the time of the Revolution of (1) In India also roundabout 1700

1789, condition of general people something, condition of general

not congenial at that time.This due mass of people not congenial,

to their own rulers,out of whom one only difference was that condition

was not of their own country. thus totally due to foreign rulers.

(2) The people in the French Revolution (2) In the Indian National and Re

of 1789 and era following it i.e. the -naissance movement also, role

thinkers and reformers there,played of thinkers and reformers also

a considerable role in it and its later was considerable and immense.

-on repercussions.

(3) Activity started after awakening in (3) Similar activity started in

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subconscious and conscious levels India also, after gradual

which led to fall of Bastille on 14th. awakening. It led to 1857

July 1789 etc. revolt and small and periodic

outbursts here and there.

(4) There was re-grouping and (4) Re-grouping and organised

organised activity. activity here also and

difference here was that more

organised activity here of

social reformers. There was

legislation concerning

abolition of sati and widow

remarriage.

(5) There were large scale activities (5) Large-scale activity

here like Tennis Court Oath of organised here also like later

June 20th 1789 etc. on Gandhiji’s non-cooperation

movement.

(6) There was terrorist nature of the (6) There was terrorist activity

French Revolutionary movement. in Indian National movement

There were clubs there similar to also. Indians generally more

the revolutionary groups in India. tolerant, thus less bloody but

This was only to a greater extent nevertheless terrorist periods

compared to India and more (aspects) were there.

thoroughly organised and not

sporadic as in India,nevertheless

it was very much there. Here the

terrorist period was long and

intermittent both and also much

more bloody than in India.

(7) Here the economic factor was (7)In India also,the economic

underpinning every other factor. factor was underpinning

There was economic every other factor.There was

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exploitation in France and Europe economic exploitation and

at hands of their own rulers but of consequent weakening at

foreign origin (one of them) who hands of foreign rulers and it

behaved like outsiders only. was a very important factor

for arousing the people.

(8) They wanted freedom to develop (8) Here also the general

and advance i.e. the mass of the people wanted freedom to

people. This was an overriding develop and advance.

factor.

(9) It led to Constitution being evolved (9) Resulted in formulation

gradually and concrete points of Constitution, enshrining

being embellished in it. People thus principles safeguarding the

became secure.Principles of Liberty, rights and liberty of the

Equality and Fraternity inspired and people. Thus led to their

still kept on inspiring the people. security. Declaration of the

Rights of Man was the

motivating factor for

Indians.

(10) There were different leaders at (10) Like the French Revolu

different stages of the Revolution. –tionary and National mo-

Leaders could be categorised into vement,the leaders in India

moderates like theGirondists and the also kept on changing in

extremists likethe Jacobins. An after each phase. There were

-effect of the French Revolutionary moderates and extremist

movement was emergence of an leaders in Indian National

important leader like Napoleon movement too. End result

Bonaparte. of Indian arising was also

emergence of a

leader like Gandhiji.

(11) There was predominant influence (11) Similarly, predominant

of ideas in the French Revolution. influence of ideas in

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Indian National and

Renaissance movement

also.

The resemblance between the two was that one form of revolutionary

movement overtook another in both the places and thus form and nature of the

movement kept on changing in both the places. People of next forthcoming stage

absolutely different from previous stage in both places. New leaders kept on

emerging and taking the reins and with them kept on bringing a new,

comprehensive outlook to the movement. In both, the national movement was won

in bits and pieces, by this process only nation and Constitution were formed.

The differences between the two were only differences of place and people

and local factors. The overall main inspirational motivating principles were

the same. The principle of brotherhood was propounded by French Revolution

and thinkers and social workers of Indian pre-Renaissance, Renaissance and

National period.

In general a nation is a natural growth; it is a group of families or

individuals with the same traditions. But a State is an organised government. It

will be clear then that the State ‘may’ be the organised nation, but the nation ‘may’

be subordinated to a State-organisation not its own. Such is our modern conception

of the distinction; but no such distinction was clear to the thinkers of the

Renaissance, and the vast majority of the governed, who were led by the thinkers

or driven by the officials, could not possibly as yet have distinguished the right of

every government to be independent from the right of every nation to have its

own government. Renaissance sovereignty therefore was a State ideal rather than a

national ideal, but it had within it implicitly the later ideal of modern

Nationalism.1` This does not imply that there was no national sentiment --- there

clearly was in England and France of the fourteenth century; but this national

sentiment went to support established dynasties and State sovereignty, and did not

involve the expression in the government of the will of the group governed.

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It was important for the coming age that in an empty continent

offering boundless opportunities for innovation and enterprise a new gospel of

liberty and equality had been proclaimed as the slogan of a triumphant republic.

The American declaration of rights gave the cue to every friend of liberty in the

old world. What the Americans had made themselves by revolution the Europeans

might become by a similar exercise of daring. The spirit of liberty took many

forms, constitutional with Mirabeau, revolutionary with Danton, romantic with

Schiller, Shelley, and Lamartine, prophetic with Mazzini, intellectual with Condorcet

and J. S. Mill, practical with Cobden and Cavour, militant and adventurous with

Cochrane and Garibaldi; but once aroused it embarked upon a contest which is

still unconcluded. Surviving the crimes of the French Revolution and the terror of

Napoleon, it succeeded by the end of the nineteenth century in founding

parliamentary institutions in every important European country with the exception

of Russia. Like the Alexandrian age, the times which have now to be surveyed

witnessed an immense increase in the scope, velocity, and complexity of events. In

less than a hundred and fifty years, the population of Europe grew by more

than three hundred and fifty millions.

The “condition of the people question,” though always of the first

importance, was never steadily and continuously kept in the forefront of political

attention. Other causes or diversions more melodramatic and attractive, such as the

rivalry of nations, the thirst for empire, the appetite for markets, were apt to

ensnare the attention of statesmen or inflame the passion of mobs. The history of

Europe, then, cannot be narrated strictly as the sequence of those multitudinous and

almost insensible changes which transformed a society in which mill-owners and

landowners were predominant into one in which a town clerk, a borough engineer,

a medical officer of health, or a schoolmaster may make all the difference to the

happiness of a community. It would be too great a simplification of issues to

regard the European story as nothing but a struggle of classes, a clash of

economic interests. That would be to underrate the rich and varied stuff of human

nature, the distractions of statesmen and the waywardness of events. In actual life

even the most important social problems which press upon a generation are never

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removed into a laboratory, and after dispassionate examination there and then

thoroughly and scientifically solved. The real nature of social ailments may for

many years on end be completely ignored. We may search the memoirs of Guizot

(1787 – 1874) one of the greatest Frenchmen of the nineteenth century, without

finding evidence that he was aware of the soul of the underworld and of its

many troubles.

Everywhere society will be transformed by mechanism and capital, and

everywhere governments, if they are to survive, will be compelled to make

provision for a new population, owning no capital, uprooted from the stable

economic conditions and ancient pieties of village life, without standards, without

traditions, without loyalties, the flotsam and jetsam of rude and jostling

competition. We are entering in fact upon an industrial age. We must forestall its

dangers, anticipate its needs, guide its course. Europe said nothing of the kind. So

far from attending to the faint signals of the coming industrial democracy

which were already visible in the sky, it plunged into the wars of the French

Revolution and the Empire.

Enlightenment is humanity’s departure from its self-imposed

immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s intellect without the guidance

of others. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause is not a lack of

intelligence but a failure of determination and courage to think without the

guidance of someone else. Dare to know ! This then is the slogan of the

Enlightenment ---- Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment ?’(1784).

The years between roughly 1660 and 1789, which witnessed the

prevalence of absolutism in western Europe, witnessed as well the most important

mutation in all of European intellectual and cultural history to occur between the

Middle Ages and the present. Just as the sweep of fresh winds can greatly change

the weather, so in the last few decades of the seventeenth century the sweep of

new ideas led to a bracing change in Europe’s “climate of opinion.” For purposes

of analysis it is convenient to refer to two phases within the larger period: the

triumph of the scientific revolution in the second half of the seventeenth century

and the age of “Enlightenment” which followed for most of the eighteenth century.

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But without any doubt the same intellectual winds that swept into Europe during

the later seventeenth century prevailed for well over a hundred years. Indeed, their

influence is still felt today.

How did the new intellectual climate differ from the old ?

Concentrating on essentials, three points may be stressed. First, whereas medieval,

Renaissance and Reformation thinkers all assumed that past knowledge was the

most reliable source of wisdom, the greatest thinkers from the seventeenth century

onward rejected any obeisance to ancient authority and resolved to rely on their

own intellects to see where knowledge would lead them. Making their motto “dare

to know,” they stressed the autonomy of science and the free play of the mind in

ways unheard of in the West, since the golden age of Greece. Second, the new

breed of thinkers believed strongly that knowledge was valueless if it could not

be put to use. For a Plato, an Aristotle, or a St. Thomas Aquinas alike, the greatest

wisdom was the most abstract wisdom since such wisdom helped to turn the

human mind away from all earthly “corruptibility” and supposedly brought

happiness by its sheer resemblance to timeless divinity. But after the change in

Europe’s climate of opinion in the late seventeenth century, all knowledge without

practical value was belittled and thinkers from every realm of intellectual

endeavour aimed directly or indirectly at achieving “the relief of man’s estate.”

Firstly, the new climate of opinion was characterised by the demystification of

the universe. Up until the mid-seventeenth century, most people, learned and

unlearned, assumed that the universe was driven and inhabited by occult forces

that humans could barely understand and surely never control unless they were

magicians. But around 1660 a mechanistic worldview swept away occultism, and

pixies became consigned to the realm of children’s storybooks. Thereafter nature

was believed to work like the finest mechanical clock ---- consummately

predictable and fully open to human understanding.

Why such a dramatic change in basic patterns of thought took

place when it did will long remain a subject for speculation. Certainly the

prior Scholastic stress on human rationality and the Renaissance reacquisition of

classical Greek texts helped to bring European thought to a scientific threshold.

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Probably the most direct causes of the intellectual mutations, however, were the

twin challenges to conventional assumptions introduced in the sixteenth century by

the discovery of the New World and the realisation that the earth revolves around

the sun rather than viceversa, for neither the Bible nor ancient science allowed

room for what one bewildered contemporary called “new islands, new lands, new

seas, new peoples, and what is more, a new sky and new stars.”` At first many

thinkers, daunted by all this novelty, experienced a sense of intellectual crisis. Some

took refuge in skepticism, others in relativism, and others in a return to blind

faith. Speaking for several generations, the poet John Donne lamented in 1611 that

“new philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out, the sun is

lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit can well direct him where to look for it… .

`tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.” But just as Europe surmounted its early-

modern political crisis around 1660, so did it surmount its intellectual one, above

all because the last stages of profound scientific revolution gave a new, completely

convincing “coherence” to things. As Alexander Pope wrote in the early eighteenth

century, almost as if in response to Donne: “Nature and Nature’s Law’s lay hid in

night: / God said, Let Newton Be ! and all was light.”

Even though Europe did not begin to resolve its intellectual crisis until

about 1660, the groundwork for that revolution was prepared earlier in the

seventeenth century by four great individuals ---- Kepler, Galileo, Bacon and

Descartes. Kepler and Galileo ---- both practising scientists ---- suffice it here to

say that they removed all doubts about the Copernican heliocentric theory of the

solar system and helped lead the way to Sir Isaac ewton’s theory of universal

gravitation. As for Bacon and Descartes, their main

achievements were not in the realm of original scientific discovery but rather in

propagating new attitudes toward learning and the nature of the universe.

Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) lord chancellor of England was also an

extremely influential philosopher of science. In Bacon’s view expressed most fully

in his ‘Novum Organum’ (New Instrument’) of 1620, science could not advance

unless it departed entirely from the inherited errors of the past and established

“progressive stages of certainty.” Bacon’s later contemporary, the French

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philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), agreed with him on two points: that all

past knowledge should be discarded, and that the worth of any idea depended on

its usefulness. Yet Descartes otherwise proposed some very different approaches to

science, for unlike the empiricist Bacon, Descartes was a rationalist. Roughly

speaking, for about a century after the work of Bacon and Descartes, the English

scientific community was Baconian i.e. mainly performing empirical experiments,

and the French Cartesian (a name given to the followers of Descartes) i.e. mainly

dealing with philosophical theory.

Although the presuppositions for the Enlightenment were set by the

triumph of the scientific revolution in the late seventeenth century, the

Enlightenment itself was an eighteenth-century phenomenon, lasting for close to the

entire century until certain basic Enlightenment postulates were challenged around

1790 by the effects of the French Revolution and the new movement of

romanticism. Of course not every thinker who lived and worked in the eighteenth

century was equally “enlightened.” Some, such as the Italian philosopher of history

G. B. Vico (1668-1744), were thoroughly opposed to everything the Enlightenment

stood for, and others, most notably Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), accepted

certain Enlightenment values but sharply rejected others. Moreover, patterns of

Enlightenment ideology tended to vary from country to country and to change in

each country over the course of the century. Yet, despite these qualifications, most

thinkers of the eighteenth century definitely shared the sense of living in an

exciting new intellectual environment in which “the party of humanity” would

prevail over traditionalism and obscurantism by dint of an

unflinching commitment to the primacy of the intellect.

Most Enlightenment thought stemmed from three basic premises: (1) the

entire universe is fully intelligible and governed by natural rather than

supernatural forces; (2) rigorous application of “scientific method” can answer

fundamental questions in all areas of enquiry; and (3) the human race can be

“educated” to achieve nearly infinite improvement.

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The first two of these premises were products of the scientific

revolution and the third primarily an inheritance from the psychology of John

Locke.

It must be stressed, however, that if most thinkers of the Enlightenment

supposed that the empirical study of human conduct could reduce society’s

working to a few laws, most also believed that human conduct was not immutable

but highly perfectible. In this they were inspired primarily by the psychology of

John Locke (1632-1704), who was not only a very influential political philosopher,

but also the formulator of an extremely influential theory of knowledge. In his

‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ (1690) Locke rejected the hitherto

dominant assumption that ideas are innate, maintaining instead that all knowledge

originates from sense perception. According to Locke, the human mind at birth is a

“blank tablet” (Latin: ‘tabula rosa’) upon which nothing is inscribed : not until the

infant begins to experience things, that is, to perceive the external world with its

senses, is anything registered on its mind. From this point of departure,

Enlightenment thinkers concluded that environment determines everything. For

example, in their view, if some aristocrats were any better than ordinary mortals it

was not because they had inherited any special knowledge or virtues, but only

because they had been better trained. It therefore followed that all people could be

educated to become the equals of the most perfect aristocrats, and that there were

no limits to the potentialities for universal human progress. Indeed, a few

Enlightenment thinkers became so optimistic as to propose tat all evil might be

eradicated from the world, since whatever evil existed was not the result of some

divine plan but only the product of a faulty environment that humans had created

and humans could change.

Now we will see the world of the philosophes. France, the dominant

country in eighteenth-century Europe,, was the centre of the Enlightenment

movement, and thus it is customary to refer to the leading exponents of the

Enlightenment, regardless of where they lived, by the French term ‘philosophe’,

meaning philosopher. In fact the term philosophe is slightly misleading inasmuch

as hardly any of the philosophes were really philosophers in the sense of

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being highly original abstract thinkers. Rather, most were practically

oriented publicists who aimed to reform society by popularising the new scientific

interpretation of the universe and applying dispassionate “scientific method” to a

host of contemporary problems. Since they sought most of all to gain converts

and alter what they regarded as outmoded institutions, they shunned all forms of

expression that might seem incomprehensible or abstruse, priding themselves

instead on their charity and occasionally even expressing their ideas in the form

of stories or plays rather than treaties.

By common consent the prince of the philosophes was the Frenchman

born Francois Marie Arouet who called himself Voltaire (1694-1778). Virtually

the personification of the Enlightenment, much as Erasmus two centuries earlier

had embodied Christian humanism, Voltaire commented on an enormous range of

subjects in a wide variety of literary forms. Probably his greatest single

accomplishment lay in championing the cause of English empiricism in previously

Cartesian France. Having as a young man been exiled to England for the crime of

insulting a pompous French nobleman, Voltaire returned after three years a

thorough and extremely persuasive convert to the ideas of Bacon and Locke. Not

only did this mean that he persuaded other French thinkers to accept Newton’s

empirically verifiable scientific system in place of Descartes’ unverifiable one, but

he also encouraged them to be less abstract and theoretical in all their intellectual

inclinations and more oriented toward the solving of everyday problems. To be

sure, throughout the eighteenth century, France’s intellectual world remained

more rationalistic than England’s but Voltaire’s lifelong campaign on behalf

of empiricism nonetheless had a very salutary effect in making French

thinkers more practically oriented than before.

Continually engaged in commenting on contemporary problems himself,

Voltaire was an ardent spokesman for civil liberties. In this regard his battle cry

was ‘Ecrasez l’ infame’ ---- “crush infamy” ---- meaning by infamy all forms of

repression, fanaticism, and bigotry. In his own words, he believed that “the

individual who prosecutes another because he is not of the same opinion is

nothing less than a monster.” Accordingly, he wrote an opponent a line which

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forever after has been held forth as the first principle of civil liberty: “I do not

agree with a word you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Of all forms of intolerance Voltaire hated religious bigotry most of all because it

seemed based on silly superstitions : “the less superstition, the less fanaticism; and

the less fanaticism, the less misery.” In addition to attacking religious repression,

Voltaire also frequently criticised the exercise of arbitrary powers by secular

states. In particular he thought that the English parliamentary system was

preferable to French absolutism and that all states acted criminally when their

policies resulted in senseless wars. “It is forbidden to kill,” he maintained

sardonically, “therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large

numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” These were Voltaire’s social views.

Although Voltaire exerted the greatest effect on his age as a

propagandist for the basically optimistic Enlightenment principle that by “crushing

infamy” humanity could take enormous strides forward, the only one of his works

still widely read today, the satirical story ‘Candide’ (1759), is atypically subdued.

Writing not long after the disastrous Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in which over

20,000 lives were lost for no apparent reason, Voltaire drew back in this work

from some of his earlier faith that mankind by its own actions could limitlessly

improve itself. Lulled into false security concerning what life has in store for him

by the fatuous optimism of his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, the hero of the story, Candide,

journeys through the world only to experience one outrageous misfortune after

another. Storms and earthquakes are bad enough, but worse still are wars and

rapacity caused by uncontrollable human passions. Only in the golden never-never

land of “Eldorado” (clearly a spoof of the perfect world most philosophes saw on

the horizon), where there are no priests, law courts, or prisons, but unlimited wealth

and a “palace of sciences…..filled with instruments of mathematics and physics,”

does Candide find temporary respite from disaster. Being a naturally restless

mortal, however, he quickly becomes bored with Eldorado’s placid perfection and

leaves for the renewed buffetings of the real world. After many more lessons in

“the school of hard knocks,” he finally learns one basic truth by the end of the

story: setting down on a modest farm with his once-beautiful but now hideously

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disfigured wife, he shrugs when Dr. Pangloss repeats for the hundredth time,

that “this is the best of all possible worlds,” and replies: “that’s as , may be, but

we must cultivate our garden.” In other words, according to Voltaire, life is not

perfect and probably never will be, but humans, will succeed best if they ignore

vapid theorising and buckle down to unglamorous but productive hard

work.

In addition to Voltaire, the most prominent French philosophes were

Montesquieu, Diderot, and Condorcet. The baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) was

primarily a political thinker. In his major work, ‘The Spirit of Laws’(1748),

Montesquieu sought to discover the ways in which differing environments and

historical and religious traditions influence governmental traditions. Finding that

unalterable differences in climates and geographic terrains affect human behaviour,

and hence governmental forms, Montesquieu throughout much of ‘The Spirit of

Laws’ seems to be saying that external conditions force humans to behave in

different ways and that there is nothing they can do without this. But ultimately

he was an idealist who preferred one particular political system, the English

constitution, and hoped that all nations might overcome whatever environmental

handicaps they faced to imitate it. For him, the greatest strength of the English

system was that it consisted of separate and balanced powers ---- executive,

legislative and judicial: thus it guaranteed liberty inasmuch as no absolute

sovereignty was given to any single governing individual or group. This

idealisation of “checks and balances” subsequently influenced many other

Enlightenment political theorists and played a particularly dominant role in the

shaping of the United States Constitution in 1787.

Unlike Voltaire, who was not a very systematic thinker, and Montesquieu,

who wrote in a somewhat ambiguous and primarily reflective mode, the most

programmatic of the philosophes was Denis Diderot (1713-1784). As a young

firebrand Diderot was clapped into solitary confinement for his attacks on religion

and thereafter worked under the ever-present threat of censorship and

imprisonment. Yet throughout his life he never shrank from espousing a fully

materialistic philosophy or criticising what he considered to be backwardness or

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tyranny wherever he found it. Although, like Voltaire, Diderot wrote on a wide

range of subjects in numerous different forms, including stories and plays, he

exerted his greatest influence as the organiser of and main contributor to an

extremely ambitious publishing venture, the ‘Encyclopaedia’. Conceived as a

summation and means for dissemination of all the most advanced contemporary

philosophical, scientific, and technical knowledge, with articles written by all the

leading philosophes of the day (including Voltaire and Montesquieu), the

‘Encyclopaedia’ first appeared between 1751 and 1772 in installments totaling

seventeen large volumes and eleven more of illustrative plates. Whereas modern

encyclopaedias serve primarily as reference works, Diderot thought of his

‘Encyclopaedia’ as a set of volumes that people would read at length rather than

merely using to look up facts. Therefore he hoped that it would “change the

general way of thinking.” Above all, by popularising the most recent achievements

in science and technology, Diderot intended to combat “superstition” on the

broadest front, aid the advance of science, and thereby help alleviate all forms of

human misery. Dedicated to the proposition that all traditional beliefs had to be

reexamined “without sparing anyone’s sensibilities” he certainly would have

excoriated all “irrational” dogmas openly if left to himself. But since strict

censorship made explicitly antireligious articles impossible, Diderot thumbed his

nose at religion in such oblique ways as offering the laconic cross-reference for

the entry on the Eucharist: “see cannibalism.” Not surprisingly, gibes like this

aroused storms of controversy when the early volumes of the ‘Encyclopaedia’

appeared. Nonetheless, the project was not only completed in the face of prominent

opposition, but as time went on the complete work became so popular that it was

reprinted several times and helped spread the ideas of the philosophes not just in

France but all over Europe.

One of the youngest of the contributors to the ‘Encyclopaedia’, the

marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), is customarily termed – “the last of the

philosophes” because his career, and the philosophes’ activities in general, were cut

short by the excesses of the French Revolution. In his early career Condorcet

gained prominence as a brilliant mathematician, but he is best known as the most

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extreme Enlightenment exponent of the idea of progress. Already in the late

seventeenth century, particularly as the result of the triumphs of science, several

thinkers began arguing that the intellectual accomplishments of their own day

were superior to any of the past and that greater intellectual progress in the

future was inevitable. But since it was less clear to some that modern literature

was superior to the Greek and Latin classics, around 1700 an argument raged

concerning the relative claims of “ancients” and “moderns” wherein so able a

critic as the English writer Jonathan Swift could regard what he called the “battle

of the books” as a standoff. In the eighteenth century, however, the conviction grew

that the present had advanced in all aspects of human endeavour beyond the

accomplishments of any earlier time, and that the future was bound to see

unlimited further progress on all fronts. Condorcet’s ‘Outline of the Progress of

the Human Mind’ (1794) was the ultimate expression of this point of view.

According to Condorcet, progress in the past had not been uninterrupted ---- the

Middle Ages had been an especially retrogressive era ---- but, given the victories of

the scientific revolution and Enlightenment, indefinite and uninterrupted progress in

the future was assured. Venturing into prophecy, Condoret confidently stated not

only that “as preventive medicine improves….the average human life-span will be

increased and a more healthy and stronger physical constitution guaranteed,” but

that “the moment will come….when tyrants and slaves…..will exist only in history

or on the stage.” Ironically, even while Condorcet was writing such optimistic

passages he was hiding out from the agents of the French Revolution, who in fact

soon counted him among the numerous victims of their “reign of terror.” Thus

Condorcet had faith in progress.

Now we can see the audience of the philosophes. In taking final stock

of the Enlightenment movement, historians customarily raise two major questions.

One is whether the philosophes were mere elitists who had no influence on the

masses. Certainly, if one studies the sales figures of the philosophes’ books or

membership lists of eighteenth-century learned societies the answer is yes, for

these reveal the philosophes’ immediate audience to have been aristocrats, lawyers,

government officials, prosperous merchants, and a scattering of members of the

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higher clergy. To some degree this class bias lay beyond the philosophes’ control,

for many of the poorer people throughout eighteenth-century Europe remained

illiterate, and most of the masses in southern and south-eastern Europe ---- literate

and illiterates alike ---- lived under the sway of an extremely conservative Roman

Catholic hierarchy that was determined to keep them ignorant of the philosophes’

ideas by means of the strictest censorship.Yet it is also true that many of the

philosophes, despite their avowed commitment to clarity, wrote over the heads of

most labouring people, and many did not even seek a lower-class audience

because they feared that, if taken too far by the “uncouth” masses, their ideas

might provoke open revolution. Typical philosophe elitism is well expressed in

Gibbon’s praise of imperial Roman religious policy whereby “the various modes

of worship……were all considered by the people as equally true, by the

philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.”

Tradition also relates that whenever Voltaire discussed religion with his philosophe

friends, he dismissed the servants so that they would not overhear any subversive

remarks. Given this prevalent attitude, it is less surprising that Enlightenment ideas

hardly percolated down to the masses than that they did have some effect on

popular beliefs in France and England. For example, recent research on religious

practices in southern France in the eighteenth century demonstrates that from 1760

to 1790, fewer and fewer people of all classes requested that masses be said for

their souls after death. Apparently, then, some servants were overhearing the

philosophes’ drawing-room conversations after all.

Then there was the philosophes’ commitment to social reform. The other

major question often asked about the Enlightenment is whether the philosophes

were not hopelessly impracticable “dreamers rather than doers.” Without ignoring

the clear vein of utopianism in Enlightenment thought, the answer to this must

surely be no. Admittedly, most philosophes were far more optimistic about the

chances of human perfectibility than most people are today, after the total wars

and gas ovens of the twentieth century. Yet even the most optimistic did not

expect utopian miracles to occur overnight. Rather, almost all the philosophes were

committed to agitating for piecemeal social reforms which they believed would

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culminate, step by inevitable step, in a new world of enlightenment and virtue.

