It should now be clear that revolution is something quite different from rebellion or anarchy. Revolution is not fighting at the barricades and storming the armory and the howling of the Montagne [Montagnards] and the guillotine and the noyades.* All these are only symptoms of the illness, but not its essence. The revolution is not merely the momentary rising of the people against a certain governing authority, a momentary disturbance of order: — it is the fundamental, permanent rising of the people against all given governing authority, against all given order. It is not merely a disturbance in the relationship of the people to governing authority, but rather it is the general dissolution and disintegration of the entire society. To be sure, all of this is closely related. Rebellion is usually an expression, indeed one of the most heinous expressions of revolution, and the means whereby it puts itself in place of the old order. But there is also rebellion without any fundamental arrogation of the people, owing to oppression or willfulness. It answers to its own judgment, but it is not revolution.
The English deposed Richard II and crowned Henry IV. So they rose up over king and lord. But Henry IV immediately became their sovereign king and lord, and they his subjects, and the entire society remained unchanged. That is rebellion.
In 1791, by contrast, the French kept the king, but established the people forever as sovereign and lord over the king and leveled the entire society. That is revolution.
The Protestant princes of Germany who waged war against their Emperor Charles V may be accused of rebellion – this, in fact, I do not grant – but in any event one cannot accuse them of revolution.
If a Holsteiner takes part in the struggle against his provincial sovereign on behalf of specific (whether real or supposed) rights of the duchy's inhabitants, but without participating in all those subversive principles and demands, he may have to decide in his conscience whether the extraordinary urgency of the situation justifies his act of self-help against his governing authority; but he is in no way a revolutionary.
By contrast, when the followers of Thiers and Odilon Barrot** assure us that they do not need to break with the revolution just now, they would have broken with it from the start, they would not have taken part in the struggles at the barricades, in the mobs, in the mischief at the National Assembly, they would be innocent in the February and the March revolution, then we should like to answer them: Have you not done everything in order to make the will of the king subject to the popular will? — and to take apart the entire society? — and to de-Christianize the state? To be sure, you have broken with the rebellion, with anarchy, but you have not broken with the revolution! — —
* Mass executions by drowning in 1794 at the hands of the Jacobins – trans.
** French liberals, in opposition to the government of the July Monarchy, but not advocating its overthrow, as occurred in February 1848 – ed.
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