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KATZ
than the democratic one which had preceeded it, which showed itself as
more eager to extend the Revolution to the rest of Europe, and which,
in Palmer's words, "became an inspiration for analogous developments
in other countries."
In the second volume of
The Age of the Democratic Reuolution,
Palmer insists-as he must if his thesis is to hold up-that the Directorial
regime "was such that a more broadly based democratic movement could
legally take place under it." But Palmer's stress on the word "legality"
shows the dubious foundation of his argument. Legality is a misleading
standard with which to judge the Directory, because in the five years in
which it governed France, it employed any and all means, legal and extra–
legal alike, in resisting every attempt of the more democratic elem'ents
to
broaden the base and change the character of the regim'e; and it
dealt swiftly and savagely, not only with the extreme Left, but also-with
the
coup d'etat
in Floreal, 1798-with a legally elected "democratic"
chamber.
Palmer's curious treatment of the Directory, his ambiguous denial
of its exclusive and undemocratic character, has its source in the ideo–
logical concern which animates his entire study-that is, in his desire to
"dissociate," as far as possible, the French from the Russian Revolution.
For if the Directory can be understood as a "democratic" regime,
it
is
then legitimate to say that the "revolutionary-democratic" movement at–
tained its first "high tide" in the late eighteenth century, with the short–
lived victory of French armies all over Europe; and that, some fifty
years later, this movement was brought to fruition, this time
without
French aid, in the Revolution of 1848. And
if
this is true, if "democracy"
is the child of an eighteenth-c'entury Western Revolution, then the
social doctrines of Karl Marx and of modern Communism-to which
Palmer admittedly feels "a certain lack of coroiality"-are totally irrele–
vant to the Western world. Indeed Marx, who claimed that
. . . The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the
ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagon–
isms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of op–
pression, new forms of struggle
in
place ,of the old ones. . . ,
can be disposed of as "dogmatic," and we
in
the West can confidently
affirm, with Tocqueville, that "the gradual trend toward equality of
conditions is a fact of Providence, of which it bears the principal charac–
teristics: it is universal, it is enduring, it constantly eludes human powers
of control; all events and all men contribute to its development."
But the connection between the French and the Russian Revolution
cannot be so easily dismissed. For Marxism was in part inspired by the
