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Title: The anatomy of revolution
Author: Crane Brinton
Release date: February 27, 2026 [eBook #78065]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: W. W. Norton, 1938
Credits: Tim Lindell, Craig Kirkwood, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ANATOMY OF REVOLUTION ***
Transcriber’s Notes:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
* * * * *
THE _Anatomy of_ REVOLUTION
[Illustration]
* * * * *
_BOOKS BY CRANE BRINTON_
THE ANATOMY OF REVOLUTION
THE LIVES OF TALLEYRAND
THE _Anatomy of_ REVOLUTION
_BY CRANE BRINTON_
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.
_Publishers_ · _New York_
* * * * *
Copyright, 1938, by
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.
70 Fifth Avenue, New York
_First Edition_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
* * * * *
TO ALDEN AND HELEN HOAG,
WHO LISTENED TO IT ALL
CONTENTS
FOREWORD 9
_Chapter_ I. THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF REVOLUTIONS 11
I. THE NECESSITY FOR A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH, 11.
II. THE BARE ELEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC METHODS, 16.
III. THE APPLICATION OF SCIENTIFIC METHODS TO THIS
STUDY, 21. IV. LIMITATIONS OF THE SUBJECT, 31.
_Chapter_ II. THE OLD REGIMES 38
I. THE DIAGNOSIS OF PRELIMINARY SIGNS, 38.
II. STRUCTURAL WEAKNESSES, ECONOMIC AND
POLITICAL, 39. III. THE DESERTION OF THE
INTELLECTUALS, 52. IV. CLASSES AND CLASS
ANTAGONISMS, 63. V. SUMMARY, 79.
_Chapter_ III. FIRST STAGES OF REVOLUTION 82
I. THE ETERNAL FIGARO, 82. II. THE EVENTS OF THE
FIRST STAGES, 85. III. SPONTANEITY OR PLANNING? 94.
IV. THE ROLE OF FORCE, 105. V. THE HONEYMOON, 111.
_Chapter_ IV. TYPES OF REVOLUTIONISTS 113
I. THE CLICHÉS, 113. II. ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL POSITION:
RANK AND FILE, 117. III. ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL
POSITION: LEADERS, 123. IV. CHARACTER AND DISPOSITION,
129. V. SUMMARY, 145.
_Chapter_ V. THE RULE OF THE MODERATES 148
I. THE PROBLEM OF THE MODERATES, 148. II. EVENTS
DURING THE RULE OF THE MODERATES, 151. III. DUAL
SOVEREIGNTY, 161. IV. WEAKNESSES OF THE MODERATES,
166. V. THE FAILURE OF THE MODERATES, 176.
_Chapter_ VI. THE ACCESSION OF THE EXTREMISTS 179
I. THE COUP D’ÉTAT, 179. II. ORGANIZATION OF THE
EXTREMISTS, 181. III. FITNESS OF THE EXTREMISTS,
193. IV. THE MACHINERY OF DICTATORSHIP, 206.
_Chapter_ VII. REIGNS OF TERROR AND VIRTUE 212
I. PERVASIVENESS OF THE TERROR, 212. II. THE TERROR
AND THE OUTSIDER, 214. III. THE TERROR AND THE
INSIDER: THE RELIGIOUS PARALLEL, 220. IV. WHAT MAKES
THE TERROR? 236.
_Chapter_ VIII. THERMIDOR 244
I. UNIVERSALITY OF THE THERMIDOREAN REACTION,
244. II. AMNESTY AND REPRESSION, 247. III. RETURN
OF THE CHURCH, 255. IV. THE SEARCH FOR PLEASURE,
261. V. SUMMARY, 270.
_Chapter_ IX. A SUMMARY OF THE WORK OF REVOLUTIONS 272
I. CHANGES IN INSTITUTIONS AND IDEAS, 272. II. SOME
TENTATIVE UNIFORMITIES, 286. III. A PARADOX OF
REVOLUTION, 299.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 303
I. HISTORICAL WRITING ON THE FOUR REVOLUTIONS,
303. II. THE WISDOM OF THE AGES, 310. III. THE
MARXISTS, 312. IV. THE SOCIOLOGY OF REVOLUTIONS,
315.
INDEX 321
FOREWORD
This book is a modified and expanded form of lectures delivered in
Boston in February and March, 1938, on the foundation of the Lowell
Institute. I wish here to thank the officers of the Lowell Institute
for giving me the opportunity to initiate this study, and my audience
for the co-operation an audience--perhaps without knowing it--always
gives. I wish also to thank those of my friends and colleagues with
whom I have discussed the subject of this book for the last two
years, and especially Professor L. J. Henderson, the effects of whose
care, taste and judgment ought to be evident everywhere in a work
he has gone over with great thoroughness; Professor W. S. Ferguson,
who first called to my attention the inadequacy of important parts
of my uniformities when applied to Athenian history; Professor R.
B. Merriman, who very kindly placed the manuscript of his study of
seventeenth-century revolutions at my disposal, and discussed it with
me to the great profit of the present work; Professors Frederick Merk
and A. M. Schlesinger and Dr. Richard Leopold, Americanists most gentle
with me and helpful in my invasion of a field not my own; Dr. George
Pettee; and Professor Penfield Roberts and Dr. O. H. Taylor who, if
there is anything in the adage that _solvitur ambulando_, have had a
large part in this book. Finally, I am very grateful to my research
assistant, Miss Bernice Hempel, for patient and discerning help alike
in the gathering and in the organizing of my materials.
CRANE BRINTON
PEACHAM, VERMONT.
July 2, 1938.
_Chapter_ ONE THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF REVOLUTIONS
_I. The Necessity for a Scientific Approach_
We are today very much aware of revolution. The bare word itself is
likely to set stirring a whole set of sentiments and associations in
the mind of any modern man or woman. For some, perhaps for most in the
older democracies of the West, these sentiments are not far from fear
and dislike. For others, revolution is still a word of good promise,
a beginning of better things, a necessary part of the progress of the
race. Once, indeed, and not so very long ago, hopeful liberals could
believe that certain favored countries--England, the United States,
Germany, the good little countries of Europe like Switzerland and
Holland, possibly even the classic land of revolution, France--had
outgrown this kind of political instability. Freedom in the long run
might slowly broaden down from precedent to precedent everywhere,
even in South and Central America. All this seems, like so many other
Victorian hopes, very distant to us now.
For our postwar world has produced a series of revolutions by no means
limited to lands in general political disrepute. Russia in 1917,
Central Europe in 1918-19, Italy in 1923, Spain in 1931, Germany again
in 1933, all underwent violent changes of government to which the name
revolution is usually attached. Some of these revolutionary movements
were, indeed, not strictly in the nineteenth-century pattern: they were
put through, not in the name of liberty, equality, fraternity, but
in the name of authority, discipline, power. They were, if you like,
authoritarian, conservative, reactionary. Hitler and Mussolini did not
talk the language of Hampden, Patrick Henry, Mirabeau, Mazzini, nor
even that of Marx and Engels.
The older democracies, as yet apparently stable politically, have
undergone a series of economic strains which certainly appear more
serious than similar strains they survived successfully enough in
the nineteenth century. The breakdown of the Versailles settlement,
the return of international anarchy, the difficulties of government
finances, contributed further to a sense of insecurity in these
democracies. Recent events in Russia have, to put it mildly, bewildered
and discouraged those outside that country who in one degree or another
looked hopefully on the Russian revolution. The whole tone of writing
on politics has changed, especially in countries like England, France,
and the United States. Prophets of doom are now almost as common as
prophets of progress used to be in the good old days when we could
blandly rejoice in clichés like “Evolution, not Revolution.”
Even in the United States, where pleasant memories of 1776 are
incorporated into such unrevolutionary bodies as the Daughters of the
American Revolution, the great crash of 1929 set all sorts of people
to worrying about, or hoping for, a catastrophic overturn. Sober
people in conservative circles began to discuss whether a little farm
in Vermont wouldn’t give them subsistence and reasonable safety from
the wandering robber-bands of the coming Reign of Terror. Hopeful
radicals, too well read in Marx, began to discuss whether economic
privation might not make a majority of American workers realize that
they are a proletariat, and not a group of potential capitalists. Down
through Hollywood and the columnists there ran the naïvely cynical
catch phrase, “Comes the revolution....”
It is, then, almost impossible for us in these days to be indifferent
toward revolutions. Yet we shall not go far towards understanding them
unless we can maintain toward them, if not indifference, at least
detachment. This last word, one may hope, is not just a favorable
way of saying what “indifference” says unfavorably. A physician may
feel far from indifferent towards his patient, but he will not be a
good physician unless he is detached in his observation and treatment
of his patient’s malady. We may dodge here a whole lurking set of
philosophical difficulties, and say simply that what we commonly call
modern science has as one of its basic elements the detachment of the
scientist. The scientist, _as a private person_, may love and hate,
hope and fear; _as a scientist_, he must try to leave all this behind
when he enters his laboratory or his study.
To attempt to maintain in the analysis of human affairs the detachment
of the physicist or the chemist is very difficult, and to a great many
upright and intelligent people seems unprofitable, even treasonous. You
should, they feel, hate Hitler all the time, before, while, and after
you start explaining him; otherwise your explanation may edge into
extenuation.
But to understand all is by no means to pardon all. At any rate, the
scientific understanding of the place of the mosquito in yellow fever
has not led us to tolerance of, or indifference to, that particular
type of mosquito. Quite the contrary. We cannot, of course, expect such
immediate and apparently spectacular results as were obtained with
yellow fever from the study of man in society, from what are a bit
optimistically called the social sciences--anthropology, economics,
political science, history, sociology, and the like. But we may well
consider the possibility of approaching the study of revolutions in
something of the spirit the natural scientist carries to his work.
Our aim in the following study is the modest one of attempting to
establish, as the scientist might, certain first approximations of
uniformities to be noted in the course of four successful revolutions
in modern states; the English revolution of the 1640’s, the American
revolution, the great French revolution, and the recent--or
present--revolution in Russia. We must make clear at the start some of
the limitations of our study: this is not the only, nor necessarily the
best, way of studying revolutions; this study does not pretend to be
a complete sociology of revolutions; it deliberately limits its field
to four relatively well-studied revolutions; its conclusions are to be
taken to refer to these four revolutions, and any extension of such
conclusions to other revolutions, or to revolutions in general, is to
be undertaken with caution and humility.
Were we attempting to find an ideal type for revolution, were we
seeking a kind of Platonic idea of revolution, we might be fairly
reproached with picking four nice neat revolutions which made almost
too good a case, too perfect a pattern. But we are making no such
attempt. It should be very clear that not all revolutions, past,
present, and future, will conform to the pattern here drawn. Our four
revolutions are not necessarily even “typical” in the sense the word
“typical” has for literary critics or moralists. They are simply four
important revolutions with which we have chosen to begin a work of
systematization still in its infancy. Subtler systematizations will
come later, from other and more advanced workers. Above all, we do
not here claim any prophetic wisdom. We do not expect to be able to
predict from this study just when and where the next revolution will
break out on this earth.
At this point it may be objected that the social sciences have been
aping the natural sciences for several centuries, and got no further
forward, that they ought therefore to try and stand on their own
feet, that they ought to work out their own methods without bothering
about what has been done in the natural sciences. There is a kernel
of truth in this objection. Certainly writers like Fourier or Herbert
Spencer, who have proclaimed themselves literally the Newtons or the
Darwins of social science, appear to have gone wrong from the start.
A prophetic soul drawing upon philosophy and the arts--a Spengler,
for instance--will probably make at least as much sense out of the
study of men in society as will the social scientist who tries to take
over _unaltered_ the methods and materials of physics or biology. Yet
one hesitates to turn the study of men in society wholly over to the
Spenglers. The long tradition of what may be called rationalism has
in our society made conquests not to be lightly abandoned even in
this postwar world. That tradition makes it imperative to attempt to
continue, and extend, the kind of work we call scientific.
There has, indeed, been a great deal of nonsense written under the
protecting name of science. It is easy to sympathize with Mr. Max
Lerner’s outburst: “I am frankly skeptical when people working on the
study of societies begin arming themselves with scalpels, slide-rules
and test-tubes. For they are promising more than they can possibly
fulfill. The protestations of complete objectivity that we have been
hearing from students of society in the past quarter century take on a
religious note: it is as if they were washing themselves in the blood
of the scientific lamb.” Some of Mr. Lerner’s objections to the appeal
to science and to scientific detachment are probably those of the
romantic lover of his fellow-men, and are almost wholly irreducible by
logic or experience; but some are those of the skeptic and critic, and
such objections can be shown to rest in good part on a misunderstanding
of scientific method not by any means limited to Mr. Lerner. So common
is this misunderstanding that we must attempt here to put the matter
as clearly as possible in a very few words. This will be in no sense a
detour; it will be an essential approach to our subject.
_II. The Bare Elements of Scientific Methods_
First, not even the “exact” sciences like astronomy or physics are
exact in the sense of “absolute” or “infallible.” Their firmest laws
or uniformities are to be regarded as tentative. They may be upset at
any time by further work. But at any given moment they are not to be
tampered with unless they prove unreliable _in relation to observed
facts_. A few mystics, inhibited in our crass society from the delights
of navel-gazing, have made too much of the contemporary revolution in
physics. Newton’s laws have not been “disproved”; nor has the principle
of indeterminacy been so firmly established as to make all men equally
good at the game of poker. What has happened in modern physics, as far
as a layman can judge, is that the physicist has been sharply reminded
that even his neatest uniformities are not absolutes, but are subject
to correction, that he is safer in regarding these uniformities as
based on observations rather than on the will of God, or the nature of
things, or on reality.
This brings us easily to the second point. Science makes no attempt
to study or describe reality--certainly not ultimate reality. Science
is not even concerned with truth, in the sense that word has for
theologians, for most philosophers, and for a good many other people.
The desire to find a final cause, an unmoved mover, a _Ding an sich_,
seems to be so common in men that we have no grounds for believing that
this search is not, in one form or another, a fairly constant element
in human society. Only, scientists _as scientists_ can have no part in
such a search. This by no means need be taken as indicating that the
search is silly, and ought to be stopped. Some scientists have lately
been, _as private persons_, very active in the search, and indeed,
after the manner of such searches, successful. Faith has long since
found God in unlikelier places than the atom. But such discoveries are
not the discoveries of science. That discipline is based, not on faith,
but on skepticism, on a skepticism that will not even worry itself over
its status in the universe. And so the scientist works on serenely,
undisturbed by the philosopher’s final thrust: that to be constantly
skeptical is to believe in doubt, which is after all a form of faith.
Third, the scientist by no means confines himself to “the facts and
nothing but the facts.” Dangerous metaphysical depths yawn at this
point, but we shall have to try and go ahead in spite of them. The
popularization of Baconian ideas on induction is probably the chief
source of the erroneous notion that the scientist does nothing to
the facts he laboriously and virtuously digs up, except to let them
fall neatly into a place they have made for themselves. Actually the
scientist cannot work without a conceptual scheme; and though the
relation between facts and conceptual schemes is not by any means
clear it is at least clear that a conceptual scheme involves something
besides facts.
Let no one be frightened of the technical term “conceptual scheme.”
It is really very simple: thunder and lightning impinge on our senses
of hearing and sight--probably the mere differentiating of this
sound and this flash from other sounds and flashes means that we are
employing a conceptual scheme; certainly when we think of Jupiter
with his bolts, Thor with his hammer, or the electrical discharge of
modern physics, we have clearly arranged our sense-perceptions in
accordance with definite conceptual schemes. We possess, indeed, the
basic elements of three different theories of thunder and lightning,
three different uniformities in these phenomena. But the only important
reasons why we should prefer our electrical discharge to Jupiter or
Thor _as a conceptual scheme_ is that it is more useful, and that we
can by using it get on better also with other conceptual schemes we use
for similar purposes. But in the sense which the word _true_ has for
the theologian, and most moralists and philosophers, our electrical
discharge is not a bit _truer_ than the old notions about Jupiter and
Thor.
We may even use two contradictory conceptual schemes, choosing one or
the other at convenience, or from habit. We are all of us educated out
of the old Ptolemaic conceptual scheme, which saw the sun moving about
a stationary earth, into the Copernican conceptual scheme, which sees
the earth moving about a stationary sun. Einstein, of course, used a
conceptual scheme different from both of these, but most of us are not
yet up to Einstein; in daily life we all, however, contentedly say
“the sun rises,” and should be very pedantic indeed if we insisted on
saying in Copernican terms “the earth has revolved into sight of the
sun.” More important is the present situation in respect to conceptual
schemes in modern physics. We learn, as far as laymen can learn in
such matters, that physicists find it convenient in the study of
certain problems to regard the electron as a particle, or at least a
point, and in the study of other problems to regard it as a wave. Some
physicists, many of them of very great distinction indeed, are troubled
by this contradiction, and have sought to work out a single conceptual
scheme which will make the electron a nice logical unity again. One
suspects, however, that these physicists have left in them a little of
the philosopher, and that it is their philosophical selves that demand
unity in the electron. For other physicists get on admirably with this
logically impossible electron, wave when they want it to be a wave,
particle when they want it to be a particle. As scientists, they are
quite content to solve their problems, which deal wholly with this
world and can be solved in this world, though no doubt not in the next,
without regard for ultimate truth.
The scientist, then, goes to work roughly in some such fashion as
this: he starts with a conceptual scheme of some sort, and questions,
or even hypotheses, he frames in terms of that scheme; he then hunts
for a suitable supply of facts--and a fact in the natural sciences we
define with Professor L. J. Henderson as “an empirically verifiable
statement about phenomena in terms of a conceptual scheme”; these
facts he seeks to arrange in uniformities or theories which will
answer his questions, and perhaps suggest other questions; he then
immerses himself again in the hunt for facts, and emerges with new
or modified uniformities. The scientist is not interested in where
his conceptual scheme came from, or whether it preceded or followed
on facts, or whether it is “subjective” and the facts “objective.”
These questions he leaves to the philosophers, who have not settled
them yet after two thousand years of debate. But the scientist does,
by his recognition that a conceptual scheme is as essential to his
activity as are observed facts, emancipate himself completely from
self-styled “scientific” materialists, positivists, empiricists, who
naively assert that our sense-perceptions are somehow in themselves
an orderly and sole reality, or a “reflection” of such a reality.
For, note particularly, the facts with which the scientist deals
are not phenomena, sense-perceptions, the “external world,” those
dear absolutes of innocent positivists, but merely statements about
phenomena. A properly verifiable statement about Cromwell is then as
much a fact as the reading of a thermometer in a laboratory.
Fourth, though the scientist is very careful indeed about matters of
definition, and is as disdainful of sloppiness and bad thinking as
any logician can be, he distrusts rigidity and attempts at perfection
here as elsewhere. He is interested less in beauty and neatness of
definition than in having his definitions fit not his sentiments and
aspirations, but the facts. Above all, he does not dispute over words.
He is less interested in the accurate theoretical distinction between a
mountain and a hill than he is in making sure that he is dealing with
concrete elevations on this earth. He does not expect class-terms to
be perfect, mutually exclusive; when he distinguishes between a plant
and an animal, he is not at all offended if you call his attention to
a living thing that seems to belong to both his classes at once. He
sets to work studying the living thing and will, if necessary, modify
his class-terms. But he is quite willing also, if it proves more
convenient, to set up a new class-term of borderline plant-animals.
This simple willingness to be guided by convenience is of course one of
the amazing things about the scientist and one of the most difficult
for us who have not had a scientific training to adapt ourselves to.
Most of us are early trained to prefer our opinions to our convenience.
Finally, scientific thinking cannot be, except perhaps in suggesting
problems, what nowadays most of us know well enough as wishful
thinking. The scientist’s own hopes and fears, his own standards of
what he would like to have prevail on this earth, must be kept as far
as possible out of his work, and especially out of his observations of,
or dealings with, facts. How far such hopes and fears and standards
enter into his choice of conceptual schemes, how far they influence
the kind of questions he asks, are difficult problems we may perhaps
be permitted to dodge. Sufficient that the techniques of most of the
established sciences provide a very effective check on the cruder forms
of wishful thinking. History--because it has been so long an art and
a craft perhaps the most respectable of the social sciences--provides
in the technical training undergone by most professional historians
a surprisingly effective and not wholly dissimilar check on the more
violent forms of partisan writing and thinking.
All in all, there is no reason why we should feel that the natural
scientist uses methods, sets standards, forever quite unattainable by
the social scientist. Natural science as the more innocent materialists
of the last century saw it--exact, infallible, a cosmos built on
induction--must seem remote to a struggling economist or sociologist.
But natural science as it has always been understood by its ablest
practitioners and is now widely understood--natural science as
expounded methodologically by a Poincaré--is no such thin substitute
for Divine Providence, no such metaphysical abstraction. Only God is
exact, infallible, omniscient, unchanging, and modern science has been
content to leave the search for God to disciplines fitted by long
success for such a search.
_III. The Application of Scientific Methods to This Study_
Of the bare elements of scientific thinking--conceptual scheme, facts,
logical operations, uniformities--the social sciences in general come
out well on the score of facts. Even in the field of history, where
neither laboratory nor questionnaire methods of research are available,
our existing supply of facts is surprisingly good. You cannot draw
Cromwell back to life, but neither can you call the dinosaurs back to
life. What we know about Cromwell is in many ways as reliable as what
we know about dinosaurs. To say that history is a fable agreed upon,
or a set of tricks played upon the dead, is to slander, or at least
to misjudge, the great body of industrious and sober workers who have
carried on the study of history. Notably the last century or so has
seen the formation of a body of research workers in history who, with
all their faults, maintain standards comparable in some ways to those
maintained by similar groups in the natural sciences. These research
workers do not indeed uncover the simple raw material of facts. The
humblest antiquarian arranges the facts he digs out of his documents
into some kind of pattern. Such a process of arrangement, however, is
not the conscious theorizing of the physical scientist. It was never
even learned as the scientist learns the theoretical scaffolding of
his science, but was acquired almost as the manual worker acquires a
craft. It is this craftsman’s technique for the gathering, winnowing,
and assaying of facts about the behavior of men in the past that is
the great strength of the professional historian. If you asked such a
historian what a fact is, he would probably be greatly puzzled at the
question, and usually quite unable to answer in adequate general terms.
Any good philosopher could convict him of complete epistemological
_naïveté_. But in his daily work the historian shows a very keen
appreciation of the difference between a fact and a theory, and a real
ability to manipulate and arrange facts.
We shall, then, rely on the historians to supply us with the necessary
facts. For the English, American, and even for the French, revolutions,
the body of reputable and reasonably detached historical writing is
very large indeed. Passions still run high over the French revolution,
but they are being cooled slowly in an increasing flood of printer’s
ink; the chief trouble, indeed, is to choose from among this enormous
mass of material. The Russian revolution is still too near us to be
regarded by professional historians as capable of the kind of treatment
the guild likes to give. Its source material is scattered about, and
much of it is still withheld from scholars. Language is a barrier only
gradually being overcome here in the West. Yet our supply of facts
about the Russian revolution is by no means so slight, or so poor in
quality, as to hinder our enterprise. Twenty years is a long time, and
the early stages of the Russian revolution have been surveyed, if not
_sine ira et studio_, at least with relative detachment. And then both
lovers and haters of the present regime in Russia are almost equally
articulate, and can be balanced off one against the other by anyone who
cares to take the trouble.
Our conceptual scheme will give us a great deal more difficulty than
will our supply of facts. In the social sciences, at least, the
distinction between a conceptual scheme and a metaphor is still an
uncertain one, and there is no great harm in looking at our present
problem as a search for a framework of not too-literary metaphor to
hold together the details of our revolutions. Yet one of the most
obvious of such metaphors, that of a storm, has several faults. One can
outline it readily: at first there are the distant rumblings, the dark
clouds, the ominous calm before the outbreak, all this corresponding
to what our textbooks used confidently to list as “causes” of the
revolution; then comes the sudden onset of wind and rain, clearly the
beginnings of the revolution itself; the fearful climax follows, with
the full violence of wind, rain, thunder, and lightning, even more
clearly the Reign of Terror; at last comes the gradual subsidence,
the brightening skies, sunshine again, as in the orderly days of the
Restoration. But all this is too literary and too dramatic for our
purposes, too close altogether to the metaphor as used by prophets
and preachers. Insofar as it can be brought into use as a conceptual
scheme it rests on a science, that of meteorology, which has little
direct help to offer the social scientist.
At almost the opposite side there is the conceptual scheme of a social
system in equilibrium, as best developed in Pareto’s _The Mind and
Society_. The tender-minded are often annoyed by the term equilibrium,
which has for them mechanistic overtones damaging to the dignity of
man. In modern science, however, the term has proved useful in fields
such as chemistry and physiology, well outside that of the mechanics
in which it had its origin. Furthermore, the word as the practicing
scientist uses it has no metaphysical connotations whatever. The
concepts of a physico-chemical system in equilibrium, a social system
in equilibrium, John Jones’s body in equilibrium, do not in the least
prejudice the immortality of anyone’s soul, nor the ultimate victory
of Vitalists over Mechanists. The concept of equilibrium helps us to
understand, and sometimes to use or to control, specific machines,
chemicals, and even medicines. It may some day help us to understand,
and within limits to mold, men in society.
Its use in the study of revolutions is in principle clear. A society
in perfect equilibrium might be--purely theoretically--defined as a
society every member of which had at a given moment all that he could
possibly desire and was in a state of absolute contentment. Obviously
any real society can be in but an imperfect equilibrium, a condition in
which the varying and conflicting desires and habits of individuals and
groups of individuals are in complex mutual adjustment, an adjustment
so complex that no mathematical treatment of it seems possible at
present. As new desires arise, or as old desires grow stronger
in various groups, or as environmental conditions change, and as
institutions fail to change, a relative disequilibrium may arise, and
what we call a revolution breaks out. We know that in the human body,
for instance, the disequilibrium we call disease is accompanied by
certain definite reactions which tend to restore the body to something
like what it was before the onset of the disease. It seems quite likely
that in a social system in disequilibrium there is something of the
same kind of reaction towards the old conditions, and that this helps
explain why revolutions do not turn out entirely as revolutionists
want them to. The old adjustments tend to re-establish themselves, and
produce what in history is known as the reaction or the restoration.
In social systems, as in the human organism, a kind of natural healing
force, a _vis medicatrix naturae_ tends almost automatically to balance
one kind of change with another and restorative change.
This conceptual scheme of the social equilibrium is probably in the
long run the most useful for the sociologist of revolutions. It is
for our purposes, however, a bit too ambitious. It needs for full
success a more accurate grasp of more numerous variables than we can at
present manage. Though it need not necessarily be formulated in precise
mathematical terms, it ought to be formulated in terms more close to
those of mathematics than we can honestly employ. In other words, it is
better suited to a complete sociology of revolutions, or a “dynamics of
revolution,” than to our modest study of the anatomy of four specific
revolutions. We are here attempting merely a preliminary analysis,
attempting to classify and systematize at a relatively low level of
complexity.
Though it has one very grave defect, the best conceptual scheme for
our purposes would seem to be one borrowed from pathology. We shall
regard revolutions--wholly, be it understood, for convenience, and
with no implications of eternal and absolute validity, and with no
moral overtones--as a kind of fever. The outlines of our fever chart
work out readily enough. In the society during the generation or so
before the outbreak of revolution, in the old regime, there will be
found signs of the coming disturbance. Rigorously, these signs are not
quite symptoms, since when the symptoms are fully enough developed
the disease is already present. They are perhaps better described as
_prodromal_ signs, indications to the very keen diagnostician that a
disease is on its way, but not yet sufficiently developed to be the
disease. Then comes a time when the full symptoms disclose themselves,
and when we can say the fever of revolution has begun. This works up,
not regularly but with advances and retreats, to a crisis, frequently
accompanied by delirium, the rule of the most violent revolutionists,
the Reign of Terror. After the crisis comes a period of convalescence,
usually marked by a relapse or two. Finally the fever is over, and
the patient is himself again, perhaps in some respects actually
strengthened by the experience, immunized at least for a while from a
similar attack, but certainly not wholly made over into a new man. The
parallel goes through to the end, for societies which undergo the full
cycle of revolution are perhaps in some respects the stronger for it;
but they by no means emerge entirely remade.
This conceptual scheme may be used without committing its users in any
sense to an organic theory of society. The organic theory, the motion
of a “body politic,” is a metaphor developed by political philosophers
into a kind of metaphysics. A good German idealist can find almost
anything he wants in the organic theory, from the categorical
imperative to a justification of anti-Semitism and a condemnation of
parliamentary democracy. The word “society” is used in this study as a
convenient way of designating the observed behavior of men in groups,
their interactions, and that is all. We find it convenient to apply
to certain observed changes in given societies a conceptual scheme
borrowed from medicine. We should find it inconvenient and misleading
to extend that conceptual scheme and talk of a body politic, with a
soul, a general will, heart, nerves, and so on. When, for instance,
we apply terms like “prodrome,” “fever,” “crisis,” to the French
revolution, we are very definitely _not_ thinking of a personified
France which suffers all these. To some this distinction may seem only
a verbal one, and unimportant. It is, however, based on one of the
most important distinctions in human thinking--the distinction between
metaphysics and science.
The really grave defect of this fever chart lies deeper, in the
apparently unalterable fact that our ordinary language, to which words
like “fever,” “disease,” and “crisis” clearly belong, is only in small
part logical. The intellectuals of our generation are rather inclined
to worry over the non-logical overtones of words, which is perhaps a
good sign for the social sciences. Mathematicians, most scientists,
and even symbolic logicians, manage to say what they mean, and can
communicate exactly with one another. When, however, a given act by a
given person, John Doe, is referred to by five separate reporters as
persevering, firm, determined, obstinate, and pig-headed, you obviously
learn as much about the feelings of the reporters towards John Doe as
about John Doe himself. The reporters are trying to spread abroad their
own feelings, not to describe John Doe. Many people from Thucydides
through Bacon and Machiavelli to Pareto have understood this use of
words. It has been noted even by people like Jeremy Bentham and Mr.
Stuart Chase, who cannot perhaps be said to have fully understood it.
In our own day a dozen disciplines, from psychology and philology to
political theory, have made us keenly aware that propaganda lurks in
every syllable, in every accent. This awareness seems not to have
resulted in any appreciable drying-up of propaganda.
Now nobody wants to have a fever. The very word is full of unpleasant
suggestions. Our use of terms borrowed from medicine is likely, at the
very least, to arouse in many readers sentiments which bar further
understanding. We seem to be damning revolutions by comparing them with
a disease. To those of liberal sympathies and hopes we shall seem to be
condemning in advance such great efforts of the free human spirit as
the French revolution. To the Marxists our whole inquiry has probably
been suspect from the moment we wrote doubtingly about the American
proletariat, and our conceptual scheme will appear to them simply the
expected bourgeois dishonesty. Yet it seems too bad to offend even
the Marxists unnecessarily. Protestations of good intent are probably
useless, but we may none the less record that consciously at least
we are aware of no feelings of dislike for revolutions in general.
We do indeed dislike cruelty whether in revolutions or in stable
societies. But the thought of revolutions sets up in us no train of
unhappy associations. Unconsciously and subconsciously we may well feel
horror of revolution to our thoroughly bourgeois marrow, but without
benefit of Freud we dare not commit ourselves about our unconscious. Of
more persuasive force with the distrustful is perhaps the fact that,
biologically, fever in itself is a good thing rather than a bad thing
for the organism that survives it. To use a figure of speech, the fever
burns up the wicked germs, as the revolution destroys wicked people
and harmful and useless institutions. On close and fair inspection our
conceptual scheme may even seem to have overtones of implication too
favorable, rather than too unfavorable, to revolutions in general.
Facts and conceptual scheme being thus disposed of, it remains to
consider the possibility of finding some kind of uniformities in
the way in which our facts fit into our conceptual scheme. Most of
us would assume that on the rough level of common sense some kind
of uniformities can be discerned in history. But at least among
professional historians there is a tendency to deny that these
uniformities are real and important, and we must therefore give the
matter brief attention. In a recent review of Professor W. C. Abbott’s
magisterial edition of Cromwell’s speeches and writings, a learned
and conventional English historian wrote that “it is unfortunate that
Professor Abbott has thought to elucidate the English revolution by
comparing it with the American and French revolutions. Revolutionary
technique undoubtedly interests a world familiar with the writings of
Marx and Trotsky and the method of Lenin, but comparisons in history
as elsewhere are odious and revolutions are more remarkable for their
particular differences than for their common elements.” This is
undoubtedly an extreme view, and the English have for the last century
and more been insistent that their revolution was unique--so unique as
to have been practically no revolution at all.
A full consideration of the problem of historical uniformities would
be very long, and might well end in the cloudland of metaphysics. We
shall have to be content with the crude assertion that the doctrine of
the absolute uniqueness of events in history seems nonsense. History
is essentially an account of the behavior of men, and if the behavior
of men is not subject to any kind of systematizing, this world is even
more cock-eyed than the seers would have it. But you have only to look
at a page of Theophrastus or of Chaucer to realize that Greeks of more
than two thousand years ago and Englishmen of six centuries ago seem
extraordinarily like Americans of today. Even Mr. Christopher Morley’s
jazz version of _The Trojan Horse_ does not seem unreal. Comparisons
may be odious, but they form the basis of literature as well as of
science, and provide a good deal of the staple of everyday conversation.
As we have seen, an essential element in any attempt to work
scientifically is the detachment of the scientist. In the historian,
this is the ability to keep his observations of what has happened
uninfluenced by what he would like to have happened, or to happen.
We have already encountered this difficulty in our discussion of a
conceptual scheme, where to think of a revolution as a fever seems at
first sight a way of condemning the revolution, of giving it a bad
name. It must be repeated that in all the social sciences genuine
scientific detachment is difficult to attain, and in any “absolute” or
“pure” sense impossible of attainment. Even in the natural sciences,
desire to prove an hypothesis or a theory of one’s own may bring to
the distortion of facts some of the most powerful sentiments in human
beings. But the natural scientist does not want to improve a molecule
or an amoeba--at least, not “morally.” Upon the social scientist,
however, there pours the full force of those sentiments we call moral
as well as those we call selfish. He can hardly avoid wanting to change
what he is studying: not to change it as the chemist changes elements
he compounds, but to change it as the missionary changes the man he
converts. Yet this is just what the social scientist must try to avoid
as a better man would avoid the devil. One of the hardest things on
this earth to do is to describe men or institutions without wanting to
change them, a thing so hard that most people are not even aware that
the two processes are separable. Yet separated they must be if we are
to get anywhere with the social sciences.
In this study we shall make this attempt to describe without
evaluating. It will not be a complete success, for here on this earth
completion is rare. Absolute detachment is a polar region, unfit for
human life; but one might well make an effort to get out of the
steaming jungles, and come a bit closer to the pole. In less figurative
language: it is impossible to study revolutions without having
sentiments about them, but it is quite possible to keep your sentiments
relatively more out of your study than in. And an inch gained here is
worth several ells on less fertile frontiers of the mind.
_IV. Limitations of the Subject_
This willingness to put up with, indeed this expectation of, partial
and incomplete results is one of the distinguishing marks of science.
It would be possible to start out with the intention of discovering
uniformities in all recorded revolutions. To begin with, the hardest
conceivable task is, however, rather the privilege of the philosopher
than that of the scientist. At any rate, it seems now scientifically
unprofitable and therefore unwise to ask the question: What have all
known revolutions in common? The very question shows the logical
limitations of the subject: we can never know _all_ revolutions. Any
answer would have to make up in scope and assurance what it would lack
in concreteness. You might ask: What have all known men in common?
The systematist in biology could indeed list certain uniformities
under _homo sapiens_. But the commoner kind of answer would be that
men all have souls, or that they are all created equal, or even, as
Cicero discovered, that “Nihil est enim unum uni tam simile, tam par,
quam omnes inter nosmet ipsos sumus.” (For no one thing is as like,
as equal, to another one as we human beings are like and equal one to
another.) These answers are all very important, but they are not quite
the sort of thing we are after.
We shall, then, study four revolutions which on the surface seem to
have certain resemblances, and deliberately avoid certain other
types of revolution. Our four took place in the post-medieval Western
world, were “popular” revolutions carried out in the name of “freedom”
for a majority against a privileged minority, and were successful;
that is, they resulted in the revolutionists’ becoming the legal
government. Anything like a complete sociology of revolutions would
have to take account of other kinds of revolution, and notably of
two, the revolution initiated by authoritarians or oligarchies, or
conservatives, that is, the “Rightist” revolution; and the abortive
revolution.
No doubt there are sentimental distortions involved in distinguishing
our four revolutions as “popular,” but even words heavily encrusted
with sentiments have reference to concrete things; and the English,
French, American, and Russian revolutions were attempts to ensure a
different kind of life from that aimed at in the Fascist revolution in
Italy and the National Socialist revolution in Germany. If, however,
these Fascist revolutions seem too recent to be judged, or even to be
catalogued, fairly, we may find in the time of troubles in Athens at
the end of the fifth century B.C. less controversial evidence. Here the
revolution of 411 B.C. was the work of the conservative or oligarchic
group, and was directed against the old democratic constitution under
which Athens had been ruled since Cleisthenes, if not since Solon. In
the Council of Four Hundred set up by the successful revolutionists,
the extreme oligarchs split with the moderates. After the assassination
of the extremist Phrynicus, and the arrival of bad news from the
front, the moderate Theramenes was able to take over power and set up
a “mixed” constitution, seeking to combine the best of democracy and
oligarchy. Then the fleet, in general strongly democratic, won the
battle of Cyzicus, and paved the way to a fairly complete restoration
of democracy in 410.
The final victory of Sparta led in 404 to a similar revolutionary
cycle in Athens, beginning with the extreme oligarchic rule of the
Thirty Tyrants and ending again with the restoration of democratic
forms. In these movements, the sequence--to use perhaps misleading
modern political analogies--is from Right to Center to Left, or from
Extremists to Moderates to the Old Gang, a sequence clearly quite
different from that we shall encounter in England, France, and Russia.
Those devoted to the concept of social equilibrium will note that
in these Athenian revolutions the tendency seems to be toward the
restoration of old habits and old institutions; and there is much
here--the role of political clubs, for instance, and the varied uses
of violence--familiar to any student of modern revolutions. Yet the
sequence of power, the time-scale, and much else in these Athenian
revolutions mark them off from those we have chosen to study, and
suggest that they belong at least to a different sub-class.
Of abortive revolutions we have numerous examples. Needless to
say, abortiveness is not measured by the failure of revolutionary
movements to live up to the ideals professed by their leaders. We mean
by abortive simply the failure of organized groups in revolt. Thus
the American Civil War is really an almost classical example of an
abortive revolution. So too is the Paris Commune of 1871. The European
revolutions of 1848 were on the surface mostly abortive, though in
many countries they helped bring about important and comparatively
permanent administrative and constitutional changes. An abortive
revolution may, of course, mold the defeated revolutionary group to
an even more heroic determination, and pave the way to continued
underground resistance, plotting, propaganda. The blood of martyrs has
built council halls and presidential palaces as well as churches. The
abortive revolution is especially important in the welding together of
oppressed nationalities, which after a few heroic uprisings attain
a pitch of exalted patriotism and self-pity that makes them almost
unbeatable. Contemporary Ireland and Poland were born of a long series
of revolutions that failed, and in their final emergence as independent
nations they bear the clear and unlovely scars of these great moral
victories. Indeed, in a complete study of revolutions, there would have
to be a special sub-class for revolutions in which a territorial or
“national” group rises against another and dominating territorial or
national group.
Three of our four revolutions--the English, French, and Russian, have
courses in general surprisingly similar. All have a social or class
rather than a territorial or nationalistic basis, though Oxford and
Lancashire, the Vendée, and the Ukraine, suggest that one cannot wholly
neglect these latter factors. All are begun in hope and moderation,
all reach a crisis in a reign of terror, and all end in something like
dictatorship--Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin. The American revolution does
not quite follow this pattern, and is therefore especially useful to us
as a kind of control.
Our revolution was, perhaps predominantly, a territorial and
nationalistic revolution, animated throughout by patriotic American
hatred for the British. On the other hand, it was also in part a social
and class movement, and as time went on its social character came out
more and more strongly. It never quite went through a reign of terror,
though it had many terroristic aspects, usually soft-pedaled in school
and popular histories. All in all, the American revolution presents
a number of interesting problems, and the attempt to integrate some
of its aspects with our other three revolutions promises to extend,
without unduly stretching, the limits of this study. But we must always
remember that the American revolution was in a sense an incomplete one,
that it does not fit perfectly our conceptual scheme, that it does
not show the victory of the extremists over the moderates. We must be
even more cautious than with the other revolutions when we attempt to
discern uniformities in the anatomy of the American revolution.
We choose then, deliberately, to isolate four revolutions for analysis,
quite aware that there are many other revolutions on record. This
procedure has another distinct advantage, that it enables us to dodge a
good deal of unprofitable debate over the definition of “revolution.”
Pages have been spent on the question as to whether to speak of an
“Industrial Revolution” (which began about 1760 and is in a sense still
going on) is or is not an abuse of the word “revolution.” Writers on
politics have worried over the differences between political and social
revolution, between a _coup d’état_, a _putsch_, and a revolution. We
propose to avoid this tangle by the simple, if metaphysically somewhat
disingenuous, device of declaring that since the movements with which
we are concerned are commonly called revolutions, they may be so called
once more.
The difference between a revolution and other kinds of changes in
societies is, to judge from many past uses of the term, logically
nearer to that between a mountain and a hill than to that, say, between
the freezing point and the boiling point of a given substance. The
physicist can measure boiling points exactly; the social scientist
cannot measure change by any such exact thermometer, and say exactly
when ordinary change boils over into revolutionary change. One might
flirt with the notion of a “revolt point” for different social systems;
England’s being at, say, 200° in some conventional scale, France’s at
150°, Japan’s at 400°, and so on. But this would be nonsense of the
type altogether too common in the social sciences, which have long
been in the habit of putting up mathematical false fronts. In actual
practice, we let use distinguish for us between a hill and a mountain,
and there is no harm in accepting the decision of use as to what to
call a revolution. The important element in scientific definition
is that the definition should be based on facts, and enable us to
handle facts better; precision and neatness come definitely second,
and are defects if they are achieved by the neglect or distortion of
facts. Obviously in present usage the word revolution is a class-term
covering quite a number of concrete phenomena, from the introduction
of the spinning-mule to the ejection of Porfirio Diaz, and the job
of the systematist is to cling to the general term and devise useful
sub-classifications within it.
To such simple truths are we reduced even before we enter fully into
the study of actual revolutions. Yet the really obvious, the really
commonplace, does not often find its way into print. What gets there
much more often is the literary commonplace, the cliché and the
stereotype, the beliefs men have about things and beings they never
deal with directly. The world of the pulp magazines is a world of
literary commonplaces. Many an intellectual in the world usually
rated above the pulps is driven by a no doubt commendable horror of
the literary commonplace into an equal horror of the obvious. The
scientist can afford no such indulgence. The first job of the scientist
is to be obvious, for only on a firm foundation in the obvious can
he build securely the more complex fabric of a developed science. He
may even have to be a bit insistent and repetitive about the obvious;
for in this modern world of ours, where so much of our experience is
the vicarious experience of sermons, books, pictures, plays, even the
simple souls who love commonplaces have literary commonplaces fobbed
off on them instead of the real thing.
We shall, then, hope that whatever uniformities we can detect in the
revolutions we are analyzing will turn out to be obvious, to be just
what any sensible man already knew about revolutions. We shall be
genuinely disappointed if the anatomy of revolutions does not turn
out to be a familiar one. It will seem a sufficient gain if these
uniformities can be listed, recorded, as uniformities. Those whose
appetites demand great discoveries are, then, warned in advance. Here
they will find poor fare. Nor is this said in any spirit of mock
humility. A literary saw, now almost folk-wisdom, but still pretty
literary, is scornful over the mountain which labored and brought
forth only a ridiculous mouse. That mountain has perhaps never had due
recognition for what is surely a rather remarkable biological feat.
Moreover, the mouse was at least alive. Most mountains, when they go in
for this sort of thing, produce nothing better than lava, steam, and
hot air.
_Chapter_ TWO THE OLD REGIMES
_I. The Diagnosis of Preliminary Signs_
From France, which has long carried out a kind of linguistic Free
Trade, comes the phrase “old regime.” Applied to the history of France,
it covers roughly the society of the last two-thirds of the eighteenth
century, the generation or two preceding the revolution of 1789. We may
reasonably extend its use to describe the varied societies out of which
our revolutions emerged. Following our conceptual scheme, we shall look
in these societies for something like a revolutionary prodrome, for a
set of preliminary signs of the coming revolution.
Such a search must not be undertaken without one important caution.
Disorder in some sense appears to be endemic in all societies, and
certainly in our Western society. The historian turned diagnostician
can find evidences of disorders and discontents in almost any society
he chooses to study. If a stable, or healthy, society is defined as one
in which there are no expressions of discontent with the government
or with existing institutions, in which no laws are ever broken, then
there are no stable or healthy societies. Not even the totalitarian
state, one suspects, can live up to this standard.
Our normal or healthy society, then, will not be one in which there
are no criticisms of the government or the ruling class, no gloomy
sermons on the moral decay of the times, no Utopian dreams of a better
world around the corner, no strikes, no lock-outs, no unemployment,
no crime waves, no New Deals. All we can expect of what we may call a
healthy society is that there should be no striking excess of this sort
of thing, and perhaps also that most people should behave as if they
felt that, with all its faults, the society were a going concern. Then
we may look about for the kind of signs just described--discontents
expressed in words or deeds--and try to estimate their seriousness.
We shall, of course, very soon find that we are dealing with a large
number of variables, that for given societies studied in their old
regimes these variables combine variously and in different proportions,
and that in some cases certain variables are apparently absent
altogether or nearly so. We are surely unlikely to find in all the
cases we study one clear, omnipresent symptom, so that we could say:
when you find _x_ or _y_ in a society, you know that a revolution is
a month, or a year, or a decade, or any time in the future. On the
contrary, symptoms are apt to be many, varied, and by no means neatly
combined in a pattern. We shall be lucky if, to borrow another medical
term, they form a recognizable syndrome.
_II. Structural Weaknesses, Economic and Political_
As good children of our age, we are bound to start any such study as
this with the economic situation. All of us, no matter how little
sympathy we may have with organized communism, betray the extent
of Marx’s influence in the social studies--and of the influences
that influenced Marx--by the naturalness with which we ask the
question: “What had economic interests to do with it all?” Now it is
incontestable that in all four of the societies we are studying the
years preceding the outbreak of revolution witnessed unusually serious
economic, or at least financial, difficulties of a special kind. The
first two Stuarts were in perpetual conflict with their parliaments
over taxes, and the years just before 1640 resounded with complaints
about Ship Money, benevolences, tonnage and poundage and other terms
now strange to us, but once capable of making a hero of a very rich
Buckinghamshire gentleman named John Hampden, who was financially
quite able to pay much larger taxes than he did. Americans need not be
reminded of the part trouble over taxation played in the years just
before the shot fired at Concord defied all the laws of acoustics. “No
taxation without representation” may be rejected by all up-to-date
historians as in itself an adequate explanation of the beginnings of
the American revolution, but the fact remains that it was in the 1770’s
a slogan capable of exciting our fathers to action. In 1789 the French
Estates-General, the calling of which precipitated the revolution,
was made unavoidable by the bad financial state of the government.
Official France in 1789 was financially in as unhappy a way as, until
our own times, one would have believed it possible for a government
to be. In Russia in 1917 financial collapse did not perhaps stand out
so prominently because the Czarist regime had achieved an all-round
collapse in all fields of governmental activity, from war to village
administration. But three years of war had put such a strain on Russian
finances that, even with the support of the Allies, high prices and
scarcity were by 1917 most obvious factors in the general tension.
Yet in all of these societies, it is the _government_ that is in
financial difficulties, not the societies themselves. To put the matter
negatively, our revolutions did not occur in societies economically
backward, nor in societies undergoing widespread economic misery or
depression. You will not find in these societies of the old regime
anything like unusually widespread economic want. In a specific
instance, of course, the standard against which want or depression
is measured must be the standard of living more or less acceptable
to a given group at a given time. What satisfied an English peasant
in 1640 would be misery and want for an Iowa farmer of 1938. It is
possible that certain groups in a society may be in unusual want
even though statistically that abstraction “society as a whole” is
enjoying an increasing--and almost equally abstract--“national income.”
Nevertheless, when national income is rapidly increasing, someone does
get the benefit. We must look more carefully at our four societies in
this respect.
