The French Revolutions and the Meaning of Politics: Marx and France

This chapter investigates the way in which the interpretation of the political, social, and intellectual history of revolutionary and post-revolutionary France shaped Marx’s thought in the decade 1842-52. Throughout this first phase of his theory’s development, Marx focused on the French context to address a specific topic: the status of politics in the modern age. I therefore propose the expression ‘the French question’ to designate the way in which, in the decade under investigation, Marx tackled the issue of politics, developed a critique of it as an abstract sphere separate from concrete, material life, and ultimately advanced a different interpretation of the essence of politics centred on the notion of class struggle. In order to trace this development, I will set out by analysing the first ‘critique of politics’ that this author formulated in 1843-44 by interpreting the significance and destiny of the French Revolution (§ 1). I will then employ the expression ‘Parisian moment’ to describe Marx’s encounter with the social and working-class context of Paris and the development of his critical engagement with French socialism, which revolved around the understanding of class political action and revolutionary initiative (§ 2). After that, I will consider Marx’s reception and development of the concept of class as formulated by bourgeois liberal historians in France, and the way in which this notion was used to interpret the 1848 revolution in France and the subsequent coup by Louis Bonaparte (§ 3). What will emerge from this discussion is primarily the role played by making reference to the French Revolution as a means to interpret all the major events that Marx found himself facing in the decade under investigation. Therefore, I will end by addressing the development of Marx’s interpretations of the Great Revolution in order to show how they reflect certain tensions and antinomies that are typical of this thinker’s way of envisaging the very notion of politics (§ 4).