Often such agitation did lead to significant changes in the conduct of practical

affairs, and in at least one case, that of the American Revolution, Enlightenment

ideas were the main source of inspiration for constructing a fully new political

system. Moreover, sometimes even when Enlightenment propagandising did not

have any immediate practical impact, it did help to accomplish change in the

future. For example, many philosophes condemned slavery on humanitarian or

utilitarian grounds, thereby initiating a process of discussion that led cumulatively

to the triumph of abolitionism throughout the West in the nineteenth century. In

short, then, it is impossible to deny that the philosophes as a class were among

the most practical-minded and influential intellectuals who ever lived.

Thus in my work so far I have tried to prove the thesis of my topic

that the French Revolution and Revolutionary Era following it in Europe were

a Precursor to the Indian Renaissance and National Movement and I have

succeeded in doing that to a large extent also I think. I have shown the

relationship between the two as a Precursor, mainly on following lines:

1. Role of Thinkers (already done in detail).

2. Role of Press and Education.

3. Revolutionary Similarities.

4. Economic Similarities.

5. Last motivating and enlightening one, the Renaissance factor and

Resemblances (Inspirational, Overriding factor i.e. Desire for Freedom).

The last four I will now pursue in detail.

The role of the press and education was as follows. An important

influence on the nationalist movement of India was the influence of press.

Freedom of press was needed by the Nationalist leaders in the mid 19 th

century. Almost from the beginning of the 19th century, politically conscious

leaders were attracted to modern civil rights, especially the freedom of the

Press. As early as 1824, Raja Rammohan Roy had protested against a

regulation restricting the freedom of the press. In the period from 1870 to

1918 the main political task was that of politicisation of national ideology.

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The press was the chief instrument for carrying out this task. Powerful

newspapers emerged during these years under distinguished and fearless

journalists. Nearly all major political controversies of the day were

conducted through the Press. Newspapers were published as a national or

public service. Indian journalists adopted several clever stratagems and

evolved a distinctive style of writing to remain outside the reach of law.

The man who was most frequently associated with the struggle for

the freedom of the Press during the nationalist movement was Bal

Gangadhar Tilak. The freedom of press was associated with the spread of

the nationalist ideas. The leaders did succeed in their motives by retaining

the freedom of Press. Thus the fight to secure press freedom continued.

The press had a great role to play in the development of modern

nationalism. The press had also a decisive social role to play. In modern

times, the Press has become a powerful social institution. This is proved by

the fact that the Press has been glorified as the Fourth Estate. The Press

moulds as well as mirrors all complex processes of modern life. It

facilitates the exchange of thought on a mass scale in the shortest time.

By its aid, conferences are mobilized, controversies settled or fought out,

movements organized, institutions built up. The Press is a powerful censor

of all actions of those who occupy the summits of society and hold the

destiny of peoples in their hands. It, thereby, helps to establish popular

democratic control over them.

In France, the intelligentsia, the harbingers and proclaimers of the

new social order and its advanced social conceptions, found in the Press

an effective weapon to expose the moral decadence, cultural poverty, and

reactionary social significance, of the ruling feudal class. Through the Press,

Voltaire, Diderot, Holbach, Helvetius, and others disseminated scientific

social ideas among the people and kindled indignation among them against

the religious superstition and social oppression under which they lived.

They stormed against serfdom and summoned serfs to revolt against the

feudal nobility and its state. They denounced, in thousands of books and

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brochures, the undemocratic principles of the privilege through birth on

which feudal society was based and which was made sacrosanct by the

catholic superstition. They propagated in flaming printed word, equal rights

of individuals in opposition to feudal privilege. They carried on the

propaganda of a programme of abolition of serfdom and the establishment

of a centralised democratic national state of the French people. The Press

became an indispensable weapon for the rising social forces led by the

intelligentsia including political writers such as Mirabeau, Danton,

Robespierre, Marat, and others, to stir up the consciousness of the people, to

enlighten it with new ideas and lead them through a great historic struggle

for the overthrow of the feudal state and society and replace them by the

modern national state and society. In the hands of the advanced section of

the French people, the Press became a weapon for the creation and

development of the new, historically higher type of society, the bourgeois

national democratic society which post-Revolutionary France represented.

Without the help of the Press, it is extremelydoubtful if the mass

mobilization for the anti-feudal struggle, the establishment of a national

state and society after the destruction of the feudal state and social order,

and the development of the rich, complex, scientific and artistic culture of

modern France, would have been possible.2

‘Ideas become a material force when they reach out to the people’.

The printing press played a big role, in the history of a number of

peoples, in their national awakening, in their imbibing progressive ideas, and

in their being drawn as active forces into great social, political and cultural

movements. We can see the growth of the Indian press upto 1900 A.D.

The introduction of the printing press in India was an event of

revolutionary significance in the life of the Indian people. The awakening

and growth of national consciousness among them gave rise to the

nationalist press. Raja Rammohan Roy was the founder of the nationalist

Press in India. Tilak started ‘The Kesari’, a Marathi journal, in which he

expounded the ideology and methodology of struggle for national freedom

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conceived by the new school. Tilak was a journalist of consummate ability

and, in his hands, ‘The Kesari’ and ‘The Maratha’ (an English weekly)

became effective weapons to instill militant nationalist sentiments and ideas

among the people. The vital role of the Press in the building of Indian

nationalism and national movement could be shown by the fact that, ‘In

India, from Raja Rammohan Roy to Keshab Chandra Sen, Gokhale, Tilak,

Pherozeshah Mehta, Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath Banerjee,

C.Y.Chintamani, M.K.Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, there is a distinguished

line of public men who have used, and are using, the Press as a medium

for the dissemination of their ideas of “moral values.”3

There was a great deal of revolutionary similarity between the two.

In fact, the revolutionary factor in French Revolution and Revolutionary

Era in Europe was to a much greater extent and more bloody than the

Indian Renaissance and National Movement. In this case, French Revolution

was in a very true sense a precursor to the Indian Renaissance and

National Movement.

Education has a great social significance. Every society always

possessed a philosophy or a world outlook, however crude it might be. By

introducing modern education in India, the British brought the Indian

people in contact with the extensive and profound achievements of the

modern west in the sphere of scientific and social scientific knowledge.

‘The time has arrived when the ancient debt of civilisation which Europe

owes to Asia is about to be repaid; and the sciences, cradled in the East

and brought to maturity in the West, are now by a final effort to over-

spread the world.’4

The triumph of the common people in the first stage of the French

Revolution did not go unchallenged, however. In the summer of 1792, the

revolution entered a second stage, which saw the downfall of moderate middle-

class leaders and their replacement by radical republicans claiming to rule on

behalf of the common people. Three major reasons accounted for this abrupt and

drastic alteration in the course of events. First, the politically literate lower classes

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grew disillusioned as they perceived that the revolution was not benefiting them.

The uncontrolled free-enterprise economy of the government resulted in constantly

fluctuating and generally rising prices. These increases particularly exasperated

those elements of the Parisian population that had agitated for change in

preceding years. Urban rioters demanded bread at prerevolutionary prices, while

their spokesmen called for governmental control of the ever-growing inflation.

Their leaders articulated as well the frustrations of a mass of men and women

who felt cheated by the constitution. Despite their major role in the creation of a

new regime, they found themselves deprived of any effective voice in its

operation.

A second major reason for the change of course was a lack of

effective national leadership during the first two years of the revolution. Louis

XVI remained the weak vacillating monarch he had been prior to 1789. Though

outwardly prepared to collaborate with the leaders of the assembly, he remained

essentially a victim of events. He was compelled to support measures personally

distasteful to him, in particular the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. He was thus

sympathetic to the plottings of the queen, who was in correspondence with her

brother, Leopold II of Austria. Urged on by Marie Antoinette, Louis agreed to

attempt an escape from France in June 1791, in hopes of rallying foreign support

for counterrevolution. The members of the royal family managed to slip past their

palace guards in Paris, but were apprehended near the border at Varennes and

brought back to the capital. Though the Constitution of 1791 declared

France a monarchy, after Varennes that declaration was more fiction than fact.

From that point on, Louis was little more than a prisoner of the assembly. The

leadership of that body remained in Mirabeau’s hands until his death in 1791. Yet

he was less than a satisfactory leader. An outstanding orator, he was nevertheless

mistrusted by many revolutionaries because of his dissolute, aristocratic youth. Nor,

despite his continued support of a strong constitutional monarchy, did he enjoy the

confidence of the king. Even with his shortcomings, Mirabeau was the most

effective leader among the moderate constitutionalists, a group that generally failed

to capitalise on its opportunities.

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The third major reason for the dramatic turn of events was the fact

that after 1792 France found itself at war with much of the rest of Europe. From

the outset of the revolution, men and women across Europe had been compelled,

by the very intensity of events in France, to take sides in the conflict. What we

have called the first revolution won the support of a wide range of thoughtful

intellectuals, politicians, businessmen and artisans. Strikes and revolts broke out in

Germany and Belgium. In England, philosophical radicals such as Joseph Priestley,

the scientist, and Richard Price, a Unitarian minister, joined with businessmen such

as James Watt and Matthew Boulton to welcome the overthrow of privilege and

absolutism.

Others opposed the course of the revolution from the start. Exiled

nobles, who had fled France for the haven of sympathetic royal courts in Germany

and elsewhere, did all they could to stir up counterrevolutionary sentiment. The

distressed clamouring of these émigrés, along with the plight of Louis XVI and

his family, aroused the sympathy, if not, at first, the active support, of European

defenders of absolutism and privilege. In England the cause was strengthened by

the publication in 1790 of Edmund Burke’s ‘Reflections on the Revolution

in France.’ A Whig politician who had sympathised with the American

revolutionaries, Burke nevertheless attacked the revolution in France as a monstrous

crime against the social order. He argued that by remodeling their government as

they had, the French had turned their backs on both human nature and history.

Men and women were not constitutional abstractions, endowed with an objective

set of natural rights, as the Declaration of the Rights of Man had insisted. Rights

---- and duties as well ---- were the consequence of the individual histories of the

countries into which men and women were born. Those histories bound

people to the past and entailed a commitment to the future, as well as the

present. Hence they had no right to remake their country and its institutions

without reference to the past or concern for the future, as Burke insisted the

French had. Their failure to pay proper respect to tradition and custom had

destroyed the precious fabric of French civilisation woven by centuries of national

history.

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Burke’s famous pamphlet, in which he painted a romantic and highly

inaccurate picture of the French king and queen, helped arouse sympathy for the

counterrevolutionary cause. It is questionable, however, whether that sympathy would

have turned to active opposition, had not the French soon appeared as a threat to

international stability and the individual ambitions of the great powers. It was that

threat which led to war in 1792, and which kept the Continent in arms for a

generation. This state of war had a most important impact on the formation of

political and social attitudes during this period in Europe. Once a country declared

war with France, its citizens could no longer espouse with the revolution without

paying severe consequences. Those who continued to support the revolution, as did

a good many among the artisan and small tradespeople class, were persecuted and

punished for their beliefs. To be found in Britain, for example, possessing a copy

of Tom Paine’s revolutionary tract, ‘The Rights of Man’ (1791-1792), a

prorevolutionary response to Burke’s ‘Reflections’, was enough to warrant

imprisonment. As the moderate nature of the early revolution turned to violent

extension, entrepreneurs and businessmen eagerly sought to live down their radical

sentiments of a few years past. The wars against revolutionary France came to be

perceived as a matter of national survival; to ensure internal security, it seemed

that patriotism demanded not only a condemnation of the French but of French

ideas as well.

The ‘Rights of Man’ is a phrase with definite historical atmosphere

about it: for the date of its great power is already long past. It helped to create

the two great Republics of modern times in France and America; and yet even in

these, so swift has been the development that the old magic has gone out of the

words. The hypothetical Man of the Revolution is now thought a meaningless

abstraction and rights are but shadows of duty.

There survives, however, in modern life a definite ideal from the days

of the French Revolution. We are too far away to be terrified as our

grandfathers were of the sansculottes, and one could hardly bring a shudder to

the heart even of a country person by speaking of Liberty, Equality, and

Fraternity. In the modern ideal of equality, the ideal involved concerns the relation

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of one individual to another: for even though there was much said about the State

by the theorists of the Revolution, it was generally conceived simply as a

collection of individuals; and although revolutionary France set about the

destruction of tyrants in other countries, there was no new conception expressed of

the relation of these national groups of men to the other.5` What chiefly moved

men to enthusiasm concerning the Rights of Man was a conception of the

individual having freedom enough to develop himself and equality of opportunity

as his basis for intercourse with others. All those changes which appear in date-

and-fact history as the English Revolutions of 1640 and 1688, and the French

Revolution of 1789, were really motivated by the same ideal. There was the same

vague and, in England, unconscious striving after the political equality of all adults,

and the same indefinite and in part mistaken conception of the independent

individual. This is the ideal which is called revolutionary, not indeed because it

is more subversive of the orderly progress of civilisation than any other, but

chiefly because of its embodiment in that French movement which is still called

‘par excellence’ the Revolution. It involves perhaps a kind of philosophical

Individualism such as was common in the Enlightenment; it is as reckless a faith

in the dictates of the individual conscience as was the faith of Immanuel Kant.

But we should keep the word ‘Individualism’ as the name for a more modern

ideal. And on the other hand, the revolutionary ideal implies much that is now

connected with Socialism, but this also must be left for later treatment.

It must be our first task therefore to show what conception in

modern politics belongs in the history of development by date of birth to

the revolutionary period. This conception will probably be found in the modern

view of the minimum requisite for human life in society; and if one word may be

chosen as expressing the ideal it must be ‘Equality’. The implied opposite is a

situation in which some men had much and most had too little. Of these ‘most’

also we may say that the little they had was dependent on the will of those who

had much.

We are all agreed that there is no possibility of civilised human life

without security for each man of food and clothing independently of the will of

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any other. That is to say, the position of the medieval serf on many estates may

have been more fortunate than that of the modern agricultural labourer, but he

depended for that position on the goodwill of the lord of the manor. Now we are

not willing to leave to the vagaries of personal character the distribution of the

necessaries of life among most of the inhabitants of a civilised country.

The modern conception therefore is based on the fact that, apart from

the social position of any individual and apart from his necessities as a labourer

to make him fit for his labour, he must be first considered as a man. So obvious

does this seem that we can hardly imagine a time when social caste was strong

enough to obscure the fundamental likeness between all members of the same

race; and we can hardly believe that even religious men once justified slavery as

being good for the slaves, who would be well fed by their owners in order that

they might do sufficient work for these owners. Thus we admit that every human

being has a right, independently of the interests of any other, to food and clothing;

or at least we allow it theoretically: for there may be some who would maintain

that those who are without sufficient food and clothing should be left to ‘charity’6`.

Since, however, very many still are without sufficient food and clothing

even for bare human life, the ideal is not realised. We are still moved to act by

the conception that as far as possible all human beings should have sufficient for

a human life. But if our action be simply charitable or the organising of charity, it

is medieval even though we think it well that all the inhabitants of a civilised

state should have the bare needs of life. We know indeed that in the Middle Ages

distress was often relieved. There was of course abundant charity. The new ideal

is implied in that small word ‘right’; and although the Church of the Middle

Ages, preached almsgiving there was never any conception of the ‘right’ of each

man to food and clothing. There is a vast difference between giving out of

benevolence and supplying a legitimate demand. The Revolution did not ask for

charity: it demanded the Rights of Man. We agree, presumably, at least in the

vaguest sense, that each man has an equal right to the bare necessities of life; and

perhaps the majority of political thinkers would agree that all men are politically

equal. If that is so the Revolutionary ideal is still in some sense alive; for,

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although we have acquired a certain amount of equality, much more has yet

to be attained and there are at least some who are working for this equality.

There is no need to define the equal right of all men; since there may be much

disagreement, for instance, as to whether real equality can co-exist with vastly

different private incomes, or with inherited wealth, or with certain traditional

privileges. But the point is that whatever may be the precise sense given to

political equality by different parties, all accept some form of political equality as

desirable; and by that we mean, of course, equality of sane adults whom we may

call men, not of lunatics, imbeciles, or children.

The fact remains that it is to the pagan Renaissance and not to the

medieval Church that we must look for the source of that ‘Liberty, Equality,

Fraternity’ which made the soul of the French Revolution. It cannot, of course, be

denied that the Church and the ecclesiastical politicians had stated that all men

were brothers whose Father is God. The fundamental difficulty to a real

democracy was the addition of the statement that all men were thus ‘in the eyes

of God’. This made the first statement ineffective, and it was reserved for the anti-

ecclesiastical political thinkers of the Enlightenment to show that all men were

equal ‘in the eyes of men’. What was true only to the mind of God was not true

for political purposes; but when it was shown that men could themselves grasp,

how all men were equal, then a new and splendid ideal was added to the tradition

of Western Civilisation. The interests of all men had been considered by theorists

long before their rights had been admitted, and even medieval political thinkers

had not lost sight of a common humanity.

Thomas Aquinas 7` was inclined to suppose that government ultimately

resulted on ‘the will’ of the governed, and he certainly grasped the truth that it

exists for the ‘good’ of the governed.8` But what was not clear in early times to

the official teachers was that the people do not ask for their good to be

considered as a sort of charity; it is no special virtue in a prince to consider his

subjects. He exists for no other purpose; for such is their ‘right’.

As for the expression of the ideal in the days when it was first

powerful some hint of the new conceptions respecting the relation of individuals

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may be found in Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’. In this great book the whole structure of

society was based upon the conception that individuals unite together for self-

preservation. They agree to transfer the power for self-preservation which is in

each to a central government, which thus in origin rests upon the will of the

people, and exists for the equal benefit of all. Here was a principle which might

justify discontent with existing governments, but it could not become a gospel of

Revolution, because for Hobbes the government once established was for ever

supreme. The transfer of power had been made. Thus we are still in the region of

Renaissance sovereignty, and Hobbes is classed with Grotius in the ‘Contrat

Social’9`; for although there was present in the work of Hobbes a clear conception

of the origin and theoretical basis of government in the will of the governed,

which is hardly to be found in Grotius, both held that the transfer of power

deprived the people of even the theoretical possession of ultimate sovereignty. The

theory of the origin of government, however, implied the idea of political equality

among the many in whom rested the basis of sovereign rule.

The actual change in the political situation which made it possible for

the ideal of equality to flourish on a soil of concrete reality was sudden in some

countries and slow in others. In England the greater number of inhabitants

gradually made their power felt from the sixteenth century onwards. Political

monopoly of power had been corrected in the Puritan revolution and again in

168810`. A gradual approach was thus made towards the equalising of all adults in

law and politics. But in France the old medieval situation was perpetuated until

the great Revolution of 1789; and the strength of the ‘ancien regime’ made its

opponents all the more violent, so that it is doubtful whether the crimes committed

in the name of fraternity should be put down to the Revolution or to the long-

established caste-system which made such a revolution possible.

The ideal of Rousseau may once more be considered. Meantime

the change of ideas had begun, and the Gospel of the Revolution was

found in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. These have been so frequently

and so well expounded that it will not be necessary here to do more than show

how the fundamental idea of an equal humanity gave them force. The union of

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men in society as conceived according to the ‘Contrat Social’ is a union of equals

who do not, as in the ‘Leviathan’, repudiate their equality by their act of union.

Rousseau made a distinction between the government set up by a people and the

structure of society, or the relationships of the individuals. The only ‘natural’ union

is, for him one in which the fundamental equality or brotherhood of all is

preserved. ‘If the whole structure of society rests on an act of partnership

entered into by equals in behalf of themselves and their descendants for ever, the

nature of the union is not what it would be if the members of the union had

only entered it to place their liberties at the feet of some superior power. Society

in the one case (Hobbe’s) is a covenant of subjection, in the other a covenant of

social brotherhood.’11` But this involves that ‘every’ form of government then

existing, in so far as the people were not directly governing, even if they had

given over their power willingly and it had not been snatched from them, was

corrupt : it was a violation of the natural state and therefore of what was just.12`

‘Man is born free and he is everywhere in chains’ : these first words

of the ‘contrat social’ are, as it were, the cry of pain from which the

Revolutionary enthusiasm arose. It is of interest to notice the fierce antagonism

with which Rousseau mentions the name of Grotius as of one who had riveted

these chains :13` his name recurs frequently and Rousseau’s violence only shows

how completely the Renaissance ideal had become obstructive. The family is the

only natural society, all others are conventional. The State is indeed conventional

in so far as it is the result of a free contract or pact, but it is by no means a

loss of liberty for the 14,15. The natural inequality of men is thus recognised by

Rousseau and placed in opposition to their political equality. What meaning, then,

does he give to the new equality arising in the social pact ? There was a protest

against class-legislation and privilege, and against the tendency of those who are

naturally better endowed than others to consider only their own interests.

Such a tendency still exists, and the old excuse for it, that men are

born more or less intelligent or powerful, is still sometimes used; but Rousseau is

quite reasonable in supposing that its correction can only be made by enforcing

the fact of ‘likeness’ between all men in so far as they are members of the State.

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To form a State, he argues, not only the intelligent or the competent enter the

compact but ‘all’, both the intelligent and the non-intelligent. As parties to the

agreement all are equal though in other ways they are dissimilar ; this is the

meaning of political equality. How to make this real it is difficult to say ; but

equality is not a chimera. A government is established by the sovereign people for

this purpose ;17` governments are of all kinds, and they tend to abuses,16` while

what remains always unchanged is the popular sovereignty. Thus the statement

(Book II, chap.i) that ‘Sovereignty is inalienable’ and is not given up even when a

government is established, becomes the theme (Book IV) of the later thesis that

direct government by the people is the only safe method ; kings, priests, and all

governors are to be suspected, for their very abilities lead them to power and their

power to the maintenance of a situation no longer willed by the governed.18,19.’

Rousseau, however, was not isolated in the expression of this right of

revolution ; although perhaps he saw or felt more clearly than others what

practical consequences were involved in the theory of popular sovereignty. The

theorists of the eighteenth century supposed the existence of a Law of Nature by

which, as Blackstone has it, men have ‘natural rights such as life and liberty,

which no human legislature has power to abridge to destroy ; but here was a

principle of revolution in the guise of a basis for established law, since any man

might assert that the existing human legislature violated his rights according to the

Law of Nature. And this Law of Nature, being unknown to every one, could be

quoted by any one. It agreed on all sides that it involved certain rights existing in

man as man and irrespective of social rank or inherited privilege.

Nature was an excellent ground for destroying the governments which

existed ; but in practice the direct sovereignty of a fraternal and equal people was

not established even by the Revolutionaries who were inspired by Rousseau. Direct

popular government is only possible in small groups ; but the Revolution had

inherited the whole of monarchical France as a unit to be governed. Hence an

indirect government of the people had to be set up ; and the various committees

and councils of Paris adopted the old methods of centralised authority. Hence also

the same principle of revolution which had destroyed the monarchy destroyed

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any government which the Revolution could create ; for the ‘true believers’ in

the Rousseau gospel could always protest that any existing government was a

tyranny when the whole people did not vote on every issue.

Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men’

contains the same general theme.20` It admits natural inequality and deplores the

political inequality erroneously founded upon it. Rousseau clearly expresses the

prevailing difficulties and puts them all down to inequality. Even the natural

inequality is misrepresented he says, in a state of things in which ‘a child is king

over an old man, an imbecile leads a wise man, and a few are gorged with

superfluities while the hungry majority lack what is barely necessary.’21` It is only

too easy to point out the mistakes as to fact and the erroneous political

judgements of Rousseau. What is not easy but is more important is to see how

clearly he expressed the general distress and the accepted idea of what would

remove it. If we could suppose all men equal, the Revolutionaries might have said,

we should at least discover by competition with equal opportunities who were the

best.22` Thus by political equality in place of prevailing inequality we might arrive

at natural inequality and also at the fundamental likeness between all men

irrespective of their special abilities. But this political equality of right was to be

secured by direct popular government.

The political conceptions of Rousseau were confused and unpractical ;

but the ideal which moved him was shared by very many and it survived even

the ludicrous consequences of the first attempts to apply it. For, after all, the

repudiation of representative government was only a means suggested by which to

arrive at the end of giving all men equal political rights ; and although Rousseau

thought it was a necessary means, we may perhaps suppose that there are others.23`

And if it is really possible for all men to have equal political rights in groups

which are too large for direct voting on all issues to be practical, then we may

value the ideal of the Revolution independently of our judgement of its political

programme. That ideal as it appears in Rousseau is the production and

development of individuals who may have the freest possible play fr all their

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faculties. It involves that no human being is to be sacrificed to the development

of any other ; all are equal, all brethren, and all are free. The still more

fundamental conception, which is perfectly valid, is that man is essentially ‘good’;

and this transformation of the fundamental basis of equality was wrought by the

French thinkers almost in spite of their English teachers, Locke and Hobbes. For

with Hobbes especially the fundamental prejudice, inherited from Puritanism, is that

human nature tends to evil. Social organisation is the result of man’s tendency to

‘conflict’; and government improves man. Rousseau on the contrary held that

government degrades man; for man is essentially free and independent. How then

did society arise if it was an evil ? It arose as the less of two evils. ‘The state of

nature’ was being destroyed by the inevitable growth of natural forces (crowding,

etc.) and to save themselves men conventionally agreed to unite. Thus the less

government the better, for thus we are nearer to the free life of the naturally

virtuous man. Such conceptions, it is clear, have their modern results in Anarchism

or in Socialism according as government is conceived as a bad convention or as

a natural result of human nature. The important point for our present argument is

the immense faith in the original purity of man’s nature which was possessed by

all the great Revolutionaries.

The facts as to the Revolution are sufficiently well known, but it is

perhaps necessary to point out why we should discuss Rousseau’s expression of

the ideal before even stating the events in which that ideal may be seen to have

been an influence. It is not altogether true that the philosophers made the

Revolution; but it is true that by contrast with the history of other ideals the ideal

of the Revolution, at least in France, preceded in statement the attempt at

realisation of it in fact.24` This does not mean that the want from which the ideal

arose was not felt long before Rousseau or other Revolutionary thinkers expressed

it. The Revolution was not the result of a political theory but of definite distress.

