I have always learned of the French Revolution as a story of the reclamation of popular sovereignty over Monarchy. Rule of the people over everything else. However, through our readings and lectures, I have come to understand that this was not necessarily the case.
The National Assembly originally reacted negatively to the storming of the Bastille. Only after the fall of Bastille was viewed as a legitimate threat by King Louis XVI, did the National Assembly view the act of violence as legitimate. They did not, however, extend the same grace to the acts of violence carried out just a few short days later in the towns of Poissy and Saint-Germain-en-Laye as Sewell had noted.
This discovery made me reflect on violence in political action and coinciding with our class discussion, I was specifically focused on nonviolence theory and its applicability to how we conceptualize movements in both the past and present.
Dr. Bjork-James taught us the deradicalized histories of icons within the political nonviolence tradition. From MLK to Nelson Mandela, both are commemorated for their breakthroughs in civil rights and the end of South African apartheid respectively. However, mainstream historical depictions of these figures obfuscate the reality that both these figures were viewed negatively by the state during their time.
The connection between the reception of both violence and nonviolence made me reflect upon the legitimacy of political action and its relation to the state. When trying to understand political violence Dr. Bjork-James noted that it is important to understand nonviolence as relative to violence carried out by the state.
For me, this statement was an important throughline in understanding these three interconnected resistances against oppression. The taking of Bastille was violent and yet the destitute under extreme poverty that the people of France faced under feudal rule outweighed this. The same can be said about the Jim Crow Era in the United States and Apartheid in South Africa. Compared to the constant repression and violence of the state in these three scenarios, actions taken during these movements as forms of resistance are nonviolent.
Ultimately, for forms of violence to be viewed as legitimate in any present era, they must have recognition by the state. In the case of the French Revolution, the contrast between what violence was viewed as legitimate and nonlegitimate despite similar levels of violence depended entirely upon the utility of the recognition in expanding the power of the National Assembly, comprised of wealthy property owners. In this case, though the political action was a genuine act of sovereignty by the people, the political legitimacy was conferred not by the people, but by the wealthy.
Resistance, therefore, must be understood with an acknowledgment of the nature of the state to co-opt political movements to maintain its own power and hierarchies of oppression. This reflection on the dynamics of violence and legitimacy has helped me expand my conceptual framework for understanding all political movements, both in the past and looking toward the future.
Revolutionary Cities 