Reappropriating the Past? The Bourgeois Era and the Ideology of the European Worker’s states, 1919-1935

Reappropriating the Past? The Bourgeois Era and the Ideology of the European Worker’s states, 1919-1935, Hans Ulrich-Wehler (1981)​

The revolutions of 1919 were one of the rare events that not only marked a genuine historic juncture but were widely and immediately understood by those participating in it as such. Much attention has been recently paid to the self-conscious efforts of the first worker’s states to banish the superstitions of the old world and inculcate a new, socialist mentality. When the new states engaged in efforts to publicly legitimize themselves, they spoke of popular sovereignty, the loss of the bourgeoisie’s “right of rule”, and the laws of dialectical historical development. Pointedly absent was any claim to be a “successor” to previous bourgeoisie regimes, whether republican or monarchist. At least officially, the link to the proximate past had been severed.

This was mirrored in the official art and propaganda, which overwhelmingly took as its objects the present reality of worker’s life and the future, stateless communist society. Treatments of the Great War, when they did occur, were suffused with a rigorous moralism which is perhaps only understandable for a continent so recently ground down in its half-decade of horrors. Yet a yearning for some more tangible connection with the past was clearly expressed in the political culture of socialist europe, particularly with the stabilization of the new polities in the mid-twenties. Radio networks, public lectures, and continuing education coursework offering workers the opportunity to make greater acquaintance with 19th century bourgeoisie high culture proved extremely popular, often to the consternation of dedicated cultural revolutionaries.

The re-engagement of proletarian society with the bourgeois past served as the impetus for its re-evaluation in universities and legislatures. Almost all of the socialist states - with the notable exception of Russia - would eventually formalize a connection between the ongoing proletarian revolutionary project and some elements of previous national history. This naturally involved a contentious process of selection, as those aspects of the shared past which could be made to cohere with the new proletarian ideology were (at times artificially) separated from those which were judged so much reactionary chaff. Eventually, this would culminate in the historiographical division of the “bourgeois epoch” into the heroic “Age of Revolution (1789-1848)”, and the hegemonic-decadent “High Bourgeois Era (1848-1919)”.

The dynamic described here has been either shrouded or downplayed in light of the growing internationalization of IntRevMar. Yet if we are to gain a true measure of the first stage of socialism, it behooves us to examine all of its details. To this end, will make a brief examination of three different cases: Germany, France, and Italy.

Germany: Forging a Proletarian Classical Culture

Compared to France and Italy, Germany had a relatively scant national-revolutionary heritage to draw upon. It was, of course, the historical homeland of Marx and Engels, but it is little coincidence that in one of his first major works, the founder of scientific socialism upbraided his own land of birth for imagining that it could repeat in the “realm of thought” the revolutionary upheaval of France. Despite its large commercial middle-class, Germany did not have a proper bourgeois revolution before its socialist one, a sonderweg , or “special-path” which has been readily employed by Germany’s critics inside IntRevMar to explain what they see as its more pathological features.

German high culture had long been associated with a stodgy and reactionary Mandarin elite hostile to the aspirations of the working class. As a consequence, Germany, along with Russia, displayed the greatest tendencies toward cultural iconoclasm and state patronage of revolutionary art, particularly under RAF-dominated governments. The expansion of the university system and stabilization of the state-apparatus slowly brought a cautious reapprochment with Germany’s classical canon of romantic poets, idealist philosophers, and great composers. Schiller, Goethe, and Beethoven, once castigated as ossified representatives of a vanished bourgeois hegemony, had elements of their work gradually recuperated: in it, one notable critic remarked, was “the first stirrings of the desire for freedom and true community, however distorted in practice by the presence of class society”.

The end-result of this process of appropriation was a distinctly German synthesis: while the classical canon was imported nearly wholesale into the new curriculum, it was subjected to a so-called “dialectical transformation”, which read it in light of the unique experience of proletarian revolution. The Kantian “Kingdom of Ends” thus became an abstract and impoverished prefiguration of communism; Schiller’s concerns about the division of man’s faculties a reflection of the brutalization and dehumanization imposed on man by capitalist commodification. In short, classical German culture was systematically purged of its elitism and petty-bourgeois mysticism. Given the manifestly elitist provenance of these texts, this was by necessity a self-conscious process: educators tasked students to use “culture as a weapon” and to view texts not as static entities frozen in time but “potential resources for the new worker’s culture”.

…The physical spaces in which elite culture was previously lodged - concert halls, theaters, gymnasium, private libraries and galleries - were nationalized, either to be operated by the state or sold to discount prices for cooperatives pledged to put them to “public use”. These would form the backbone of new programs of worker’s education that would prove enormously popular. Their most accomplished graduates would go on to serve as part-time instructors at these venues, contributing to the goal of “proletarianizing” academic life.