The dumb rage of the peasantry led to the Jacquerie; but even in that brutal

action one may see the want out of which an ideal arises. We may read the list

of grievances in the account of all that was abolished in 1789. This and much

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more of the same kind exists as proof of the nature of the want felt. It was

economic but also political. Financial distress and brutalising poverty were

combined with obsolete administration and privileges which turned awry all the

energies of the community. Vaguely and for the greater number unconsciously, a

conception was moving men to action, a dream that all might be well if privilege

was destroyed. There was hope in a king who would deliver his people; but the

deliverance was delayed until patience was exhausted.

The mass of men are not interested in their rights until they suffer

physically and mentally. But all the force of established government went to

maintain this mass of suffering, until the dams were broken and the flood

overwhelmed the whole obsolete system. Paris rose in insurrection, the Bastille was

taken and popular assemblies voted complete reform. Then the forces of

Revolution began to divide among themselves. Such an immense tradition of

obsolete abuses naturally gave rise to innumerable plans of reform; and fear, which

makes states as well as gods, began to force extreme measures upon those who

would have anything rather than a return to the old evil. The sovereigns who

had been established by the Renaissance allied themselves against the new

France (1791); and the people of the Revolution replied by raising armies and at

last, impelled by fear of civil warfare, by the execution of Louis XVI (1793).

The whole effort was to realise equality of political rights among all

the inhabitants of France, and this equality was to be extended by the destruction

of privilege and caste in every country. But the established government having

been destroyed, different groups grasped at the supreme power. Paris was in the

throes of extreme party controversy and all France was in confusion, while the

armies of the Revolution passed the frontiers (1793, 1794). It was clear practically,

though not yet in theory, that without any settled government, caste and privilege

must be destroyed but no one would be any the better. Confusion and a strong

army led to the Directorate (1795): that gave Bonaparte prominence, and the result

was the transformation of the First Consul into the Emperor (1804). Thus the

gospel of equal political rights, led to a sort of military despotism. It had however,

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achieved something for the bourgeoisie and it remained as an inspiration for the

movement of 1848.

But perhaps it is as well to state that the equality at which the

Revolution aimed was not a futile and abstract equality of worth among all men.

We must not imagine that the Revolution failed to make that real, for that it

never attempted to establish. The ideal of the Revolution does not imply that all

men have good brains any more than that all men have long legs. Only the

rhetorical fool can imagine that he gains a victory over those old enthusiasts by

showing ---- what is perfectly obvious ---- that men are not equal in ability, in

birth, or in moral character. No one ever said they were, and perhaps it might

have been less misleading if the Revolutionary theory had asserted, not that

all men are equal, but that they are all similar. That would have sounded like a

platitude, but it would not therefore have been a useless observation; for the fact

is that the Revolution was protesting against the continual forgetfulness of

precisely that platitude. Political thinkers, statesmen, and lawyers had really

forgotten that, underlying the distinctions there was a fundamental likeness in all

men. The distinctions were given a prominence which quite obscured the

similarity; so that in practice the humanity of human beings was disregarded. Some

men were treated as beasts and others as gods. The Revolution aimed first at

establishing that all were men. It may be said that this is a fantastic

exaggeration of the grievance against which the Revolutionaries were protesting.

It may be held impossible to believe that thinking men ever forgot the common

humanity of all men. It may not be possible to realise that our conception of

equality was not always current. But if there is any difficulty, we need only think

of the same sort of pre-Revolutionary conceptions which are in vogue today with

respect to women.

In spite of Plato, in defiance of history, on a plea of reference to

‘facts’, it is actually possible for many today even in civilised countries to

consider that sexual differences render insignificant or negligible the common

humanity of man and woman.25` It is indeed said that women because of their sex

are not competent terminology that the bodily structure of the female makes it to

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think or act in political issues. It is urged that it is pseudo-scientific impossible

for her to enter into business or politics. Not many years ago the same sort of

argument was used to show that their bodily structure made women incompetent

in mathematics, science, philosophy, or the higher branches of art. But this reference

to differences, involving a repudiation of fundamental likeness, is precisely the

attitude of the ‘ancien regime’. Exactly the same was said of the differences in

birth, wealth, education or genius, all of which showed that whole classes of men

were incompetent in political issues and that their interests would best be

considered by others. The arguments drawn from differences once supported caste

and privilege. The point is that if many still do not recognise in politics the

common humanity of man and woman, we can easily imagine how many in the

eighteenth century did not recognise the common humanity even among male

human beings. It was therefore no platitude but a paradox at that time to say that

the labourer and the shopkeeper should have equal politial rights with the

landowner and the courtier.

Out of Renaissance Sovereignty combined with Revolutionary Rights

comes Nationalism. The local independence of the sovereign State was at last

connected with the right of the inhabitants to choose their own form of

government; and the result has been the conception that every group of sufficient

permanence and with enough of a distinct tradition to have a ‘national’ character

should have an opportunity for developing its own forms of law and government.

The existence of many small independent states has resulted in the past in the art

of Athens or Florence, the philosophy and science of Greek cities and the

International Law which arose among the Dutch. The Nationalist would therefore

argue that each group with a civilised tradition has a right to independent

development in view of what it may produce for humanity at large. In practical

politics, therefore, we should allow every distinct national group to have a genuine

political freedom. For, in the second place, no one method for organizing the

relation of individuals is correct universally. States should vary in their methods of

law and government, reflecting in their variety the distinctions of human groups.

Besides independence, therefore, a characteristic development should be supported,

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and the tendency to assimilate due to the increasing ease of communication

should be corrected.

First came the observed fact of difference, and then the ideal of

Nationalism was conceived. The old historians used to write as though the ideals

of the Renaissance, independent states and the self-development of the individual,

had come first, and then had come the Renaissance state and the Renaissance

prince. But clearly events occurred in the reverse order. Nations were independent

before philosophers and politicians said that they should be so. Individuals had

freed themselves from medievalism before artists and poets claimed self-

development as a right. I do not mean that men already had what they aimed at;

but what they had gave them the first hint of the advantage of having more of

the same kind. As yet, however, the ideal was embryonic. We may imagine it as

the unborn child of the ideal of Renaissance sovereignty; for governmental

independence came before any clearly conceived Nationalism. Accepting the fact of

difference it was now possible for nations to work out their own futures. Not

even in theory was it any longer the business of an emperor or a pope to

see to the development of England or of France. The Renaissance, however,

divided Europe rather into a collection of states than into nations. The ideal of the

time was governmental independence, not group-development. And it was not until

the Revolution had come and gone that the long slumbering national

consciousness came to birth as a new ideal.26` What sort of ideal was then

conceived ? First, Nationalism meant the independent development of each distinct

group. Racial dialect had become a literary and official language; differences of

custom had become fixed in distinct systems of law and government; and all this

was no longer thought of in terms of organisation as it had been during the

Renaissance. The new Nationalism was based upon the common character

of distinct groups of people. The people became the centre of interest; they and

not the government were the nation. The Age of monarchs passed and the popular

gospel of Revolution followed; but the work of the Renaissance and Reformation

in dividing the religious tradition was not undone, and Nationalism found ready to

its hand characteristic creeds in different groups. Through the centuries that

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followed the Renaissance, and until the Napoleonic era, Nationalism was rather a

sentiment than a programme, but the sentiment was strong. It was felt as a real

political fact at the partition of Poland (1772). It gave force to the Spanish

resistance against French government from 1806 until 1813. It produced the defeat

of Napoleon at Moscow and the revival of Germany;27` and although it was

disregarded by the statesmen of the Congress of Vienna,28` it continued to grow

until at last it became a definite political ideal in about 1848. Thus, as Lord

Morley puts it, Nationalism ‘from instinct, became idea; from idea, abstract principle;

then fervid pre-possession; ending where it is today, in dogma, whether accepted or

evaded’.29`

In this last form therefore, it must be further described; for whether we

oppose or not, it is one of the greatest forces in modern politics. Nationalism was

in the first place revolutionary, because Europe still bore traces of the crude

dynastic divisions of the Renaissance. In some cases one nation forced its own

institutions upon another, as Austria upon the Italians. ‘Europe bled white by the

man who was to have been her saviour was again prisoner to kings whom she

no longer reverenced.’30` The association known by the name of ‘Young Italy’ was

founded on ‘the three inseparable bases of Independence, Unity, and Liberty ---- that

is, the Austrians must go, the various small states must be united in one, and

democratic government with liberty of opinion must be established’.31` But first

‘Austria must go’; and so in every country Nationalism implied a shaking of

established governments, which were sometimes, as in Italy, alien to the people

governed, sometimes, as in Germany, an inheritance from obsolete politics. But

Nationalism was also constructive. It implied that each national group should and

could develop its own institutions and manage its own affairs. Thus it was at once

an assault on any governmental oppression and a plan for reorganisation. The

group was to choose, establish, and maintain its own form of law and government.

The general principles of all such law or government were drawn from what had

been proved in the Revolution; and, speaking vaguely, Nationalism was democratic

in all countries: but it implied also that particular application of these general

principles should be made by each group for itself.

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The bare existence of the United States has been an inspiration to

democracy. The Rights of Man in the French Revolution were derived from the

statements of the Constitutions of the United States. It is no accident of history

that one of the most brilliant essays on democracy is an analysis of the situation

in the United States. Tocqueville’s ‘Democratic en Amerique’ still remains an

admirable expression of the democratic ideal in action.32` The author sees the very

essence of the ideal. ‘Poetry, eloquence ---- all those gifts’, he says, ‘which heaven

scatters, are a gain to democracy; and even when they fall to those who oppose

democracy, they serve its cause by showing the natural grandeur of man.’33` He

points out that the French Revolution by destroying the old local administrations

favoured the despotism of a bureaucracy rather than liberty,34` and he sees the

dangers in the approach to democracy ---- the pernicious retention of false but

popular ideas, the growth of industrial autocracy, to balance political democracy,

instability of mind, the desire of the officers of a democratic army for war to

give them social prestige. He is not, therefore, a blind enthusiast, but in a

democratic society he finds vigour and initiative, ability to organise in associations

for definite purposes, sobriety of judgement and freedom from the restrictions of

old custom. He also sees that it is only in a democracy that other political ends

are thought superior to the mere preservation of order. And it is perhaps for this

reason chiefly that men are now moved by the democratic ideal: since democracy

allows for a continually changing form of social organisation; and we now regard

the future as indefinitely long, the possibility of improvement as infinite. Our

Utopias are not now fixed and eternal situations, but continually developing

organisations of life. When at the close of 1790, Edmund Burke published his

‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’, it was a bitter arraignment of “mob

rule” and a brilliant defense of conservative evolution against radical revolution.

Although Burke’s book was speedily challenged by Thomas Paine and other

radicals it enjoyed widespread popularity. It was quickly translated into the chief

languages on the Continent and was acclaimed by monarchs, nobles, and

clergymen. Catherine II of Russia personally complimented the author, and the

puppet king of Poland sent him a letter of flamboyant glorification and a gold

218

medal. All over Europe, voices were raised against the French Revolution as a

wicked assault upon traditional society and civilisation.

Of the monarchs of Europe, several had special reasons for viewing the

progress of the Revolution with grave misgiving. The Bourbons of Spain and of

the Two Sicilies were united by blood and family compacts with the ruling

dynasty of France; any belittling of the latter was likely to affect disastrously the

former. Then, too, the French Queen, Marie Antoinette, was an Austrian Habsburg.

Her family interests were in measure at stake. In the Austrian dominions, the

visionary Joseph II died in 1790 and was succeeded by another brother of Marie

Antoinette, the gifted though unemotional Emperor Leopold II. Leopold skillfully

extricated himself from the embarrassments at home and abroad bequeathed him

by his predecessor and then turned his attention to French affairs. He was in

receipt of constant and now frantic appeals from his sister to aid Louis XVI

against the revolutionaries. He knew that the Austrian Netherlands, whose rebellion

he had suppressed with difficulty, were saturated with sympathy for the Revolution

and that many of their inhabitants would welcome annexation to France. As chief

of the Holy Roman Empire, he must keep revolutionary agitation out of Germany

and protect the border provinces against French aggression. All these factors served

to make him the foremost champion of the “old regime” in Europe and

incidentally of the royal cause in France.

Now it so happened that Leopold II found an ally in Frederick

William II of Prussia, who had succeeded Frederick the Great in 1786, and who

combined gross sensuality with Protestant mysticism in most curious ways. He

neglected the military machine which his predecessors had constructed with

infinite patience and thoroughness. He lavished money on favourites and

mistresses. In foreign affairs he reversed the policy of Frederick the Great by

allying himself with Austria and accepting for Prussia a secondary role among the

German states. In August 1791, he joined with the Emperor Leopold in issuing the

public Declaration of Pillnitz, to the effect that the two rulers considered the

restoration of order and of monarchy in France an object of “common interest to

all sovereigns of Europe.”

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The declaration was only a threat, for the armies of the German allies

were not prepared for war, but the very threat of foreign despots to

interfere in the internal affairs of France aroused bitter and militant feeling among

the mass of Frenchmen, who were patriotic as well as revolutionary. The

Constituent Assembly had sat for two and a half years and passed 25,000 decrees.

It had taken the initial step of revolution and reconstruction. It had swept away

the ‘ancien regime’. It had set up the first democratic constitution for France and

reorganised the administrative system. It had, however, kept peace with foreign

Powers and it had preserved the Monarchy. Its successor, the Legislative Assembly,

was within a year to destroy the throne and plunge France into war.

With the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the French Revolution

entered on a new phase and into the control of a new set of men. The men of

1789 passed into the ranks of conservatives, ‘Constitutionalists’, defenders of the

order which they had established. It is interesting to notice the fate of some of

the leading men of 1789. Lafayette, the most popular hero of 1789, appeared in

1792 trying to lead the troops under his command to defend the Monarchy

against the attacks of revolutionaries. He was proscribed by the Assembly,

abandoned France, and gave himself up to the enemy. Bailly, President of the

National Assembly on the occasion of the Tennis-court Oath, was guillotined by

the Revolutionaries in 1793. Mounier, another President of the Assembly, went into

exile after the October Riots of 1789. Talleyrand saved his head by withdrawing

himself from France in 1792. He was then proscribed as an ‘émigré’.

A fresh set of Revolutionaries, idealists and theorists, led the country

into new paths of republicanism, militarism, and later, terrorism and socialism. The

conduct of affairs fell increasingly into the hands of professional politicians,

more particularly into the hands of the clubs, as the ordinary citizen tended to

concern himself less and less with politics. Men with other occupations soon

wearied of the incessant elections which required their votes; elections for district

and administrative offices, for judges of various ranks, for members of municipal

corporations, for bishops and cures, for deputies to the Legislative Assembly, & c.

---- elections which often dragged on for weeks. From the middle of 1790 the

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records show an astonishing reduction of active voters. Often less than 25 percent,

of the qualified voters exercised their votes. In the Paris elections of 1791, less

than 12 percent voted.

The leaders of the French government at this time were the moderate

Girondists, a body of young and eloquent men of the middle class, who, since they

were drawn from the south-western area of France called the Gironde, soon

became known, and are to this day remembered, as the Girondins. Of the art and

science of government the Girondins knew little; but they possessed, and were able

to communicate to others, a glowing enthusiasm for the republican idea, and a

missionary impulse to spread it through Europe. The Girondins ---- so called

because some of their conspicuous members came from the mercantile department

of the Gironde ---- were the radicals and were intensely patriotic. They were filled

with noble, if somewhat impractical, “classical” ideas borrowed from the ancient

republics of Greece and Rome. They were eager to discredit Louis XVI and to

establish a republic in France. In Brissot, a Parisian lawyer, they had a leader and

organiser and diplomatic advisor. In Vergniaud, they had a polished orator and

Isnard was also an orator. In Condorcet, they had a scholar and philosopher. In

Dumouriez, they possessed a military genius of the first order. And in the home of

the wealthy and talented Madame Rolland, they had a charming salon for political

discussion and she was the Egeria of the party. The dazzling dreams, the

sentimental enthusiasm, and the tragic end of the Girondins have secured them

many friends. Upon them however, must rest the chief responsibility for a long

and terrible war, which destroyed the system of Richelieu and left France a

permanently enfeebled member of European society, shielded from imminent danger

on the eastern border only by heavy taxes and a universal and compulsory system

of military service.

In internal affairs the Legislative Assembly accomplished next to

nothing. Everything was subordinated to the question of foreign war. Here,

Feuillants and Girondists found themselves in strange agreement. Only such

extreme radicals as Marat and Robespierre, outside the Assembly, opposed a policy

which they feared would give rise to a military dictatorship. Marat expressed his

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alarms in the ‘Friend of the People’: “What afflicts the friends of liberty is that

we have more to fear from success than from defeat;…..the danger is lest one of

our generals be crowned with victory and lest…..he lead his victorious army

against the capital to secure the triumph of the Despot.” But the counsels of

extreme radicals were unavailing.

Afraid of losing political support in France, the Girondists pronounced

the Declaration of Pillnitz a threat to national security, hoping that enthusiasm

for a war would unite the French and result also in enthusiasm for their

continued rule. Pretexts for a war were not lacking. Leopold of Austria could

complain of French encouragement given to a revolution in Belgium, of German

princes dispossessed of feudal rights in Alsace, of Avignon snatched from the

Pope and annexed to France, of the novel and disquieting principle that the people

of a country have the right to determine their own allegiance, and yet more

important than these other occasions of friction, of the dangerous position of his

sister the Queen of France. To Marie Antoinette’s entreaties that he should

summon a European Congress to deal with the French Revolution and concentrate

an armed force to give effect to its decisions he could not be altogether

indifferent. Yet the situation, though grave, was still not beyond repair. A cold,

prudent, long-headed man, much occupied with the internal problems of the

Austrian empire Leopold had no desire to embark upon a quixotic crusade against

the tumultuous democracy of Frace. Prompt to threaten, he was reluctant to act,

and hoped that when Louis had accepted the Constitution the need for action had

passed away. But as autumn melted into winter, and every week brought fresh

news of revolutionary violence in Paris, the Emperor’s mind turned more and

more towards an armed intervention. On all sides he was pressed to stem the tide

of militant French democracy; by the ‘emigres’ who were gathered at Coblentz, by

Catharine of Russia, by Gustavus of Sweden, by the King of Spain, and more

particularly by Marie Antoinette, who saw in an unsuccessful French defense

against foreign invasion the one chance for the salvation of her husband’s crown.

But then, before his slow resolution ripened to action, Leopold unexpectedly died.

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The Girondists of France were aided in their scheme by the activities

of monarchists, both within and outside France, whose plottings and

pronouncements could be made to appear an additional threat, though to a greater

extent than they actually were. On April 20, 1792, the assembly declared war

against Austria and Prussia. Although Leopold had just died, his policy was

followed by his son and successor, the Emperor Francis II. The campaign of 1792

of Austria and Prussia was the first stage in a vast conflict which was destined

to rage throughout Europe for twenty-three years. It was the beginning of an

international contest between the forces of revolution and those of the old order.

Enthusiasm was with the French. They felt they were fighting for a cause ---- the

cause of liberty, equality, and nationalism. Men put on red liberty caps, and such as

possessed no firearms equipped themselves with pikes and hastened to the front.

Troops coming up from Marseilles sang in Paris a new hymn of freedom which

Rouget de Liste had just composed at Strasbourg for the French soldiers ---- the

inspiring ‘Marseillaise’ that was to become the national anthem of France. But

enthusiasm was about the only asset that the French possessed. Their armies were

ill-organised and ill-disciplined. Provisions were scarce, arms were inferior, and

fortified places in poor repair. Lafayette had greater ambition than ability. Though

the French army was disorganised, and Austria and Prussia were leagued against

them, Brissot and his followers were confident of victory. At the shock of war the

peoples of Europe would rise against their tyrants. Everywhere thrones would fall.

The principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality would conquer the world.

Robespierre, an oracle of the Jacobin Club, reasoned otherwise, thinking that the

war would restore prestige to the French Crown. But Robespierre’s hour had not

yet struck. A Girondin ministry, with the able Dumouriez at the Foreign Office,

swept their country into war (April 20, 1792). Almost all of the various political

factions in France welcomed the war. The Girondists expected that their aggressive

policy would solidify the loyalty of the people to their regime. Reactionaries

hailed the intervention of Austria and Prussia as the first step in the undoing of

all that had happened since 1789. Radicals hoped that initially the French would

suffer reverses that would discredit the moderate Girondists and the monarchy, and

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thus hasten the advent of republican rule in France, and the triumph of people’s

armies and revolutionary ideals across Europe. As the radicals hoped, the forces

of the French met serious reverses. “The rupture of the Austrian alliance is as

necessary as the taking of the Bastille.” Brissot, ‘the Girondist’.

On July 25, 1792, the Duke of Brunswick, as commander-in-chief of the

allied armies, issued a proclamation to the French people. He declared it his

purpose “to put an end to the anarchy in the interior of France, to check the

attacks upon the throne and the altar, to reestablish the legal power, to restore to

the King the security and liberty of which he is now deprived and to place him

in a position to exercise once more the legitimate authority which belongs to

him.” The Duke further declared that French soldiers who might be captured

“shall be treated as enemies and punished as rebels to their King and as

disturbers of the public peace,” and that, if the slightest harm befell any member

of the royal family, his Austrian and Prussian troops would “inflict an ever

memorable vengeance by delivering over the city of Paris to military execution

and complete destruction, and the rebels guilty of such outrages to the punishment

that they merit.” This manifesto sealed the fate of the French monarchy. It

convinced the revolutionaries that French royalty and foreign armies were in

formal alliance to undo what had been done. The French response was the

insurrection of August 9-10, 1792.

Then it was discovered that, if revolutionary France was to be

effectively defended against the monarchies of unreformed Europe, Louis XVI must

cease to reign and France submit to a strict form of tyranny very remote from

that extreme dispersion of political authority which had found favour at the

opening of the revolution. The war led straight to the fall of the Monarchy, the

establishment of the Republic, and to the formation of the government of the

Terror. It imparted a deeper note of savage apprehension and passion to the

anxieties which had been caused by dear bread and soaring prices, by the

widespread prevalence of disorder, and by the ceaseless agitation of the

bloodthirsty press against counter-revolutionary activities. It was therefore the

exciting cause of terrible crimes, and of a shameful fashion of bloodthirstiness

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which has been surpassed in modern times only by the communists of Russia. But

the war had other consequences more profound and enduring. Revolution was

identified with patriotism. For the first time the vast latent energies of the French

people were deployed in defense of a cause which was regarded as the common

concern of every citizen in the land. For the first time France, emerged as an

organic nation, its institutions based on popular assent, and maintained against a

world in arms by a people in revolution, the masters and servants of a

revolutionary state. Another consequence was inevitable. As the military spirit of

the French people was aroused, the idyllic professions of pacificism and

cosmopolitan brotherhood which had decorated so many revolutionary speeches

passed swiftly into the background. Old diplomatic principles, familiar objects of

territorial ambition, resumed their empire. The ghost of Louis XIV returned to

direct the counsels of the Jacobins. Fraternity was thrown to the winds. The

Girondins were drunk with vainglory and the lust of conquest. They determined to

isolate Austria, that they might rob her of Belgium, and bring the French frontier

to the Rhine.

“We will make a graveyard of France rather than fail to regenerate her according

to our ideas.’ Carriere, ‘the Jacobin’.

For the moment, however, the impolicy of the Girondins had launched

France all unprepared (for the royal army was in dissolution) in war against

Prussia and Austria, the two strongest military states on the continent. The result

was what might be expected. By August 1792 the allied armies of Austria and

Prussia had crossed the frontier and were threatening the capture of Paris. A fury

of rage and despair seized the capital. The first hostile exchanges were sufficient

to show that the revolution had no army upon which it could rely for the defense

of the country. There was cowardice, indiscipline, failure, and, as invariably

happened after every military reverse, the cry of treachery. It was during this

period of agonised uncertainty, when the old army had proved itself incompetent,

and before the new volunteers of the revolution had proved their worth, that the

fate of the monarchy was decided. How, it was asked, could the war be made to

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succeed, while Louis, the friend of the enemy, reigned in the Tuileries, dismissing

his Girondin ministers, refusing a decree for a big military camp near Paris,

holding out, so it was believed, secret encouragement to the invader ? In the French

insurrection of August 9-10, 1792, the proletariat and the extreme element among

the bourgeoisie of Paris revolted against the constitutional monarchy. They

supplanted the legal commune with a radically revolutionary commune. At this

crisis when the Prussian army was marching on France, and its chief was

threatening Paris with destruction if the royal family was injured, a great, gross

revolutionary figure rose above the tumult and took sudden command. The

memory of Danton is red with violence. It was he who organised the attack on

the Tuileries (Auguat 10, 1792), when the gallant Swiss Guard were hacked to

pieces, and the King and Queen were delivered over to captivity, and a Convention

was summoned to proclaim a Republic; nor can he be acquitted of condoning the

terrible September massacres in the prisons, which were planned to influence the

elections to this new Parliament.

The allies were advancing into France. Fear deepened into panic.

Supreme control fell into the hands of the revolutionary commune. Danton became

virtual dictator. His policy was simple. The radicals should strike terror into the

hearts of their domestic and foreign foes. “In my opinion,” said Danton, “the way

to stop the enemy is to terrify the royalists. Audacity, more audacity, and always

greater audacity !” The news of the investment of Verdun by the allies, published

at Paris on September 2, was the signal for the beginning of a massacre of

royalists in the French capital. For five days some 2,000 persons were taken from

the prisons and handed over by a self-constituted judicial body to the tender

mercies of a band of cutthroats. Among the victims were women and children,

nobles and magistrates, priests and bishops, ---- anyone suspected of royal

sympathy. Meanwhile Danton was infusing new life and spirit into the French

armies. Dumouriez replaced Lafayette in supreme command. And on September 20

the allies received their first check at Valmy. The very day on which news

reached Paris that it was saved and that Brunswick was in retreat, the newly

elected National Convention, amid the wildest enthusiasm, unanimously decreed

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“that royalty is abolished in France’ Then it was resolved to date from September

22, 1792, Year I of the Republic. A decree of perpetual banishment was enacted

against the émigrés, and it was soon determined to bring the King to trial before

the Convention.