France in 1789 was a very striking example of a rich society with an
impoverished government. The eighteenth century had begun to collect
statistics about itself, and though these would not satisfy a modern
economist they enable us to be very certain about the increasing
prosperity of eighteenth-century France. Any series of indices--foreign
trade, population growth, building, manufactures, agricultural
production--will show a general upward trend all through the eighteenth
century. Here are a few examples: wastelands all over France were
being brought under the plow and in the _élection_ of Melun alone in
two years from 1783 to 1785 uncultivated land was reduced from 14,500
to 10,000 arpents; Rouen in 1787 produced annually cotton cloth worth
fifty millions of _livres_, having at least doubled its production
in a generation; French trade with North Africa (the Barbary Coast)
increased from about 1,000,000 _livres_ in 1740 to 6,216,000 _livres_
in 1788; the total French foreign trade had in 1787 increased nearly
100,000,000 _livres_ in the dozen years since the death of Louis XV in
1774.
Even in our imperfect statistics we can distinguish short-term cyclical
variations, and it seems clear that in some respects, notably in
the wheat harvest, 1788-89 was a bad year. It was, however, by no
means a deep trough year like 1932 for this country. If business men
in eighteenth-century France had kept charts and made graphs, the
lines would have mounted with gratifying consistency through most of
the period preceding the French revolution. Now this prosperity was
certainly most unevenly shared. The people who got the lion’s share of
it seem to have been the merchants, bankers, business men, lawyers,
peasants who ran their own farms as businesses; the middle class, as we
have come to call it. It was precisely these prosperous people who in
the 1780’s were loudest against the government, most reluctant to save
it by paying taxes.
In America, of course, with an empty continent available for the
distressed, general economic conditions in the eighteenth century
show increasing wealth and population, with economic distress a
purely relative matter. There can be no talk of starvation, of
grinding poverty in the New England of the Stamp Act. Even the
minor fluctuations of the business cycle fail to coincide with the
revolution, and the early years of the 1770’s were distinctly years
of prosperity. There were economic stresses and strains in colonial
America, as we shall soon see, but no class ground down with poverty.
Nor is it easy to argue that early Stuart England was less prosperous
than late Tudor England had been. There is rather evidence that,
especially in the years of personal government which preceded the
Long Parliament, England was notably prosperous. Ramsay Muir writes
that “England had never known a more steady or more widely diffused
prosperity and the burden of taxation was less than in any other
country. The coming revolution was certainly not due to economic
distress.” Even in the Russia of 1917, apart from the shocking
breakdown of the machinery of government under war-strain, the
productive capacity of society as a whole was certainly greater than at
any other time in Russian history; and to take again the long view, the
economic graphs had all been mounting for Russia as a whole in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the progress in trade and
production since the abortive revolution of 1905 had been notable.
Our revolutions, then, clearly were not born in societies economically
retrograde; on the contrary, they took place in societies economically
progressive. This does not, of course, mean that no groups within these
societies cherished grievances mainly economic in character. Two main
foci for economic motives of discontent seem to stand out. First, and
much the less important, is the actual misery of certain groups in a
given society. No doubt in all our societies, even in America, there
was a sort of submarginal group of poor people whose release from
certain forms of restraint is a very important feature of revolution
itself. But in studying the preliminary signs of revolution, these
people are not very important. French republican historians have
long insisted on the importance of the bad harvest of 1788, the cold
winter of 1788-89, and the consequent sufferings of the poor. Bread
was relatively dear in that spring when the Estates-General first
assembled. There was apparently a tightening up of business conditions
in America in 1774-75, but certainly nothing like widespread distress
or unemployment. The local sufferings of Boston, considerable under the
Port Bill, were really a part of the revolution itself, and not a sign.
The winter of 1916-17 was certainly a bad one in Russia, with food
rationing in all the cities.
The important thing to note, however, is that French and Russian
history are filled with famines, plagues, bad harvests, sometimes
local, sometimes national in sweep, many of which were accompanied by
sporadic rioting, but in each case only one by revolution. In neither
the English nor the American revolution do we find even this degree
of localized want or famine. Clearly, then, the economic distress of
the under-privileged, though it may well accompany a revolutionary
situation, is not one of the symptoms we need dwell upon. This the
subtler Marxists themselves recognize, and Trotsky has written: “In
reality, the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an
insurrection; if it were, the masses would always be in revolt.”
Of much greater importance is the existence among a group, or groups,
of a feeling that prevailing conditions limit or hinder their economic
activity. We are especially aware of this element in our American
revolution, and Professor A. M. Schlesinger has shown how the
prosperous merchants, their immediate interests damaged by the new
imperial policy of the British government, led an agitation against the
legislation of 1764 and 1765 and helped stir up a discontent among the
less well-to-do which these merchants later found a bit embarrassing.
No doubt, too, that many of the firm spots in the very uneven and
wavering policy of the British government--the Stamp Act and subsequent
disorders, the announced intention of enforcing the Navigation Act, and
so on--did have momentary ill effects on business, did throw men out
of work. The currency question was of course mismanaged in a day when
common sense did not very effectively supplement ignorance of economic
processes. The colonies were always lacking in specie, and business
enterprise suffered from this lack. Paper money, to which recourse was
inevitable, was also an inevitable source of further quarrels between
governors and governed.
The working of economic motives to revolt among possessing classes
normally inclined to support existing institutions is especially clear
among the aristocrats of tidewater Virginia. Largely dependent on a
single crop, tobacco, used to a high standard of living, increasingly
indebted to London bankers, many of the planters hoped to recoup their
fortunes in the western lands they regarded as clearly belonging
to Virginia. George Washington’s own involvements in western land
speculations make one of the favorite topics of the debunkers. By
the Quebec Act of 1774, however, the British government took the
trans-Allegheny lands north of the Ohio from Virginia and other
claimant colonies, and incorporated them with Canada. This act gave a
grievance to others besides the planter-speculator. The closing of this
frontier was also an offense to a class perhaps normally more inclined
to revolt--the restless woodsmen and fur traders, and the only slightly
less restless small pioneer farmers who had already occupied the
Appalachian valleys, and were ready to pour over into the Kentucky and
Ohio country. The Quebec Act in itself does not, of course, explain the
American revolution; but taken with a long series of other acts, the
Stamp Act, the Navigation Act, the Molasses Act, it accounts for the
feeling so evident among active and ambitious groups in America that
British rule was an unnecessary and incalculable restraint, an obstacle
to their full success in life.
In France the years preceding 1789 are marked by a series of measures
which antagonized different groups. With striking awkwardness, the
government offered with one hand what it withdrew with the other.
Tax-reform efforts, never carried through, offended privileged groups
without pleasing the unprivileged. Turgot’s attempted introduction
of _laissez-faire_ into labor relations offended all the vested
interests of the old guilds. The famous tariff reduction treaty with
England in 1786 directly affected French textiles for the worse,
increased unemployment in Normandy and other regions, and gave
the employer class a grievance against the government. So, too, in
seventeenth-century England, there is no doubt that the attempt to
revive obsolete forms of taxation seemed to London or Bristol merchants
a threat to their rising prosperity and importance.
Thus we see that certain economic grievances--usually not in the form
of economic distress, but rather a feeling on the part of some of the
chief enterprising groups that their opportunities for getting on in
this world are unduly limited by political arrangements--would seem to
be one of the symptoms of revolution. These feelings must, of course,
be raised to an effective social pitch by propaganda, pressure-group
action, public meetings, and preferably a few good dramatic riots, like
the Boston Tea Party. As we shall see, these grievances, however close
they are to the pocketbook, must be made respectable, must touch the
soul. What is really but a restraint on a rising and already successful
group, or on several such groups, must appear as rank injustice towards
everyone in the society. Men may revolt partly or even mainly because
they are hindered, or, to use Dr. George Pettee’s expressive word,
_cramped_; but to the world--and, save for a very few hypocrites,
also to themselves--they must appear _wronged_. Revolutions cannot do
without the word “justice.”
All this, however, is rather less than what the Marxists seem to mean
when they talk about the revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth,
and nineteenth centuries as deliberately the work of a class-conscious
bourgeoisie. Not having the benefit of the writings of Marx to go
by, nor indeed those of the still little known Adam Smith, even
eighteenth-century revolutionists and discontented spirits used a very
non-economic vocabulary. Of course the Marxist, aided by Freud, can
reply neatly that economic motivation drove these bourgeois at an un-
or sub-conscious level. The trouble with this, from the point of view
of the person brought up in the conventions of professional historical
research, is that the subconscious never, or rarely, writes documents
or makes speeches. If we confine ourselves to what these bourgeois
said and did, we find plenty of evidence that separate groups--the
American merchants, for instance--felt specific economic grievances,
but no signs that bourgeois, entrepreneurs, business men, were aware
that as a class their interests in free economic expansion were blocked
by existing “feudal” arrangements. Indeed in France a great many
business men were more annoyed by the semi-free trade treaty of 1786
with England than by any other governmental step. Certainly one finds
no trace of men in England or America or France saying: “Organized
feudalism is preventing the triumph of middle-class capitalism. Let
us rise against it.” Nor, as a matter of fact, were there in these
countries just before the revolutions any serious economic barriers
to prevent the clever lad, even in the lower classes, from making
money if he possessed the money-making gifts. Dozens of careers--a
Pâris-Duverney, an Edmund Burke, a John Law, a John Hancock--show this.
Certainly one cannot deny that class antagonisms existed in these
countries; but so far as we can judge, these class antagonisms do not
seem to have a clear and simple economic basis. In twentieth-century
Russia, of course, these antagonisms were expressed in the language
of economics, even though here we shall probably also find that human
sentiments as well as human interests are involved.
To sum up so far, if we look at economic life in these societies in the
years preceding revolution, we note first, that they have been on the
whole prosperous; second, that their governments are chronically short
of money--shorter, that is, than most governments usually are; third,
that certain groups feel that governmental policies are against their
particular economic interests; fourth, that, except in Russia, class
economic interests are not openly advanced in propaganda as a motive
for attempting to overturn existing political and social arrangements.
It is interesting to note here that Professor R. B. Merriman, in a
study of six seventeenth-century revolutions in England, France, the
Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Naples, finds that they all had in
common a financial origin, all began as protests against taxation.
If now we turn from the stresses and strains of economic life to the
actual workings of the machinery of government, we find a much clearer
situation. Here, again, we must not posit a normal condition in which
this machinery works perfectly. Government here on earth is at best a
rough and ready thing, and the governed will always find something to
grumble about, from favoritism in distributing low-number automobile
license plates to post-office pen points. But there are obviously
degrees of governmental inefficiency, and degrees of patience on the
part of the governed. In our four societies the governments seem to
have been relatively inefficient, and the governed relatively impatient.
Indeed, the near-bankruptcy of a government in a prosperous society
might be regarded as good _a priori_ evidence of its inefficiency,
at least in the old days when governments undertook few social or
“socialized” services. France in 1789 is a striking example of
a society the government of which simply no longer works well.
For generations French kings and their ministers had fought the
particularistic tendencies of the provinces to get out of the control
of Paris by devising a whole series of agencies of centralization,
which may be said in a sense to run from the _missi dominici_ of
Charlemagne to the _intendants_ of Richelieu and Louis XIV. Almost as
if they had been Anglo-Saxons, however, they destroyed very little
of the old in the process, so that France in 1789 was like an attic
stuffed full of all kinds of old furniture--including some fine
new chairs that just wouldn’t fit in the living room. We need not
go too deeply into the details of the situation, which can perhaps
be summed up graphically by saying that in the sense in which you
could make a map of the United States showing all our administrative
areas--townships, counties, states--you could not possibly make one
map of the administrative areas of old France. Even the confusion
added to an administrative map of the United States by the various,
and relatively new, federal commissions, bureaus, agencies,
administrations, does not begin to equal that of France in 1789. You
would need at least half a dozen maps to show the criss-cross units of
_paroisse_, _seigneurie_, _baillage_, _sénéchaussée_, _généralité_,
_gouvernement_, _pays d’état et d’élection_, _les cinq grosses fermes_,
_pays de grande et de petite gabelle_--and this is but a beginning.
There is told about Louis XV one of those revealing anecdotes the
actual historical truth of which is unimportant, since they reflect
contemporary opinion of a concrete condition. Traveling in the
provinces, his majesty saw that a town hall or some such building in
which he was to be received had a leaky roof. “Ah, if I were only a
minister, I’d have that fixed,” he remarked. A government of which
such a tale could be told was perhaps despotic, but most certainly
inefficient. In general, it would seem the inefficiency is more readily
recognized by those who suffer from it than is the despotism.
The incompetence of the English government under the first two Stuarts
is much less clear, but one can safely say that the central government
was not as well run, especially under James I, as it had been under
Elizabeth. What is most striking in the English situation is the total
inadequacy to modern government of a tax system based on the modest
needs of a feudal central government. For the government of James I was
beginning to be a modern government, to undertake certain elementary
social services, and to rest on a bureaucracy and an army that had to
be paid in cash. The chronic need for money which confronted James I
and Charles I was by no means a result of riotous living and courtly
extravagance, but was for the most part brought on by expenses no
modern government could have avoided. And yet their income was on the
whole determined and collected by old-fashioned medieval methods. At
any rate it is clear that the Stuarts needed money; but their attempts
to fill their coffers were awkward, hand-to-mouth expedients that
brought them into sharp quarrels with the only people from whom they
could collect money--the gentry and the middle class. Their struggles
with Parliament threw the whole machinery of English government out of
gear.
In America the failure of the machinery was a double one. First, the
central colonial administration in Westminster had been allowed to grow
in the hit-or-miss fashion Anglophiles have long regarded as the height
of political wisdom. In this crisis, however, muddling through clearly
was not enough. The attempted reform in colonial administration after
the Seven Years’ War only made matters worse, as did Turgot’s attempted
reforms in France, since it was carried out in a series of advances
and retreats, cajolings and menaces, blowings-hot and blowings-cold.
Second, within most of the colonies the machinery of government had
never been properly adjusted to the frontier. The newer western regions
of many colonies complained that representation, courts, administrative
areas, were rigged in favor of the older seaboard settlements.
The breakdown of Czarist administration is now so much a commonplace
that one is tempted to suspect that it has been a bit exaggerated.
Looking at the decades preceding 1917--for in all these countries we
have been considering the background of the revolutions and not their
actual outbreaks--it seems possible to maintain that the government
of Russia in peacetime, at least, was perhaps a bit more of a going
concern than the other governments we have been studying. From
Catherine the Great to Stolypin a great deal of actual improvement can
be seen in Russian government. But one thing is clear from the hundred
years preceding 1914. Russia could not organize herself for war, and
failure in war had, especially in 1905, brought with it a partial
collapse of the machinery of internal administration. We must be very
careful here to stick to facts and to avoid judgments which have so
insinuated themselves into our awareness of Russia that we regard
them as facts. It may be that there is some wild oriental element in
the Russian soul that makes Russians both incompetent and submissive
politically, subject, however, to fits of alcoholic rebellion. This
soul is certainly very hard to observe scientifically; and even in
literature one may hesitate to label Dostoevski more Russian than
Turgenev, who seems far from wild, oriental, drunken or mystic. For
our purposes, it is sufficient to note that the Russian _governmental_
breakdown, clear in 1917 or even 1916, was by no means clear, say, in
1912.
Finally, one of the most evident uniformities we can record is the
effort made in each of our societies to reform the machinery of
government. Nothing can be more erroneous than the picture of the old
regime as an unregenerate tyranny, sweeping to its end in a climax of
despotic indifference to the clamor of its abused subjects. Charles I
was working to “modernize” his government, to introduce into England
some of the efficient methods of the French. Strafford is in some ways
but an unlucky Richelieu. George III and his ministers were trying
very hard to pull together the scattered organs of British colonial
government. Indeed, it was this attempt at reform, this desire to work
out a new colonial “system,” that gave the revolutionary movement
in America a start. In both France and Russia, there is a series of
attempted reforms, associated with names like Turgot, Malesherbes,
Necker, and Stolypin. It is true that these reforms were incomplete,
that they were repealed or nullified by sabotage on the part of the
privileged. But they are on the record, an essential part of the
process that issued in revolution in these countries.
_III. The Desertion of the Intellectuals_
So far we have fixed our attention on the machinery of economic and
political life, and have tried to distinguish signs of any approaching
breakdown. Let us now turn to the state of mind--or better, feeling--of
various groups within these societies. First we may ask the question,
does the disorganization of the government find a counterpart in the
organization of its opponents? We shall have later to deal with what
are nowadays well known as “pressure groups,” men and women organized
in societies with special aims, societies which bring all sorts of
pressure--from propaganda and lobbying to terrorism--to the attaining
of their aims. Such societies in one form or another are apparently
a constituent part of all modern states and the mere fact of their
existence cannot be taken as a symptom of revolution, or we should have
to regard the A.S.P.C.A. or anti-billboard associations as signs of
a coming second American revolution. There seems to be no simple and
sole test to determine when and under what conditions the existence
of pressure groups may be taken as a symptom of approaching political
instability. The pre-revolutionary decades in our four societies do
show, however, an intensity of action on the part of pressure groups,
an action more and more directed as time goes on towards the radical
alteration of existing government. Certain groups, indeed, begin to
go beyond lobbying and propaganda, begin to plan and organize direct
action, or at least a supplanting of the government in some dramatic
way.
In America the merchant’s committees organized to resist measures
for imperial control did a great deal of quite modern pressure-group
work, from straight propaganda to stirring up popular demonstrations
and to intercolonial co-operation through resolutions, conferences,
and so on. They form the prelude to those efficient revolutionary
cells, the correspondence committees Sam Adams handled so well in the
1770’s. Similar organizations are to be found lower down the social
scale, where they edge over into boisterous tavern parties. In many of
the colonies, the legislatures could be used for pressure-group work
against the imperial government in a way not possible in the other
societies we are studying. The New England town meeting provided a
ready-made framework for this kind of agitation.
In France, the work of Cochin has shown how what he calls the _sociétés
de pensée_, informal groups gathered together to discuss the great
work of the Enlightenment, gradually turned to political agitation
and finally helped steer elections to the Estates-General of 1789.
Though the official school of historians in the Third Republic has
always distrusted such notions, it is difficult for an outsider not
to feel that Cochin has put his finger on the essential form of group
action which turned mere talk and speculation into revolutionary
political work. Freemasonry, even French Republican historians admit,
had a place in the preparation of the revolution. Masonic activity in
eighteenth-century France was clearly no dark plot, but it certainly
was far from being purely social, recreational, or educational. Almost
all the ambitious nobles and bankers, almost all the intellectuals,
were freemasons. Even at the time, clerical conservatives were shocked
at what they considered the subversive aspects of freemasonry.
In Russia, societies of all degrees of hostility to things as they were
had long flourished. Nihilists, anarchists, socialists of all stripes,
liberals, westernizers, and anti-westernizers, expressed themselves
in various ways from bomb-throwing to voting at Duma elections. One
gathers from a consideration of the last years of the Czarist regime
that the diversity and cross-purposes of its opponents did much to
keep that regime in the saddle. Certainly the Russian revolution had
plenty of advance publicity, and the role of pressure groups in its
preparation is singularly clear.
England here is a less clear case. Nevertheless there are definite
indications of systematic opposition of merchants and some of the
gentry to measures like Ship Money, and the parliamentary majorities
which were rolled up against Charles after the period of personal
government were the product of embryo pressure groups, as a glance at
the very prolific pamphlet literature of the time will show. Moreover,
the English revolution was the last of the great social overturns
within the active domination of specifically Christian ideas. In a
sense, the pressure groups most obvious in seventeenth-century England
are simply the Puritan churches, and especially the churches called
Independent. Their very existence was as much a menace to Charles as
was that of the Bolshevik party to Nicholas.
It must be noted that some of these pressure groups, the American
merchant’s committees, the French _sociétés de pensée_ and freemasons,
for instance, would not in the heyday of their action have admitted
they were working for a revolution, certainly not for a violent
revolution. What perhaps separates them from pressure groups like
the A.S.P.C.A. or anti-billboard associations--which we can surely
agree are not to be taken as symptomatic of revolution--is their basic
aim at a radical change in important political processes. Thus the
American merchants were really aiming to reverse the whole new imperial
policy of Westminster; the French who prepared the elections to the
Third Estate were aiming at a new “constitution” for France. On the
other hand, some of the Russian organizations were from the very start
violently revolutionary; but these were not the important elements in
the Russian situation from 1905 to 1917, any more than the antinomians
or anarchistic religious sects were in England before 1639.
There were, then, pressure groups with purposes more or less
revolutionary in all these societies. Their activity is seen against a
background of political and moral discussion which in these societies
seems particularly intense. We come now to a symptom of revolution well
brought out in Mr. Lyford P. Edwards’s _Natural History of Revolution_,
and there described as the “transfer of the allegiance of the
intellectuals.” Although the word “desertion” has perhaps unfortunate
moral overtones, the shorter phrase “desertion of the intellectuals”
is so much more convenient that we propose to use it, rather than the
longer one, in this study.
We must, however, be clear as to what we are talking about before
we attempt to use the desertion of the intellectuals as a symptom.
Intellectuals we may define without undue worry over preciseness as
the writers, teachers, and preachers. Further subdivision into the
small group of leaders who initiate, or at least stand prominently in
the public eye, and the larger group who grind over material they get
from the leaders, is not of major importance here. What is important,
and somewhat puzzling, is the general position of the intellectuals
in our Western society since the Middle Ages. Clearly we must not
posit agreement among its intellectuals before we decide that a given
society is reasonably stable. Even in the thirteenth century, in
which so many of our contemporary thinkers find an enviable unanimity
as to fundamentals of belief, the amount of bickering among the
intellectuals was in reality very considerable. There were rebels and
prophets aplenty throughout the Middle Ages. In modern times we expect
the intellectuals to disagree. Moreover, for a number of reasons,
writers, teachers, and preachers are to a large degree committed by
their function to take a critical attitude towards the daily routine
of human affairs. Lacking experience of action under the burden of
responsibility, they do not learn how little _new_ action is usually
possible or effective. An intellectual as satisfied with the world as
with himself would simply not be an intellectual.
Here, as so often in the social sciences, and indeed in the natural
sciences, we are dealing with a question where quantitative and
qualitative differences shade most confusingly one into the other.
Quantitatively, we may say that in a society markedly unstable there
seem to be absolutely more intellectuals, at any rate comparatively
more intellectuals, bitterly attacking existing institutions and
desirous of a considerable alteration in society, business, and
government. Purely metaphorically, we may compare intellectuals of this
sort to the white corpuscles, guardians of the bloodstream; but there
can be an excess of white corpuscles, and when this happens you have a
diseased condition.
Qualitatively, we may discern a difference of attitude, partly, no
doubt, produced by the numbers and unity of these intellectuals in
attack, but partly produced by a subtler reality. Victorian England,
for instance, was a society in equilibrium, an equilibrium now in
retrospect a bit unstable, but still an equilibrium. Here Carlyle
upbraided a generation addicted to Morison’s Pills instead of to
heroes, Mill worried uncomfortably over the tyranny of the majority,
Matthew Arnold found England short of sweetness and light, Newman
sought at Rome an antidote for the poison of English liberalism, Morris
urged his countrymen to break up machines and return to the comforts
of the Middle Ages, and even Tennyson was worried over his failure to
attain to anything more useful than a high, vague, and philosophical
discontent. Many, though by no means all, Victorian intellectuals
were in disagreement among themselves, united apparently in nothing
but a profound dislike for their environment. If, however, you look
at them carefully you will find a curious agreement that not too much
is to be done right away to remedy matters. It is not, as we are told
so often of the scholastic intellectuals of the Middle Ages, that
these Victorians were in agreement on fundamental metaphysical and
theological assumptions. They weren’t in any such agreement. It is
rather that they were in agreement about the less dignified but in some
ways more important routines and habits of daily life, and they did not
expect the government to change such matters.
The difference between the intellectual atmosphere of a group like the
Victorians, writers who cannot be said as a whole to have deserted,
and a group which has deserted, will be clear in a moment if we look
at that famous group in eighteenth-century France which stood at
the center of the great Enlightenment. One has first the impression
of immense numbers of intellectuals, great and small, all studying
matters political and sociological, all convinced that the world,
and especially France, needs making over from the tiniest and more
insignificant details to the most general moral and legal principles.
Any of the textbooks will give you the roll--Voltaire, Rousseau,
Diderot, Raynal, d’Holbach, Volney, Helvétius, d’Alembert, Condorcet,
Bernardin de St. Pierre, Beaumarchais--rebels all, men leveling
their wit against Church and State or seeking in Nature a perfection
that ought to be in France. You will hardly find active literary
conservatives like Sam Johnson or Sir Walter Scott, nor even literary
neutrals, men pursuing in letters a beauty or an understanding quite
outside politics.
Literature in late eighteenth-century France is overwhelmingly
sociological. If you look in the yellowing remains of French
eighteenth-century journalism, if you try to reconstruct the chatter
of salons and clubs, you will find the same chorus of complaints and
criticisms of existing institutions, the same search for Nature’s
simple plan of perfection in politics. There is both a bitterness and
a completeness in this chorus of complaint that you will not find in
Victorian complaints. Statistically, one might establish the fact that
there were proportionately more intellectuals “against the government”
in eighteenth-century France than in nineteenth-century England. But
the difference goes beyond statistics, and into what we have called
the qualitative difference. The French have a tone, at once more
bitter and more hopeful, quite different from the Victorians. That
this is not altogether a national difference will be clear to anyone
reading the pamphlet literature of the age of Milton. Then the English
intellectuals had deserted, as they had not under Victoria.
Russia, too, is a clear example of this desertion of the intellectuals.
There is certainly much more than political propaganda in the series
of novelists who have made Russian literature a part of the education
of us all. But there is unmistakably political and social criticism
of Czarist Russia even in the work of the most Olympian of them,
Turgenev. And the impression one gets from even a cursory view of
Russian intellectual life in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries is unmistakable; to write, teach, or preach in those days
meant being against the government. There are exceptions, and degrees
of opposition, but the above statement would probably be accepted even
by present-day Russian exiles.
America is not so neat an instance. In Boston, for instance, in
the 1760’s and 70’s, a good many of the kind of people we are
discussing--intellectuals will have to do--were as firmly as such
people are now against so un-Bostonian an activity as sedition. It is
clear that Harvard was by no means unanimous against the Crown, let
alone in favor of the democratic machinations of her distinguished
alumnus, Sam Adams. But if the literary and journalistic output
in the colonies between 1750 and 1775--and even if we include the
sermons--could be statistically assigned as either for or against
the actual policies of the imperial government, there seems little
doubt as to the very considerable balance against these policies. The
Enlightenment, especially through Locke and Montesquieu, had come to
the American colonies. The natural and inalienable rights of man were
in this country, as in Europe, concepts introduced by intellectuals.
England may seem at first sight an exception to the desertion of the
intellectuals. Lovelace, Suckling, even Donne seem hardly preoccupied
with sociology. Yet at a second glance it is quite clear that English
literature under the first two Stuarts is far from being the chorus of
loyal praise it was in the days of Queen Bess. A glance into Professor
Grierson’s _Cross Currents in English Literature in the Seventeenth
Century_ will show how much that literature was a dissolvent of the
merry England of the Renaissance. Even more important is the fact that
in those days there were no real newspapers, and the pamphlet took
their place. Now the pamphlet literature of the early seventeenth
century in England, quantitatively enormous, even by modern standards,
is almost wholly preoccupied with religion or politics--better,
religion _and_ politics--about as good an example of the desertion of
the intellectuals as could be found. Indeed, as Professor Gooch has
written, in the reign of James I “proclamation followed proclamation
against the sale of ‘Seditious and Puritan books’ and there was ‘much
talk of libels and dangerous writings.’”
To what do these intellectuals desert? To another and better world
than that of the corrupt and inefficient old regimes. From a thousand
pens and voices there are built up in the years before the revolution
actually breaks out what one must now fashionably call the foundations
of the revolutionary myth--or folklore, or symbols, or ideology. Some
such better world of the ideal is contrasted with this immediate and
imperfect world in all the ethical and religious systems under which
Western men have lived, and notably in Christianity. It is not quite
accurate to assert that for medieval Christianity the other, ideal
world is safely put off to heaven. Yet it is clear that with the
Reformation and the Renaissance men began to think more earnestly
about bringing part of heaven, at any rate, to this earth. What
differentiates this ideal world of the revolutionaries from the better
world as conceived by more pedestrian persons is a flaming sense of the
immediacy of the ideal, a feeling that there is something in all men
better than their present fate, a conviction that what is, not only
ought not, but need not, be.
We shall later meet these revolutionary ideals in their fully developed
forms. Here we need only notice that in the writings and preachings
of the English Puritans--and to a lesser extent the constitutional
lawyers--in those of the eighteenth-century _philosophes_, in those
of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Marxists, the evil, and
indeed illegitimate existing regime is very effectively contrasted with
the good, and indeed inevitable, rule of right to come. In England,
America, and in France, the essential principle to which men appealed
against present conditions was Nature, with its clear and simple laws.
Ship Money in England, Stamp Act in America, patents of nobility in
France, were all contrary to the law of Nature. Even in England and
America, where there was also much appeal to rights to be found in
Magna Charta or the common law, the final appeal was always to a law
of Nature “engraved in the hearts of men.” As the Puritan Henry Parker
wrote in England, the common courts were “furnished only with rules of
particular justice, which rules being too narrow for so capacious a
subject [the relation of Crown to People] we must refer to those that
the original laws of Nature hold out to us.” By the eighteenth century
this kind of language had become almost universal among intellectuals.
That Nature always counseled what the intellectuals in revolt wanted
is an observation we must in these days feel bound to make. It seems
likely, however, that for most of those who appealed to her Nature
was as definite and explicit as God had once been, and as dialectical
materialism was to be.
For the Russian writers and agitators of the Czarist regime, Nature
did not play so prominent a part. Not that Nature is lacking in the
pages of Tolstoy and his fellows, and the contrast between “artificial”
society and “natural” instincts was not disdained even in Socialist
propaganda. But the official ideology of most of the Russian radicals
was Marxism, and Marxism finds that the existence of capitalists, the
rule of the bourgeoisie, is altogether natural. Only, its destruction
by the proletariat is also natural, and this destruction is determined
by forces quite beyond capitalistic control. The inevitable march
of economic forces would then for the Marxists accomplish what the
English Puritan expected from God and the French _philosophe_ from
Nature and Reason. The essential thing all these pre-revolutionary
agitators have in common, the essential ingredient, intellectually at
least, in the revolutionary myth, is this abstract, all-powerful force,
this perfect ally.
One special point is here worth our attention for a moment. Not only
does God, Nature, or dialectical materialism make the victory of the
present under-dog certain. The present upper-dog can be shown--perhaps
for propaganda purposes _must_ be shown--to have acquired his
preponderance by an accident, or a particularly dirty trick, while God
or Nature was temporarily off duty. Thus in the English revolution the
royalists and indeed the gentry as a whole were labeled “Normans,”
descendants of a group of foreign invaders with no right to English
soil. John Lilburne, the Leveller, goes so far as to assert that the
whole common law was a badge of slavery imposed upon the free people
of England by the Norman Conquest. American hatred of absentee British
government hardly needed such artificial fanning. The French were told
by no less a person than Siéyès that all their trouble came from the
usurpations of the Franks over a thousand years ago. French nobleman
in 1789 were descendants of barbarous Germans, while French commoners
were descendants of civilized Gauls and Romans. Revolution was but
restoring the conditions of 450 A.D. Marxism explained the exploiting
class without recourse to such pseudo-historical notions. And yet
there is plenty of reference in Russian revolutionary agitation to the
usurpation of land by the nobles, to their Varangian, or Tartar, or
Western, or at any rate foreign origins.
Finally, a great deal of energy has been expended on the question
as to whether this revolutionary ideology “causes” revolutionary
action, or whether it is merely a sort of superfluous decoration
with which the revolutionists cover their real acts and real motives.
Most of this discussion is in the highest degree futile, since it is
based on a crude notion of causation altogether untenable in fruitful
scientific work beyond a very simple level. There is no more point
disputing whether Rousseau made the French revolution or the French
revolution made Rousseau than in disputing whether egg or chicken
came first. We note that in our pre-revolutionary societies the kind
of discontents, the specific difficulties about economic, social and
political conditions that hard-boiled moderns focus on are invariably
accompanied by a very great deal of writing and talking about ideals,
about a better world, about some very abstract forces tending to bring
about that better world. It is, indeed, the _expression_ of ideas,
rather than particular ideas--which may vary enormously in different
revolutions--that makes the uniformity. We find that ideas are always
a part of the pre-revolutionary situation, and we are quite content to
let it go at that. No ideas, no revolution. This does not mean that
ideas _cause_ revolutions. It merely means that they form part of the
mutually dependent variables we are studying.
_IV. Classes and Class Antagonisms_
Certain groups in our four societies of the old regimes nourished
feelings of dislike, mixed or unmixed with contempt, for other groups.
If we avoid the narrow economic connotations of the term, we may call
these groups classes; if we realize the struggle was not simply one
between two contending classes, feudal vs. bourgeois or bourgeois
vs. proletariat, we may even speak of class struggles. This type
of struggle in one form or another seems as endemic as many other
kinds of violence in the stablest of Western societies. Here again
we must not postulate for the normal society with which we contrast
our pre-revolutionary societies, a lying down together of the lion
and the lamb. But even so, it will soon appear that these class
hatreds are stepped up, exacerbated in a noticeable degree in the old
regimes. Class distinctions are seen, not as barriers the clever,
brave, or ambitious can cross, but as unnatural and unjust privileges,
established by wicked men against the express intention of Almighty
God, Nature, or Science. These class struggles are by no means simple
duels; there are groups within groups, currents within currents. We
must try and analyze some of these currents.
In the first place, what may be called the ruling class seems in
all four of our societies to be divided and inept. By ruling class
we understand, it may be too generously, the people who run things,
the people in the public eye--the politicians, the important civil
servants, the bankers, the men of affairs, the great landowning nobles,
the officers, the priesthood, perhaps even some of the intellectuals.
Formal nobility of the blood has in the Western world usually been a
much too narrow test of membership in a ruling class. Even in early
modern times, the ruling class was something like what we have outlined
above, the minority of men and women who seemed to lead dramatic lives,
about whom the more exciting scandals arose, who set the fashion, who
had wealth, position, or at least reputation, who, in short, ruled.
Indeed, in a socially stable society it seems likely that the great
masses of poor and middling folk, as also the obscure and unsuccessful
people who by birth and training might seem to be in the ruling class,
really accept the leadership of those at the top of the social pyramid,
and dream rather of _joining_ them than of _dislodging_ them.
Now the ruling classes in our societies seem, and not simply _a
posteriori_ because they were in fact overthrown, to have been
unsuccessful in fulfilling their functions. It is unlikely that short
of Sparta or Prussia the simpler military virtues alone are enough
for a ruling class. Such a class ought not, however, to shrink from
the use of force to maintain itself, and it ought not to value wit
and originality in its own members too highly. Wit, at any rate, it
can usually hire adequately enough from other sources. A mixture of
the military virtues, of respect for established ways of thinking
and behaving, and of willingness to compromise, is probably an
adequate rough approximation of the qualities of a successful ruling
class--qualities clearly possessed by the Romans of Punic War times,
and the English of the eighteenth century, though the latter failed in
relations with America.
When numerous and influential members of such a class begin to believe
that they hold power unjustly, or that all men are brothers, equal in
the eyes of eternal justice, or that the beliefs they were brought up
on are silly, or that “after us the deluge,” they are not likely to
resist successfully any serious attacks on their social, economic and
political position. The subject of the decadence of a ruling class, and
the relation of this decadence to revolution, is a fascinating and,
like so much of sociology, a relatively unexplored subject. We can
here do no more than suggest that this decadence is not necessarily
a “moral” decadence if by “moral” you mean what a good evangelical
Christian means by that word. Successful ruling classes have not
infrequently been quite addicted to cruel sports, drinking, gambling,
adultery, and other similar pursuits which we should no doubt all agree
to condemn. It is a reasonable assertion that the virtuous Lafayette
was a much clearer sign of the unfitness of the French aristocracy to
rule than were Pompadour or even Du Barry.
The Russians here provide us with a _locus classicus_. To judge from
what appears of them in print, Russian aristocrats for decades before
1917 had been in the habit of bemoaning the futility of life, the
backwardness of Russia, the Slavic sorrows of their condition. No doubt
this is an exaggeration. But clearly many of the Russian ruling classes
had an uneasy feeling that their privileges would not last. Many of
them, like Tolstoy, went over to the other side. Others turned liberal,
and began that process of granting concessions here and withdrawing
them there that we have already noticed in France. Even in court
circles, it was quite the fashion by 1916 to ridicule the Czar and his
intimates. As Protopopov, a hated Czarist minister, writes: “Even the
very highest classes became _frondeurs_ before the revolution; in the
grand salons and clubs the policy of the government received harsh and
unfriendly criticism. The relations which had been formed in the Czar’s
family were analyzed and talked over. Little anecdotes were passed
about the head of the state. Verses were composed. Many grand dukes
openly attended these meetings.... A sense of the danger of this sport
did not awaken until the last moment.”
Finally, when those of them who had positions of political power did
use force, they used it sporadically and inefficiently. We shall have
more to say about this general problem of the use of force when we
come to the first stages of actual revolution. In this connection it
will be sufficient that the Russian ruling classes, in spite of their
celebrated Asiatic background, were by the late nineteenth century more
than half ashamed to use force, and therefore used it badly, so that on
the whole those on whom force was inflicted were stimulated rather than
repressed. The line in actual practice of government between force and
persuasion is a subtle one, not to be drawn by formulas, by “science”
or textbooks, but by men skilled in the art of ruling. One of the best
signs of the unfitness of the ruling class to rule is the absence of
this skill among its members. And this absence is recorded in history
in the cumulated minor disturbances and discontents which precede
revolution.
Russia remains the classic instance of an inept ruling class, but
France is almost as good a case. The salons in which the old regime was
torn apart--verbally, of course--were presided over by noblewomen and
attended by noblemen. Princes of the blood royal became freemasons,
and if they did not quite plot the overthrow of all decency, as
witch-hunters like Mrs. Nesta Webster seem to think, at least sought to
improve themselves out of their privileges and rank. Perhaps nowhere
better than in France is to be seen one of the concomitants of the kind
of disintegration of the ruling class we have been discussing. This is
the deliberate espousal by members of the ruling class of the cause
of discontented or repressed classes--upper-dogs voluntarily turning
under-dogs. It is not altogether cynical to hazard the guess that this
is sometimes an indication that there is about to be a reversal in
the position of the dogs. Lafayette is in some ways a good example of
this kind of upper-dog, since he seems to have been an unintelligent
and ambitious man, whose course was largely determined by fashion.
Lafayette tried to do what his own circle would most admire, and since
he could not dance well--and his circle admired good dancing--he
went to fight for freedom in America, which was also something his
circle admired. But ruling classes cannot profitably fight for
freedom--freedom, that is, for the other fellow.
In America this decadence of a ruling class is not a prominent symptom
of the coming revolution. Our native ruling class was still young,
still in the process of formation, and seen as a class exhibited none
of the ineptness we have noted in Russia and France. But of course a
large part of our ruling class espoused the American revolution, which
is probably one of the reasons why our revolution stopped short of a
full-blooded Reign of Terror. As far as the ruling class in England at
the time of our revolution is concerned, it was very far from being
capable of a resolute course towards America. It managed to hold on
in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but only by
granting concessions to the middle classes, concessions which its
French counterpart refused to grant. Many of these Englishmen were,
however, anything but defenders of the established order as regards
relations with America. Fox, Burke, the Whigs in general, sided with
the Americans even after 1775, and their attitude unquestionably helped
give the rebellious Americans heart.
Even in seventeenth-century England this sort of symptom is to be
discerned. In the English aristocracy of Jacobean times there is not,
of course, exactly the same mixture of weariness, doubt, humanitarian
hopes, and irresponsibility we have found in Russia or in France.
Yet most of these elements can be found in the group later known as
Cavaliers. Picturesque, romantic, appealing though the Cavaliers
seem to us now in literature and tradition, it would be hard to
maintain that they displayed the solidarity and balance necessary to
a ruling class. And the Cavalier legend is not wholly a product of
the years after the Great Rebellion. The Cavaliers were romantic even
to themselves, and in a harsh world of Puritans and money-making had
already begun that search for a golden past so characteristic of the
émigrés of later revolutions. Nor are the enlightened or inspired, the
Lafayettes or the Tolstoys, altogether lacking in the English ruling
classes of the time. Even though you accept the nineteenth-century
evaluation of the English as always hard-headed, practical,
compromise-loving, you will do well to recall that a Tudor gentleman
gave the word “Utopia” to political thought, and that Harrington’s
famous Utopia, _Oceana_, is a seventeenth-century product.
Still, what conceals from us the extent to which many able and
ambitious English gentlemen had deserted the established order in early
Stuart times is that they deserted, not as did Lafayette, to America
and the abstract rights of man, but to God and the way of salvation.
Puritanism, in one or another of its many forms, proved attractive not
merely to humble men, nor even to traders and bankers, but to many of
the gentry and the nobility. Do not forget that Cromwell himself was a
gentleman. Finally, what we may call the politico-legal opposition to
the first two Stuarts--though separation of political and religious for
that time is purely a matter of analysis, the two being inextricably
mixed in the feelings of contemporaries--this politico-legal opposition
was, as far as leadership went, almost wholly recruited from gentry
and nobility. Men like Hampden and Essex resemble Washington in that
they are essentially conservatives driven to rebellion by the ineptness
of their immediate rulers; they are not, like Lafayette, sentimental
deserters of their class.
Except perhaps in America, we find the ruling classes in the old
regimes markedly divided, markedly unsuited to fulfill the functions
of a ruling class. Some have joined the intellectuals and deserted the
established order, have indeed often become leaders in the crusade
for a new order; others have turned rebels, less because of hope for
the future than because of boredom with the present; others have gone
soft, or indifferent, or cynical. Many, possibly even most of the
rank-and-file of the ruling classes, the English squire, the French and
Russian country nobleman, retained the simple faith in themselves and
their position which is apparently necessary to a ruling class. But
the tone of life in the upper classes was not set by such as these.
Fashion had deserted with the intellectuals. The sober virtues, the
whole complex series of value-judgments which guards a privileged class
from itself and others, all these were out of fashion at Whitehall, at
Versailles, at the old court of St. Petersburg. _Esprit de corps_ is a
subtle thing, difficult, indeed impossible, to analyze with the methods
of the chemist or the statistician. The intricate balance of sentiments
and habits which hold men together in any such group as those we have
been discussing may be altered by changes apparently insignificant,
and extremely difficult to trace. But the fact of the alteration is
clear. The very wit, refinement, the cultural graces so evident in what
we know of the Cavaliers, the French aristocrats of Versailles and
the salons, the Russian upper classes of the ballet, the opera, the
novel, are signs of the decadence, not necessarily moral, but certainly
political, of a ruling class.
Nor is it possible, even for those who find the simple forms of the
economic interpretation of history inadequate and misleading, to deny
that in three of our societies--England, France, and Russia--there
are clear signs that the ruling classes were in a very shaky economic
position. In each case there had been a notable rise in the standards
of living of the nobility and gentry; finer houses, finer clothes,
the luxuries brought by the decorative arts, by sculpture, painting,
and music all cost a great deal of money, and were not in a purely
economic sense good investments. Though the prohibitions against a
gentleman’s making money in business were by no means as absolute, even
in France, as they sometimes appear in textbooks of history, it is a
fact that most gentlemen had neither the gifts nor the training for
such money-making. Most of them lived from agricultural rents, which
could not be stretched to meet their rising costs, and from pensions,
sinecures, and other aids from the government, which were at least
as inelastic. Notably for the French and Russian upper classes, it
is clear that some of the discontent which undermined their _esprit
de corps_ at the outbreak of the revolution had its origin in their
economic difficulties.
So much for the upper or ruling classes. The classes immediately
beneath them in the social structure display in England, France, and
Russia, and to a lesser degree in America, a more than ordinary dislike
for their superiors. Here once more we are confronted with the problem
of what is normal in class relationships in Western societies. The
view that in a normal society there are no class antagonisms is as
much to be rejected as the Marxist view that in such societies--at
least up to the present--the class struggle has been unceasingly and
equally bitter and ferocious. A picture of our Old South, for instance,
which sees contented, well-fed slaves, prosperous artisans and traders
with no dislike for their gentlemanly patrons, a serene plantation
aristocracy nobly patriarchal, is plain nonsense; but so, too, is one
which sees only smoldering discontent among the slaves, envy and hatred
among poor whites, pride and fear among the planters. Men in Western
societies have never been free, equal, and brothers; there has always
been political, social, and economic inequality among groups within
these societies, groups we commonly call classes. The existence of
antagonisms among classes is a fact, however much it may be to the
interest of the ruling class to deny it. But the various antagonisms,
by no means purely economic, which set class against class are in a
normal society subordinated to other concerns, wider or narrower, cut
across by other conflicts, subdued by other interests. At any rate they
are not concentrated, embittered, strengthened by an almost unanimous
support from the intellectuals, as we shall find they were in the old
regimes we are studying.
In England, where we have usually been taught to believe that class
hatreds were minimized by the good relations between country gentlemen
and villagers, by the absorption of younger sons of the nobility in
the middle classes, by some English sense of solidarity and decency,
the seventeenth century saw a bitter class struggle. The following
quotation from Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson is not only a fair specimen of the
feelings of a middle-class Puritan towards the nobility; it can stand
as a sample of the kind of intense, and always highly moral, atmosphere
of such class antagonisms in other pre-revolutionary societies: “The
court of the King [James I] was a nursery of lust and intemperance
... the nobility of the land was utterly debased.... The generality
of the gentry of the land soon learned the court fashion, and every
great house in the country soon became a sty of uncleanness. Then began
murder, incest, adultery, drunkenness, swearing, fornication, and all
sorts of ribaldry to be countenanced vices because they held such
conformity to the court example.” Or, more gently:
“courtesy,
Which oft is sooner found in lowly sheds
With smoky rafters, than in tapst’ry halls
And courts of princes, where it first was nam’d
And yet is most pretended.”
This was not written by an eighteenth-century disciple of Rousseau, but
by John Milton.
We need hardly labor the point that both the French and the Russian
middle classes hated, and envied, and felt morally superior to their
aristocracies, and that their writings are filled with passages
indicative of the strength and spread of these sentiments. At fourteen
years Manon Phlipon, later as Madame Roland something more than Egeria
to the Girondin party, told her mother after a week spent with a lady
of the suite of the Dauphiness, “Another few days and I shall detest
these people so much that I shan’t be able to control my hatred.” And
to her mother’s question as to what harm these aristocrats did her she
answered, “It’s just feeling the injustice, thinking every moment about
the absurdity of it all.” The higher the French bourgeois rose, the
closer he came in his way of life to the aristocracy, the more vividly
in some respects he felt the gap which separated him from his neighbor
with four quarters of nobility. “It wasn’t the taxes,” wrote Rivarol in
his memoirs, “nor the _lettres de cachet_, nor all the other abuses of
authority; it wasn’t the vexations of the _intendants_, nor the ruinous
delays of justice which most irritated the nation; it was the prejudice
of nobility. What proves this is that it was the bourgeois, the men
of letters, the financiers, in fine all those who were envious of the
nobility, who raised against the nobility the petty bourgeois of the
towns and the peasants in the country.”
How far the lower classes or the proletariat really were stirred
against their betters in these societies is not wholly clear, save
perhaps in Russia. In England there can be little doubt that the more
prosperous artisan classes in the big cities, and in regions like East
Anglia the peasantry, were won over to Puritanism; and this meant
hostility to the Anglican upper classes. Mixed inextricably with the
religious fervor and phrases of the pamphlet literature is a great deal
of social hatred, which later came out fully as the revolution moved
towards its radical extreme. The French peasantry in many, perhaps
most regions, showed by acts in 1789 that they hated their absentee
landlords, or the institutions of land tenure, but conclusive evidence
that this hatred was much stronger and more universal than it had been
for several hundred years has not yet been produced. We cannot be sure
whether they hated individuals or a status. Certainly the old notion,
evident even in the work of Taine, that the French peasantry were
in 1789 smarting under a sharpened double oppression from government
and from _seigneurs_, is at least a revolutionary myth rather than
an historical fact. A great deal of work remains to be done in the
objective study of the actual sentiments of suppressed or oppressed
classes at the bottom of the social scale.