France: From 1789 to 1919

In the devastated and perennially troubled French Worker and Soldier’s Republic, the revolutionary tradition of the bourgeois was unavoidable. The modern concept of Revolution was a product of 1789, and no progressive French state - whether socialist or liberal-capitalist - could credibly repudiate 1789. Unlike the new revolutionary states in Germany and Italy, the symbolism and heritage of the bourgeois past figured in the earliest symbolic representations of the French council-state. The new flag maintained the revolutionary tricolor, albeit with a hammer and sickle overlaid upon it; public speeches by politicians and worker-activists stressed continuities between 1789, 1871, and 1919.

Over time, a more systematic and official narrative developed in which the Jacobin revolutionaries were saved from the enormous condescension of bourgeois historiography. A hagiography of Robespierre, Saint-Just, Marat, and the sans-culottes was counterposed to a scathing critique of the Third Republic, which was portrayed as the final, decayed expression of bourgeois rule. Public festivals would recall the fashion and popular iconography of 1792 - phygian caps, tricolor cockades, and rhetoric of popular sovereignty - but the actual form of these festivals was less liberal than proletarian, displaying before the public the entirety of French society as a homogenous, class-less unity. In these collective rituals, the Jacobin phase of the French revolution was reimagined as a fundamentally plebeian affair which had been betrayed by Thermidor and Napoleon. Perhaps the most famous of these celebrations was the new version of Bastille Day, now rechristened La Journée du Peuple en Armes : the entire male citizenry would be invited to publicly parade bearing arms to a designated building which would be ceremonially “stormed”, with the local mayor or intelligentsia being forced to stand in for the prisoners.

Fairly quickly, other elements of the French national past were reincorporated into the official ideology and pedagogy of the French worker’s state, though this was an geographically uneven process given the high levels of regional autonomy in both Alsace and the Rhone valley, two areas prone to cultural iconoclasm. The French realist authors, such as Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, were taken up as subtle diagnosticians of bourgeois society’s contradictions and decay. Victor Hugo’s work, which had always figured uneasily in the liberal canon, was recast as an expression of proto-socialist humanism. As in Germany, avante-garde artwork would be one of the few lines of direct continuity between pre-war France and its revolutionary present.

By the 1930s, despite the enormous tensions present within Red France, a shared understanding of the nation’s history had been arrived at: no longer merely bourgeois, the nation’s aborted popular revolutions had at last been partially vindicated by the events of 1919.

Italy: Beyond the Bourgeois Interlude

Although Italy resembled France more than Germany in its possession of a rich revolutionary-republican tradition, it came much closer to the latter in its more recent social and political history. The risorgimento, like German unification, frequently employed the rhetoric of nationalism and popular rule while being in reality an oligarchic and elite-driven process. The deep disillusionment most Italians felt with the bourgeois Italian state led many of the new leaders of Italy to repudiate this process of “forced unification”, instead devolving significant autonomy to regions and promising to build up and consolidate a new national state gradually, on the ground of “popular proletarian sovereignty”.

In truth, this was only one side of an evolving dynamic. The liberal oligarchs may have been expelled from Italy, but by launching the Great War they had subjected Italian society to a shared ordeal and compelled it to engage in a shared revolutionary project. Only in the fires of war and revolution did the Italian nation achieve a measure of unity. And yet, like in almost all socialist states, the revolution proper was rarely linked in the official discourse to a process of nation-building, and the war was remembered chiefly in moralistic commemorations.

Instead, elements of the national past were latched upon. Owing to its decentralization, this was a less top-heavy process than in Germany. Different regional councils and Camera del Lavoro took up the task of reinterpreting figures such as Mazzini and Garibaldi as radical democrats whose aims were repeatedly frustrated by the need to triangulate with the bourgeoisie and old aristocracy. Naturally, Garibaldi became a particularly popular figure, depicted in murals as a populist guerilla leader who appealed to artisans and peasants.

This turn to the 19th century was markedly more limited in Italy than either Germany or France. Often, it was the republican traditions of Roman antiquity and Renaissance humanism which were embraced, typically on a province-by-province basis. In the cities of Tuscany, a renewed interest arose in the great republican thinkers of Florence, such as Machiavelli and Bruni. In the great northern cities of Milan, Turin, and Genoa, civic festivals emphasized a republican past while downplaying its de facto entanglement with hierarchy, patronage and mercantile interests. No true theoretical synthesis in the German manner could result from these diverse regional re-imaginings of the historical past; instead, what emerged was a patchwork bricolage which only uneasily coalesced into a single national narrative. The bourgeois era would be neither redeemed or repudiated. In orthodox historiography, it would be treated as a painful but necessary step to socialist society; in more popular consciousness or amongst the heterodox and the romantically-inclined, it was instead figured merely as a tragic interlude between a communal past and communist future.

Conclusion

Whether this re-appropriation of bourgeois culture was a betrayal of revolutionary principles or an acknowledgment of political reality must be left to the theorists, not us historians. At the time, the worker’s states of Europe clearly believed that the creation of a usable past was necessary to cement their legitimacy. By reframing the bourgeois epoch as a contradictory, transitional phase—heroic in its beginnings, decadent in its culmination—socialist regimes engaged with histories they once sought to escape, even while contending that it was only in the proletarian revolutions of 1919 that these histories could be redeemed.