Nevertheless more than any other revolutionary character of the time

Danton was a statesman and a patriot, with an eye for essential needs, a mind

clear of illusions, and a rare power for decisive action. He aimed at giving France

a convinced republic instead of a disloyal monarchy, a centralised government in

place of anarchy, and new armies highly disciplined and permeated by the

revolutionary faith in place of the crumbling and doubtful fragments of the army

of the Crown. The Girondin idea of a crusade against all the crowned head of

Europe soon struck him as fantastic. The man who pulled down the French

monarchy became in diplomacy a pupil of the ‘ancien regime’. To Danton as to

all statesmen in time of war terror was a necessary instrument of policy. The one

intolerable thing, as long as foreign enemies were on French soil, was disunion

among Frenchmen. That such disunion existed was a suspicion widely entertained.

Every misfortune at home and abroad, the high prices, the bad trade, the foreign

war, the disquietude about the king and the priests, was calculated to swell the

ranks of the malcontents. A counter-revolution was no impossibility. Such measure

of terrorism as was necessary to cow the enemies of the revolutionary state

Danton was always prepared to employ.

From this point, the country’s leadership passed into the hands of

an equalitarian-minded “middle” class. These new leaders called themselves

Jacobins, after the political club to which they belonged, whose headquarter was in

Paris, but whose membership extended throughout France. Like the Girondists, the

Jacobins were mostly members of the bourgeoisie, professionals and businessmen,

though an increasing number of artisans joined the club as it grew. They differed

from the Girondists in their political philosophy, however. Girondists were loud in

their defense of liberty, by which they often meant no more than their freedom to

pursue their own economic interests without state regulation. Because their political

base was in the provinces, they tended to mistrust Parisians and were alarmed by

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the extremism of the Commune. Jacobins, in contrast, were the master-minds of the

Commune. They were vigorous proponents of equality. They supported the

elimination of civil and political distinctions, favoured universal suffrage, and state

programmes for the maintenance of the poor. The Jacobins differed from the

Girondists in that they were a tightly organised party. As such, again unlike the

Girondists, they were able to move decisively and prepared to act ruthlessly in

defense of their programs and their leadership.

The most famous of the clubs was that of the Jacobins. The central

Jacobin Society had grown out of the Breton Club, an informal group of Breton

deputies to the National Assembly. It had moved to Paris with the Assembly in

October 1789, established itself in the convent of the Jacobins, and widened its

membership. Branches began to be formed in the provinces, and by September

1791 there were 406 affiliated societies all over France. This great centralised

society with its headquarters at Paris soon became the most powerful

organisation in France, and before its overthrow in 1794, the real ruler of the

country. The Moderates35` tended to fall away from it, and it became during 1792

and 1793 increasingly the organ of the Extremists.

The strength of the Jacobins was seen in the new Legislative

Assembly. On the left36` sat a solid group of 130 members of the Club, who

because they had a definite and united policy, succeeded in dominating the

Assembly, and in drawing the majority of the members into their following.37 They

were led by a group of men from the Gironde district, Brissot, Vergniaud,

Condorcet, and others. Later these men from the Gironde were to enter into mortal

conflict with the Jacobins and be overthrown by them. In the year 1791,

however, Jacobins and Girondists were still at one in the common aim of striking

a blow for the Revolution and routing its enemies. These enemies they saw in the

non-juring priests who would not accept the Civil Constitution, in the ‘émigré’

nobles who were stirring up mischief beyond the frontiers, and finally in the King

and his court where they believed dwelt treachery and ill will to the Revolution.

They were also bent upon war. A war on behalf of France and the Revolution

would bring about the fulfillment of their aims. It would inflame the people, give

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a fresh impetus to the Revolution, expose treason and apathy, force the King into

the open, shake the throne, and carry the Republicans to power. ‘We have need of

great treasons,’ declared Brissot, ‘for there is still poison in the heart of France

which needs a powerful explosion to expel it.’

There were also other sections of France which were not averse from

war; the people, who thought it would take off the rowdy elements; the Court and

the Monarchists who believed that a foreign war would keep the army together,

refresh the loyalty of the country, and restore to the King his declining popularity.

Only a handful of Jacobins, Robespierre among them, opposed the war, arguing that

it would destroy the Revolution, and give rise to a dictator, maybe the sovereign,

maybe some one else. They were to be proved right. The war was to lead to

Napoleon. The war which opened in 1792 expanded into a great European

struggle, which for twenty-three years exerted a relentless pressure upon the

history of France and the history of Europe.

The clue to the understandin of revolutions is that they are worked by

small fanatical minorities. The French Convention, which proclaimed the Republic,

executed the King, sent the Girondins to the scaffold, and established the Terror,

was returned by the votes of some six percent of the total electorate. The main

body of the French people, after the first blaze of enthusiasm had died down,

wanted nothing so much as to be allowed to manage their own concerns in

tranquility, and were well content to leave politics to the club men. Either because

he was too inert or too busy, too selfish, or too indifferent, too frightened or too

disgusted, or too little capable of entering into combination with others, the average

respectable citizen stood aside from the battle. In Paris, where political interest was

most widely diffused, it would appear from the report of a careful observer that

in every one hundred and thirty persons only one gave active support to the

Terror.

The vast majority of the Convention, known as the Plain or ‘Marais’,

belonged to that moderate, colourless, uncertain, but wholly respectable section of

the French middle class, which constituted the strength of the nation. To such it

was natural to seek guidance from the Girondins, who were returned a hundred

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and twenty strong, and were already established in parliamentary reputation. The

Girondins were the last apostles of the liberal idea. They believed in liberty local

and personal. They had a vision of France settling down to a blameless and

brilliant existence under a Republican Constitution the finest in the world. Being

essentially humane, they were shocked by the crimes of August and September.

But though they could make beautiful speeches, they were incapable of brave and

concerted action. They attacked Robespierre, but did not imprison him; assailed the

assassins of September, but did not prosecute them; realised the dangerous

opposition of revolutionary Paris, but would neither close the clubs, nor curb the

Press, nor provide the Convention with the necessary safeguard of an armed force

on which reliance could be placed. One man might have saved them from

destruction, and offered to do so; but the Girondins were too respectable to clasp

the strong, but blood-stained hand of Danton. To the average Frenchman no

respectability remained to a party which had given a regicide vote, and when the

Girondins through cowardice and ineptitude allowed themselves against

their better judgement to be outmanoeuvred by the Mountain into sending the

King to the guillotine, they had decreed their own extinction. After that no

moderate Frenchman would lift up a finger to help them.

The spring which followed the execution of Louis was crowded with

disaster for the regicide state. With England, Spain, and Holland added to the circle

of her enemies, with her armies withdrawn from Belgium, with Dumouriez, her best

general, gone over to the enemy, with insurrection ablaze in the Vendee and in

Lyons, and with Toulon at the mercy of the British fleet, the Republic was

fighting with its back to the wall. It was the stress of these terrible anxieties

which swept the Girondins clean out of the political scene, and founded that firm

and terrible instrument of autocratic rule which succeeded amidst much bloodshed

and cruelty in restoring the military situation.

The Jacobin Government consisted of a small secret Cabinet or

Committee of Public Safety for the general direction of policy, of a somewhat

larger Committee of Public Security for police, of a revolutionary tribunal for the

dissemination of terror, and of a plan for the strict supervision of generals in the

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field by civil agents of the purest fanaticism known as ‘representants en mission’.

The Convention, scornfully described by Dumouriez as a body of three hundred

scoundrels and four hundred imbeciles, continued to sit, to debate, to legislate; but

its authority was gone. A ‘coup d’ etat’ led by Henriot (June 2) had eliminated those

Girondin orators whose eloquence had so often charmed and delighted the

assembly. The party of these brilliant idealists had not even been able to defend

its leaders from proscription or the scaffold. It could not police its debating hall.

Paralysed by the publicity which its principles forbade it to renounce it was

overshadowed by the new Cabinet, by the Commune of Paris, by the Jacobin and

Cordelier Clubs, and by the discipline and vocal ruffians who dominated the

revolutionary committees in the forty-eight sections or electoral districts into which

the capital was divided. Other times required other methods. The stress of war had

created an immense acceleration in affairs: swift and ruthless action in place of

the interminable loquacity which had so long perplexed and arrested the march of

government was the note of men like Carnot at the War Office and Jean Bon

Saint-Andre at the Marine. The Jacobins, who saved the Republic, were giants of

industry. Science came to their aid. On July 27 an order was sent from Paris to

the armies on the frontier in a quarter of an hour. The semaphore telegraph, one

of the secrets of an impending military Empire, had made its debut in the service

of France.

The man of the new era was Robespierre, the lean lawyer from Arras,

who entered the Committee of Public Safety on July 28, 1793, and for one

amazing year, memorable for its military glories and domestic shame, was the real

ruler of France and the master spirit of Europe. What a catalogue of Jacobin

triumphs belongs to the reign of Robespierre ! The royalist revolution put down in

Lyons, Toulon recaptured, the Duke of York beaten at Hondschoote, the Austrians

defeated at Wattignies and Fleurus, Belgium reconquered, Holland invaded, French

soil everywhere liberated from the invader. It is the year of the first ‘levee en

masse’ of the nation in arms, the year, though not the official natal year, of

that system of military conscription which still brings a dark shadow into

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every Frenchman’s life, the year in which Carnot began to organise the armies

which made for Napoleon his instrument of conquest.

One of the Jacobins’ first actions was to call for an election by

universal suffrage of delegates to a national convention whose task would be to

draft and enact a new and republican constitution. This convention became the

effective governing body of the country for the next three years. It was elected in

September 1792, at a time when disturbances across France reached a new height.

The so-called September massacres occurred when patriotic Paris mobs, hearing a

rumour that political prisoners were plotting to escape from their prisons,

responded by hauling them before hastily convened tribunals and sentencing them

to swift execution. Over one thousand supposed enemies of the revolution were

killed in less than a week. Similar riots engulfed Lyons, Orleans, and other French

cities.

When the newly elected convention met in September, its membership

was far more radical than that of its predecessor, the Legislative Assembly, and its

leadership was determined to demand an end to the monarchy and the death of

Louis XVI. On September 21, the convention declared France a republic. In

December it placed the king on trial and in January he was condemned to death

by a narrow margin. The heir to the grand tradition of French met his end

bravely as “Citizen Louis Capet,” beheaded by the guillotine, the frightful

mechanical headsman that had become the symbol of revolutionary fervour.

Meanwhile, the convention turned its attention to the enactment of

further domestic reforms. Among its most significant accomplishments over the

next three years were the abolition of slavery in French colonies; the prohibition

of imprisonment for debt; the establishment of the metric system of weights and

measures; and the repeal of primogeniture, so that property might not be inherited

exclusively by the oldest son, but be divided in substantially equal portions among

all immediate heirs. The convention also supplemented the decrees of the assembly

in abolishing the remnants of manorialism and in providing for greater freedom of

economic opportunity for the commoner. The property of enemies of the revolution

was confiscated for the benefit of the government and the lower classes. Great

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estates were broken up and offered for sale to poorer citizens on easy terms. The

indemnities hitherto promised to the nobles for the loss of their privileges were

abruptly cancelled. To curb the rise in the cost of living maximum prices for grain

and other necessities were fixed by law, and merchants who profiteered at the

expense of the poor were threatened with the guillotine. Still other measures of

reform dealt with religion. An effort was made to abolish Christianity and to

substitute the worship of Reason in its place. In accordance with this purpose a

new calendar was adopted, dating the year from the birth of the republic

(September 22, 1792) and dividing the months in such a way as to eliminate the

Christian Sunday. Later, this cult of Reason was replaced by a Deistic religion

dedicated to the worship of a Supreme Being and to a belief in the immortality

of the soul. Finally, in 1794, the convention decreed simply that religion was a

private matter, that church and state would therefore be separated, and that all

beliefs not actually hostile to the government would be tolerated.

While effecting this political revolution in France, the convention’s

leadership at the same time accomplished an astonishingly successful reorganisation

of its armies. By February 1793, Britain, Holland, Spain, and Austria were in the

field against the French. Britain’s entrance into the war was dictated by both

strategic and economic reasons. The English feared French penetration into the

Low Countries directly across the Channel; they were also concerned that French

expansion might pose a serious threat to Britain’s own growing mercantile

hegemony around the globe. The allied coalition ranged against France, though

united only in its desire to contain this puzzling, fearsome revolutionary

phenomenon, was nevertheless a formidable force. To counter it, the French

organised an army that was able to win engagement after engagement during

these years. In August 1793, the revolutionary government imposed a levy on the

entire male population capable of bearing arms. Fourteen hastily drafted armies

were flung into battle under the leadership of young and inexperienced officers.

What they lacked in training and discipline, they made up for in improvised

organisation, mobility, flexibility, courage, and morale. (In the navy, however, where

skill was of paramount importance, the revolutionary French never succeeded in

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matching the performance of the British). In 1793-1794, the French armies

preserved their homeland. In 1794-1795, they occupied the Low Countries, the

Rhineland, parts of Spain, Switzerland, and Savoy. In 1796, they invaded and

occupied key parts of Italy and broke the coalition that had arrayed itself against

them.

Then there was the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety.

These achievements were not without their price, however. To ensure their

accomplishment, the rulers of France resorted to a bloody authoritarianism, that has

come to be known as the Terror. Although the convention succeeded in 1793 in

drafting a new democratic constitution, based upon manhood sufrage, it deferred

its introduction because of wartime emergency. Instead, the convention prolonged

its own life year by year, and increasingly delegated its responsibilities to a group

of twelve leaders known as the Committee of Public Safety. By this time the

moderate, upper middle-class Girondists had lost all influence within the

convention. Complete power had passed to the Jacobins, who, though from the

middle class, continued to proclaim themselves disciples of Rousseau and

champions of the urban workers.

Foremost among the members of the Committee of Public Safety were

Marat, Danton, and Robespierre. Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793) was educated as a

physician, and by 1789 had already earned enough distinction in that profession to

be awarded an honorary degree by St. Andrews University in Scotland. Almost

from the beginning of the revolution, he stood as a champion of the common

people. He opposed nearly all of the dogmatic assumptions of his middle-class

colleagues in the assembly, including the idea that France should pattern its

government after that of Great Britain, which he recognised to be oligarchic in

form. He was soon made a victim of persecution and was forced to take refuge

in sewers and dungeons, but this did not put an end to his efforts to rouse the

people to a defense of their rights. It did, however, leave him with a chronic skin

affliction from which he could find relief only through frequent bathing. In 1793

he was stabbed through the heart during one of these soothing respites by

Charlotte Corday, a young woman who was fanatically devoted to the Girondists.

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In contrast with Marat, Georges Jacques Danton (1759-1794) did not come into

prominence until the revolution was three years old; but, like Marat, he directed his

activities toward goading the masses into rebellion. Elected a member of the

Committee of Public Safety in 1793, he had much to do with organising the

terror. As time went on he appears to have wearied of ruthlessness and displayed

a tendency to compromise that gave his opponents in the convention their

opportunity. In April 1794 he was sent to the guillotine. Upon mounting the

scaffold he is reported to have said: “Show my head to the people; they do not

see the like every day.”

The most famous and perhaps the greatest of all extremist of all the

extremist leaders was Maximilien Robespierre (1775-1794). Born of a family

reputed to be of Irish descent, Robespierre was trained for the law and speedily

achieved a modest success as an advocate. In 1782 he was appointed a criminal

judge, but soon resigned because he could not bear to impose a sentence of death.

Of a nervous and timid disposition, he was a less than able administrator, but he

made up for this lack of talent by fanatical devotion to principle. He had adopted

the belief that the philosophy of Rousseau held the one great hope of salvation

for all mankind. To put this philosophy into practice he was ready to employ any

means that would bring results, regardless of the cost to himself or to others. This

passionate loyalty to a gospel that exalted the masses eventually won him a

following. Indeed, he was so lionised by the public that he was allowed to wear

the knee breeches, silk stockings, and powdered hair of the old society until the

end of his life. In 1791 he was accepted as the oracle of the Jacobin club. Later

he became president of the National Convention and a member of the Committee

of Public Safety. Though he had little or nothing to do with originating the

Terror, he was nevertheless responsible for enlarging its scope. He came to justify

ruthlessness as a necessary and therefore laudable means to revolutionary progress.

In the last six weeks of his government, no fewer than 1,285 heads rolled

from the scaffold in Paris.

The years of the Terror were years of ruthless dictatorship in France.

There was ruthless suppression of enemies of the state. Pressed by foreign enemies

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from without, the committee faced sabotage from both the political Right and Left

at home. In 1793, a royalist counterrevolution broke out in the western area of the

Vendee. The peasantry there had remained generally loyal to church and king.

Government attempts to conscript troops into the revolutionary armies fanned long-

smoldering resentments into open rebellion. By the summer, the peasant forces

there, led by noblemen in the name of a Royal Catholic Grand Army, posed a

serious threat to the convention. Meanwhile, Girondist fugitives helped fuel

rebellions in the great provincial cities of Lyon, Bordeaux, and Marseilles. This

harvest of the decentralising policies of the National Assembly was bitter fruit to

the committee. At the same time they met with the scornful criticism of

revolutionaries even more radical than themselves. This latter group known as the

‘enrages’, was led by the journalist Jacques Hebert, and threatened to topple not

only the government but the country itself by its extremist crusades. Determined to

stabilise France, whatever the necessary cost, the committee dispatched

commissioners into the countryside to suppress the enemies of the state. During

the period of the Terror, from September 1793 to July 1794, the most reliable

estimates place the number of executions as high as twenty thousand in France as

a whole. The victims were by no means all aristocrats. Anyone who appeared to

threaten the republic, no matter what his social or economic position, was at risk.

Far more peasants and labourers than noblemen and women were killed. Among

those executed was Marie Antoinette (“The Widow Capet”). When some time later

the Abbe Sieyes was asked what he had done to distinguish himself during the

Terror, he responded dryly, “I lived.”

Three points need to be made with regard to the Committee of Public

Safety. First, it dramatically reversed the trend toward decentralisation which had

characterised the reforms of the assembly. In addition to dispatching its own

commissioners from Paris to quell provincial insurrection, the committee published

a ‘Bulletin des loix’, to inform all citizens what laws were to be enforced and

obeyed. And it replaced local officials, some of them still royalist in sympathy,

with “deputies on mission” whose task was to conscript troops and generate

patriotic fervour. When these deputies appeared eager to act

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independently, they were in turn replaced by “national agents,” with instructions to

report directly to the committee. Second, by fostering, as it did, the interests of the

lower middle class the committee significantly retarded the pace of industrial

transformation in France. Through policies which assisted the peasant, the small

craftsman, and the shopkeeper to acquire property, the government during this

“second” revolution encouraged the entrenchment of a class at once devoted to the

principle of republicanism while unalterably opposed to a large scale capitalist

transformation of the economy of France. Third, the ruthless Terror of the

committee undoubtedly achieved its end by saving France from defeat at the

hands of coalition of European states. Whether the human price extracted in return

for that salvation was worth the paying is a matter historians --- and indeed all

thoughtful human beings ---- may well never finally resolve.

The Thermidorian reaction was stage three. The Committee of Public

Safety, though able to save France, could not save itsef. It failed to put a stop to

inflation, thereby losing the support of those commoners whose dissatisfactions had

helped bring the convention to power. The long string of military victories

convinced growing numbers that the committee’s demands for continuing self-

sacrifice, as well as its insistence upon the necessity of the Terror, were no longer

justified. By July 1794, the committee was virtually without allies. On July 27 (9

Thermidor, according to the new calendar) Robespierre was shouted down by his

enemies while attempting to speak on the floor of the convention. Desperate, he

tried to rally loyal Jacobins to his defense and against the convention. Discovered

in the thick of this plot by convention troops, Robespierre tried unsuccessfully to

shoot himself. The following day, along with twenty-one fellow conspirators he met

his death as an enemy of the state on the guillotine. Now, the only remaining

leaders in the convention were men of moderate sympathies, who, as time went

on, inclined toward increasing conservatism. Gradually, the revolution came once

more to reflect the interests of the upper middle class. Much of the extremist work

of the radicals was undone. The law of maximum prices and the law against

“suspects” were both replaced. Political prisoners were freed, the Jacobins driven

into hiding, and the Committee of Public Safety shorn of its absolute powers. The

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new situation made possible the return of priests, royalists, and other émigrés

from abroad to add the weight of their influence to the conservative trend.

In Paris the year of Robespierre marks the culmination of the Jacobin

Terror. The man was of the type of Lenin, a fanatical believer in an inspired text.

As Karl Marx was to the Russian, so was Rousseau to the French revolutionary.

Part of his power with the Parisians lay in his plain simplicity of purpose, and in

a life reputed to be free from the taint of peculation. “You may laugh at him

now,” said a contemporary, “but that man will go far. He believes every word he

says.” The ease and malice of his oratory, the violence of his views, coupled with

a great dexterity in the arts of political management, made him almost from the

first a leader among the Jacobins. He was the master of the Paris revolutionary

machine before he became a director of national policy. Scrupulously, and elegantly

dressed, well-mannered, ostentatious in his professions of republican virtue, he had

for every dissenter from his narrow creed the one and simple remedy of the

guillotine. In March he sent Hebert and Chaumette to the scaffold for their

anarchy and aetheism. In April, the knife fell upon Danton and Desmoulins, who in

the ‘Vieux Cordelier’, the one piece of real literature produced in the revolution,

had advocated a return to clemency and moderation. At last the man-eating tiger

overreached himself by a law (the law of 22 Prairial) which threatened the life of

every member of the Convention, for the legislators were deprived of their

immunity, and the last feeble safeguards for the protection of persons accused for

political offences were swept away. In self-defense even cowards may pluck up

courage. There were men in the Convention led by Barras and Tallein who

resolved that the tyrant should perish and saw that with a careful organisation of

forces outside the assembly the deed could be done. Meeting the Jacobins, not

with eloquent speeches, but with their own weapons of calculated force, these

capable men achieved a swift and easy victory. On July 2, 1794 (9 Thermidor by

the Republican Calendar), the Hotel de Ville was invested and stormed by a force

largely drawn from the Section Lepelletier, a well-to-do quarter of the city. Their

Robespierre was found, his jaw shattered by a bullet wound, and thence he was

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hauled, all bleeding, to the scaffold that he might die under the knife, as his many

victims had died before him.

The long nightmare was over. The hateful epidemic of butchery, which

in Paris alone had cost two thousand six hundred victims, came to a sudden

end. Moderates and Dantonists seized the wheel of power, abolished the

Commune, closed the Jacobin Club, amnestied the Vendeans, and recalled the

Girondins. The dark miasma of suspicion which had poisoned the political life of

Paris passed away with Robespierre’s fall and Jourdan’s great victory at Fleurus.

In her sudden deliverance from fear and humiliation, the country swung back into

the sunlight of gaiety and hope. No more fanatical gloom ! No more ravings of a

blood-thirsty press ! No more guillotining of the brave, the good, the beautiful, the

innocent ! Frivolity resumed its long-interrupted reign. But if France ceased to be

Terrorist, she remained revolutionary. The members of the regicide Parliament could

make no advances to the party of reaction. For them it was a matter of life and

death so to manoeuvre that, whatever the future government of France might be,

regicides from the Convention should stand at the wheel.

Thus we see that there is lot of similarity between the French

Revolution and era following it in Europe and Indian national and renaissance

movement. French Revolution was a precursor to the Indian Renaissance

movement so far as the revolutionary, terrorist aspect was concerned. The

terrorism factor was as much there in the French Revolution period as in the

Indian National and Renaissance period. The only difference was in the intensity

and scale. The terrorism factor in French revolutionary period was on a

much larger scale and very bloody and cruel. In Indian movement, it was less

bloody and on a smaller scale. But both were supposed to be against

outsiders or enemies of the country. And both resulted in some way in giving

a boost to each country’s national movement. Thus French Revolution was a

precursor so far as terrorist, revolutionary aspect was concerned.

The Indian terrorist phase may be traced in the following few pages.

Revolutionary terrorism made its appearance in India in Bengal roundabout 1907.

The Moderate nationalists had exhausted their historical role. Their achievements

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were immense considering the low level of political consciousness and the

immense difficulties they had to face when they began. Their failures too were

numerous. They lacked faith in the common people, did no work among them and

consequently failed to acquire any roots among them. Even their propaganda did

not reach them. Their politics were based on the belief that they would be able to

persuade the rulers to introduce economic and political reforms but their

practical achievements in this respect were meagre. Instead of respecting them for

their moderation, the British treated them with contempt, sneered at their politics,

and met popular agitations with repression. Their basic failure, however, was that of

not keeping pace with events. They could not see that their own achievements had

made their politics obsolete. They failed to meet the demands of the new stage of

the national movement. Visible proof of this was their failure to attract the

younger generation. Extremist leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Lala Lajpat

Rai also did not succeed in their aims.

Thus the end of 1907 brought another political trend to the fore. The

impatient young men of Bengal took to the path of individual heroism and

revolutionary terrorism (a term we use without any pejorative meaning and for

want of a different term). This was primarily because they could find no other

way of expressing their patriotism. It is necessary at this point to reiterate the

fact that, while the youth of Bengal might have been incensed at the official

arrogance and repression and the ‘mendicancy’ of the Congress Moderates, they

were also led to ‘the politics of the bomb’ by the Extremists’ failure to give a

positive lead to the people. The Extremists had made a sharp and on the whole

correct and effective critique of the Moderates. They had rightly emphasised the

role of the masses and the need to go beyond propaganda and agitation. They had

advocated persistent opposition to the Government and put forward a militant

programme of passive resistance and boycott of foreign cloth, foreigners’ courts,

education, and so on. They had demanded self-sacrifice from the youth. They had

talked and written about direct action. But they had failed to find forms through

which all these ideas could find practical expression. They could neither create a

viable organisation to lead the movement nor could they really define the

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movement in a way that differed from that of the Moderates. They were more

militant, their critique of British rule was couched in stronger language, they were

willing to make greater sacrifices and undergo greater suffering, but they did not

know how to go beyond more vigorous agitation. They were not able to put

before people new forms of political struggle or mass movements. Consequently,

they too had come to a political dead end by the end of 1907. Perhaps that is

one reason why they expended so much of their energy in criticising the

Moderates and capturing the Congress. Unsurprisingly, the Extremists’ waffling

failed to impress the youth, who decided to take recourse to physical force. The

‘Yugantar’, a newspaper echoing this feeling of disaffection, wrote in April 1906,

after the political assault on the peaceful Barisal Conference. ‘The thirty crores of

people inhabiting India must raise their sixty crores of hands to stop this curse of

oppression. Force must be stopped by force.’38`

But the question was what form would this movement based on force

take. Organising a popular mass uprising would ordinarily be an uphill and

prolonged task. Many thought of trying to subvert the loyalty of the army, but

they knew it would not be easy. However, these two objectives were kept as long-

term goals and, for the present, revolutionary youth decided to copy the methods

of the Irish nationalists and Russian nihilists and populists. That is to say, they

decided to organise the assassination of unpopular British officials. Such

assassinations would strike terror into the hearts of the rulers, arouse the patriotic

instincts of the people, inspire them and remove the fear of authority from their

minds. Each assassination, and if the assassins were caught, the consequent trial of

the revolutionaries involved, would act as ‘propaganda by deed.’ All that this form

of struggle needed was numbers of young people ready to sacrifice their lives.

