Danton vs. Robespierre

I recently viewed a movie titled "Danton" about the French Revolution, directed by a Pole named Vitlja around 1980.  He used French and Polish actors for the film, each using their native dialect.  French was dubbed into the Polish parts and there were English subtitles.

The movie was a fictional treatment of the conflict between Danton, the more liberal, and Robespierre, the more dogmatic revolutionary.  Danton rued the loss of personal liberty for all as the revolution went on,while Robespierre while sticking to the tenets of liberty, fraternity and equality for all actually ended up just framing them as words only.  Robespierre, of course, guilloteend many of his fellow revolutionaries; the revolution "devoured its children."  

Danton ended up with the same fate although he had much of Paris supporting him.  He wanted a public trial to show Robespierre's intransigence, stubbornness and lack of pity.  Robespierre, however, gained the upper hand during the trial and also had control of the secret police and the political machinery.  

It was a classic example of "the end justifying the means."  The supposed goals of the Revolution allowed any and all methods of bringing these goals to fruition, even to the killing of supposed "enemies of the Revolution."

This was classic in the Russian Revolution of 1917 as well.  With both, violence was followed by a reign of terror and then a "dictatorship of the proletariat."  Napoleon brought "law and order" after the chaos of the French Revolution while Stalin with his iron fist did the same in Russia.  Enemies of the state and of the revolution were quickly and ruthlessly dispatched - all for the glory of said Revolutions and their presumed egalitarian goals.  As Hannah Arendt pointed out in her study "On Revolution," freedom is sacrificed as a result.

Danton in the movie goes to the guilloteen with dread, but also saying that while his life has been short, he regrets nothing of what he has done.  Robespierre, on the other hand, is shown to be consumed with his own fears and guilt - a little boy recites the doctrines of the Revolution to him while he trembles over his own fate and what he has done.  The little boy knows the doctrines by rote only - he has zero sense of what they mean.  This is symbolic of what has become of the grand and sympathetic ends of their revolt - they have become mere and empty words, especially in the face of the terror that has replaced their high ideals.

Much the same occurred with the Bolshevik revolt.  Many in America had high hopes for the ideals of the Russians, even into the late 1930's.  But Stalin's non-aggression pact with Hitler, the cynicism of the Soviets during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930's, the murder of exiled Leon Trotsky in Mexico by Soviet agents, and the staged trials and execution of old Bolsheviks by Stalin painted a sad picture of the outcome of the Russian Revolution even to most of the hard-line leftists in the U.S.  Many like Lincoln Steffans and Max Eastman traveled to Russia and saw the truth themselves and were turned off by it.

So what does that mean for those who see revolution as a cure for the society's evils?  Hannah Arendt believed that the American Revolution posed a template for useful revolutions because freedom become more prevalent after it.  But to me, the American Revolution was not a true revolution, it was mostly a civil war against Great Britain, a war of separation rather that a war to right societal wrongs against the poor.

We still have the same class divisions of rich and poor now.  In fact, so do France and Russia.  It would seem that overthrowing one tyranny just leads to another, and often with a huge amount of disruption to everyday life.

Does Jesus Christ offer a better way?  Acts 2 in the New Testament shows the Believers "sharing everything in common."  Class distinctions seem to have disappeared for them as they seek a common good and a common goal.  But how long did that disposition last?  Is there much of it in the Church as a whole today?  I suppose you can find more of it among believers than among political devotees in the U.S., France or Russia today.