“A state of crisis and a century of revolutions”: The legacy of the French Revolution
Dominique Pagani
Platypus Review 187 | June 2026
On November 14, 2025, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel on the legacy of the French Revolution during the Platypus European Conference in Leipzig with panelists Dennis Graemer (formerly of the Association for the Design of History) and Mike Macnair (Communist Party of Great Britain (PCC) and author of Revolutionary Strategy (2008)).[1] Dominique Pagani, author of Femininity and Community in Hegel (2010),[2] had been scheduled to be the third panelist but was not able to attend the event. The following comprises Pagani’s prepared opening remarks, translated from French by Platypus member Lucas Zabotin.[3]
NEARLY TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES after the storming of the Bastille, does our historical present still have something to learn from the French Revolution? Two and a half centuries — such a length of time seems to cast the event into an already distant past. And yet, the answers to this question are more passionately contradictory than ever. It is already remarkable to note that the French Revolution is received principally by the extremes of the political spectrum: either it is received with enthusiasm, as is the case among a certain far Left, or it is seen as the principal cause of the ills afflicting the modern world. Such is the view of the political Right and especially, a fortiori, the more we move towards the far Right. As such, our historical present, at least for what has come to be called “the West,” increasingly falls prey to these ultra-reactionary, counterrevolutionary sirens. On both sides of the Atlantic, what is making headlines are not the ideals of the French Revolution, but rather the worrying rise of the Right, especially the far Right. This should give us pause for thought.
On the other hand, we must already conclude from this simple fact that the positive or negative reception of the French Revolution today takes place principally at the extremes. The part of the political spectrum which seems to be least concerned is the Center, that is, the extreme Center — a concept to which we should accustom ourselves. This “Center” seems to have been in power since about the end of World War II, whether it be Center-Right or Center-Left. Is there a decisive difference here, keeping to the French context, between Sarkozy and Hollande, or between Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand? All four are pro-European — by which I mean Europe reduced to the “European Union” — and therefore are, in Cold War terms, Atlanticists. And yet what is most insidious here is that much of this extreme Center claims to be the Left. Indeed, what goes by the name of the “New Left” of the post-war period — including the anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and so on — I instead call the liberal-libertarian counterrevolution.
We must recall here, on this point, that in the draft Constitution which we were presented by the European Union in 2005, and which was subject to a referendum: the chapters concerning defense and foreign policy merely referred to NATO decisions! In a referendum, 55% of voters in France said “No” to this draft Constitution, yet it was nonetheless imposed on us. This should be sufficient demonstration of the absurdity of the notion of the political “Center” — one which disregards the democratic will of the people. The Western extreme Center is indeed an extreme. Three million dead in Vietnam. Three million dead, a few years prior, in the Korean War. In both cases, it was at the hands of NATO powers, and in particular the Pentagon: it was necessary to punish these countries which, although thousands of kilometers from the United States, had the silly idea of opting for communism. Six million deaths then, without counting the permanent blood-bath in Latin America with its coups d’états and its pronunciamentos[4] throughout the Cold War, as well as recent events in Venezuela, the instability in Ecuador and Peru, and the neo-fascism developing in Argentina.
I insist on this point because it’s not immediately apparent that this proliferation of opinions regarding the French Revolution primarily concerns the Left. If we look to the Right, condemnation of the Revolution is unanimous. A reference to the ideologue-in-chief of the Third Reich should be sufficient proof. I’m thinking, of course, of Mr. Alfred Rosenberg, who said, “The revolution of 1789 is dead. It has been but an explosion without creative thought, which is why we are today witnessing its decomposition.”[5] This declaration is interesting for two reasons: not only does it illustrate as clear as day the quasi-unanimous position of the far Right on the French Revolution, but it also shows the extent to which the French Revolution has supposedly long ceased to be meaningful, since Rosenberg goes as far as to speak of its “decomposition.”
It is even more surprising to note that this condemnation has a deep history, much older than the Third Reich, almost as old as the Revolution of 1789 itself. This is what I will try to illustrate with two texts, as antithetical as can be: one by the philosopher Hegel, and the other by the novelist and poet Achim von Arnim — one of the most important German Romantics and part of the Jena group. Here is von Arnim in one of his admirable novels, The Heirs of the Majorat (1820):
The other day, we were leafing through an old almanac whose engravings depicted the follies of the year. How far behind us all that lies now, already turned into legend! How full the world was then, before that universal revolution to which France has given its name had overturned everything! How uniformly impoverished it has since become! Centuries seem to separate us from that happy time, and we can scarcely remember that our earliest years still belonged to it. . . . When one delves into those oddities whose image has been preserved for us by Chodowiecki’s talent, one discovers the loftiness, the subtlety, and the clarity of the spirit of that age; it mingles with all the silhouettes that pass before the draftsman’s eyes. What harmony, what delicacy of nuance is found in every detail of life! Each individual formed, in manner and in dress, a world unto himself; each established himself upon this earth as though he were to remain there for all eternity, and as people sought to live as well as possible, they welcomed with enthusiasm the visionaries, conjurers, secret gatherings and mysterious adventures, marvellous remedies, and prophetic invalids who offered nourishment to the impatience and curiosity of the heart. . . . To how many centuries did that era not still cling through institutions which upheld themselves nobly against all change!