Inevitably, it appealed to the idealism of the youth; it aroused their latent sense of

heroism. A steadily increasing number of young men turned to this form of

political struggle.

Here again the Extremist leadership let the young people down. While

it praised their sense of self-sacrifice and courage, it failed to provide a positive

outlet for their revolutionary energies and to educate them on the political

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difference between a revolution based on the activity of the masses and a

revolutionary feeling based on individual action, however heroic. It also failed to

oppose the notion that to be a revolutionary meant to be a believer in violent

action. In fact, Aurobindo Ghosh encouraged this notion. Perhaps the actions of the

Extremist leadership were constrained by the feeling that it was not proper to

politically criticise the heroic youth who were being condemned and hunted by

the authorities. But this failure to politically and ideologically oppose the young

revolutionaries proved a grievous error, for it enabled the individualistic and

terroristic conception of revolution to take root in Bengal.

In 1904, V. D. Savarkar organised ‘Abhinav Bharat’ as a secret society

of revolutionaries. After 1905 several newspapers openly (and a few leaders

secretly) began to advocate revolutionary terrorism. In 1907, an unsuccessful

attempt was made on the life of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. In April

1908, Prafulla Chaki and Khudiram Bose threw a bomb at a carriage which they

believed was occupied by Kingsford, the unpopular judge at Muzaffarpur.

Unfortunately, they killed two English ladies instead. Prafulla Chaki shot himself

dead while Khudiram Bose was tried and hanged. Thousands wept at his death

and he and Chaki entered the ranks of popular nationalist heroes about whom

folk songs were composed and sung all over the country.

The era of revolutionary terrorism had begun. Very soon secret societies

of revolutionaries came up all over the country, the most famous and long lasting

being ‘Anushilan Samiti’ and ‘Jugantar’. Their activities took two forms ---- the

assassination of oppressive officials and informers and traitors from their own

ranks and dacoities to raise funds for purchase of arms, etc. The latter

came to be popularly known as Swadeshi dacoities ! Two of the most

spectacular revolutionary terrorist actions of the period were the unsuccessful

attempt under the leadership of Rash Behari Bose and Sachin Sanyal to kill the

Viceroy, Lord Hardinge who was wounded by the bomb thrown at him while he

was riding an elephant in a state procession ---- and the assassination of Curzon-

Wylie in London by Madan Lal Dhingra. In all 186 revolutionaries were killed or

convicted between the years 1908-1918. The revolutionary terrorists also established

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centres abroad. The more famous of them were Shyamji Krishnavarma, V. D.

Savarkar and Har Dayal in London and Madame Cama and Ajit Singh in Europe.

Revolutionary terrorism gradually petered out. Lacking a mass base, despite

remarkable heroism, the individual revolutionaries, organised in small secret groups,

could not withstand suppression by the still strong colonial state. But despite their

small numbers and eventual failure, they made a valuable contribution to the

growth of nationalism in India. As a historian has put it, ‘they gave us back the

pride of our manhood.’39`

The revolutionary terrorists were severely suppressed during World War

I, with most of their leaders in jail or absconding. Consequently, in order to create

a more harmonious atmosphere for the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, the

Government released most of them under a general amnesty in early 1920. Soon

after, the National Congress launched the Non-Cooperation Movement and on the

urging of Gandhiji, C. R. Das and other leaders, most of the

revolutionaryterrorists either joined the movement or suspended their own activities

in order to give the Gandhian mass movement a chance. But the sudden

suspension of the Non-Cooperation Movement shattered the high hopes raised

earlier. Many young people began to question the very basic strategy of the

national leadership and its emphasis on non0violence and began to look for

alternatives. They were not attracted by the parliamentary politics of the

‘Swarajists’ or the patient and undramatic constructive work of the No-Changers.

Many were drawn to the idea that violent methods alone would free India.

Revolutionary terrorism again became attractive. It is not accidental that nearly all

the major new leaders of the revolutionary terrorist politics, for example, Jogesh

Chandra Chatterjea, Surya Sen, Jatin Das, Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh,

Sukhdev, Shiv Varma, Bhagwati Charan Vohra and Jaidev Kapur, had been

enthusiastic participants in the non-violent Non-Cooperation Movement.

Gradually two separate strands of revolutionary terrorism developed ----

one in Punjab, U. P. and Bihar and the other in Bengal. Both the strands came

under the influence of several new social forces. One was the upsurge of working

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working class trade unionism after the War. They could see the revolutionary

potential of the new class and desired to harness it to the nationalist revolution.

The second major influence was that of the Russian Revolution and the success

of the young Socialist State in consolidating itself. The youthful revolutionaries

were keen to learn from and take the help of young Soviet State and its ruling

Bolshevik party. The third influence was that of the newly sprouting Communist

groups with their emphasis on Marxism, Socialism and the proletariat.

The revolutionaries in northern India were the first to emerge out of the

mood of frustration and reorganise under the leadership of the old veterans,

Ramprasad Bismil, Jogesh Chatterjea and Sachindranath Sanyal whose ‘Bandi

Jiwan’ served as a textbook to the revolutionary movement. They met in Kanpur

in October 1924 and founded the Hindustan Republican Association (or Army) to

organise armed revolution to overthrow colonial rule and establish in its place a

Federal Republic of the United States of India whose basic principle would be

adult franchise. Before armed struggle could be waged, propaganda had to be

organised on a large scale, men had to be recruited and trained and arms had to

be procured. All these required money. The most important ‘action’ of the HRA

was the Kakori Robbery. On 9 August 1925, ten men held up the 8-Down train

at Kakori, an obscure village near Lucknow, and looted its official railway cash.

The Government reaction was quick and hard. It arrested a large number of young

men and tried them in the Kakori Conspiracy Case. Ashfaqulla Khan, Ramprasad

Bismil, Roshan Singh and Rajendra Lahiri were hanged, four others were sent to

the Andamans for life and seventeen others were sentenced to long terms of

imprisonment. Chandrashekhar Azad remained at large. The Kakori case was a

major setback to the revolutionaries of northern India; but it was not a fatal

blow. Younger men such as Bejoy Kumar Sinha, Shiv Varma and Jaidev Kapur in

U. P., Bhagat Singh, Bhagwati Charan Vohra and Sukhdev in Punjab set out to

reorganise the HRA under the overall leadership of Chandrashekhar Azad.

Simultaneously, they were being influenced by socialist ideas. Finally, nearly all the

major young revolutionaries of northern India met at Ferozeshah Kotla Ground

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at Delhi on 9 and 10 September 1928, created a new collective leadership,

adopted socialism as their official goal and changed the name of the party to

Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (Army).

Even though, as we shall see, the HSRA and its leadership was rapidly

moving away from individual heroic action and assassination and towards mass

politics, Lala Lajpat Rai’s death as the result of a brutal lathi-charge when he was

leading an anti-Simon Commission demonstration at Lahore on 30 October 1928,

led them once again to take to individual assassination. The death of this great

Punjabi leader, popularly known as Sher-e-Punjab, was seen by the romantic

youthful leadership of the HSRA as a direct challenge. And so, on 17 December

1928, Bhagat Singh, Azad and Rajguru assassinated, at Lahore, Saunders, a police

official involved in the lathi-charge on Lala Lajpat Rai. In a poster, put up by the

HSRA after the assassination, the assassination was justified as follows: ‘The

murder of a leader respected by millions of people at the unworthy hands of an

ordinary police official…..was an insult to the nation. It was the bounden duty of

young men of India to efface it…..We regret to have had to kill a person but he

was part and parcel of that inhuman and unjust order which has to be

destroyed.’40`

The HSRA leadership now decided to let the people know about its

changed objectives and the need for a revolution by the masses. Bhagat Singh

and B. K. Dutt were asked to throw a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly

on 8 April 1929 against the passage of the Public Safety Bill and the Trade

Disputes Bill which would reduce the civil liberties of citizens in general and

workers in particular. The aim was not to kill, for the bombs were relatively

harmless, but, as the leaflet they threw into the Assembly hall proclaimed, ‘to make

the deaf hear’. The objective was to get arrested and to use the trial court as a

forum for propaganda so that people would become familiar with their movement

and ideology. Bhagat Singh and B. K. Dutt were tried in the Assembly Bomb

Case. Later, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru and tens of other revolutionaries were

tried in a series of famous conspiracy cases. Their fearless and defiant attitude in

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the courts ---- every day they entered the court-room shouting slogans ‘Inquilab

Zindabad’, ‘Down, Down with Imperialism’, ‘Long Live the Proletariat’ and singing

songs such as ‘Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil mei hai’ (our heart is filled

with the desire for martyrdom) and ‘Mera rang de basanti chola’ (dye my clothes

in saffron colour ---- (the colour of courage and sacrifice) ---- was reported in

newspapers; unsurprisingly this won them the support and sympathy of people all

over the country including those who had complete faith in non-violence. Bhagat

Singh became a household name in the land. And many persons, all over the

country, wept and refused to eat food, attend schools, or carry on their daily work

when they heard of his hanging in March 1931.

The country was also stirred by the prolonged hunger strike the

revolutionary under-trials undertook as a protest against the horrible conditions in

jails. They demanded that they be treated not as criminals but as political

prisoners. The entire nation rallied behind the hunger-strikes. On 13 September, the

64th of the epic fast, Jatin Das, a frail young man with an iron-will died. Thousands

came to pay him homage at every station passed by the train carrying his body

from Lahore to Calcutta. At Calcutta, a two-mile-long procession of more than six

lakh people carried his coffin to the cremation ground. A large number of

revolutionaries were convicted in the Lahore Conspiracy Case and other similar

cases and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment; many of them were sent to

the Andamans. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were sentenced to be hanged.

The sentence was carried out on 23 March 1931.

In Bengal, too, the revolutionary terrorists started reorganising and

developing their underground activities. At the same time, many of them continued

to work in the Congress organisation. This enabled them to gain access to the

vast Congress masses; on the other hand, they provided the Congress with an

organisational base in small towns and the countryside. They cooperated with C. R.

Das in his Swarajist work. After his death, as the Congress leadership in Bengal

got divided two wings, one led by Subhash Chandra Bose and the other by J. M.

Sengupta, the Yugantar group joined forces with the first and Anushilan with the

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second. Among the several ‘actions’ of the reorganised groups was the attempt to

assassinate Charles Tegart, the hated Police Commissioner of Calcutta, by Gopinath

Saha in January 1924. By an error, another Englishman named Day was killed. The

Government came down on the people with a heavy hand. A large number of

people, suspected of being terrorists, or their supporters, were arrested under a

newly promulgated ordinance. These included Subhash Chandra Bose nd many

other Congressmen. Saha was hanged despite massive popular protest. The

revolutionary activity suffered a severe attack. Another reason for stagnation in

revolutionary terrorist activity lay in the incessant factional and personal quarrels

within the terrorist groups, especially where Yugantar and Anushilan rivalry was

concerned. But very soon younger revolutionaries began to organize themselves in

new groups, developing fraternal relations with the active elements of both the

Anushilan and Yugantar parties. Among the new ‘Revolt Groups’, the most active

and famous was the Chittagong group led by Surya Sen.

Surya Sen had actively participated in the Non-Cooperation Movement

and had become a teacher in a national school in Chittagong, which led to his

being popularly known as Masterda. Arrested and imprisoned for two years, from

1926 to 1928, for revolutionary activity, he continued to work in the Congress. He

and his group were closely associated with the Congress work in Chittagong. In

1929, Surya Sen was the Secretary and five of his associates were members of

the Chittagong District Congress Committee. Surya Sen, a brilliant and inspiring

organiser, was an unpretentious, soft-spoken and transparently sincere person.

Possessed of immense personal courage, he was deeply humane in his approach.

He was fond of saying: ‘Humanism is a special virtue of a revolutionary.’ He was

also very fond of poetry, being a great admirer of Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi

Nazrul Islam. Surya Sen soon gathered around himself a large band of

revolutionary youth including Anant Singh, Ganesh Ghosh and Lokenath Baul.

They decided to organise a rebellion, on however small a scale, to demonstrate

that it was possible to challenge the armed might of the British empire in India.

Their action plan was to include occupation of the two main armouries in

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Chittagong and the seizing of their arms with which a large band of

revolutionaries could be formed into an armed detachment; the destruction of the

telephone and telegraph systems of the city; and the dislocation of the railway

communication system between Chittagong and the rest of Bengal. The action was

carefully planned and put into execution at 10 o’clock on the night of 18 April

1930. A group of six revolutionaries , led by Ganesh Ghosh, captured the Police

Armoury shouting slogans such as ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, ‘Down with Imperialism’

and ‘Gandhiji’s Raj has been established’. Another group of ten, led by Lokenath

Paul, took over the Auxiliary Force Armoury along with its Lewis guns and 303

army rifes. Unfortunately, they could not locate the ammunition. This was to prove

a disastrous setback to the revolutionaries’ plans. The revolutionaries also

succeeded in dislocating telephone and telegraph communications and disrupting

movement by train. In all, sixty-five were involved in the raid, which was

undertaken in the name of Indian Republican Army, Chittagong Branch.

All the revolutionary groups gathered outside the Police Armoury where

Surya Sen, dressed in immaculate white ‘khadi’ dhoti and a long coat and stiffly

ironed Gandhi cap, took a military salute, hoisted the National Flag among shouts

of ‘Bande Mataram’ and ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, and proclaimed a Provisional

Revolutionary Government. It was not possible for the band of revolutionaries to

put up a fight in the town against the army which was expected. They, therefore,

left Chittagong town before dawn and marched towards the Chittagong hill

ranges,, looking for a safe place. It was on the Jalalabad hill that several thousand

troops surrounded them on the afternoon of 22 April. After a fierce fight, in which

over eighty British troops and twelve revolutionaries died, Surya Sen decided to

disperse into the neighbouring villages; there they formed into small groups and

conducted raids on Government personnel and property. Despite several repressive

measures and combing oppressions by the authorities, the villagers, most of them

Muslim, gave food and shelter to the revolutionary outlaws and enabled them to

survive for three years. Surya Sen was finally arrested on 16 February 1933, tried

and hanged on 12 January 1934. Many of his co-fighters were caught

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and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The Chittagong Armoury Raid had

an immense impact on the people of Bengal. As an official publication remarked,

it ‘fired the imagination of revolutionary-minded youth’ and ‘recruits poured into

the various terrorist groups in a steady stream.’ The year 1930 witnessed a major

revival of revolutionary activity, and its momentum carried over to 1931 and 1932.

There were numerous instances of death-defying heroism. In Midnapore district

alone, three British magistrates were assassinated. Attempts were made on the lives

of two Governors; two Inspectors-General of Police were killed. During this three-

year period, twenty-two officials and twenty non-officials were killed. The official

reaction to the Armoury Raid and the revival of revolutionary terrorist activity

was initially one of panic and, then, of brutal reprisals. The Government armed

itself with twenty repressive Acts and let loose the police on all nationalists. In

Chittagong, it burnt several villages, imposed punitive fine on many others, and

in general established a reign of Terror. In 1933, it arrested and sentenced

Jawaharlal Nehru to a two-year term in jail for sedition. He had in a speech in

Calcutta condemned imperialism, praised the heroism of revolutionary youth (even

while criticising the policy of terrorism as futile and out-of-date) and condemned

police repression.

A remarkable aspect of this new phase of the terrorist movement in

Bengal was the large-scale participation of young women. Under Surya Sen’s

leadership, they provided shelter, acted as messengers and custodians of arms, and

fought guns in hand. Pritilata Waddedar died while conducting a raid, while

Kalpana Dutt (now Joshi) was arrested and tried along with Surya Sen and given a

life sentence. In December 1931, two school girls of Comilla, Santi Ghosh and

Suniti Chowdhury, shot dead the District Magistrate. In February 1932, Bina Das

fired point blank at the Governor while receiving her degree at the Convocation.

Compared to the old revolutionary terrorists, as also Bhagat Singh and his

comrades, the Chittagong rebels made an important advance. Instead of an

individual’s act of heroism or the assassination of an individual, theirs was a

group action aimed at the organs of the colonial state. But the objective still was

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to set an example before the youth, and to demoralise the bureaucracy. As Kalpana

Joshi (Dutt) has put it, the plan was that when, after the Chittagong rebellion, the

Government would bring in troops to take back Chittagong they (the terrorists)

would die fighting ---- thus creating a legend and setting an example before their

countrymen to emulate.’41` Or as Surya Sen told Ananda Gupta: ‘A dedicated band

of youth must show the path of organised armed struggle in place of individual

terrorism. Most of us will have to die in the process but our sacrifice for such a

noble cause will not go in vain.’42 The Bengal revolutionaries of the 1920s and

1930s had shed some of their earlier Hindu religiosity ---- they no longer took

religious oaths and vows. Some of the groups also no longer excluded Muslims ----

the Chittagong IRA cadre included many Muslims, like Sattar, Mir Ahmad, Fakir

Ahmad Mian, Tunu Mian and got massive support from Muslim villages around

Chittagong. But they still retained elements of social conservatism, nor did they

evolve broader socio-economic goals. In particular, those revolutionary terrorists,

who worked in the ‘Swaraj’ party, failed to support the cause of Muslim peasantry

against the ‘Zamindars’.

A real breakthrough in terms of revolutionary ideology and the goals of

revolution and the forms of revolutionary struggle was made by Bhagat Singh and

his comrades. Rethinking had, of course, started on both counts in the HRA itself.

Its manifesto had declared in 1925 that it stood for ‘the abolition of all systems

which made the exploitation of man by man possible’ 43`. Its founding council, in

its meeting in October 1924, had decided ‘to preach social revolutionary and

communistic principles.’44` Its main organ, ‘The Revolutionary’, had proposed the

nationalisation of the railways and other means of transport and large-scale

industries such as steel and ship-building. The HRA had also decided ‘to start

labour and peasant organisations’ and to work for ‘an organised and armed

revolution.’45` In a message from the death-cell, Ramprasad Bismil had appealed to

the youth to give up’ the desire to keep revolvers and pistols,’ ‘not to work in

revolutionary conspiracies,’ and to work in ‘the open movement.’ He had asked the

people to establish Hindu-Muslim unity and unite all political groups under the

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leadership of the Congress. He had also affirmed his faith in communism and the

principle that ‘every human being has equal rights over products of nature.’46`

Bhagat Singh, born in 1907 and a nephew of the famous revolutionary

Ajit Singh, was a giant of an intellectual. A voracious reader, he was one of the

most well-read of political leaders of the time. He had devoured books in the

Dwarkadas Library at Lahore on socialism, the Soviet Union and revolutionary

movements, especially those of Russia, Ireland and Italy. At Lahore, he organised

several study circles with the help of Sukhdev and others and carried on intensive

political discussions. When the HSRA office was shifted to Agra, he immediately

set up a library and urged members to read and discuss socialism and other

revolutionary ideas. His shirt pockets always bulged with books which he

constantly offered to lend his comrades. After his arrest he transformed the jail

into a veritable university. Emphasising the role of ideas in the making of

revolution, he declared before the Lahore High Court: ‘The sword of

revolution is sharpened on the whetting-stone of ideas.’ 47 ̀ This atmosphere of

wide reading and deep thinking pervaded the ranks of the HSRA leadership.

Sukhdev, Bhagwati Charan Vohra, Shiv Varma, Bejoy Sinha, Yashpal, all were

intellectuals of a high Order. Nor would even Chandrashekhar Azad, who knew

little English, accept any idea till it was fully explained to him. He followed

every major turn in the field of ideas through discussion. The draft of the

famous statement of revolutionary position, ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’, was

written by Bhagwati Charan Vohra at the instance of Azad and after a full

discussion with him. Bhagat Singh had already, before his arrest in 1929,

abandoned his belief in terrorism, and individual heroic action. He had turned to

Marxism and had come to believe that popular broad-based movements alone

could lead to a successful revolution; in other words, revolution could only be

achieved ‘by the masses for the masses.’ That is why Bhagat Singh helped

establish the Punjab Naujawan Bharat Sabha in 1926 (becoming its founding

Secretary), as the open wing of the revolutionaries. The Sabha was to carry out

open political work among the youth, peasants and workers. It was to open

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branches in the villages. Under its auspices, Bhagat Singh used to deliver political

lectures wit the help of magic lantern slides. Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev also

organised the Lahore Students Union for open legal work among the students.

Bhagat Singh and his comrades also gave expression to their

understanding that revolution meant the development and organisation of a mass

movement of the exploited and suppressed sections of society by the revolutionary

intelligentsia in the course of their statements from 1929 to 1931 in the courts as

well as outside. Just before his execution, Bhagat Singh declared that ‘the real

revolutionary armies are in the villages and in factories.’48` Moreover, in his behest

to young political workers, written on 2 February 1931, he declared: ‘Apparently, I

have acted like a terrorist. But I am not a terrorist…..Let me announce

with all the strength at my command, that I am not a terrorist and I never was,

except perhaps in the beginning of my revolutionary career. And I am convinced

that we cannot gain anything through those methods.’49` Then why did Bhagat

Singh and his comrades still take recourse to individual heroic action ? One reason

was the very rapidity of the changes in their thinking. The past formed a part of

their present, for these young men had to traverse decades within a few years.

Moreover, effective acquisition of a new ideology is not an event; it is not like a

religious conversion, it is always a prolonged historical process. Second, they were

faced with a classic dilemma: From where would come the cadres, the hundreds of

full-time young political workers who would fan out among the masses ? How

were they to be recruited ? Patient intellectual and political work appeared to be

too slow and too akin to the Congress style of politics which the

revolutionaries had to transcend. The answer appeared to be to appeal to the youth

through ‘propaganda by deed,’ to recruit the initial cadres of a mass revolutionary

party through heroic dramatic action and the consequent militant propaganda

before the courts. In the last stage, during 1930 and 1931, they were mainly

fighting to keep the glory of the sacrifice of their comrades under sentence

shining as before. As Bhagat Singh put it, he had to ask the youth to abandon

revolutionary terrorism without tarnishing the sense of heroic sacrifice by

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appearing to have reconsidered his politics under the penalty of death.50` Life was

bound to teach, sooner or later, correct politics; the sense of sacrifice once lost

would not be easy to regain.

Bhagat Singh and his comrades also made a major advance in

broadening the scope and definition of revolution. Revolution was no longer

equated with mere militancy or violence. Its first objective was national liberation

---- the overthrow of imperialism. But it must go beyond and work for a new

socialist social order, it must ‘end exploitation of man by man.’51` ‘The Philosophy

of the Bomb’,written by Bhagwati Charan Vohra, Chandrashekhar Azad and

Yashpal, defined revolution as ‘Independence, social, political and economic’ aimed

at establishing ‘a new order of society in which political and economic

exploitation will be an impossibility.’52` In the Assembly Bomb Case, Bhagat Singh

told the court: “Revolution,” does not necessarily involve sanguinary strife, nor is

there any place in it for individual vendetta. It is not the cult of the bomb and

the pistol. By “Revolution” we mean that the present order of things, which is

based on manifest injustice, must change.’53` In a letter from jail, he wrote: ‘The

peasants have to liberate themselves not only from foreign yoke but also from the

yoke of landlords and capitalists.54` In his last message of 3 March 1931, he

declared that the struggle in India would continue so long as ‘a handful of

exploiters go on exploiting the labour of common people for their own ends. It

matters little whether these exploiters are purely British capitalists, or British and

Indians in alliance, or even purely Indians.’55` Bhagat Singh defined socialism in a

scientific manner ---- it must mean abolition of capitalism and class domination.

He fully accepted Marxism and the class approach to society. In fact, he saw

himself above all as a precursor and not maker of the revolution, as a propagator

of the ideas of socialism, and communism, as a humble initiator of the socialist

movement in India.56` Bhagat Singh was a great innovator in to areas of politics.

Being fully and consciously secular, he understood, more clearly than many of

his contemporaries, the danger that communalism posed to the nation and the

national movement. He often told his audience that communalism was as big an

enemy as colonialism.

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In April 1928, at the conference of youth where Naujawan Bharat

Sabha was organised, Bhagat Singh and his comrades openly opposed the

suggestion that youth belonging to religious-communal organizations should be

permitted to become members of the Sabha. Religion was one’s private concern

and communalism was an enemy to be fought, argued Bhagat Singh.57` Earlier in

1927, condemning communal killings as barbaric, he had pointed out that

communal killers did not kill a person because he was guilty of any particular act

but simply because that person happened to be a Hindu, Muslim or Sikh. But,

wrote Bhagat Singh, a new group of youth was coming forward who did not

recognise any differences based on religion and saw a person first as a human

being and then as an Indian.58` Bhagat Singh revered Lajpat Rai as a leader. But

he would not spare even Lajpat Rai, when, during the last years of his life, Lajpat

Rai turned to communal politics. He then launched a political-ideological campaign

against him.59` Because Lajpat Rai was a respected leader, he would not publicly

use harsh words of criticism against him. And so he printed as a pamphlet Robert

Browning’s famous poem, ‘The Lost Leader’ in which Browning criticises

Wordsworth for turning against liberty. The poem begins with the line ‘Just for a

handful of silver he left us.’ A few more of the poem’s lines were: ‘We shall

march prospering, -- not thro’ his presence; songs may inspirit us, -- not from his

lyre,’ and ‘Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more.’ There was not one

word of criticism of Lajpat Rai. Only, on the front cover, he printed Lajpat Rai’s

photograph !

