The French Revolution was far more totalitarian than Nazi Germany...and far more awesome!

Yes, let me repeat that: The French Revolution was far more totalitarian than Nazi Germany.

Nazi Germany: the grotesque, archaic zombie of Prussian Despotism and German Romanticism, electrified with economic despair and youthful disillusionment, dressed up in an industrialist's top-hat, and hellbent on ripping its Krupp artillery into the flesh of modernity. All this was less totalitarian than the French Revolution?

Absolutely.

For some background first:

Just as in Nazi Germany, in feudal France, people did not exist as individuals. They existed within incorporated entities (guilds of the "mechanical arts" (which existed for both artisans and merchants, and on roughly equal footing in terms of status!)), religious orders, the noble household, the biological family, the master/apprentice type of family, the feudal manor, etc.) If you didn't belong to one of these pateralistic corporativist groups, you were a non-entity (a vagabond, a casual laborer, a petty thief, etc.) You could only become incorporated into one of these social stations by swearing a solemn oath of loyalty to one's king to uphold the honesty and goodness of the Community (in the big, capital, "Gemeinschaft" sense of the term---not in the fake sense of the term that we use today). Incorporation into a corporativist community gave you certain "privilèges" (literally, private laws) that went beyond the common laws, which varied depending on your social station. If you didn't have a social station, you had no privileges, and you were totally at the mercy of common law. Why didn't absolutist France need police everywhere? Because everyone in a corporativist community policed everyone else according to moral norms wherever you were (at the church, at the tavern, in the home, in public, at work, there was no escape into anonymity, unless you wanted to experience social death in being cast out and losing all privileges and possibly all prospects of employment). As rigid and hierarchical as this seems, this was not totalitarian. For one, it was softened by genuine social mores of paternalism (which were long eroded in Germany by the time the Nazis tried to resurrect this feudal zombie), and most importantly, although these incorporated entities were ultimately beholden to the king's goodwill along the lines of a hierarchical pyramid, one had an independent basis of social power within these social stations. One was not subject to the "State" and to the State alone. There were plenty of intermediary institutions.

In Nazi Germany, supposedly nothing was supposed to come between the individual and the State. Hah! The family was FORCED back into an intermediary position (which had actually been eroded by capitalist development and State education). The Nazis had their own secular clergy to provide spiritual guidance to their "Volksgemeinschaft" ("people's community"). The Hitler Youth. The Sturmabteilung (Brownshirts) and Schutzstaffel (Blackshirts), the civil service, the German Labor Front party-controlled unions, the party-controlled marching bands, the (tamed) Catholic and Protestant churches, the freakin' Junker estates, etc. Yes, one served in these social stations at the pleasure of the Fuhrer, and one swore a sacred oath of loyalty to him---just as to a king. But at least you had your social station as XYZ, and Der Fuhrer had his social station as leader and protector of the German nation (which was determined by the archaic qualification of bloodline, not place of birth, civic loyalty (as in the bourgeois-revolutionary U.S. and bourgeois-revolutionary France), or even spoken language---so German-speaking Jews who were born in Germany and who were loyal to the laws and customs of Germany still did not count---because they were not a part of the all-important Community with a capital "C." They were non-entities, not entitled to the special privilèges that German members of the German community were entitled to. At least, as a proper member of the German racial community serving in the Hitler Youth, at least you had some station in life, some specific base of social power and respect.

This is the horrifying spectre of Nazism---a zombie-like resurrection of German romaticism, of solemn torchlight parades, of fervent reveries and panegyrics about organicist Communities (instead of the mechanistic calculations of self-interest and rights of the individual borne out of the Enlightenment, capitalist development, and the bourgeois revolutions)---Nazi Germany as an all-out assault on 1789 and the entirety of modernity (one Nazi ideologue, I forget which, once famously said, "Now we have erased 1789 from human history forever."

All of this is why we should find Nazi Germany horrifying---not because it was "totalitarian." It wasn't (relatively speaking, compared to revolutionary France). Comparatively, Nazi Germany looks like an archaic despotism armed with Stuka divebombers and cyanide chambers (that's being flippant and incredibly simplistic and irresponsible as a historian,but just run with it for a second). But consider the industrial slavery and industrial genocide of Nazi Germany alongside the international slavery and religious slaugther and torture of the early-modern period in Europe. Not exactly equivalent, but definitely a supporting piece of evidence for the argument for continuity, rather than for the common idea of Nazi anti-Semitism and revived organicist Volksgemeinschaft as coming out of nowhere.

What was truly totalitarian---and in a way, really remarkable and progressive for its day---was the French Revolution, a complete social revolution that demanded that nothing come between the individual and the National State, that all citizens be held to the same common laws (no privilèges or special considerations given to you because you belong to this community or that community, to this estate or that estate, etc.), that all citizens have the same equal rights, and that no citizen refuse the dignity of holding himself (eventually, herself) up in public society and in front of the state as an individual. A revolution that forbade you from proclaiming or uniting on any common interest or association that came between one's own interests and the entire nation's interests (this means, no uniting based on "special interests"---the interests of the nobility, of the clergy, of the master craftsmen, of the journeymen, of the bourgeoisie, of the sans-culottes, etc. No intermediary associations that come between you and the National State. No regional associations, no labor unions, no craft guilds, no religious orders, no households of nobility, etc. You must not recognize any interest other than your own self-interest (especially in the marketplace---free trade), and the interests of the National State as the protector of the political order in accordance with Natural Law in which those self-interests can flourish).

How incredibly totalitarian! And how awesome! (For its time...)

BTW, if you are curious where I'm getting this nonsense, it's from this book I'm reading for a class, "Paris: Capital of the 19th century." The book is entitled, "Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848" by William Sewell.

Also, I'd like to end on a note about Marxism: when are we gonna get back to thinking about Marxism as a methodological capstone to the Enlightenment rather than as some Confucianist Mao's-little-red-book mumbo-jumbo apologia for anti-imperialist agrarian despotism in the Third World?????? Eh????