>According to Hal Draper (in one of the volumes of his KARL MARX'S
>THEORY OF REVOLUTION), Marx himself was anti-Jacobin, since the
>Jacobins were petty-bourgeois, professionals, or even haute
>bourgeois. He sided instead with the plebeian _sans culottes_, and
>if memory serves me well, with the Hebertistes (sorry but I don't
>remember the what kind of accents there are on this term) and to
>some extent with Graccus Babeuf, though Marx did not like the
>latter's conspiratorial methods after he himself grew out of them.
>There was not yet a true proletariat of significant size in Paris
>(the locus of most revolutionary activity).
>
>The CP of France, on the other hand, has always favored the Jacobin
>side of the 1789 revolution.
>
>This probably doesn't undermine your point, since L & M probably
>were using "Jacobin" as synonymous with revolutionary.
>
>Jim Devine jdevine at lmu.edu & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Draper's is a possible interpretation of the Jacobins (as real historical actors, not as strawmen of Laclau & Mouffe's making). However, Gramsci provides an alternative interpretation. He argues that "The Jacobins strove with determination to ensure a bond between town and country" (_Prison Notebooks_ 63) & "made the demands of the popular masses one's own" (66). Of course, the Jacobins did so within the limits of the bourgeois revolution & enlightenment philosophy (e.g., they maintained the Le Chapelier law, which denied the workers the right of combination), but Gramsci says that the absence of the Jacobins in Italy created many problems: the Southern Question (oppression of peasants in the South by landlordism & underdevelopment); the lack of religious reform through anti-clericalism; the failure to forge progressive & republican national culture; and so forth. In contrast to France, Italy only experienced what he calls "passive revolution,": "restoration becomes the first policy whereby social struggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic upheavals, without the French machinery of terror. The old feudal classes are demoted from their dominant position to a 'governing' one, but are not eliminated, nor is there any attempt to liquidate them as an organic whole; instead of a class they become a 'caste' with specific cultural and psychological characteristics, but no longer with predominant economic functions" (115). The absence of Jacobinism, in short, left Italy under material & cultural conditions vulnerable to the rise of fascism (itself a kind of passive revolution).
In other words, Gramsci took strong exception to conservative historians' one-sided interpretation of Jacobinism: "If the conservative historicists, theorists of the old, are well placed to criticise the utopian character of the mummified Jacobin ideologies, philosophers of praxis are better placed to appreciate the real and not abstract value that Jacobinism had as an element in the creation of the new French nation (that is to say as a fact of circumscribed activity in specific circumstances and not as something ideolgised) and are better placed also to appreciate the historical role of the conservatives themselves, who were in reality the shame-faced children of the Jacobins, who damned their excesses while carefully administering their heritage" (399).
Hailing from Japan (itself a country with no Jacobin tradition, modernized through passive revolution & militarism), I am inclined to agree with Gramsci. Japan would have been a better country now if it had been led by the Japanese Jacobins into modernity. At least, we would have had a song like La Marseillaise for "national anthem," instead of Kimigayo (a praise song for the imperial dynasty!):
***** Kimi ga yo wa Chiyo ni yachiyo ni Sazare ishi no iwao to narite Koko no musu made.
Thousands of years of happy reign be time; Rule on, my lord, till what are pebbles now By age united to mighty rocks shall grow Whose venerable sides the moss doth line.
Translated by Basil H. Chamberlain *****
Here's the JCP's view of Kimigayo & Hinomaru: <http://www.jcp.or.jp/english/e-990315-flag_song.html>
Yoshie