# WITH THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Source: PSS vol 29

“‘The ideas,’ Marx quotes Bauer, ‘arising from the French Revolution did not, however, transcend the very order that the Revolution had sought to overthrow by force.’
Ideas can never transcend the old world order; in every instance, they can only transcend the ideas of the old world order.
Ideas, in and of themselves, are incapable of bringing anything into being. To actualize ideas, one requires human beings who are prepared to wield practical power.” (186) [132].
The French Revolution gave birth to the ideas of communism (Babeuf), which, when developed consistently, contained the notion of a new Weltzustand*.
Regarding Bauer’s assertion that the state must restrain individual, egoistic atoms, Marx observes (188–189) [133–134] that the members of bourgeois society are, in truth, far from being atoms—they merely imagine themselves as such, for they do not exist independently, like atoms; rather, they are dependent upon other people, and their needs thrust them into this very relation of dependence hour after hour.
“Thus, natural necessity, the inherent qualities of human beings—no matter how alienated those qualities may appear—and self‑interest—these are the bonds that unite the members of civil society with one another. The real link between them is not political but civil life… Only political superstition could still, in our time, imagine that the state ought to bind civil life together—when, in fact, it is precisely civil life that binds the state together.” (189) [134].
Robespierre, Saint-Just, and their party perished because they attempted to fuse the ancient, realistically democratic society founded on slavery with the modern, spiritualist‑democratic representative state rooted in bourgeois society. Before his execution, Saint-Just pointed to the table (Tabelle * – the world order. Ed.
the poster hanging there) of the Rights of Man and said, “And yet it was I who created this.”
“It was on this very board that the Rights of Man were proclaimed—rights which, in equal measure, cannot belong to a citizen of the ancient republic any more than the economic and industrial relations of that republic can be considered antique.” (192) [136].
On 18 Brumaire, the prize Napoleon secured was not a revolutionary movement, but the liberal bourgeoisie. Following Robespierre’s fall, under the Directory, the bourgeois society began its prosaic realization: Sturm und Drang** the commercial enterprises, the tumultuous (Taumel) rhythms of new bourgeois life; “the genuine enlightenment of the French countryside—whose feudal structure had been shattered by the hammer of revolution, and which the numerous new proprietors, in the feverish fervor of their initial endeavors, now subjected to comprehensive transformation; the first stirrings of an industrious, newly liberated economy—such are some of the manifestations of the life of the nascent bourgeois society” (192–193) [136–137].