Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/6

IV the Jacobins, representatives of the immature proletariat and the really great men of the Revolution, resorted to the drastic means of The Terror, equally against the bourgeoisie and the nobility, to continue the Revolution against all opposition. The antipathy aroused in France by the Revolution was enormous, and violent was the opposition; but the antipathy and the opposition were not confined to France: the whole world of aristocracy and privilege was aroused against the Revolution. As the Revolution verged on success, its international aspects were emphasized: if it succeeded in annihilating monarchy and feudal privilege in France, monarchy and feudal privilege in all Europe would verge on collapse. Europe, aristocratic Europe and "Commercial England," moaned over the "anarchy" in France, denounced the "mass murder," villified Marat and the Jacobins—and even the "revolutionary" conservatives—as fiends in human form, enemies of civilization and scourges of humanity. Intrigues, corruption, propaganda of the emigres, the organizing of counter-revolutionary plots,—all these were resorted to by England, Prussia, Russia, and Austria to crush the French Revolution from within, through the action of the people of France; and when these maneuvres failed, when the Revolution conquered in spite of all and everything, monarchical Europe attempted "intervention" in France to crush the Revolution by alien force. The answer of revolutionary France was the wonderful series of revolutionary wars and the conquests of Napoleon. The national antagonisms generated by the Revolution had become international; the class struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal class waged within France by means of revolution and civil war became an international class struggle waged by means of revolutionary wars provoked by the "intervention" of that feudal, monarchic Europe threatened by the French Revolution.

At Waterloo, the French Revolution, objectively expressed in Napoleon, was militarily defeated. The defeat was merely objective; it was not subjective. Metternich and the Concert of Europe, particularly the "Holy Alliance," were confident that the revolutionary ideas of France had been conquered and monarchic reaction restored. It was a characteristic error. Revolutionary France had been conquered largely by the national ideas and conditions of bourgeois emergence which it developed in Europe by its military conquests. And the fundamental purposes of the French Revolution—the overthrow of the absolute monarchy and feudal domination, the introduction of the democratic parliamentary