"Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, eroes.. who, with Roman trappings and phrase

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Saint-Just, Napoleon-these were the accomplished the mission of their epoch: they unleashed and established modern bourgeois society. The first four of these smashed feudalism...The fifth, Napoleon, created inside France the conditions that made it possible for free competition to develop, for the redistributed land to be exploited, and for the newly liberated productive energy of the nation to be put to use;

beyond the borders of France, he swept away eudal institutions....Once the new form of society had been established those giants disappeared from the face of the earth, and with them 'anished the resurrected Romanism....and Caesar SOCIALIST ACTION AUGUST 1989 7 swept away, and careers were opened to talent. Furthermore, the extensive landholdings of the Church were expropriated, and the very definition of "property" was profoundly transformed.

All of these measures created a relatively free-market economic environment conducive to the development of capitalism: one that was good for business.

The principal long-term beneficiaries of the Revolution were the business class: entrepreneurs, manufacturers, merchants, and bankers. The new society was geared to serving their class interests rather than those of the landed aristocracy. That is what is summed up in Marx's phrase: "bourgeois revolution.' This is not to say, of course, that a full-blown capitalist economy immediately sprang into existence in France. The destruction of internal tariff barriers, for example, created the possibility of a unified national market, but the actual development of the national market would have to wait almost a century until railroads were able to connect all parts of France.

Likewise, the loosening of the traditional ties holding the peasants on the land provided a potential source of urban industrial workers, but the actual conversion of peasants into proletarians was a lengthy process.

Paradoxically, the sale of nationalized himself." -Karl Marx The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte throne.

Louis Philippe immediately displayed a partiality toward the great magnates of finance capital. Although he appeared to be their royal patron, the opposite was the case, of course; it was they who had put him on the throne.

(To get a feel for the spirit of the times, look at Daumier's prints and read Balzac's novels. Marx said that one can learn more about bourgeois society from Balzac's novels than from any non-fictional source. Balzac's "Pere Goriot," for example, illustrates that during the Bourbon restoration the trappings of aristocracy were highly prestigious, but money still made the world go 'round.)

The essential achievements of the French Revolution proved to be irreversible. By establishing capitalist social relations on the continent of Europe, the door was opened to the greatest advance in the material basis of human existence that the world had ever seen.

Today, approaching the final decade of the 20th century, we confront a capitalism that has long passed its progressive era and now spawns only war, racism, poverty, oppression, and destruction of the environment. Nevertheless, it would be ahistorical to deny the role of capitalism in creating the modern world.

That is why revolutionary socialists revere the memory of the great bourgeois revolution that began to unfold exactly 200 years ago in France.