Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin did not arouse people in the loud way that the French and the Americans did. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia falls in this category. If in 17 it was the majesty of the people which rose out of the mists of despondency, in other lands revolution was sometimes brought about in a nuanced way, the strategy being to consciously create the conditions needed to overthrow a corrupt political order. In both America and France, it was citizen power which asserted itself and was systematically reinforced with the passage of time.
And yet the objective has been the same, namely, an assertion of the power of citizens. They have never been a rule of thumb to be applicable everywhere. The themes underscoring revolutions through the ages have never been uniform. Government by the consent of the governed was the principle accruing from 1776. Prior to 1789, the American Revolution of 1776, strengthened through a Declaration of Independence spelling out the rights of a people who had put an end to imperial power exercised from distant London, was to be a harbinger of pluralistic aspirations in the times to be.įor the men behind the revolution - George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson - the goal was clear: men and women possessed the natural and political right to choose their government and were empowered to remove their rulers should governance dwindle into misrule or inefficiency. It gave the country a democratic system of governance which has endured despite the bumps on the road. It paved the way to republicanism in France. There were the scores of others who went the same way. And so it was that Danton and Robespierre perished in the fury of the tumult they helped to generate. But, as has been said, revolutions often consume their heroes as well. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette would lose their lives under the guillotine.
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Of course, the immediate aftermath of the revolution of 1789 was a long and disturbing series of bloodletting in the country.
But as the world observes yet one more anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, it makes sense to reflect on the many ways in which life around the world was to change in the decades and even in the two centuries-plus following the uprising of the French people. That was China's revolutionary leader expressing what was a philosophical view of a defining moment in history. Zhou En-lai was once asked for his opinion on the ramifications of the French Revolution. For all latest news, follow The Financial Express Google News channel.
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