What Paris Gave Us
There were three revolutions in Paris. Paris, as a city, has liberated us three times.
The first was emancipation from the divine right of Kings, the ancient regimes, and the reactionary priestly caste that supported them. It was the poor, the dispossessed of Paris, the mustadaefeen, who pressed upon the Jacobin Club and had them destroy, not a King, but monarchy itself. The churches and cathedrals, which had become founts of ruling class oppression, became Temples of Reason and Science.
On the Champs de Mars, Robespierre surveyed this scene and dedicated the revolution to the Supreme Being. The Supreme Being ’ did not create kings to devour the human race. He did not create priests to harness us, like vile animals, to the chariots of kingss… He created the universe to proclaim His power. He created men to help each other, to love each other mutually, and to attain to happiness by the way of virtue.’
Almost one hundred years later, the working class of Paris took control of the city. The Paris Commune of 1871 ushered in a new age. For the first time, proletarian democracy had been enacted. This was an enactment of the long-held dream: ‘a new society in which there are no masters by birth, title or wealth, and no slaves by origin, caste or salary,’ as Kristin Ross put it. As we would put it, a classless society. Social tawhid.
Finally, at the College de France. Michel Foucault gathers his lecture notes. Society Must Be Defended. Power/Knowledge. ‘A war continued by other means,’ Foucault would describe the workings of power. He theorised our condition, enchained by capital and global carceral regimes. Later he would coin a new term after the Islamic Revolution – political spirituality. He was writing when there was hope in Tehran, before the years of despair. He described the people acting as one against the dictator, as ‘the first great insurrection against the planetary systems.’
Paris thus overthrew monarchy, bourgeois rule, and bourgeois systems of thought, in succession. It introduced a revolutionary religious creed, the first liberated space of the workers’ republic, and the tools to dismantle our prisons.
The King was restored, and the commune was drowned in blood. The city is enmeshed with breezeblocks and gendarmes. Yet if Yazid rules, never forget our Karbalas. The Champs de Mars, the Hotel de Ville, the College de France ; these are holy and sacred spaces for us.
Martyn Rush