Bolsheviks and Mensheviks on the Jacobins and the Girondins

Abstract

Following a survey of how educated Russians analogized the 1905 Revolution to aspects of the French Revolution, Chapter 5 describes the debates within the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, and between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks about the temporal relationship between a bourgeois revolution in Russia and a proletarian one. Also, because the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, in European exile, had time on their hands, they engaged in interminable debates on how the Jacobins and their supporters among the sans-culottes should be considered in terms of their class. The former were thought to originate in one or another subclass of the bourgeoisie; the latter were variously considered proletarian, proto-proletarian, or ‘plebeian’. Complicating matters—and making the emergence of a consensus more difficult—was that the classes that made the French Revolution were sometimes defined on the basis of what they did, and of whom they supported, rather than in terms of their social origin per se.