ABSTRACT
The memory of the great French Revolution haunted the barricades; but at the same time the murdered Ernesto Che Guevara was attaining immortality, and the distant horizon of China was offering western minds the myths of the Great Steersman. This is demonstrated in the history of the nineteenth century, when the influence of the French Revolution abroad and the circulation of ideas throughout liberal Europe favoured the internationalism of the revolutionary current. Revolutionary myths are extremely diverse; and an additional difficulty springs from the fact that it is hard to distinguish social revolution from national uprisings for independence. Marx describes how Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just and Napoleon, the heroes and the mass parties of the first French Revolution, wore Roman costume and used Roman phraseology to carry out the task of their own period. Thus the myth of William Tell, the legendary hero of Swiss independence, fired the imaginations of people seeking freedom during the French Revolution.