Significantly, two of the six rules of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, drafted

by Bhagat Singh, were: ‘To have nothing to do with communal bodies or other

parties which disseminate communal ideas’ and ‘to create the spirit of general

toleration among the public considering religion as a matter of personal belief of

man and to act upon the same fully.’60` Bhagat Singh also saw the importance of

freeing the people from the mental bondage of religion and superstition. A few

weeks before his death, he wrote the article ‘Why I am an Atheist’ in which he

subjected religion and religious philosophy to a scathing critique. He traced his

own path to atheism, how he first gave up belief, ‘in the mythology and

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doctrines of Sikhism or any other religion,’ and in the end lost faith in the

existence of God. To be a revolutionary, he said, one required immense moral

strength, but one also required ‘criticism and independent thinking.’ In the struggle

for self-emancipation, humanity struggle against ‘the narrow conception of religion’

as also against the belief in God. ‘Any man who stands for progress,’ he wrote

‘has to criticise, disbelieve and challenge every item of the old faith. Item by item

he has to reason out every nook and corner of the prevailing faith.’ Proclaiming

his own belief in atheism and materialism, he asserted that he was ‘trying to stand

like a man with an erect head to the last; even on the gallows.’61`

Government action gradually decimated the revolutionary terrorist ranks.

With the death of Chandrashekhar Azad in a shooting encounter in a public park

at Allahabad in February 1931, the revolutionary terrorist movement virtually came

to an end in Punjab, U. P. and Bihar. Surya Sen’s martyrdom marked an end to

the prolonged saga of revolutionary terrorism in Bengal. A process of rethinking in

jails and in the Andamans began. A large number of the revolutionaries turned to

Marxism and the idea of a socialist revolution by the masses. They joined the

Communist Party, the Revolutionary Socialist Party, and other Left parties. Many

others joined the Gandhian wing of the Congress. The politics of the revolutionary

terrorists had severe limitations ---- above all theirs was not the politics of a mass

movement; they failed to politically activate the masses or move them into

political actions; they could not even establish contact with the masses. All the

same, they made an abiding contribution to the national freedom movement. Their

deep patriotism, courage and determination, and sense of sacrifice stirred the Indian

people. They helped spread nationalist consciousness in the land; and in northern

India the spread of socialist consciousness owed a lot to them. The common

feature of terrorism in both the French Revolutionary period and Indian

Renaissance and National period was that both occurred or happened due to

force of circumstances in each place. The differences in the nature of the

terrorist movement in the two places were only differences of the peculiar

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conditions of the two places and thus in a rightful way the French

Revolution and revolutionaty era following it in Europe was a precursor to

the Indian National and Renaissance Movement.

I will again proceed to give a synoptic view of the revolutionary

terrorism in India. ‘Storming heaven’: these historic words are perhaps the aptest

description of the bold fight for freedom which the revolutionaries of Bengal and

India launched and continued for about thirty years, against the mightiest empire

of history. It required courage no doubt, the courage to ‘do and die’ when for

generations Indians of light and leading had been taught to beg and pray. More

even than that, it required imagination and faith in the National Destiny. For, these

revolutionaries dreamt the dreams which came true and remained unshaken in

their belief at an hour when ‘responsible citizens’ looked confused and crushed at

the very idea of full freedom and the responsibility such freedom would entail.

The seeds had been sown earlier by men of vision and courage but the plant of

freedom was watered with the martyrs’ blood. It was their revolutionary lot to

have the soil watered and not to reap the fruit; no, for many of them, not even to

see it in bloom. They were giving themselves, in most cases unknown and

unhonoured, to the cause, to live or die as in the Task-master’s eye, until the goal

of freedom was at last accepted as the national objective. The national

organisations were thus won from passivity and vacillation to revolutionary and

uncompromising struggle for freedom; and, violent or non-violent, constitutional or

unlawful, whatever be the methods, all popular forces including themselves merged

into the revolutionary struggle against imperialism.

Freedom was the issue, and not this or that method, as in the perspective

of history we can see clearly today. For, methods and techniques of the freedom

movement varied as they must according to times and circumstances. The zigzag

course of Indian freedom was naturally marked by a variety of methods and

techniques. Each of them had, however, its genesis in the national life, and, to look

deeper, in the very complexities of that life. As such, the Grand Strategy of

Freedom needed them all. To distinguish any section of the national force merely

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by its apparent technique and method is to confuse largely the means with the

end; and, secondly to lose sight of the inner connection among the different forces

of the national life. National freedom is a complex process of development. The

main features have undoubtedly to be recognised as they distinguished each

particular section of the freedom fighters of India. The popular term ‘Revolutionary

Terrorism’, which we employ, serves a useful purpose to describe a pattern of

activity pursued for a prolonged period of 30 years, from 1904 to 1934. We

realise now the role the nationalist revolutionaries played in the development and

transformation of Indian politics as a whole. The technique and features of their

fight have also to be studied now with care with the full perspective in view.

These in the past were often improperly emphasised in order to throw the picture

of revolutionary contribution out of focus.

‘Revolutionary Terrorism’, both in its origin and growth, was no simple

phenomenon. It was not confined to Bengal; the freedom movement in other parts

of India, particularly in the Punjab and Northern India, was also marked at certain

priods by revolutionary terrorism. So, at the outset we should note the broad facts

and salient features of the Bengal movement.

First, the revolutionaries did not belong to a single unified party, but

were divided into a number of secret groups, generally working independently.

Second, they did not subscribe to any common ideology but expressed the

common nationalist aspiration for full freedom and a common faith in armed

revolution. Third, the common features of their ‘terrorism’ were organisation of

secret societies, anti-imperialist indoctrination of their members physical and moral

training, collection of firearms, collection of funds by dacoities, assassination by

bombs and firearms of enemies and traitors. Fourth, by no means were all who

belonged to these revolutionary secret societies reconciled to all such activities (see

Jadugopal Mukhopadhyay’s ‘Biplavi Jivaner Smriti’). Many of them accepted these

as temporary and unwelcome devices of defense and counter-attack. Almost all

took to these as necessary steps in the process of revolution, in the

preparation for guerilla campaigns, defection of Indian forces; and finally, for

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armed insurrection on a wide and national scale. A good number valued the

method as calling for maximum sacrifice by minimum men to draw out by their

examples at least minimum sacrifice by maximum men in the cause of national

freedom. Fifth, it is also to be noted that as opportunities presented themselves, in

the national and international fields, the revolutionary terrorists tried to take

advantage of them and varied their method and technique in accordance with the

requirements of the situation. Lastly, most of the leaders of the groups, like Sri

Aurobindo himself, had probably an exaggerated notion about the role of the

middle-class intelligentsia in the national democratic revolution. The democratic

content was relatively weak in their political consciousness and of course it

was alien to their methods of organisation which were intended to be military

and secret.

Bearing in mind this particular aspect we have to look deeper into the

Bengali life and movements since the last quarter of the 19th century if we are to

understand why revolutionary terrorism had such a prolonged existence in

particular in Bengal from 1904 to 1934. We can then proceed to study the

different phases of the movement as it waxed or waned.

I. ‘The Background: Renaissance and Revolutionary Ideas’.

“The spirit of freedom,” writes Bipinchandra Pal in recalling the birth of

‘Our New Nationalism’ in the seventies of the last century, “quickened by

contact with modern European thought and history, throbbing under the new

impulse imparted by idealism of the French Revolution, was abroad”

(‘Memories of My Life and Times’, Vol.I, p. 237). The literary and cultural

renaissance in Bengal was in high tide in the seventies of the last century. The

spirit of freedom that it generated challenged the religious and social authorities

with all its might. But very naturally it perceived that a challenge to the political

authorities of the land was out of the question. The liberal attitude was to look

for help from the rulers for ordered progress; the nationalist attitude as expressed

through the Hindu Mela (1867) was to inculcate a movement of self-reliance and

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self-respect. During Lord Lytton’s viceroyalty (1876-1880), educated Indians of

different schools of thought came to realise that the authorities would not allow

any free development of Indian political life. Secret societies were a natural

offshoot of this political feeling, and the feeling was specially acerbated

by the Vernacular Press Act and the Arms Act of Lord Lytton.

(i) ‘Secret Societies of the Seventies’.

So while the liberal Anandamohan Bose gathered the students of

Calcutta in the first organised Students’ Association (1875) and Surendranath

Bannerji raised “the storm in the College Square” with his orations there on Josef

Mazzini and the ‘New Italy’ movement (1875), we are told, on the authority of

Bipinchandra Pal (‘ibid’), that “Calcutta student community was at that time

honeycombed with” secret organisations. Surendranath himself is said to have been

the President of a number of such groups. Bipinchandra was writing about 1932,

when the wave of Revolutionaty Trrorism was touching its peak in Bengal and

he is careful to remind the readers that these organisations of the seventies “were

without any revolutionary motive or any plan of secret assassination as the way

to national emancipation” (unlike those of the 20th century) and their thought and

imagination alone were of a revolutionary character”. He refers to one such

organisation, probably to the one that Sibnath Sastri and his friends initiated

(‘Atma Charit’, Sibnath Sastri). Rabindranath Tagore in a humorous description

refers to a different one the ‘Sanjibani Sabha’. It was founded by Rajnarayan Bose,

the grand-father of Indian revolutionism and Hindu Nationalism, and young

Jyotirindranath Tagore; and Rabindranath, then a lad of fifteen only, also was a

member of it (‘Jiwan Smriti’). This too contemplated no action in near future to

overthrow the foreign yoke. All probably died a natural death and none constituted

any danger to the regime.

What however is to be noted from such attempts is this: first, a

revolutionary temper was being created. Secondly, secret societies came to be

regarded as natural. British liberalism was passing into arrogant Imperialism from

about the time of Lord Lytton’s viceroyalty in India. The educated intelligentsia of

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Bengal had frequent clashes with the foreign rulers and their henchmen, as at the

last session of Hindu Mela (see Pal on Hindu Mela). Serious-minded men were

thus forced to realise that secret organisations were needed for maintenance of

national and personal honour.

But as yet the secret societies of Calcutta had no idea of direct action,

nor felt any need of it. The task they set before themselves was ideological and

physical training. Two other features are worth noting, namely that it is the

students and the educated young men who form the basis of the movement; and

that, while vows and rituals associated with Hinduism marked the initiation into

some of these societies, Mazzini and ‘Young Italy’, the anti-Czarist secret

organisations, as well as the American War of Independence were their real

political inspiration.

(ii) ‘The Middle Class in Isolation’.

These features point to the basic complexity of our colonial social

existence. Political consciousness had undoubtedly been quickened by contact

with modern European thought and history. But it had been quickened only

among a very small minority, a section of the urban middle class in particular, for

they alone could avail of the new education. It is the young men of this

‘bhadralok’ section, the students generally, who “throbbed with the impulse

imparted by idealism of the French Revolution”, and liberals like Anandamohan

Bose and Surendranath Banerji had to direct their activities largely to these

educated youths. Not that there were no other sectors seething with discontent

under British rule. The Revolt of 1857 showed how deep and widespread was the

rebellious mood in Northern India in general. The ‘Indigo Revolt’ of 1859-62 and

the Peasant ‘Samiti’ movement in Pabna (1873) showed that even in Bengal there

existed a popular revolutionary base, composed of the peasants and the rural poor.

But the Bengali ‘bhadraloks’ could not identify themselves with the cause of such

‘lower classes’. Socially and economically they belonged to the semi-feudal middle

classes in Bengal; they thrived on the Zamindari system which had created a

chain of middle interests. Inspite of the idealism that the French Revolution

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imparted to them, they could not be identified with the forces of social revolution

in the country and accept the anti-feudal struggle of the peasantry as their own.

They sought to make a distinction between ‘political emancipation’ and ‘social

revolution’ and desired to concentrate all their attention on the former. Thus Indian

Independence took some more time to be achieved.

Besides the basic difference in social interests, the situation came to be

complicated more with time as the middle classes of Bengal were almost entirely

Hindu in faith and the toiling masses were largely Muslims and the latter had no

share in the Renaissance, reformation and political awakening of Bengal. Third, the

‘new education’ again, imparted exclusively through English, had increasingly cut

off the educated section from the uneducated masses and the intellectual and

psychological hiatus between the two classes became larger and larger. The

educated classes could not and did not carry the uneducated masses along with

them. Their attention moreover was devoted to the glorification of the Hindu past

of India and to the organisation of the politically advanced Hindu youths. This

complex religious, social and intellectual condition in Bengal favoured the

growth of revolutionary terrorism as a desperate weapon of a patriotic middle

class. Denied all power and honour, subjected to humiliation, the class was cut off

from the real revolutionary mass base. It could not see its way to politicalise and

radicalise the masses as it desired ---- nor champion the anti-feudal struggle of the

masses with needed social justice. It was thrown upon itself and naturally took to

desperate action and secrecy.

Of course a fourth and subjective factor in the case of the Bengalis was

the common jibe against them that they were “soft and effeminate”; the “Babus”

“talked loud” and were cowardly and afraid of action. As such it was said that the

Bengalis were born to be mere clerks and slaves. The renaissance poetry of

Bengal urged the Bengalis to wipe out this stigma on their manhood and prove

their worth in patriotic adventure however fruitless. Further, colonial conditions

deprived the youths of all normal channels of noble adventure. They were

disarmed and excluded from all military service and naturally turned to any

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desperate course of action they could find to realise their dreams of heroism and

patriotism. The French Revolution and the New Italy were still there and now

the life-blood of the movement was now also sought to be drawn from the

national sources, the philosophy of the Gita, Bankim, Tilak and Aurobindo all

offered it as the gospel to the new generation ---- a gospel of ‘Dharma-

Yuddha’ or Righteous War.

The philosophical and the moral fountain-head for the revolutionaries was

thus the Gita and its doctrine of selfless fight against Evil . The method and

means sought, however, to be adopted by the revolutionaries were not dictated

by Hindu Nationalism but were borrowed from the examples of the French

Revolution, American War of Independence and the revolutionary secret societies

of the West, those of Italy, Russia, Ireland. The plan was to start with secret

societies, collection of funds by violence and arms, terrorism, guerilla bands etc.,

and end in an uprising. Aurobindo was pre-eminently fitted to unite the two ideas

of the East and West. He had thought of these even in his Cambridge days ----

secret societes, terrorism, bombs, and recovery of the Hindu heritage. As he arrived

in Baroda, he found a ready atmosphere to confirm his faith in the plan and

method. The religious bias remained very strong in Bengal’s revolutionary terrorist

groups at least till the end of the First World War (1918), and the Hindu bias in

their nationalism persisted even later, for the rise of Muslim communalism

alienated the Muslims further from the national struggle for freedom.

The initiation of the early revolutionaries by Aurobindo, for example, was

marked by religious vows and rituals. The Anushilan prescribed a more elaborate

process, vows being imposed on trainees, stage after stage. The literature common

to all groups was generally the ‘Gita’, at time the ‘Chandi’, and martyrs

welcomed death reciting the ‘Gita’ with its assurance of the immortality of the

soul, and crying ‘Bande Mataram’. Next to the Gita, came the Bengali lives of

Mazzini, Garibaldi, the literature on secret societies, on military sciences and arts, as

also the writings of Aurobindo and Vivekananda and economic studies like

Sakharam Ganes Deuskar’s ‘Desher Katha’. A strict uritanic code of morality,

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celibacy etc. were enjoined, and its breach severely punished. The Vivekananda

ideal of ‘Seva Dharma’and volunteer service (‘Srimath Ardhodaya Yoga of 1906),

relief work, nursing organisation etc. were undertaken with a missionary zeal and

devotion, and because of such activities the individual revolutionary became an

idol of his people for humanitarian work and solid capacity for organisation. No

wonder that many of them felt a sincere inclination towards joining the

Ramakrishna Mission, and, still less to wonder that the best idealists among the

youths of Bengal, specially in East Bengal, felt as they came in contact with the

revolutionaries that the revolutionary way was the noblest way to fulfillment.

In retrospect, looking back, one must admit that Revolutionary Terrorism

as a course of action full of daring and danger was no casual phenomenon nor

futile attempt of blind hatred. The best elements of the country subscribed to this

course for thirty long years. It was not, as was held by some officials, due to

“unemployment” of the educated ‘bhadraloks’; nor, as was pointed out by more

subtle researches, due to some psychological maladjustment of the youthful

individuals that would yield to psycho-analytic therapy. In fact, like the Indian

struggle for freedom of which it was a part and parcel, revolutionary terrorism

was an expression of the national situation and also of its unresolved social

and religious contradictions. No doubt during the thirty years of its life (1904-

34), it failed ‘at every phase’ to attain its end. But so failed the Indian nationalist

movement itself during all the years ---- in 1905, in 1921-22, in 1930-33, and in

1942. Repression had won outwardly every time. But, terrorism also emerged out of

every such period of suppression, a stronger force with a bigger moral and

popular appeal ---- until it found that the real objects of the revolutionary

movement had been gained one after another, for example, acceptance of Complete

Independence as the goal of the Indian nation in 1930, creation of the conditions

for a revolutionary mass movement by 1935, and finally, defection of the Indian

forces in 1945-46 that had been visualised in 1914.

It must be said that revolutionary terrorism had failed in only one vital

matter. It could not enlist active Muslim support. It failed to resolve the religio-

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social conflicts of the Indian life and the Bengali life as a part of it, and to evoke

the courage, patriotism and dynamism of our Muslim countrymen in the cause of

freedom. That of course is the failure it shared it with Indian Nationalism as a

whole; and it is a failure the roots of which lay deep in our past. Apart from this,

revolutionary terrorism succeeded in what it intended to do ---- evoking by the

maximum sacrifice of a chosen few the “spirit of minimum sacrifice on the part

of the many”. And the heritage it has left is in the main rich and noble. It is the

call for living a dedicated life ---- self-sacrifice for national freedom, spirit of

service for the needy and the poor, and regard for certain fundamental moral

values ---- courage and discipline and devotion to duty, a seriousness in outlook,

and a healthy scorn for publicity and political exhibitionism. Thus the terrorism

point was a very important point in which the French Revolution and

revolutionary era in Europe was a precursor of Indian National and Renaissance

movement, there it was on a large scale and much more intense and for some

time only, here also very much there though not so widespread and intense but

lasting for a longer time.

In another aspect the French Revolution and revolutionary era in

Europe was a Precursor of Indian National and Renaissance movement. That

was the economic aspect and that too a very important factor. This factor was

behind that great revolution and behind the great Indian revolution also and thus

former became precursor of the latter. In the French Revolution the economic

cause was a very great determinant as in India as seen in foregoing pages.

The French Revolution occurred as a result of several factors. Social

antagonism contributed in important ways to the tensions that eventually produced

revolution. Those tensions were heightened by another major, and eventually

precipitating cause of the revolution, a continuing and deepening financial crisis

brought on by years of administrative improvidence and ineptitude. This crisis was

compounded by a general price rise during much of the eighteenth century, which

permitted the French economy to expand by providing capital for investment, but

also worked hardship on the peasantry and urban artisans and labourers, who

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found their purchasing power considerably reduced. Their plight deteriorated further

at the end of the 1780s when poor harvests encouraged landlords to extract even

larger sums from their dependants in order to compensate for a sharp decline in

profits, and when the high price of bread generated desperation among the urban

poor. Families found themselves spending more than 50 percent of their income on

bread in 1788; the following year the figure rose to as much as 80 percent. Poor

harvests contributed to a marked reduction in demand for manufactured goods;

families had little money to spend for anything other than food. Peasants could no

longer rely on the system of domestic industry to help them make ends meet,

since they were receiving so few orders for the textiles and other articles they

were accustomed to making at home. Many left the countryside for the cities,

hoping to find work there, only to discover that unemployment was far worse

there than in rural areas. Evidence indicates that between 1787 and 1789 the

unemployment rate in many parts of urban France was as high as 50 percent. The

financial despair produced by this unemployment fueled resentment and turned

peasants and urban workers into potential revolutionaries.

The country’s financial position was further weakened by an inefficient

system of tax collection and disbursal. Not only was taxation tied to differing

social status, it varied as well from region to region, some areas, for example,

subject to a much higher ‘gabelle’ than others. The myriad special circumstances

and exemptions that prevailed made the task of collectors all the more difficult.

Those collectors were in many cases so-called tax farmers, members of a syndicate

which loaned the government money in return for the right to collect taxes and to

keep for itself the difference between the amounts it took in and the amounts it

loaned. The system of disbursal was at least as inefficient as was revenue

collection. Instead of one central agency there were several hundred private

accountants, a fact which made it impossible for the government to keep accurate

track of its assets and liabilities. The financial system all but broke down

completely under the increased expenses brought on by French participation in the

American war. The cost of servicing the national debt of four million livres in the

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1780s consumed 50 percent of the nation’s budget. By 1788 the chaotic financial

situation, together with severe social tensions and an inept monarch, had brought

absolutist France to the edge of political disaster.

The assumption of the government by the British in India, reliance on

English ideas and methods, necessarily introduced great changes in India. Economic

measures of the new government and new economic forces brought about a very

rapid economic transformation. The old order was changing throughout the second

half of the eighteenth century. But what happened between 1790 and 1833 turned

India’s economy into another channel along which it flowed for more than a

century.

Spinning and weaving were the great national industry of India next after

agriculture. Weaving was a very widespread domestic industry. Thread was spun by

women of all castes both in towns and country. The production of salt, saltpeter

and raw silk also provided employment to groups of people in different parts of

the country. There was almost full employment and practically no landless

proletariat. British attempts to establish a class of revenue farmers who would be

helpful associates in extracting wealth from land failed completely. The Zamindars

continued to maintain their hold on land. There was some sub-infeudation but not

on a very extensive scale. The relation of a ‘ryot’ to Zamindar was neither that of

proprietor nor of a vassal but a compound of both. But the tillage rights which

the ‘ryots’ possessed were never investigated by their new rulers. British Indian

administration preferred a simple mechanism of land-revenue collection. There was

no noticeable capital investment by the British in India even at the end of the

eighteenth century. The Company’s servants relied mainly upon the Indian

‘banians’ for the supply of capital with which to carry on private trade. After the

passing of Pitt’s India Act and the reforms of Cornwallis, the Company’s servants

disappeared from trade in the eastern seas. The East Indian agency houses,

financed to a large extent by the Company’s servants became the characteristic

unit of private trade in the east. The British free merchants in India became

conspicuous after 1793, indigo, opium and coasting trade opening up new avenues.

This was the state of things about the time of the Permanent Settlement.

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The Cornwallis system of administration and the irresistible power of

the new manufacturing interests of Britain were the new economic forces

operating in India at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of

domestic industries followed closely on the wake of the Permanent Settlement. The

Permanent Settlement cannot therefore be studied in isolation. Another aspect of

the changed economic situation should be borne in mind. According to the

Reporter of External Commerce, the circulating native capital in Calcutta between

1797 and 1801 was 16 ‘krores’. The Cornwallis system of administration deprived

the ‘banians’ of their business as agents, British agents taking their place. The

scope of indigenous banking became narrower. Lucrative contracts or sub-contracts

were given only to Europeans. The ‘native’ capitalists began to invest in houses,

lands and government loans. But the Court of Directors’ order was to buy out the

native holders of paper. They also passed order to draw interest bills which would

be beneficial to Europeans alone. Cornwallis wrote to the Court of Directors:

“there is every ground to expect that the large capitals possessed by the natives

which they have no means of employing when the public debt is discharged will

be applied to the purchase of landed property as soon as the tenure is declared to

be secured.” People not traditionally associated with land began to invest in land.

It would not perhaps be an exaggeration to say that all sections of the people

were pushed towards land. The increasingly large number and variety of urban-

tenures added to the complexity of the land system. But the benefits of a

Permanent Settlement were not extended to the cultivators. To protect land-revenue

greater power of distraint was granted to the Zamindars by Reg. VII of 1799.

Thus was created a total and absolute property in land which did not exist

before. Very soon land was bought at revenue sales at about 15 years’ purchase.

The pre-existing relationship between the zamindar and ‘ryot’ was completely

annihilated. The problem of creating new relationship was not faced until 1859,

when the occupancy right of the ‘ryots’ was for the first time conceded. British

Indian administration gave no thought to the welfare of the peasantry ---- “no

business of ours” they thought. ‘Laissez Faire’ did its mischief in India as in

England. In defence of British administrators it has been pointed out that the

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protection of the cultivator against the Zamindar kept pace fairly well with

factory legislation and the control of child welfare in England. Land became the

principal field of ‘native’ capital investment. A formidable rival to British capital

investment in India was thus removed.

Domestic industry was almost completely destroyed within about a

quarter of a century. As Montgomery Martin pointed out in 1840, this was not in

the fair course of trade. He said: “We have during this period compelled the

Indian territories to receive our manufactures, our woolen duty free, our cottons at

2.5 p.c., while we have continued during that period to levy prohibitory duties

from 10 to 1000 p.c. upon articles they produce from our territories ……..a free

trade from this country not a free trade between India and this country.”

The disappearance of domestic handicrafts was a very quick process. Population

increased, but handicrafts disappeared. The weaver cum cultivator became merely a

cultivator. The ‘malangi’ or salt worker who had his patch of land had to depend

entirely on it now for his subsistence. Thus was created the greatest under-

unemployment problem. Tens of millions of farmers were doomed to idleness for

half the time ---- there was perhaps less than one acre of land per head of

agricultural population. As there was not enough land to round, there was

henceforth a landless proletariat. Rural pauperisation pushed these masses to the

plantations or to the colonies. In the agrarian economy of India ---- in the life of

the ‘ryot’ ---- the village moneylender began to play a part which was not less

important than that of the zamindar. The moneylenders were mostly survivors of

the old trading classes ---- the ‘seths’, ‘shroffs’ and ‘chetties’.

The Charter Act of 1833 opened a new outlet for British capital and

British commercial enterprise in India. The Court of Directors despatch on the

Charter Act insisted on their servants keeping in view the Parliament’s intention

of opening of the interior of India to Europeans. They emphasised that the

Regulations must not be such as to harass the European with unnecessary

restraints. Casual misconduct must not be made the occasion of harsh legislation.

The restraints which the Regulations of 7 May 1824 and 17 February 1828 laid on

the acquisition and ownership of land by Europeans were, according to the

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Directors, partly intended for the protection of the European buyers rather than

that for that of the ‘natives’. Bengal Chamber of Commerce was founded in

1834. It became the spearhead of European capital in India. European capitalist

enterprise began in silk, indigo, tea and coffee. The agency houses gave place to

the managing agency system. This opened India to the full impact of the Industrial

Revolution in England. Transit duties were abolished in 1835 as a result of

Charles Trevelyan’s famous report. Thus was created a huge Indian market for

British goods. There was henceforth free import of surplus capital from England.

