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involved heroism, social conflict and assaults on tradition. The contrast between David’s images and the reality of the revolution shows how unprepared the Jacobins were for the politics they ultimately practised. 32 At first they had planned to transpose the unity and archaic simplicity of ancient Sparta to eighteenth-century France: David even designed a range of pseudo-classical costumes for the new revolutionary nation. 33 Instead they found themselves involved in war and class conflict, and in order to fight effectively, they sought to build a modern state, army and defence industry. In trying to reconcile their ideal of classical republicanism with the demands of modern warfare, they brought together many of the elements that were eventually to make up the Communist amalgam.
    For a time, the very contradictions within the Jacobins’ project were an advantage. They could use the language of classical virtue and morality to mobilize the
sans-culottes
, whilst employing technically efficient methods in the army and industry. Also, as a strategy for building a strong state and military, Jacobinism’s combination of central authority and mass participation had its advantages. Indeed, it was under the Jacobins that revolutionary France recovered its military élan after a long decline. The Jacobins showed how effective equality could be in forging a modern nation in arms.
    Ultimately, however, the Jacobins failed to deal with these conflicting forces. They could not reconcile the demands of the
sans-culottes
with the interests of the propertied, nor could they marry the rule of virtue (or ideological purity) with the power of the educated and expert. Confronted with these difficulties, the Jacobins split, and then split again and again, until Robespierre was left with a pitifully small network of the loyal and the trusted. His solution was the inculcation of ‘virtue’ combined with Terror.
    As will be seen, the Communists of the future had to deal with similar contradictions: they often sought to satisfy or exploit a populist egalitarianism and anger towards the upper classes and an urban rage against the peasantry, whilst at the same time they sought unity and stability; and they tried to build effective modern, technologically sophisticated economies whilst also believing that emotional inspiration was the best way of mobilizing the masses. At times they, like Robespierre, tried to solve these contradictions by trying to impose strict discipline, or by imposing a reign of virtue with propaganda and violence against unbelievers. Yet the Communists had no qualms about destroying property rights, and so could, for a time, secure the support of the poor. They could also learn from the history of the revolutionary movement, and of the French Revolution itself. The Jacobins had nothing to look back to, except a classical past that was of dubious value.
    Robespierre remained unloved for some time, spurned by the left as well as the right; it was only in the 1830s, as socialist ideas became more fashionable, that his rehabilitation began. But the ideas and forces he and the Jacobins had unleashed were enormously influential on the Communism of the future. For the next half-century, the example of the French Revolution and its failures loomed large over the left. And the events of 1793–4 exerted a particular pull over the imagination of one young radical, born in a Rhineland that had only recently been occupied by revolutionary France. For Karl Marx, the Jacobins had made serious mistakes, but the Jacobin era was still ‘the lighthouse of all revolutionary epochs’, a beacon that showed the way to the future. 34 Marx, like many other nineteenth-century socialists, was to construct his theory of revolution by learning the lessons of the Jacobins and their bloody history.

A German Prometheus
     

I
     
    In 1831 Eugène Delacroix exhibited his extraordinary painting of the 1830 revolution,
July 28: Liberty Leading the