Daniel Guérin

French historian, anarchist-communist activist, and political writer (1904–1988); author of La Lutte des classes sous la Première République (2 vols., 1946), Fascisme et grand capital (1936), Où va le peuple américain? (1950), and many works of social and political history. In his lifetime an unusual intellectual position: a Marxist who drew on anarchist traditions, a libertarian-socialist who refused both Leninist and social-democratic orthodoxies. For this wiki, Guérin is significant as the source of the extended reading of the French Revolution in the Epilogue of *Adventures of the Dialectic* — the case-study through which Merleau-Ponty works out his thesis on revolutions as movements vs. regimes.

Key Points

  • La Lutte des classes sous la Première République (1946): Guérin's two-volume history of the French Revolution as class struggle, with particular attention to the Bras Nus — the Parisian sans-culottes whose direct-democratic pressure on the revolutionary government is Guérin's main subject. MP's Epilogue engages this book at length (AD 211–21).
  • The Bras Nus thesis: Guérin argues that within the French Revolution there was a proletarian revolution (the Bras Nus's direct democracy) alongside the bourgeois revolution (the Mountain's governmental dictatorship). The Mountain, including Robespierre, represented "the bourgeois spirit" against the Bras Nus's proletarian spirit.
  • MP's appreciation: Guérin's historical material is rich and his documentation careful. "By virtue of knowledge, of revolutionary sympathy and honesty, the author has assembled rich historical material" (AD 211). MP uses Guérin's material to illustrate the structure of revolutionary equivocation.
  • MP's critique: Guérin's framework imputes the equivocation of the French Revolution to the particularities of the bourgeois class. MP argues it is the structural form of any revolution-becoming-regime. "We cannot agree with... Guérin when [he] supposes that [the French Revolution's] contradictions are only those of Bolshevism, those of a historical form linked to the particularities of a backward country" (AD 116, similarly applied to Guérin's bourgeois-particularity thesis in the Epilogue).
  • The Bras Nus as sublime point: Guérin treats the Bras Nus as the unrealized proletarian revolution — what would have been the true revolution had conditions been ripe. MP diagnoses this as a sublime-point illusion: Guérin projects a sublime point onto the unrealized that would have been ungraspable as a regime had it been realized.

Details

The Book

Guérin's La Lutte des classes sous la Première République was written during the occupation and published in 1946. It is a dissident Marxist history — dissident in that it refuses the orthodox Marxist-Leninist reading of the French Revolution (as purely bourgeois) and dissent in that it works with material the orthodox tradition suppressed (the Bras Nus, the Enragés, the Hébertists).

The central historical thesis: the revolutionary government's move against the Hébertists in March 1794 was not a defense of the revolution against counterrevolution but a counterrevolution within the revolution — the Mountain-bourgeois turning against the direct democracy the Bras Nus were starting to establish. The Committee of Public Safety is read as governmental dictatorship, Thermidor as its logical consequence, Bonaparte as the completion.

Guérin's framing: the French Revolution was "progressive" relative to the ancien régime but "reactionary" relative to the Bras Nus. Robespierre was progressive against Louis XVI but reactionary against Hébert. The Mountain's centralization, the levying of paper money, the subordination of local administrators to the central power (all of which Guérin documents in painstaking detail) were moves against the revolutionary spontaneity of the Paris sections.

This reading anticipates anarcho-Marxist and left-libertarian traditions of the late 20th century (the Situationists, George Rudé, E.P. Thompson's "history from below," and later "history of the crowd" scholarship).

MP's Engagement

The Epilogue of Adventures of the Dialectic engages Guérin as a test case. MP's strategy: accept Guérin's historical documentation (which he praises) while rejecting Guérin's theoretical framework.

The documentation shows:

  • The equivocalness of the French Revolution is real. The revolutionary government did indeed turn against the Bras Nus.
  • The distinction between bourgeois and proletarian moments within the revolution is well-founded.
  • The dictatorship of the revolutionary government was both progressive (against the ancien régime) and reactionary (against the direct democracy).

But the framework suggests:

  • That the equivocalness was due to the specifically bourgeois character of the Mountain;
  • That a proletarian revolution would have been free of this equivocalness;
  • That permanent revolution, if it had been possible in 1793, would have realized what the Bras Nus pointed toward.

MP's critique targets the framework. "If one admits, on the contrary, that in a given moment... it is impossible to distinguish between what is progressive and what is reactionary or to accept one as 'proletarian' and to refuse the other as 'bourgeois,' if both must be accepted or refused together in the absolute of the moment as the objective aspect and the subjective aspect, the 'outside' and the 'inside' of the Revolution, the question arises of knowing whether at every moment of every revolution the same kind of ambiguity will not be found again" (AD 220).

The claim: Guérin's equivocation is structural, not contingent. Every revolution has an "outside" (the governmental-regime aspect) and an "inside" (the movement-direct-democracy aspect). The two cannot be separated; they are two modes of revolutionary life. A proletarian revolution would have its own Robespierre and its own Bras Nus; it would face the same equivocation. This is the general thesis MP's Epilogue derives from Guérin's material.

