Hannah Arendt on the Irresistibility and Revolution While the elements of novelty, beginning, and violence, all intimately associated with our notion of revolution, are conspicuously absent from the original meaning of the word as well as from its first metaphoric use in political language, there exists another connotation of the astronomic term which I have already mentioned briefly and which has remained very forceful in our own use of the word. I mean the notion of irresistibility, the fact that the revolving motion of the stars follows a preordained path and is removed from all influence of human power. We know, or believe ~e know, the exact date when the word revolution was used for the first time with an exclusive emphasis on irresistibility and without any connotation of a backward revolving movement; and so important does this emphasis appear to our own understanding of revolutions that it has become common practice to date the new political significance of the old astronomic term from the moment of this new usage. The date was the night of the fourteenth of July 1789, in Paris, when Louis XVI heard from the Due de La Rochefoucauld- Liancourt of the fall of the Bastille, the liberation of a few prisoners, and the defection of the royal troops before a popular attack. The· famous dialogue that took place between the king and his messenger is very short and very revealing. The king, we are told, exclaimed, Cest une revolte, and Liancourt corrected him: Non, Sire, cest une revolution. Here we hear the word still, and politically for the last time, in the sense of the old metaphor which carries its meaning from the skies down to the earth; but here, for the first time perhaps, the emphasis has entirely shifted from the lawfulness of a rotating, cyclical movement to its irresistibility.31 The motion is still seen in the image of the movements of the stars, but what is stressed now is that it is beyond human power to arrest it, and hence it is a law unto itself. The king, when he declared the storming of the Bastille was a revolt, asserted his power and the various means at his disposal to deal with conspiracy and defiance of authority; Liancourt replied that what. had happened there was irrevocable and beyond the power of a king. What did Liancourt see, what must we see or hear, listening to this strange dialogue, that he thought, and we know, was irresistible and irrevocable? The answer, to begin with, seems simple. Behind these words, we still can see and hear the multitude on their march, how they burst into the streets of Paris, which then still was the capital not lllerely of France but of the entire civilized world- the upheaval of the populace of the great cities inextricably mixed with the uprising of the people for freedom, both together irresistible in the sheer force of their number. And this multitude, appearing for the first time in broad daylight, was aCtually the multitude of the poor and the downtrodden, who every century before had hidden in darkness and shame. What from then on has been irrevocable, and what the agents and spectators of revolution immediately recognized as such, was that the public realm - reserved, as far as memory could reach, to those who were free, namely carefree of all the worries that are connected with lifes necessity, with bodily needs- should offer its space and its light to this immense majority who are not free because they are driven by daily needs.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 14:27:11 +0000
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