Page:Voices of Revolt - Volume 1.djvu/19

 Rh and all shades of the National Assembly were represented in them. The later course of the Revolution caused them to split again and again.

The Revolution is not a single act of terror, but a process in which the class struggle unfolds in the form of a struggle for power between the various class strata, a struggle assuming the most accentuated forms. After the bloc of absolutism, anchored and sanctified in centuries of habit, was overthrown by the execution of the king, the parties struggled for power as the representatives of various class interests.

Each party, in accordance with the economic position of its adherents, necessarily demanded a different type of republic. We must here make clear in advance that it is a bourgeois revolution of which we speak; the point was the economic emancipation of the large-scale bourgeoisie, of merchant and industrial capital, the first form of capital to develop the tendency to the formation of surplus value. This class, and with it also the exclusively intellectual stratum of the bourgeoisie, is the spiritual source of the French Revolution, if we are justified in regarding the spiritual phalanx which embraces that intellectual movement known as the "bourgeois enlightenment," as the lever of the revolutionary forces, the consciousness and the conscience of the revolution. This spiritual phalanx, however, is only the expression of an immense economic fact;