The Russian proletariat, at least in the cities, had certainly been
exposed to several generations of Marxist propaganda, and had acquired,
so far as its elite goes, a sense of mission against nobles and middle
class alike. As the first manifesto of the Social Democratic party,
issued in 1898 before the split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks,
put it: “The farther one goes to the East of Europe the weaker, baser
and more cowardly becomes the bourgeoisie and the larger cultural and
political tasks fall to the lot of the proletariat. On its strong
shoulders the Russian working class must bear and will bear the cause
of conquering political liberty. This is necessary, but only as the
first step toward the achievement of the great historic mission of the
proletariat: the creation of a social order in which there will be no
place for the exploitation of man by man. The Russian proletariat will
cast off from itself the yoke of the autocracy in order with all the
greater energy to continue the struggle with capitalism and with the
bourgeoisie until the final victory of socialism.” Just how the Russian
peasants felt towards classes above them is a difficult problem. We may
assume a good deal of variety, as also in eighteenth-century France,
depending on local conditions, the character of the landlord, the
prosperity of the peasants themselves. There is some indication that
by the twentieth century one can risk the generalization: the more
prosperous the peasants, the more discontented. But here, as throughout
the range of our study, trustworthy materials of one kind are scarce:
neither historians nor sociologists have paid sufficient systematic
attention to the _sentiments_ towards other groups which seem to
prevail in a given social group or class.
We have noted the ineptness of the ruling classes, and the existence
among the middle and parts of the lower of more than normally strong
sentiments hostile to the ruling classes. It remains to consider how
far these class lines were rigid, how far, in particular the “career
open to talents,” existed in these societies. One might well argue _a
priori_ that in Western societies any approach to a rigid caste-system
which would bar the possibility of rise to the able but low-born, any
stoppage of what Pareto calls the _circulation of the elites_, would
be a very important preliminary symptom of revolution. Able men do
seem to get born in the humblest ranks, and an accumulation of able
and discontented men would provide splendid natural leaders for groups
restive and ready for revolt. Yet this test of the career open to
talents is one of the hardest to apply to our societies. The normal
standard for a Western society is here very difficult indeed to sketch,
even as roughly as we have done for our other variables.
One might start with a characteristic American assumption, and say
that in this country at least we have full freedom of opportunity.
Very well, let us take at random some self-made contemporaries--Babe
Ruth, Henry Ford, Rudy Vallée, Sinclair Lewis. It would be comforting
to be able to say confidently that in the societies of the old regimes
these able men would have been kept down by hard-and-fast caste lines,
condemned to obscurity or to revolt. Unfortunately, it would not be
true. We must not, indeed, be indecently sure about such hypothetical
matters. The professional athlete as such could probably not have
attained in any other society than our own the wealth Mr. Ruth has nor
as much honor--public attention, if you prefer--save perhaps in the
Rome of the gladiators. Yet in early feudal society sheer physical
strength might have won him knighthood, and even in later societies
noble patronage might have carried him far. Mr. Ford may be taken as
the entrepreneur-inventor, and though one doubts whether any other
society than our own would have made him a national hero, it is likely
that in eighteenth-century France or in twentieth-century Russia he
could have secured substantial financial success. Mr. Vallée is the
man who amuses, and Western society has usually rewarded adequately,
and sometimes highly, those who could amuse it. Perhaps aristocracies
have never quite concealed their contempt and democracies have made
no attempt to conceal their admiration for those who amused them. Yet
actors, musicians, jesters and their like seem not, in spite of the
example of Figaro, to have been greatly irked by their social status
in the past. Certainly the French eighteenth century was kind enough
to them, even economically. As for Mr. Lewis, he would presumably have
been in his element among the _philosophes_, and with proper national
and racial adjustments, among the Gorkys and the Chekhovs. He would
have made proportionately quite as much money, and have been even more
honored.
We are dealing with very subtle variables of human sentiments. At all
times and in all societies, probably, some men feel that they have
abilities which are denied free play by existing social, political, and
economic restrictions. Some men always feel balked, cramped, kept-down,
and some of them really are. Probably in societies on the eve of
revolution there are very large numbers of such men. Yet it is very
difficult to put one’s finger on those kinds of activity, those fields
of distinction, where this restraint is most felt. Here as elsewhere
the given situation is always a complex of restraints, no one or two
or three of which would, without additional elements of disturbance,
be anything but a quite normal social fact. Moreover, there are other
elements besides restraint. Men conditioned to loyalty may put up with
great hardships. Fact and feeling seem to vary independently. Thus in
Western society there has always been--say in comparison with Hindu
caste-society--a very high degree of the “career open to talents.” The
circulation of the elites has always gone on. We can here but glance
at our societies and see whether there were any special limitations to
that circulation in the years prior to the revolution.
In eighteenth-century France, the way to wealth and fame was open
practically unrestricted to business men, adventurers, adventuresses,
actors, artists, writers--to Pâris-Duverney, to Cagliostro, to Mme. Du
Barry, to Talma, to Watteau, to Voltaire. The way to political power
was much harder, though the Abbé Dubois, an apothecary’s son, could
attain its highest peak. On the whole, substantial political power, the
power of making programs and policies, was open to the courtier talents
even more than to noble birth; administrative power was almost entirely
in the hands of the _noblesse de robe_, an hereditary, conscientious,
and not incapable bureaucracy. Social position, the highest honors, we
are frequently told, went only to those who could show four quarters of
nobility. Certainly a privileged nobility did exist, and was disliked
in the abstract by many a bourgeois who had no concrete experience
of it. Twentieth-century Russia is in many ways a close parallel in
these respects. A privileged nobility topped the social system, and
closed the very highest social honor to plebeian talent. This class was
disliked and bitterly disliked by those who saw it from the outside;
and no doubt many of its individual members were insufferably haughty,
overbearing, dissolute, vain, empty-headed, and the rest, just as if
they had come from the pages of _A Tale of Two Cities_. Yet the way to
fame and fortune was far from closed in pre-revolutionary Russia, with
new industries rising, with an active theatrical, ballet, and musical
life, with university and administrative positions open to ambitious
and able young men even from the villages. Rasputin you may perhaps
regard as an unhealthy example of the career open to talents, but you
can hardly deny that the Siberian monk reached the top.
One clue to this problem of the circulation of the elite may lie in a
stoppage of that circulation in a particular and very delicate spot,
such as the professions, and especially the “intellectual” professions;
that is, among people especially liable to the feeling of frustration,
of being excluded from good things. One is struck in studying French
society in the years just preceding the revolution with a kind of jam
in the stream of bright young men descending on Paris to write and talk
their way to fortune. Mercier in his _Tableau de Paris_ tells how every
sunny day young men may be seen on the quays, washing and drying their
only shirts, ruffled and lacy symbol of high social status. There are
also in Russia signs of pressure in competition in the ranks of what we
should call “white-collar men,” intellectuals, bureaucrats, clerks, and
the like. We know that a similar stoppage in the society of the Weimar
Republic had a great deal to do with the Nazi revolution of 1933. This
symptom is, like most others that indicate strong social tensions,
nearly lacking in eighteenth-century America, and extremely difficult
to trace, partly for lack of proper historical materials, in the
English revolution. Naturally enough, a stoppage in the circulation of
the elite into journalism, literature, and such professions is likely
to be rapidly reflected in the desertion of the intellectuals.
Finally, social antagonisms seem to be at their strongest when a class
has attained to wealth, but is, or feels itself, shut out from the
highest social distinction, and from positions of evident and open
political power. This, broadly speaking, does describe the situation
of the Calvinist gentry and merchants in seventeenth-century England,
the colonial aristocracy and merchants of America, at least in relation
to the British ruling class, the French bourgeois of the eighteenth
and the Russian bourgeois of the nineteenth centuries. Individuals in
each society might rise from ranks even lower than the middle class,
and surmount all these barriers. Even as a class, the bourgeoisie in
all four societies really had a determining voice in major political
decisions even before the revolutions. But the countries were “run”
by other, and privileged, beings, and from the highest social
distinctions the bourgeoisie as a class were hopelessly excluded.
Moreover, this exclusion was symbolized, manifested continuously in
all but the most remote rural districts. Long before Marx, long before
Harrington’s _Oceana_, practical men knew that political power and
social distinction are the handmaids of economic power. Where wealth
cannot buy everything--everything of this world, at any rate--you have
a fairly reliable preliminary sign of revolution.
_V. Summary_
In summing up, the most striking thing we must note is that all
of these preliminary signs--government deficits, complaints over
taxation, governmental favoring of one set of economic interests over
another, administrative entanglements and confusions, desertion of the
intellectuals, loss of self-confidence among many members of the ruling
class, conversion of many members of that class to the belief that
their privileges are unjust or harmful to society, the intensification
of social antagonisms, the stoppage at certain points (usually in the
professions, the arts, perhaps the white-collar jobs generally) of
the career open to talents, the separation of economic power from
political power and social distinction--some, if not most of these
signs may be found in almost any modern society at any time. With the
wisdom of hindsight, we can now say that in four, or at least in three,
of our societies these--and no doubt other signs we have omitted to
consider--existed in some unusual combination and intensities before
revolution ensued. But clearly we must infer from what we have just
done that in its earlier stages diagnosis of revolution is extremely
difficult, and certainly cannot be reduced to a neat formula, a recipe,
a set of rules. This is also true of the diagnosis of human illnesses.
The best diagnosticians, we are told on good authority, could not
possibly analyze out and put into formal logical sequence all the steps
they take in the clinical diagnosis of disease.
We are not, however, left altogether helpless before some mystic
gift for short-term prophecy in the successful diagnostician. His
methods are not those of magic, but rather the gift for making what
is, until familiarity has made it easy, the difficult and rarely
explicit synthesis of past experience and present observation into a
successful generalization--or hunch if you prefer. And we can in this
instance hazard something further as to signs of revolution in our four
societies. In all of them, and especially in France and in Russia,
there is as the actual outbreak of revolution approaches increasing
talk about revolution, increasing consciousness of social tension,
increasing “cramp” and irritation. Prophets of evil there always are,
and we need not lay much stress on any specific prediction of a given
revolution, such as the Marquis d’Argenson made forty years before the
French revolution. But when such fears--or hopes--become something like
common property, when they are, to use a very aged metaphor to which
the invention of the radio has given an ironic twist, in the air, then
it is fairly safe to take this general sentiment as a pretty conclusive
sign of revolution. Even then, however, we have a sign difficult to
use. For people never seem to expect revolution for themselves, but
only for their children. The actual revolution is always a surprise.
This is true even for Russia, where the revolution had long been in the
air.
It must, however, be really in the air, and not simply in the mouths
of professional seers or timid conservatives. It must, above all,
go beyond the intellectuals. For, valuable as the desertion of the
intellectuals is as a sign if found with others, as part of a syndrome,
in itself alone this desertion proves nothing. After all, one of the
great functions of the intellectuals in Western society has always
been to shake ordinary mortals out of their unthinking optimism, and
Cassandra has perhaps as much claim as Plato to be founder of a great
academic tradition. But Cassandra’s successors have not quite achieved
her unhappy infallibility.
_Chapter_ THREE FIRST STAGES OF REVOLUTION
_I. The Eternal Figaro_
There is in the _Marriage of Figaro_ of Beaumarchais, first performed
at Paris in 1784, a famous soliloquy by Figaro in which much of what
we have laboriously analyzed in the previous chapter is dramatically
focused in a few pages. Figaro himself is the able young man unjustly
kept down by the pressure of a social system built on privilege. As the
scene opens he is waiting in the darkness to surprise in an assignation
his bride and his master, the Count Almaviva. His first reflections
on feminine inconstancy pass over very rapidly into a violent attack
on his noble master. “Because you are a great lord, you think you are
a great genius! ... nobility, fortune, rank, appointments; all this
makes a man so proud! But what have you done to deserve so many good
things? You took the trouble to get born!” Then he looks back on the
struggles that have filled his life--his obscure birth, his education
in chemistry, pharmacy, surgery, all barely sufficing, because of his
lack of high birth, to give him the privilege of practicing veterinary
medicine; his venture in playwrighting, and his inevitable clash with
the censor; his turn to writing on state finance, and the resulting
prison term; another essay in literature, this time in journalism, and
another suppression; rejection as candidate for a government job, since
unfortunately he was fitted for the post; a turn as gambler, when his
noble patrons took most of his profits; and his final return to his old
trade as barber-surgeon.
Scattered throughout the soliloquy are a train of epigrams which
delighted fashionable audiences in the old regime, and were taken up
throughout the country. Indeed, families would come up to Paris chiefly
to see the _Marriage of Figaro_, and hear French wit at its best
directed against a wicked government. Here are a few of Beaumarchais’
most famous jibes: “Not being able to degrade the human spirit, they
get revenge by mistreating it.” “Only little men fear little writings.”
“For the job an accountant was necessary; a dancer got it.” “To get on
in this world, _savoir faire_ is worth more than _savoir_.” And, of
course, that bitter jibe at the Count’s attainments--“qu’avez-vous fait
pour tant de biens? _vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître._” Here
in this one speech are so many indications of the coming revolution
that, with the wisdom of after-the-fact that comes so naturally to the
historian, we can say the revolution is already almost full-blown in
Figaro. Including, of course, the fact that, after a long vacillation,
the censor _did not stop_ Beaumarchais’ play.
The years just preceding the actual outbreak of revolution witness a
crescendo of protests against the tyranny of the government, a hail of
pamphlets, plays, addresses, an outburst of activity on the part of
interested pressure groups. Facing all this, the government certainly
does not live up to the reputation its opponents seek to make for
it. Its tyrannous attempts at suppressing the rebellious opposition
may perhaps fail because that opposition is too strong, resourceful,
and virtuous; or its attempts may fail because they are carried out
half-heartedly and inefficiently by governmental agents more than half
won over to the opposition. The fact remains that they do fail.
Even the period of the personal rule of Charles I which preceded the
English revolution was not altogether as quiet and successful as it
seemed on the surface to be. Many Puritan divines escaped Laud’s
attempt to drive them from the Established Church, and the others found
plenty of independent pulpits and printing presses. Strafford might
write in 1638 that “the People are in great quietness and, if I be
not much mistaken, well-satisfied if not delighted with his Majesty’s
gracious government and protection”; but he was much mistaken. At the
very least these eleven years of personal government were but the calm
before the storm.
In our other three societies we do not even find this deceptive calm,
but a steady growth of revolutionary agitation. In America hardly a
colony escaped some form of rioting in the period between the Stamp Act
and Lexington, and all of them saw a steady growth of agitation through
merchants’ committees, correspondence committees, Sons of Liberty,
and similar groups. The French government in the 1780’s drew nearer
and nearer to bankruptcy, and with each expedient to avoid bankruptcy
brought nearer the calling of the Estates-General and the signal for
revolution. As for Russia, it was a society strikingly conscious of
the possibilities of revolution. Upper-class Russians had for more
than a generation been turning their uneasiness into the smooth coin
of conversation: “sitting upon a volcano,” “after us the deluge,” “the
storm is rising.” In 1905 and 1906, under pressure of defeat by the
Japanese, a kind of dress rehearsal of the great revolution took place.
The patriotic enthusiasms of 1914 for a while stilled conspicuous
preparation for revolution, but military defeat in 1915 and 1916
brought back conditions that grew daily more and more like those of
1905.
_II. The Events of the First Stages_
The Russian revolution began more dramatically and definitely with a
single event--street riots in Petrograd in 1917--than did any of our
other revolutions. Yet even in Russia it took four or five days for the
revolutionists themselves to realize that the confused milling around
of Petrograd crowds might bring about the fall of the Romanovs. History
and patriotic ritual have singled out dramatic episodes--the battles
at Lexington and Concord, the fall of the Bastille--as beginning
revolutions. But though contemporaries were aware of the dramatic
quality of such events, they were not always sure that they had turned
revolutionary agitation into revolution. The first steps in revolution
are by no means always dear to the revolutionists themselves, and the
transition from agitation to action is rarely a sudden and definite
thing.
Charles I came to the throne in 1624, and almost immediately found
himself engaged with the House of Commons in a struggle chiefly over
taxes. Out of the conflict there emerged the Petition of Right of
1628, in which the Commons forced the King’s consent to a statement
of definite limitations on the royal power: Charles promised not to
raise forced loans, not to quarter soldiers on unwilling householders,
not to permit officers to exercise martial law in time of peace, not
to send anyone to prison without showing cause why he had done so.
Emboldened by this success, the Commons under the leadership of the
emotional Sir John Eliot went on to refuse to grant the King the usual
form of customs’ revenue--tonnage and poundage--and to insist in an
aggressive and indeed revolutionary way on their privileges. At a
final debate on March 2, 1629, two men, Denzil Holles and Valentine,
held down the Speaker in his chair by force while Eliot proposed a
ringing declaration on the illegality of paying tonnage and poundage
without a grant from Parliament. Conservatives pushed forward to free
the Speaker. There followed a riotous debate fully worthy of the
standards set later by the National Assembly in France, but somehow
or other in the confusion Eliot’s resolutions were put through before
the royal order dissolving the Parliament could be carried out. The
parliamentarians had made a grand gesture of protest. From that day, no
Parliament met in England for eleven years. Eliot, jailed for rioting,
maintained that the King had no power over a member of the House of
Commons. He died a most effective martyr in 1632.
In the years of personal rule Charles, aided by his two great
supporters, Strafford and Laud, did his best to organize the government
of England in accordance with notions of efficient centralization and
expert rule which were the chief political heritage of the Renaissance.
He did a job in some ways surprisingly good. But he may, as
nineteenth-century liberal historians fondly believed, have been going
against the basic grain of the English character and the basic mold of
English institutions; he was most certainly going bankrupt. A clash
with the Scotch Presbyterians probably merely hastened the inevitable.
Charles called a Parliament in the spring of 1640, but dissolved it
after less than a month. A Scotch army now invaded England, and Charles
had to buy it off. To get money he had to call another Parliament.
The Short Parliament was, therefore, but a breaking of the ground for
the Long Parliament, which met on November 3, 1640, was dissolved on
April 20, 1653, and was brought briefly to life again in 1659, just
before the restoration of the Stuarts. The life of this extraordinary
assembly thus spans almost completely the twenty years of the English
revolution.
The Long Parliament got to work at once, for on November 11, 1640,
a week after it first met, Pym moved the impeachment of Strafford
for high treason. The impeachment, held up by the more conservative
House of Lords, was turned early in 1641 into a bill of attainder.
Impeachment involved at least the forms of judicial action, whereas
attainder was a simple legislative act. The Lords were willing enough
to abandon Strafford, if not to try him, and on May 12th he fell under
the executioner’s ax. Less than eight years later that ax was to reach
his royal master.
Actual outbreak of armed hostilities between Charles and the
Parliament was not to come for another year. Parliament voted by a
majority of eleven the Grand Remonstrance, a long summing-up of all
the grievances accumulated against the King in the seventeen years
of his reign. Charles replied to this vote of want of confidence by
attempting to arrest six members of Parliament, Lord Kimbolton in the
Lords, Pym, Hampden, Haselrig, Holles, and Strode in the Commons, who
had compromised themselves by entering into technically treasonous
negotiations with the invading Scotch army. Charles rashly came down to
the House of Commons himself with armed men and attempted to seize the
members. He was met with something of the kind of passive resistance
the French Third Estate displayed at the royal session of June 17,
1789, when Louis XVI ordered them to give up attempting to form a
National Assembly. The threatened members fled to the City of London,
and Charles was again checkmated. The Commons were now so aggressively
successful that they decided to take over the military by naming
officers in the militia and train-bands. Charles, in turn, began to
build up his own army, and set up his standard at Nottingham in August,
1642. The Civil War had begun.
Where in this long and closely knit series of events you wish to say
the English revolution fairly began is partly a subjective matter.
Somewhere between the calling of the Long Parliament in 1640, and the
outbreak of the war two years later, the first critical steps in the
revolution were undertaken. Perhaps the execution of Strafford is a
good dramatic date, or Charles’s futile attempt to seize the five
members in the Commons. At any rate, by the summer of 1642 the English
revolution had taken on unmistakable form.
Events in America moved hardly more rapidly. In a sense, you can
maintain that the American revolution really began in 1765 with the
Stamp Act; or at any rate that the agitation which culminated in the
repeal of that Act was a kind of rehearsal for the great movement of
the seventies. The imperial government was determined to do something
about the American colonists, and Townshend’s mild duties on tea,
glass, lead and a few other articles imported into America were
accompanied by an attempt to collect them in an efficient modern way.
Under Townshend’s act His Majesty’s customs houses in America were
equipped with a hopeful and willing bureaucracy. The result was a
series of clashes with increasingly well-organized groups of Americans.
Tarring and feathering of informers, stealing sequestered goods from
under the noses of customs officers, jeering at British troops, led up
to the more dramatic incidents enshrined in the textbooks: the seizure
of the _Gaspee_ at Providence, the Boston Massacre of 1770, the Boston
Tea Party, the burning of the _Peggy Stewart_ at Annapolis.
The closing of the port of Boston, the dispatch of Gage and his troops
to Massachusetts, the Quebec Act itself, were all really measures taken
by the imperial government against colonies already in revolt. You may,
if you are interested in such matters, discuss at length the question
as to just when the American revolution is to be considered as formally
beginning. You may go as late as the first Continental Congress in
1774, or the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, or even the most
famous Fourth of July in 1776. But the complex group-struggles out of
which revolutions actually grow only later turn into formal sources for
patriotic ritual. The first steps in the American revolution were many
and spread over something like a decade. Only an absolutist mind could
insist that out of this long process a given detail be isolated as the
beginning of the American revolution.
The French revolution of 1789 may be said to have been incubating for
several decades. Overt and definite resistance to the royal government,
as in the parliaments of Charles I and in the American colonial
assemblies, is not to be found in France, which was wholly without
such representative bodies. The nearest thing to such a body was the
_parlement de Paris_, a kind of supreme court composed of judges who
were nobles and held their positions by heredity. It was precisely this
_parlement_, followed by the provincial _parlements_, that began in the
1780’s an open quarrel with the Crown, which culminated in a dramatic
defiance of royal power and the forced exile of the judges. Popular
opinion, at least in Paris, was overwhelmingly with the judges, and
privileged nobles though they were, they became heroes and martyrs for
a day.
Meanwhile, approaching bankruptcy had forced the King to call in 1787
an Assembly of Notables, a kind of hastily gathered special commission
of prominent nobles, from whom Louis XVI in good eighteenth-century
style no doubt expected enlightenment. This he certainly obtained, for
the Assembly contained many upper-class intellectuals, like Lafayette,
who were convinced that France must cease to be a “despotism,” must
endow itself with an up-to-date constitution of the kind the new states
of the American union were making fashionable. The Assembly of Notables
was accordingly very divided and doubtful about ways of filling the
empty treasury, but clear that further consultation with the nation was
necessary. The Crown finally yielded, brought back into the government
the Swiss commoner, Necker, who had a reputation as a financial wizard,
and summoned a meeting of the Estates-General for the spring of 1789.
This Estates-General had last met in 1614, and there was some
uncertainty as to how one went about electing it. The antiquarians
came to the rescue, however, and three hundred representatives of the
First Estate, or clergy, three hundred of the Second, or nobility, and
six hundred of the Third, or commons, were chosen, practically in time
for the first meeting. The double representation of the Third Estate
had no precedent in 1614 or earlier. It was, in fact, a revolutionary
step, a concession wrung from the King, an admission that in some way
or another the Third Estate was more important than the others. In the
old constitution, however, final decisions were made by the orders
as units; that is, if the Clergy and the Nobles as separate houses
agreed on a policy, they could carry it, two to one, even against the
dissenting Third Estate. When the Estates met in May, 1789, the great
question was whether to follow the old constitution and vote by orders,
or to vote in one great assembly of twelve hundred members in which the
doubled Third Estate, plus the “liberals” among the other two orders,
would have a clear majority. Louis had characteristically permitted
this problem to remain vague and unsettled, and only after the Third
Estate had insisted on one great assembly did he royally insist on
three separate ones.
The issue out of which the French revolution formally grew was this
simple one of vote by orders or vote by individuals in one assembly.
The Third Estate stood pat, and refused to transact any business until
the other orders joined it in what was to be called--and the name
was a sound piece of propaganda for the revolutionists--the National
Assembly. There are certain dramatic moments in a two-months’ struggle
which was essentially parliamentary and lacking in the more physical
kinds of violence. Shut out by a royal blunder from their usual meeting
place, the Third Estate on June 20, 1789, met hastily in a large indoor
tennis court, and swore not to disperse until they had endowed France
with a constitution.
Thanks partly to David’s famous painting, which is more symbolic
than realistic, this episode is now second only to the taking of the
Bastille in the patriotic ritual of the present Third French Republic.
Actually more important was the glowering defiance of the Third Estate
when in a plenary royal session of June 23rd the King called on all
the prestige and pageantry of the Crown to enforce voting by separate
orders. At this session the Third Estate remained behind after the
King’s withdrawal, and Mirabeau is said to have made his famous reply
to a request from the King’s Grand Master of Ceremonies that they in
turn withdraw: “We are assembled here by the will of the nation, and we
will not leave except by force.” Shortly afterwards the King yielded,
though probably not to Mirabeau’s rhetoric. By the beginning of July
the National Assembly had been duly constituted, and was ready to put
the Enlightenment, so long in France a matter of theory, into practice.
The first steps in the French revolution had been taken.
Those who insist that you must have violence before you can label
revolution as begun will date the great French revolution from July
14, 1789, when a Paris mob, aided by soldiers who had gone over to
the popular side, took the gloomy fortress-prison of the Bastille on
the eastern edge of the city. Bastille Day is the French republican
Fourth of July, a great holy day in one of the best organized of our
contemporary nationalist religions. As such it has been surrounded
by legends, endowed with a martyrology, safely withdrawn from the
unedifying touch of history. To an outsider, the taking of the Bastille
seems an involved and confusing process, at least as much the result of
the weakness of the royal governor, De Launay, as of the strength of
the besiegers. What is important for us is that Paris was in the hands
of a mob for three days, and that this mob was clearly shouting against
the King, shouting for the National Assembly. After the rioting had
died down, the National Assembly--or rather, the revolutionary majority
in the Assembly--could proceed in the useful assurance that the people
were on its side, could feel that it had _carte blanche_ to neglect
royal protests as it went about its task of remaking France.
The revolution in Russia got under way with great speed. As we have
seen in a previous chapter, there were plenty of precedents for
a Russian uprising, and several generations of Russians had been
discussing the inevitable coming of the storm. The first steps which
led up to the February revolution of 1917, however, took even advanced
leaders like Kerensky somewhat by surprise. Socialist parties the
world over had been used to celebrating March 8th as Women’s Day. On
that day--February 23rd of the old Russian calendar, whence the name,
February revolution, by which it has gone down in history--crowds
of women workers from the factory districts poured into the streets
calling for bread. Each day thereafter crowds increased. Orators of the
radical group harangued at street corners. Soldiers from the large
Petrograd wartime garrison mingled with the crowds, seemed indeed to
sympathize with them. Even the Cossacks were not hostile to the people,
or at any rate, seemed to lack stomach for fighting.
Meanwhile the authorities were consulting, and as piecemeal measures
failed to work, they decided on March 11th to repress the troubles
in accordance with a fine neat plan already drawn up on paper for
just such emergency. But the plan didn’t work. The soldiers of the
garrison, anxious not to be sent to the front, began to waver. On
March 12th the first of the mutinies broke out, and one after another
the famous regiments of the Imperial Army poured out of the barracks,
but to join, not to shoot on, the crowds. Obscure leaders, sergeants,
factory foremen and the like arose and directed their little groups at
strategic points. Out of all the confusion and madness which makes the
detailed record of events in this week the despair of the historian,
one clear fact came out. There was no imperial government left in the
capital, no formal government at all. Gradually there emerged the
nucleus of the Soviet government to come, organized through trade
unions, Socialist groups, and other working-class sources. The Czar and
his advisers, too bewildered and incompetent to control the movement,
did prevent the legal Duma from taking control. Instead, moderates
of all sorts got together to form the nucleus of the provisional
government to come. In such a chaotic condition, indeed, it would seem
that the action of the moderates is a uniformity of revolutions. Their
sentiments and training impel them to try and put a stop to disorder,
to salvage what they can of established routines.
Socialists and liberals alike were agreed that the Czar must abdicate.
Nicholas himself had started from Headquarters for his palace at
Tsarskoe Selo near Petrograd, but was held up at Pskov by the
increasing disorders. Here, on March 15th, he decided to abdicate in
favor of his brother, the Grand Duke Michael. What centralized power
there was in Russia seems to have been in the hands of a committee of
the Duma, and this committee waited on Michael in person. Kerensky,
who was on the committee, seems at this juncture to have been as
neurotically dramatic as usual; at Michael’s refusal to accept
the Crown he went into a transport of delight. Russia was to be a
republic. Michael’s own decision to refuse seems to have been dictated
by personal cowardice. One of the nice problems of history in the
conditional centers around the question of what would have happened had
this Romanov been a man of courage, decision, and ability. No one can
say, but the question reminds us that even in its most sociological
moments, history cannot neglect the drama of personality and chance.
With Michael’s abdication on March 16, 1917, the Russian revolution had
clearly begun. There were repercussions in the provinces, and in some
remote spots the fall of the Romanovs was not realized for weeks. But
the work of those eight days had destroyed a centralized bureaucratic
government at its most vital point--its head and nerve-center. Much
in Russia was unchanged by the February revolution, but politically a
week had done what it had taken years to do in England and France. The
Romanovs had gone much more rapidly than the Stuarts and the Bourbons.
_III. Spontaneity or Planning?_
Even from the foregoing sketch of the first steps in four revolutions,
it should be clear that to the narrative historian the differences
in the four are striking. The English revolution was begun in one of
the oldest, best established of representative bodies; the American
revolution began chiefly in New England, among people used to town
meetings and colonial legislatures; the French revolution developed out
of the meetings of a legislative body with no immediate precedents,
staffed by men unused to parliamentary life; the Russian revolution
started in street riots in the capital city, and went on without
benefit of any parliamentary body, since even the old Duma met only
through an emergency committee. There are differences of personality,
differences of time and place. Charles raising his standard in hope
at Nottingham in 1642 seems worlds apart from the abject Nicholas,
buffeted about the northern plains in a railroad train at the mercy
of striking workers and troops in revolt, drearily abdicating in the
provincial gloom of Pskov. There may even be racial differences.
The orderly and almost chivalrous Civil War of the English seems at
first sight something quite unlike the madness of July 14th, or the
tragicomic spectacle of metropolitan Petrograd in the hands of a mob
without even a good slogan.
Yet this last should give us pause. At the informal level of mere
dramatic or narrative likenesses, these early stages of revolution
have similarities as striking as their differences. Speaker Lenthall
defying Charles come to seize the five members, Mirabeau thundering his
challenge to the bewildered Grand Master of Ceremonies at the royal
session of June 23rd, Patrick Henry warning a king of the unfortunate
fate of certain other rulers--these seem to be speaking the same
language, assuming the same effective postures. The English House of
Commons in the pandemonium of its final session in 1629 seems much
like the French National Assembly during its frequent heated moments,
and not worlds apart from certain important sessions of the Petrograd
soviet.
For the emotions of men in groups, and the rhetoric and gestures
necessary to bring out and make effective for action these emotions,
are more uniform than the rationalist likes to think them. Any
representative body of several hundred responds in definite ways
to certain definite stimuli, and it does this the more certainly
and invariably because it cannot respond to logic, cannot confront
a new situation with complete experimental freedom. Especially are
excited representative bodies much alike, whether they are composed
of “irresponsible” Russians, “excitable” Frenchmen, or “sensible”
Englishmen. We need not be surprised if in these early stages of
revolution there are clear parallels in the behavior of men in such
groups.
It is, however, more important for us to see whether there are not in
these four revolutions uniformities which can be grouped together,
related to the whole course of the movements, given a place in our
conceptual scheme of the fever. What evidence have we here that we are
dealing with a process which has definite and common stages? Do these
first steps in revolution take place under conditions sociologically
similar even if dramatically dissimilar?
One uniformity is crystal-clear. In all four of our societies, the
existing government attempted to collect monies from people who refused
to pay. All four of our revolutions started among people who objected
to certain taxes, who organized to protest them, and who finally
reached the point of agitating for the elimination and replacement of
the existing government. This does not necessarily mean that those who
resisted taxation foresaw or wished a radical revolution. It does mean
that the transition from talking about necessary great changes--for
in all our societies, as we have seen, something was in the air--to
concrete action, was made under the stimulus of an unpopular form of
taxation.
A second uniformity is quite as clear, though the consequences that
derive from it are much more obscure. The events in this stage, these
first steps in revolution, do most certainly bring out of the confused
discontents of the old regime two parties into clear opposition, and
indeed into preliminary violence. These parties we may call briefly the
party of the old regime and the party of the revolution. Moreover, by
the end of this period of the first stages, the party of the revolution
has won. The muddy waters of doubt and debate are momentarily cleared.
The revolution, hardly begun, seems over. In England after the Long
Parliament had disposed of Strafford and wrung concessions from the
King, in America after Concord, and that greatest of moral victories,
Bunker Hill, in France after the fall of the Bastille, in Russia after
the abdication, there is a brief period of joy and hope, the illusory
but charming honeymoon of that impossible pair, the Real and the Ideal.
That our four revolutions ran through some such early stage as this,
in which the opposition between old and new crystallized dramatically,
and the new won a striking victory, is too evident for the most
old-fashioned narrative historian to deny. Over the reasons why this
stage developed as it did, however, there is still a running dispute
among writers who concern themselves with such matters--historians,
political theorists, sociologists, essayists. The heart of the
dispute is a matter which must be got straight before anything like a
sociology of revolutions is possible. Briefly, one set of disputants
maintains that these glorious first steps in revolution are taken
almost spontaneously by a united nation rising in its might and virtue
to check its oppressors; another maintains that these first steps are
the fruition of a series of interlocking plots initiated by small but
determined groups of malcontents. By and large the first view is that
taken by persons favorable to a given revolution, the second by persons
hostile to it, or at least loyal to the memory of the old regime.
There are, however, all sorts of variations on the theme, and different
commentators have differently balanced these elements of spontaneity
and planning.
This opposition is clearest, and in some ways quite adequately typical
for our purpose, in the historiography of the French revolution.
Augustin Cochin used to describe this opposition as that between the
_thèse des circonstances_ and the _thèse du complot_, the explanation
by circumstances and the explanation by plot. Those who on the whole
regarded the revolution as a good thing maintained that the people
of France, and especially the people of Paris, were goaded into
revolt by the oppression of king and court, that the circumstances of
their social, political, and economic life in 1789 are in themselves
adequate explanation of what happened. Given such circumstances, and
men and women of French blood, and you have revolution as naturally,
as _automatically_, in a sense, as you have an explosion when a spark
strikes gunpowder.
This figure may be applied to specific steps in the revolutionary
process. The Bastille riots, for instance, were not planned in any
sense. Paris heard of the dismissal of Necker, noted that the King
was concentrating troops around Paris, and in a million forgotten
conversations spread the fear that the King and his party were about to
dismiss the revolutionary National Assembly and rule by armed force.
Paris therefore rose in its might, and with a sure instinct seized on
the Bastille as a symbol of the hated old regime, and destroyed it. The
sovereign people were self-guided in all this, moved if you like by a
natural force, by a hatred of injustice, and were led by hundreds of
small men, by noncommissioned officers of the revolution, but not by
any general staff, not by any small group who had deliberately planned
an aggression.
The opposite theory maintains that the whole revolutionary movement
in France was the work of a scheming and unprincipled minority,
freemasons, _philosophes_, professional agitators. These people in the
second half of the eighteenth century got control of the press and the
platform, and persistently indoctrinated the literate part of France
with a hatred for established institutions, and especially for the
Church. As the government found itself in increasingly bad financial
straits, these plotters wormed their way into its councils, and finally
secured the promise of an Estates-General. By clever electioneering
in a populace not used to representative assemblies, they filled the
Third Estate with members of their sect, and succeeded in penetrating
even the ranks of the First and Second Estates. They had been used
to working together, and thanks to years of discussion of political
reform, they knew what they wanted. The more determined and initiated
of these plotters could therefore control the actions of the large and
shapeless National Assembly, though they were a minority of its twelve
hundred members.
Bastille Day seems very different to the writers of this school. Louis
was concentrating troops to protect, not to dissolve, the National
Assembly, to protect it from the minority of wild radicals who were
abusing its machinery. Fearing defeat, these radicals stirred up Paris
in a hundred ways: they sent orators to street corners and cafés;
they distributed radical news-sheets and pamphlets; they sent agents
to spread discontent among the royal troops, and especially among the
French Guard; they even subsidized prostitutes to get at the soldiers
more effectively. Everything was planned ahead for a more propitious
moment, and when the dismissal of Necker afforded that moment, the
signal was given and Paris rose. But not spontaneously. Somewhere a
general staff--Mirabeau was on it, and most of the popular figures
in the National Assembly--was working, carefully sowing the seeds of
rebellion.
With the appropriate changes, this sort of opposition can be made out
in all our revolutions. To the Stuart partisans--and they still find
their way into print--the Great Rebellion was an unhappily successful
conspiracy of gloomy money-grubbing Calvinists against the Merrie
England of tradition. More commonly, since the Whigs gave the tone
to modern England, the Parliamentarians are seen as liberty-loving
children of Magna Charta, who rose quite naturally and spontaneously
against unbearable Stuart tyranny. American Loyalists always maintained
that the best of the country was with them, that the Whigs had won
by superior organization and chicanery. Most of us, of course,
were brought up to regard George III as a personal tyrant, a hirer
of Hessians, a man who wished to grind the Americans into unmanly
submission. The American revolution was to us the spontaneous reply of
injured freemen to British insolence.
Finally, some Russian _émigrés_ still seem to believe that a minority
of unscrupulous Bolsheviks somehow engineered both the February and
the October revolutions. Marxism attaches no shame to revolution, and
admits the importance of planning and leadership in revolutionary
movements. Therefore, though official Communist explanations by no
means soft-pedal Czarist guilt and oppression, though they insist that
the people of Russia in February, 1917, wholeheartedly and nearly
unanimously rose against the Czar, still they admit, and indeed glory
in, the role of leaders consciously planning a revolution. At least,
this was the explanation accepted in orthodox Marxist circles, and it
is classically stated in the first volume of Trotsky’s _History of the
Russian Revolution_. There are signs in Stalinite Russia of a reversion
to something analogous to an American schoolbook explanation of our
own revolution; Czarist tyranny and the spontaneous popular uprising
are emphasized, the tactics of a revolutionary minority minimized.
Indeed, that these two conflicting, and in their exaggerated forms
antithetical, explanations of the first steps in revolution should
arise is in itself a clear uniformity to be got from the comparative
study of revolutions. Very early indeed these two interpretations
arise, the victorious revolutionists attributing their success to the
rise of the many against intolerable tyranny, the defeated supporters
of the old regime attributing their failure to the unscrupulous tactics
of a minority of clever, wicked men. Neither explanation is interested
primarily in facts or the scientific interpretation of facts; both are
aimed at satisfying human sentiments. It is interesting to note that
even the revolutionists’ explanation seeks to gloss over violence,
seems in a way ashamed of the fact of revolution. This again is
perfectly natural, since once in power the revolutionists wish to stay
in power. A useful help to this end is a general feeling among the
governed that it is wrong to resist those in authority. By and large,
successful revolutionists do not often subscribe to Jefferson’s desire
to see a revolution every twenty years or so; rather, they endeavor
to create a myth of their own revolution, which becomes the last one
necessary. Marxist theory even anticipates this, since the proletarian
revolution ushers in the classless society, where there will be no
class struggle, and no need for revolution.
It is, however, possible for us to go further than simply noting
this division of opinion among the lovers and the haters of a given
revolution. We may venture the generalization that there is some
truth in both the explanation by circumstances and the explanation by
plot. This may seem to many in 1938 a characteristically liberal and
wishy-washy solution, a stupid adhesion to an outdated notion of a
golden mean. But it does seem to have a more satisfactory relation with
the facts than either extreme explanation.
Bastille Day may again serve as an example. There is plenty of
evidence that organized groups did help stir up trouble in Paris in
those July days. We know that the radical groups, the “patriots”
in the Assembly at Versailles, had close connections with Paris
politicians. A kind of skeletal political organization had been left
over from the Paris elections to the Third Estate, and these Parisian
electors helped greatly to bring a new municipal organization, and
a new National Guard, out of the confusion of the riots. Most of
the Royalist description of agents circulating in the crowds, of
inflammatory pamphleteering, even perhaps of subsidized prostitutes,
is substantially true. What is not true is that these elements of
planning can be traced to any one or two small plotting groups, to
the Duc d’Orléans, or to a few freemasons. The word “plot” is indeed
a bad one--except for the purposes of Rightist propaganda, where it
proves very useful indeed. Rather we must say that there is evidence of
the activities of a number of groups of the kind any careful observer
of societies knows well--pressure groups, embryo political parties,
semi-religious sects, gatherings on the lunatic fringe. There is,
however, no evidence that these very dissimilar groups were in July,
1789, managed from any one center, controlled by a small scheming
directorate.
On the contrary, there is every evidence that once the dismissal of
Necker got these various groups excited, what followed was in a sense
spontaneous mob action. No one has yet said the final word on the
psychology of crowds, but it is fairly well accepted that the behavior
of crowds cannot be completely gauged in advance by the cleverest of
mob leaders. Actually it is clear that in Paris in those days there
was not one mob, but at least several dozens. People came out in the
street because their neighbors were already out. They paraded up and
down, shouting and singing, stopping now and then for another drink,
or to hear another street-corner orator. Self-constituted leaders of
little groups certainly supplemented any planned action. The decision
to march on the Bastille seems to have been taken independently in
several quarters. No one knows for sure who first had the brilliant
idea of going to the Invalides Hospital to secure small arms. The
rioting seems to have died out less because the Bastille fell than
because the rioters were tired out. Three days is a long time to be
riotous, or drunk, or both.
What holds for the taking of the Bastille holds for the general
preparatory work and the first stages of revolutions as we have
discussed them in this chapter. The Russian February revolution
centered in Petrograd in one week and seems like the Bastille riots
on a larger scale. Trotsky has done some of his best writing in his
description of the February revolution and in his balanced accounting
of what must be considered spontaneous popular risings and what must
be attributed to conscious revolutionary tactics. Kerensky writes
flatly that the revolution “came of its own accord, unengineered by
anyone, born in the chaos of the collapse of Tsardom.” Trotsky admits
that no one planned or expected the revolution when it did come, that
it developed out of ordinary Socialist manifestations and a mild
bread-riot. But that development, he adds, was led by “conscious and
tempered workers, educated for the most part by the party of Lenin.” We
may question the last part of this statement, but there can be no doubt
that in the last few days of the Petrograd riots leaders of the coming
soviet and leaders of the coming provisional government combined to
force out the Czarist government.
The role of the pressure group is especially conspicuous in the
early stages of the American revolution. As early as April, 1763,
the merchants of Boston organized a “Society for Encouraging Trade
and Commerce with the Province of Massachusetts Bay” with a standing
committee of fifteen to watch trade affairs and call meetings. Accounts
of their activities were sent to merchants in other colonies. To
combat the Stamp Act the radicals organized themselves as “Sons of
Liberty,” a mass organization which met at times openly, at times
secretly, to promote the work of revolution. Their vigilance committees
“maintained a sort of Holy Inquisition with the sales and purchases
of every man of business, into the outgoings and incomings of private
households, and with the reported opinions of individuals.” Town and
county in the North, the county in the South, provided a framework for
public meetings and resolutions. The Committees of Correspondence,
organized originally as private pressure groups, were later skillfully
manipulated by Sam Adams until they had partly supplanted the more
conservative town meetings. Adams called into meeting in 1773 a joint
committee for Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, Brookline, and Cambridge
which was able to swamp the now fairly conservative merchant vote.
Throughout the movement, violence was employed whenever it seemed
necessary, from grand affairs like the Boston Tea Party to isolated
beating of Tories.
Yet the most realistic of our modern historians will hardly go so
far as to assert that the American revolution was plotted by a tiny
minority. The net effect of a dozen years of British mistakes, of
concessions and retractions, blowings-hot and blowings-cold, together
with a great variety of American agitation, was to produce in 1775
a widespread popular backing for the Continental Congress in its
resistance to George III. It is quite impossible to say how many Whigs,
how many Tories, and how many indifferent or neutral persons there
were in the thirteen colonies at the outbreak of armed hostilities.
Probably there were proportionately more Tories than there were extreme
Royalists in France in 1789 and many more than there were Czarists in
Russia in 1917; and there were probably fewer Tories in revolutionary
America than partisans of the Stuarts in England in 1642. But in all
these cases it is a matter of proportion. The American revolution
was, like the others, in part the result of an active, able, and far
from infinitesimal minority working on a large majority group with
grievances enough to be stirred up effectively when the right time came.
To sum the matter up in a metaphor: the school of circumstances
regards revolutions as a wild and natural growth, its seeds sown among
tyranny and corruption, its development wholly determined by forces
outside itself or at any rate outside human planning; the school
of plot regards revolutions as a forced and artificial growth, its
seeds carefully planted in soil worked over and fertilized by the
gardener-revolutionists, mysteriously brought to maturity by these same
gardeners against the forces of nature. Actually, we must reject both
extremes, for they are nonsense, and hold that revolutions do grow
from seeds sown by men who want change, and that these men do do a lot
of skillful gardening; but that the gardeners are not working against
Nature, but rather in soil and in a climate propitious to their work;
and that the final fruits represent a collaboration between men and
Nature.
_IV. The Role of Force_
A final uniformity to be discerned in these first stages of our
revolutions is perhaps the clearest and most important of all. In each
revolution there is a point, or several points, where constituted
authority is challenged by the illegal acts of revolutionists. In such
instances, the routine response of any authority is to have recourse
to force, police or military. Our authorities made such a response,
_but in each case with a striking lack of success_. Those of the ruling
class responsible for such responses in all our societies proved
signally unable to make adequate use of force. Let us first look at the
facts.
In England there was no considerable standing army, and of course
nothing like a modern police force. Indeed, the question of control
over what standing army there was had been one of the big issues
between the first two Stuarts and their Parliaments. The Crown had
been obliged to quarter its soldiers on private citizens in order to
keep any kind of army together, and this quartering was one of the
grievances most strongly held against Charles I. When a Scotch army
crossed the border, Charles was obliged to call the Long Parliament
to get money to buy this armed force off. When the actual break
between Royalists and Parliamentarians drew near, both sides tried to
constitute an armed force. Charles had the benefit of a devoted noble
officer-class, and enough tenant-followers of noblemen and gentry to
constitute what was by far the strongest armed force controlled by the
government, or conservatives, or party-in-power side in any of our
four revolutions. Yet the Civil War proved that he didn’t have enough
good soldiers, in comparison with the human resources available to the
Parliament. Charles was beaten in the first instance because he lacked
decisive military power.
Similarly in the American revolution, neither the American Tories
nor the British armies were quite strong enough, as in the actual
event they used their armed strength to suppress the revolutionists.
Notably in the earlier stages, the British undertook to introduce
what they knew to be unpopular governmental changes with what now
seems an amazing disregard of police necessities. No doubt the
long tradition of British loyal self-government made it hard for a
British colonial administrator to conceive of any other methods. But
the fact remains that these forces in North America in 1775 were
quite inadequate to enforce authority. How many more men than Gage
actually did have would have been necessary to keep royal order in
Massachusetts Bay is a matter of guesswork, of perhaps unprofitable
history-in-the-conditional. It is, however, unduly complimentary to
rugged Yankee love of independence to suppose that no armed force could
have been large enough to have controlled Massachusetts. Had there been
a Napoleon instead of a Gage, there would perhaps have been a different
end to the fighting. Whether such a policy of repression would not
ultimately have produced a successful revolution anyway is a matter we
are not called upon to discuss. What does concern us is the simple fact
that in America also an important initial failure of the government was
its failure to use force adequately and skillfully.
Louis XVI had in 1789 a fairly trustworthy armed force. His French
troops were perhaps open to propaganda by the patriots. But he had
important household troops, mercenaries recruited from foreign peoples,
chiefly Swiss and German, and not accessible to French agitators.
That the Swiss would die for him, or for their duty, was proved three
years later at the storming of the Tuileries. He had, especially in
the artillery, a capable set of officers, most of whom could be relied
upon at this stage. Yet at the decisive moment, the rioting in Paris
in July, he and his advisers failed to use the military. Again we edge
into history-in-the-conditional, but one cannot avoid wondering what
would have happened had a few disciplined troops with street guns
attempted the reduction of Paris in July, 1789. Napoleon was later to
show that such a force could readily beat down civilian resistance,
and this fact was to be amply confirmed in 1848 and 1871. Louis might
have failed. But the point is that he didn’t even try. Once again a
government has failed to make adequate use of force.
