Revolution Quotes

“The tragedy of revolutions lies in the fatal metamorphosis that drives them from liberation to the struggle for survival, and finally to the edification of a new oppressive rule; from emancipating violence to coercive violence. The key to durably preserving their liberating potential has not yet been found, but this is not a good reason to condemn liberation itself. In any case, revolutions do not care about law, and this is both for the best and for the worst. One need not share Walter Benjamin’s messianism or Georges Sorel’s theory of myth to understand revolution as the expression of a ‘law-destroying’ violence, which is the premise for the emergence of a new sovereignty.”
― Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History

“Six out of eight members of the first politburo of the Bolshevik Party created in November 1917 – Lev Kamenev, Nikolay Krestinsky, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Andrei Bubnov, and Grigori Sokolnikov – were killed by Stalin between 1936 and 1941; only Lenin and Stalin himself died natural deaths.”
― Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History

“In the words of Jaurès, ‘there was in the history of the red flag an ambiguous period in which its meaning oscillated between the past and the future.’ It seems that it takes its current significance from a sort of semiotic reversal: deployed by the royal authorities during the executions of sans-culottes, the latter appropriated it and began to make of it their emblem (this occurred with the insurrection of 10 August 1792, when the revolutionary crowds stormed the Tuileries Palace, put an end to the monarchy and established the National Convention, which proclaimed the Republic in September). It reappeared in 1830 and, like the barricade, became the symbol of the insurgents in all the revolutions of 1848.
After the violent repression of June 1848 and the ‘bloody week’ that crushed the Paris Commune in May 1871, counterrevolution made the red colour an object of fetishistic demonization; nothing red could be tolerated, and burning red fabrics became a ritual of purification and a practice of public safety. In 1849, Léon Faucher, the state secretary of the first conservative republican government, issued a circular letter directed to the prefects that contained very precise instructions: ‘The red flag is a plea for insurrection; the red cap recalls blood and mourning; bearing these sad marks means provoking disobedience.’ Therefore the government ordered the immediate banishment of those ‘seditious emblems’. After the Paris Commune, a witness wrote in his memoirs that the city was seized by ‘a crazy rage against all that was red: clothes, flags, ideas, and language itself …’ The colour red, he explained, had become ‘a mortal disease’ whose return should be avoided absolutely, as we do ‘the plague and the cholera’.”
― Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History