Introductory - Global Sikh Studies

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represent their order at Versailles in 1789; some 25% were lawyers,
5% were other professional men, 13% were industrialists, merchants
and bankers; at most 7 to 9% were agriculturists, and even of these
only a handful were peasants. 26 The Assembly or National Convention,
which met on the 20 th Sept., 1979, socially ‘differed little from the
members of the two preceding parliaments; there was a similar
preponderance of former officials, lawyers, merchants and businessmen
as before, there were no small peasants, and there were only two
working men of their number… 27 The Jacobins were the most radical
group within the Assemblies and the sans-culottes were in the van of
revolutionary demonstrations and insurrections. ‘If anyone was
bourgeois, Jacobins were;’ 27a and shopkeepers and master-craftsmen,
not the lower order, were the backbone of the san-culottes. 27b
As against this, the plebian base of the Khalsa has been shown
in chapter XII.
(c) Modus Operandi
The French Revolution is a remarkable series of historical events
that continues to inspire to this day because of the mass upsurge of
the revolutionary spirit which rose in its yearning for human liberty
and equality. It is the people of the orders lower than the Third Estate,
called by some writers as the Fourth Estate, which look a leading part
in the mass demonstrations and insurrections, but it is the middle
classes which derived the maximum advantage out of these mass
interventions. This happened mainly because of two reasons. The
French Revolution was not a people’s direct revolution in the sense
that the insurrectionists never attempted, rather never conceived, to
capture political power in their own hands. They looked to, or at best
pressurized, the higher orders to concede their demands through
constitutional channels. Secondly, the Fourth Estate had not yet
developed a sufficient consciousness of their real political interests
and had not thrown up a leadership of its own alive and committed to
these interests. ‘On the whole wage workers had no clear consciousness
of class. If they had, it is very doubtful whether the Revolution of
1789 would have been possible... probably the bourgeoisie, as happened
later in Germany, would have shunned the support of such formidable
allies. 27c