Petrograd in 1917 is the most perfect example of this important
role of the military and the police. Everyone, from Czarist to
Trotskyite, admits that what turned somewhat chaotic and aimless
street demonstrations into a revolution was the failure of the
elaborate government plan to restore order in Petrograd. And that
plan failed because at the critical moment the soldiers refused to
march against the people, but regiment by regiment came over instead
to join them. Again, such is the advantage which a disciplined force
with modern artillery possesses over even the most inspired civilian
revolutionists, there can be little doubt that if the Cossacks and
a few of the famous regiments of the line, the Preobrazhensky, for
instance, had been warmly loyal to the government, even the somewhat
incompetent rulers of Petrograd could probably have put down the
disturbance. Whether another and worse riot was not inevitable within a
few months under existing conditions of failure in war is not a matter
that concerns us here.
This striking failure on the part of the rulers to use force
successfully is not, however, likely to be an isolated and chance
phenomenon. Indeed, it seems intimately bound up with that general
ineptness and failure of the ruling class we have noticed in a previous
chapter. Long years of decline have undermined the discipline of the
troops, bad treatment has given the private soldiers a common cause
with civilians, the officers have lost faith in the conventional
and stupid military virtues. There is no co-ordinating command, no
confidence, no desire for action. Or if there are some of these things,
they exist only in isolated individuals, and are lost among the
general incompetence, irresolution, and pessimism. The conservative
cause--even the cause of Charles I--seems a lost cause from the
start. The American case is somewhat different. Here we have an inept
_colonial_ government, but not an inept native ruling class.
We can then with some confidence attribute the failure of the
conservatives to use force skillfully to the decadence of a ruling
class. After all, we are dealing with fairly large groups of the
kind we are accustomed to treating as subjects for sociological
generalization. When, however, we attempt to bring the four crowned
heads of our societies under some such general rule, we can hardly
help feeling that we have no adequate statistical basis. Yet Charles
I, George III, Louis XVI, and Nicholas II display such remarkable
similarities that one hesitates to call in chance as an explanation.
Trotsky confidently asserts that a decaying society will inevitably
head up into the kind of incompetence displayed by these monarchs. We
dare not display quite as much confidence, but we must bring forward
these uniformities in the behavior of four men as a valid part of our
observed uniformities. At any rate their being what they were had an
important part in that process through which the revolutionists won
their preliminary and decisive victories over incompetent authority.
At the very least, one can discern in all these monarchs mistakes
which point to their lack of a reasonably objective thing, the
technical skill necessary to rule men. If a baseball player strikes
out consistently over a long stretch of games, and fields badly, it
may be because of poor eyesight, or family troubles, or a lot of other
reasons, but the simple fact remains that he is a poor ball-player.
Our four kings were poor kings, though they were all good family men,
men on the whole whom we should probably list as good, or at least as
well-meaning. Nicholas was petty and jealous, as well as ignorant and
superstitious, and by conventional Christian moral standards probably
the worst of the lot. But he was far from being a cruel tyrant. Louis
was kindly, well-meaning, but singularly unsuited to affairs of state.
Both men were deficient intellectually, were very much under the
domination of determined, passionate, proud, and ignorant wives, and
both have left diaries which display amazing parallels in obtuseness.
Louis went hunting on Bastille Day and in his diary records “Nothing”;
Nicholas in a similar crisis records “Walked long and killed two crows;
had tea by daylight.”
We cannot here go into the fascinating subject of the personalities of
all these monarchs. George III was high-minded, stupid, and stubborn,
which is a very bad combination indeed in a ruler. Charles is humanly
the most attractive of the four; there is a sound basis for the
romantic legend woven around him. But he was a bad king for a number
of reasons, of which the chief were perhaps first an almost complete
inability to understand what was going on in the hearts and heads of
those of his subjects commonly called Puritans--and this emphatically
includes the Scotch Calvinists--and, second, a tendency to high-minded
intrigue. In politics, high-mindedness and intrigue are much safer if
kept decently apart. This much, in summary, we may conclude about our
kings. However much they differed as men, they were alike in being
wholly unable to make effective use of force, even had they possessed
it, at the first stages of the revolution.
For our revolutions, then, we may put this last uniformity very
simply: they were successful in their first stages; they became actual
revolutions instead of mere discussions, complaints, and riotings,
only after revolutionists had beaten, or won over, the armed forces
of the government. We cannot attempt to erect uniformities for other
revolutions or for revolutions in general. But we may here suggest
in very tentative and hypothetical form the generalization that
no government has ever fallen before revolutionists until it has
lost control over its armed forces or lost the ability to use them
effectively; and conversely that no revolutionists have ever succeeded
until they have got a predominance of effective armed force on their
side.
_V. The Honeymoon_
The first stage of revolution ends in all four of our societies with
the victory of the revolutionists after what is rather dramatic than
serious bloodshed. The hated old regime has been conquered so easily!
The way is open to the regeneration men have been so long talking
about, so long hoping for. Even the Russian February revolution, though
it broke out in the midst of the misery and shame of defeat at the
hands of Germans and Austrians, was cradled in the hope and joy that
seems a natural heritage of revolutions. Russians all over the world
heard the good news with delight. Liberals were as happy as their
ancestors had been in ’76 and ’89. Now Russia was washed clean of the
stain of absolutism, could take her place with confidence in the ranks
of her sister democracies of the West, join with a new effectiveness
in the crusade against the sole remaining forces of darkness, the
Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs.
The honeymoon stage of revolution is most perfectly developed in
France, where the revolution came in peacetime, and at the end of a
great intellectual movement called the Enlightenment which had prepared
men’s minds for a new and practical miracle. Wordsworth’s lines are
familiar:
“France standing on the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming born again.”
But poets in a dozen languages set to work to celebrate the
regeneration of France and of mankind. And not only poets. Sober
business men, professional men, country gentlemen, people who in the
twentieth century tend to regard revolution with horror, joined in the
rejoicing. Far away in unenlightened Russia noblemen illuminated their
houses in honor of the fall of the Bastille. Americans and Englishmen
rejoiced that the ancient enemy had come to join the self-governing
peoples. Frenchmen themselves were for a brief happy moment almost
unanimous. The King had seen the error of his ways, had embraced the
paladin Lafayette, had come freely to his good city of Paris to hear
the cheers of the heroes of the Bastille.
Yet the honeymoon period even in France was brief, briefer yet in
Russia, in England and in America never quite so clear and so definite.
In the first stages, and at the critical moment when the test of force
comes, the old regime is faced by a solid opposition. The opposition
is indeed composed of various groups, is never that myth a “united
people.” But it is welded by the necessity of effectively opposing the
government into a genuine political unit, into something more than a
chance coalition of contradictory elements. Its victory is, if we are
willing to take the terms critically and not sentimentally, the victory
of the “people” over its “oppressors.” It has shown itself stronger and
abler than the old government in this time of crisis. It has now become
the government, and is facing a new set of problems. When it actually
gets to work on those problems the honeymoon is soon over.
_Chapter_ FOUR TYPES OF REVOLUTIONISTS
_I. The Clichés_
It would clearly be helpful in our inquiry if we could at this point
isolate the revolutionist as a type. To pursue our analogy of the
fever, may it not be that certain individuals act as “carriers,”
and that they can be classified, labeled, described in economic and
sociological terms as well as in those of psychology or common sense?
This is at any rate a lead which seems worth following.
There are, however, several ways in which such a pursuit might lead us
astray. We must beware of regarding revolutionists, and revolutionary
leaders in particular, as literally bearing disease germs of
revolution. Here as throughout this study, our conceptual scheme must
never be allowed to lead us into fantasy. It must be a convenience, not
an obsession. We must more than ever avoid using terms of praise or
dispraise, which lurk in every corner of this particular field. For the
simple word “revolutionist” is likely to call up in the minds of most
of us a relatively uncritical personification, the sort of loose change
of daily intercourse that serves us well enough to get on with “poet”
or “professor” or “Frenchman.”
Even the subtlest thinker, the most delicate and conscientious artist
in words, has to come down in daily life to something very close to
the clichés that serve the man in the street. You and I, of course, do
not picture poets as long-haired, delicate, bohemian and tubercular,
nor professors as impractical, absent-minded, kindly and bearded,
nor Frenchmen as polite, dapper, wax-mustached, ladies’ men. But we
cannot go into Proustian intricacies with ourselves when we use such
words, nor can we use them as rigorously as a scientific systematist.
We get along with them as best we may, adjusting them roughly to our
experience and our sentiments.
Now what “revolutionist” means at this level to various persons and
various groups is in itself an important element in a full sociology of
revolutions. What all sorts of people feel about revolution is perhaps
most easily studied in the clichés which arise out of words like
“revolutionist” and “revolutionary,” or their more concrete parallels,
“Jacobin,” “Bolshevik,” “red,” and the like. We cannot attempt such a
study here, but we must look a bit further into a few of these clichés,
if only as a warning and a contrast.
Probably for most Americans in the fourth decade of the twentieth
century the word “revolutionist” carries unpleasant overtones. At
the level of the Hearst papers or the Macfadden publications, a
revolutionist appears as a seedy, wild-eyed, unshaven, loud-mouthed
person, given to soapbox oratory and plotting against the government,
ready for, and yet afraid of, violence. Even at slightly more
sophisticated levels, one suspects many of our countrymen feel much the
same about revolutionists, or at any rate are convinced that they are
pronouncedly queer people, failures under pre-revolutionary conditions,
sufferers from inferiority complexes, envious of their betters, or
just downright ornery, “agin the government” on principle and by
disposition. Other and more favorable pictures of the revolutionist
no doubt arise in other minds. To judge by some of our proletarian
writers--not themselves proletarians--the revolutionist is a sturdy,
broad-shouldered steelworker, uncorrupted by the falsities the
bourgeois call education, but well-versed in Marx and Lenin, strong,
kindly, a warrior-spirit with just a redeeming touch of Shelley about
him.
Now the social uses of beliefs of this sort are plain enough. In an
old bourgeois society like the United States, sentiments hostile to
revolutionists are probably important factors in maintaining social
stability. Revolutionists were all right in 1776, but not in 1938. Any
society that is a going concern must apparently contain large numbers
of people who feel this way about revolutionists. Even in Russia, where
memories of violent revolution are still fresh, a concerted effort
is being made by the government to discredit living, flesh-and-blood
revolutionists. Revolution was all right in 1917, but not in 1938. On
the other side, it is clear that radicals and extremists who think of
revolutionists as fine fellows, as heroes and martyrs, are also aiding
in their own social discipline, strengthening themselves for the fray.
The social scientist, however, cannot let the matter rest here. He must
attempt an objective classification of revolutionists, as complicated
as his data about them makes necessary. We can say with confidence that
even a hasty review of the four revolutions with which we are concerned
is very far from confirming either set of clichés we have outlined. And
notably, since the derogatory set is commoner in this country, such a
review by no means confirms the notion that our revolutionists were
seedy, loud-mouthed, bomb-throwing failures in the old regimes. If we
include, as we must, those who took the first steps in revolution as
well as those who ruled in the reign of terror, our type becomes still
less simple.
Let us take a random list of names as they come to mind: Hampden, Sir
Harry Vane, John Milton, Sam Adams, John Hancock, Washington, Thomas
Paine, Lafayette, Marat, Talleyrand, Hébert, Miliukov, Konavalov,
Kerensky, Chicherin, Lenin. All are revolutionists; all opposed
constituted authority with force of arms. The list includes great
nobles, gentlemen, merchants, journalists, a professor of history,
a political boss, a ward-heeler. It includes several very rich men
and one or two poor men. It includes many who would by conventional
Christian standards seem to have been good men; and it includes several
who would by such standards seem to have been very wicked men. It
includes some who were important people in their pre-revolutionary
days, some who were quite unknown, and two, perhaps three, who were
apparent failures in life until the revolution gave them a chance to
rise. Surely it is no easy task to find a least common denominator for
a list like this.
No doubt we shall be aided by making a distinction between the men
who dominate in the early stages of a revolution--on the whole the
moderates--and those who dominate in the crisis stage--on the whole
the extremists. But it will not do to say that only our extremists
are real revolutionists. After all, even George Washington seems to
have taken an oath of loyalty to the British Crown, and his breaking
that oath would have been treason had the American revolution failed.
We have been taught by Whig historians to believe that Essex and Pym
were defending the sacred laws of England, and that therefore they
weren’t real revolutionists. This was not, by any means, the current
opinion in Europe in the 1640’s, where the Parliamentarians were
regarded as shocking rebels against their king; and monarchy was in
seventeenth-century Europe as solidly rooted in the sentiments which
give force to law as the American Constitution seems rooted with us in
this country at the present time. No, we must list the moderates among
our revolutionists, even though they were defending the higher law
against the lower, and weren’t just nasty anarchists and rebels.
_II. Economic and Social Position: Rank and File_
One of the most useful approaches to the problem of the personnel of
revolutionary movements is from the relatively objective indications
of the economic and social status of those who take part in the
uprising. Now it is very difficult to find out much about the rank
and file of the revolutionists. Like the private soldier in war,
the ordinary revolutionist is inarticulate and nameless. For the
French revolution, however, some such study is not impossible. In the
surviving records of the Jacobin Clubs, which served as centers of
revolutionary action, and resemble both the Russian soviets and the
American corresponding committees, we have a large number of lists of
members--imperfect, of course, but still lists. Some years ago the
present writer made a study of these lists, and, aided by tax-rolls and
other documents in French local archives, was able to arrive at certain
rough statistical generalizations about these revolutionists. Some of
these generalizations must be here summarized from the author’s _The
Jacobins: A Study in the New History_.
In general, it is possible to arrive at some statistical approximation
of the social and economic positions of these Jacobin revolutionists in
pre-revolutionary France. There are tax-rolls extant for various years
between 1785 and 1790, and on these many of the Jacobins can be found,
with the sums they were assessed at. As these were direct taxes not too
far out of proportion to income, it is possible thus to get a rough
estimate of Jacobin wealth. Occupations are usually given, and this is
a useful indication of social position. Finally, it is also possible
to study certain clubs at specific moments in the revolution, so that
a sample can be taken during the early or moderate period, and another
during the later rule of the extremists. Here, briefly, are some of the
results.
For twelve clubs, with a total membership of 5,405 over the whole
course of the revolution, 1789-95, in both its moderate and its
violent phases: 62 per cent of the members were middle class, 28 per
cent working class, 10 per cent peasants. For twelve clubs in the
moderate period, 1789-92, with a membership of 4,037: 66 per cent
were middle class, 26 per cent working class, 8 per cent peasants.
For forty-two clubs in the violent period, 1793-95, with a membership
of 8,062: 57 per cent were middle class, 32 per cent working class,
11 per cent peasants. The tax-rolls confirm what occupational and
social classification suggests. In eight clubs considered over the
whole period of revolution, club members paid an average tax of 32.12
_livres_, where the average tax for all male citizens of the towns
considered was 17.02 _livres_; in twenty-six clubs considered in the
violent period only, club members paid 19.94 _livres_, male citizens
14.45 _livres_. Thus, though there was certainly a tendency for the
clubs to be recruited in the violent period from social strata a bit
lower, on the whole one is forced to the conclusion that “the Jacobin
was neither a nobleman nor a beggar, but almost anything in between.
The Jacobins represent a complete cross-section of their communities.”
Other relatively objective indices help us a bit. It was often possible
to list the ages of members of the clubs during the revolution.
As far as the rank and file of these clubs went, the notion that
revolutionists are recruited from the young and irresponsible was
not borne out. For ten clubs the average age varied from 38.3 years
to 45.4 years, and for all ten together came to 41.8 years. These
were clearly not foolhardy youngsters. Nor were they footloose
itinerants, shock troops imported from revolutionary urban centers
like Paris. Out of 2,949 members of fifteen clubs, only 378, or 13
per cent, had moved into the towns since the outbreak of trouble in
1789. The actual membership of the clubs varied as the revolutionary
movement grew more and more extreme--or in modern terms, went more
and more to the Left. Many moderates emigrated or were guillotined,
many disreputable extremists, often though by no means always from
the lower classes, only “made” the clubs later on. Yet in six clubs
with a total membership from 1789 to 1795 of 3,028, something over 31
per cent managed to stay on the books for the whole period, to have
been successively good monarchists, good Girondists, good Montagnards.
It is not true that the personality of these clubs became dominantly
lower or working class after the fall of the monarchy in 1792, nor even
that their newer recruits were largely from the proletariat. And it is
quite clear that these people are not on the whole failures in their
earlier environment; rather they represent the abler, more ambitious
and successful of the inhabitants of a given town. It is as if our
Rotarians today were revolutionists.
A similar statistical study could probably not be made for the English
revolution since lists corresponding to the Jacobin membership lists
are not available. The material certainly exists for such a study
of the actual membership of the soviets in, say, the crucial year
1917, but it would have to be put together from scattered sources
available only in Russia. We know a good deal about the membership
of our own American revolutionary groups, from merchants’ committees
and corresponding committees to continental congresses. Even for the
English revolution we have enough scattered material to permit some
generalizations about the personnel of the movement.
In the early stages of the English revolution there can be no doubt
about the respectability and economic prosperity of the men who backed
Parliament. Baxter, somewhat exaggeratedly, but with a kernel of truth,
writes that when the Great Rebellion broke out “it was the moderate
Conformists and Episcopal Protestants who had long been crying of
Innovations, Arminianism, Popery, Monopolies, illegal taxes and the
danger of arbitrary government, who raised the war.” The merchants of
London, Bristol and other towns, great lords, small landowning gentry,
all rose in sedition against their king. Even in what we may call the
extremist or crisis period of the English revolution, which begins
in 1646 or 1647 when the tension between the New Model Army and the
Presbyterians becomes acute, your revolutionists are very far from
riffraff. Even Baxter reports of that army--which was to the English
revolution what the Jacobins were to the French and the Bolsheviks to
the Russian revolutions--that “abundance of the common troopers and
many of the officers I found to be honest, sober, orthodox men, and
others tractable, ready to hear the truth, and of upright intentions.”
An historian has estimated that when the New Model “took the field
in 1645, of its thirty-seven chief officers, nine were of noble,
twenty-one of gentle birth, and only seven not gentlemen by birth.”
The English lower classes, or at least the more proletarian elements
as opposed to independent artisans, on the whole stood aloof from
the conflict. Even the wilder sectarians seem to have been recruited
from humble, but by no means poverty-stricken people, men who had
taught themselves to follow the theological disputes, men on the whole
representing the more active and ambitious of their class. The poorer
peasants, especially in the North and West, actually sided with the
King and against the revolutionists.
In America we have already pointed out the well-known fact that
it was the merchants who first organized opposition to the Crown.
This opposition was echoed by many planters in the southern coastal
plain, and by many very respectable yeoman farmers of the Piedmont.
It is quite true that there are numerous signs of the pretty active
participation of what a good conservative would regard as the dregs
of the population. The Boston Sons of Liberty, who performed most of
the actual work of violence there, were recruited from workingmen and
actually met habitually in the counting-room of a distillery. The
Tories, whom it is now more fashionable to call Loyalists, naturally
saw their opponents as a pretty shabby lot. Hutchinson writes of the
Boston town meeting that it is “constituted of the lowest class of
the people under the influence of a few of the higher class, but of
intemperate and furious dispositions and of desperate fortunes. Men of
property and the best character have deserted these meetings, where
they are sure of being affronted.”
Actually the line between Tory and Whig is a very irregular one,
depending on much besides economic status, as can be seen from the
late J. F. Jameson’s _The American Revolution Considered as a Social
Movement_. If the rich gentlemen of “Tory Row” in Cambridge sided with
the Crown, there were plenty of sober, respectable farmers, merchants,
and lawyers, who turned revolutionist. Such men were likely to be
shocked at the doings of wild young apprentices in the Sons of Liberty,
but this did not necessarily turn them to the British side, though it
made them critical of the Congress. A good sign of the respectability
of revolution is the adhesion of the clergy, which save for the
Episcopalians was in most colonies general. As a disgruntled Tory put
it, “The high sons of liberty include the ministers of the gospel, who
instead of preaching to their flocks meekness, sobriety, attention to
their different employments, and a steady obedience to the laws of
Britain, belch from the pulpits liberty, independence, and a steady
perseverance in endeavoring to shake off their allegiance to the mother
country. The independent ministers have ever been ... the instigators
and abettors of every persecution and conspiracy.”
To sum up we shall have to agree with Jameson that the strength of the
revolutionary movement in the long run lay with the plain people--not
with the mob or “rabble,” for American society was rural and not
urban--but with country artisans, small farmers, and frontiersmen. But
we shall also have to agree with Alexander Graydon that “the opposition
to the claims of Britain originated with the better sort: it was truly
aristocratical in its commencement.”
The February revolution in Russia seems to have been welcomed by
all classes save the most conservative of conservatives--a few army
officers, a few members of the Court and the old nobility. No one knows
who made the February revolution, but there can be no doubt as to its
popularity. Almost everyone, liberal noble, banker, industrialist,
lawyer, doctor, civil servant, _kulak_, and workingman, was glad to
co-operate in giving the Czarist regime its final blow. Even the
Bolsheviks, whose sudden victory in the October revolution of 1917
makes the time-scheme of the Russian revolution so very different from
those of the English and French revolutions, were by no means what
confirmed haters of revolution call riffraff, rabble, “the masses.”
They seem to have been recruited chiefly from the more enterprising,
able, and skilled workingmen in the factories of Petrograd, Moscow, and
specialized industrial centers like Ivanovo-Vosnessensk or the Don
basin. Their most important leaders were largely drawn from the middle
class. One might perhaps argue that the Kadets, led by Miliukov, were
so early discouraged that they may not be counted as a revolutionary
party. But the Mensheviks and S-R (Socialist-Revolutionary) party,
later scorned as “Compromisists” by triumphant Bolshevik historians,
are most certainly revolutionary elements. The Mensheviks may have
been mostly intellectuals, but the S-R were also recruited from the
prosperous peasants, from the people who ran the co-operatives, from
small shopkeepers and the like.
_III. Economic and Social Position: Leaders_
Hitherto we have been considering the main bodies of the
revolutionists, and have found that on the whole they by no means
represent the dregs of society, even in the great proletarian uprising,
and that they commonly include members of almost every social and
economic group in a given society, except possibly the very top of
the social pyramid. And yet the Essexes, Washingtons, and Lafayettes
are very close to the top. Even in Russia, Brusilov, a distinguished
Czarist general, lived to serve the Soviet government in the 1920 drive
on Warsaw.
Let us now see what we can make of the leaders, judging them first
by the comparatively objective standards of their social origins and
economic status. With the Jacobins the present writer was able to make
some study of the purely local leaders, the men who normally don’t
get into history. From the careers of dozens of these subalterns of
revolution, a conclusion seemed clear: “the leaders are substantially
of the same social standing as the rank and file. Possibly there are,
among the leaders during the Terror, more men who seem definitely, in
1789, failures, or at least at odds with their environment. Yet the
proportion of these village Marats is not striking.”
As for the national leaders in the French revolution, they are, judged
by these standards, a varied lot. In the years 1789-92 they include
noblemen like the King’s cousin, the Duke of Orléans, Mirabeau, the
Lameths, Lafayette; lawyers in vast numbers, from well-known Parisian
lawyers like Camus to obscure but thoroughly respectable provincial
lawyers like young Robespierre from Arras (who had once written his
name de Robespierre), or rising barristers like Danton, come to
Paris from a peasant background in Champagne; men of science like
the astronomer Bailly, the chemist Lavoisier, and the mathematician
Monge; and, nursed by the new power of the press, journalists like
Marat and Desmoulins, publicists like Brissot, provincial bourgeois
of Chartres, and Condorcet, a marquis and a _philosophe_. After 1792,
extremely few new leaders came to the top. The men who ran France in
1793-94 were, perhaps, somewhat less refined or distinguished than the
hopeful intellectuals of Mme. Roland’s circle; and they would have
seemed very barbarous at Versailles in 1788. They were not, however,
of very different social origins from the men who really ran the old
France--the literate bourgeoisie from which were ultimately recruited
the bureaucracy.
Of the striking respectability and excellent social standing of the men
who signed our Declaration of Independence most Americans are fully
aware. Of its fifty-six signers thirty-three held college degrees and
only about four had little or no formal education. There were five
doctors, eleven merchants, four farmers, twenty-two lawyers, three
ministers. Twelve were sons of ministers. Nearly all were affluent.
Sam Adams, who seems among the more disreputable of our leaders, came
from a merchant family of some means, and graduated from Harvard in
1740, where he was listed fifth out of twenty-two in those mysterious
lists which before Professor S. E. Morison’s researches we all thought
directly measured social standing. Even the Tories, though they flung
words like “rabble” about very freely, could consistently reproach
the revolutionary leaders with nothing worse in this respect than
being amateurs in the art of governing. “From shopkeepers, tradesmen,
and attorneys they are become statesmen and legislators.... Almost
every individual of the governing party in America fills at present,
in his own fancy, a station not only superior to what he had ever
filled before, but to what he had ever expected to fill,” writes a
conservative, or moderate, in the _Middlesex Journal_ for April 6, 1776.
We need not go into the social origins of the leaders of the moderates
in the English revolution. They are clearly among the highest in the
land. The immoderates present an interesting spectacle, a mixture
of gentlemen of good breeding, of self-educated careerists and of
humble men inspired by a fury as yet divine, as yet without benefit
of psychoanalysis. Cromwell himself, of course, was an East Anglian
country gentleman, whose family tree ramified into a good deal of the
new wealth originating in Tudor confiscations. Ireton, who became his
son-in-law, was of similar antecedents, as were many other Independent
leaders in old and new England. Ludlow the regicide was a son of Sir
Henry Ludlow of Wiltshire, and went to Trinity, Cambridge. Even John
Lilburne the Leveller is described as “of good family” dating back to
the fourteenth century, and seems to have been typical of the lesser
gentry whose sons not infrequently passed over into trade. We know
little of the social origins of such men as Winstanley the Digger or
Edward Sexby, a soldier of Cromwell’s regiment who appears later as
a kind of international agent of republicanism. Robert Everard, with
Winstanley a leader of the curious communistic group known as the
Diggers, was a captain in the army and is described as a “gentleman
of liberal education.” John Rogers the Millenarian was the son of an
Anglican clergyman and a Royalist.
Russia presents a case more nearly parallel to our other countries in
respect to the social origins of the leaders of her revolution than
might at first sight seem likely in a proletarian revolution. Perhaps
the moderates in Russia held power so briefly and so uncomfortably that
they hardly count. Kadets like Miliukov, a historian of good family,
Tereschenko, a Kiev sugar millionaire, the Octobrist Guchkov, a wealthy
Moscow merchant, and poor old Prince Lvov remind us of the rich Puritan
lords and merchants of the English revolution, the well-born Feuillants
of the French revolution. The Menshevik and Social-Revolutionary
leaders were mostly intellectuals, petty officials, trade union and
co-operative leaders; some of their most eloquent orators came from
Georgia, “the Gironde of the Russian revolution.” Kerensky was a
radical lawyer of provincial bureaucratic stock from the little Volga
town of Simbirsk, now called Ulianovsk, in memory of a greater than
Kerensky who also hailed from Simbirsk. As a matter of fact, V. I.
Ulianov, better known by his revolutionary name of Lenin, came from
exactly the same social class as Kerensky. His father was an inspector
of schools at Simbirsk, a position of much more social standing in
bureaucratic Czarist Russia than it would seem to us to be--very
definitely in the superior bourgeoisie.
The other Bolshevik leaders are a varied lot: intellectual Jews like
Trotsky (born Bronstein) and Kamenev (born Rosenfeld), both educated
men, by no means typical Ghetto Jews; Felix Dzerzhinsky, of noble
Polish-Lithuanian stock; Sverdlov, by training a chemist; Kalinin,
whom one might call a professional peasant; Stalin (born Djugashvili),
of Georgian peasant-artisan stock, destined by his mother for the
priesthood, and actually for some time a student in a seminary;
Chicherin, of stock sufficiently aristocratic to hold himself at least
as well-born as Lord Curzon; Antonov-Ovseënko, Red Army leader with the
fine bourgeois inheritance of a hyphenated name. The negotiations at
Brest-Litovsk, however, afford a neat synopsis of Bolshevik leadership
and proof of its non-proletarian character. When the first Russian
delegation was sent to that town to meet the Germans it included as
samples of the proletarian achievements of the revolution one specimen
each of sailor, worker, and peasant. The peasant is said, no doubt by
malicious enemies of the working class, to have distinguished himself
chiefly by his interest in the liquor supply. When, however, the
negotiations really got going after a recess, the Russians dropped
their ornamental sailor, worker, and peasant, and were represented by
men of course not the social equals of the high-born Germans opposite
them, but, one suspects, their cultural superiors--Joffe, Kamenev,
Pokrovsky, Karakhan--and by a somewhat neurotic lady-Bolshevik, Mme.
Bitzenko, who had won her spurs by shooting a Czarist official in
the bad old days. But, of course, even orthodox Marxism admits that
the proletariat cannot lift itself by its own bootstraps, and that
its leaders must therefore come from classes sufficiently privileged
to have had an education fitting them to interpret the subtleties of
Marxist theology.
Finally, the inexperience, the “newness,” of the revolutionary
leaders has generally been exaggerated in our textbooks. They had,
especially in Russia, a long training in the direction of dissenting
and persecuted little societies, the revolutionary groups. And
revolutionists as a group are so much like any other human beings
that to learn the art of leading them is to have gone a long way in
political apprenticeship. Even in France, the members of the National
Assembly were not as politically innocent as they are supposed to have
been. Many had had business experience, or had been diplomatists,
or civil servants, or had taken part in local politics in provinces
which had their own estates. All of them were used to the politics
of pressure groups. These revolutionary leaders are mostly far from
academic, unworldly, pure theorists; they do not step suddenly from the
cloister to the council hall. Their training may have subtly unfitted
them for leading a stable society; but that is another, and at present
insoluble, problem. They are certainly fitted for leadership in an
unstable society.
We have, then, found that both rank and file and leaders of active
revolutionary groups cannot be catalogued neatly as coming from any one
social or economic group. They are not even strikingly, precociously,
young. Their leaders are usually in middle age, the thirties and
forties, and thus younger than most of the politically prominent in
stable societies, which naturally incline to the rule of the old. But
the St. Justs and the Bonapartes, the boys in their twenties, are the
exception, not the rule. The leadership of the Russian revolution
which, with the distortion that comes from contemporaneousness, we are
likely to regard as the most “radical,” was on the average the oldest
in years of all our revolutions. The revolutionists tend to represent a
fairly complete cross-section of their communities, with a sprinkling
of the very highest ranks of their societies--men like Lafayette, for
instance, whom Mr. Lothrop Stoddard calls “misguided superiors”--and,
as far as the active ruling groups go, extremely few of the submerged,
downtrodden, lowest ranks. This is as true of the Bolsheviks as of
the Puritans and the Jacobins. Bums, hoboes, the mob, the rabble,
the riffraff, may be recruited to do the street-fighting and the
manor-burning of revolutions, but they emphatically do not make, do not
run, revolutions--not even proletarian revolutions.
_IV. Character and Disposition_
We now face a much more difficult task, one where our information is
neither so objective nor so readily catalogued as our information
about the social and economic status of revolutionists. This is
the problem--psychological at bottom--of seeing how far these
revolutionists belong to types which are normally viewed by John Jones
as queer, eccentric, or downright mad. Now one might quite justifiably
argue _a priori_ that a wholly contented man could not possibly be
a revolutionist. But the trouble is that there are so many ways of
being discontented, as well as contented, on this earth. Indeed, the
cruder Marxists, and the cruder classical economists, make an almost
identical error: they both assume that economics deals exhaustively
with whatever makes men happy or miserable. Men have many incentives
to action which the economist, limited to the study of men’s rational
actions, simply cannot include in his work. They observably do a great
deal that simply makes no sense at all, if we assume them to be guided
_wholly_ by any conceivable rational economic motive: near-starving in
the British Museum to write _Das Kapital_, for instance, or seizing
deserts under the comforting illusion that trade follows the flag, or
making the world quite safe for democracy. Yet clearly a man who takes
part in a revolution before it is demonstrably successful--and after it
is successful it may perhaps be said to have ceased to be a revolution
anyway--is a discontented man, or at least a man shrewd enough to
estimate that there are enough discontented men to be forged into a
group that can make a revolution. We must make some effort to study the
nature of such discontents as seen in individuals.
For here the method of statistical study of large groups of
revolutionists, like the Jacobins, will not work. At most these rank
and file are names, with profession and perhaps some other indication
of social status. Modern interest in social history and the common man
has indeed made available a certain number of old diaries and letters
of common men, and the Russian revolution has done its best to keep
alive the memory of worker this of the Putilov factory or sailor that
of the _Aurora_. Trotsky himself is very eloquent about the role of
these heroic workers, sailors, and peasants in his _History of the
Russian Revolution_, yet he manages to spend as much of his time on
the great names as if he were a mere bourgeois historian. We have, of
course, the blanket denunciations--they are hardly descriptions--of
one side by another. These are much too emotional as a rule to have
any evidential value, except as to the intensity of emotions evoked
during revolutions. Even in our own presumably mild revolution one
notes a Tory who is reported to have said, “It would be a joy to ride
through American blood to the hubs of my chariot wheels.” Of course
these American Tories thought the revolutionists were wild radicals,
scheming inferiors, jealous rabble. On the other hand, most of us
who were brought up without benefit of the new history were taught
in school to regard the Tories as just straight villains, traitors,
morally reprehensible people without economic, social, or indeed any
characteristics that separated them from such villains of fiction
as Simon Legree. So in the French revolution, each side accused the
other of all sorts of moral failings, but rarely got down to effective
details of daily life.
If we cannot for these reasons do much with the political and social
psychology of large groups of revolutionists, we can at least look
over some of the leaders, hoping that the list we decide upon will
not be too unrepresentative. Here at least we can count upon quite a
bit of biographical information. Thanks to those admirable works, the
_Dictionary of National Biography_ and the _Dictionary of American
Biography_, we can even sample some of the lesser leaders, the
noncommissioned officers of revolutions. The French are now at work on
their biographical dictionary, which promises to be even more scholarly
than its Anglo-Saxon prototypes, but as it has only just conquered the
letter “A” it is not of much use to us. Russia is very difficult indeed
from this point of view; there are plenty of brilliant comments on
Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, but they are also very contradictory. On
the lesser figures there is not much trustworthy biographical writing
available in the Western languages, nor for that matter in Russian. We
may note here, however, that the extraordinary proliferation of assumed
names in the Russian revolution probably does not stem with most of
these pseudonymous heroes from any feelings of shame for a criminal
or disgraceful past. Their crimes were no doubt many, but crimes only
against Czarist oppression. Perhaps there was originally some mildly
melodramatic notion that these aliases were useful against the Czarist
police, but soon they became a mere fashion, a revolutionary fad.
At this point there is some danger of our falling into a dreary
catalogue. At the risk of seeming to turn aside from strictly
scientific systematizing, we shall have to group our facts as we go
along under certain human types or characters. This is a process
which has been done successfully by a great many shrewd observers of
human behavior, from Theophrastus through Molière to Sainte-Beuve
and Bagehot. It is perhaps in some respects a more useful way of
classifying men than formal psychology or formal sociology has yet
worked out. These are not, one hopes, imaginary characters. If they are
one-tenth as real as Alceste or the Penurious Man they are more real
than anyone the average sociologist ever dealt with.
We may begin with the gentleman-revolutionist, whom Mr. Lothrop
Stoddard calls the “misguided superior,” the man born on top, but
perversely unwilling to stay there. He is by no means a simple person,
and indeed sometimes manages to combine an astonishing number of
revolutionary traits. It must be admitted that with many of these
misguided superiors in our four societies, dislike for the ways of
their class is apparently partly motivated by their inability to
succeed in certain activities honored in that class. You need not be a
debunking historian to admit that Lafayette revolted against the Court
of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette partly because he cut so awkward a
figure there. Liberty, fortunately, did not need to be courted in a
minuet. We must not seem to be cynical in these matters. Lafayette’s
love of liberty was no doubt morally a far better thing than if he had
loved place, pension, or mistress. But we must infer from his actions
that he had very early realized that nothing short of a love of liberty
would get him very far. And so today, when you find in one of our
colleges a well-nurtured youth turned Communist, you can be almost
certain that he is not captain of the football team nor secretary of
Chi Phi Digamma. He may indeed be Phi Beta Kappa. This condition we
need not here either applaud or condemn, but simply note.
It would, however, be cynical--and hence quite unscientific--to deny
that many of these misguided superiors are also moved by what we shall
have to call sincere idealism. Their own social group comes to seem
to them dissolute, or dull, or cruel, or heartless. They see the
possibilities of a better world. They are influenced by the writings of
the intellectuals, who have begun their desertion of the established
order. They come to struggle for God’s kingdom on this earth. They are
usually, of course, uncomfortable on this earth, but for a whole lot
of reasons, many of which cannot be simply dismissed as being in the
province of the psychiatrist. Shelley, who never actually got a chance
at revolution outside poetry, is a familiar example of this sensitive,
and often neurotic, type. Dzerzhinsky, the Polish aristocrat who gave
life to the terrible Cheka, was a delicate and sincere fanatic. The
Marquis de St. Huruge, who figures disreputably in the disorders and
street-fighting of the French revolution, was apparently pretty crazy,
and not even a gentleman. Condorcet, also a marquis, was a gentleman
and scholar, and if he had a good deal of the vanity that goes
naturally enough with both, and very little of the sense that sometimes
goes with either, was at heart a kind and sensitive man.
Others desert their class and join the revolution for the ignoble
but sometimes socially very useful reason that they think the signs
point to the victory of the revolution. Sometimes these men are like
Mirabeau, rather shady characters who have for some time compromised
themselves by irregular lives. Sometimes they are men like Talleyrand,
careful, sensible men whose main desire is to keep in a position of
honor and affluence, and who have no sense of loyalty to abstract
notions of right and wrong. And, of course, in the early stages of our
revolutions, even the Russian, plenty of rich and influential men of no
extraordinary intelligence or stupidity joined the revolution because
the revolution was fashionable, and an apparent success. Often these
men, who had not been directly in political power, were flattered by
the prospect of political power--men like the Duc d’Orléans or Bailly
or Tereschenko or Konovalov. But they were essentially fairly ordinary
human beings, no fitter subjects for hagiography--Christian, Freudian,
or Marxist--than you or I.
If we leave the superiors, those who belong by birth or upbringing to
the ruling classes, and who yet side with revolt, and turn to leaders
who come from classes below the ruling one, we shall find the same very
great variety of what we must tritely call human nature. We shall find
fools, scoundrels, idealists, professional agitators, diplomatists,
lunatics, cowards, and heroes.
Now it would be useless to deny that among those who come to the top in
the troubled times of revolution are many who probably never would have
been heard of in normal times. Some of these were certainly failures
in the old society, men who were unable to attain the objects of their
ambition. In spite of all that an able defender like Professor L. R.
Gottschalk has written to prove Marat’s learning and respectability,
it is still true that on the whole the _Friend of the People_ was
not a success before the revolution. Marat was a self-educated man
of humble stock, with a habit of presenting himself with academic
degrees and honorary distinctions his biographers--and even his
contemporaries--were not always able to confirm. He tried very hard
to storm the Parnassus of the _philosophes_, but was never admitted.
Like most enlightened eighteenth-century men of letters, he dabbled
in natural science, and emerged with a variant of the old phlogiston
theory of combustion, the originality and truth of which were not
properly appreciated by his jealous contemporaries. Lavoisier and the
“new chemistry” were triumphing in the 1780’s, and Marat failed to
recognize the meaning of the revolution in this science.
When the Estates-General met in 1789 he was a disappointed
intellectual, a man who had failed of acceptance by that little band
of writers and talkers who in late eighteenth-century France perhaps
enjoyed more unalloyed admiration from the public than such folk have
ever enjoyed. No Frenchman could at that epoch have coined a term like
“brain-trust”; but if he had it would have carried no such ironic
overtones of scorn as it does in twentieth-century America. Marat,
rejected by these admired leaders of opinion, was in 1789 full to the
brim with envy and hatred of everything established and esteemed in
France. Soon revolutionary journalism was to give him an ample outlet.
He became the watch-dog of the revolution--a mad watch-dog, always in
his _l’Ami du Peuple_ at work scenting plots against the people, always
hating those in power, even when they were of his own party, always
crying for blood and revenge. A most unpleasant fellow, no doubt.
Whether he was a more unpleasant one than certain journalists of normal
and unrevolutionary twentieth-century America, it is hard to say.
Journalism was very new in France in 1790, and people expected a good
deal. Marat at least had one excuse. He was suffering from an incurable
skin disease which gave to his life an almost unbearable nervous
tension.
Yet the failures are by no means all of the relatively simple type of
Marat. Sam Adams was certainly a failure when judged by the standards
of thrifty, sober New England. He had no money sense whatever, ran
through a small inheritance, was constantly in debt; let his wife and
children get along as they could while he organized his famous caucus
and committees of correspondence. He is by no means a figure for the
copy-books. Yet Adams could do certain things extremely well, and
if these things were not in the 1770’s as financially rewarding as
they are now, Adams at least reaped less tangible rewards in his own
time--and he did become governor of Massachusetts. Adams’s gifts,
of course, as they are deftly analyzed in Mr. J. C. Miller’s recent
study, are those of the expert propagandist and organizer. It is hard
to believe that today the advertising business would leave a man of his
parts undiscovered and unrewarded.
Thomas Paine, who managed to involve himself in two revolutions, the
American and the French, is still another revolutionist who amounted
to very little before the revolution. When he sailed for America
in 1774 he was thirty-eight, certainly no longer a young man. He
came from East-Anglian Quaker artisan stock, and had picked up an
eighteenth-century education, chiefly in the sciences and in the
philosophy of the Enlightenment, while pursuing half a dozen different
occupations from privateering to stay-making and shopkeeping. He had
made an unsuccessful marriage, been in and out of the excise service
twice, acquired a reputation as the town “atheist” of Lewes in Sussex,
and had led an unsuccessful and somewhat premature attempt at lobbying
in the interest of his fellow-excisemen. This attempt, which resulted
in his second and final dismissal from the service, also brought him
to the attention of Benjamin Franklin, who encouraged him to emigrate.
But Paine arrived in Philadelphia like many another European, an
unsuccessful man looking for a new start. The revolution gave it to
him, and _Common Sense_ made him a distinguished publicist. Paine was
the professional radical, the crusading journalist, the religious
rationalist, a man who in quiet times could hardly have been more than
another Bradlaugh, another Ingersoll.
On the other hand, revolution not infrequently brings to the top men
of very practical abilities, men of the kind that even cautious and
hard-headed conservatives must recognize as worthy of respect. Such
men may have lived in obscurity simply because they had not been
disturbed; or they may have been the victims of some such stoppage in
the circulation of the élite, the career open to talents, as we noted
in a previous chapter. Cromwell is a classic example of a man who might
have remained a simple country gentleman with an undistinguished career
in the House of Commons had it not been for the Puritan revolution.
Of Washington himself a similar generalization can be made. We shall
come back again to this question of the soundness of revolutionary
leadership.
So far we have said nothing of the men of blood, of Carrier and the
_noyades_ of Nantes, of Collot d’Herbois and the _mitraillades_ of
Lyons, of those to us nameless agents of the Cheka whose work made the
French Reign of Terror seem mild in comparison, or of those English
agents of the so-called Cromwellian settlement of Ireland who for
long-time effectiveness perhaps hold the record among Terrorists. We
shall later come to the problem of terroristic methods during the
crisis period of our revolutions. Here we are simply interested in
pointing out that among the personnel of the revolutionists are a
number of men who have been singled out by posterity as examples of the
kind of monster that comes to the surface in revolutions. No one can
deny the fact of such emergence, nor the fact that such men can hardly
be understood save with the help of criminology and abnormal psychology.
Carrier himself is a perfectly good example of these men. However
much Republican apologists may try to soften down the melodramatic
accounts his enemies have left of his activities at Nantes, the fact
remains that he did so speed up the revolutionary courts that it became
much easier to drown convicted persons in batches in the river Loire
than to wait for the slow-moving guillotine. Carrier was a provincial
lawyer who had got himself elected to the Convention by joining his
local club and repeating the stock phrases of the Enlightenment. He
was sent as a representative on mission to Nantes, and there power
seems to have gone to his head. Moreover, Nantes was on the edge of
the always dangerous Vendée, and Carrier may well have been driven to
cleaning up his enemies in a group by fear of conspiracy against his
own life. He certainly put up a bold front, swaggered about town, gave
entertainments, talked big, and left behind him festering hatreds that
brought his downfall and condemnation to death after the Terror was
over.
Carrier reminds one of Mr. James T. Farrell’s gangsters. There is the
bravado, the consciousness of life lived at the level of melodrama, the
new, crude sense of power, the constant haunting fear of reprisals,
the childish immediacy of purpose. What one does not find in Carrier
is a specific pathological love of bloodshed, a diseased mind of the
sort linked with the name of the Marquis de Sade. Indeed, this latter
kind of insanity is more often found among the jailers, thugs, and
hangers-on of revolution than among its leaders, even leaders at the
level of Carrier. And of course to many people the most revolting acts
in general are the acts of revolutionary mobs--the September massacres
at Paris in 1792, for instance, which are very closely paralleled by
the history of lynching in America. Here there crop up some of the
most shocking instances of human cruelty; but they are by no means
specifically to be associated with revolutions. Pogroms and lynchings
are at least as bad. Revolutions and mobs are not interchangeable
terms; you can and usually do have one without the other. The kind of
cruelty more properly associated with revolutions is the cruelty--to
some people more revolting than the cruelty of mobs--of judicial
murders done in cold blood, and on principle.
There is another type commonly, but erroneously, held to come to the
top in revolutions. This is the crack-brained schemer, the fantastic
doctrinaire, the man who has a crazy gadget which will bring Utopia.
Briefly, perhaps, in the honeymoon stage the lunatic fringe has its
innings, and in the English revolution rather more than its innings,
at least in print. But revolutions are a serious business, not to be
distracted by eccentricities. Once the line of revolutionary orthodoxy
is established--and though as we shall see it is a grim and rigid line,
it is not a crazy and aberrant one--once this orthodoxy is established
the lunatics, mild or serious, are pretty well kept down. There are
Marxist revolutions, natural rights revolutions, but none for the
Single Tax, Social Credit, Theosophy or Extra Sensory Perception. It
is only your very stable societies, like Victorian England, that can
afford to turn a Hyde Park over to the lunatic fringe. Even if you
think Cromwell, Washington, Robespierre, Napoleon, Lenin, and Stalin
all belong to this lunatic fringe, you will have to admit that in their
day of power they clamped down pretty hard on other and discordant
lunatics.
Nor is it possible to isolate a revolutionary type labeled “criminal,”
“degenerate,” and neatly conforming to some anthropometric standards.
Attempts to do this sort of thing have certainly been made. There are
probably those who hold that revolutionists have a fixed cephalic
index, or that they are predominantly dark-haired. Certainly there are
many revolutionists who, like Carrier, behave as criminals behave in
stable societies; but the proportion of such revolutionists does not
seem extraordinarily high.
A more characteristic revolutionary type is the disputatious,
contrary-minded person who loves to stand out from the crowd of
conformists. Indeed, one of our revolutionary groups, the English
Puritans, was filled with this especially rugged anarchism. Not only
do individuals stand out in this respect; the group as a whole sets
itself off deliberately from the great and the fashionable. As a social
historian has written: “Whatever was in fashion is what the Puritan
would not wear. When ruffs were in vogue, he wore a large falling band;
when pickadillies [ruffs] were out of request [1638], and wide falling
bands of delicate lawn edged with fine lace came in, he wore a very
small band. Fashionable shoes were wide at the toe; his were sharp.
Fashionable stockings were, as a rule, of any color except black; his
were black. His garters were short, and, before all, his hair was
short. Even at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, short hair was a mark of
Puritanism.”
The type is seen most clearly, however, in certain individuals. John
Lilburne, the English Leveller, is virtue incarnate and uncomfortable.
He seems to have come of a family of rugged individuals, for his
father, a gentleman of Durham, is said to have been the last Englishman
to have recourse to the feudal right to ask for judgment through
ordeal by combat in a civil suit. John was steadily addicted to
contention, and attacked Presbyterians and Independents as bitterly
as he had earlier attacked the Court. Indeed, as an historian has
written, “Lilburne was tried in almost every court in the kingdom,
under varying conditions, during a period of some twenty years, for
libels on the Government of the day, King, Parliament, Commonwealth,
and Protector. One of the first duties that devolved upon the judges
of the Commonwealth was to deal with this gentleman.” Yet he seems to
have preserved a good deal of social pride along with that intellectual
and spiritual pride which is one of the marks of the English Puritan.