Larger and cheaper banking facilities for European business could be organised in

India. The system of production was completely geared to the needs of

industrialised Britain. Commercial policy was calculated to ensure production of

raw materials in India for British industries and the consumption of British

manufactures in India.

Europeans’ right to own land conceded by the Charter Act, 1833, led

to the plantation system. Oppression and lawlessness became associated with the

plantation system. It was too much to expect moderation from those who were

intent only on making money and who had no traditional restraints or enlarged

views. Famine was considered to be a problem of distribution. Except for fifteen

years between 1880 and 1895 there were not five consecutive years free from

famine between 1866 and 1900. The first place in famine prevention works was

not assigned to irrigation but to railways. English merchants naturally looked to

the opening of distant markets in India. New lines of communication were

therefore opened. Concessions were granted to British companies and new lines

were pushed perhaps beyond the urgent needs of India.

England had no plan for the development of India’s resources. There

was in India growing poverty and decadence. It has been pointed out that frequent

famines in India were only an indication of a greater evil, the permanent poverty

of Indians even in ordinary years. The Indian peasant was absolutely without any

savings. After paying his dues to the Zamindar in the Zamindari areas and to the

State where some form of Ryotwari Settlement prevailed and after meeting his

obligations to the village moneylender, the cultivator had very little left to to him

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above his subsistence even in years of good harvest. In this aspect also was there

similarity between the Indian and French conditions at the time of the revolution.

Land-revenue was in many areas even 60 p.c. of the rental. The mass of

the revenue was drawn from the rural districts. As Lord Salisbury, Secretary of

State for India, pointed out: “It is not in itself a thrifty policy to draw the mass

of revenue from the rural districts, where capital is scarce, sparing the towns

where it is redundant and runs to waste in luxury. As India must be bled, the

lancet should be directed to the parts where the blood is congested, or at least

sufficient, not to those which are already feeble from the want of it.” Manufacture

was crippled, agriculture was overtaxed. Much of the revenue was exported without

an equivalent. At the beginning of the century there was the East India Company’s

‘Investment’ ---- export of cotton piecegoods, raw silk, saltpeter etc. from the

surplus revenue of the country. The ‘Investment’ system ceased in 1813; the Home

Charges crept in, increased progressively, amounting in 1900-1 to 17 millions

sterling.

Modern Industrialism in India commenced under the aegis of British

capital in woollen mills, jute mills, paper mills etc. The Parsi community in

Bombay had become quite early in the history of British trade in the eastern seas

junior partners in British enterprise in trade and commerce. There was a change in

their attitude towards the last decades of the nineteenth century. There was some

diversion of capital owned by this community from commerce to industry. The

Indian cotton mills started in Bombay needed all the protection in the world. But

fiscal policy was dictated by Lancashire. The import duty on coarse cotton goods

was surrendered by Lord Lytton’s government in 1875. But that was not enough.

An unjust excise tax was imposed on the products of Indian mills in 1894 on

such Indian goods as competed with Lancashire goods. In 1896 an excise duty

was imposed on all cotton goods produced in India. This was the greatest act of

fiscal injustice. “It threw a burden on Indian mills which competed with no mills

in Europe.”

The system established by Lord Cornwallis was based upon the

principle of doing everything by European agency. Only very inferior public

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services were manned by Indians. Lord William Bentinck substituted for this a

system by which public business was transacted by native agency under European

superintendence. Bentinck started recruiting ‘native’ Deputy Collectors in 1833. The

cadre of ‘native’ Deputy Magistrates was instituted in 1843. The middle class

looked for eminence in the public services and in the new professions. This new

middle class based on land, on professions and on public services had no roots in

indigenous commerce and industry. In India the business man was traditionally a

‘bania’, separated from the craft or intellectual classes. But during the years

1757-1785, the principal businessmen in Calcutta were mostly higher caste Hindus.

In the petition presented by 95 of the principal ‘native’ inhabitants of Calcutta in

1766 against hanging a man for forgery, more than eighty were high caste Hindus

with such surnames as Mukherjee, Banerjee, Sarma, Tagore, Dutta, Mitra, Ghosh, Sen

etc. Most of them were Calcutta ‘banians’. This class of people disappeared from

business by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Once again Indian business

---- whatever it was ---- fell into the hands of those who belonged to the trader

caste. They were very capable financiers but they were not technically competent

nor were they possessed of professional standards of integrity.

The economic weakness of the Muslim middle class in the nineteenth

century very much influenced the history of India from the beginning of the

twentieth century. At the time of the establishment of British power in India, the

Muslims were the ruling class and they were the lowest class. The British centres

---- Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were remote from the Muslim centres ----

Lucknow, Delhi and Lahore. By the time British administrative machinery was

installed in the old Muslim centres there were, as it has been said, established

traditions and connections in which the Muslims did not find any place. In the

services, in the professions and even in inland trade the Hindus were now well-

established. Communalism, when it came, became so effective because of the

difference in the economic level between the two communities. Government’s

political manoeuvre ---- divide et impera ---- began about 1870. Economic conditions

were conducive to the policy; “communalism needs only to be well started and

then it thrives of itself.”

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An economic critique of Colonialism has to be given at some length

now. Of all the national movements in colonial countries, the Indian national

movement was the most deeply and firmly rooted in an understanding of the

nature and character of colonial economic domination and exploitation. Its early

leaders, known as Moderates were the first in the 19 th century to develop an

economic critique of colonialism. This critique was, also, perhaps their most

important contribution to the development of the national movement in India ----

and the themes built around it were later popularised on a massive scale and

formed the very pith and marrow of the nationalist agitation through popular

lectures, pamphlets, newspapers, dramas, songs, and ‘prabhat pheries’.

Indian intellectuals of the first half of the 19 th century had adopted a

positive attitude towards British rule in the hope that Britain, the most advanced

nation of the time, would help modernise India. In the economic realm, Britain, the

emerging industrial giant of the world, was expected to develop India’s productive

forces through the introduction of modern science and technology and capitalist

economic organisation. It is not that the early Indian nationalists were unaware of

the many political, psychological and economic disabilities of foreign domination,

but they still supported colonial rule as they expected it to rebuild India as a

split image of the Western metropolis.

The process of disillusionment set in gradually after 1860 as the reality

of social development in India failed to conform to their hopes. They began to

notice that while progress in new directions was slow and halting, overall the

country was regressing and underdeveloping. Gradually, their image of British rule

began to take on darker hues; and they begn to probe deeper into the reality of

British rule and its impact on India.

Three names stand out among the large number of Indians who initiated

and carried out the economic analysis of British rule dyring the years 1870-1905.

The tallest of the three was Dadabhai Naoroji known in the pre-Gandhian era as

the Grand Old Man of India. Born in 1825, he became a successful businessman

but devoted his entire life and wealth to the creation of a national movement in

India. His near contemporary, Justice Mahadev Govind Ranade, taught an entire

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generation of Indians the value of modern industrial development. Romesh Chandra

Dutt, a retired ICS officer, published ‘The Economic History of India’ at the

beginning of the 20th century in which he examined in minute detail the entire

economic record of colonial rule since 1757.

These three leaders along with G.V. Joshi, G. Subramaniya Iyer, G. K.

Gokhale, Prithivis Chandra Ray and hundreds of other political workers and

journalists analysed every aspect of the economy and subjected the entire range of

economic issues and colonial economic policies to minute scrutiny. They raised

basic questions regarding the nature and purpose of British rule. Eventually, they

were able to trace the process of the colonialisation of the Indian economy and

conclude that colonialism was the main obstacle to India’s economic development.

They clearly understood the fact that the essence of British imperialism lay in the

subordination of the Indian economy to the British economy. They delineated the

colonial structure in all its three aspects of domination through trade, industry and

finance. They were able to see that colonialism no longer functioned through the

crude tools of plunder and tribute and mercantilism but operated through the more

disguised and complex mechanism of free trade and foreign capital investment.

The essence of 19th century colonialism, they said, lay in the transformation of

India into a supplier of food stuffs and raw materials to the metropolis, a market

for the metropolitan manufactures, and a field for the investment of British capital.

The early Indian national leaders were simultaneously learners and

teachers. They organised powerful intellectual agitations against nearly all the

important official economic policies. They used these agitations to both understand

and to explain to others the basis of these policies in the colonial structure. They

advocated the severance of India’s economic subservience to Britain in every

sphere of life and agitated for an alternative path of development which would

lead to an independent economy. An important feature of this agitation was the

use of bold, hard-hitting and colourful language. The nationalist economic agitation

started with the assertion that Indians were poor and were growing poorer every

day. Dadabhai Naoroji made poverty his special subject and spent his entire life

awakening the Indian and British public to the ‘continuous impoverishment and

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exhaustion of the country’ and ‘the wretched, heart-rending, blood-boiling condition

of India.’ Day after day he declaimed from public platforms and in the Press that

the Indian ‘is starving, he is dying off at the slightest touch, living on insufficient

food.’62`

The early nationalists did not see this all-encompassing poverty as

inherent and unavoidable, a visitation from God or nature. It was seen as man-

made and, therefore, capable of being explained and removed. As R.C. Dutt put it:

‘If India is poor today, it is through the operation of economic causes.’ 63` In the

course of their search for the causes of India’s poverty, the nationalists underlined

factors and forces which had been brought into play by the colonial rulers and

the colonial structure.

The problem of poverty was, moreover, seen as the problem of increasing

the ‘productive capacity and energy’ of the people, in other words as the

problem of national development. This approach made poverty a broad national

issue and helped to unite, instead of divide, different regions and sections of Indian

society.

Economic development was seen above all as the rapid development of

modern industry. The early nationalists accepted with remarkable unanimity that the

complete economic transformation of the country on the basis of modern

technology and capitalist enterprise was the primary goal of all their economic

policies. Industrialism, it was further believed, represented, to quote G.V. Joshi, ‘a

superior type and a higher stage of civilisation;’4` or, in the words of Ranade,

factories could ‘far more effectively than Schools and Colleges give a new birth

to the activities of the Nation.’65` Modern industry was also seen as a major force

which could help unite the diverse peoples of India into a single national

entity having common interests; Surendranath Banerjea’s newspaper the ‘Bengalee’

made the point on 18 January 1902: ‘The agitation for political rights may bind

the various nationalities of India together for a time. The community of interests

may cease when these rights are achieved. But the commercial union of the

various Indian nationalities, once established, will never cease to exist. Commercial

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and industrial activity is, therefore, a bond of very strong union and is, therefore, a

mighty factor in the formation of a great Indian nation.’

Consequently, because of their whole-hearted devotion to the cause of

industrialisation, the early nationalists looked upon all other issues such as foreign

trade, railways, tariffs, currency and exchange, finance, and labour legislation in

relation to this paramount aspect. At the same time, nearly all the early nationalists

were clear on one question: However great the need of India for industrialisation, it

had to be based on Indian capital and not foreign capital.66` Ever since the 1840s,

British economists, statesmen and officials had seen the investment of foreign

capital, along with law and order, as the major instrument for the development of

India. John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall had put forward this view in their

economic treatises. In 1899, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, said that foreign capital was

‘a sine qua non’ to the national advancement’ of India.67`

The early nationalists disagreed vehemently with this view. They saw

foreign capital as an unmitigated evil which did not develop a country but

exploited and impoverished it. Or, as Dadabhai Naoroji popularly put it, foreign

capital represented the ‘despoilation’ and ‘exploitation’ of Indian resources. 68`

Similarly, the editor of the ‘Hindustan Review and Kayastha Samachar’

described the use of foreign capital as ‘a system of international depredation.’69`

They further argued that instead of encouraging and augmenting Indian

capital, foreign capital replaced and suppressed it, led to the drain of capital from

India and further strengthened the British hold over the Indian economy. To try to

develop a country through foreign capital, they said, was to barter the entire future

for the petty gains of today. Bipin Chandra Pal summed up the nationalist point

of view in 1901 as follows: ‘The introduction of foreign, and mostly British, capital

for working out the natural resources of the country, instead of being a help, is, in

fact, the greatest of hindrances to all real improvements in the economic condition

of the people. It is as much a political, as it is an economic danger. And the

future of New India absolutely depends upon an early and radical remedy of this

two-edged evil.’70`

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In essence, the early nationalists asserted that genuine economic

development was possible only if Indian capital itself initiated and developed the

process of industrialisation. Foreign capital would neither undertake nor could it

fulfill this task.

According to the early nationalists, the political consequences of foreign

capital investment were no less harmful, for the penetration of a country by

foreign capital inevitably led to its political subjugation. Foreign capital investment

created vested interests which demanded security for investors and, therefore,

perpetuated foreign rule. ‘Where foreign capital has been sunk in a country,’ wrote

the ‘Hindu’ in its issue dated 23 September 1889, ‘the administration of that

country becomes at once the concern of the bondholders.’ It added: ‘(if) the

influence of foreign capitalists in the land is allowed to increase, then adieu to all

chances of success of the Indian National Congress whose voice will be drowned

in the tremendous uproar of “the empire in danger” that will surely be raised by

the foreign capitalists.’ A major problem the early nationalists highlighted was that

of the progressive decline and ruin of India’s traditional handicrafts. Nor was this

industrial prostration accidental, they said. It was the result of the deliberate policy

of stamping out Indian industries in the interests of British manufactures.

The British administrators, on the other hand, pointed with pride to the

rapid growth of India’s foreign trade and the rapid construction of railways as

instruments of India’s development as well as proof of its growing prosperity.

However, the nationalists said that because of their negative impact on indigenous

industries, foreign trade and railways represented not economic development but

colonialisation and under-development of the economy. What method in the case

of foreign trade, they maintained, was not its volume but its pattern or the nature

of goods internationally exchanged and their impact on national industry and

agriculture. And this pattern had undergone drastic changes during the 19 th century,

the bias being overwhelmingly towards the export of raw materials and the import

of manufactured goods.

Similarly, the early nationalists pointed out that the railways had not

been coordinated with India’s industrial needs. They had, therefore, ushered in

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a commercial and not an industrial revolution which enabled imported foreign

goods to undersell domestic industrial products. Moreover, they said that the

benefits of railway construction in terms of encouragement to the steel and

machine industry and to capital investment ---- what today we would call backward

and forward linkages ---- had been reaped by Britain and not India. In fact,

remarked G.V. Joshi, expenditure on railways should be seen as Indian subsidy to

British industries.71` Or, as Tilak put it, it was like ‘decorating another’s wife.’72`

According to the early nationalists, a major obstacle to rapid industrial

development was the policy of free trade which was, on the one hand, ruining

India’s handicraft industries and, on the other, forcing the infant and

underdeveloped modern industries into a premature and unequal and, hence, unfair

and disastrous competition with the highly organised and developed industries of

the West. The tariff policy of the Government convinced the nationalists that

British economic policies in India were basically guided by the interests of the

British capitalist class.

The early nationalists strongly criticised the colonial pattern of

finance. Taxes were so raised, they averred, as to overburden the poor while

letting the rich, especially the foreign capitalists and bureaucrats, go scot-free

just like the condition in France at the time of the French Revolution. To

vitiate this, they demanded the reduction of land revenue and abolition of the salt

tax and supported the imposition of income tax and import duties on products

which the rich and the middle classes consumed. On the expenditure side, they

pointed out that the emphasis was on serving Britain’s imperial needs while the

developmental and welfare departments were starved. In particular, they

condemned the high expenditure on the army which was used by the British to

conquer and maintain imperialist control over large parts of Asia and Africa. The

focal point of the nationalist critique of colonialism was the drain theory. 73` The

nationalist leaders pointed out that a large part of India’s capital and wealth was

being transferred or ‘drained’ to Britain in the form of salaries and pensions of

British civil and military officials working in India, interest on loans taken by the

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Indian Government, profits of British capitalists in India, and the Home Charges or

expenses of the Indian Government in Britain.

This drain took the form of an excess of exports over imports for which

India got no economic or material return. According to the nationalist calculations,

this drain amounted to one-half of government revenues, more than the entire land

revenue collection, and over one-third of India’s total savings. (In today’s terms

this would amount to eight percent of India’s national income).

The acknowledged high-priest of the drain theory was Dadabhai Naoroji.

It was in May 1867 that Dadabhai Naoroji put forward the idea that Britain was

draining and ‘bleeding’ India. From then on for nearly half a century he launched

a raging campaign against the drain, hammering at the theme through every

possible form of public communication. The drain, he declared was the basic cause

of India’s poverty and the fundamental evil of British rule in India. Thus, he

argued in 1880: ‘It is not the pitiless operations of economic laws, but it is the

thoughtless and pitiless action of the British policy; it is the pitiless eating of

India’s substance in India, and the further pitiless drain to England; in short, it is

the pitiless ‘perversion’ of economic laws by he sad bleeding to which India is

subjected that is destroying India.’74`

Other nationalist leaders, journalists and propagandists followed in the

foot-steps of Dadabhai Naoroji. R.C. Dutt, for example, made the drain the major

theme of his ‘Economic History of India’. He protested that ‘taxation raised by a

king, says the Indian poet, is like the moisture sucked up by the sun, to be

returned to the earth as fertilising rain; but the moisture raised from the Indian

soil now descends as fertilising rain largely on other lands, not on India……So

great an Economic Drain out of the resources of a land would impoverish the

most prosperous countries on earth; it has reduced India to a land of famines

more frequent, more widespread, and more fatal, than any known before in the

‘history of India, or of the world.’75

The drain theory incorporated all the threads of the nationalist critique of

colonialism, for the drain denuded India of the productive capital its agriculture

and industries so desperately needed. Indeed, the drain theory was the high water-

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mark of the nationalist leaders’ comprehensive, inter-related and integrated economic

analysis of the colonial situation. Through the drain theory, the exploitative

character of British rule could be made visible. By attacking the drain, the

nationalists were able to call into question, in an uncompromising manner, the

economic essence of imperialism.

Moreover, the drain theory possessed the great political merit of being

easily grasped by a nation of peasants. Money being transferred from one country

to another was the most easily understood of the theories of economic

exploitation, for the peasant daily underwent this experience vis-à-vis the state,

landlords, moneylenders, lawyers and priests. No other idea could arouse people

more than the thought that they were being taxed so that others in far off lands

might live in comfort.

‘No drain’ was the type of slogan that all successful movements need ----

it did not have to be proved by sophisticated and complex arguments. It had a

sort of immanent quality about it; it was practically self-evident. Nor could the

foreign rulers do anything to appease the people on this question. Modern

colonialism was inseparable from the drain. The contradiction between the Indian

people and British imperialism was seen by people to be insoluble except by the

overthrow of British rule. It was, therefore, inevitable that the drain theory became

the main staple of nationalist political agitation during the Gandhian era. This

agitation on economic issues contributed to the undermining of the ideological

hegemony of the alien rulers over Indian minds, that is, of the foundations of

colonial rule in the minds of the people. Any regime is politically secure only so

long as the people have a basic faith in its moral purpose, in its benevolent

character ---- that is, they believe that the rulers are basically motivated by the

desire to work for their welfare. It is this belief which leads them to support the

regime or to at least acquiesce in its continuation. It provides legitimacy to a

regime ---- in this belief lie its moral foundations.

The secret of British power in India lay not only in physical force but

also in moral force, that is, in the belief sedulously inculcated by the

rulers for over a century that the British were the ‘Mai-Baap’ of the common

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people of India ---- the first lesson in primary school language textbooks was most

often on ‘the benefits of British rule’. The nationalist economic agitation gradually

undermined these moral foundations. It corroded popular confidence in the

benevolent character of British rule ---- in its good results as well as its good

intentions.

The economic development of India was offered as the chief justification

for British rule by the imperialist rulers and spokesmen. The Indian nationalists

controverted it forcefully and asserted that India was economically backward

precisely because the British were ruling it in the interests of British trade,

industry and capital, and that poverty and backwardness were the inevitable

consequences of colonial rule. Tilak’s newspaper, the ‘Kesari’, for example, wrote

on 28 January 1896: ‘Surely India is treated as a vast pasture for the Europeans

to feed upon.’ And P. Ananda Charlu, an ex-President of the Congress, said in the

Legislative Council: ‘While India is safeguarded against foreign inroads by the

strong arm of the British power, she is defenceless in matters where the English

and Indian interests clash and where (as a Tamil saying puts it ) the very fence

begins to feed on the crop.’76`

The young intellectual from Bihar, Sachidanand Sinha, summed up the

Indian critique in a pithy manner in ‘Indian People’ on 27 February 1903: ‘Their

work of administration in Lord Curzon’s testimony is only the handmaid to the

task of exploitation. Trade cannot thrive without efficient administration, while the

latter is not worth attending to in the absence of profits of the former. So always

with the assent and often to the dictates of the Chamber of Commerce, the

Government of India is carried on, and this is the “White Man’s Burden.”

It was above all Dadabhai Naoroji who in his almost daily articles and

speeches hammered home this point. ‘The face of beneficence,’ he said, was a

mask behind which the exploitation of the country was carried on by the British

though ‘unaccompanied with any open compulsion or violence to person or

property which the world can see and be horrified with.’ And, again: ‘Under the

present evil and unrighteous administration of Indian expenditure, the romance is

the beneficence of the British Rule, the reality is the “bleeding” of the British

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Rule.’77` Regarding the British claim of having provided security of life and

property, Dadabhai wrote: ‘The romance is that there is security of life and

property in India; the reality is that there is no such thing. There is security of

life and property in one sense, or way, i.e., the people are secure from any

violence from each other or from Native despots…….But from England’s own

grasp there is no security of property at all, and, as a consequence, no security for

life……What is secure, and well secure, is that England is perfectly safe and

secure…….to carry away from India, and to eat up in India, her property at the

present rate of 30,000,000 or 40,00,000 pound a year….To millions in India life

is simply “half-feeding,” or starvation, or famine and disease.’78`

With regard to the benefits of law and order, Dadabhai said: ‘There is

an Indian saying: “Pray strike on the back, but don’t strike on the belly.” Under

the “native despot the people keep and enjoy what they produce though at times

they suffer some violence on the back. Under the British Indian despot the man is

at peace, there is no violence; his substance is drained away unseen, peaceably and

subtly ---- he starves in peace, and peaceably perishes in peace, with law and

order.”79` The corrosion of faith in British rule inevitably spread to the political

field. In the course of their economic agitation, the nationalist leaders linked nearly

every important economic question with the politically subordinated status of the

country. Step by step, issue by issue, they began to draw the conclusion that since

the British Indian administration was ‘only the handmaid to the to the task of

exploitation’ pro-Indian and developmental policies would be followed only by a

regime in which Indians had control over political power.

The result was that even though most of the early nationalist leaders

were moderate in politics and political methods, and many of them still

professed loyalty to British rule, they cut at the political roots of the empire

and sowed in the land the seeds of disaffection and disloyalty and even

sedition. This was one of the major reasons why the period 1875 to 1905

became a period of intellectual unrest and of spreading national consciousness

---- the seed-time of the modern Indian national movement.

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While until the end of the 19 th century, Indian nationalists confined their

political demands to a share in political power and control over the purse, by

1905 most of the prominent nationalists were putting forward the demand for

some form of self-government. Here again, Dadabhai Naoroji was the most

advanced. Speaking on the drain at the International Socialist Congress in 1904, he

put forward the demand for ‘self-government’ and treatment of India ‘like other

British Colonies.’80` A year later, in 1905, in a message to the Benares session of

the Indian National Congress, Dadabhai categorically asserted: ‘Self-government is

the only remedy for India’s woes and wrongs.’81` And, then, as the President of the

1906 session of the Congress at Calcutta, he laid down the goal of the national

movement as “self-government or ‘Swaraj,’” like that of the United Kingdom or

the Colonies.’82`

While minds were being prepared and the goal formed, the mass struggle

for the political emancipation of the country was still in the womb of time. But

the early nationalists were laying strong and enduring foundations for the national

movement to grow upon. They sowed the seeds of nationalism well and deep.

They did not base their nationalism primarily on appeals to abstract or shallow

sentiments or on obscurantist appeals to the past. They rooted their nationalism in

a brilliant scientific analysis of the complex economic mechanism of modern

colonialism and the chief contradiction between the interests of the Indian people

and British rule.

The nationalists of the 20 th century were to rely heavily on the main

themes of their economic critique of colonialism. These themes were then to

reverberate in Indian cities, towns and villages, carried there by the youthful

agitators of the Gandhian era. Based on this firm foundation, the later nationalists

went on to stage powerful mass agitations and mass movements. At the same

time, because of this firm foundation, they would not, unlike in China, Egypt and

many other colonial and semi-colonial countries, waver in their anti-imperialism.

Thus in the end I would like to reiterate that I have proven the ‘topic’

of my thesis. Before winding up, I would like to give in a nutshell the

significance of the word ‘Renaissance’. It was a general new spirit, stimulated by

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the revival of learning and diffused by the art of printing. The chief ingredients of

the new spirit were individualism and worldliness, and these characteristics

manifested themselves in many forms. One of the principal forms which the

individualism of the Renaissance took was the rejection of authority --- the

determination to make one’s own decisions, right or wrong. Another important facet

of individualism was the insistence on the well-rounded man. If a man is only a

unit in a social mass, there is a strong obligation to be as much like the other

units as possible. But if a man is an individual, an end in himself, then there is a

value in his differences, in his uniqueness. Furthermore, he should be complete, with

all his potentialities developed, instead of being a mere specialist who must be

completed by other specialists. Worldliness is connected with all-round development

in that it takes the form of a hunger, for all the experiences that this world has

to offer. Thus above was in short the literal meaning and origin of the word

‘Renaissance’.

The Napoleonic Empire was comparatively short-lived. But it

had tremendous importance in spreading throughout Europe, directly or

indirectly, certain novel principles which it inherited from the French

Revolution. ‘Three’ are particularly significant.

(1) ‘Individualism’, the principle that the unit of society and the basis

of government is the individual person and not a corporation. Prior to the

French Revolution, and from time immemorial, the pillars of society and

government had always been such corporate groups as the family, the class (or

“estate”), the guild, the university, the church, etc.; and liberties (or privileges)

belonged to corporate groups, rather than to individuals as such. The French

Revolution struck a body-blow at the historic corporations, and Napoleon did

not resuscitate them. “Liberty” and “equality” were for individuals.

