The French Revolutionary Calendar

At a certain point, the dominant revolutionary party in France decided that the new Republic needed to be purged of all traditional, Christian and monarchical symbolism. The new calendar went far beyond a mere renaming of the months. The year and the months were given new starting points, and new names based on the seasons, the weather and the agricultural year were devised.

French historians of the Revolution often use the new calendar when discussing the events of the most turbulent period of the Revolution, in part because that is how dates are identified in the documents they study, but also (I think) because using them gives modern people a feeling for how the Revolution seemed to all concerned as a whole new era of the world. If you are not steeped in this stuff, however, you may find it rather difficult to figure out when the Year II was, or the month of Thermidor.

But wait! Brittanica has an attractively illustrated primer on the months of the Calendar. I think lots of people may find this useful.

Image: One of the great Revolutionary celebrations: the Festival of the Supreme Being 20, Prairial Year II (8 June 1794).

It's not the Arab Spring, it's the French Revolution (1789-99)

 From Foreign Policy:

This massive financial support follows on, and replaces, billions of dollars given by Qatar to the previous Muslim Brotherhood government. It is likely to prove equally ineffectual in delivering the desired payoffs, though. As Doha discovered to its dismay, money will buy only temporary love and symbolic returns. Whatever Gulf paymasters might hope, the new Egyptian government will be forced to respond to its own intensely turbulent, polarized, and dysfunctional domestic political arena. No outside player -- not Washington, Riyadh, Doha, or Tehran -- can really hope to effectively shape the new Egyptian politics for long.

More from Phil Paine on intelligent protest

More from Phil on the limitations of current forms of activism.  An excerpt:

Protests within a func­tion­ing democ­racy are fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent from  [the fall of the Soviet Union, the Arab Spring]. The pro­tes­tors face no sig­nif­i­cant dan­ger. This is not to say that we should turn a blind eye to cops vio­lat­ing civil rights, strong-arming peace­ful demon­stra­tors, or the kind of trea­so­nous fraud per­pe­trated by the author­i­ties that occurred dur­ing the G-20 sum­mit in Toronto. All those respon­si­ble for these crimes against my coun­try should be pun­ished severely for them, though I know that they never will be. But there is a world of dif­fer­ence between a brief stay in a local lock-up and a court appear­ance, and fac­ing a fir­ing squad or ten years dig­ging rocks with your bare hands in a mine. Pro­test­ers in Canada do not face dan­ger great enough to clas­sify their actions as exam­ples of great courage. I’m not imply­ing that they shouldn’t engage in protest. Protest is urgently needed. But it is not help­ful or hon­est to mis­rep­re­sent its nature. 

What moti­vates real protest in a democ­racy is not phys­i­cal courage, but civic virtue....This is why I do not feel any glad­ness when pro­fes­sional pseudo-revolutionaries, con­ven­tional ide­o­log­i­cal “anar­chists” or “rad­i­cals” par­tic­i­pate in such protests, or attempt to take them over. They are there pre­cisely to val­i­date the “good guy” image of the author­i­ties, and to tor­pedo the moral legit­i­macy of the protest. They per­form exactly the same debas­ing func­tion that Islamic Fun­da­men­tal­ist groups have done for the Arab Spring. 

Within a demo­c­ra­tic polity, one finds protests occur­ring all the time, pre­cisely because a free soci­ety should be open to them, and should encour­age them. But such protests dif­fer greatly in their qual­ity. Some protests tell us lit­tle more than that some­body is angry about some­thing. Since another, equally large or influ­en­tial group may be equally angry about an oppo­site state of affairs, this sel­dom has any influ­ence on either opin­ion or pol­icy. More sophis­ti­cated protest aims at influ­enc­ing pub­lic opin­ion, by 1) mak­ing clear what is wrong about some pub­lic pol­icy; 2) putting for­ward a dif­fer­ent, pre­sum­ably bet­ter pol­icy; and 3) con­vinc­ing a broad pub­lic of the wis­dom of act­ing to this end. In a democ­racy, effec­tive protest should merely be the ini­tial step in a process cul­mi­nat­ing in real polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion and action. This action must, to be gen­uinely effec­tive, trans­late into peo­ple mark­ing x’s on bal­lots in the end. If it is merely a rit­ual, an amuse­ment, or a way of blow­ing off steam, it is not progressive.

Read the rest. 