On trial in 1653, he told his judge, a self-made man of artisan
background who had risen with Cromwell, that “it was fitter for him
[the judge] to sell thimbles and bodkins than to sit in judgment on
a person so much his superior.” Henry Marten, the regicide, who ought
to have been a good judge of such matters, said that if the world were
emptied of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John and
John would quarrel with Lilburne. Lilburne’s pamphlets are full of the
self-righteousness of those who fight always for the right, and who
seem to take delight in the uncomfortable position to which the poet
later assigned the right--
“Right forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.”
We are close to the martyrs.
Lilburne’s motives were no doubt of the highest. He believed in
absolute democracy, and his platform of manhood suffrage, biennial
parliaments, religious toleration, equality before the law, was one day
to secure pretty complete acceptance in England. But in 1645 only a
very doctrinaire person, only a fanatic, could have held this platform
possible of immediate realization. Lilburne was not only a disputatious
man, a courter of martyrdom; he was what the world commonly calls an
idealist, and suggests a consideration of a type which occurs very
frequently in these revolutions. It does not seem altogether wise to
single out any one type as the perfect revolutionist, but if you must
have such a type, then you will do well to consider, not the embittered
failure, not the envious upstart, not the bloodthirsty lunatic, but
the idealist. Idealists, of course, are in our own times the cement of
a stable, normal society. It is good for us all that there should be
men of noble aspirations, men who have put behind them the dross of
this world for the pure word, for the idea and the ideal as the noblest
philosophers have known them. But in normal times such idealists do not
seem, at least in Western society, to occupy positions of power and
responsibility. In normal times today we look up to our idealists,
and occasionally give them prizes and honorary degrees, but we do not
choose them to rule over us. We notably refuse to let them make our
foreign policies.
Indeed, one of the distinguishing marks of a revolution is this: that
in revolutionary times the idealist at last gets a chance to try and
realize his ideals. Revolutions are full of men who hold very high
standards of human conduct, the kind of standards which have for
several thousand years been described by some word or phrase which has
the overtones that “idealistic” has for us today. There is no need for
us to worry over the metaphysical, nor even the semantic, implications
of the term. We all know an idealist when we see one, and certainly
when we hear one.
Robespierre would have been an idealist in any society. There is a
familiar story of how the young Robespierre resigned a judgeship rather
than inflict the death penalty, which ran counter to his humanitarian
eighteenth-century upbringing. Historians have pretty well destroyed
that story, as they have so many others from the cherry tree to Alfred
and the cakes. But, except in the very narrowest and least useful
senses of the word, such stories are in many important ways usually
“true.” This story about Robespierre suggests that he was a good child
of the Enlightenment. One need only read some of his speeches, full of
the simplicities, the moral aphorisms, the aspirations of that innocent
age, to realize that he was quite capable of resigning, or buying, a
judgeship rather than abandon his ideals. He would, indeed, kill for
his ideals.
Those ideals, as they got formed by 1793, may seem to us somewhat
less than heroic, and they were certainly bolstered by a good deal of
personal ambition and sheer vanity in Robespierre. But there they were:
Robespierre wanted a France where there should be neither rich nor
poor, where men should not gamble, nor get drunk, nor commit adultery,
nor cheat, nor rob, nor kill--where, in short, there would be neither
petty nor grand vices--a France ruled by upright and intelligent men
elected by the universal suffrage of the people, men wholly without
greed or love of office, and delightedly stepping down at yearly
intervals to give place to their successors, a France at peace with
herself and the world--but surely this is enough? Robespierre’s
personal rectitude is now hardly questioned even by historians hostile
to what he stood for; in his own day, and especially immediately
after his fall, he was accused of almost every possible crime and
moral delinquency. He seems actually not even to have had any of the
fashionable vices--no drink, no gaming, no women. Modern historians
claim to have evidence that for a brief time in Paris he kept a
mistress. If he did, one supposes it must have been out of motives of
fancied hygiene; or possibly for a few weeks the country lawyer had
ideas of living as did the fashionable Parisians. The Robespierre of
the Terror, however, had certainly put such ideas behind him, and was,
as the Incorruptible, a living symbol of the Republic of Virtue in his
public and private life.
Now this idealist type is by no means simple. Cromwell should clearly
not be listed primarily under this category, and yet there is something
of the puritanical “seeker” in Cromwell, something that makes his
tortuous policy--indeed his double-dealing--very hard to understand if
you insist on seeing human beings as logically consistent wholes. Both
Lenin and Trotsky are strange compounds of idealism and realism. This
coupling of idealism and realism does not mean simply that they both on
occasion could use realistic methods to attain ends dictated by their
ideals. Robespierre, Cromwell, Gladstone, or Woodrow Wilson could
do that. It means that they were also capable of pursuing realistic
immediate ends. Lenin, of course, was a very skillful propagandist
and organizer, with a great deal of what we shall have to call
executive ability. But, at least in 1917, he seems to have thought that
world-wide revolution was just around the corner, and that absolute
economic equality could be introduced immediately in Russia. The New
Economic Policy of 1921 is a clear indication that Lenin would not
pursue his ideals to the bitter end of defeat and martyrdom.
Trotsky has one of the best critical minds of any Marxist, is even
capable, at moments, of a kind of skepticism about his own aims. The
Civil War of 1917-21 in Russia gave convincing proof of his abilities
both as an orator and as an executive under pressure. Yet the Trotsky
of the exile years seems to be howling for the moon, which is one
definition, perhaps too unkind, of idealism. Had Trotsky remained in
power he might indeed have made his peace with bureaucracy, inequality,
socialism-in-one-country, Thermidorean decadence and all the other
evils he now associates with the name of Stalin. And yet it seems not
unlikely that this intransigeance of Trotsky’s, this insistence on
bringing heaven immediately to earth, this unwillingness to accommodate
his aims to human weakness, or if you like, to human nature, help to
explain why he did not last in post-revolutionary Russia.
Sentimental idealism was of course distinctly out of fashion in
the Russia of 1917. The harsh realities, or at any rate the harsh
_formulas_, of Marxist Socialism had replaced the naïve hopes with
which the French revolution had set out to make this a better world.
In both Lenin and Trotsky you can trace this desire to seem to be
hard-boiled, and it will not do to imply that they did not in some
ways succeed. There is one pure idealist among the Russian leaders,
however, one who presents us with still another variant of the type.
That is Lunacharsky, long Commissar for Education, the artist and
man of culture of the movement. Lunacharsky, in spite of his past as
a revolutionary agitator, was unquestionably a softie. He possessed
the ability to talk movingly about life and education and art, and
carried over into a century where it seemed a little strange something
of Rousseau or of _Paul and Virginia_. The world should be grateful
to him, however, for he helped greatly to prevent the wholesale
destruction of works of art identified offhand with a dissolute
capitalistic past.
There is, finally, the man almost wholly of words, the man who can
hold crowds spellbound, the revolutionary orator. He may be listed as
an idealist, because although part of his role is to egg the crowd
on to acts of violence, he is even more typically the soother, the
preacher, the ritual-maker, the man who holds the crowd together. In
this role his words need hardly have any meaning at all, but commonly
they can be analyzed out into pleasant aspirations and utterances. Much
of Robespierre comes under this head, as do Patrick Henry, Vergniaud,
Tseretelli. The type, of course, exists in all normal societies, and
is usually esteemed. Zinoviev seems in the Russian revolution to have
borne some such role. Lenin realized how useful Zinoviev was as an
orator and even as a kind of Petrograd boss, but he seems to have had a
pretty complete contempt for his sense and intelligence.
V. _Summary_
To sum up, it should by now be clear that it takes almost as many
kinds of men and women to make a revolution as to make a world. It is
probable that, especially in their crisis periods, our revolutions
threw up into positions of prominence and even of responsibility men
of the kind who would in normal or healthy societies not attain similar
positions. Notably, great revolutions would appear to put idealists
in possession of power they do not ordinarily have. They would seem
also to give scope for special talents, such as Marat had, for yellow
journalism and muck-raking of a very lively sort. They certainly create
a number of empty places to fill, and give an opportunity to clever
young men who may also be unscrupulous. They probably insure a bit
more public attention, for a while at least, to the chronic rebel and
complainer, as well as to the lunatic fringe of peddlers of social and
political nostrums.
But they do not re-create mankind, nor do they even make use of a
completely new and hitherto suppressed set of men and women. In all
four of our revolutions, even in the Russian revolution, the rank
and file was composed of quite ordinary men and women, probably a
bit superior to their less active fellows in energy and willingness
to experiment, and in the English, American, and French revolutions,
even in their crisis periods, people of substantial property.
These revolutionists were not in general afflicted with anything
the psychiatrist could be called in about. They were certainly not
riffraff, scoundrels, scum of the earth. They were not even worms
turning. Nor were their leaders by any means an inferior lot suddenly
elevated to positions of power which they could not worthily occupy.
There is no question that in the turmoil of revolutions a good many
scoundrels rise to the top--though they can also rise to the top
without benefit of revolution, as a glance at some of the phases of
either the Grant or the Harding administrations should amply prove.
But the level of ability, of ability in an almost technical sense,
the ability to handle men and to administer a complex social system,
the level of ability suggested by names like Hampden, Pym, Cromwell,
Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Mirabeau, Talleyrand,
Carnot, Cambon, Danton, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, is certainly very high.
All this by no means amounts to asserting the paradox that there
are no real differences between revolutions and ordinary times.
On the contrary, especially in their crisis periods, revolutions
are like nothing else on earth. But you cannot altogether explain
the differences between societies in revolution and societies in
equilibrium by suggesting that a whole new crew operates during a
revolution; by saying, if you dislike a particular revolution and all
its works, that the scoundrels and the bums put it over on the good
souls; or if you happen to like and approve a particular revolution,
that the heroes and sages turned out the corrupt old gang. It just
isn’t as simple as all that. Since on the whole the evidence would seem
to show that revolutionists are more or less a cross-section of common
humanity, an explanation for the undoubted fact that during certain
phases of a revolution they behave in a way we should not expect such
people to behave, must be sought in changes worked on them by the
conditions they live under, by their revolutionary environment.
_Chapter_ FIVE THE RULE OF THE MODERATES
_I. The Problem of the Moderates_
In the summer of 1792 Lafayette, with some of his officers, left
the French Army and passed over to the Austrian lines. He was
promptly put in prison by the Austrians, to whom he was a dangerous
firebrand of revolution. Lafayette was, however, a good deal more
fortunate than many of his fellow-heroes of 1789 who elected to stay
in France, and who were guillotined as dangerous reactionaries and
counter-revolutionists. Fedor Linde, a moderate Socialist who in April,
1917, moved the Finnish Regiment to a mutinous demonstration against
the pro-Ally and still more moderate Miliukov, was later sent to the
front as a government commissar under Kerensky and there was lynched
by mutinous soldiers who refused to obey his commands. In 1647 Denzil
Holles, of whom we took note briefly back in 1629, as he was helping
to hold down the Speaker in his chair, was with ten other Presbyterian
members excluded from Parliament for “endeavoring to overthrow the
rights and liberties of the subjects.” He did indeed return briefly to
his seat again in 1648, but was soon forced to flee to France to save
his life. A famous phrase from the French revolution puts the thing
neatly: “The revolution, like Saturn, devours its children.”
The honeymoon was in these revolutions short; very soon after the old
regime had fallen there began to be evident signs that the victors were
not as unanimous about what was to be done to remake the country as had
appeared in the first triumphant speeches and ceremonies. Those who had
directly taken over the mechanism of government were in all four of our
societies men of the kind usually called moderates. They represented
the richer, better known and higher placed of the old opposition to
the government, and it is only to be expected that they should take
over from that government. Indeed, as we have seen, their assumption of
responsibility is almost a spontaneous act. So strong is this feeling
that the moderates should take over power that it prevailed even in
Russia in February, 1917. It looks to us now as though a Socialist
coalition of some kind--Social-Revolutionary and Menshevik groups, with
possibly even Bolshevik adhesions--might just as well have assumed
power right away in that month. The Kadets and other bourgeois groups
clearly had few strong roots in the country. And yet Lvov and his
well-meaning moderates had little difficulty in assuming at least
nominal control.
The moderates, once in power, turned out to have less homogeneity and
party discipline than they seemed to have when they were in opposition.
They were faced with the difficult task of reforming existing
institutions, or making a new constitution, and taking care at the same
time of the ordinary work of governing. They were also confronted very
soon with armed enemies, and found themselves engaged in a foreign or
civil war, or in both together. They found against them an increasingly
strong and intransigeant group of radicals and extremists who insisted
that the moderates were trying to stop the revolution, that they
had betrayed it, that they were as bad as the rulers of the old
regime--indeed, much worse, since they were traitors as well as fools
and scoundrels. After a period, brief in Russia, longer in France and
England, there came a show of force between moderates and extremists,
a show of force in many ways quite like that earlier one between the
old government and the revolutionists, and the moderates were beaten.
They fled into exile, they were put into prison ultimately to face the
scaffold, guillotine, or firing-squad, or if they were lucky or obscure
enough, they dropped out of sight and were forgotten. The extremists in
their turn took power.
This process was not quite the same in the American revolution, where
on the whole it may be said that extremists like the Independents,
the Jacobins, and the Bolsheviks, did not attain undivided rule.
Nevertheless, as we shall see, in America rather earlier in the
revolutionary process a struggle between moderates and radicals had
been fought out, and had ended with victory for the radicals. The
fruit of that victory was the Declaration of Independence. We may say
then that in all our revolutions there is a tendency for power to go
from Right to Center to Left, from the conservatives of the old regime
to the moderates to the radicals or extremists. As power moves along
this line, it gets more and more concentrated, more and more narrows
its base in the country and among the people, since at each important
crisis the defeated group has to drop out of politics. To put it in
another way: after each crisis the victors tend to split into a more
conservative wing holding power and a more radical one in opposition.
Up to a certain stage, each crisis sees the radical opposition
triumphant. The details of this process vary naturally from revolution
to revolution. Its stages are not identical in length or in their
time-sequence. In America power never got as far Left as it did in the
other countries.
Nevertheless this struggle between moderates and extremists is a stage
in our revolutions as definite as those we have studied in previous
chapters, and by its very existence provides us with a useful if
somewhat simple uniformity. Before we attempt to make refinements in
this observation, before we try to discern uniformities in the conduct
of moderates and extremists, we must review briefly the course of
events during the rule of the moderates.
_II. Events During the Rule of the Moderates_
With the outbreak of the Civil War in the summer of 1642, Royalists
and Parliamentarians stood opposed in arms. By the Battle of Marston
Moor in 1644, and certainly by that of Naseby in 1645, the Royalist
cause had become, in a military sense, hopeless. But almost from the
first clear break with Charles, the Parliamentarians had won their
revolution. The Royalists did but play more effectively the role played
in America by the Tories, in France by the Royalists and clericals in
the provinces, the _émigrés_ abroad, in Russia by the numerous White
Armies which opposed the Bolsheviks until 1921. We are not here so much
interested in the Royalists as in the Parliamentarians. Within these
latter there is from 1642 on an increasingly evident division between
groups which we may call roughly moderates and extremists.
The division is not at first a simple one between two parties. At the
extreme right of the Parliamentarians were a few moderate Episcopalians
just touched with puritan notions, and usually also constitutional
monarchists. Many of this group were on the whole indifferent to
religious questions, felt that church matters would settle themselves
decently if the political difficulties could be adjusted. Between
these men and the moderate Royalists, who somewhat reluctantly chose
to stand with their king, there was actually very little difference.
Next came the great moderate party, Presbyterian in religion, puritan
in ethics, monarchist at heart, but monarchist in what was to become
the Whig tradition of the monarch who reigns but does not govern. The
left wing of the Presbyterians, early disillusioned with the idea of
monarchy by their hatred for Charles, merged easily with the main group
of the extremists. These in the English revolution are called the
Independents, extreme Calvinists who insisted upon the independence of
each separate congregation. Their notions of church government were
substantially those well known in this country as Congregationalism.
With them for most political purposes were other groups that
subsequently made up the English nonconformists or dissenters--notably
the Baptists. The New Model Army, through which these radicals made
themselves an effective force in the revolution, contained individuals
espousing almost every conceivable kind of evangelical religious
belief, and a good many varieties of economic and social beliefs. But
the group did work as a group, and its core was certainly Independent.
To the left were other groups, Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchy men,
whom we shall consider in a later chapter.
Now the fact that Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents are
in the English revolution respectively conservatives, moderates, and
extremists, is a bit confusing to the modern reader. For the extreme
idealists, these seventeenth-century Englishmen are fighting over
religious matters, fighting for ideals, and he finds it absurd to
equate them with Frenchmen fighting for worldly liberty, equality,
and fraternity, and shocking to compare them with Russians fighting
for crude economic interests. On the other hand, the modern convert
to the economic interpretation of history is likely to regard these
religious differences as mere “ideologies,” or pretexts for a quarrel
which was really a simple economic one. To him, the Presbyterians
were small gentry or bourgeois business men, the Independents petty
bourgeois traders, artisans, and yeomen farmers who quarreled after
they had disposed of the feudal upper classes. Both the idealist and
the materialist are here clearly wrong. Politics, economics, church
government, and theology are inextricably mingled in the minds and
sentiments of seventeenth-century Englishmen. Their conflicts are
conflicts between human beings, not between the abstractions of the
philosopher, the economist, or the sociologist. We must here observe
the ways in which these conflicts worked out. From many points of
view, it is profitable to regard these conflicts as exhibiting the
sequence of domination first by conservatives, then by moderates,
then by extremists. Naturally these conservatives, moderates, and
extremists were not identical with similar groups in later revolutions.
As compared with the men of 1789 or of 1917, they read different books,
disputed over different ideas, just as they wore different clothes. Yet
the course of their revolution does display a striking identity with
our other revolutions in the relation between political organization
and human temperaments. The Presbyterian “compromisers” were pushed
aside by more determined and extreme men, just as were the Feuillants
and Girondins in France and the Kadets and compromisist Socialist
groups in Russia.
Under the leadership of the Westminster Assembly, a Presbyterian synod
which began its meetings in the summer of 1643, that part of England
under parliamentary control was brought under the famed Scottish
Covenant. Crosses, images, crucifixes were torn down, the stained glass
removed from the churches, sermons lengthened, and liturgy simplified.
Parliament became the supreme law of the land. But already there were
signs that the Presbyterian rule was not to go unchallenged. Marston
Moor was not a Presbyterian victory. It was won by Cromwell and his
“Ironsides”; and these men were not good Presbyterians. They were
Independents, and some were Anabaptists, Antinomians, Heaven knows
what! It is said that someone complained to Cromwell because one of his
officers was an Anabaptist, and received the reply, “Admit he be, shall
that render him incapable to serve the public? Take heed of being too
sharp ... against those to whom you can object little but that they
square not with you in every opinion concerning matters of religion.”
When the New Model Army was constructed from the nucleus of
Cromwell’s Ironsides, and had won the Battle of Naseby, army and
Parliament, Independent and Presbyterian, extremists and moderates,
found themselves in opposition on various questions, notably on
religious toleration and on what was to be done about Charles I. The
Presbyterians wanted an established state church, built on their own
notions of church government and theology, with a minimum of toleration
towards papists and prelatists on the right and the sects on the
left. And they most certainly wanted a king, even if that king were
Charles Stuart. The Independents wanted what they called toleration.
They certainly didn’t mean what a nineteenth-century Englishman or an
American meant by religious toleration, and when they got into power
they were very far from practicing toleration, even in the sense in
which they had preached it. But at least while they were in opposition
they agreed that religious belief was a personal matter and that the
state should not seek to impose identical religious practices and
organization on its citizens. As for the King, most of them by 1645
were sure Charles Stuart would never do. Cromwell was probably never a
doctrinaire republican, but a great many of his men certainly were.
No single event marks exactly the transfer of power from the moderates
to the extremists in England. The process had gone pretty far when
Cornet Joyce of the army in June, 1646, seized the King at Holmby
House as he was about to yield to the Parliament and consent for three
years to govern as a Presbyterian king. It was almost completed when
two months later Parliament at the dictation of the army reluctantly
consented to the exclusion of eleven of its own members, conspicuous
leaders of the Presbyterian group. Charles took the occasion of the
quarrel to attempt to further his own interests. His complicated
intrigues ended in nothing better than a brief war between the
Scottish Presbyterians and the Cromwellians, in which for a moment the
moderates could look up hopefully. Cromwell defeated the Scotch at
Preston Pans in August, 1648, and the army was in undisputed control in
Great Britain. After this the formal end of the moderates at Pride’s
Purge in December was unimportant. Colonel Pride and a few soldiers
were stationed at the door of the House of Commons to turn back the
unsuitable members as they came. Ninety-six Presbyterians were thus
excluded, leaving a group of fifty or sixty regular voting members on
whom the extremists could rely. The Long Parliament had become the Rump.
In America the conflict never took quite such clear lines. We may say
that the conservatives were those Tories who never really complained
about the imperial government, the moderates those merchants and
prosperous landowners who in a sense began the whole movement by their
agitation against the Stamp Act, and the radicals that by no means
united group which finally put through the Declaration of Independence.
There was thus a kind of three-way struggle going on among these
groups in the ten years preceding the outbreak of hostilities with the
British Army. In this struggle the radicals exhibited an extraordinary
technical skill in the practical politics of revolution. As John
Adams later wrote of the organizations which, starting with local
committees of correspondence and committees of safety, worked up to
the continental congresses: “What an engine! France imitated it and
produced a revolution.... And all Europe was inclined to imitate it for
the same revolutionary purpose.”
The radicals really won their decisive victory by organizing as they
did the first Continental Congress in 1774. Professor A. M. Schlesinger
admirably summarizes the work of this Congress: “The radicals had
achieved several important ends. They had reproduced on a national
scale a type of organization and a species of tactics that in many
parts of British America had enabled a determined minority to seize
control of affairs ... they had snatched from the merchant class the
weapons which the latter had fashioned to advance their own selfish
interests in former years, and had now reversed the weapons on them,
in an attempt to secure ends desired solely by the radicals. Finally,
they had defined--nationalized--the issue at stake in such a manner as
to afford prestige to radical groups, wherever they were to be found,
and to weaken the hold of the moderate elements, on the ground that the
latter were at variance with the Continental Congress.”
The taking of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, in France sealed the
defeat of the most conservative group, the true Royalists. The
victorious revolutionists did not long remain in harmony, and the
process of transfer of power to the left began in a few months. In
October of the same year the King and Queen were riotously brought back
to Paris from Versailles in what are known as the October Days. These
events sent into exile the leaders of the moderate conservatives,
men like Mounier who greatly admired the English Constitution, and
wished France to have a bicameral legislature with a House of Lords
and a House of Commons, and a real king. For the next few years a
group of moderates centering about men like Mirabeau, Lafayette and
the Lameths, were opposed by a group of radicals centering around
men--Pétion, Robespierre, Danton, Brissot--soon to be leaders of
the rival republican groups of Gironde and Mountain, but at present
united against the moderates. The moderates succeeded in making the
Constitution, and starting the new regime off. But war between France
and the Central European powers of Austria and Prussia broke out,
certain provisions of the Constitution, notably those concerning
religion and the monarchy, failed to work well, Louis himself was
suspected of treason by many of his subjects, and in the general
political turmoil the active and well-organized radicals overthrew
the monarchy in the famous attack on the Tuileries Palace in Paris on
August 10, 1792.
Avowed monarchists and such mild reformers and liberals as Lafayette
were thus excluded from power, and France became a republic. But the
final and critical defeat of the moderates in France is better placed
on June 2, 1793. In matters of this sort, as in any splitting up of
historical events into periods, there may be legitimate differences of
interpretation. Conservatives, moderates, and radicals and extremists
are not in any of our societies absolutely clear-cut and definite
groups, nor is the transference of power from one to another very often
a single event agreed upon by all to be such. You may feel that no
moderate could have voted the end of the French monarchy. None the less
it would seem that the right wing of the republicans, known to history
as the Girondins, and to their contemporaries as the Brissotins,
were really moderates upon whom circumstances forced actions to
them disagreeably radical and extreme. Notably they did not wish the
death of the King. They were mostly prosperous bourgeois, lawyers and
intellectuals, and after the trial of the King in January, 1793, they
became very sure that the revolution had gone far enough, that it ought
to be stopped. Whatever their past, they had now become moderates. By
the early months of 1793 they had lost control of the Paris Jacobin
Club and with it most of the other revolutionary clubs and the whole
network of organizations which had helped the radicals achieve their
ends in the early days of the revolution. They could not command the
support of the hesitating and more or less neutral mass of deputies in
the Convention who were called the Plain. Their enemies were better
organized, more aggressive, and perhaps more unscrupulous. They were
certainly more successful.
Just as with the Presbyterians in England, there came the demand
that these now moderate leaders be excluded from the Convention and
brought under arrest. In a test of strength in the Convention on June
2, 1793, the extremists took care to surround the meeting-place of
that body with sympathetic Parisian militiamen, back of whom assembled
a large and hostile crowd. The Convention tried to stand on their
representative dignity and to refuse to permit the arrest of the
twenty-two members demanded by the Mountain. Headed by their president,
they solemnly marched out to ensure that their position be respected
as the embodiment of the will of the people. The deputies made the
circuit of the gardens, finding an unyielding row of bayonets at every
gate, and a “people” with a temporary will of its own. They returned
indoors and voted the arrest of the twenty-two Girondins. The radical
Montagnards were now in undisputed command.
Events moved rather faster in Russia, but their sequence is almost
identical with those in England and in France. The first provisional
government headed nominally by Prince Lvov, really by Miliukov, was
made up mostly of Kadets, the left wing of middle-class groups in the
old Duma, but no more than “progressives,” “liberals,” or “democrats”
in Western political terminology. There were several representatives
of more conservative groups, and only one Socialist, Kerensky. After
a life of less than two months, this government broke down over the
question of continuing an “imperialist” war on the side of the allies.
Miliukov was forced out for too great compliance with the imperialism
of the allies, and a number of Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries
accepted positions in the new government. In July Kerensky took the
formal leadership after a crisis, and in September the Kadets finally
withdrew altogether, leaving Kerensky at the head of a very shaky
moderate Socialist government.
The Socialists who thus consented to co-operate with bourgeois
governments in the prosecution of the war were christened by
the Bolsheviks “compromisist.” Such Socialists came from almost
all the fractions into which this political faith had split in
twentieth-century Russia, where the usual doctrinal differences within
Marxism were complicated by those which looked back into Russian
history for a peculiarly deep-seated Slavic village-communism. In the
specific Russian situation, these Social-Revolutionaries, Trudoviks,
Narodniks, Mensheviks, must be called moderates. They did not hope
to introduce the dictatorship of the proletariat. They wanted to win
the war, and they were willing to make use of parliamentary methods
to secure social reforms. They had long been distrustful of the
Kadets, but under the pressure of events they consented to co-operate
with them. The Kadets themselves suffered the fate of the Puritan
Episcopalians and the Feuillants; they were pushed out by their
collaborators to the Left.
The Bolsheviks refused to take part in any of these governments.
They insisted that the bourgeois revolution of February must sooner
or later be followed by the proletarian revolution Marx had preached
and predicted. Lenin, who returned from a Swiss exile in April to
enjoy a few months of bourgeois freedom, decided that the proletarian
revolution might be brought off in Russia. His party was by no means
unanimously agreed, but his leadership kept the small band together,
and the blunders of the compromisists, together with the heritage
of defeat and disorganization, played into his hands. In July a
premature rising of workers in Petrograd was apparently given local and
reluctant leadership by some of the party, and its failure sent Lenin
into hiding, and Trotsky and Lunacharsky to prison. The subsequent
swing of the pendulum to the Right ended with the abortive attempt
of General Kornilov to march on Petrograd, and in this whole process
the Bolsheviks gradually acquired new courage and a new following.
Lenin from hiding held a guiding hand. Trotsky was released, and
elected president of a Petrograd soviet now in Bolshevik control.
Lenin, back secretly in Petrograd, presided at a final meeting of the
party Central Committee, and an insurrection was decided upon. In a
masterly exhibition of revolutionary technique, a military revolution
committee made sure of the Petrograd garrison, other groups contrived
to hamstring the press and communications, and on the agreed day the
Bolsheviks took over Petrograd with astonishingly little difficulty and
almost no bloodshed. Even the siege of the Winter Palace, which forms
the high point of the uprising, has a comic-opera touch. The October
revolution in Petrograd was almost as bloodless as Pride’s Purge or
June 2, 1793, the corresponding events in the English and French
revolutions. In Moscow there was real fighting, but there, too, the
Bolsheviks were successful within a week. Kerensky fled, and the rule
of the moderates in Russia was over.
_III. Dual Sovereignty_
The Russian revolution affords the neatest example of a uniformity that
lies beyond the somewhat superficial uniformity of sequence of power
from conservatives to moderates to extremists, from Right to Center
to Left. This is at once an institution and a process; or better,
a process that works through a very similar set of institutions.
Theorists and historians of the Russian revolution refer to it as the
_dvoevlastie_, a word usually translated as dual power, but containing
overtones that make it better translated, perhaps, as dual sovereignty.
We must go briefly into the general situation to which this word refers.
The problem of sovereignty has long been in itself sufficient to keep
hundreds of political philosophers busy and happy. Here once more,
having other work to do, we must resign ourselves to abstention from
these philosophical delights. In a normal Western society, it may
well be difficult or impossible to locate any one person, or group
of persons, who possesses the final, authoritative power to decide
questions concerning what the society is to do. The pluralists would
seem to be, from the point of view of description of social processes,
quite right. Even the broader political policies of a modern state
seem to be arrived at by so elaborately natural a process of adjusting
the desires of conflicting groups, that to say that a single and
identifiable “sovereign” determines these policies is nonsense. And
yet in a normal society there is at least one co-ordinated chain of
institutions through which conflicting groups do finally adjust their
conflicts, for the moment at least, in action. That co-ordination may
seem inefficient and irrational when academically analyzed, and it may
well be so complicated that even the politicians who make it work do
not understand it. For men are as often as not unaware of how they do
things they do very successfully.
But it does work, and through it questions at issue are decided--or
forgotten, which is also a kind of deciding. Those who do not like the
decision may try to alter it by a very great variety of action, from
agitation to conspiracy or sabotage. Socially powerful or numerous
groups may under favoring conditions even go so far as to nullify a
given decision: the example of the Eighteenth Amendment in the United
States will occur to everyone. On the whole, however, the decisions
become law, and overt disobedience becomes criminal.
When another and conflicting chain of institutions provides another
and conflicting set of decisions, then you have a dual sovereignty.
Within the same society, two sets of institutions, leaders, and
laws demand obedience, not in one single respect, but in the whole
interwoven series of actions which make up life for the average man.
Thus the nullification of the Prohibition Amendment by many citizens
over large areas of the United States did not in itself mean that there
was in this country a revolutionary situation of dual sovereignty.
Were a similar nullification extended by, let us say, a strengthened
amalgamation of the American Federation of Labor and the Committee for
Industrial Organization from the Fourteenth Amendment on through to the
common law of property; were this amalgamation to enforce laws of its
own on workers in factories; were it to take over many of the functions
of local government in relation to markets, sanitation, police, and so
on--we should clearly have dual sovereignty. We should, as a matter
of fact, have a state of affairs something like that in Russia in the
summer of 1917.
In _all_ our revolutions, however, the legal government finds opposed
to it, once the first steps in actual revolution have been taken, not
merely hostile individuals and parties--this any government finds--but
a rival government, better organized, better staffed, better obeyed.
This rival government is of course illegal, but not all of its leaders
and followers are from the beginning consciously aiming to supplant
the legal government. Very often they think of themselves as merely
supplementing it, perhaps also as preserving it in a revolutionary
course. Yet a rival government they are, and no mere critics or
opponents. At a given revolutionary crisis they step naturally and
easily into the place of the defeated government.
This process does indeed work itself out in the old regimes before the
first steps in revolution are taken. Puritans in England, Whigs in
America, Third Estate in France, the Kadets and compromisist Socialists
in Russia, all had organizations that demanded their allegiance and
that enabled them to fight the old regime with revolution at least
in the back of their minds. But the process is much more clear, more
sharply edged--except perhaps in America--at the stage we have now
reached.
Once the first stage in revolution is over, the struggle that arises
between moderates and extremists comes to be a struggle between
two rival governmental machines. That of the moderates, the legal
government, bar inherited some of the prestige that goes with being
established, some of the financial resources--actual or potential--of
the old government, most of its liabilities, all of its institutions.
Try to alter these latter as it may, it finds them annoyingly
persistent, extremely difficult to blot out. The legal government is
unpopular with many just because it is an obvious and responsible
government, because it has to shoulder some of the unpopularity of the
government of the old regime.
The illegal government of the extremists, however, has to face no
such difficulties. It has the prestige which recent events have given
to attackers, to those who can claim to be in the forefront of the
revolution. It has, as governments go, relatively few responsibilities.
It does not have to try to use, if only temporarily, the worn-out
machinery, the institutions of the old regime. It has, on the
contrary, for the moment the great advantage of using the efficient
machinery gradually constructed by the revolutionists, both moderates
and extremists, from the time when they began under the old regime
to emerge as a pressure group. Indeed, the final capture of this
machinery--or this organization, if you prefer--seems to be what really
determines the final victory of the extremists over the moderates, long
before that final victory is apparent in events. Why the moderates do
not keep control of the organization they have done so much to initiate
and to mold is a question that permits of no simple answer. We may hope
that some answer will emerge from a more detailed study of the fate
of the moderates. We must first, however, see how well the foregoing
analysis fits the facts in our four revolutions.
Charles and the Long Parliament were clearly dual sovereigns from the
actual outbreak of hostilities in 1642 if not from the very first
session of 1640. Once the Civil War was decided against Charles,
Parliament, under the control of the moderates, found itself the legal
government. But almost immediately it was confronted by the radical New
Model Army, which very soon began to take the kind of action that in
this world only a government can take. The fact that Charles was still
on the scene and the existence of the Scotch Army complicated the
situation in the three or four years before the execution of Charles
in 1649, but the broad lines of the duel between the newly legal
government of the Presbyterian moderates in Parliament and the illegal
government of the extremist Independents in the New Model Army are
clear.
In America this dual sovereignty is most obvious in the years before
the final break in 1776. The lines between the legal and the illegal
government were obscured, especially in a colony like Massachusetts,
by the fact that town meetings and colonial legislatures were part of
the legal government, but were often controlled by men active in the
illegal government. None the less, the machinery which culminated in
the continental congresses--in themselves illegal bodies--was clearly
used by revolutionists against constituted authority.
While the moderates in France, the Feuillants, or constitutional
monarchists, still controlled the legislative body and the formal
machinery of the centralized state, their increasingly republican
opponents controlled the network of Jacobin societies which made up
the frame of the other, or illegal, government. Through their control
of these societies they worked into the control of many of the units
of local government, and from this position of vantage were able to
expel the Feuillant moderates and destroy the monarchy. The process was
then repeated with the Girondin moderates controlling the legislative
body and the Montagnard extremists controlling the important units
of the Jacobin network and at least one exceedingly important local
governmental unit--the Paris Commune. In the crisis of June 2, 1793,
the illegal government again won out over the legal.
In Russia the _dvoevlastie_ is plain. The provisional government which
emerged from the February revolution had through its connection with
the Duma some claim to legitimacy. Though it absorbed more and more
Socialists of various stripes in the next six months, thus exhibiting
the leftward movement we have found in all our societies, it remained
moderate and quite conscious of its legality. On the other side the
Bolsheviks and a few allied radical groups had by late summer obtained
control of the network of soviets and stood as an illegal government
facing the legal one. Soviet means no more than “council” and had
originally in Russia no more connotations than its English equivalent
has for us. The soviets were local councils of trade-unionists,
soldiers, sailors, peasants, and suitable intellectuals. They sprang
up naturally enough with the dissolution of the Czarist power in 1917,
all the more since memories of the abortive revolution of 1905, which
had also made use of the soviet form, were fresh in the minds of
everyone. The Bolsheviks, wisely concentrating on the soviets while the
attention of the compromisists was increasingly taken by participation
in the legal government, were able to wrest control of key soviets in
Petrograd, Moscow, and major industrial towns from the compromisists.
There is here a curious detailed parallel with the French revolution.
The final insurrectionary victory of the Bolsheviks was achieved
without complete control of the general network of soviets, just as
that of the Montagnards was achieved without control of the whole
network of Jacobin clubs. In each case control of the most important
units of the illegal government was sufficient.
_IV. Weaknesses of the Moderates_
At this stage in revolution, then, the moderates in control of the
formal machinery of government are confronted by the extremists in
control of machinery devised for propaganda, pressure-group work, even
insurrection, but now increasingly used as machinery of government.
This stage ends with the triumph of the extremists and the merging of
the dual sovereignty into a single one. We must now inquire into the
reasons for the failure of the moderates in these revolutions to hold
power.
There is first the paradox we have previously noted, that in the early
stages of revolution the control of the machinery of government is in
itself a source of weakness for those who hold such control. Little by
little the moderates find themselves losing the credit they had gained
as opponents of the old regime, and taking on more and more of the
discredit innocently associated by the hopeful many with the status
of heir to the old regime. Forced on the defensive, they make mistake
after mistake, partly because they are so little used to being on the
defensive. They are in a position from which only a superhuman wisdom
could extricate them; and the moderates are among the most human of
revolutionaries.
Faced with the opposition of more radical groups organized in the
network we have called the illegal government, the moderates have
broadly but three choices: they may try to suppress the illegal
government; they may try to get control of it themselves; or they may
let it alone. Actually their policy shifts around among these three
policies, combining one with another; in these circumstances, the net
effect is to produce a fourth policy, which amounts to a positive
encouragement of their enemies in the illegal government.
In the revolutions we are studying the moderates are particularly
handicapped in their efforts to suppress these enemy organizations. The
revolutions were all made in the name of freedom, were all associated
with what the Marxists call a bourgeois individualistic ideology. The
moderates found themselves obliged to observe certain “rights” of
their enemies--notably those of freedom of speech, of the press, of
assembly. What is more, many if not most of the moderates sincerely
believed in such rights, held that truth is great and will prevail.
Had it not just prevailed against the tyranny of the old regime?
Even when under pressure the moderate begins to try to suppress an
extremist newspaper, forbid an extremist meeting, jail a few extremist
leaders, his conscience troubles him. More important, any unsuppressed
extremists raise a mighty howl. The moderates are betraying the
revolution; they are using exactly the same methods the villainous
tyrants of the old regime had used.
The Russian revolution is here an excellent example. The Kadets and
compromisists between February and October could not conveniently
suppress Bolshevik propaganda, nor indeed any form of Bolshevik
political activity. When they tried to do so after a premature
Bolshevik rising, the street troubles in Petrograd known as the “July
Days,” they were met by protests from all sorts of people, including
notably the Bolsheviks. This was despotism, this was Czarism of the
worst sort. Had not the February revolution brought political freedom,
freedom of the press and association, to Russia forever? Kerensky
mustn’t make use of the kind of weapons the Czars had used. In 1938
Stalin of course can use methods worthy of Peter the Great or Ivan the
Terrible, but that is only to say that the Russian revolution is over.
In 1917, however, even had Kerensky been the sort of man who could
successfully organize repressive measures--and he plainly was not that
sort of man--what we are bound to call public opinion would not in
those days have permitted the execution of such measures. Much the same
situation is to be found in France, where the Jacobins were permitted
free speech and free association, and firmly and publicly insisted on
their rights as free men to get ready for a dictatorship.
Nor are the moderates more successful in their attempts to get--or
rather to retain--control of the machinery which they and the
extremists had jointly built up as a means of overthrowing the old
regime. For this there seems to be no single preponderant reason.
The moderates are, of course, occupied with a good deal of the work
of actual governing, and they have less time for army committees or
Jacobin clubs or soviet meetings. They feel themselves perhaps a trifle
superior to such activity. They are temperamentally unfitted for the
rougher and dirtier work of the politics of direct action. They have
moral scruples. They are not quite the noble souls historical legend
makes out the Girondin moderates in the French revolution to have been;
indeed many of them, like Brissot and Kerensky, have a good many of the
gifts of the political manipulator. But they are in power, and they
seem to set about quite naturally cultivating the sober virtues that
go with power. Such virtues, however, make them inadequate leaders of
militant revolutionary societies.
Whatever the explanation, the fact of the uniformity is clear. This
particular failure of the moderates is well shown in the French
revolution. The Jacobin network of societies of “Friends of the
Constitution” was in its inception hardly to the Left of Lafayette and
his friends. When, however, it began to move further to the Left the
Fayettists made a few feeble efforts to retain control, and then went
off and founded their own society, the Feuillants. The Feuillants,
however, could not spread beyond narrow upper-class and intellectual
Parisian circles. Later groups founded here and there throughout the
country as “Friends of the Monarchy,” or “Friends of Peace,” tried to
compete with the Jacobins, but with very little luck. If they gave
bread to the poor, the Jacobins cried out that they were attempting
bribery. If they did nothing, the Jacobins complained that they lacked
social conscience. Finally the Jacobins worked out a fairly systematic
procedure. They would hire a few hoodlums--sometimes it was not
necessary to hire them--to break up a meeting of the rival Friends of
Peace, and would then send a deputation to the municipal authorities
asking that the Friends of Peace be closed as a public nuisance. The
authorities were either Jacobins themselves, or more afraid of the
Jacobins than of the Friends of Peace, so that the matter received a
suitable revolutionary solution.
Similarly the Presbyterians found themselves powerless to control the
spread of Independency, not only in the army, but in local parishes.
And in Russia the compromisists found the Bolsheviks formidable in
all the important soviets. A detailed study of the Petrograd soviet
from February to October will show how cleverly the party of Lenin
took advantage of every mistake of its opponents, how successfully it
burrowed from within, spreading its control from factory soviets on
up until finally the city soviet was captured. Such a study will also
show the compromisists gradually losing ground, in spite of the great
oratorical gifts of leaders like Tseretelli, Chkheidze and Kerensky.
There is, indeed, an almost organic weakness in the position of the
moderates. They are placed between two groups, the disgruntled but not
yet silenced conservatives and the confident, aggressive extremists.
There are still freedom of speech and the other political rights, so
that even conservatives have a voice. Now the moderates seem in all
these revolutions to be following the slogan used so conspicuously
for French politics of the _Cartel des Gauches_ in 1924: no enemies
to the Left. They still distrust the conservatives, against whom they
have so recently risen; and they are reluctant to admit that the
extremists, with whom they so recently stood united, can actually be
their enemies. All the force of the ideas and sentiments with which the
moderates entered the revolution give them a sort of twist toward the
Left. Emotionally they cannot bear to think of themselves as falling
behind in the revolutionary process. Moreover, many of them hope to
outbid the extremists for popular support, to beat them at their
own game. But only in normal times can you trust in the nice smooth
clichés of politics like “beat them at their own game.” The moderates
fail by this policy of “no enemies to the Left” to reconcile these
enemies to the Left; and they make it quite impossible to rally to
their support any of the not yet quite negligible conservatives. Then,
after the moderates get thoroughly frightened about the threatening
attitude of the extremists, they turn for help to the conservatives,
and find there just aren’t any. They have emigrated, or retired to
the country, hopeless and martyred in spirit. Needless to say, a
martyred conservative is no longer a conservative, but only another
maladjusted soul. This last turn of theirs towards the conservatives,
however, finishes the moderates. Alone, unsupported in control of a
government as yet by no means in assured and habitual control of a
personnel, civil or military, they succumb easily to insurrection. It
is significant that Pride’s Purge, the French crisis of June 2, 1793,
and the Petrograd October revolution were all hardly more than _coups
d’état_.
In the English, French, and Russian revolutions it is possible to
distinguish one critical measure around which all these currents
converge, a measure which, espoused by the moderates, cuts them off
from support on the Right and leaves the radicals in a position to use
this very measure against its authors. Such are the Root-and-Branch
Bill in the English, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in the
French, and Order Number One in the Russian, revolutions.
The Root-and-Branch Bill originated in a petition with 15,000
signatures presented to the House of Commons late in 1640, asking
for the abolition of Episcopacy “with all its roots and branches.”
Naturally the moderate Episcopalians, from Hyde and Falkland to Digby,
were against a measure which destroyed their Church; and just as
naturally the Presbyterians were inclined to favor it. It is possible
that politically minded moderates like Pym might have left the bill
alone, but the refusal of the bishops to give up their seats in the
House of Lords seems to have determined Pym to support the bill. This
espousal made almost every Episcopalian a Royalist, and when the Civil
War broke out in 1642 the Presbyterians were stranded on the extreme
Right of the party groupings within the region controlled by the
Parliamentarians. They could find no possible allies except to the
Left. The Independents--and Cromwell had first actually introduced the
Root-and-Branch Bill to the House--could now argue that presbyters were
no better than bishops, that the reasons which held for the abolition
of one held incontrovertibly for the abolition of the other. Later,
when the moderates proved incapable of carrying the war to a successful
conclusion, measures like the Self-Denying Ordinance and the creation
of the New Model Army had to be accepted by a Presbyterian majority
which yet was not by any means a commanding majority, and which had
left itself with no possibility of conservative support.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy emerged after months of discussion
in the National Assembly as a charter for renewed Christianity in
France. The moderates who put it through seem mostly to have been
sincere men, bad Catholics in some ways, perhaps, but rather because
they had absorbed some of the practical worldly spirit of the age than
because they were outright anti-clericals. Yet their measure alienated
the good Catholics and merely encouraged the violent anti-clericals to
try to root out the “vile superstitions” of Christianity altogether.
The Civil Constitution in all innocence provided for the election
of parish priests by the same local electoral bodies that chose lay
officials for the new government positions, and for the election of
bishops by the same departmental body that elected representatives to
the Legislative Assembly. It scrapped all the historic dioceses of old
France, and substituted nice, nearly uniform dioceses identical with
the new _départements_ into which France was governmentally divided. It
did consent to “notify” the Pope of such elections.
Since the property of the Church as a corporation had been taken over
to serve as security for the new paper money of the revolution, the
_assignats_, the State was to support the expenses of the clergy under
the new constitution. The election of priests and bishops by bodies
to which Protestants, Jews, and avowed atheists were eligible was so
completely uncanonical that no Pope could for a moment have considered
accepting it. Although there was the usual diplomatic delay, the break
between the Pope and the revolutionary government was inevitable, and
with it the powerful and conservative group of Catholics was forced
irreconcilably into opposition. A schism began which extended to every
village in the land. But the new Constitutional Church was hardly more
acceptable to the real radicals than the old Orthodox Church, and
as the critical days of the Terror drew nearer the moderates found
themselves saddled with the protection of a church which returned them
no important support.
Order Number One emerged from no such long debate as did the
Root-and-Branch Bill and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Indeed,
it is not quite fair to list it as a definite measure sponsored
by the moderates, though the soviet leader most prominent in the
group which prepared it was the moderate N. D. Sokolov, and the
compromisists energetically promulgated it. The Order emerged in the
very last days of the February revolution from the headquarters of
the Petrograd soviet. It was addressed to the army, and in addition
to the usual revolutionary measures towards a standing army of the
old regime--abolition of salutes, social and political equality of
privates with officers, and so on--it provided for elected company
and battalion committees which were to have entire charge of arms,
above all of those of officers; and it ordered that every military
unit obey the soviets in political matters. The military committee of
the Duma might be obeyed in military matters, provided the soviet did
not object in a specific case. The Order was devised primarily with
the Petrograd garrison in mind, but its main provisions were rapidly
taken up at the front. This order at once convinced the conservatives
that there was nothing to be hoped for from the revolution, and put
even the more liberal officers in a state of mind to welcome later
attempts at a conservative _coup d’état_. It made the subsequent task
of the moderates in bringing Russia back to military efficiency for
the war on Germany more difficult than ever. And it by no means served
to reconcile the soldiers themselves with the continuation of the war.
Most of the popularity of Order Number One eventually redounded to
the credit of the Bolsheviks; most of its unpopularity came back on
the compromisists. This is the typical fate of the moderates in these
revolutions.
Again, the moderates are in all our societies confronted sooner or
later with the task of fighting a war; and they prove poor war leaders.
