For Martin Breaugh, the plebs are neither a multitude without direction, nor a simple strength of resistance. The plebeian revolts produce freedom by abolishing hierarchies. They seize power because they judge that the elections always end up being betrayal.
Social conflicts (not to mention the riots) are often condemned in the name of their ineffectiveness and their irrationality. Our time celebrates peaceful negotiations, compromises between responsible people and the consensus of enlightened experts. To argue that popular revolts increase political freedom, The plebeian experience could therefore pass for a populist and irresponsible apology for violence. But Mr. Breaugh is trying to show, through the history of scattered revolts, the analysis of the forms of ephemeral organization which were born and the theories on the role of the people, that political freedom would die in the absence of conflicts.
In the wake of J. Rancière, Mr. Breaugh defines policy as the claim of an equal capacity of all to public deliberation and action, usually monopolized by a minority that birth, money, election or competence distinguish. Now if the reformers, often from this oligarchy, sometimes deign to grant the title of “ people “And the right to exist politically to the greatest number, the powers constituted stigmatize it by the name of” pleb When he protested in order to exercise this right directly. The plebeian experience is there, in “ The transition from infrapolitical status to that of a full -fledged political subject »Accompanying the very provisional suspension of hierarchies and domination. Whether the plebs are always ultimately defeated by the oligarchy or betrayed by its leaders does not prevent the revolts to leave the memory and the hope of the possibility open to everyone to participate in the life of the city.
Historical and philosophical genesis of the plebeian principle
The paradigm of the plebeian experience is embodied in the first plebeian secession in Rome, in 494 BCE. The plebeians, deprived of the right to public speech, can still be enslaved for debt, although they have the duty to defend the Roman freedom of the invaders. Tired of protecting Rome from a servitude that is not always spared them, the plebeians peacefully withdraw from Mount Aventine, leaving Rome to be disturbed in disorder, for lack of labor. An ambassador of the Senate persuades the plebeians to reintegrate Rome in exchange for a political representation. The plebeian victory is short -lived. But this revolt gives a principle of intelligibility for other similar events: revolt of the CIOMPI in Florence in 1378, carnival of novels in 1580, Neapolitan revolt in 1647.
THE Speech on the first decade of Tite-Live De Machiavelli proposes the first theorization of the political role of the plebs. Both “ moods Antagonists of patricians and plebeians structure social and political space. If the greats want to dominate, the people want to be dominated. This desire for freedom and political dignity pushes the plebs to revolt against the great. But, according to Machiavelli, political conflicts benefit the progress of freedom. “” The plebs is this political actor who brings the desire for freedom to life within the city by ensuring the presence of the conflict thanks to its irreducible opposition to the great. »With a few variations, linked to the risk of seeing the revolt give birth to a tyranny, this lesson is repeated in the monographs devoted to Montesquieu, in Vico, Ballanche, de Leon and Rancière. In this regard, the work too often gives the feeling of being an unfinished compilation of interesting materials which would have deserved a stronger synthesis, since Mr. Breaugh has the ambition to characterize, thanks to the plebs, a modern political actor.
Plebeian organizations and political ties
Indeed, the plebeian experience concerns us. The dominant political configuration of modernity, embryonic at the end of XVIIIe century, is based on “ A conception that dismisses any effective participation of citizens in political life ». The representative government, the party system and the bureaucracy, which make up this configuration, limit access to power to the new patricians that are the virtuous notable, the effective activist or the competent technocrat. On the contrary, the forms of plebeian political organization demonstrate the will to exercise power with the greatest number, rather than exercising it without him and as soon as the elections were finished. However, the organization of power, if not based on domination but on the concerted action of men, forges a political link different from the usual social bond between them. Three plebeian experiences stand out against the bottom of modern European history.
Organized in sectional societies of Paris, the Sans-Culottes, in search of real political equality, fight against the vestiges of the ancient domination of the aristocrats, but also against the nascent bourgeois domination. In this struggle, the insurrection is the last appeal, legitimized by the Constitution of 1793, against the authoritarian drifts of the constituted powers, visible in the desire to centralize decisions and to rely on specialists who claim to impose technical solutions outside any political debate. The objective of these insurrections is “ to democratize the political sphere and not to generate a new form of man domination over man ». At the same time, the London correspondence company (SCL) English Jacobins militates to obtain the right to vote for all British subjects. New spaces of political debate (in cabarets or manufacturers) opened by the SCL In the popular strata, represent the model of a society where everyone has the right and the duty to speak freely, without it being desirable for democracy to want to control or predict the forces thus implemented. It is in the same plebeian logic of active citizenship that Parisian communards wish to destroy the oligarchic state in order to replace it with associative forms, open to all, of participation in public policies, which must ultimately reduce the government to a simple administrative agency.
The blind point of plebeian thought ?
Mr. Breaugh, however, notes that the plebeian desire of freedom sometimes turns into a desire for servitude. Certain revolts studied testify to this. If the leader of the Naples insurrection in 1647, Masaniello, a miserable fisherman, first ruled in a moderate way, he sinks into megalomania and paranoid tyranny, after an attempted assassination commanded by Neapolitan patricians exasperated by this intractable opponent. The intense research of political unanimity leads to the sans-culottes, from purifications to divisions and from divisions to discord, to gradually isolate itself from the large number. The communards themselves, blinded by the revolutionary myth, fall back into a classic form of exercise of power, with the establishment of a restricted public salvation committee, authorized to make urgent decisions.
Mr. Breaugh dodges an essential problem here. How to dismiss the Foucauldian idea that the plebs is an indefinite political actor, a pure force of resistance or oppression, while accepting the possibility of a plebeian desire for servitude ? The bias favorable to the plebs, placed ultimately On the good side of the political barrier, with the defenders of freedom, handicaps Mr. Breaugh’s reflection: the idea of the fascist potential of the plebs is not to be taken lightly. On the one hand, it can legitimize the monopoly of the usual elites on political power. But it also justifies a revolutionary elitism with which Mr. Breaugh also wants to distance itself. Indeed, Marx counted more on the qualified and educated proletariat to make the revolution than on the plebs of his time, the lumpenProletariat : Social class without conscience of herself, dreamy mercenary of the bourgeoisie. It would have been certainly difficult, but perhaps very fruitful to enhance the political scope of the riots, to sail better between the pitfalls of these antagonistic elitisms.