Von Arnim is speaking of the time before the Revolution, that of the ancien régime. The word “eternity” alone captures the spirit of the passage, as it repeatedly pays homage to stability, to everything that is the inverse of time and of change. It bears emphasizing in order to better highlight the contrast with the Hegel text I will turn to below.
I insist on this ending: “institutions which upheld themselves nobly against all change!” Here is what he admires most in the ancien régime and that the French Revolution abolished — that is, the permanence assured by the institutions. It is almost a metonymy for the Holy Roman Empire. Let me be clear: I am not opposing France to Germany. Not all of France is the French Revolution, and not all of Germany is Right-wing or far-Right. But what is certain is that the Holy Roman Empire perfectly illustrates what von Armin means here: the collaboration of two institutions, the empire and the Catholic Church, before the Reformation in the 16th century, with the Pope as the leader of Christianity. With this hymn to permanence and allergy to all change characterizing the text, I hardly need to underline the contrast with that of Hegel:
Thanks to the bath of her Revolution, the French Nation has freed herself of many institutions which the human spirit had outgrown like the shoes of a child. These institutions accordingly once oppressed her, and they now continue to oppress other nations as so many fetters devoid of spirit. What is even more, however, is that the individual as well has shed the fear of death along with the life of habit — which, with the change of scenery, is no longer self-supporting. This is what gives this Nation the great power she displays against others. She weighs down upon the impassiveness and dullness of these other nations, which, finally forced to give up their indolence in order to step into actuality, will perhaps — seeing that inwardness preserves itself in externality — surpass their teachers.[6]
What Hegel designates here with the word “actuality” is not merely different from what von Arnim said but the exact inverse: actuality is neither permanence nor eternity but temporality. Now, this can be an empty temporality, wasted time, time used towards positive or negative ends, magnificent or criminal ends; regardless, actuality is only effective as temporality, as change. This is what the German Romantic refused to see, for this temporality implies finitude, death, and the immense repression it can induce. When Hegel speaks here of death, he means not the death which awaits me later, but the death which applies to each and every one of us at every moment of life, immanent to life itself. It’s the famous river in which Heraclitus, the father of the dialectic, said we never swim twice. I insist on the dialectical quality of this Hegel passage, already in 1807! This is the year in which he completed The Phenomenology of Spirit — the publication marks the end of his so-called “young” period and therefore begins his mature period. It is all the more important, then, to recognize the emphasis put in this text on change and historical movement.
Marx revisits this fundamental attribute of the dialectic in homage to Hegel, stating that what separates him from the philosopher is not the content of what Hegel says but the mystical form in which he draped it.[7] With the caution of a German civil servant, Hegel knew well that he was surveilled by the censorship of his employer which was particularly vigilant concerning what appeared to be influenced by what at the time was referred to as “French ideas,” that is, ideas coming from the French Revolution. Let’s not forget that Hegel, the great poet Hölderlin, and Schelling — the most emblematic philosopher of this very fruitful period for German Romanticism — were students together at the Tübingen theological seminary where together they planted a tree of liberty to commemorate the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. You see, we began with a text by Achim von Arnim insisting, on the contrary, on all that is timeless and blaming the French Revolution — in the sense that Nietzsche will later speak of ressentiment — for having brought about upheaval, change, and becoming, to that which saw itself as timeless and eternal. With Hegel we have the antithesis.
I will resist the formalistic temptation which would have me propose my own synthesis here. So if I do indeed proceed and succumb to providing a synthesis, it is because this synthesis has already been expressed, paradoxically, before both von Achim and Hegel’s texts. Before the thesis and the antithesis, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had, throughout his oeuvre, produced a prodigious synthesis of what is at play here, namely, the reconciliation of what will be called in Marxian terms “praxis” and that to which the Romantics typically devoted themselves, that is, “psyche.” Here is Rousseau from The Social Contract:
The passing from the state of nature to civil society produces a remarkable change in man; it puts justice as a rule of conduct in the place of instinct, and gives his actions the moral quality they previously lacked. It is only then, when the voice of duty has taken the place of physical impulse, and right that of desire, that man, who has hitherto thought only of himself, finds himself compelled to act on other principles, and to consult his reason rather than study his inclinations. And although in civil society man surrenders some of the advantages that belong to the state of nature, he gains in return far greater ones; his faculties are so exercised and developed, his mind so enlarged, his sentiments so ennobled, and his whole spirit so elevated that, if the abuse of his new condition did not in many cases lower him to something worse than what he had left, he should constantly bless the happy hour that lifted him for ever from the state of nature and from a stupid, limited animal made a creature of intelligence and a man.[8]
Pardon the interruption of a text so dense that it asks not to be explained but made explicit. Rousseau is speaking now of the abuses of this new condition which can degrade him below the state he had left. How can one be below the animal? That the animal is a beast is not a problem; the problem is rather that the human animal can become bestial, even lower than an animal. The animal can do neither good nor evil. It does what it can, and when it has exhausted its forces, it lays down and dies. Perhaps all that is worth recovering from existentialism is its recognition that the animal subsists, while only man exists.
