ABSTRACT
Marx et la Revolution Francaise consists of three interconnected essays. The first, “Le jeune Marx et la Revolution Francaise,” has grown out of Furet’s contribution to the Marx Centennial Conference in Paris, in December, 1983. It has been organically continued and complemented by two further writings, “Le Marx de 1848 en face de 1789,” and “Marx et l’enigme francaise. The three papers cover three consecutive phases of Marx’s truly dramatic struggle to appropriate the lessons of the French revolutions for his philosophically construed protagonist, the proletariat. This chapter focuses on two typical versions of Marx’s understanding of Jacobinism. In the first (Feuerbachian) period, Marx’s main explanatory device is the so-called culturalist interpretation. Jacobinism appears in this presentation as the greatest instance of what will be called in the materialist period “false consciousness,” which, in the case of the protagonists of 1793–94, was growing into an almost complete political somnambulism.