In England the fighting broke out in 1642, and before the first
Civil War was over Cromwell and the Independents had made themselves
indispensable, and were on the threshold of power. Foreign war in
France broke out in the spring of 1792, and a few months later the
monarchy had fallen; the war went very badly in the spring of 1793, and
in June the moderate Girondins, who had on the French side been the
most eager for war, were turned out by the Montagnards. The Russian
revolution was born in the midst of a disastrous war, and the Russian
moderates never had a chance at peaceful administration. The fact is
clear. The moderates cannot seem to succeed in war. The reasons why are
less clear. No doubt the commitment of the moderates to protect the
liberties of the individual is a factor. You cannot organize an army if
you take Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity at all seriously.
Modern wars seem to carry with them the necessity for organizing
civil government along military lines, for the exercise of strong,
centralized governmental authority in which the liberty of the
individual is far from a matter of first concern, in which there is
very little debate, very little of the government by discussion so
prized by the moderates, very little compromise and moderation. War,
said Madison, is the mother of executive aggrandizement, and even
here in America our wars have borne him out. But in the midst of a
revolution the executive that gets aggrandized is not the moderate
executive. The Reigns of Terror in France and in Russia are in part
explicable as the concentration of power in a government of national
defense made necessary by the fact of war. This is by no means a
complete explanation of the Reigns of Terror. But certainly the
necessity for a strong centralized government to run the war is one of
the reasons why the moderates failed. They simply could not provide the
discipline, the enthusiasm, the unpondered loyalty necessary to fight a
war, and they went out.
_V. The Failure of the Moderates_
To the kindly souls who for the most part wrote the history from which
we get our notions of modern revolutions, this failure of the moderates
was a great tragedy. The moderates appear as good men worsted by
circumstances and unscrupulous opponents. They seem to be idealists
crushed by a harsh world, but thereby sure of the resurrection history
holds out to the just. The gentle Falkland and the scholarly Condorcet
smile down upon us from the only heaven to which mere mortals hold
the key; and if historians have not yet admitted Kerensky into their
heaven, the reason may be no more than that the poor man is still
inescapably here on earth.
Perhaps most of the moderates would be better or at least more normal
men than their extremist opponents. Yet, leaders and led together,
they make a motley lot, by no means easily catalogued by Marxist or by
psychologist. And the traditional notion that they were idealists and
that they failed because in the rough give-and-take the idealist must
always fail is here peculiarly misleading. It is more accurate to risk
the paradox: they failed because they were in so many respects what is
usually called realists; that is, some of them were reasonably well
adapted to a common-sense world.
Pym and Mirabeau, who died peacefully before the defeat of the
moderates was evident, still enjoy reputations as skilled politicians,
as sensible moderates. Over most of the others there hangs something
of the kind of reputation most definite and clear with Kerensky. The
eloquent compromisist leader seems to us a man of words, an orator
who could move crowds but could not guide them, an impractical and
incompetent person in the field of action. The Gironde seems much the
same, as also the lesser Presbyterian leaders like Holles. It seems
emptily paradoxical to list these people as realists. Yet realists
of a kind they were. They used grand words and phrases grandly, as
a consolation and a joy to their listeners and to themselves. But
they did not believe in them as the radicals believed in them; they
did not intend to try to pursue them to their logical conclusions in
action. They were, in short, using words in the way most men in normal
societies, including such realistic politicians as Gladstone, use
them. They would not seem realists to a hard-headed horse-trader. But
within the limits which tradition and ritual have set for the work of
such people as they--part priest, part administrator, part actor, part
teacher--they were good quiet practitioners.
But the times were turned topsy-turvy, and as the crisis of the
revolution approached, only the man with a touch--or more--of fanatic
idealism in him, or at least with the ability to act the part of such
a fanatic, could attain to leadership. The normal social roles of
realism and idealism are reversed in the acute phases of a revolution.
We shall return to this topic in our next chapter. Here we need only
note that the outward evidences of the approach of this kind of crisis
appear as a heightened form of class antagonism. The moderates by
definition are not great haters, are not endowed with the effective
blindness which keeps men like Robespierre and Lenin undistracted in
their rise to power. In normal times, ordinary men are not capable of
feeling for groups of their fellow-men hatred as intense, continuous,
and uncomfortable as that preached by the extremists in revolution.
Hatred is a heroic emotion, and heroic emotions are exhausting. The
poor may hate the rich, the Protestant the Catholic, the bourgeois the
noble, the Southerner the Yankee, and so on endlessly. But this hate is
normally in human beings a routine and consoling hate, a part of life,
like food, drink, and loving, integrated with an existence as alien to
the possibility of revolution as that of a vegetable.
The moderates, then, do not really believe in the big words they have
to use. They do not really believe a heavenly perfection is suddenly
coming to men on earth. They are all for compromise, common sense,
toleration, comfort. In a normal society, these desires are part of
their strength and give them their hold over their fellows, who share
at least their desire for comfort. But in these three revolutions large
numbers of men were for the moment lifted by desire and emotion to a
point where they seemed to despise even comfort. The moderates could
not deal politically with such men; they could not take the first steps
which are necessary if such men are to be understood. The moderates
were cut off from the immoderates by a gap neither philosophy nor
common sense could fill. There is an adage that in the kingdom of the
blind the one-eyed man is king. In one of his subtler short stories,
_The Kingdom of the Blind_, Mr. H. G. Wells has exposed the weakness
of this apothegm. In the heat of a violent revolution, its weakness is
perhaps even more apparent than in the imaginary Andean valley of Mr.
Wells’s tale. The moderates we have been dealing with were all very
human and very fallible; but even had they been as wise as the heroes
of Plutarch, as wise as Washington, it would seem that they must have
failed. For we are here in a land fabulous, but real, where the wisdom
and common sense of the moderate are not wisdom and common sense, but
folly.
_Chapter_ SIX THE ACCESSION OF THE EXTREMISTS
_I. The_ Coup d’état
The struggle between the moderates and the extremists, which begins
almost as soon as the dramatic overthrow of the old regime is effected,
is marked by a series of exciting episodes: here street-fighting,
there a forced seizure of property, almost everywhere heated debates,
attempted repressions, a steady stream of violent propaganda. Tempers
are strained to the breaking point over matters that in a stable
society are capable of an almost automatic solution. There is an almost
universal state of tension. The fever is working its way to a crisis.
As with many fevers, its progress is in detail jerky, with now an
apparent improvement and then a sudden jump ahead. But the cumulative
effect is unmistakable. With the final overthrow of the moderates the
revolution may be said to have entered its crisis stage.
Before we attempt to describe the behavior of men in societies in such
a crisis, we shall have to go a bit further into the process by which
the extremists acceded to power. In a sense, such an analysis will be
but pointing out in reverse what we have already said of the moderates:
the reasons why the extremists succeeded are but the other side of
the reasons why the moderates failed. Where the moderates were weak,
the extremists were strong. The actual steps by which the extremists
rise to power are, however, too important to be left with this general
statement. We must parallel our analysis of moderate weaknesses with an
analysis of extremist strengths.
The extremists win out because they secure control of the illegal
government and turn it in a decisive _coup d’état_ against the legal
government. The problem of the dual sovereignty is solved by the
revolutionary acts in which the Independents, the Jacobins, and the
Bolsheviks seized power. But the moderates had once shared with them
the control of the organizations which they had turned against the
government. The key to the success of the extremists lies in their
monopoly of these organizations--New Model Army and Independent
churches, Jacobin clubs, and soviets.
They obtain this monopoly by ousting, usually in a series of conflicts,
any and all opponents from these organizations. The discipline,
single-mindedness, and centralization of authority which mark the
rule of the triumphant extremists are first developed and brought to
perfection in the revolutionary groups. The characteristics which were
formed in the growth of the illegal government remain those of the
radicals after the illegal government becomes the legal. Indeed, many
of these useful characteristics were first molded even further back
in the days of the old regime, when the extremists were very small
concentrated groups subject to the full “tyranny” of the government.
The Independents gained discipline and devotion from a long series of
persecutions which began under Elizabeth, whose famed love of tolerance
was not extended to Catholics or Brownists. The French radicals were
not as badly treated under the old regime as their descendants and
historians like to think, but the censorship, the Bastille, and
the _lettres de cachet_ were real enough, even if they rarely fell
to the lot of the rank and file of the enlightened. As for Russia,
its extremists were molded in the most melodramatic traditions of
oppression, were backed by almost a century of secret organization,
plotting, oaths, and martyrdom.
What emerges from this longer past and from the recent conflict with
the moderates is a fighting group with the newly acquired habit of
winning. You cannot say exactly why a given football team succeeds in
winning most of the time, let alone why an army or a revolutionary
party wins. The variables are so many even in the simplest case that no
sensible man would make predictions based wholly on the most apparent
and perhaps most important variable of all--the quality of the human
material. Gamblers know this, if historians and sociologists do not.
That our revolutionists were successful and admirably organized groups
we know, and we can make some attempt to point out in what ways they
succeeded, what particular kinds of strength they exhibited. We cannot
give any neat formula for success in building a revolutionary group,
cannot measure exactly why _these_ revolutionists succeeded and others
failed.
_II. Organization of the Extremists_
The first thing likely to strike an observer of the successful
extremists in the English, French, and Russian revolutions, and
indeed, the not quite so radical patriots who put through the American
revolution, is their fewness in numbers. The membership of the formal
organizations which did the work of beating the moderates was never
more than a small minority of the total population. Their active
membership was of course always smaller than the membership on the
books. It is not easy to get exact figures, whether for membership or
for populations, but the following figures are not erroneous enough
to be misleading. The New Model Army was created at a membership of
22,000, and was not more than 40,000 in its most obstreperous days. The
population of England was somewhere between three and five millions.
The Jacobins at the most generous estimate numbered in their struggle
with the moderates about 500,000. The population of France was probably
over rather than under twenty millions. The Communist party in Russia
has always prided itself on its numerical smallness; this is no
unwieldy bourgeois party, full of indifferent members who cast a lazy
vote, or don’t even vote at all. Figures again are uncertain, but it
seems likely that at no time during the revolution did the Communist
party number even 1 per cent of a population of well over one hundred
million. In America the difficulty of even approximate figures is
greater, since the patriots were not organized into a single body. It
is clearly not fair to take the relatively small continental armies
as exactly measuring the strength of the patriot--or Whig--group.
Nevertheless, the best authorities are agreed that if you count out
avowed Tories and the very numerous indifferent or neutral, the
group which actively engineered, supported, and fought the American
revolution is a minority, probably not more than 10 per cent of the
population.
It is easy to remark that though the facts clearly show that these
revolutionary groups are very small minorities indeed, all politically
active groups are minorities, and that in these revolutions the
radicals in some way “represented” or “carried out” what the soul,
will, genius, of their nations demanded. This may well be so in terms
familiar to the metaphysician, but the relation involved is one which
at present we cannot pretend to be able to study by the methods we
have laid down in this book. Perhaps the Jacobins were the agents
of the general will of the French people; but the general will is a
metaphysical concept the relation of which with tangible Jacobins we
cannot possibly measure here.
Trotsky in one of his less realistic moods has a fine time reconciling
the fewness of the Bolsheviks in 1917 with the largeness of Russia,
and with the various groups clearly hostile to the Bolsheviks. “The
Bolsheviks,” he writes, “took the people as preceding history had
created them, and as they were called to achieve the Revolution.
The Bolsheviks saw it as their mission to stand at the head of this
people. _Those against the insurrection were ‘everybody’--except
the Bolsheviks. But the Bolsheviks were the people._” Here again
“everybody” in quotation marks is obviously different from everybody
without quotation marks; and though we can as scientists, perhaps, make
use of everybody, we can do nothing at all with “everybody.”
We can, however, say that in all our societies these radicals were very
conscious, and usually very proud, of their small numbers. They felt
definitely set off from their countrymen, consecrated to a cause which
their countrymen were certainly not consciously and actively equal to.
Some of the radicals may have satisfied themselves that they really
represented the better selves of their fellow-countrymen, that they
were the reality of which the others were the potentiality. But here
and now they were very sure that they were superior to the inert and
flabby many. The English saints of the seventeenth century, the elect
of a God more exclusive than any poor worldly king, made no attempt to
conceal their contempt for the damned masses--and dukes and earls were
of course masses for these determined Puritans. The Jacobins inherited
from the Enlightenment a belief in the natural goodness or the natural
reasonableness of the common man, and this belief put a limit to
their expressed scorn for their fellows. But the scorn is there, and
the Jacobin was almost as loftily consecrated as was the Independent.
The Bolsheviks were brought up to believe that dialectical materialism
works through an elite of the laboring classes, and that the peasants
in particular were incapable of working out their own salvation. The
Bolsheviks therefore took their fewness naturally enough, and their
superiority as well.
There is also a good deal of evidence that as the revolutions go on,
a very large number of people just drop out of active politics, make
no attempt to register their votes. Now it may be that most of these
people again are at heart in sympathy with the active radicals; but
on the whole it looks as if most of them were cowed conservatives or
moderates, men and women not anxious for martyrdom, but quite incapable
of the mental and moral as well as physical strain of being a devoted
extremist in the crisis of a revolution. We have very clear evidence of
this dropping out of the ordinary man in two of our revolutions, and we
may assume that it is one of the uniformities we are seeking.
In Russia, the February revolution brought in universal suffrage as
a matter of course. Russia had at last caught up with the West. At
the first elections almost everybody, men and women alike, took the
opportunity to vote in various local elections. But very shortly
there set in a noticeable decline in the total number of votes cast.
In the June, 1917, elections for the Moscow district dumas the
Social-Revolutionary groups received 58 per cent of the votes; in
the September elections the Bolsheviks received 52 per cent. A clear
gain for the Bolsheviks by democratic methods? Not at all. In June
the Social-Revolutionaries got 375,000 votes out of 647,000 cast; in
September the Bolsheviks got 198,000 out of 381,000 cast. In three
months half the electorate dropped out. Trotsky himself has a simple
explanation for this; “many small-town people who, in the vapor of
the first illusions, had joined the Compromisers fell back soon after
into political non-existence.” The same story is graphically recorded
in French municipal and national elections between the rosy days of
1789, when everyone who could stagger to the polls voted, and 1793,
when in some cases less than a tenth of the qualified voters actually
voted. They did not vote for Bolsheviks or Jacobins, and it seems more
than likely that if most Englishmen could have voted at all in 1648,
they would not have voted for Independents, Levellers, Diggers, Fifth
Monarchy Men, or Millenarians. The great numbers of qualified voters
just don’t vote; in Trotsky’s compact phrase, they are politically
non-existent.
Their political non-existence is not achieved without a good deal of
help from the extremists. The elections are supposedly free and open,
but the extremists are not hindered by any beliefs in freedom they
may have expressed in other days. They soon take to steps familiar in
this country through the history of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and
Tammany Hall. They beat up well-known aristocrats and such-like class
enemies, they start riots at polling places or in electoral assemblies,
they break windows and start street fights, they howl down moderate
candidates, they bring to bear good journalists, skilled at libel
and innuendo, and in a hundred ways which any realistic student of
politics can uncover with a little study, they make it very difficult
for ordinary, peaceful, humdrum men and women to go to the polls and
cast their votes for the moderates to whom ordinary, peaceful, humdrum
men and women seem attracted. Not that terrorism alone scares off the
ordinary man. Mere laziness, an inability to give to political affairs
the ceaseless attention revolutions demand, is also instrumental in
keeping the man in the street from expressing himself. He gets fed up
with the constant meetings, the deputations, the papers, the elections
of dog-catchers, general inspectors, presidents, the committees, the
rituals, the ceaseless moil and toil of self-government on a more than
Athenian basis. At any rate he quits, and the extremists have the field
to themselves.
Their fewness is indeed one of the great sources of the extremists’
strength. Great numbers are almost as unwieldy in politics as on
the battlefield. In the politics of revolutions what counts is the
ability to move swiftly, to make clear and final decisions, to push
through to a goal without regard for injured human dispositions. For
such a purpose the active political group must be small. You cannot
otherwise obtain the single-mindedness and devotion, the energy and
the discipline, necessary to defeat the moderates. You cannot in large
numbers maintain the fever of fanaticism long enough to secure the
ultimate victory. The masses do not make revolutions. They may be
enlisted for some impressive pageantry once the active few have won
the revolution. Our contemporary revolutions, both of the Right and
the Left, have achieved apparent miracles of mass participation. But
the impressive demonstrations the camera records in Germany and Russia
ought not to deceive the careful student of politics. Neither Bolshevik
nor Nazi victory over the moderates was achieved by the participation
of the many; both were achieved by small, disciplined, principled,
fanatical bodies.
Nor at this stage of revolution do the victorious radicals make use of
the plebiscite. They do not dare risk anything like a free election.
Only later, when the crisis is followed by a convalescence, by a return
to normal ways, does the plebiscite stage arrive. This interval may
not be a very long one, and in the case of Rightist revolutions may be
very brief, since the full fury of the Ideal rarely inspires the men
of the Right. But certainly for the revolutions we are here studying,
the generalization holds: the plebiscite is absent from the struggle
between extremists and moderates, and is not used by the extremists
even after their accession to power.
The extremists are not only few; they are fanatically devoted to their
cause. Their awareness of being few seems correlated with the intensity
of their fanaticism. One feeds upon and strengthens the other. With
their objects, with the content of their dreams of a better world, we
shall concern ourselves later. For those who think that only in the
service of a personal God can feelings properly defined as “fanatical”
be aroused, our application of the word to Jacobins and Bolsheviks may
seem illegitimate. But this is surely an undue narrowing of a clear
and useful word. Bolsheviks and Jacobins were as convinced as any
Calvinist that they alone were right, that what they proposed was the
only possible course. All of our revolutionary radicals displayed a
willingness to work hard, to sacrifice their peace and security, to
submit to discipline, to submerge their personalities in the group.
They were all aware of the spiritual difficulties of keeping “always
at the height of revolutionary circumstances,” as the Jacobins used to
put it; but to a surprising extent they overcame these difficulties and
maintained on this earth an _esprit de corps_, an active moral union,
that is far beyond the powers of ordinary men in ordinary circumstances
to attain and to maintain.
And they are disciplined. Partly, as we have explained, this is an
inheritance from their oppressed past. It correlates with their fewness
and with their fanatical strength. The New Model Army is an excellent
example. It defeated the haphazard aggregations which the ordinary
recruiting methods of the Royalists opposed to it; it defeated the
cream of the opposing forces, the cavalry recruited from faithful
country gentlemen and their dependents. The New Model was recruited
from ardent Puritans, vouched for by men who knew them; and it was
submitted to a brief but effective course of training incomparably more
severe than any that had yet been used in English military history.
The result was a fine army--and a compact body of hard revolutionists
who could cut through the best intentions and the best rhetoric of the
moderates. The discipline of the Jacobins was not military, but it
was very rigorous, and indeed resembled the kind of discipline which
a militant religious body imposes on its members. The Jacobins were
always scrutinizing their own membership, submitting to the ordeal of
an _épuration_, literally a “purification,” perhaps in contemporary
terms a “purge.” The slightest deviation from the established order of
the day might bring a warning and possible expulsion. With the Spartan
ways of the Russian Communist party in the early days of the soviet
state most of us are familiar; it is a point on which all reporters,
kindly and unkindly, are agreed.
The extremists put their disciplined skill into the realization of
the revolutionary ends. There has been worked out in the last few
hundred years an elaborate technique of revolutionary action, of which
the Russian Communists were the latest heirs. A good deal has been
written about this technique, which is in part simply the technique of
any successful pressure group: propaganda, electioneering, lobbying,
parading, street-fighting, delegation-making, direct pressure on
magistrates, sporadic terrorism of the tar-and-feather or castor-oil
variety. Jacobins, Communists, and Sons of Liberty did a notably good
job at this sort of thing. But it is rather surprising to note how many
of these techniques can be found in England, and especially in London,
as early as the seventeenth century. In this respect, as in many
others, the English revolution is clearly of a modern type. Here is a
bit that might have come from the French revolution: during the debate
on the Militia Order, a crowd of apprentices “came into the House of
Commons and kept the door open, and their hats on ... and called out
as they stood ‘Vote, vote,’ and in this arrogant posture stood until
the votes passed.” One suspects that these apprentices did not march in
spontaneously. This is the kind of thing that takes organization.
Finally, the extremists follow their leaders with a devotion and a
unanimity not to be found among the moderates. Theories of democratic
equality, which crop up at the start of all our revolutions, prove no
obstacle to the development among the extremists of something very
like the “Führer” principle we associate with Fascist movements.
Here it is the moderates who live up to their theories, and in the
early stages of the revolutions it is not uncommon to find complaints
that So-and-so is arrogating to himself powers no good man would
want to possess. Mirabeau and Kerensky, to take neat examples,
were accused by moderates and extremists alike of aiming at a
personal dictatorship. Yet Robespierre and Lenin followed in their
footsteps--almost literally--and this time only the cheering could
be heard. This magnifying of the principle of leadership runs right
through the organization, from the subalterns up to the great national
heroes--Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin.
On the whole, this leadership is effective, and especially so at the
very top. Now if they are seen as full and rounded human beings, there
are unquestionably differences among the men who make up the general
staffs of the extremists. The psychologist and the novelist--indeed
the historian as well--could not lump them all together. Yet they have
in common one aspect which is of great importance to the sociologist;
they combine, in varying degrees, very high ideals and a complete
contempt for the inhibitions and principles which serve most other men
as ideals. They present a strange variant of Plato’s pleasant scheme:
they are not philosopher-kings but philosopher-killers. They have the
realistic, the practical touch very few of the moderate leaders had,
and yet they have also enough of the prophet’s fire to hold followers
who expect the New Jerusalem around the next corner. They are practical
men unfettered by common sense, Machiavellians in the service of the
Beautiful and the Good.
A bit from Lenin will make the point clear. At a secret meeting of
the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party just before the October
revolution, Lenin was urging insurrection on the more tender-minded
of his colleagues, who thought that the Bolsheviks ought to respect
the will of the majority of Russians, which was clearly against them.
“We are inclined to consider the systematic preparation of an uprising
as something in the nature of a political sin,” said he. “To wait
until the Constituent Assembly, which will clearly not be with us, is
senseless.” There is the practical Lenin, unworried by a democratic
dogma that stands in his way. After the October revolution he writes
in _Pravda_ of “the crisis which has arisen as a result of the lack of
correspondence between the elections to the Constituent Assembly and
the will of the people and the interests of the toiling and exploited
classes.” Here the will of the people is somehow at bottom the will
of the minority party of Bolsheviks. We are back again in the midst
of democratic dogma. Parallel cases could readily be drawn from
Robespierre, Cromwell, and even, one fears, from Jefferson.
Hypocrisy? To those of little imagination or experience of the world,
such acts must always seem hypocritical. But, on a less heroic scale,
they are far too much a part of normal human action to deserve so
opprobrious a label. The Robespierre who, as an enlightened young
man, had held capital punishment wrong did not hypocritically send
his enemies to the guillotine. He had convinced himself that his
enemies were scarcely men at all; they were sinners, corrupt souls,
agents of a worse-than-Satan, and their removal from this earth
wasn’t really capital punishment in the conventional sense at all.
You could still treat ordinary criminals in full accord with the most
humanitarian principles of jurisprudence. Most of us make this sort
of compromise with ourselves often enough in daily life. But with us
comfort, convenience, habit, even common sense, determine the limits
of compromise. For the revolutionary extremist such limits are off; in
the delirium, in the crisis, there is an extraordinary reversal of the
roles played in normal times by the real and the ideal. Here briefly
and at last the blind--or the seer--is king; plain earthly seeing, the
kind that concerns the oculist, is for once of very little use. The
seers have just enough of it to keep their positions of leadership.
Cromwell, indeed, had a good deal of what seems an English sense of the
contingent, and Lenin was certainly no academic idealist. Robespierre
is in some ways the most unadulterated seer of the lot.
Yet all of them, including even Robespierre, were what the world calls
men of action. They could and did get things done, were administrators
and executives, ran organizations for which tradition and routine had
not yet been able to build up much that worked automatically. If they
have left behind them a reputation for unusual ruthlessness, this may
be in part a reflection of the ill repute terrorism has for most of
us. And the ruthlessness, in the proper service of the ideal, went
while they were alive into the making of their leadership. Cromwell
gained credit among the Saints for his Irish massacres. The guillotine
in France was for a few months the “holy guillotine.” Trotsky, early
in his famous rallying of the Bolshevik troops in the Civil War,
ordered shot the commander, commissar, and one soldier out of ten in a
Petrograd workers’ regiment that had fled the enemy, and to the dismay
of gentler colleagues showed no hesitation about continuing the policy
of discipline through bloodshed. Trotsky became briefly a savior and a
hero. We are a long way from Order Number One!
For most men, there is a gap between their deeds and their professions,
between what they are and what they would like to be, between what
they are and what they think they are. Normally, however, they manage
to keep the gap small enough, or turn their attention away from one
side of it or the other, so that they are not unduly troubled by it.
For the leaders of the extremists in times of revolution the gap
looks to an outside observer enormous, bigger than it ever is in
normal times. A few men, like Fouché, seem to have been terrorists to
save their own skins. But, in general, only a sincere extremist in a
revolution can kill men because he loves man, attain peace through
violence, and free men by enslaving them. Such contrasts in action
would paralyze a conventionally practical leader, but the extremist
seems quite undisturbed by it. Where the ordinary man would be troubled
by something like a split personality, where his conscience or his
sense of reality, or both, would be haunted, the extremist goes boldly
ahead. Wide though the gap between the real and the ideal is in the
crisis period, he can cross it at his own convenience. He has, for the
moment, the best of both worlds. He can manipulate with equal skill the
concrete and complex human beings on committees, deputations, bureaus,
ministries, all the unsettling problems of administration, and yet use
gracefully and convincingly the abstract, indispensable, haunting words
which have in revolutions such magic power over large groups of men.
It is this last gift that seems to lie all but wholly beyond the
capacity of the most ambitious hypocrite. The great leaders of the
Terrors are fitted for their task by a genuine vocation, a vocation
which in ordinary times would exclude them from political power. Their
belief in the Absolute is not assumed, and is as real as their ability
to handle the contingent. And for once the Absolute is practical
politics. F. W. Maitland has a passage, suggested by Coleridge,
which puts the point neatly: “Coleridge has remarked how, in times
of great political excitement, the terms in which political theories
are expressed become, not more and more practical, but more and more
abstract and impractical. It is in such times that men clothe their
theories in universal terms.... The absolute spirit is abroad. Relative
or partial good seems a poor ideal. It is not of these, or those men
that we speak, of this nation or that age, but of Man.”
_III. Fitness of the Extremists_
The transition from opposition to power is not a sudden one for
the extremists. The whole point about the _dvoevlastie_, the dual
sovereignty, is that it is not a struggle between government and
opposition, between ins and outs, but between two governments within
the same state. Under the old regime perhaps no more than a pressure
group, the revolutionists’ organization gradually takes over, in the
confusion of the first stages of actual revolution, governmental powers
which are never thereafter wholly subordinated to the provisional
government, the almost legal heir of the old regime. The process is
especially clear in Russia, though it is substantially uniform in all
our revolutions.
Practically all the soviets, even in the market towns, did
administrative work from the very beginning. Trotsky, here in his
role of historian, gives some good succinct examples: “The soviet
in Saratov was compelled to interfere in economic conflicts, to
arrest manufacturers, confiscate the tramway belonging to Belgians,
introduce workers’ control, and organize production in the abandoned
factories.... In the Urals the soviets frequently instituted courts
of justice for the trial of citizens, created their own militia
in several factories, paying for its equipment out of the factory
cash-box, organized a workers’ inspection which assembled raw materials
and fuel for the factories, superintended the sale of manufactured
goods and established a wage-scale. In certain districts of the Urals,
the soviets took the land from the landlords and put it under social
cultivation.” Obviously, in parts of Russia the slogan “All power to
the Soviets” had become a bit superfluous even before the October
revolution.
In France the “Societies of Friends of the Constitution,” at their
formation in 1789 hardly more than pressure groups, or possibly French
variants of the Yankee caucus, had by June 2, 1793, taken over a good
many functions normally carried out by governmental bodies. When
the “constituted authorities,” as the Jacobins respectfully called
governing councils and legislatures, failed to do what the Jacobins
wanted, the Jacobins went ahead and did it themselves. Notably the
whole repressive legislation on the non-juring (Catholic) clergy was
anticipated in practice by the Jacobin clubs in the provinces. The
clubs were organized like parliamentary bodies, with elaborate rules
on debating, with committees, officers, minutes, and indeed all the
apparatus of a proper legislature. Sometimes a club would overawe or
persuade municipal or departmental officers into an approved Jacobin
policy; sometimes, failing in this, a club would almost openly pass
laws and decrees. Those of the members who protested against this
shocking interference with authorities chosen by popular election--and
many did protest on just such grounds--were thereby ticketed as
moderates, and were lucky if they avoided the guillotine later.
That the men who made the American revolution were by no means
unexercised in the art of actual governing has long been a commonplace
of proud Anglo-Saxon writers on both sides of the Atlantic. What we
must note here is that that preparation had by no means been wholly
of the conventional legal sort. Not only in town meeting and colonial
legislatures, but in caucuses, committees, and congresses that bear a
close parallel with soviets and Jacobin clubs, the American radicals
were schooled to take over the government from the agents of the Crown.
We shall see in the next chapter that they did not hesitate to use
terroristic means to preserve, as they had used to attain, that power.
In England the situation is complicated by the fact that though the
illegal organization headed up in the New Model Army, the various
Independent congregations were also in their way agents of the
extremists in their drive to power. The army itself, of course,
began very soon after Naseby to interfere in politics in a way no
conventional army does; and the first expulsion of Presbyterians from
Parliament was initiated and carried through by army resolutions and an
army committee. But the Independents, and especially the Independent
clergy, had much earlier taken a hand in matters very terrestrial
indeed. As Professor Grierson has said, “It is not what Laud did that
Baxter [a Puritan divine] seems to complain of, so much as what he
would not allow them, the parish pastors, to do, viz., to exercise
a moral discipline co-extensive with the parish.” And by a moral
discipline a Puritan meant something co-extensive with the whole of
human life.
The extremists are not, then, politically innocent or inexperienced;
they have had a long experience of oppression, and a briefer, but very
intensive, training in actual government before they come to full
power. To call either leaders or rank and file inexperienced, “pure
theorists,” and “metaphysicians,” as has long been the habit especially
among political writers in English, is misleading. Neither their aims
nor their methods are those that good Victorians like Bagehot or Maine
could approve or sympathize with. They are certainly heaven-storming
idealists, scornful of compromise. But they are not academic theorists
totally unadapted to action. _On the contrary, they are admirably
adapted, almost in the sense a biologist gives to adaptation, to the
special, the unique environment of the crisis._ That is why they
succeed.
The actual overthrow of the moderates is usually a very neat job, an
excellent example of the skill of the revolutionary leaders and the
close adaptation of the revolutionary organizations to their functions.
It is, as we have seen, by no means a great popular uprising. The
crowds whose confused milling about makes an exact account of the
taking of the Bastille or the February revolution in Petrograd
impossible for the historian, do not interfere with the professional
dispatch with which Pride’s Purge, the purge of the Girondins, and the
October revolution were put through. In France the extremists reached
power in two of these _coups d’état_. The first, the overthrow of
the monarchy on August 10, 1792, was achieved through an elaborate
but never confused collaboration of various organs of the illegal
government--Jacobin and other political clubs, the _fédérés_, local
militia from all over France assembled in Paris to celebrate the
anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, and the ward organizations
out of which the revolutionary Parisian Commune was made. Almost the
same elements were integrated ten months later for the easier task of
bullying the Convention into giving up the Girondins. Danton, Marat,
possibly Robespierre, and certainly a number of less famous but very
skilled secondary leaders formed a general staff which engineered both
of these coups.
The October revolution was elaborately prepared, and has been clearly
described in Trotsky’s own _History of the Russian Revolution_. We
need not here go into details of this preparation. But a quotation
from Trotsky will show how the details were taken care of: “The
typographical workers, through their union, called to the attention
of the Committee [the Military-Revolution Committee in Petrograd, the
general staff of the October revolution] an increase in Black Hundred
leaflets and brochures. It was decided that in all suspicious cases the
printers’ union should come for instructions to the Military-Revolution
Committee. This control was the most effective of all possible forms
of control over the printed agitation of the counter-revolution.”
Naturally; printed agitation has to have printers as well as legal
freedom of the press. In a dozen such ways the moderates were hamstrung
in the last few days before the Bolshevik insurrection. There was no
nonsense about a general strike; there was simply a co-ordinated series
of seizures of centers of power, press, post and telegraph, banks, and
ministries.
The dramatic seizure of Charles I by Cornet Joyce on June 3, 1647, at
Holmby House is perhaps the first assumption of sovereign power by the
New Model. When Charles asked Joyce whence he had his commission to
remove him, Joyce is said to have replied, pointing to his soldiers
drawn up on the lawn, “There is my commission.” The reply will serve
in all our revolutions. Once the extremists are in power, there is
no more finicky regard for the liberties of the individual or for the
forms of legality. The extremists, after clamoring for liberty and
toleration while they were in opposition, turn very authoritarian
when they reach power. There is no need for us to sigh over this, or
grow indignant, or talk of hypocrisy. We are attempting to discern
uniformities in the behavior of men during certain revolutions in
specific social systems, and this seems to be one of the uniformities.
“It was but a bare six months,” writes Gardiner, “since the Independent
leaders [Cromwell and Vane] who now permitted some hundreds of
sufferers to be excluded for conscience’s sake from the University of
Oxford, had been striving to lay the foundations of a broad system of
toleration in _The Heads of the Proposals_ and had even taken into
consideration a scheme for extending that toleration to the Roman
Catholic priesthood itself.” Later under the Rump a strict censorship
of the press was instituted, and the various canons and tastes of
Puritanism enforced as far as possible by government policy. Similarly
in France and Russia the new government clamped down at once on its
enemies and began to build up the machinery of the coming Terror.
Where, as in France and Russia, the army had lost its discipline
under active attempts to introduce Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,
discipline was reintroduced with a good deal of firmness. Mr.
Chamberlin describes the Russian situation: “The Bolshevik military
authorities now began to talk about the harmful and disruptive
influence of army committees very much as Kornilov, Denikin, and the
old army officers had spoken in 1917; and strict obedience to the
orders of the officers gradually became embedded in the discipline of
the Red Army.”
_The Heads of Proposals_ and _The Agreement of the People_, radical
platforms adopted by the army under Leveller influence, had proposed
something very close to what came to be conventional nineteenth-century
democracy--equal electoral districts, frequent parliaments, specific
limitations on the executive power, even universal manhood suffrage.
Cromwell seems never to have been in any sense a doctrinaire rebel,
and indeed probably had many of the sentiments about authority and
tradition one would expect from a country gentleman. If he suffered at
all in mind about the situation, it was probably because the good old
parliamentary institutions could not be restored. Certainly the last
thing that could be done was to hold an open and free election on any
conceivable franchise. The so-called Parliament of Saints which met in
1653 after the dissolution of the Rump was hardly more than a council
sent up from trustworthy Independent groups and chosen by caucus
methods.
Similarly in France, the victors of June 2nd did not dare go to the
people. As a gesture they promulgated the so-called Constitution of
1793, based on universal suffrage, bill of rights, and the rest of the
paraphernalia of democracy, but they took good care to go no further
than printing it. It was never put into effect.
The Bolsheviks had for months attacked the Provisional government
for not calling a constituent assembly. Such an assembly was finally
chosen by universal suffrage just before the Bolshevik _coup_. In it
the Bolsheviks were in a minority. Lenin dissolved this constituent
assembly in January, 1918, with a light heart, but many of his
followers, in spite of their Marxist training, were really hurt by such
a defiance of democratic sentiments and traditions. Many good Jacobins
were also worried by the fact of their new dictatorship.
Theory came to provide a salve to wounded consciences. The theory of
revolutionary dictatorship is very nearly identical in all three of
our revolutions. Liberty for everyone, liberty full, free, and fair,
is of course the ultimate goal. But such liberty at present would
mean that men corrupted by the bad old ways would be able to realize
their wicked plans, restore the bad old institutions, and frustrate
the good men. On reflection, the extremist continues, it is clear
that we must distinguish between liberty for those who deserve it,
and liberty for those who don’t, which latter is, of course, false
liberty, pseudo-liberty, license or anarchy. God had given liberty to
the Saints--true liberty, which is obedience to Him--but he clearly
did not give liberty to sinners. You repress papists as you would
repress devils. To argue that such sinners ought to be left alone
would have seemed to seventeenth-century English Puritans as absurd
as it would to us to suggest that yellow-fever-bearing mosquitoes be
left alone. Robespierre himself phrased it with classic neatness: the
revolutionary government, he said, was the despotism of liberty against
tyranny. For Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a necessary
transitional stage, in which the last vestiges of capitalistic methods
and capitalistic mentality are wiped out. Ruthless use of force will be
necessary in this period--unfortunately of indeterminate length. Once a
capitalist, always a capitalist, apparently. But when men are finally
brothers, then the freedom of the classless society will finally begin.
Solaced by the knowledge that they are serving Liberty--in the high,
true sense of the word--by a rigorous application of what to the
unbeliever seems tyranny, the extremists go ahead to consolidate their
power through institutions. Before we attempt a brief, generalized
description of these institutions, we may note another uniformity. With
the triumph of the extremists as we have defined them, the process of
transfer of power from Right to Left ceases. The extremists are not
indeed exempt from the difficulty other triumphant groups had faced
from the very beginning of the revolutionary process. They develop
internal conflicts, tend to split up into groups too hostile among
themselves for co-operation. But these groups cannot be neatly ranged
from Right to Left; and their dissension is ended quickly and without
even the turmoil and confusion of a _coup d’état_. The dissensions
have by now become so subtly doctrinal, so remote from the masses of
the population, that they can be centered on a few leaders. And they
are settled by the banishment or “judicial murder”--as it seems to
the defeated partisans--of some of these leaders. What began with
large-scale popular uprisings has now come to the dramatic intimacy of
a courtroom.
France is here the clearest case. The victorious Montagnards of June
2nd divided into three major factions, that of which Robespierre
stands as the head, that of Danton, and that of Hébert. There were,
of course, sub-factions, wheels within wheels, and had Marat not been
assassinated in the summer of 1793, there might have been still further
complications. Robespierre, eventually victorious, rationalized the
situation as a conflict between the true revolutionaries on one hand
and the Ultra-revolutionaries (Hébert) and the Citra-revolutionaries
(Danton) on the other. He was, to himself, the golden and virtuous mean
between proletarian vice and bourgeois corruption. The actual situation
is almost unbelievably complicated, and only the narrative historian
with plenty of space to command can disentangle it. Both Dantonists
and Hébertists, “traitors” and “anarchists,” were condemned before the
Revolutionary Tribunal, and went to the guillotine in two large and
rather miscellaneous batches. For the next few months, the “faction of
Robespierre” was in complete control of France.
The victorious Independents in England in 1649 found themselves facing
an astonishing variety of sects which had been carried along to triumph
in the general good work for the cause of complete toleration of all
Dissenters. We shall in a moment have a word to say about the doctrinal
aspect of these groups. Meantime we may note that not only did
Cromwell continue to keep down papists, prelatists, and Presbyterians,
but he and his officers saw to it that Fifth Monarchy Men, Diggers,
Levellers, Millenarians, Quakers, and the rest were not allowed to try
out their wilder schemes in practice. The Diggers could dig no more
in this earth. The old tactics of “no enemy to the Left,” which had
held ever since the beginning of the revolution, were now definitely
abandoned. As Professor Trevelyan has written, “All revolutionists,
the moment they undertake the actual responsibilities, become in some
sort conservatives. Robespierre guillotined the Anarchists. The first
administrative act of the [English] Regicides was to silence the
Levellers.” There are, then, if you like, those more extreme than the
group we have called the extremists. But such men are of the lunatic
fringe. They are the impractical people erroneously thought by some
conservatives to be typical revolutionists. They definitely do not
attain power.
The Russian situation is still somewhat obscured in respect to the
opposition to official Bolshevism after October, 1917, and this
obscurity seems in some ways thicker than ever today. Nevertheless it
is clear that even while Lenin was alive, and especially in the year
or so after the October revolution, there were a good many stresses
and strains within the Bolshevik party, and that Lenin and his
followers suppressed opposing groups even when they claimed to be more
“revolutionary” than the Leninists. Thanks to the excellent discipline
of the Bolshevik party and to the particularly pressing nature of the
war against the Whites and the Allies, these quarrels were not as
public as they had been in England and in France. The recent Moscow
trials seem to belong to a different phase of revolution, or rather,
are internal difficulties of a specific state that has gone through the
cycle of revolution. In spite of certain superficial analogies, they do
not seem to be a part of the uniformity we are here discussing.
These little opposition factions are inextricably woven in with various
eccentric groups which are not completely stilled until the height of
the Terror--if even then. They represent, as we have seen, the lunatic
fringes common to any complex civilization, and they are especially
active and vocal in the early stages of our revolutions, and during the
struggle between moderates and extremists. They are less important in
the actual course of these revolutions than conservative historians,
and conservatives generally, like to make out. But they are interesting
variations in the main body of revolutionary orthodoxy, and they
illuminate in many ways the general history of heresy and heretics.
“Never did the human mind attain such a magnificent height of
self-assertiveness as in England about the year 1650,” wrote Lytton
Strachey. And certainly what we now think of as almost a racially
founded British love for the middle-of-the-road is not very evident
in these years. Strachey ironically lists the possibility of becoming
a Behmenist, a Bidellian, a Coppinist, a Salmonist, a Dipper, a
Traskite, a Tyronist, a Philadelphian, Christadelphian, or Seventh Day
Baptist, omitting the subject he was actually writing about, Ludovic
Muggleton, founder of the still-existing Muggletonians. The terms mean
almost as little to us today as do those with which John Goodwin is
referred to in the third volume of _Gangraena_: “a monotonous sectary,
a compound of Socinianism, Arminianism, Libertinism, Antinomianism,
Independency, Popery and Skepticism.” This is a marvelous compound
of contradictions, as though a man today were called a mixture of
Communism, Hitlerism, Fascism, Republicanism and Prohibitionism. As
Mr. Gooch has said, the English revolution presents some of the most
remarkable communistic speculations in history. As early as 1647 John
Hare published a pamphlet, _Plain English to our Wilful Bearers of
Normanism_, in which he attacked the institution of private property
without being very clear about what might take its place. Chamberlen,
in his _Poor Man’s Advocate_, urged the nationalization of all Crown
and Church possessions, the resumption of all common lands that had
been enclosed. This land was to be called the national stock, and was
to be administered for the benefit of the poor.
The Diggers, however, are the most remarkable of these communistic
groups, if only because they tried to put their ideas into practice.
The movement was prefaced by an obscure pamphlet of December, 1648,
with a title quite characteristic of the age, _Light Shining in
Buckinghamshire_. Early in April of 1649 one Everard, a cashiered
soldier of the New Model, with a few followers came to St. George’s
Hill in Surrey “and began to dig, and sowed the ground with parsnips,
carrots, and beans.” A voice, said Everard, had bidden him dig and plow
the earth and receive the fruits thereof. They did not intend to meddle
with enclosed land, but simply to take what was common and untilled and
make it fruitful. For the time being General Fairfax, who seems to have
regarded them as harmless fanatics, left them to their digging.
The apocalyptic touch is even more striking, if possible, in the
Millenarians or Fifth Monarchy men. These held that the fourth monarchy
of the Bible was drawing to a close, and that the fifth monarchy, or
reign of the saints, was at hand.... They, of course, were the saints.
They split, however, over the question as to whether or not it was
proper for them to aid divine providence. Some of them held that the
Lord was in himself quite equal to the task of overthrowing the mighty
of this world; others believed that it was lawful, and presumably
helpful, to combat the Lord’s enemies with the material sword, and
hasten the day when the saints should possess riches and reign with
Him on earth. Their dilemma reminds one somewhat of that facing
nineteenth-century Socialists, forced to choose between the militants
and the revisionists.
In comparison with the wealth of imagination the English put into
the effort to bring heaven to earth, the other two revolutions
seem poverty-stricken. Perhaps the old Anglo-Saxon belief that the
French lack imaginative depth is valid, but surely this cannot be
brought up against the Russians. Perhaps the answer is simply that as
sources of imaginative inspiration neither the Enlightenment of the
eighteenth-century _philosophes_ nor the dialectic materialism of the
Marxist can hold a candle to the King James version of the Bible. Yet
France was by no means unproductive on the side of the lunatic fringe.
The _Enragés_, led by Varlet and Roux, and based largely on the poorer
sections of Paris, seem to have held a vaguely communistic doctrine.
At any rate, they were definitely against the rich, against the new
merchant aristocracy. The _Hébertistes_, another popular Parisian group
sometimes confused with the _Enragés_, had largely yellow journalists
and ward spoilsmen as leaders, but their main body must have nourished
vaguely Utopian dreams. Then there was the incredible little circle
around Catherine Théot, “Mother of God”--with Robespierre designated at
least as one of the manifestations of God. It does indeed seem likely
that republican professors in France are right, and that much of this
was stirred up by Robespierre’s enemies to make him seem ridiculous;
for even at the crisis period of revolutions some men retain a sense of
humor. Yet the fact remains that Catherine Théot and her circle existed.
In Russia the completeness and quickness of the Bolshevik victory
probably explains the relative lack of rival Utopias. It is true that
from 1918 to 1921 the Bolsheviks were forced to fight off Whites and
Allies on a dozen fronts, and that in a region like the Ukraine, for
instance, you can find everything from Czarist rulers through mild
_narodniks_ and partisan or guerilla rulers to pure Reds. But there is
a dog-eat-dog cruelty in the Russian revolution that seems to exclude
the mild delusions of an Everard or a Catherine Théot.
_IV. The Machinery of Dictatorship_
The dictatorship of the extremists is embodied in governmental forms
as a rough-and-ready centralization. In detail these forms vary in our
different societies, but the Commonwealth in England, the _gouvernement
révolutionnaire_ in France and the Bolshevik dictatorship during
the period of “war communism” in Russia all display uniformities of
the kind the systematist in biology or zoology would not hesitate
to catalogue as uniformities. Notably the making of final decisions
in a wide range of matters is taken away from local and secondary
authorities, especially if those authorities have been “democratically”
elected, and is concentrated on a few persons in the national capital.
Though names like Cromwell, Robespierre, and Lenin stand out as those
of rulers, and although these men did exercise unquestioned power in
many ways, the characteristic form of this supreme authority is that
of a committee. The government of the Terror is a dictatorship in
commission.
This centralized executive commission--Committee of Public Safety,
the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (Vtsik)--rests on a
supine if talkative legislative body--Rump, Convention, All-Russian
Congress of Soviets--and gets its orders carried out by an extemporized
bureaucracy, largely recruited from party workers, and from that
club-sect-pressure-group we have seen as the body of the extremist
group. The old law courts cannot work, at least in their traditional
manner. They are therefore supplemented by extraordinary courts,
revolutionary tribunals, or are wholly transformed by new appointments
and by special jurisdictions. Finally, a special sort of revolutionary
police appears. The Russian Cheka is familiar to everyone with the
slightest knowledge of recent history. In France the _comité de surété
générale_ and the _comités révolutionnaires_ fulfilled these police
functions; in the English revolution they were carried out very
effectively by the new Independent parish clergy, aided by various
_ad hoc_ committees in the army. But in England the whole fabric of
governmental centralization was rudimentary and simple--Cromwell’s own
anomalous dictatorship, the new Court set up by the Rump in March,
1650, in which legislative, administrative, and judicial powers were as
thoroughly combined as ever in the Star Chamber, the curious experiment
of the Major Generals in 1655-56. The fact of the centralization in
England is, however, unquestionable. Even the sacred functions of that
holiest guardian of English local liberties, the Justice of the Peace,
were under attack all during the domination of the extremists.
These extemporized dictatorships were faced not only with the ordinary
problems of government, but with civil and foreign war, and with at
least a certain number of actual reform measures which they had to try
to put through. Notably in the French and Russian revolutions, the new
government had to administer what, to avoid dispute as to the meaning
of Socialism, we may call measures of economic planning--fixed prices
and wages, managed currency, food rationing, and so on. We need not
here bother with the problem as to whether in France these were purely
war measures or not. The point is that the government found itself
obliged to try to administer them. In Russia, of course, there were
conscious efforts to embody Marxist Socialism in working institutions.
