Daniel Guérin, le trouble-fête

Abstract

Louis Janover, Daniel Guerin, the kill-Joy ; According to a famous historian, ex-member of the CP, « the Terror announces in many aspects the nature of communist societies ». In fact, as we are informed through the work of Daniel Guerin published after the war, the Jacobin government aimed from the beginning to stopping the egalitarian aspirations, communist dreams, of grassroot people. Equally, the Terror did not put into question communism, but the modern political state charged to create relationships of domination and servitude according to the reign of bourgeois property. All the phenomena of manipulation and of instrumentalization of the masses which are observed afterwards in party systems have been analysed by Guerin, scrutinizing observer of The Class Struggle under the First Republic (1946). He derived from this analysis the outline of a critical sociology of the forms of the modern political state, showing the character of the antidote of the mecanism of the centralisation and repression restored by the bourgeoisie on the ruins of the Ancien Regime : the organs of direct democracy invented by the « bras-nus » during their autonomous activities.