This July marks the 237th anniversary of the start of the French Revolution, a day the French capitalist class has whitewashed into a celebration of the dawn of their racist, imperialist, and decaying democracy. But Bastille Day carries buried working-class and revolutionary roots: it helped inspire the enslaved workers of Haiti to rise up and overthrow the French plantation slavers, and it echoed through the movements that later toppled colonial rule across Latin America.

This year, the anniversary falls on the eve of the 250th anniversary (semiquincentennial) of a the United States, built on the bedrock of slavery, genocide, a nation the French monarchy itself helped bring into being. Seeking to weaken its rival Britain, the crown bankrolled a small class of planters and merchants, the so-called founding fathers, who declared independence on July 4, 1776, just under seventeen years before that same monarchy lost its head to the guillotine.

As the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary and France marks another Bastille Day, both holidays expose the same hollow core: fake democracies built to serve capital. France today is a wasteland of exploitation, where unemployment runs nearly twice as high for African immigrants as for native French workers, and discrimination against Black and Arab communities remains well documented in hiring, housing, and everyday life.Paris and Brussels bankroll border-militarization deals with Libya, Morocco, and Niger that have turned the Sahara and the Mediterranean into mass graves, with the UN estimating migrant deaths in the desert may run twice as high as those recorded at sea.Meanwhile, crushing debt, first imposed on Haiti in 1825 as literal ransom for its freedom, has cost the country tens of billions in lost development and helped lock it into the crisis it faces today.

Meanwhile, on the eve of its own semiquincentennial, the U.S. ruling class is unmasking its "sacred democracy": the Supreme Court is greenlighting escalating attacks on immigrants, deepening the exploitation of workers, minting new trillionaires, hunting down and caging migrant workers in concentration camps, and stripping Temporary Protected Status from Haitians and Syrians, sending them back to the violent, destabilized chaos the U.S. itself created. Justice Kagan's dissent in the June 2026 ruling did not mince words, writing that the record "fairly shouts" that race drove the decision to strip Haitians of protection.

The article that follows is a reprint on the history of the Bastille and the lessons the international working class can still draw from it today. As Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." Marx himself was profoundly shaped by the earth-shattering example of the French Revolution, and it is that same history the working class must learn from and finish the job on. Workers took power once. We can do it again, and hold it this time. Join PLP, and help us write a new revolutionary history that frees workers from this capitalist nightmare for good.

Lessons from the storming of Bastille

France was then an agricultural society ruled by noble landowners and a powerful Catholic church, with the king at the top. The urban bourgeoisie wanted a constitutional monarchy. That would give them more political power. They needed the urban workers, called “sans-culottes” – a French word meaning “worker’s pants”– to fight for them against the monarchy. But for a few years the “sans-culottes” fought for their own interests.

The sudden, violent overthrow of the French monarchy and landed aristocracy proved that the status quo was not “God-given,” not inevitable, not the product of “human nature.” It proved that the political structure could be changed for the better. A society with more equality and less exploitation was possible! The French Revolution also gave birth to future revolutionary communist movements.

The French Revolution was inspired by the Enlightenment, a bourgeois movement that attacked monarchies and feudalism. The Enlightenment popularized talk of human rights— liberal democracy, the so called rights of the people and equality for all. It argued that the power of kings and aristocrats was illegitimate.

In 1789 the French King had called a nationwide meeting (Estates-General) of nobles, clergy, and bourgeoisie, to vote for new taxes. When the bourgeoisie refused, the king tried to shut them down. But the “sans-culottes” rebelled and stormed the Bastille. The revolution began.

Here are some lessons, especially from the most radical and democratic period of 1789 to 1795.

The “sans-culottes” of the cities—workers, journeymen, apprentices, working women—always pushed the Revolution ahead, towards more equality, more rights and power for working people.

The “sans-culottes” had no political party. The party of petty-bourgeois revolutionaries and sincere idealists who worked most closely with them was called the Jacobins.

But the working class needs its own party. This is the greatest discovery of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik ( communist) Revolution of 1917 in Russia. Today, it’s the job of the Progressive Labor Party to fulfill that historic task.

It was the mass actions of the “sans-culottes”, sometimes supported by the most radical Jacobins, who pushed the Revolution to adopt the most democratic reforms.

The bourgeoisie, intellectuals, and “sans-culottes” all united to get rid of the king and aristocracy and to take land from the Church. But after that, their interests no longer coincided. The radical bourgeoisie needed the “sans-culottes” only as long as foreign armies threatened to destroy the Revolution.

With the seizing of the lands of aristocrats and the Church, peasants gained their own land. They also wanted higher prices for the food they grew. But the urban “sans-culottes” needed low food prices. The peasants’ economic interests were more aligned with the bourgeois merchants, traders, and landlords than with those of the “sans-culottes.”Once foreign armies were driven back, the bourgeois representatives—some of whom had been executed as counter-revolutionaries—turned against the Jacobins and the “sans-culottes” and established a more repressive state. After 1795 the propertied bourgeoisie was in firm control. They organized a bourgeois dictatorship, and then an authoritarian empire under Napoleon Bonaparte.

The communist movement begins

Gracchus Babeuf, a poor, self-taught worker, headed the last and most radical movement of the Revolution. His “Conspiracy for Equality” was crushed, and Babeuf executed. But one of his followers, Buonarroti, survived to influence the working-class and student militants of the 1840s, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

The working class of Europe learned from the experience of the “sans-culottes” of France. The Paris Commune of 1871, and the Russian Revolution of 1917, were the first revolutions by the industrial working class, the proletariat. They all sprang from the lessons of the great French Revolution.