Egyptian revolutionaries attack Cairo's Israeli embassy

I've called Cairo "Paris, 1791." It may be progressing to Paris, 1792, or even Tehran, 1980--the attack on the US embassy comes to mind, an attack on the hated foreign ally of the Old Regime.

Go away and just see what happens

Often enough when I go away camping in August, and am paying no attention, something dramatic happens.  In 1989, I re-entered the world of news to hear that Hungary was taking down its stretch of the Iron Curtain.  In 1991, the coup against Gorbachev took place, followed quickly by the collapse of  the Soviet Union.

A lot of stuff happened this August, but for all the import of British riots and American Russian roulette with the economy, I think the beginning of the trial of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo wins the prize.

Cairo is the place, it is Paris in 1791.  Mubarak is Louis XVI and his judges are...?

When Louis fled France in rejection of the new constitutional monarchy, and was captured doing so, Thomas Paine told the revolutionaries  that how they treated the ex-king would determine the course of the new  republican regime.  He particularly warned against blood vengeance against the traitor-king, which would lead to more blood, and even more.  He was emphatically right.

Hosni Mubarak deserves to answer to a court for his actions, but the trial has its dangers.  The course and meaning and the consequences of the Egyptian revolution may well be determined in that courtroom.  Whether the Arab Spring keeps its potential for humane progress or descends into vengeance -- we shall see.

For a less hopeful set of developments, see these reports and reflections in Syria Comment.

More on China -- "Too early to say"

Phil Paine forwards me this post from Delanceyplace.com:

In today's excerpt - the Chinese have often been invoked as having a longer-term perspective on history compared to the West, and to buttress this view, the story is often repeated of Premier Zhou Enlai's response when asked to discuss the impact of the French Revolution. His answer? "Too early to say":

"The impact of the French Revolution? 'Too early to say.'

"Thus did Zhou Enlai - in responding to questions in the early 1970s about the popular revolt in France almost two centuries earlier - buttress China's reputation as a far-thinking, patient civilisation.

"The former premier's answer has become a frequently deployed cliché, used as evidence of the sage Chinese ability to think long-term - in contrast to impatient westerners.

"The trouble is that Zhou was not referring to the 1789 storming of the Bastille in a discussion with Richard Nixon during the late US president's pioneering China visit. Zhou's answer related to events only three years earlier - the 1968 students' riots in Paris, according to Nixon's interpreter at the time.

Phil says:

I'm often amazed at the way even serious journalists and historians abandon all critical faculties when talking about China, and think in cliches, vague images, and old sayings and quotations.  Imagine the same guys analysing the Netherlands in terms of wooden shoes and windmills and taking sayings like "dutch treat" or "Dutch courage" as if they were profound. Or concluding that they can predict American foreign policy by watching old episodes of The Lucy Show.

Image:  1968

That other globalization

Ideas and images whiz around the world, and the unexpected happens.  Rebecca Solnit at Tomgram:

There were three kinds of surprise about this year’s unfinished revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and the rumblings elsewhere that have frightened the mighty from Saudi Arabia to China, Algeria to Bahrain. The West was surprised that the Arab world, which we have regularly been told is medieval, hierarchical, and undemocratic, was full of young men and women using their cell phones, their Internet access, and their bodies in streets and squares to foment change and temporarily live a miracle of direct democracy and people power. And then there is the surprise that the seemingly unshakeable regimes of the strongmen were shaken into pieces.
And finally, there is always the surprise of: Why now? Why did the crowd decide to storm the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and not any other day? The bread famine going on in France that year and the rising cost of food had something to do with it, as hunger and poverty does with many of the Middle Eastern uprisings today, but part of the explanation remains mysterious. Why this day and not a month earlier or a decade later? Or never instead of now?
Oscar Wilde once remarked, “To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.” This profound uncertainty has been the grounds for my own hope.
Hindsight is 20/20, they say, and you can tell stories where it all makes sense. A young Tunisian college graduate, Mohammed Bouazizi, who could find no better work than selling produce from a cart on the street, was so upset by his treatment at the hands of a policewoman that he set himself afire on December 17, 2010. His death two weeks later became the match that lit the country afire -- but why that death? Or why the death of Khaled Said, an Egyptian youth who exposed police corruption and was beaten to death for it? He got a Facebook page that said “We are all Khaled Said,” and his death, too, was a factor in the uprisings to come.
But when exactly do the abuses that have been tolerated for so long become intolerable? When does the fear evaporate and the rage generate action that produces joy?  After all, Tunisia and Egypt were not short on intolerable situations and tragedies before Bouazizi’s self-immolation and Said’s murder.
Thich Quang Duc burned himself to death at an intersection in Saigon on June 11, 1963, to protest the treatment of Buddhists by the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam. His stoic composure while in flames was widely seen and may have helped produce a military coup against the regime six months later -- a change, but not necessarily a liberation. In between that year and this one, many people have fasted, prayed, protested, gone to prison, and died to call attention to cruel regimes, with little or no measurable consequence.
Guns and Butterflies 
The boiling point of water is straightforward, but the boiling point of societies is mysterious. Bouazizi’s death became a catalyst, and at his funeral the 5,000 mourners chanted, "Farewell, Mohammed, we will avenge you. We weep for you today, we will make those who caused your death weep."
But his was not the first Tunisian gesture of denunciation. An even younger man, the rap artist who calls himself El General, uploaded a song about the horror of poverty and injustice in the country and, as the Guardian put it, “within hours, the song had lit up the bleak and fearful horizon like an incendiary bomb.” Or a new dawn. The artist was arrested and interrogated for three very long days, and then released thanks to widespread protest. And surely before him we could find another milestone. And another young man being subjected to inhuman conditions. And behind the uprising in Egypt are a panoply of union and human rights organizers as well as charismatic individuals.
This has been a great year for the power of the powerless and for the courage and determination of the young. A short, fair-haired, mild man even younger than Bouazizi has been held under extreme conditions in solitary confinement in a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, for the last several months.  He is charged with giving hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. documents to WikiLeaks and so unveiling some of the more compromised and unsavory operations of the American military and U.S. diplomacy. Bradley Manning was a 22-year-old soldier stationed in Iraq when he was arrested last spring.  The acts he’s charged with have changed the global political landscape and fed the outrage in the Middle East.
As Foreign Policy put it in a headline, “In one fell swoop, the candor of the cables released by WikiLeaks did more for Arab democracy than decades of backstage U.S. diplomacy.” The cables suggested, among other things, that the U.S. was not going to back Tunisian dictator Ben Ali to the bitter end, and that the regime’s corruption was common knowledge.
Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a 1958 comic book about the Civil Rights struggle in the American South and the power of nonviolence was translated and distributed by the American Islamic Council in the Arab world in 2008 and has been credited with influencing the insurgencies of 2011. So the American Islamic Council played a role, too -- a role definitely not being investigated by anti-Muslim Congressman Peter King in his hearings on the “radicalization of Muslims in America.” Behind King are the lessons he, in turn, learned from Mohandas Gandhi, whose movement liberated India from colonial rule 66 years ago, and so the story comes back to the east.
Causes are Russian dolls. You can keep opening each one up and find another one behind it. WikiLeaks and Facebook and Twitter and the new media helped in 2011, but new media had been around for years. Asmaa Mahfouz was a young Egyptian woman who had served time in prison for using the Internet to organize a protest on April 6, 2008, to support striking workers. With astonishing courage, she posted a video of herself on Facebook on January 18, 2011, in which she looked into the camera and said, with a voice of intense conviction:

“Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire to protest humiliation and hunger and poverty and degradation they had to live with for 30 years. Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire thinking maybe we can have a revolution like Tunisia, maybe we can have freedom, justice, honor, and human dignity. Today, one of these four has died, and I saw people commenting and saying, ‘May God forgive him. He committed a sin and killed himself for nothing.’ People, have some shame.”

She described an earlier demonstration at which few had shown up: “I posted that I, a girl, am going down to Tahrir Square, and I will stand alone. And I’ll hold up a banner. Perhaps people will show some honor. No one came except three guys -- three guys and three armored cars of riot police. And tens of hired thugs and officers came to terrorize us.”
Mahfouz called for the gathering in Tahrir Square on January 25th that became the Egyptian revolution.  The second time around she didn’t stand alone. Eighty-five thousand Egyptians pledged to attend, and soon enough, millions stood with her.
The revolution was called by a young woman with nothing more than a Facebook account and passionate conviction. They were enough. Often, revolution has had such modest starts.  On October 5, 1789, a girl took a drum to the central markets of Paris. The storming of the Bastille a few months before had started, but hardly completed, a revolution.  That drummer girl helped gather a mostly female crowd of thousands who marched to Versailles and seized the royal family. It was the end of the Bourbon monarchy.
Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act. As they did in Egypt, where liberty leading the masses was an earnest young woman in a black veil.
That the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can shape the weather in Texas is a summation of chaos theory that is now an oft-repeated cliché. But there are billions of butterflies on earth, all flapping their wings. Why does one gesture matter more than another? Why this Facebook post, this girl with a drum?
Even to try to answer this you’d have to say that the butterfly is born aloft by a particular breeze that was shaped by the flap of the wing of, say, a sparrow, and so behind causes are causes, behind small agents are other small agents, inspirations, and role models, as well as outrages to react against. The point is not that causation is unpredictable and erratic. The point is that butterflies and sparrows and young women in veils and an unknown 20-year-old rapping in Arabic and you yourself, if you wanted it, sometimes have tremendous power, enough to bring down a dictator, enough to change the world.

