622
PARTISAN REVIEW
ber, however, that this ideal was long compromised by reality: this re–
public of free people tolerated slavery for many decades.
The French Revolution, in contrast, has left us an intrinsically am–
biguous legacy.
It
was the embodiment of Montesquieu's notion of a
triple division of power and of the rule of law: all that is not forbidden
by law is allowed. At the same time, this revolution translated the glori–
ous vision of freedom, equality, and fraternity into a language of utopia
in which the cult of reason, guarded by the Jacobin Terror, would re–
place the dictatorship of Church doctrine. Thanks to the Jacobins, the
Declaration of the Rights of Man - the monument of Europe's demo–
cratic culture - has been forever linked to the shadow of the guillotine -
the symbol of revolutionary terror. The French Revolution thus leaves us
a dual legacy: it is to us a source of freedom but also represents that first
fit of the madness of boundless reason. Because of this madness, the
French Revolution and the Terror were followed by Bonapartism and
then by the triumphant Restoration. The French Revolution gave birth
to both the principles of human rights and the Jacobin Terror of
Robespierre and Saint-Just; it gave us Thermidor as well as Bonapartism.
It also gave rise to De Maistre, the classic defender of counter-revolu–
tionary terror. The French Revolution declared war on God in the
name of freedom. But whoever wishes to destroy God in the name of
freedom elevates to power either the devil wearing the mask of a Saint–
Just or the executioner glorified by De Maistre.
I am a Pole. I look at the tradition of anti-feudal revolution from
the perspective of a man who came to spend most of his life rebelling
against Communist dictatorship. What was Communism? It was a temp–
tation and an illusion. It was the temptation to participate in the great
cause of social justice, and it was the illusion of bringing about a world
in which the powerless could control their own fate. Communism was
based- on the illusory Promethean hope of stealing from the gods the se–
cret of the universe and creating thereby a world based on equality, jus–
tice, and true universal values. Communism believed it had deciphered the
hidden meaning and the end of history. In practice, it was but an inti–
mate union of violence and lies.
How did the opposition to Communist dictatorship take shape? The
first phase of the rebellion against Communism was "revisionism," the
critique of Communist practice from within the Communist value sys–
tem. To paraphrase the Polish philosopher Stanislaw Brzozowski, one
might say that this movement was the rebellion of the flower against its
roots. The second phase of the
anti-Communi~t
opposition was meta–
physical critique, which, while attacking Communism's deceptive facade,
simultaneously rejected the Communist principle of total control over