What MP Takes from Guérin

Despite the critique, MP takes three things from Guérin:

  1. Historical concreteness: the Bras Nus, the Hébertists, the Enragés are historical realities, not just abstractions. The equivocation of the French Revolution can be documented.
  2. The internal mechanism: Guérin's use of "internal mechanism" (AD 111 — MP borrows the phrase from Guérin) for the dynamic that accelerates a revolution beyond its starting conditions. This phrase enters MP's vocabulary and becomes part of his account of interworld.
  3. The "revolution under the revolution": Michelet's figure, which Guérin develops at length, is the image MP uses for what a revolution promises in its movement-phase that the subsequent regime cannot deliver.

What MP Rejects from Guérin

MP rejects:

  1. The Bras Nus as the "real" revolution: Guérin treats the Bras Nus's unrealized direct democracy as the truth of the French Revolution. MP argues this is to privilege the imaginary over the actual — "the history which was is replaced by the history which could have occurred in another time" (AD 219). A revolution is what it is, not what it could have been.
  2. The proletarian revolution as a solution: Guérin holds that a proletarian revolution would not face the equivocation that defeated the Bras Nus. MP argues this is the generalization of a sublime-point illusion. "The dictatorship of the proletariat, even if one supposes its mission to be the implanting in history of the relationships among men as the proletariat discovers them, will accomplish this work only in ambiguity and with the loss of energy which is inseparable from power and social generality" (AD 225).
  3. Direct democracy as an alternative to government: Guérin's "direct democracy... dictatorship from the bottom up" is diagnosed as "a pompous political concept with which one clothes the Apocalypse. It is a dream of an 'end of politics' out of which one wants to make a politics" (AD 222).

The Michelet Inheritance

Guérin's history draws heavily on Jules Michelet's Histoire de la Révolution française (1847–53). Michelet's phrase "a revolution under the revolution" (quoted AD 210) becomes MP's figure for revolution-as-movement underneath revolution-as-regime. The Michelet inheritance is important because it situates Guérin in a specifically French historiographical tradition — the républicaine-sociale reading of 1789 — that MP treats with more sympathy than the Marxist tradition proper.

Michelet's image of the Committee of Public Safety — "a skeleton of a totalitarian state" (Guérin's phrase applied to the Committee, AD 221) — is what MP takes up into the movement/regime distinction. The Committee was "a victory of the bourgeoisie, not of the people," but at that time no other victory was possible. This is the structural form MP generalizes.

Connections

  • is the author of the French Revolution case-study MP engages in the Epilogue of AD
  • borrows from Jules Michelet the figure of "a revolution under the revolution"
  • anticipates the left-libertarian and anarcho-Marxist historiography of the mid-20th century
  • is read sympathetically by MP for his historical material
  • is critiqued by MP for his theoretical framework (bourgeois-particularity thesis)
  • contributes to MP's vocabulary the phrase "internal mechanism" of revolution
  • exemplifies for MP the sublime-point illusion — the treatment of unrealized direct democracy as the "real" revolution
  • shares with Trotsky the Marxist-dissident approach to history — both insist on permanent revolution while remaining within Marxist naturalism
  • contrasts with Weber's methodology — Guérin writes engaged history; Weber writes methodologically self-aware history

Open Questions

  • How fairly does MP represent Guérin's position? Guérin's own later work (especially Pour le communisme libertaire, 1959) developed the libertarian-socialist framework that MP's critique arguably anticipates; a fuller engagement with Guérin's later work might show more convergence than MP's 1955 critique suggests.
  • Does MP's reading do justice to the Bras Nus as historical subjects? MP's structural diagnosis ("it would have ended in the same equivocation") may flatten the specific political achievement of the Parisian sections in 1793–94.
  • Guérin's later work engaged anti-colonial struggles (particularly Vietnamese and Algerian) in ways that the 1946 Lutte des classes did not. Would MP's critique of the sublime-point illusion apply to these as well?
  • How does Guérin's reading relate to Eric Hobsbawm's later Primitive Rebels (1959) and the subsequent British social history from below? The French and British traditions meet in some of the same questions.
  • Guérin's work on fascism (Fascisme et grand capital, 1936) is not engaged by MP; it contains a Marxist analysis of fascist movements that could be tested against the "derailment of the dialectic" thesis.

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1955-adventures-of-the-dialectic — the Epilogue's extended engagement with Guérin at pp. 211–21. Key passages: the initial appreciation at p. 211; the bourgeois-particularity critique at pp. 212–14; the sublime-point diagnosis of direct democracy at p. 222; the "revolution under the revolution" at p. 210; the "totalitarian state" quote at p. 221.
  • Daniel Guérin, La Lutte des classes sous la Première République, 2 vols., Paris 1946 — the primary text MP engages.