How might we abuse civil society? This is the question we must ask ourselves. Rousseau is presenting us with a model of absolute evil. In the 19th century already, immediately following the French Revolution, there was a phenomenon known as le mal du siècle.[9] The 20th century, however, was undeniably the century of evil, the century of death camps. These are the stakes in Rousseau’s crucial text. Abuse here is not meant in the sense that one might abuse alcohol. Here, abuse means to deceive, to cheat, to trick. What is this ruse that lies at the heart of absolute evil? It is to restore power relations in civil society. Power relations in the state of nature are not evil. When in the African savannah — as I myself have witnessed — a pack of wild dogs pursues a gazelle as it attempts to give birth, and the dogs attack the embryo before it has the time to reach the ground, we can say this is terrible. But the dogs also have children to feed in their den, do they not? There is neither good nor evil here. Far more serious, though, is what Rousseau speaks of, this descent into Hell — if I can allow myself the religious metaphor — that is, the absolute evil which is the abuse of civil society.
I will now move rather prosaically from a religious metaphor to an economic one. Rousseau unveils that there may be two opposed ways of dealing with our relation to the other in civil society: one leads to justice, to the good, to the law, and the other contradicts these by reintroducing force or power under the guise of law. The blackmail carried out by certain world powers, not least in the contemporary world, unmistakably illustrates what I mean. Let me take the example of the Vietnam War, during which there was the systematic use of napalm and its 3 million deaths in the name of — under the guise of — the “free world.” This is how power relations are never more deleterious, deadly, pernicious, and criminal than when they are cloaked in the law and rights.
Rousseau, after theorizing absolute evil, concludes the chapter by addressing the problem of property. He does not condemn all forms of property — my toothbrush, my husband or wife, etc. No, Rousseau condemns “possession”:
If we are to avoid mistakes in weighing the one side against the other, we must clearly distinguish between natural liberty, which has no limit but the physical power of the individual concerned, and civil liberty, which is limited by the general will; and we must distinguish also between possession, which is based only on force or ‘the right of first occupant’, and property, which must rest on a legal title. We might also add that man acquires with civil society, moral freedom, which alone makes man the master of himself; for to be governed by appetite alone is slavery, while obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself is freedom.[10]
This conclusion is crucial because it deals with the most important concept of all those debated during the French Revolution, namely, the concept of liberty and all the confusion to which it gives rise — of which my example of the Vietnam War was one. Rousseau opposes two modalities of liberty: “natural liberty” limited by the power of the individual, and “civil liberty,” “limited by the general will.” And what is the general will but the collective product of tens of thousands of years of human history? Such are the stakes of the French Revolution for which Rousseau was, among all the Enlightenment philosophers, the principal inspiration.
There’s no better way to conclude this formidable synthesis than by evoking the admirable formula of Thomas Mann, one of those who has saved the honor of the German intelligentsia in the nation’s darkest hours. To paraphrase Mann, Germany’s problems, and therefore those of Europe, will only be resolved through the reconciliation of Marx and Hölderlin. |P
[1] Dennis Graemer and Mike Macnair, “The legacy of the French Revolution” (November 14, 2025), <https://youtu.be/6Z2hTF68v_s>.
[2] Dominique Pagani, Féminité et communauté chez Hegel: Le rapport de l’esthétique au politique dans le système (Paris: Editions Delga, 2010).
[3] The quotation in the title comes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or Treatise on Education, trans. William H. Payne (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1918), 175.
[4] [Spanish] Public political manifestos or proclamations; literally, pronouncements. These were typically issued by military officers or political parties.
[5] Attributed to Alfred Rosenberg’s “Blood and Gold” speech at the Palais Bourbon in France (November 28, 1940), <https://dokumen.pub/gold-und-blut.html>.
[6] G. W. F. Hegel to Christian Gotthold Zellman (January 23, 1807), in Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 123.
[7] Karl Marx, “Afterword to the Second German Edition” (1873), in Capital, vol. 1 (1867).
[8] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Civil Society,” in The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 64–65.
[9] [French] The evil of the century.
[10] Rousseau, “Civil Society,” 65.
