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But even two centuries later, not all of France cherishes the spirit of 1789. Counterrevolutionary commemorations are proliferating. Right-wing Catholics are organizing a huge "Mass for the Martyrs" of the revolution on Aug. 15 in the Place de la Concorde. Local governments in western France helped raise funds for a $7 million movie called Vent de Galerne, which opened last month, about the republican army's savage repression of peasant rebels in the Vendee. In Lyons a historical society is tracing the descendants of 3,000 executed in anti-Jacobin uprisings. "The bicentennial is more an occasion for mourning than for celebration," says philosopher Jean-Marie Benoist, a former adviser to Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac. Asks Sorbonne historian Pierre Chaunu: "Why should we celebrate a failure?"
The official strategy for evading an answer is to focus resolutely on the high-minded events of 1789, like the Declaration of Rights, with its ideals of liberty, equality, and the sovereignty of the people. As for the blood that flowed thereafter -- the September Massacres of 1792, the Terror of 1793, and the 1793-94 uprising of the Vendee in which 400,000 died -- the less said the better. The play-it-safe politics of the commemoration is aimed at creating at least the illusion of ideological harmony, the same strategy that has sparked Mitterrand's recent political success. "We're not going to celebrate the guillotine," says Jeanneney. "Our mission is to emphasize the positive."
The trouble with this homogenized version of history is that the battles fought during the revolution still resist accommodation 200 years later. Twentieth century French historiography has been dominated by a Marxist school that celebrated the French Revolution and its class struggles as the mother of the Bolshevik Revolution. Regicide was the only way to crush the power of the privileged, and the Terror, like Stalin's purges, was a necessary transition to an eventual dictatorship of the proletariat. Many French have thought of themselves as different from other Europeans because they broke so violently with their past and started fresh.
The unreconstructed left wants an unapologetic bicentennial honoring the nation's radical roots. "France is still a country of class struggle," wrote historian Claude Mazauric in the Communist Party newspaper L'Humanite. "The message of 1789 . . . is to build a society unconstrained by multinational capitalism." SOS-Racisme, a civil rights group, for example, will celebrate with a rally for Toussaint L'Ouverture, a former slave who led an 18th century Haitian rebellion against French colonialism. A group of prominent Parisian socialists is agitating to rename part of the Rue St.-Honore after Robespierre. "All revolutions have excesses," explains former Health Minister Leon Schwarzenberg, "and any revolution without them must be considered suspect." But so far Robespierre's defenders have had no luck, and even moderates are concerned that the government has gone too far in snubbing controversial revolutionary leaders. "They are going to present people with a pasteurized, dissected, plastic-wrapped revolution," complains philosopher and leftist philosopher Andre Glucksmann.