But these were all very rough-and-ready forms of dictatorship. The
governments of the Terror were on the whole much less efficient, less
effectively absolute than many peacetime governments with nowhere near
their reputation for absoluteness. Indeed, one of the reasons why
they seem so tyrannical and hard to bear, even retrospectively, is
precisely because they were so inefficient. They got their big tasks
done--saved England, France, and Russia from dissolution or conquest,
but they did it very messily and, in detail, very badly. The actual
administrators were usually inexperienced, were often petty fanatics,
often incompetent blow-hards who had risen to prominence in the clubs
or the party. They were under tremendous pressure from above to get
results. They were frequently in charge of operations very close to
the heart of the revolution as an economic movement--confiscation of
Royalist estates and clerical livings in England, disposition of the
confiscated lands of clergy and _émigrés_ in France, nationalization
of land and factories in Russia--which gave them grand opportunities
for graft. They had to work with a population many if not most of whom
were distrustful or hostile. Small wonder then that these reigns of
terror stand out rather for irregular acts of violence, that their
full history is a matter of incredible complexity. Nothing is more
illuminating in the study of these revolutions than the study of local
history. Here you see the Terror as it really was, no steady and
efficient rule from above, as in an army or in Sparta, but a state
of suspense and fear, a dissolution of the sober little uniformities
of provincial life. Much depends on the accidents of personality--a
sensible squire, a moderate and able local revolutionary or two, and a
given village may go through a revolution fairly serenely. In others,
terror may rule as bitterly as in the capital.
This inefficiency of the governments of the crisis period comes out
clearly in their attempts to regulate and control the economic life of
the state. This whole matter has probably very little to do with the
general problem of what is known as “economic planning.” Again we must
emphasize that we are concerned only with the anatomies of certain
specific revolutions. Suffice it to say that in France in 1793-94 and
in Russia in 1918-21 armies were fed and supplied with munitions, and
some civilians kept alive at any rate, under a pretty absolute state
control of economic activity. The French _maximum_ meant of course
price- and wage-fixing, and the Russian war communism was an even more
complete form of central planning. Yet in France violation of the
_maximum_ was as frequent as bootlegging used to be in this country,
and the detailed history of the _maximum_ seen as part of local history
would certainly provide some amusing bits. In Russia illegal trading
in the war years was again very like our bootlegging. The famous
Sukharevka Market in Moscow was occasionally raided but on the whole
winked at by Lenin’s government. All city dwellers who could possibly
do so made trips to the country to bargain with peasants for forbidden
food supplies. Here again the intimate little details of daily life are
fascinating, and call for the full talents of the social historian.
There seems to be a pretty unanimous admission by historians, even
when they are hostile to revolutions in general, that during the
crisis period ordinary crimes of violence are rare. There may be
plenty of cruelty and corruption among these new administrators and
judges, the new regime may be very far from insuring peace and order,
but conventional robbers, cutthroats, kidnapers, and their like are
not very active. Your good stupid Tory has a simple explanation:
they’ve all got government jobs. We can, however, hardly accept this
as a blanket explanation. It seems likely that the ordinary criminals
are for the moment pretty well cowed by the general crusade against
ordinary vice and crime which is a part of the crisis period and to
which we are coming shortly. Petty thieves and in several instances
even prostitutes were summarily disposed of by what amounts to lynch
law during the French revolution, and similar instances can be found
in England and Russia. One need not accept it as a general suggestion
that you can always cow criminals by lynching; here, as throughout
this book, we are studying a particular set of events, seeking some
rough uniformities, and making no attempt at general conclusions in
any such field as criminology. It may be that in the general tension,
in the extraordinary widening of public concerns until privacy is
almost impossible, so private a thing as ordinary crime is difficult.
The criminal is disturbed, not only by fear of being lynched, but by
an indefinable general fear which he shares with ordinary citizens.
For fear needs no object, and in the Terror often has none. It must
be remembered that this crisis period is brief--a few months, a few
years at the most. At any rate, again a simple uniformity stands out: a
considerable lessening in the number of ordinary crimes is to be noted
during the crisis period. Mr. Chamberlin notes that Moscow in 1918-19
was a very safe place to live in--if you could get enough to eat and
keep warm.
There is usually a short period between the overthrow of the moderates
and the full impact of the Terror. The machinery of the Terror,
for one thing, hastily assembled though it is, cannot be assembled
overnight. Though the earlier history of the revolution has had its
share of violence, there has been an interlude or so of apparent peace
at times during the struggle between the moderates and the extremists.
The pressure of foreign enemies and their _émigré_ allies is not
immediately at its strongest. Yet as the weeks go on the forces that
make for the Terror come into full operation.
We have in this chapter briefly described the rise of the extremists,
and have attempted to analyze the reasons for their victory. We have
taken them to the point where they have disposed of all important
conflicting groups, and have consolidated their position by installing
a centralized system of government. For the next few months, or for a
year or so, the extremists can be as extreme as they like. No one dare
challenge them. We have come to that crisis in the fever of revolution
men commonly call the Reign of Terror. This very important subject must
be treated in a separate chapter.
_Chapter_ SEVEN REIGNS OF TERROR AND VIRTUE
_I. Pervasiveness of the Terror_
“August 8, 1775. Riflemen took a man in New Milford, Connecticut, a
most incorrigible Tory, who called them d--d rebels, etc., and made
him walk before them to Litchfield, which is twenty miles, and carry
one of his own geese all the way in his hand. When they arrived there,
they tarred him, and made him pluck his goose, and then bestowed the
feathers on him, drummed him out of the company, and obliged him to
kneel down and thank them for their lenity.” The Jacobins of Rodez
in southern France drew up a list of “damned dogs of noblemen” and
others unworthy of wearing a mustache, the new symbol of patriotism,
republican virility and orthodoxy. It then ordered its committee of
surveillance to see that any such persons daring to wear a mustache
were seized and shaved, “taking good care to get the job done without
soap, and with the dullest razor available.” Shaving seems in some ways
a ritual performance lifted above the ordinary acts of the toilet, for
on October 3, 1775, the New York Sons of Liberty “in solemn Congress
assembled” took a vote of thanks: “to Mr. Jacob Vredenburgh, barber,
for his firm, spirited, and patriotic conduct in refusing to complete
an operation vulgarly called _shaving_, which he had begun on the
face of Captain John Croser, commander ... of one of his Majesty’s
transports.... It is to be wished that all gentlemen of the razor will
follow this wise, prudent, interesting example.”
The undignified little details are important, for they help bring home
to us the pervasiveness of the Reign of Terror. There is not only the
melodrama of the block, the guillotine and the firing-squad, not only
the heightened struggle for power among the great of the new order,
not only the tension of foreign and civil war, there is also the
tragi-comedy of thousands of little lives invaded by heroic concerns
which are ordinarily not theirs at all. The Terror touches great and
small with the obsessive power of a fashion; it holds men as little of
the common weal ever holds them, unless they are professionally devoted
to the study or practice of politics. During the Terror, politics
becomes as real, as pressing, as unavoidable for John Jones or Jacques
Duval as food and drink, wife or mistress, his job and the weather.
Political indifference, that mainstay of the modern state, becomes
impossible for even the most selfish, the most unworldly.
This participation in the common thing, in the drama of the
revolutionary state, means different things to those we may call
outsiders and those we may call insiders. The opposition is purely
one of convenience. No doubt there are insensible gradations from the
ardent revolutionary extremist--the admirably drawn Evariste Gamelin
of Anatole France’s _The Gods Are Athirst_, for instance--through
the neutral and colorless Center to skulking and repressed
anti-revolutionaries. But in broad lines the division between the many
outside the revolutionary cult and the small active band of orthodox
believers in the new dispensation is worth making. Let us look first
at the Terror as it affects the life of the outsider.
_II. The Terror and the Outsider_
This ordinary outsider is not the actively hostile person, the _émigré_
in fact or, as the French actually put it, the _émigré d’esprit_, the
_émigré_ who has quit spiritually if not in the flesh. He is not the
disgruntled moderate. He is simply the man who makes up the bulk of
modern societies, the man who on the whole accepts what others do in
politics, the man who fairly soon gets on the band-wagon. Especially
in its crisis period, the revolution is awfully hard on this outsider.
It may provide him with a certain number of spectacles in the form of
various celebrations of the new revolutionary cults--processions, trees
of liberty, festivals of reason, and so on. But certainly in the French
revolution there are many indications that the outsiders got very tired
of this, that in the long run they found the old Catholic ceremonials
more to their liking. One wonders whether in the long run the mass
ceremonials which Stalin as well as Hitler and Mussolini seem to manage
so well will not also wear a bit thin. On the other hand, there can be
no doubt that our modern revolutionists are much better stage managers
than their predecessors.
The revolutionary mania for renaming seems also to tend to confuse
and annoy the outsider. The English confined their efforts largely
to the names of persons, where they achieved some remarkable
results. We are all familiar with Praise God Barebone, and
Put-thy-Trust-in-Christ-and-Flee-Fornication Williams is perhaps more
than a legend. The Puritans of course drew chiefly from the Bible and
from evangelical abstractions--Faith, Prudence, Charity, and so on.
The French drew from the virtuous days of Roman republicanism, from
the abstractions of the Enlightenment, and from their own leaders
and martyrs. Babeuf, the forerunner of Socialism, became Gracchus
Babeuf. Claude Henri, Comte de St. Simon, kept his Christian names,
but dropped the compromising contact with a saint, and became Claude
Henri Bonhomme. The unfortunate Leroys (Kings) found it well to change
to Laloys (Laws) or something equally patriotic. One faithful Jacobin
had his child republicanly baptized Libre Constitution Leturc. The
French, however, did not stop with persons. Corrupt street names were
changed, the Place Louis XV becoming Place de la Révolution, the rue de
la Couronne becoming rue de la Nation. Place names underwent wholesale
changes that must have added greatly to the wartime disruption of
the mail service. Most of the Saints were dropped, which alone would
cause a lot of trouble. Lyons, having sinned against the revolution
by siding with the Federalists, on being taken by troops of the
Convention was re-christened Commune Affranchie (Freed Town). Le Havre
became Havre-Marat. In the conventional greeting of one’s fellows,
monsieur became citoyen. For a while the word “roi” was under a taboo
as definite as the kind the anthropologist studies, and was actually
cut out of classic authors like Racine. There was an attempt, possibly
serious, possibly journalistic, to change “reine abeille” into “abeille
pondeuse”--“queen bee” into “laying bee.”
In their determination to uproot everything of the contaminated past,
the French revolutionists decided to revolutionize the calendar, to
do away with names like January, which recalled the vicious old Roman
god Janus, or July, which recalled the even more vicious Roman tyrant,
Julius Caesar. So they made twelve new months, and named them, in
melodious French, after the glorious works of Nature--_germinal_,
the month of buds, _fructidor_, the month of ripening, _brumaire_,
the month of mists. Although the French boasted the universality
of their revolutionary aims and principles, they were apparently
undisturbed by the narrow limitation of their new calendar to French
climatic conditions. The calendar is, of course, most inappropriate to
Australia, and even to the American midwest.
The Russians, in addition to their fondness for personal revolutionary
_noms de guerre_, have been particularly addicted to changing place
names, and unlike the French, have hitherto made them stick, insofar
at least as the names were those of good Stalinists. Catherine the
Great, in particular, had put herself on the map as successfully as
did Alexander the Great, but she has vanished altogether from Soviet
Russia. Ekaterinodar has become Krasnodar, Ekaterineburg Sverdlovsk,
and Ekaterinoslav Dnepropetrovsk. The familiar Nizhni Novgorod has only
recently, with a loss of euphony and great associations, become Gorki.
Stalin, for a living man, has done very well for himself. Stalinabad
is perhaps the most exotic of the Stalin towns, but most effectively
symbolic no doubt was the changing of Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad--not the
only place where Stalin has replaced the Czar. From long Socialist
tradition, “comrade” took the place occupied by “citizen” in the
French revolution. Children, too, were given names as suitable to the
day as were Praise God and Libre Constitution to their day. Vladilen,
a telescoping of Vladimir and Lenin, is one of the most shockingly
unconventional to an old Russian.
This renaming is clearly one of the uniformities we can list for all
our revolutions. Even the moderate American revolution indulged in some
renaming. Boston saw King Street and Queen Street give way to names
like Federal and State, thoroughly suited to the new regime; but for
some reason or other the tainted name of Hanover Street survived. The
American name for a certain harmful fly is the Hessian fly, a name
given it in revolutionary days. A kind of cousin of that fly is known
in the South as the Abe Lincoln bug, which is a reminder of the fact
that what we call the Civil War was essentially an abortive revolution.
There is no need to worry much over an explanation of this rage for
renaming. Names are to the savage associated with magic, and we are
constantly reminded in these days of our own nearness to the savage.
Change a name and you change the thing. It’s all very simple. We are
here, however, interested rather in the effect of all this renaming on
the outsider, and we can be reasonably sure that it affords an example
of the kind of thing that begins to wear on him. The revolution in
names is petty enough. But for John Jones life is an accumulation of
petty matters; and John is not built to support a very complete set of
changes in the trivial details of which his habits are made. Witness
Rip Van Winkle.
There is also, of course, the strain of living under the kind of
government we have in the last chapter described as the government of
the Terror. Even the humblest person, the person most indifferent to
politics, can never tell when the lightning is going to strike him or
his household, when he may be haled into court as a class enemy or a
counter-revolutionary. Detailed study of this constant threat, this
omnipresence of the government, cannot be attempted here. We may,
however, take up briefly two phases which particularly affect the
outsider.
First, as we shall see shortly from the point of view of the insider,
all these revolutions have at their crisis a quality unmistakably
puritanical or ascetic or, to use an overworked word, idealistic.
There is a serious attempt by those in authority to eradicate the
minor vices, as well as what some might feel inclined to call
the major pleasures. With what the Saints in England tried to do
in the seventeenth century most Americans are familiar, if only
from repercussions in New England. But Americans, who have always
exaggerated the French capacity for the pleasures of the senses, are
perhaps not so aware of the fact that in ’93 and ’94 there was an
earnest attempt to clean up Paris, to shut up brothels, gaming houses,
to eliminate actual drunkenness. Virtue was the order of the day.
You couldn’t even be lazy. Some Jacobin would be sure to report you
to the club, with the suggestion that the best place to cure you of
unrepublican laziness was the army. The puritanism of the Bolsheviks
may seem even more paradoxical, but it most certainly existed, and we
shall return shortly to its consideration.
Now there is no doubt that in the better world towards which we
all in some measure aspire, drinking, whoring, gambling, laziness,
boastfulness, and a whole lot of things we all condemn, will simply
not exist. But it seems equally undeniable that here and now on this
earth, and for some generations back, a fairly large number of human
beings have been and are addicted to one or more of these pursuits,
regarding them--not always consciously with the intellect--as necessary
compensations for dullness or other inadequacies in their daily lives.
We must again remind ourselves that we are not dealing with moral
questions, not praising or condemning, but trying to arrange facts in a
useful order. It seems then that the following uniformity is clear: the
extremists’ attempt to enforce a life without the ordinary vices within
a fairly short time puts a strain on the outsider very hard for him, or
her, to bear.
Not only is the outsider denied access to what he probably regards
as legitimate amusement; the new authorities will not even leave him
to himself. Revolutions are very hard indeed on privacy. Gorki once
wrote that “Lenin was a man who prevented people from leading their
accustomed lives as no one before him was able to do.” This is no doubt
a rhetorical exaggeration, but one can see what Gorki is getting at.
And as people have a certain inertia in the direction of leading their
“accustomed lives,” we can perhaps understand better why Stalin rather
than Trotsky has proved to be Lenin’s successor. In the crisis period
the revolution comes to hound John Jones in whatever he does. In a
revolution even the conventional back-biting, gossip and hatreds of
ordinary social life are intensified beyond endurance. The Jacobins,
especially in the provinces, were eager to pick up any bit of gossip
that would show a reform was needed. Citizen W should keep his dog
tied up, citizen X should be made to marry the girl, citizen Y should
be admonished against outbursts of temper, rich citizen Z should be
made to give his consent to the marriage of his daughter to a poor but
honest Jacobin youth in good standing with the club. One expects this
sort of thing from one’s own family and friends, but not, even in the
totalitarian state, from the government. The Germans have a delightful
proverb, which may perhaps give them some solace today: “The soup is
never eaten as hot as it’s cooked.” But certainly in the crisis period
of revolutions there is an effort to force it steaming down the throat
of the ordinary citizen. In the long run, he can’t stand it, and his
cooks learn their lesson and allow it to cool off a bit. But that is in
the period of convalescence from the revolutionary fever.
Shut out from his ordinary pleasures and vices, constrained to fight
for, or at least to cheer long, loud, and conspicuously for the
revolutionary state in its struggle with foreign and civil foes,
exposed to privation and suffering from scarcity attendant on war
and the inevitable inefficiencies of the new government, urged to
the “height of revolutionary circumstances” on every hand, in press,
theater, pulpit, rostrum, mass demonstration, above all inescapably
caught in the common and very exhausting nervous excitement which
marks the crisis period, John Jones sooner or later finds these
strains insupportable, and gets ready to welcome anyone who can throw
the extremists out. Perhaps no one of these strains would be in
itself unbearable, though it does seem likely that there is a kind of
saturation point in large-scale, obsessive political propaganda after
which such propaganda actually backfires. We may hope to learn more in
this respect from contemporary German and Russian experience. At any
rate, the converging series of pressures outlined above seems clearly
to have put too great a strain on the outsider in our revolutions.
_III. The Terror and the Insider: The Religious Parallel_
To the insider, to the true believer, the revolution appears as a very
different thing in this crisis period, though one may guess that for
some of the less ardent insiders much of what has been said about the
outsiders begins, after a while, to hold true also. The revolution
begins to take too much out of him, and he begins to have his
hesitations and his doubts, to be bored with the endless ceremonies,
deputations, committees, tribunals, militia work, and the other chores
necessary to achieve the reign of virtue on earth. He, too, becomes
an outsider. But the true faithful stay to the end, to the block, the
guillotine, the firing-squad, or exile.
Now to this insider it would seem that the service of the revolution
supplies many of the satisfactions commonly supplied by what we call
religion. This analogy with religion has been frequently made. It has
been applied, not only to the English revolution where its fitness
is undisputed, but also to the French and Russian revolutions. Since
both Jacobins and Bolsheviks were violently hostile to Christianity
and boasted themselves atheists or at least deists, this analogy has
given a great deal of offense both to Christians and to their enemies.
For the Marxist in particular the assertion that his behavior has
similarities with the behavior of men under the acknowledged influence
of religion is like a red rag to a bull. Nor is the Marxist wholly
unjustified in his anger, for the glib phrase, “Oh, the Communists
are just another fanatical sect,” is frequently thrown out by shallow
conservatives as at once a reproach and a dismissal. Actually, to
judge from past experience, it would seem that large numbers of men
can be brought to do certain very important things of the kind the
Communists want to have done only under the influence of what we call
religion; that is, some pattern of more or less similar sentiments,
moral aspirations, and ritualistic practices. Marxism as a religion
has already got a great deal done; Marxism as a “scientific theory”
alone would hardly have got beyond the covers of _Das Kapital_ and the
learned journals.
But the dispute sketched above is endless, and we are not rash enough
to suppose we can settle it. Those who use the term “religion” in
this connection seem to us to be trying to describe a phenomenon of
the world of sense-experience, one that needs to be integrated with
other phenomena of revolutions. It is certainly true, however, that
this use apparently arouses in many persons emotions unfavorable
to the continued objective study of the subject. Anyone who could
suggest a neutral term as effectively pointing to the same phenomena
as does the term “religion” would be performing a great service for
sociology. No such term at present existing, we shall have to continue
to use the word “religion.” We must insist that this word does not
refer necessarily and exclusively to a formally theistic cult like
Christianity; and above all, that it does not necessarily imply belief
in the “supernatural.” We take it that in the present analysis the
important thing about a religious belief is that under its influence
men work very hard and excitedly in common to achieve here or somewhere
an ideal, a pattern of life not at the moment universally--or even
largely--achieved. Religion attempts to close in favor of the best of
human hopes the gap between what men are and what men would like to be;
at least in its young and active phase, it will not for a moment admit
that such a gap can long exist.
To discern the element of religion in the behavior of the ardent
extremist is not to deny the existence of economic motives. Indeed, at
this stage some of the most acute phases of the struggle among classes
are to be noticed, and form one of the uniformities we can clearly
consider established. Whatever the place of economic class struggles
in the days just before the revolution--and in our four revolutions it
takes varied forms by no means adequately summed up in phrases such
as “feudal nobility,” “middle class,” and “proletariat”--once the
revolution gets going these class struggles have at least one phase
common in all four societies. The property of many, if not most, of
those openly and stubbornly identified with the beaten parties is
confiscated for the benefit of the successful parties, identified
as “the people.” Furthermore, as the different moderate groups are
defeated their property, too, is commonly confiscated in the same way.
In the English revolution the Royalists lost a large part of their
property, mostly in land; and though lay Presbyterians were not
as a rule subjected to confiscation of property unless they were
actively on the wrong side in politics, there was a great deal of
easing Presbyterians and other unacceptable ecclesiastics out of
their livings. Laurence Washington, a clergyman, the father of the
John of Virginia, and a direct ancestor of George, was “plundered”
as the phrase went in 1643, cause he was said to have said that the
parliamentary army had more papists in it than there were around the
King. That is to say, he was deprived of his living. We need hardly be
reminded that Loyalist property was confiscated during the American
revolution. Indeed the late J. F. Jameson concludes that in a quiet
way--quiet at least for revolutions--the American revolution effected
in its whole course a very sensible democratization, or spreading
into smaller units, of ownership of property in this country. Both in
France and in Russia the revolutions saw the confiscation primarily
of land, but even in France to some extent also of capital, and their
redistribution. We need not go into detail here on these agrarian
problems. Sufficient to state that many of those who came to the top
in the crisis period, both leaders and followers, had good reason to
hope that by staying on top their economic status would be consistently
better than it had been. This is true regardless of what theories and
ideals, laissez-faire or Socialism, were appealed to as guiding the new
distribution.
But though we must recognize the economic motive, as we recognize the
drive to centralization to repel attacks from within and without, our
picture is incomplete until we consider those elements unavoidably
called religious. Partly because the economic and political elements
are in their conventional sense familiar to most people nowadays,
partly because these religious elements appear to be among the
most important variables in the situation, we are here emphasizing
them. They seem to be among the most important variables because
their presence in an acute form gives a different and much more
pervasive tone to the political and economic elements of struggle,
which frequently occur by themselves in very similar form and even
somewhat similar intensity in situations we do not commonly label
revolutionary. It is also true that in the growth of Wesleyan Methodism
in eighteenth-century England, for instance, in times not to be called
revolutionary, one finds actively religious behavior among large
numbers of people, behavior in many ways like that we are going to
analyze in our revolutionary insider. But Wesleyanism was politically
conservative on the whole, and not directed at a given social and
political system. The whole point, indeed, of the three revolutions
we are about to analyze is that religious enthusiasms, organization,
ritual and ideas appear inextricably bound up with economic and
political aims.
The insiders in all three of our complete revolutions, and indeed
to a certain extent in the fourth, the American revolution, seem to
have wished to put into life here on earth some of the order, the
discipline, the contempt for the easy vices, which the Calvinist sought
to put there. Indeed our first revolution, the English, is commonly
labeled the Calvinist or Puritan revolution. Here we may expect a
protest from the Communists, an indignant assertion that Marx put such
Christian weaknesses as a desire to subdue the flesh well behind him,
that his followers are all for an abundance of food and drink, and
the other good things of this world for everybody. We shall return to
that question in a moment. In the meantime we can begin to see some
lurking ascetic tendency in Communism if we reflect on how indignant
good Communists would be over the slogan “wine, women, and song for
everybody.”
That the Puritans were in some sense puritanical we can take in stride
as a reasonable assumption. Indeed, at present it is probably more
useful to try to show that the historical Puritans both in old and
new England were not quite the complete killjoys the school of H. L.
Mencken would make them out to have been. As for the Jacobins, their
legislation and above all their somewhat informal administration in
1793-94 had striking analogies with the kind of things the English
Puritans tried to put over. The Jacobins were in principle against
gambling, drunkenness, sexual irregularities of all sorts, ostentatious
display of poverty, idleness, thieving, and of course in general all
sorts of crimes. In practice they felt at liberty to enforce abstention
from these vices and to insist with force on the carrying out of
positive acts of virtue--such as selling goods always at the legal
fixed maximum price, even if a little bootlegging seemed quite safe,
attending celebrations in honor of the Supreme Being on _décadi_,
expressing in public the opinion that William Pitt was a corrupt
villain, and the English nation a lot of pathetic slaves. Such a system
of action they sought to enforce by making each man his own detective,
God’s own private spy, much as was said to have been done in Calvin’s
own Geneva.
Those who chiefly did the prying were the members of the local clubs,
urged on by the local leaders, just as with the Puritans it was the
parish clergy, aided by the active elders of the church, who saw to
it that the sheep were properly shepherded. The most undignified
matters, apparently the most insignificant also, might under these
conditions set a parish or a community on end. The first dissension
in the English Separatist Church at Amsterdam, we are told, arose not
over any point of doctrine or ritual, but over the lace on Mrs. Francis
Johnson’s sleeve. One could find dozens of parallels for this in the
behavior of the Jacobins. There was the lively debate in a little club
in Normandy over the question whether citizen doctor X wasn’t making
his professional calls on aristocrats too long, his calls on patriots
too short. And the great row at Bourgoin when the secretary announced
that he wasn’t going to wear the red Liberty cap because it didn’t
become him. This shocking display of vanity overcoming patriotism
unleashed the full fury of the virtuous Republicans of Bourgoin, and
the secretary was lucky to escape with his life.
The other-worldliness of the Russian revolutionists affords a problem
more apparent than important, or even real. It is quite true that
“philosophically” modern Communism is based on materialism, that it
denies the immortality of the soul and indeed the existence of a soul,
that it insists men must be happy here on earth, enjoying the good
things of this earth. But surely it is most important if you wish to
understand the problems of men in society to find out what men do, how
they behave, as well as what they say on paper or in the pulpit that
they are doing, or want to do, or ought to do. It is also quite true
that Communists, fellow-travelers, as the Communists like to call their
sentimental followers among the intellectuals, and the brethren of the
Left in general in this country tend to be extremely indignant when
their behavior is analyzed as we propose to analyze it. Here, as so
often, indignation is not refutation.
That the Bolshevik leaders were almost all ascetics is perhaps a
commonplace. Lenin was notably austere and contemptuous of ordinary
comfort, and at the height of his power his apartments in the Kremlin
were of barrack-like simplicity. Some of Lenin’s sayings sound like
the bourgeois Calvinists as analyzed by Max Weber, or even by Mr.
R. H. Tawney: “Carry out an accurate and honest account of money,
manage economically, don’t loaf, don’t steal, maintain the strictest
discipline in labor.” Indeed, the general tone among the high command
of Bolshevism was in those early years that of a consecrated and
almost monastic group. In a Russia where men were starving or freezing
it was for one thing pretty impolitic for leaders to look too sleek
and well-fed. But just as the pressure of the war is not a complete
explanation for the Terror, so neither necessity nor policy explains
the asceticism of the Bolsheviks. They felt, as the Puritans had felt,
that the ordinary vices and weaknesses of human beings are disgusting,
that the good life cannot be led until they are eliminated. Early the
Bolsheviks prohibited the national drink, vodka, and almost all the
early soviets took steps against prostitution, gambling, night life,
and so on. Theoretically the Bolsheviks thought women should be free,
for instance, free from the shocking limitations bourgeois laws had put
upon them; hence the notable freedom allowed in Russia as to marriage,
divorce, abortion, and other phases of family and sex relationships.
But the Bolsheviks did not intend by this that women were to be free to
behave as they were sure they secretly behaved--or wanted to behave--in
dissolute old bourgeois society. On the contrary, they expected their
women to behave as they would behave in the classless society--and
though vague, that is a pretty strict canon.
Even today, when apparently the crisis stage is over in Russia, there
are numerous survivals of the intense asceticism of the true Communist
party members of the crisis period. In their innocent book on Soviet
Russia, the innocent Webbs declare that there is no asceticism in
Russia, of course, and then go on and explain how the Comsomols
(Communist Youth) are encouraged to take the pledge--not for any
silly evangelical reasons, heavens, no, but because drinking anything
alcoholic is “a breach of the rule requiring maintenance of perfect
health.” Petting, too, is very definitely discouraged as unworthy of
the Communist Youth, especially when it is done in public. “Nothing
pornographic is allowed in literature or in any form of art. There is
less public sex appeal in evidence in Russia than in any Western land.”
Since the Webbs wrote this, the Russians seem to have relaxed a bit in
their public restraints, and the Germans, in the freshness of their
revolution, have gone very puritanical in such matters. Berlin, which
used to provide the broadest range of sexual activity in the world,
has now outwardly taken on a Lutheran and Teutonic virtue, while the
existence of public prostitution in Moscow and Leningrad can hardly
escape even visiting members of the British Labour party.
The Russians of old being notoriously dirty about their public
places--almost as dirty as we Americans are--the new regime has made it
a point of discipline that no litter, papers, and such-like truck be
left in public parks, streets, and stations. Indeed, membership in the
Communist party itself, always a very select and disciplined minority,
demanded for years, and to a certain extent still demands, the exercise
of a great deal of self-restraint, a willingness to live simply, to
work hard, to conform to very high standards of personal morality.
As usual in such circumstances, and as we have already noted for the
Puritans and the Jacobins, self-restraint was apparently not enough,
and there grew up in Russia all sorts of official and unofficial
methods of spying, prying, checking-up on the actions of individuals,
and controlling them by Terrorist methods. Many of these agencies are
now serving the Stalinite reaction, as similar agencies in France and
in England served the Thermidorean reaction and the Stuart restoration.
Now groups thoroughly disciplined into lives almost as unnaturally
ascetic as those our Puritans, Jacobins, and Bolshevists sought to
impose have existed for relatively long periods. The Spartiates
contrived to support an almost heroic Communism for several centuries.
But this discipline is of slow growth, intimately tied up with the kind
of behavior in men that changes with geological slowness. A revolution
cannot manufacture this kind of discipline overnight, and perhaps
the violence--and here is meant rather spiritual violence than mere
bloodshed--of the Terror is in some sense an overcompensation for the
inability of the extremists to carry their ordinary brothers along with
them. The Terror is a desperate overshooting of the mark. Again, the
existence in individuals of a certain amount of inclination to meddle
with their neighbor’s private affairs is probably a useful thing,
part of what cements societies together. But here, too, the ardent
revolutionists overshoot the mark and make life unbearable for their
neighbors.
There are traces of this kind of organized asceticism, this crusade
against the customary vices, even in the American revolution, where
the crisis stage was never as intense as in our other revolutions.
There were many restrictive measures justified chiefly as necessary to
the efficient prosecution of the war against George III. There were
others quite as obviously dictated by the traditions of middle-class
Protestant ethics which had long been established in the Middle
Colonies and in New England. But here and there one encounters the
true accent of revolutionary idealism. Here is a passage worthy of
Robespierre: “Titles are the offspring of monarchical and arbitrary
governments. While the object of the present war with Great Britain
was reconciliation, the titles of excellency, honorable, etc., were
submitted to by the people of America, but since the Declaration of
Independence, the colonies have divorced monarchy forever, and become
free, independent states. It becomes then necessary to adopt the simple
language of free governments.... Let us leave the titles of excellency
and honorable to the abandoned servants of a tyrant King ... while we
satisfy ourselves with beholding our senators, governors, and generals
rich in real excellence and honor.”
The Baltimore Committee which in April, 1775, “recommended to the
people of the county not to encourage or attend the approaching fair
because of its tendency to encourage horse-racing, gaming, drunkenness,
and other dissipation” was going beyond the strict necessities of
the situation. Again we find a neat illustration from the pen of a
Connecticut patriot writing in July, 1775: “Wednesday evening last,
a number of ladies and gentlemen collected at a place called East
Farms, in Connecticut, where they had a needless entertainment, and
made themselves extremely merry with a good glass of wine. Such
entertainments and diversions can hardly be justified upon any
occasion; but at such a day as this, when everything around us has a
threatening aspect, they ought to be discountenanced, and every good
man should use his influence to suppress them.”
Our orthodox and successful extremists, then, are crusaders, fanatics,
ascetics, men who seek to bring heaven to earth. No doubt many of them
are hypocrites, career-seekers masquerading as believers, no doubt
many of them climb on the band-wagon for selfish motives. Yet it is
most unrealistic to hold that men may not be allowed to reconcile
their interests with their ideas. Many an ardent and sincere follower
of Robespierre, many a seeker after Calvinist truth, was able, with
the best of conscience, to buy lands confiscated from the unrepublican
or the ungodly. Our extremists are also, as the intimate details of
their daily lives should convince us, for the most part quite ordinary
people, with the loves and hatreds, aspirations and doubts, hopes
and fears, of ordinary people. Once the crisis period is over, they
will, save for the few born martyrs, cease to be crusaders, fanatics,
ascetics. Their revolutionary beliefs will be softly cushioned in a
comfortable ritual, will be a consolation and a habit rather than a
constant prick of the ideal. But now, in the crisis period, they are in
what we may call the active phase of a religion. Let us briefly take
up some of the striking characteristics of this phase in our three
societies.
Calvinism, Jacobinism, Marxism, are all rigidly deterministic. All
believe that what happens here below is foreordained, predestined to
follow a course which no mere human being can alter, least of all
those who oppose respectively Calvinism, Jacobinism, or Marxism. In
fact, the more priest and prelate storm and rage, the more certain is
the Calvinists’ victory. The acts of aristocrats, traitors, Pitts and
Cobourgs can but make the triumph of the French Republic greater. The
harder the Rockefellers and the Morgans work, the more capitalistic
their behavior, the sooner will come the inevitable glorious and final
uprising of the proletariat. God for the Calvinist, Nature-Reason for
the Jacobin, Dialectical or Scientific Materialism for the Marxist,
provide comforting assurance that the believer is on the side that
_must_ win. Obviously the belief that you can’t lose will in most--not
all--cases make you a better fighter.
Those whom God, Nature, or Science has chosen are quite willing
to advertise the fact of this choice, and, indeed, display an
inconsistency which is purely logical, and not at all of the emotions,
in that they seem very anxious to help the inevitable come about. Rigid
determinists are also usually ardent proselyters, presumably on the
grounds that they are instruments of the inevitable, the means through
which the inevitable realizes itself. They do not, however, seem to
behave as if they held that resistance to their proselyting, refusal of
unbelievers to accept their message, were also determined, inevitable,
and even pardonable.
At any rate, our revolutionists all sought to spread the gospel of
their revolution. What we now call “nationalism” is certainly present
as an element in all these revolutionary gospels. But at least in the
earlier years, and during the crisis of a revolution, crude notions of
national expansion do not prevail. The lucky people to whom the gospel
has been revealed wish to spread it properly abroad. In the Messianic
fervor of the crisis period, aggressive nationalism is not on the
surface. Underneath it doubtless helps drive the revolutionists on,
and in the period of reaction it emerges into the light, barely if at
all disguised as the “destiny” of a chosen people and its leader. The
Jacobins announced they were bringing the blessings of freedom to all
the people of the earth, and such is the power of imagination that some
men still think of Napoleon as agent of the new freedom. The Bolsheviks
are present to all our generation as great apostles of a world-wide
revolution. Most of us can still remember the days when fearful folk in
conservative lands looked under their beds each night for emissaries of
Moscow.
The Calvinists as Christians, of course, were ardent proselyters. But
the victorious English Independents were also capable of mixing their
religious with political propaganda, were anxious to win the world over
to their superior form of society. Cromwell’s famous collaborator,
Admiral Blake, used to spread the gospel in foreign lands. Thanks to
the example of England, Blake said, “All kingdoms will annihilate
tyranny and become republics.” England had done so already. France was
following in her wake; and as the natural gravity of the Spaniards
rendered them somewhat slower, he gave them ten years. All Europe is
shortly to be republican--and this in the 1650’s! Those who today
boast or bemoan that soon the Western world will be all Communist, or
all Fascist, or all Democratic, might ponder awhile the circumstances
of this remark of Blake’s.
A good deal of ink and oratory has been expended over this effort
of the extremists to propagate their faiths among the nations.
Conservatives in other nations are naturally very suspicious. Moscow
gold must be at the bottom of every liberal or radical movement; there
is an organized international plot to establish the world-rule of
atheistic Jacobinism and destroy Christianity. Probably in most cases
these fears and suspicions are much exaggerated. The revolutionists
are usually too poor, and too occupied at home, to devote more than
a small part of their energies to these foreign missions. There are,
moreover, in the other countries usually enough disgruntled natives
to form a solid nucleus for revolutionary action. The importation
into these countries of English, French, or Russian phrases and other
revolutionary fashions is the most natural thing in the world.
At any rate, there is no doubt about the fact of the uniformity. Even
in the seventeenth century, when the world was so much larger, so
much slower to cross, the English revolution spread itself abroad.
Edward Sexby at Bordeaux proposed to the French radicals a republican
constitution which was to be called _L’Accord du Peuple_--an adaptation
of the English Agreement of the People--and was obliged in consequence
to flee the town. In Holland at the news of trouble in England, “the
people began to take sides for one or the other of the parties and with
such fervor that in many cases they came to blows.” This sounds a lot
like the behavior of Federalists and Republicans in the United States
in the 1790’s, when the French revolution provided most of the dramatic
material of American politics. But the point need not be labored.
Similar examples from the Russian revolution will occur to almost
everyone.
The religious parallel may be pushed a bit further. Our revolutionists
are convinced that they are the elect, destined to carry out the will
of God, Nature, or Science. That feeling was particularly strong
among the Russian Communists, where in pure logic it should be less
strong than among the Calvinists, believers in a personal God. The
opponents of these revolutionists are not just political enemies, not
just mistaken men, grafters, log-rollers, or damned fools; they are
sinners, and must not merely be beaten--they must be wiped out. Hence
the justification of the guillotine and the firing-squad. For our
revolutionists display that vigorous intolerance which in the logic of
the emotions as well as in that of the intellect, follows perfectly
on the conviction of being absolutely, eternally, monopolistically
right. If there is but one truth, and you have that truth completely,
toleration of differences means an encouragement to error, crime, evil,
sin. Indeed, toleration in this sense is harmful to the tolerated,
as well as very trying on the tolerator. As Bellarmine said, it is a
positive benefit to obstinate heretics to kill them because the longer
they live the more damnation they heap upon themselves.
These revolutionary faiths are very interesting in their eschatologies,
their notions of final ends like heaven and hell. The English
revolution was dominated by some of the wilder as well as by the more
conventional of Christian eschatologies. The Millenarians expected the
second coming year after year. The rule of the Saints was just around
the corner. The Jacobins had a much less concrete notion of heaven, and
this heaven was to be definitely here on earth--the republic of Virtue
which we have seen as Robespierre’s ideal. After the dictatorship of
the revolutionary government, this perfect republic was to appear,
and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, would be more than a slogan. To
hardened Americans a republic doesn’t sound at all like a heaven, but
we must believe that it was very different for the earnest Jacobin
of 1794. The Russian heaven is the classless society, to be attained
after the purgatory of the dictatorship of the proletariat has slowly
put an end to the worldly miseries of the class struggle. It seems
that even the Stalinists admit being still in purgatory. The specific
content of life in the classless society is somewhat vaguely described
by most Communists; and Marx himself, unlike Mohammed, went into no
details about his heaven. There will be competition, one gathers, but
no struggle, and certainly no struggle over economic goods. Competition
will be on a lofty plane, as among artists. Perhaps there will be
competition in love? At any rate, as in a more robust heaven, the old
German Valhalla, the heroes will fight all day, but at night their
wounds will heal.
All of these faiths were incorporated in social groups, and hence had
rituals. The present writer has elsewhere described at some length the
Jacobin ritual, a strange hodgepodge of Catholic, Protestant, classical
and other elements, with Republican creeds, Republican baptisms and
prayers, even with a revolutionary sign of the cross in the name of
_Marat, Le Pelletier, la liberté ou la mort_. Communist ritual is
less crudely imitative, and perhaps less rich. But it is just as
definite, as you will find in talking to an initiated Communist. Marx’s
_Das Kapital_, of course, is hardly ever read in orthodox circles
except ritualistically. The French revolutionists had their saints
and martyrs, especially the murdered Marat: the apotheosis of Lenin,
clearly begun in his lifetime, has become a cult centered around his
tomb in Moscow. Lenin is perhaps, like Jeremy Bentham preserved in
University College, London, a purely secularist saint; but a saint he
is. Stalin, we are told, has had to fight very hard the tendency of
simple Russian folk to mix a certain amount of superstition with their
natural devotion to their present great leader. He would not care to be
classed with the old icons. Smaller groups, like the Communist Youth,
are brought up in an atmosphere of ritual, are in this respect more
like some of the social side-shows of our Protestant churches than like
comparatively secular groups such as the Boy Scouts.
Religious symbolism goes along with this ritual, and was especially
developed in France. During the Terror, one met symbolic devices
everywhere: the eye of surveillance, seeking out the enemies of the
Republic; the triangle of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; the Phrygian
cap of liberty, the _bonnet rouge_; the carpenter’s level, symbolizing
equality; any kind of mound, which served as symbol for the beneficent
Mountain, the party that had carried out the revolution to its logical
end. Most of these and many other symbols are to be found in the
elaborate pageant of the 20th Prairial at Paris, when Robespierre
personally supervised the festival of the Supreme Being. The Russians,
aided by modern poster technique, have made a similar, if less
pedantic, use of symbols to hold the people together in a Communist
society.
_IV. What Makes the Terror?_
In the crisis periods of all four of our revolutions we may distinguish
the same set of variables, differently combined and mixed with all
sorts of contingent factors to produce the specific situations the
narrative historian of these revolutions tends to regard as unique.
There are no doubt a very great number of these variables, but for the
purposes of a first approximation we may here distinguish seven. These
seem not to be related one to another in any important one-way causal
relationship. They seem, indeed, more or less like the independent
variables of the mathematician, though it is inconceivable that they
should be strictly independent. The temptation to single out one of
them as the “cause” of the Terror is, like the temptation to find a
hero or a villain in any situation, hard to resist. And each one of
them has a history, goes back at least to the last generation or two of
the old regime.
They are all woven together in a complicated pattern of reality; but
without all of them--and this is the important point--you would not
have a Reign of Terror, would not have a full crisis in the revolution.
The problem of their possible independence need not worry us.
Temperature and pressure are independent variables in the mathematical
formulation of the laws of thermodynamics; but ice can form at 0°
centigrade only if the pressure is negligibly small. We have already
stressed this point, perhaps beyond the bounds of good writing. But
the old notion of simple, linear, one-way causation is so rooted in
our habits of thought, is indeed so useful to us in daily life, that
we almost instinctively demand an explanation of a complex situation
like the Terror which will enable us to isolate a villain-cause--or a
hero-cause.
First, there is what we may call the habit of violence, the paradoxical
situation of a people conditioned to expect the unexpected. The more
violent and terroristic periods of our revolutions come only after a
series of troubles have prepared the way. Not until after several years
of civil war in England did the Independents carry out their rigorous
measures against the habitual ways of “Merrie England.” The Terror in
France in a formal sense does not begin until late in 1793; sporadic
outbreaks like the Great Fear of 1789 and the September Massacres of
1792 simply help to establish the mood necessary for a Terror. Even in
Russia, where events were telescoped together in a shorter period than
in any of our other revolutions, organized violence under the patronage
of the government does not clearly appear until the autumn of 1918, a
year and a half after the outbreak against the Czar. A telegram from
Petrovsky to all soviets is quoted by Mr. Chamberlin, who sees in this
the signal for organized Terror. “Last of all, the rear of our armies
must be finally cleared of all White Guardism and all scoundrelly
conspirators against the power of the working class and the poorest
peasants. Not the least wavering, not the least indecision in the
application of mass terror.”
This telegram brings forward a second and most important variable--the
pressure of a foreign and civil war. War necessities help explain the
rapid centralization of the government of the Terror, the hostility to
dissenters within the group--they now seem deserters--the widespread
excitement which our generation knows well enough by the cant term “war
psychosis.” Both in France and in Russia there is a rough correlation
between the military situation of the revolutionary armies and the
violence of the Terror; as the danger of defeat grows, so does the
number of victims of revolutionary tribunals. There is, however, a
certain lag, and the Terror continues after the worst of the military
danger is over. We may again recall that in England the Irish and the
Scotch fulfilled the function of the foreign enemy, even though Great
Britain kept free of the continent during the whole period. And both in
America and in England the crisis period was accompanied by a formal
war, largely a civil war. No sensible person would wish to deny the
important place these wars have in the total situation we have called
the crisis period.
Third, there is the newness of the machinery of this centralized
government. The extremists are certainly not--and we have already
emphasized this point--altogether without experience in handling men,
though they have dealt with _revolutionists_, not with _all men_.
Their long apprenticeship in the cause of the revolution has been
a political training of a sort. And in many ways their new network
of institutions is able to use some of the routine channels used by
the old government. This is especially true in local government.
Nevertheless, it is certainly true that the institutions of the
Terror are in a sense new, that they do not work smoothly, that those
charged with administering them, even if they are not politically
inexperienced, are administratively inexperienced. The machinery of the
Terror works in fits and starts, and frequently jams badly. Conflicts
between administrators arise, and are settled in no routine manner, but
by violence. Each failure of the machine annoys those who are trying to
run it, and impels them to a new and sudden decision, to another act of
violence. This in turn further jams the machinery. It is our old friend
the vicious circle.
Fourth, this is also a time of acute economic crisis--not merely what
we now call a depression, but a definite shortage of the necessities of
life. Again it must be recalled that the Terror does not come at once,
in the very beginning of the revolution, but is preceded by a time
of troubles very disrupting to the ordinary processes of production.
Capital gets frightened and begins to leave the country. Business
men hesitate to undertake new enterprises or to continue on the same
basis with the old. Peasant risings lessen agricultural production.
Then comes the war with its demand for men and munitions. The ensuing
dictatorship of the victorious extremists is in part an economic
dictatorship, a supervision of the whole economic life of the country,
controlled currency, price-fixing, food-rationing, a socialism of the
fact long before Marx. The difficulty of distributing inadequate
supplies further tries the temper of administrators, adds to the
opportunities of denunciators and spies, serves to maintain and sharpen
the peculiar excitement, the universal jumpiness of the Terror. It adds
to the tenseness of the class struggles which we have already discerned
in our study of the old regimes.
In one form or another our fifth variable, class struggles, clearly
appears in the crises of all our revolutions. The hatred of Puritan for
Cavalier, of Jacobin for aristocrats, Federalists, and other enemies of
the Republic of Virtue, the hatred of Bolsheviks for Whites, Kadets and
compromisists, of American Whigs for Tories, was in itself an elaborate
compound. One element in this compound was probably about what the
Marxist means when he talks about the class struggle. At any rate, by
the time of the Terror the different antagonistic groups within the
society have polarized into the orthodox revolutionists in power and
the somewhat mixed bloc of their enemies. Heightened like all other
tensions and conflicts by the course of the revolution, these class
antagonisms now take on a sharpness they normally possess only in the
writings and speeches of intellectuals and agitators. The party spirit,
which is in one element probably but one form of the antagonism between
classes, here seizes upon the most trivial symbols to make men aware
of their irreconciliable differences. Thus the Jacobins adopted the
term “sans-culottes” as a rallying cry to emphasize the class struggle.
The culottes are the knee-breeches of the silk-stockinged gentlemen of
the old regime, and those without _culottes_ presumably wore the long
trousers of the common man, the workingman. The Russian revolution was
filled with the slogans of the class struggle in the narrow Marxist
sense. Now though there was much more than class struggles in our
revolutions, and though these struggles are not quite as simply
determined as many believers in the economic interpretation of history
sometimes make out, it would be very foolish to deny the importance of
one of the variables in the Terror--those antagonisms between groups or
“classes” largely held together by economic interests and by a common
social and intellectual heritage, a common way of life, which our
generation knows as the class struggle.
Our sixth variable is even more obviously than the others an
abstraction, a presumably useful way of gathering together a great
number of concrete facts. It is not logically on an exact level
with our other variables, and would not fit into a nice series of
philosophical categories. This is a variable based on observation of
the behavior of the relatively small group of leaders formed during the
revolution and now in control of the government of the Terror. Much
of their behavior is affected, like the behavior of their followers
and fellow-citizens, by the other variables in our list, and no doubt
by much that has escaped us. But some very important elements in
their behavior depend on the fact that they are leaders, that they
have gone through a certain apprenticeship in revolutionary tactics,
that they have been selected, almost in a Darwinian sense, for their
ability to manipulate an extremist revolutionary group. This does
not mean that they are necessarily or even usually “impractical”
men, “theoreticians,” “metaphysicians,” or any other of the names
simple critics like Taine invented for them. It does mean that they
are not formed for compromise, for the dull expedients of politics
in unexcited, relatively stable societies. It does mean that they
are formed to push on to extremes, to use their special influence
to heighten the already high tension of life in society. Like all
politicians, they have learned the skills necessary for success in
their trade; they have come to feel their trade is something like a
game, as indeed it is; but they are reckless players, apt to play to
the gallery, and always trying for a home run. No good revolutionary
leader would ever bunt. Moreover, they are at least as jealous of one
another as, to use another comparison, actors, and each one must always
try for the center of the stage. What in more ordinary times has been
lately no more than a conventional struggle for power among politicians
is thus in the crisis period of revolutions stepped up to a murderous
intensity.
