Excerpt from The Story of the French Revolution The following Sketch of the course of the French Revolution was originally published during 1889 in serial form in Justice, the weekly organ of the Social Demo' cratic Federation. It has been revised, corrected, and, in some parts, added to, for the present re-issue. It need scarcely be said that it in no way pretends to be a com plete history of the great political, social, and intellectual movement it describes. The present volume is designed primarily as a guide to those who, not having the time to study larger works on the subject, yet wish during these centennial years to have in a small compass a con nected description of the main events of the French Revolution, more especially from the point Of View of modern Socialism. It is undeniable that there are many Englishmen who would indignantly repudiate any'asper sions on their education for whom the French Revolution means little more than the destruction of one institution called the Bastille, the erection of another institution called theguillotine, and the establishment of the Napo leonic Empire on the ruins of both. They have no idea Of the complex forces, economical, speculative, and po litical, which manifested themselves in the succession of crises (scarcely, indeed, of the existence of the crises themselves) which took place between the assembling of the states-general in 1789, _and the suppression of the Babmuf conspiracy in 1796. This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Author
Ernest Belfort Bax (23 July 1854 – 26 November 1926) was an English socialist journalist and philosopher, associated with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). Born into a nonconformist religious family in Leamington, he was first introduced to Marxism while studying philosophy in Germany. He combined Karl Marx's ideas with those of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann. Keen to explore possible metaphysical and ethical implications of socialism, he came to describe a "religion of socialism" as a means to overcome the dichotomy between the personal and the social, and also that between the cognitive and the emotional. He saw this as a replacement for organised religion, and was a fervent atheist, keen to free workers from what he saw as the moralism of the middle-class. Bax moved to Berlin and worked as a journalist on the Evening Standard. On his return to England in 1882, he joined the SDF, but grew disillusioned and in 1885 left to form the Socialist League with William Morris. After anarchists gained control of the League, he rejoined the SDF, and became the chief theoretician, and editor of the party paper Justice. He opposed the party's participation in the Labour Representation Committee, and eventually persuaded them to leave. Almost throughout his life, he saw economic conditions as ripe for socialism, but felt this progress was delayed by a lack of education of the working class. Bax supported Karl Kautsky over Eduard Bernstein, but Kautsky had little time for what he saw as Bax's utopianism, and supported Theodore Rothstein's efforts to spread a more orthodox Marxism in the SDF. Initially very anti-nationalist, Bax came to support the British in World War I, but by this point he was concentrating on his career as a barrister and did little political work. Bax was an ardent anti feminist since, according to Bax, feminism was a part of the "anti-man crusade". According to Bax, "anti-man crusades" were responsible for "anti-man laws" during the time of men-only voting in England. Bax wrote many articles in The New Age and elsewhere about English laws partial to women against men, and women's privileged position before the law, and expressed his view that women's suffrage would unfairly tip the balance of power to women. In 1908 he wrote The Legal Subjection of Men as a response to John Stuart Mill's 1869 essay "The Subjection of Women." In 1913 he published an essay, The Fraud of Feminism, detailing feminism's adverse effects. Section titles included "The Anti-Man Crusade", "The 'Chivalry' Fake", "Always The 'Injured Innocent'", and "Some Feminist Lies and Fallacies". Bax died in London. More: http://www.marxists.org/archive/bax/ http://www.marxists.org/archive/bax/b... http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/... http://ernestbelfortbax.com/2014/01/2...