Women and the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381

Jonathan Jarrett directs me to the blog Bavardess, which I have missed up till now. Its author has an interesting post on the role of women in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, saying, among other things:

While most historical accounts up until the 1980s (at least) discuss the revolt as an almost wholly male enterprise, source documents including trial records and pardons show women were very much active participants, and even instigators and organisers of rebellion.
At left, for example, is an extract from a commission of Oyer and Terminer (‘hear and determine’) held in Essex directly after the revolt to seek out those responsible. Amongst the people accused of riding armed through the countryside and inciting the commons to rise against the king is one “Nichola Cartere who was lately taken as wife by William Dekne of South Benfleet”*. In another case, records from the court of King’s Bench describe Johanna Ferrour as the “chief perpetrator and leader” of a rebel group from Kent who burnt the Savoy and executed Sudbury and Hales**[an extraordinarily important episode--SM].

A good insight -- and there is more good stuff about the gendered language of revolt in the original post. When it comes to women's participation, I am reminded of how much the Peasants' Revolt reminds me of the earliest stages of the French Revolution of 1789. John Ball's list of demands makes me think that he would've loved The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. And of course 1789 was famous for the inspiring/scandalous political participation of women, which was not unprecedented even if they went much farther in 1789.

Then there is Tehran, 1979 and 2009, both times when women's initiative was/has been a key factor...

Councils in Venezuela (history of democracy thread)

Today's Washington post has a very interesting article on Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. It's about the founding of community councils to partially replace elected mayors and municipal councils. It's not exactly clear how these councils are constituted, but the article states that for "big decisions" the elected councillors have to go back to community assemblies for a final decision.

I don't know quite to think about it. I haven't bought into the official American propaganda about how evil and threatening Chavez is, since it's entirely self-interested, but neither do I trust Chavez. The danger sign for me is that his preferred political methodologies seem to be ranting at the population for hours on end about every subject imaginable, and throwing government money around like there's no tomorrow. He reminds me all too much of Castro the Omniscent, not to mention every 20th century dictator you've heard of and all of those you haven't.

Also, the use of "community councils" can be a mere mask for dictatorship. Khaddafi abolished all the government institutions of Libya in favor of assemblies supposedly inspired by Berber customs, but guess who still controls everything, notably the energy revenues that constitute practically the entire economy the country?

Going back a couple of centuries, there are also the "section assemblies" of Paris during the Revolution that gave democracy such a bad name in Europe during the 19th century. "Section assemblies" were grassroots neighborhood groups that elected an electoral college which elected members of the National Assembly. After they chose the electoral college -- by voice vote -- the people were supposed to go home and let their betters run the government and guide the revolution. Well, a lot of them came back the next day, and the next, and the day after that and in the name of the people continually critiqued the elected government.

Sounds all very democratic, yes? Unfortunately, the sections in Paris became dominated by people convinced that they knew what the people wanted, and that everyone who opposed the people were evil "aristocrats." Continual voice votes in each section allowed the local aristocratic stooges (not necessarily nobles or even rich) to be identified and expelled. The sections, full of zealots, set up a communication network, armed themselves, and eventually seized control of the capital. This was a further step to dictatorship and government by Terror.
(The awful flavor of the word "terrorists" comes in part from the open use of terror -- revolutionary justice dispensed by kangaroo courts leading to execution -- by the resulting regime.)

So these community councils could go nowhere or worse. On the other hand, according to the WP article, there's a lot of enthusiasm on the popular level for this experiment, even among opponents of Chavez. Some people think that the old institutions of local government, which go back to colonial times, are worthless and the new councils may provide a way for them to solve some of their own problems. I direct you for some relevant thoughts about the vital role of local government in real democracies in Phil Paine's blog (under Sept. 25).

Good luck, Venezuela!

Image: Chavez surrounded by "the people"(?).