Robespierre or the "Divine Violence" of Terror
When, in 1953, Chou En Lai, the Chinese Prime
Minister, was in Geneva for the peace negotiations to
end the Korean war, a French journalist asked him
what does he think about the French Revolution; Chou
replied: "It is still too early to tell." In a way,
he was right: with the disintegration of the
"people's democracies" in the late 1990s, the
struggle for the historical place of the French
Revolution flared up again. The liberal revisionists
tried to impose the notion that the demise of
Communism in 1989 occurred at exactly the right
moment: it marked the end of the era which began in
1789, the final failure of the statist-revolutionary
model which first entered the scene with the
Jacobins.
go to article