True, that serfdom for the peasants all over Eastern Europe, and the Inquisition that had been abolished in Italy and Spain by the armies of the Revolution, were re-established. But a death-blow had been dealt to these institutions, and never since could they recover from it.
The liberation wave first reached Western Germany; then it rolled as far as Prussia and Austria in 1848; it spread over the peninsulas of Spain and Italy, and, flowing further eastwards, it finally reached Russia, where serfdom was abolished in 1861, and the Balkan States, where it ceased to exist in 1878. Slavery disappeared in North America in 1863.
At the same time, the idea of equality of all before the law, and that of representative government also, spread from West to East, and at the end of the nineteenth century Russia and Turkey alone remained under the yoke of autocracy—already weakened, however, and doomed to a certain death in a near future.[1]
More than that. On the line of demarcation separating the eighteenth century from the nineteenth, we already find the ideas of economic enfranchisement loudly advocated. Immediately after the overthrow of the King by the uprising of the people of Paris of August 10, 1792, and especially after the overthrow of the Girondins on June 2, 1793, there was, both in Paris and the provinces, an outburst of Communist feeling, leading to direct action in this sense in the revolutionary sections of the large cities and the municipalities of the small towns and villages over large portions of France.
The people proclaimed that the time had come when Equality must cease to be a shallow word: it must become a fact; and as the burden of the war that the Republic had to fight against the allied monarchies, fell especially upon the poor, the people forced the Commissaries of the Convention in the provinces to take Communistic measures.
The Convention itself was compelled by the people to take Communistic measures tending towards the "abolishing of poverty" and "levelling the fortunes." And after the bourgeois Republican party of the Girondists had been thrust out of power on May 31—June 2, 1793, the National Convention and the Radical bourgeois Club of the Jacobinists were compelled to agree to a series of measures tending to nationalise not only the land, but also all the commerce in the main necessaries of life.
- ↑ See the "Conclusion" of "The Great French Revolution."
