Yuri Chekalin
Political revolutions do more than replace governments.
Political revolutions transform the language through which political communities understand authority, citizenship, obligation, and collective identity.
Inventing a New Political Language
New institutions require new concepts, and new concepts gradually reshape political expectations. Vocabulary therefore becomes an important historical source for understanding how revolutionary governments sought to establish legitimacy after the collapse of an existing political order.
This process should not be understood as a simple exercise in political propaganda. Words alone cannot create institutions, nor can political language substitute for effective government. Rather, language and institutions evolve together.
Revolutionary leaders introduce new political concepts to describe emerging realities, while those concepts simultaneously influence how citizens interpret the changing political order.
The transformation of political vocabulary thus forms part of the broader process through which legitimacy is reconstructed.
France: The Language of the Nation and Citizenship
The French Revolution fundamentally altered the political vocabulary of Europe.
Under the Ancien Régime, loyalty had traditionally been expressed in relation to the Crown, the kingdom, and the established social order. After 1789, revolutionary leaders increasingly spoke instead of the nation, the citizen, the people, and popular sovereignty. These terms were not entirely new, but their political significance changed profoundly.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen presented political authority as deriving from the nation rather than from dynastic inheritance. Citizenship became the defining political identity, replacing many of the legal distinctions associated with the estates of the realm.
The revolutionary government sought to redefine the relationship between the individual and the state through concepts emphasizing civic equality, representation, and participation in the political community.
Language also acquired a performative dimension. Citizens addressed one another as citoyen and citoyenne, consciously replacing aristocratic forms of address.
Public speeches, official documents, newspapers, and revolutionary festivals reinforced the idea that a new political community had come into existence. Vocabulary did not simply describe institutional transformation; it expressed the claim that sovereignty itself had been reconstituted.
Russia: The Language of Revolution and Social Transformation
The Russian Revolution likewise transformed political vocabulary, although within a very different ideological and historical context.
The collapse of the Romanov monarchy was accompanied by the rapid emergence of a new political lexicon centered upon workers, peasants, soviets, comrades, class, and revolution. These concepts reflected both Marxist political theory and the practical realities of revolutionary mobilization.
The term comrade became particularly significant because it symbolized the rejection of hierarchical social distinctions associated with the imperial order. Likewise, the soviet, originally a council of workers’ deputies, evolved from a revolutionary institution into one of the defining symbols of the new political system.
The language of class struggle and proletarian leadership framed political authority not as the expression of dynastic legitimacy but as the historical mission of a revolutionary social class.
Yet this transformation was not merely rhetorical. New terminology accompanied the creation of new institutions, legal structures, administrative bodies, and forms of political participation.
The vocabulary of revolution both reflected and reinforced changing political realities as the Bolshevik government consolidated its authority during and after the Civil War.
Comparison: Language as a Source of Legitimacy
Despite their profound ideological differences, the French and Russian Revolutions reveal striking similarities in the political function of language.
In both cases, revolutionary leaders recognized that the collapse of an established order required more than institutional reconstruction.
Citizens needed new conceptual frameworks through which political authority could be understood and accepted.
At the same time, important differences remained. The French Revolution grounded legitimacy primarily in the sovereignty of the nation and the rights of the citizen, whereas the Russian Revolution increasingly emphasized class, socialist transformation, and the leading role of revolutionary institutions.
These distinct vocabularies reflected different historical circumstances, political traditions, and ideological commitments.
To be continued…
Robert Reich