(2) ‘Secularism’, the principle that religion is a private matter for each

individual, and only incidentally a concern of the state. Previously there had always

been in every European country some sort of enforced union between church and

state; and the church (whether Catholic or Protestant) had usually shared with the

state important functions of government, such as conduct of schools, administration

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of justice, powers of taxation, etc. Both the French Revolution and the Napoleonic

Empire served to deprive the church of historic rights and privileges, and, while

forwarding religious toleration, to subordinate the interests of religion to those of

secular society.

(3) “Jacobin” nationalism, the principle that the national state is the highest

form of political and social organisation and rightfully commands the supreme

loyalty of all its individual citizens. Some kind of national sentiment had long

existed in Europe and was especially evident during the religious upheaval of the

sixteenth century. But until the French Revolution it had been most often

identified, at least on the Continent, with monarchical institutions; kings and

princes had been the makers of national states and the central objects of

popular loyalty. Now, the Jacobin revolutionaries of France invoked a democratic

nationalism. With them, sovereignty becomes popular and national. National interests

transcend dynastic and all other interests. Citizens are put in national armies and

national schools. National flag and anthem support royal ensign and hymn. And if

Napoleon lacked Jacobin conviction, he did not fail to utilize Jacobin

nationalism for his personal ends.

The three foregoing principles were communicated from France to the

rest of Europe during the Napoleonic era, in several ways. In the first place, by

means of French territorial expansion, the Netherlands, the Rhineland, and most of

the Italian peninsula were subjected to the direct sway of Paris and the immediate

jurisdiction of the Code Napoleon. In these areas Dutchmen and Belgians, Germans

and Italians became accustomed to a centralised state and an individualist society.

Secondly, the construction of a string of dependent states involved

revolutionary changes in southern and central Germany, in Naples, and in Spain. In

these countries, feudalism and serfdom were abolished, religious toleration

guaranteed, and ideas of democratic government and social equality implanted.

Though the dependence of such countries on Napoleonic France was brief, it was

long enough to communicate to their populations a taste for the new order.

Thirdly, the meteoric flash of Napoleon’s success awed even his most

consistent enemies; and the more thoughtful among them, such as the Baron von

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Stein in Prussia, paid him the high tribute of imitation. The social and political

“regeneration” of Prussia (and, to a lesser extent, that of Austria) represented a

conscious attempt of the absolute monarchies of central Europe to win the

enthusiastic support of their peoples by according them some of the reforms

which inspired the French.

Of all the lessons which Europe learnt from France during the

Napoleonic era, the most common and impressive was nationalism. Frenchmen

who paved the way for Napoleon’s amazing career and Frenchmen who

militantly bore his banners at Lodi and Marengo, at Austerlitz and Jena, at

Madrid and Lisbon, at Friedland and Moscow, were effective messengers of

the novel principle of Jacobin nationalism. And they evoked a fairly quick

response. In part, this was the result of independent agitation of intellectuals

in various countries, who, like the French revolutionaries themselves, had

been given a nationalist turn of mind by their reading of eighteenth-century

philosophy and literature. In part, it was the result of sympthy with the

French and imitation of them. In greatest part, no doubt, it was the result of

growing antipathy to French aggression and Napoleonic dictatorship. Prior to the

French Revolution, Great Britain was the European country where national

patriotism was most highly developed and most broadly disseminated. It was this

intense patriotism which kept the British nation superbly united during the

protracted and difficult struggle which its Tory government waged with the French

revolutionaries and Napoleon almost continuously from 1793 to 1815.

The new nationalism was the one revolutionary principle which

became firmly implanted in Europe during the stormy era from 1789 to

1815. It tended to unite and consolidate each of the several peoples, at least of

western and central Europe, and to popularise the idea that each should have

a strong national state based on popular sovereignty.

The other revolutionary principles ---- those of individualism and

secularism ---- were divisive, rather than unifying forces in the several countries. If

all Frenchmen were now nationalistic, there remained a considerable number who

were convinced that the leveling process of the Revolution, with its abolition of

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corporate rights and privileges, its subjugation of the Church, and its abrupt break

with past tradition, was quite wrong. Henceforth, in these basic matters of

government and society, France was split. There were two Frances, one anti-

Revolution, and the other pro-Revolution. And likewise in every country where the

revolutionary doctrines permeated, there emerged both opponents and advocates of

the new individualism and the new secularism, of revolutionary “liberty” and

“equality”.

The peasantry, who comprised the large majority of the continent’s

population, were swayed between the contending parties: still respectful of authority

in state and church, sincerely religious, and innately sceptical of the fine phrases

which were on liberal lips, they could at times and in places be reckoned

conservative. But there was one important respect in which many peasants

doggedly opposed reaction, and that was their attachment to the social

achievements of the Revolution ---- they would be done with feudalism and

serfdom, they would own their own lands. Geographically, it should be noted

that on the Continent the farther west one went and the nearer to

revolutionary France one came, the larger proportion of liberals one found,

and that conversely, the farther east one went and the more remote from

France, the larger proportion of conservatives one encountered.

Yet the advent of military dictatorship did not obscure the deep

significance of the French Revolution. A present-day visitor in Paris may

still observe on all sides the words ‘Liberte’, ‘Egalite’, ‘Fraternite’ ---- Liberty,

Equality , Fraternity. These were the words which the revolutionaries spelled out on

their public buildings, and which they thought embodied the basic meaning of the

Revolution. These words Napoleon Bonaparte did not erase.

“Liberty” implied certain political ideals. The people, and not a despotic

monarch, should be sovereign. The individual citizen should possess personal

liberties of conscience, worship, speech, publication, and property.

“Equality” signified the abolition of privilege, the end of serfdom, the

destruction of the feudal system. It meant that all men were equal before the law

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and that every man should have an equal chance with every other man in the

pursuit of life and happiness.

“Fraternity” was the symbol of the idealistic brotherhood of those who

sought to make the world better and happier and more just, and at the same time

it became the watchword of a new nationalism.

Political liberty, social equality, national patriotism ---- these three

remained the ideals of all those who down to our own day have looked for

inspiration to the French Revolution.

Thus the above three important principles of the French

Revolution, ‘liberty’, ‘equality’ and ‘fraternity’ inspired the leaders of Indian

Renaissance and National movement. Indians also aspired for political liberty,

social equality and national patriotism and thus in the end, I would like to

say I have tended to prove my thesis topic right and correct that ‘The

French Revolution and Revolutionary Era in Europe was he Precursor to

Indian National and Renaissance Movement’. It was an event of worldwide

significance and inspiration and Indians were particularly inspired by it as it

gave them the guiding principles on which to base their fight.

In the end I would also like to quote the sayings of some famous

people in history who in their own words reiterate the topic of my thesis and thus

lend credence to it. The renowned politician, scholar and

intellectual Jyoti Basu in the article titled ‘People’s

Democracy’, given in the Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India

(Marxist), sub-titled ‘THE 1857 REVOLT IN INDIA: LESSONS FOR US’

(March 11, 2007), has said that, ‘The great Revolt of 1857 was a watershed in

the history of modern India. It marked first national challenge to the English

in India; it emboldened the growth of Indian nationalist politics; it presaged

significant constitutional changes in British India. Today one hundred fifty years

later as we commemorate the event, the rebellion provides us with a new source

of inspiration to complete the nation-building project.’

Nineteenth century witnessed some anti-imperialist uprisings against

imperialism, most notably in Latin America against Spanish colonialism under the

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leadership of Simon Bolivar and the revolutionary priest Hidalgo. But both in

terms of social base and geographical distribution, the 1857 Revolt in India was

much more powerful. The Revolt started with the mutiny of the Indian sepoys

over the use of greased cartridges, but the sepoys were soon joined by broader

sections of the civil society whose moral economy had been disrupted by the

political system that had been imposed by the East India Company. The

conjunction between the sepoy mutiny with the civil uprisings imparted the

rebellion of 1857 the character of a national popular armed Revolt.

Now I will quote the saying of a most famous philosopher and thinker

which supports the saying of my thesis. Writing shortly after the Indian 1857

outbreak in the New York Tribune of 28 th July, 1857, Karl Marx had correctly

described it as “not a not a military mutiny, but a national Revolt”. On 14

September 1857 in New York Tribune, Marx compared the 1857 Revolt with

the 1789 French Revolution and noted:

The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the

nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian Revolt does not similarly

commence with the ryots, tortured, dishonoured, stripped naked by the British,

but with the sepoys, clad, fled, patted and pampered by them.

It is unfortunate that professional historians of our country could not

appreciate either the national or the popular character of the 1857 Revolt and

preferred to call it a Sepoy Mutiny. But I understand that recent researchers

have exposed the fallacy of such a contention, and the historians in India and

abroad are increasingly acknowledging the national character of the 1857 Revolt.

The 1857 Revolt began on 29th March 1857 when Mangal Pandey of

the 34th infantr in Barrackpore became the first martyr. The mutiny spread

rapidly in eastern and northern India. Delhi, Patna, Arrah, Azamgarh, Allahabad,

Gorakhpur, Faizabad, Jhansi, Lucknow, Kanpur, Etawah, Fategarh, Gwalior,

Shahjahanpur, Agra, Bharatpur, Rohilkhand, Mathura, Agra, Hatras, Delhi, Meerut,

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Bareilly and Roorki ---- these emerged as storm-centres of the Revolt. On 11 th May

1857 the sepoys of the Meerut regiment captured Delhi and proclaimed the last

Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar as their undisputed leader. In this entire

region the dispossessed talukdars and impoverished peasants and artisans joined

the sepoys to contest the English authority. The English land-revenue experiments

not only deprived the talukdars and landlords of their estates and social status, but

also subjected the peasants to excessive revenue demands. At the same time the

acute crisis faced by urban handicraft industry due to the intrusion of cheaper

English products and the disappearance of the patronage of the traditional local

courts and ruling classes dislocated the livelihood of the artisans. Despite their

class contradictions, the zamindars, the peasants and artisans joined hands with the

sepoys to fight their common enemy ---- the English. According to one estimate

one-fifth of the Indian population in 1857 directly or indirectly participated in the

Revolt.

The English authority virtually collapsed over the entire plains of Uttar

Pradesh. In Rohilkhand the British rule was ‘non-existent’ for almost a year.

Contemporary British officials remarked that in Oudh and its surrounding areas it

was difficult to distinguish who among the rebels were the sepoys and the

peasants. In some areas like Bijnor the civil population even rose up in revolt

before any help could be received from the sepoys. In other cases as in

Bulandshahr the popular uprising coincided with the arrival of the rebel army

from Aligarh. Recent researches have thus tended to stress that in the affected

area the mutiny of the sepoys were either preceded by or accompanied by or

followed by a civil rebellion. The popular violence was characterised by killing of

Europeans, pillaging of English establishments and record rooms, indigo factories

and burning of land records and official documents. In some areas such assaults

on symbols of English authority were contemporaneous with attacks on indigenous

baniyas and moneylenders. In parts of North-Western province, the peasant

participation in the Revolt was motivated by the aim to win back the land that

they had lost because of English revenue settlement. Contemporary English

observers like Kaye admitted that there was hardly any Indian belonging to

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any religious faith between the Ganges and Jamuna who was not against the

British. Although traditionally believed that Bengal remained aloof from the tumult,

I understand that recent historians in Bengal are demonstrating that the English in

Bengal were also panic-stricken and the area, too, was seething with unrest.

The other unique feature of the 1857 Revolt was the solidarity

amongst the rebels cutting across religious and provincial lines. Leaders of the

Revolt issued proclamations to stress the importance of communal amity amongst

the rebels, emphasising the need of Hindus and Muslims to join their hands to

drive out the English and protect their own religious customs and rituals. Mention

may be made in this connection of the pamphlet Fath-I-Islam (Victory to Islam)

issued from Lucknow. Again, the Azamgarh proclamation called upon the Indians

of all classes and religions to rise up against the faithless English. The rebel

leader Feroze Shah’s proclamation of August 1857 reiterated the same national

spirit: ‘It is well known to all that in this age, the people of Hindoostan, both

Hindoos and Mohammedans, are being ruined under the tyranny and oppression of

the infidel and treacherous English’.

Historians have also drawn our attention to such examples as the

Muslim rebel leaders banning sacrifices of cows during the Id festival to avoid

any Hindu-Muslim discord. It is unfortunate that sometimes the Revolt of 1857

is denied the national character since the ideal of a unified all-India nation

state was premature for most people of nineteenth century India. But how can

we deny a national character to a popular outburst against an alien regime,

particularly when it enjoyed the support of a large mass of population and

affected a large part of the country ? We need not forget that based on this

particular criterion many European episodes have been considered as national

events, as for example, the Russian peasants fighting Napoleon or the French

fighting the English under Joan of Arc or the Carbonaris fighting for Italian

unification even when the concerned Russians, French or the Italians were yet to

develop the notion of a united Russia, France or Italy. Double standards in

historical judgements are required to be avoided. The Revolt failed, thanks

to the brutalities committed by the English on the rebels. But the Revolt

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generated new national ideas. Historians like Irfan Habib have demonstrated that

apart from laying stress on communal harmony the rebel leaders visualised a new

national order. They sought to establish ‘a kind of elective military rule’, assured

economic relief to the zamindars, peasants and artisans alike and promised better

service conditions for the sepoys. The rebel leaders certainly deserve credit for

nursing this national vision at a time when nationalism in the modern

bourgeois sense was yet to develop.

What then is the lesson to be drawn from the 1857 Revolt ? The

uprising underlines the importance of fighting imperialism at all costs. The 1857

rebels fought and died for a cause ---- the cause of national liberation from an

alien rule. They raised the standard of rebellion when the English power in India

was at its ascendant height, and fought relentlessly shoulder to shoulder for a

national cause till the last hour, ignoring religious, ethnic and local divides. Today

when we are fighting to uphold the secular and democratic values of our federal

polity, to strengthen the national unity of our country and to frustrate the evil

designs of the forces of neo-imperialism we can draw strength from the martyrs

of the 1857 Revolt. This should be the context of the commemoration of the 150

years of the 1857 Revolt.

In support of my thesis I would also like to quote an article given in

the April 2011 issue of ‘Yojana’ monthly magazine, published by the Ministry

of Information and Broadcasting , the writer of which is Justice K.G.

Balakrishnan, former Chief Justice of India ( on page 11). In his article, titled ,

‘Providing an Improved Environment for Human Rights in The Country,’ he

says : “The basic Charter of Human Rights is found in Magna Carta,

American War of Independence and French Revolution. They were mostly in

the form of negative rights, i.e., State shall not interfere with the enjoyment of

certain basic rights. Human rights have been recognised as standards of

achievements and norms of behaviours of all members of society, and without

its observance, society would disintegrate. Society can be maintained only by

protecting and promoting dignity of human beings.”

291

Lastly, in support of this thesis I would like to give a very important

quotation of a high dignitary of India and I think there would be no other

quotation which would convey in so many direct words the saying of this

thesis and thus prove the hypothesis of the topic that in fact, ‘The French

Revolution and Revolutionary Era following it in Europe was the Precursor of the

Indian Renaissance and National Movement.’ In the September 2009 (English

issue) of the monthly magazine ‘Pratiyogita Darpan’ there is an article titled,

‘Indian PM’s Visit to France : Growing Warmth in Indo-French Ties’ (on page

PD/September /2009/371/2 and PD/September/2009/372) which proves my topic. It

says :

‘Indo-French ties are growing from strength to strngth. Besides many

areas in which India and France are cooperating, the new warmth in the ties was

reflected when French President Nicolas Sarkozy invited Indian Prime Minister Dr.

Manmohan Singh to be the Chief Guest at Bastille Day parade. Dr. Manmohan

Singh became the first Indian leader to be the Chief Guest of honour at France’s

National Bastille Day celebrations in Paris on July 14, 2009. It was a special

privilege and honour bestowed on an Indian dignitary, otherwise, unlike at India’s

Republic Day parade, France does not normally invite foreign heads of state or

government to be Bastille Day guests. This year marks the 220th anniversary of

the French Revolution.’

Strategic Partnership : ‘Before the glittering select crowd in attendance

at the French President’s traditional garden party, the Indian PM made a forceful

call for further strengthening the strategic partnership that had developed between

the two countries since 1998.’

‘Recalling the 1789 French Revolution that Bastille Day or the

French National Day seeks to commemorate, Dr. Singh said :

“Two hundred and twenty years ago this great city saw the emergence of

powerful voice, the universal recognition of the ideals of Liberty, Equality and

Fraternity. These ideals have changed the course of history. Our own freedom

292

struggle took inspiration from the French Revolution and guided the fathers of

our constitution.”

Thus with the above final concluding statement the researcher

would like to conclude her thesis in a final fruitful way with the hypothesis

having been fully proved to the best of her ability.

293

REFERENCES.

1. Pollard A.F., Factors in Modern History. Perhaps England accidentally

combined sovereignty with Nationalism — a fortunate chance1869, New York,

G. P. Putnam's sons, London, A. Constable & Co., Ltd., 1907, p. 238.

2. Laski R. H., Tawney, Kropotkin, P. A. Kropotkin, Liberty in the Modern State

Harold J. Laski, Pelican Books, p.p. 14, 24.

3. Barns Margarita, The Indian Press: A History of the Growth of Public Opinion

In India, Institute of Historical Studies, Calcutta (India), G. Allen & Unwin

Ltd., 1940, p.p. 29-34.

4. Trevelyan's classic "The Glorious Cause : The American Revolution', Oxford,

Longmans Green & Co. 1909, p.l.

5. Burns C. Delisle., Political Ideals. The last sentence of Rousseau's 'Contract

Social' acknowledges the further issue as to the relation between States with

which he feels he cannot deal. Oxford University Press, p. 149.

6. Ibid, There appears to be still a conception abroad that poverty or disease is due

to personal moral defects, but it is so absurd that we shall not discuss it., p. 151.

7. Ibid, In 1270. p. 154.

8. Ibid, 'De reg. princ.'; 'Summa' Th. I IIae. p. 154.

9. Ibid. 'Contrat Social', Book I, ch. I pg.i. p. 155.

10. Ibid, The expression of the ideal involved is in Locke's 'Essay on Civil

Government'. The great phrase in ch. Xiii is, 'there remains in the people a

supreme power to remove or alter the legislature'. p. 156.

11. Ibid, Morley, 'Rousseau', vol. ii, p. 160.

12. Ibid, Rousseau must have been influenced by the non-representative direct

voting of the States in the Swiss Confederation; but as Morley observes, he

prefers to quote as an example the Roman comitia, and the Macedonians and

Franks. p. 157.

13. Ibid, 'Sa plus constante manrere de raisonner est d' etablir toryours le droit par

le fait' ('Contrat Social', ch. ii), and so to suppose, as Grotius did, that a people

294

gives itself over to absolute obedience is 'supposer un people de fous: la folie ne

fait pas droit'. ch. iv, p. 62.

14. Ibid. ch. viii, p. 158.

15. Ibid, Book I, ch. ix, in fine', p. 158.

16. Ibid, Whether by redistribution of wealth or by 'moderation of avarice'. Cf.,

Book H, ch. xi, p. 159.

17. Ibid, Ibid, Book HI, ch. i. Government is intermediate between the sovereign

and the subject, p. 159.

18. Ibid, Book III, ch. X. Thus Rousseau goes further in understanding Aristotle

than Grotius did, p. 160.

19. Ibid, Book IV, ch. I. Rousseau says the people of Berne or Geneva Would

never have submitted to a Cromwell or a Duke of Beaufort. Thus he definitely

refers to the Swiss method, although he seems to refer to draw his examples

from Macedon and Rome, as these had more 'prestige', p. 160.

20. Ibid, It was published eight years before the 'Contrat Social', p. 161.

21. Ibid, The last words of the 'Discourse', p. 161.

22. Ibid,The words are from D. Ritchie, p. 161.

23. Ibid, There is of course the continual tendency to complain against any system

of representative government. The Referendum is merely a modified form of

the Rousseau conception of the inalienable sovereignty of the people, p. 162.

24. Ibid, Thus Locke's Treatise is an excuse for established fact; but the

Revolutionary 'excuse' was stated by Rousseau 'before' the fact of its partical

realization, Ibid, pg 163.

25. Ibid, The pamphlet of Miss Jane Harrison, 'Homo Sum', is an admirable

continuance of Revolutionary Literature, p.167.

26. 26. Cf. Morley, ‘History and Politics’, ‘National sentiment changed to

political idea.’,Political Thought by C.LWayper, Oxford, p. 71.

27. 27. Ibid, Fichte’s ‘Addresses to the German Nation’ represent the change

from sentiment to programme, p. 131.

295

28. Ibid, ‘They defied the very force which had re-established the old

Despotism.’ Morley, ‘History and Politics’, p. 132.

29. Op. cit. ‘History and Politics’, p. 72.

30. Trevelyan, ‘Garibaldi’s Defence’, & c.,Oxford, Longmans, Green, p. 7, 45, 47.

31. Ibid, The quotation is from Mazzini’s ‘Manifesto of Young

Italy’, issued in 1831, p. 16.

32. Op. cit. Burns , Political Ideals, Published in 1834, p. 185.

33. Op. cit. Mazzini’s , Introduction, p. 10.

34. Morley, Edition of 1837, part I, i , p. 178.

35. Burns, World Civilisations , Goyl Publishers, p.925.

36. Ibid, No member of the Constituent Assembly was eligible for the

Legislative Assembly, p. 926.

37. Ibid, Before the Assembly was dissolved in 1792, 630 members out of

the 750 belonged to the Club, p. 926.

38. Haridas and Uma Mukherjee, ‘India’s Fight for Freedom or the

Swadeshi Movement 1905-1906’, Calcutta, 1958, p. 166.

39. Hirendranath Mukherjee, ‘India’s Struggle for Freedom’, Bombay,

1948 edition, p. 96.

40. Jagmohan Singh and Chamanlal, ‘Bhagat Singh aur unke Sathiyon

ke Dastavez’ (The Documents of Bhagat Singh and His

Comrades), New Delhi, 1986, in Hindi, p. 266.

41. Kalpana Joshi (nee Dutt), ‘Chittagong Uprising and the Role of

Muslims,’ in ‘Challenge ---- A Saga of India’s Struggle for

Freedom’, edited by Nitish Ranjan Ray, ‘et. Al.’, New Delhi, 1984, p. 51.

42. Anand Gupta, ‘The Immortal Surya Sen,’ p. 89.

43. Shiv Varma, editor, ‘Selected Writings of Shaheed Bhagat Singh’,

New Delhi, 1986, Appendix I.

44. ‘Proceedings of the HRA Council Meeting’, 1924.

45. Shiv Varma, ‘op. cit.’ , Appendix. II.

46. Ramprasad Bismil, ‘Autobiography’, edited by Banarsidas

Chaturvedi, Delhi, 1966, in Hindi.

296

47. Op. cit., Shiv Varma, p. 95.

48. Ibid, p. 130.

49. Ibid, pp. 137-8.

50. Ibid, p. 137.

51. Op. cit., Jagmohan Singh and Chamanlal, p. 267.

52. Op. cit., Shiv Varma, pp. 190, 198-9.

53. Ibid, p. 74.

54. Quoted in Gopal Thakur, ‘Bhagat Singh : The Man and His Ideas,’

New Delhi, 1952, p. 39.

55. Vishwanath Vaishampayan, ‘Amar Shahid Chandrashekhar Azad’,

Benaras, 1976, in Hindi, Parts 2-3, Appendix 5.

56. Op. cit., Shiv Varma, p. 109.

57. Op. cit., Sohan Singh Josh, ‘My Meetings with Bhagat Singh and on Other

Early Revolutionaries,’ New Delhi, 1976, pp. 13-5; and Jagmohan

Singh and Chamanlal, pp. 186-9, 244-5.

58. Op. cit., Jagmohan Singh and Chamanlal, pp. 190-3.

59. Ibid., pp. 248 ff.

60. Rules and Regulations of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, Punjab,

(May 19280), ‘Meerut Conspiracy Case’, 1929, Exhibit no. P 205 (T);

Reports on the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, Home (Political )

Proceedings, F. 130 & K W (1930).

61. Op. cit., Bhagat Singh, ‘Why I am an Atheist’, with an introduction by

Bipan Chandra, Delhi, 1979. Also in Shiv Varma, pp.139 ff. and pp. 117 ff.

62. Bipan Chandra, ‘The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism

in India’, New Delhi, 1966, Chapter I. Dadabhai Naoroji, ‘Poverty

and Un-British Rule in India’, London, 1901.

63. R.C. Dutt, ‘Economic History of India in the Victorian Age,’

London, 6th edition, first published in 1903, p. XVI.

64. G.V. Joshi, ‘Writings and Speeches’, Poona, 1912, p. 616.

65. M.G. Ranade, ‘Essays on Indian Economics’, Bombay, 1898, p. 96.

66. Bipan Chandra, ‘The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism

297

in India’, Chapter III, Section I; and his ‘British and Indian Ideas

on Indian Economic Development, 1858-1905’ in ‘Nationalism and

Colonialism in Modern India,’ New Delhi, 1987 reprint.

67. Curzon, ‘Speeches’, Vol. I, Calcutta, 1900, p. 34.

68. Naoroji, ‘Poverty and Un-British Rule in India’, pp. 34, 568-9,

‘Speeches’, p. 169.

69. February 1903, p. 193.

70. ‘New India’, 12 August 1901.

71. Op. cit., G.V. Joshi, pp. 687-8.

72. Ram Gopal, ‘Lokamanya Tilak’, Bombay, 1965 reprint, p. 148.

73. Bipan Chandra, ‘The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism

In India’, Chapter XIII.

74. Naoroji, ‘Poverty and Un-British Rule in India’, p. 216.

75. R.C. Dutt, ‘Economic History of India Under Early British Rule’,

London, 1956, 8th impression, pp. xi and 420.

76. ‘Abstract of the Proceedings of the Council of the Governor-

General of India’, 1896, Vol. XXXV, p. 85.

77. Naoroji, ‘Speeches’, pp. 328, 329.

78. Naoroji, ‘Poverty and Un-British Rule in India’, pp. 224-5.

79. Naoroji, ‘Speeches’, p. 389.

80. ‘India’, London. 2 September 1904.

81. Naoroji, ‘Speeches’, p. 671.

82. ‘Ibid’, p. 73.

298