Finally, there is the variable we have dwelt upon at length in an
earlier part of this chapter. This is the element of religious faith
shared by Independents, Jacobins, Bolsheviks. We need not here repeat
what we have just written about the religious aspect of the Reigns of
Terror. But it is this element that makes the Reigns of Terror also
Reigns of Virtue, heroic attempts to close once for all the gap between
human nature and human aspirations. This is but one of the variables,
but it is a very important one. Religious aims and emotions help to
differentiate the crises of our revolutions from ordinary military or
economic crises, and to give to the Reigns of Terror and Virtue their
extraordinary mixture of spiritual fury, of exaltation, of devotion and
self-sacrifice, of cruelty, madness and high-grade humbug.
Now all these elements are in constant interaction one with another,
a change in one effecting complex corresponding changes in all the
others, and hence in the total situation. We must not think of them in
terms of horse and cart, or chicken and egg, or of one billiard ball
hitting another. It is instead as complicated and mad a chase as we
conceive that of the molecules in a physico-chemical system. Thus the
stresses and strains of the early stages of our revolutions make it
easier to work the nation into war--witness the war-provoking Girondins
in France--and the war itself increases the stresses, accustoms people
to violence and suspense. War makes for economic scarcity and economic
scarcity sharpens the class struggle, and so on in a merry round-robin.
All these effects, up to the end of the crisis period, are cumulative.
Each old habit sloughed off, each definite break with the past at once
invites others and increases the strain upon everybody, or nearly
everybody, in the social system.
For it would seem to be an observable fact of human behavior that
large numbers of men can stand only so much interference with the
routines and rituals of their daily existence. It would also seem that
most men cannot long stand the strain of prolonged effort to live in
accordance with very high ideals. The outsider in the crisis period
is pushed to the limit of his endurance by interference with some of
his most prized and intimate routines; the insider is held to a pitch
of spiritual effort and excitement beyond his powers of endurance.
For both sorts of men there would seem to be a limit to their social
action as real as the limit a chemist finds for a chemical reaction.
Human beings can go only so far and so long under the stimulus of an
ideal. Social systems composed of human beings can endure for but a
limited time the concerted attempt to bring heaven to earth which we
call the Reign of Terror and Virtue. Thermidor comes as naturally to
societies in revolution as an ebbing tide, as calm after a storm, as
convalescence after fever, as the snapping-back of a stretched elastic
band. Such figures of speech, taken from established uniformities in
the physical world, seem to impose themselves. Perhaps, in spite of the
efforts of philosophers, theologians, moralists, political theorists,
social scientists, and a good many other inspired thinkers in the last
two thousand years, social systems are still almost as perversely
unaffected by revolutionary good intentions as tides or rubber bands.
_Chapter_ EIGHT THERMIDOR
_I. Universality of the Thermidorean Reaction_
As we have had to note in earlier attempts to fit our four revolutions
into our conceptual scheme, this fitting cannot be done with finicky
exactness. It is quite impossible to say that the crisis of a given
revolution ended at 4:03 P.M. on August 6th of a given year. France
does indeed furnish us with an instance almost as precise as this. The
end of the crisis in France may be dated from the fall of Robespierre
on July 27, 1794, or on the ninth Thermidor, year II of the poetic
new French calendar. The ensuing slow and uneven return to quieter,
less heroic times has long been known to French historians as the
Thermidorean reaction. The Marxists, and especially the Trotskyites,
have recently been applying the word to the Russian revolution, so
that we may adopt it, as we did “old regime,” as a term in general
acceptance. All our revolutions had their Thermidors, though in no two
were the sequence of events, the time schedules, the ups and downs of
daily life, anything like identical.
In terms of our conceptual scheme, we shall have to call Thermidor
a convalescence from the fever of revolution, even though
“convalescence” suggests something nice, and seems therefore to be a
way of praising the Thermidorean reaction. We can but repeat previous
assertions that no such eulogistic sense is here intended. We continue
to try to discover first approximations of uniformities in phenomena we
mean neither to praise nor to blame, neither to cherish nor to damn.
In England the beginning of the Thermidorean period, the convalescence,
is not to be put with any preciseness. The year or so following
the execution of Charles I represents the height of the crisis in
England, and as long as the Rump sat some strong flavor of revolution
remained. Perhaps the best date for the English Thermidor is Cromwell’s
dissolution of the Rump on April 20, 1653, when the great general made
some celebrated and un-English remarks about the resemblance between
the mace and a jester’s staff. With Cromwell installed as Protector
under the “instrument of Government” of 1653--the English actually did
indulge themselves once in a written constitution--Thermidor may be
said to be well on its way. In 1657 Cromwell became Lord Protector,
half a king at least, and with the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660
the great English revolution may be said to end.
The fall of Robespierre in France had been brought about largely by a
conspiracy among outwardly orthodox Jacobin deputies to the Convention,
men for the most part seriously involved in war-profiteering,
parliamentary corruption, stock speculation and other activities
unworthy of citizens of the Republic of Virtue. Fear of the
“Incorruptible” Robespierre seems to have been one of the main reasons
for their action. They were successful, not unaided by Robespierre’s
lack of political wisdom. The Thermidoreans themselves had apparently
not intended to end the Terror; the guillotining of Robespierre was
just another in a long list of revolutionary guillotinings to which
they had now become well accustomed. But for once public opinion got
to work, and Frenchmen made it clear that they were through with the
“tigers athirst for blood.” The reaction continued at a fairly steady
rate for some years, both under the declining Convention and the new
government of the Directory. There were definite relapses, as one might
expect in a convalescence. Especially in the summer of 1799, after
French defeats abroad, there was a striking revival of Jacobinism.
The clubs re-opened, and the good old slogans resounded once more in
public halls, in cafes, and on street corners. A few months later
Napoleon Bonaparte had achieved his _coup d’état_ of the 18th Brumaire,
and the French convalescence was nearly over. The actual restoration
of the Bourbons in 1814 is hardly a part of the course of revolution
in France. It was rather an accident, a consequence of such purely
personal factors as Napoleon’s megalomaniac insistence on fighting all
Europe to the bitter end in 1813-14, Talleyrand’s knack for calling the
turn, and the good intentions of Alexander I of Russia.
The Russian revolution may perhaps in a sense be still going on. The
Trotskyites hold that Stalin and his crowd are Thermidoreans, and
that _this_ Russian revolution, at any rate, is pretty well over.
Complete detachment in such matters is certainly difficult at this
moment. But it does seem clear that the crisis period in Russia is
over, that at most Russia is now in a rather long and disturbed
convalescence from the fever of revolution. We may perhaps regard the
period of war communism, 1917-21, as the first and main crisis of
the Russian revolution. With the New Economic Policy of 1921 began
Russia’s Thermidor. Lenin’s death and the subsequent rivalry between
Stalin and Trotsky led up to a second crisis, or rather relapse during
convalescence, which we may date at the more acute periods of violent
enforcement of the first Five Year Plan. But as many an observer has
noted, this secondary crisis lacked the hopeful idealism of the first,
lacked its improvisations and its adventures, lacked its active foreign
and White Guard enemies, and looks from even our brief historical
perspective much like characteristic acts of the “tyrants” who came to
power during other Thermidors--the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland,
for instance, or the Napoleonic enforcement of the Continental System.
Since 1933, this second crisis has been rapidly abating, and at present
evidences of reaction in Russia abound.
_II. Amnesty and Repression_
Politically the most striking uniformity to be noted in the period of
convalescence is the ultimate establishment of a “tyrant” in something
like the old Greek sense of the word, an unconstitutional ruler brought
to power by revolution or _stasis_. This uniformity has been frequently
noted: Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin, all seem to confirm it. Indeed, in
the Federalist period in the United States there were Jeffersonians
ungrateful enough to suggest that Washington was a perfectly good
example of the tyrant born of revolution. There is nothing very
puzzling about the phenomenon. After a revolution has undergone the
crisis and the accompanying centralization of power, some strong leader
must handle that centralized power when the mad religious energy of the
crisis period has burned itself out. Dictatorships and revolutions are
inevitably closely associated, because revolutions to a certain extent
break down, or at least weaken, laws, customs, habits, beliefs which
bind men together in society; and when laws, customs, habits, beliefs
tie men together insufficiently, force must be used to remedy that
insufficiency. Military force is for short terms the most efficient
kind of force available for social and political uses, and military
force demands a hierarchy of obedience culminating in a generalissimo.
Polybius has here some appropriate remarks about the military virtues
of Republican Rome. All this, however, is pretty much a commonplace of
our times.
The rule of one man does not come immediately with the Thermidorean
reaction. Even Cromwell, the earliest established of the three, did not
become uncontested ruler with the dissolution of the Rump. The reaction
to the crisis is at first slow and uncertain. The habit of violence is
by now thoroughly established. There is left from the crisis a tendency
to dramatic steps and whole-hog measures. Even sober and peace-loving
men have moments of excited relapses to the jitters of the Terror. Seen
in this light, the recent Moscow purges and trials are no indication
that the Russian revolution has had an unusually long life, that it
fails to fit our pattern. These melodramatic displays are no more
than the expected aftermath of revolution in a land and among peoples
unblessed with Magna Carta, Blackstone, and Gilbert and Sullivan.
As time goes on, the pressures the Terror applied to ordinary men are
relaxed: the special tribunals give place to more regular ones, the
revolutionary police are absorbed into the regular police--which are
not necessarily the equivalent of London bobbies; they may be agents of
the OGPU--and the block, guillotine or firing-squad are reserved for
the more dramatic criminals. It is not, of course, that political life
shortly assumes the idyllic stability some of our own contemporaries
like to describe as the Rule of Law, and which, one suspects, was
never quite as nice as appears in their books--not even in staid
nineteenth-century England, or in the thirteenth century where St.
Thomas lived so pleasantly. The taste and habit of political violence
lives on in _coups d’état_, in purges, in well-staged trials. But
John Jones, Jacques Duval, Ivan Ivanovich, the man in the street, is
no longer included in the cast--he is now left to his normal role of
spectator or supernumerary.
Gradually, too, the politically proscribed are amnestied, and come
back, sometimes to be caught up again in the scramble of competitive
politics; sometimes to become part of that staff of modern life, the
bureaucracy; sometimes to live quietly as private citizens. The process
is naturally the reverse of the process in which these men and women
had been driven out. They go from Right to Left, and come back from
Left to Right--first the almost pure radicals, then the moderates,
then moderate conservatives, until the final restoration brings back
remnants of the old gang. Such at least was the process in France and
in England. After 1653, the Presbyterians took heart and began to
emerge into politics, followed by the more moderate Episcopalians and
Royalists, until in 1660 the Stuarts and their courtiers returned.
In France the succession was very exact and ratified by formal bills
of amnesty: first the Girondins--those who had survived--came back,
while tears were shed over, and monuments erected to, the innocent
victims of the bloodthirsty tiger Robespierre; then the Feuillants, the
Lafayette-Lameth crowd; then the out-and-out Royalists and such-like
_émigrés_, whom Napoleon, however, was able to control fairly well;
then finally, in 1814, the Bourbons themselves.
So far the Romanovs have not returned to Russia, and only a very rash
prophet would prophesy their ultimate return, or indeed any kind
of formal restoration of hereditary monarchy. We must not ask our
revolutions to make too neat a picture. It is clear, however, that save
for the final monarchical restoration, the process we have outlined
above has been going on slowly in Russia, at least since Lenin’s death.
Even the aristocrats can go back if they make the proper submission
and get the proper publicity--which was true of Napoleonic France. As
for the numerous variants of revolutionary belief, it is clear that
gathered around Stalin today are many men who were far from orthodox
in 1917. Even the sainted Gorki was what in France would be called a
_rallié_, a man who rallied to the Communist regime only after the
worst of the Terror was safely over. On the other hand, almost all the
old Bolsheviks, the men who ruled Russia in the period of crisis, have
by now been liquidated. Stalin in 1938 can hardly make any direct human
contact with his revolutionary past.
The personnel of government in the Thermidorean period and in the
new-old regime that finally emerges from the revolution is likely
to be varied in origin. Napoleon was served by old aristocrats of
the _noblesse d’épée_, by bureaucrats trained in the old regime, by
Fayettists, by Girondins and even by a few once-violent Jacobins. Of
men like Albemarle, Shaftesbury, and Downing, who stood high in the
government of Charles II after his restoration, it has been written:
“They were of the same school as Blake and Vane; they represented the
most solid political attainments of the Cromwellian party.” Downing’s
career is an especially good example of how men of ability and a
certain moral elasticity can traverse revolutions. He was graduated
from Harvard in 1642, and went to England at the happy moment of
Puritan supremacy. He soon rose high in the ranks of the Cromwellians,
devoting his talents especially to diplomacy. He contrived to turn his
coat at just the right time, and was accepted in the service of the
new king. It is from this early and somewhat atypical Harvard man that
Downing Street in London takes its name. Even in Russia, though by now
old Bolsheviks are almost completely weeded out of the very highest
councils, there are undoubtedly many of them, their fires well banked,
in the great new bureaucracy.
The new governing classes in all our societies are then a very
miscellaneous lot, with very little in common as regards social
origins, education, and earlier party affiliations. They have in common
a certain adaptability. They have survived a rigorous if somewhat
arbitrary selection. They seem, after the heroes of the Terror, tame
and unenterprising in many ways. But they usually do a pretty good job
in getting institutions, laws, routines, all the necessary standard
ways of doing things, once more working.
Along with amnesty to former moderates there goes on a reverse process
of repression and persecution of unrepentant revolutionists of all
sorts. The further the reaction moves to the Right, the wider its
definition of revolutionists to be duly restrained as suitable reaction
against the honors of the Reign of Terror. The Thermidoreans themselves
are by no means unwilling to apply terroristic methods in the proper
direction. The White Terrors are as real as the Red. Even in England,
the well-known Clarendon Code of the Restoration conforms closely
enough to the general pattern of repression later carried out in France
and in Russia. The clever and unprincipled extremist is almost always
able to weather the White Terror--witness Fouché again. It is only the
convinced and persistent extremists who suffer.
As for the more active and violent leaders of the original Terror,
they are of course eliminated, either by exile or by death. They are
now declared to have been fanatics, villains, bloodthirsty tyrants,
scoundrels. They become very convenient scapegoats, explanations of
the difficulties the new regime has getting things settled. If there
is one very dramatic scapegoat, and he is already dead, so much the
better. Cromwell’s body was dug up after the Stuart Restoration and
hanged at Tyburn, along with Ireton’s and Bradshaw’s. He became a
tyrant, an ogre, a blasphemer, and so remained on the whole until
in the nineteenth century Carlyle started the rehabilitation which
has made him a hero. Except for a small sect led by the late Albert
Mathiez, Robespierre has never recovered the status of hero. The
Thermidoreans made Robespierre a prime scapegoat, the leader of the
gang of terrorists, a vain and capricious tyrant, a bloody villain.
Lenin, of course, died a saint, but fortunately for Stalin Trotsky made
a grand scapegoat. Recent events have shown that in this respect Russia
is still in its Thermidorean period, and the process of finding big and
little scapegoats seems to be going on merrily in that country.
The lift of the ideal has gone by now. The new ruling class settles
down to do as good a job as it can. But it clearly intends also to
enjoy life, to possess the privileges and wealth a ruling class has
hitherto always had. This new ruling class is certainly not going to
try to achieve Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, for everyone in the
society. It is quite content with the stratification which has worked
itself out during the revolution. It will settle its own internal
conflicts as far as it can, in the traditional way of ruling classes.
There will be none of the dangerous direct appeals to the people, no
risks of great popular uprisings. We have already noted how as the
crisis period approaches the people come less and less into active
politics, how the extremists reach power through what is no more than
a _coup d’état_. With the Thermidoreans this process continues, until
the political changes, the transfers of power during this period--and
they are numerous, and by no means altogether regular and orderly--are
hardly more than palace revolutions. When all is quiet and safe the
victors will risk a plebiscite. Appearances have to be kept up, and a
certain number of stereotypes about the will of the people have by now
got fairly well established in the mind of John Jones.
John Jones may well be somewhat tired of political turmoil. But he is
certainly not in the Thermidorean period in a generally prosperous
condition. One of the most striking uniformities we can discern in this
period is that, notably in France and Russia, but to a certain extent
also in the England of the 1650’s and the America of the Articles of
Confederation, there was more widespread economic suffering, especially
among the poorest classes, than during the Terror, or during the last
years of the old regime. When the Thermidoreans in France abandoned
price-fixing and food-rationing, prices rocketed, paper money went on
its classic decline, and the poor were left in a very bad way. There
seems to be a general agreement that there was more actual suffering in
France in the winters of 1795 and 1796 than at any other time in the
revolutionary era. Yet save for a few pathetic bread riots at Paris and
in some of the large cities, riots easily put down by the government,
nothing happened. Similarly in Russia, there seems to be no doubt that
the liquidation of the _kulaks_ and the great famine during the first
Five Year Plan brought a greater toll of death and misery than even the
period of war communism. Possibly the explanation of the failure of
this suffering to produce a rising is that suffering is not in itself
a spur to effective revolt; perhaps it is merely that the new ruling
class in Thermidor can and does use force with an effectiveness the
old ruling class did not command; perhaps it is also that by Thermidor
the great mass of people neither rich nor poor, not at any rate quite
on the margin of existence, is worn out, exhausted, fed up with the
experiences of the crusade for the Republic of Virtue.
The lift of the ideal has also gone out of the wars the revolutionists
have been waging to spread their gospel. It is doubtless true that
these wars were never wholly devoted to the spreading of this gospel,
and certainly the catchwords of the gospel continue to be used long
after the heroic period of the crisis. But aggressive nationalism
gradually supplants the missionary spirit, a Messianic crusade
gradually becomes clearly a war of conquest. Cromwell turned English
energies to the reconquest of Ireland and then to the re-establishment
of English prestige abroad. The seizure of Jamaica is a little thing
if compared with Napoleon’s conquests, but it is cut from the same
sociological pattern. With Sexby and Blake in earlier years, patriotism
had taken the form of wishing to make all Europe republican; by the
middle of the decade of the fifties, English patriotism had returned
to more normal channels. That under the Directory and Napoleon French
nationalism conformed to the pattern we have sketched above should be
clear even to the idolaters of Napoleon.
In Russia in the early days of the revolution nationalism in the
aggressive sense was virtuously abandoned according to the best
tenets of Marx; in the purely cultural sense nationalism became the
prized basis of soviet federalism. To many admirers of the Russian
revolution it will not be at all clear that Russia has also conformed
to our pattern, has fitted in with the uniformity by which Messianic
revolutionary proselyting in other lands becomes the aggressive
nationalism with which we are familiar. The skeptical can only reply
that the boasted federal equality of the national groups within the
Soviet Union has not proved incompatible with practical domination by
the Great Russians, though unquestionably the Soviet government has
been in most respects more “liberal” towards the other national groups
than was Czarist Russia, and more successful in integrating them into
the larger unity of the U.S.S.R. But more important for our purposes
is the clear reappearance of ordinary nationalism in Stalin’s Russia.
This has not yet taken the aggressive forms French nationalism took
under Napoleon, largely because the present international situation
of Russia is very different from that of France at the end of the
eighteenth century. But evidence of the existence of a strong national
spirit in contemporary Russia is abundant; it can be found in the
abandonment of the attempt to foment revolution in other countries, and
a return to the policy of nationalistic alliances, in the deliberate
encouragement of the patriotic study of Russian history, in the tone of
the Russian press, in all phases of Russian cultural life. Of course
the nice Marxist internationalist slogans are still repeated. Napoleon,
“Child and Champion of Jacobinism,” also made abundant and effective
use even of such compromising revolutionary terms as “Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity.” But he did not fool all his contemporaries,
and he certainly ought not to fool historians.
_III. Return of the Church_
The position of the recognized religions of the old regimes is one of
the very best indicators of the nature and extent of these Thermidorean
reactions. We saw in the last chapter that the extremists had developed
what we had to call a religion of their own, an active, crusading,
intolerant faith that sent its devotees storming the gates of heaven
on earth. Naturally enough during their supremacy the extremists
persecuted the old established faiths, Catholic and Protestant
alike. The English Independents persecuted papists, prelatists, and
Presbyterians with a zeal perhaps diminishing in that order. In France
the Catholic Church had been long a target for the _philosophes_. The
victorious Jacobins were not altogether of one mind either as to the
treatment of the Catholic Church or as to just what sort of substitute
might be desirable. Cults of Reason, of the Fatherland, of the Supreme
Being, all had their advocates. Most of them could agree on banning
the non-juring Catholics who were loyal to the Pope. At the height of
the Terror the most violent “dechristianizers” had their way in some
regions, destroying or defacing churches, guillotining or banishing
priests, staging burlesques of Catholic ceremonials. Fouché at Nevers
caused to be inscribed over the gate of the cemetery the confident
assertion: _Death is an eternal Sleep_.
The Bolsheviks were brought up in a hatred for the Greek Orthodox
Church at least as violent as that which the Jacobins felt for the
Roman Catholic. They had a firm belief, nourished by much repetition,
that religion is “the opium of the people.” They thought of themselves
as men of science and hence atheists. Once in power the Bolsheviks
began an active campaign against the churches, though especially in
the early days of war communism they had a good deal else to do, and
left the clergy to struggle along by itself. There were the usual
acts of violence against persons of the clergy and against the church
buildings, shutting of the monasteries, and so on. Priests were of
course classed in the non-productive group, and suffered more than
other men from lack of food during the great scarcity. Yet one gets the
impression that in Russia sheer terrorism directed against organized
Christianity was not quite as intense as it had been in France. The
Bolsheviks had a great belief in the power of proper education, and
planned from the first a state monopoly which should insure the young
against exposure to the danger of infection with Christian notions.
For adults the government trusted in anti-religious propaganda, in
museums exposing the fakes and horrors of the old religion, and in
the general spread of enlightenment and desire for the good things
of this world. The “League of the Militant Godless” was formed with
government support, the presses and the artists got to work on posters,
the newspapers went enthusiastically into this relatively safe pursuit,
and for a while in the 1920’s foreign observers might not unreasonably
report that Christianity in Russia seemed well on the way to extinction.
No such confident conclusion seems safe in 1938. It is very difficult
indeed to get trustworthy information on the present status of
organized Christianity in Russia. On this subject, even more than on
most subjects, Westerners traveling in Russia find what they want to
find. But it does seem definitely established that now after twenty
years of Bolshevik supremacy Christianity has not been wiped out in
Russia, is not even limited to older people brought up before the
revolution. The League of the Militant Godless announced in 1930
that the government had closed only 3,380 out of the 50,000 churches
of Czarist Russia. At the tenth anniversary meeting of the League,
the president stated that 50 per cent of Russian youth were still
Christian. In 1936 the League complained that priests in various
parts of Russia have cleverly adapted themselves to Communism, have
insinuated themselves into the collective farms, have taken to
appearing at trade-union meetings. A recent Catholic traveler reported
in the Commonweal that in a conducted tour he was not shown any of the
famous “atheist museums” and that on inquiry he found that the whole
business of anti-Christian propaganda was being very much soft-pedaled.
On every hand one finds bits of evidence all pointing to the same
conclusion: under the Thermidorean rule of Stalin, the Orthodox Church
is gradually coming back into a recognized and secure position
in Russian life. This is not to say that the Militant Godless are
not still active, nor that they will in their turn find themselves
persecuted. Nor is it to assert that the Orthodox Church is today
exactly what it was in the days of the Czars. On the contrary, it
is evident that its clergy, once known for their conservatism and
inaction, have been stirred to a real effort of adaptation to new
circumstances. But it does mean that the rites of the church still go
on in a Russia no longer perhaps exactly the Holy Russia of old, but by
no means cut off from an institution identified with a thousand years
of her history.
In France the reconciliation of the Thermidoreans and the old
church went on so rapidly that within less than a decade from the
“dechristianizing” movement of the Terror Napoleon could sign a
Concordat with the Pope which officially re-established Roman
Catholicism as the State Church of France. During the worst of the
Terror, Catholics in France had had to hold their services in secret,
in spite of the fact that freedom of worship was guaranteed by law.
With the fall of Robespierre they began to risk public services in
the buildings still spared them. As more and more moderates were
amnestied, the government became more and more friendly, and the last
four years of the eighteenth century saw France with complete religious
freedom and with almost complete separation of Church and State.
Napoleon and many of the new ruling class felt the need of winning the
Catholics over completely, and the formal Concordat was negotiated.
The re-established Catholic Church was not, however, in exactly the
same legal position as under the old regime, when it had been the sole
recognized faith. Protestants and Jews were by the new laws given equal
status with the Catholics.
Organized Christianity does not enter in the same way into the
American revolution. In England, however, there is a striking
similarity to the broad lines of development in France and Russia. The
established faith of the old regime was the Church of England, in many
ways, liturgically, theologically, governmentally, not very far removed
from the Catholic tradition. The new revolutionary faith was Calvinism
in its various forms, of which the Independent finally triumphed.
Under Independent rule the Anglican worship, and indeed rival forms of
Calvinist worship, were kept down. On paper, at least, this religious
persecution was even more violent than that in France and in Russia.
The disputants in the pamphlet warfare among the sects were learned
men with abundant vocabularies and firm convictions. On the other
hand, save in Ireland, there was rather less violence and bloodshed in
immediately religious quarrels during the English revolution than in
those of France and Russia. With the repressing of the more radical
sects, and especially the Quakers, the swing back begins in England. In
the later years of Cromwell Presbyterians and even Anglicans reasserted
themselves in public life and carried on their religious services in
virtual freedom. When Charles II came back the Church of England was
re-established in very nearly its old prestige and privileges, and the
cycle took its usual form with the persecution of the sects that had
made the revolution.
The history of the accepted religious faiths of the old regimes is
then one of the very clearest uniformities our study of revolutions
affords. One might almost make a graph, in which the prestige of the
old organized faith might be seen to follow a fairly regular curve,
lowest at the worst of the Terror, gradually climbing back during the
Thermidorean reaction to a position almost as high as that from which
it had started in the old regime. Such a graph would be deceptively
simple, especially if its interpretation involved the notion that the
restored church was exactly its old self once more. Neither men nor
institutions pass through the crisis of revolution unchanged. The
priests who had undergone persecution were never afterwards the same
men who had once enjoyed the security of the old regime, any more than
the _émigrés_ who returned from exile were the same men who had once
been unchallenged members of a ruling class. We shall later consider
the transformation of institutions apparently restored after the
revolution. Here we may say a word about the _émigré_ priests, nobles,
rich men, whose return to public life is one of the characteristic
phenomena of Thermidor.
It would be most satisfying morally to conclude that the old clergy
return purified and strengthened by the test of persecution and exile,
that the old rulers return chastened and wise. But no such conclusion
seems possible. There are exceptions, like the Duc de Richelieu, who
had learned moderation and the art of ruling men during his long exile
in Russia, and who returned to serve Louis XVIII faithfully but well.
In general, however, the religious as well as the moral and political
sentiments and ideas of the _émigrés_ are narrowed, intensified,
strained into complete unpliability by the bitterness of their lot.
The Catholicism of Joseph de Maistre has a rigidity and harshness not
common in the faith into which he had grown up during the old regime.
For only in the world of the Alger books is adversity always a good
teacher. In the world into which the English Royalists, the French and
Russian _émigrés_, were thrust, adversity on the whole taught romantic
and unquestioning acceptance of loyalties which they thought were old,
but which were really new and high-powered abstractions drawn from
their recent experiences in the arena. They returned having forgotten
much and having learned a great deal--mostly knowledge neither useful
nor realistic. This whole subject of what happens to the _émigrés_ and
to the defeated, cowed moderates, is a fascinating one, and one which
deserves to be further studied by competent persons. In spite of much
good research at the level of narrative history, it remains one of the
most obscure parts of the sociology of revolution. But in any case the
returned _émigrés_ do not have the field to themselves, do not by any
means determine the final course of the reaction to the revolution.
Even in England in 1660 and in France in 1814, the more extreme among
the returned _émigrés_ did not get things done as they wanted them. The
Downings and the Albemarles, the Talleyrands and the Fouchés, the men
on the scene, had got much too far ahead of them.
_IV. The Search for Pleasure_
The full flavor of the Thermidorean reaction is reserved for the social
historian. In the dress, amusements, in the petty details of the
daily lives of ordinary men and women, the full extent of the popular
abandonment of the Republic of Virtue becomes clear. So marked is this
let-down that even the historian feels it, and most nineteenth-century
liberal historians hardly concealed their disgust and disappointment
when they came to record the indecent pleasures of the English
Restoration or of the French Directory. The austerities of the good
life according to Calvin or Robespierre seemed a noble standard, a goal
towards which men might struggle with a heroism that adorns a work
of history. The doings of a society in which a Nell Gwyn or a Teresa
de Cabarrus were apparently the most important actors could hardly
be edifying to anybody, and could be made instructive only with the
addition of proper sermonizing. Scandal writers, romantic biographers,
and other purveyors to a corrupt public taste have of course fallen
with delight on the ripe tidbits of the Thermidors, but the high-minded
men who write serious history have passed by these periods holding
their hands to their noses. From one source or another, however, we can
find what we need to know about the social history of our societies
in this particular phase of revolution. We shall try to avoid being
shocked or titillated, and to see how the obvious moral looseness of
the Thermidorean reactions fits in with the uniformities we have been
working out. But first for a brief review of the facts.
Within a few days of the guillotining of Robespierre and his more
conspicuous followers Parisians began to indulge publicly and with
gusto in a whole series of pleasures denied them during the tension of
the Terror. Politicians may have thought that “Terror will not cease
to be the order of the day until the last enemies of the Republic have
perished,” but ordinary men and women for once imposed their obvious
wants and needs directly on the politicians. One gets the impression
that few phenomena in the course of the French revolution were more
genuinely “popular” and “spontaneous” than the revulsion from the
restraints of the Terror. The people of Paris took Robespierre’s death
as a signal that the lid was off.
Dance halls were opened up all over Paris, prostitutes began operating
“with their former audacity” (to quote a police report), well-dressed
prosperous young men most unrepublicanly drunk began running about and
cracking dour, virtuous Republicans over the head. These young men were
the famous _jeunesse dorée_, a gilded youth with no illusions about
a Republic of Virtue, and which would nowadays certainly be labeled
Fascist at once. Both male and female costume had during the crisis
period tended towards sobriety, the women being wrapped in flowing
Roman robes and in more than Roman virtue. Now all was changed. The
men’s clothes became extremely foppish, with tight trousers, elaborate
waistcoats, and stocks that mounted beyond the chin. The women’s
dressmakers were still classically inspired, but with a sure erotic
sense they concentrated their efforts on the skillful revealing of the
breasts. The _costume directoire_ is an excellent symbol of the period.
With the abandonment of price-fixing and in the inflation which
followed, a class of newly rich speculators, war profiteers and
clever politicians arose. Parliamentary scandals do indeed crop up
in earlier periods of the revolutions, even in the crisis period.
Corruption can be pretty well proved for certain members of the
English Long Parliament and the French Convention even in their great
days. But in these earlier periods exposure was followed by swift and
sure punishment. Now, in Thermidor, no one seems to care very much
and certainly nothing is done. There is gossip, and in some quarters
indignation. But mostly politicians who grafted successfully were
admired, as they later were to be in the United States.
Still jittery over the Terror, fearing its return, uncertain of their
wealth and position, often quite uneducated in the patrician arts, the
Thermidoreans spent their money freely and vulgarly. They gambled, they
raced horses and fought cocks, they were mad about dancing. All this
they did noisily and with little regard for the traditional decencies
of the eighteenth century. In these short years the real basis for
the romantic taste of nineteenth-century France was laid. The ladies
of the period are famous for their gaiety and abandon. Their leader
was Teresia de Cabarrus, once mistress of the corrupt representative
Tallien, and now his wife. She was universally known, in a phrase that
displays the cynicism of the age, as “Our Lady of Thermidor.”
All of us know the age of Charles II as an extreme reaction from the
rule of the Saints. Restoration drama has, especially since Victorian
times, been a symbol for naughtiness, for the kind of play no nice
person could witness without blushing. Nell Gwyn has, in the national
memory, ruled in triumph over a court life in which vice was as
aristocratic as the most virtuous commoner could wish and suspect it
to be. As a matter of fact, the Puritan code of manners and morals was
never perfectly established, even in the years immediately following
the death of Charles I. The less public pleasures were always possible,
and prohibitions against horse-racing, bear-baiting, Christmas and
other heathen festivals were subject to the same kind of nullification
the Eighteenth Amendment received in this country. The very harshness
of some of the Puritan prohibitions was in itself an indication that
the Puritans were having a hard time getting all Englishmen to behave
in such a way that they would not “stink in the nostrils of the just.”
Yet the Puritan rule was in fact harsh and rigid enough to give
non-Puritans plenty of grievances, and in its main lines the
Thermidorean reaction was as real in England as it was to be in France.
There was not in England the same mixture of _parvenus_ and tired and
lucky aristocrats as in France, and esthetically speaking the reaction
in England was on a much higher lever than that in France. But in the
frank return to the pleasures of the senses, to gambling, drinking,
dancing, open love-making, to a light and cynical literature, to a
frank joy in clothes and other vanities, the two countries present a
very close parallel. Nor was the English Restoration altogether without
a lushness of taste which chaster souls find offensive. Especially in
female costume the contrast to the sobrieties of the early period is
very striking. The ladies wore dresses of riotous and often conflicting
colors, put on towering lace headdresses, fantastic patches and
generous cosmetics on their faces, wore and displayed elaborately
brocaded petticoats.
We need hardly labor this point about the loosening of moral restraints
in the Thermidorean period in England and in France. We shall have to
be more careful in establishing the facts about any such loosening
of moral restraints in Soviet Russia. Here the facts are certainly
not yet clear in the histories. Kindly and not very earthy souls like
the Webbs see in Russia today an orderly society, half-workshop and
half-nursery. Disillusioned radicals like Mr. Eugene Lyons see most of
the major public sins of capitalistic countries magnified among the
bureaucrats of Stalin’s gang, and the minor private vices, especially
those of ostentation and comfort-seeking, at least as common among
these bureaucrats as among our own corrupt middle classes. It does seem
reasonably clear that no such striking and rapid shift from the public
pursuit of virtue to the public pursuit of pleasure has taken place in
Russia as took place in France and in England. But again we must not
expect our uniformities to be suspiciously exact. In its broad lines,
the Russian Thermidor runs as true to form morally and socially as we
have seen it does politically.
In the first place, Thermidor in Russia began in Lenin’s own lifetime,
with the coming of the New Economic Policy in 1921. Private property
and private trading were once more permitted in Russia. The new class
of entrepreneurs who rose out of this situation, the Nepmen, remind
one forcibly of the similar class of profiteers who rose in France
out of the abandonment of price-fixing after the fall of Robespierre.
They were never quite sure of their status, and they carried over
into their now legal activities a good many of the habits they had
acquired in their bootlegging days under the Terror. As a class,
they were “exceptionally vulgar, profiteering, crude, and noisy.”
In the next few years prostitution, gambling, and other un-Marxist
pleasures returned so obviously to Moscow and Leningrad that only the
most convinced of “fellow-travelers” were unable to see them. Most
foreigners in Russia since 1917 have perhaps been prevented from what
we may hopefully call the normal use of their eyesight less by the
activities of Communist officials entrusted with the task of guiding
foreigners than by their own strong religious conviction that all
must be well in the Marxist heaven. Yet until the Five Year Plan was
initiated, the return of the bourgeois vices was so obvious, especially
in the middle twenties, that even foreign Communists noticed the fact.
Stalin’s apparent return to Communism in 1928-29 is really no more
significant than Napoleon’s apparent repudiation of the corruptness and
moral looseness of the Directory once he had achieved secure power by
the _coup d’état_ of the 18th Brumaire. There seems to be in all our
societies a certain reaction to the Thermidorean reaction, notably in
this matter of the public pursuit of pleasure. Men in great numbers can
no more devote themselves heroically and permanently to sin than to
holiness. The thousand dance halls said to have been opened up in Paris
immediately after the Terror could have kept going profitably only if
most of the population of Paris wanted to dance most of the time. And
in spite of Anglo-Saxon ideas to the contrary, Parisians are really not
built that way.
What happens in the years following the crisis of the Terror is a kind
of seesaw between moral restraint and moral looseness, at the end of
which a kind of equilibrium is arrived at in which most men and women
behave in respect to such matters as gambling, drinking, love-making,
the adornment of their persons, and the use of leisure, about the way
their grandfathers and grandmothers had behaved. If we look at Stalin’s
Russia and ask ourselves how far there seems to be opportunity for the
old Adam and the old Eve to come out in the lives of Russians we shall
get a more accurate measure of the reality of Thermidor in Russia than
we could get from any amount of Marxist or anti-Marxist theorizing.
Mr. Eugene Lyons tells with malicious delight the story of the
bafflement and anger of a correspondent of the New York Jewish
_Freiheit_, a Communist paper, when he was excluded from a government
reception in Russia because he did not have a dinner jacket. Dinner
jackets a part of the dictatorship of the proletariat! Nothing could be
more absurd, illogical and wholly natural. The dinner jacket satisfies
a number of human needs--the anthropologist could analyze most of them
for you--and there seems to be no evidence that any of our revolutions
had much long-run effect on these needs. A commissar needs a dinner
jacket at least as much as a Congressman or a D.A.R. lecturer.
Detail after detail might be brought forward to show how the
dictatorship of the proletariat in contemporary Russia is by no means
the dictatorship of virtue we have seen prevailing in the crisis
periods of our revolutions. Jazz, for instance, was long prohibited
in Russia. Jazz was clearly the product of a decadent bourgeois
civilization, an indecent way of stimulating what no good Marxist would
want, or need, to have stimulated, one of the protean forms of “opium
for the people” in capitalistic countries. Communists would dance
from sheer joy to innocent, spring-like music. In the late twenties,
however, the fox-trot and similar dances began to seep into Communist
Russia, and nowadays we are told that American dance music is played as
frequently and as badly in Russia as in the rest of Europe.
No one dramatic event like the fall of Robespierre can be used to date
Thermidor in Russia. But a whole series of little matters of daily
life combine to make an impressive case for the reality of the Russian
reaction. A youth leader appears at a national youth congress in a
necktie, a step which when first taken must have been as shocking as
would be in this country the appearance of a Commencement speaker in
overalls. A fashion show is held in Moscow, and mannequins actually
parade, gliding and smiling with conventional lack of abandon, almost
as if they were poor little wage-slaves in Paris or New York. Lipsticks
and other cosmetics begin to appear even in the shops patronized by
working girls. Stories of crime, “human interest” stories, begin
to appear in the pages of newspapers hitherto superior to such
capitalistic drivel, and hitherto consecrated to the pure heights of
politics. Movies are made in which are to be seen recognizable human
beings, insignificant, comic, stupid, jealous, even Russian, rather
than bloodless abstractions representing Capitalism, the Landlord,
Communism, the Proletariat, Man in Revolt.
The Bolsheviks had been very superior about the family. It was an
institution of the old regime, interwoven with all sorts of religious
elements, inevitably conservative in its social action. The family was
a stuffy little nest breeding selfishness, jealousy, love of property,
indifference towards the great needs of society. The family kept the
young indoctrinated with the stupidities of the old. The Bolsheviks
would break up the family, encourage divorce, educate the children
to the true selflessness of Communism, get them used to collective
enterprises and collective social life, get rid of the influence of
the church in family relations. Now there seems to be no doubt that in
contemporary Russia Stalin’s government is deliberately attempting to
inculcate the old family virtues. Movies, plays, novels have restored
respect for parents, the old family ties, to honor again. Gallantry
towards women seems to be coming back; and gallantry towards women is
a shocking survival of feudalism, a symbol of their inferior position
in society. Divorce, once about as easy and inexpensive as it could
possibly be, has now been made more expensive and more difficult.
More important, the government seems to be encouraging the spread
of a sentiment that marriage is a serious and permanent affair,
something made in heaven as heaven now seems understood in Russia.
Abortion, which the old Bolsheviks proudly made as legal and as easy as
appendectomy in America, and almost as frequent, has now been forbidden
by law save where it can be certified as necessary to preserve the
woman’s life. Stalin is actually taking measures to encourage large
families. And underlying these various measures, and much more
important as a general indication of what is going on in Russia than
any one of them, is an atmosphere we should almost call Victorian. The
present rulers of Russia seem to be trying deliberately to cultivate
the kind of sentiments characteristic of societies in equilibrium--the
domestic affections, simple patriotism, love of work and routine,
obedience to those in power, dislike for individual eccentricities, in
short, what Pareto called the “persistent aggregates.”
Pursuing these ends, Stalin has recently decreed that Marxist debunking
of Russian history is to cease, that Russians are once more to learn
of the glories of the Russian past. The Byzantine missionaries who
brought Christianity to Russia are no longer to be painted as fools and
villains, agents of what was clearly capitalistic imperialism, abject
persons like contemporary missionaries bringing Bible, rum and syphilis
to the South Seas. On the contrary, Christianity in Russia is to be
seen as an essential step in preparing the barbarous Slavs for higher
things. Peter the Great and Catherine are no longer to be made cruel
despots. They, too, were great architects of Russia’s destiny, without
whom millions of other Slavs and Asiatics might not now enjoy the
blessings of Communism. Perhaps Stalin hopes that his people will love
him the more, once they learn how many other Stalins have in the past
ruled over them as Czars.
_V. Summary_
Thermidor is then not by any means something unique, limited to the
French revolution from which it takes its name. We have found in all
three of our societies which underwent the full cycle of revolution a
similar moral let-down, a similar process of concentration of power
in the hands of a “tyrant” or “dictator,” a similar seeping back of
exiles, a similar revulsion against the men who had made the Terror, a
similar return to old habits in daily life.
Even in the United States, which did not undergo quite the same sort
of crisis as the other countries, which did not have a real Reign of
Terror and Virtue, the decade of the 1780’s displays in incomplete
forms some of the marks of Thermidor. There were a relaxation of war
discipline and war tension and a grand renewed scramble for wealth
and pleasure. There were much financial speculation and much sheer
suffering. Shays’s Rebellion, a most ineffectual gesture, reminds one
of the feeble attempts of suffering Frenchmen and Russians to protest
against the newly rich of their Thermidors. There was even a moral
let-down in this country. “Sober Americans of 1784,” writes Jameson,
“lamented the spirit of speculation which war and its attendant
disturbances had generated, the restlessness of the young, disrespect
for tradition and authority, increase of crime, the frivolity and
extravagance of society.” All this sounds very like the original
Thermidor in France.
In some sense the phenomenon of reaction and restoration seems almost
inevitably a part of the process of revolution. At any rate it seems
hard for the most optimistic lover of revolution to deny that we have
found such a phenomenon in all of the four societies we have chosen
to study. The very, very faithful may still maintain that the great
revolution in Russia has proved itself exempt from this reaction, that
in Russia the noble aims of revolutionists in Western society have
at last achieved an unsullied reality. We ourselves cannot fit the
facts of Stalin’s regime to any such interpretation. Yet the fact of
Thermidor, even the fact of formal restoration as in 1660 and 1814,
does not mean that revolution has changed nothing. We shall in the
next chapter attempt to answer the very difficult question: Just what
changes did these revolutions effect?
_Chapter_ NINE A SUMMARY OF THE WORK OF REVOLUTIONS
_I. Changes in Institutions and Ideas_
With that tendency to absolutism which common sense shares with
some more formal metaphysics, we are likely to think of the kind of
revolution we have been studying as a cataclysmic break with the past.
The revolution “marks a new era” or “ends forever the abuses of the old
regime” or “digs a gulf between the old X and the new.” On the other
hand, when disillusioned liberals like Mr. E. D. Martin come to turn
against the revolutionary tradition, they conclude as sweepingly that
in effect revolutions change nothing of importance--except perhaps
for the worse--that revolutions are unpleasant and perhaps avoidable
interludes in a nation’s history. Now it should be clear that our
present study of the English, American, French and Russian revolutions
can hardly permit any such absolute answers to the question: What
did these revolutions really change? Some institutions, some laws,
even some human habits, they clearly changed in very important ways;
other institutions, laws and habits they changed in the long run but
slightly, if at all. It may be that what they changed is more--or
less--significant for the sociologist than what they did not change.
But we cannot begin to decide this last matter until we have got the
actual changes straight. We are considering here, of course, those
changes which are apparent at the end of the revolutionary fever, those
changes which the history books are likely to catalogue as “permanent.”
With the changes promised but not achieved by the extremists, as with
the many dramatic changes in the lives of the individual actors in the
revolution, we are not here directly concerned at the moment.
Politically the revolution ends the worst abuses, the worst
inefficiencies of the old regime. It settles for a time at least the
kind of internal conflict out of which the “dual sovereignty” arose.
The machinery of government works more smoothly after than immediately
before the revolution. France is here a typical case. The old
overlapping jurisdictions, the confusions and the compromises inherited
from the thousand-year struggle between the centripetal forces of the
Crown and the centrifugal forces of the feudal nobility, the welter of
accumulated precedents, were all replaced by the work of the French
revolution. An able bureaucracy operating within neatly subordinated
administrative areas, a legal system efficiently codified, an excellent
army well staffed and well provided for, enabled Napoleon to do much
that his Bourbon predecessors could not possibly have done. Tocqueville
long ago pointed out that the French revolution came to complete the
work of a long line of French monarchs, to make centralized power in
France effective and complete.
Here is one detail among many. In the old France, weights and measures
varied from region to region, indeed from town to town. A bushel at
Toulouse might be much more than a bushel at neighboring Montauban.
Worse yet, the very names of measures might be wholly different words.
The coinage was, like the present English coinage, partly duodecimal,
and very hard to handle by long division. What the revolution did about
all this is familiar to every schoolboy. It substituted the uniform
system of weights and measures known as the metric system, a system
which has made its way without benefit of revolution through most of
the world outside the British Empire and the United States.
This achievement of governmental efficiency is really the most striking
uniformity we can note in estimating the political changes effected
by our revolutions. With suitable allowances for local differences,
for accidents and for the inevitable residue of the unique with which
all history and sociology must deal, England, America, and Russia also
emerged from their revolutions with more efficient and more centralized
governments. The process is less clear in England, partly because it
took place before the full maturing of economic and cultural forces
tending to promote such forms of efficiency as the metric system
or the _Code Napoléon_. But, for all its complexities, the English
government after 1660 was much better geared to the needs of the nation
of shopkeepers than was the England of 1620, with knights’ fees, ship
money, benevolences, Star Chamber, Court of High Commission, and the
other appurtenances of the immature Stuart despotism. Parliament after
1660 was more completely master of England than the first two Stuarts
had been.
Russia is in this respect as in so many still a subject for dispute.
Violent opponents of Stalin insist that the new bureaucrats are just as
inefficient, pettily tyrannical and stupid as they were said to have
been under the Czars. Some of the sentiments involved in statements of
this sort would seem to be more or less a constant of Russian life, and
to a certain extent of life under any government. Gogol’s admirable
comedy, _The Inspector-General_, deals as certainly with uniformities
as any scientist could. Yet all in all future historians will probably
have to admit that as a piece of political machinery the soviet system
worked better than did that of the Czars, that the soviet bureaucracy
was on the whole a more capable one than that of the Czars. You may
not like the first Five Year Plan, but you must admit that beneath its
parade of statistics lies a concrete economic achievement greater than
anything the old regime could show for a similar period.
These revolutions were all made in the name of freedom, were all
directed against the tyranny of the few and towards the rule of the
many. This whole phase of revolutions is peculiarly involved with the
existence of certain sentiments in human beings which make it very hard
to apply the methods of science to the study of men in society. Yet
it would seem that the full importance of such matters as democracy,
civil rights, written constitutions, and indeed the whole apparatus
of popular government lies rather within that vague and important
field the Marxists like to call ideology than in the field of concrete
political agencies which we are now studying. Certainly one is struck
by the fact that all our revolutions promoted the efficiency of the
government rather than the “right” of the individual to a romantic
freedom to be himself. Even the traditional apparatus of popular
government can be analyzed as an instrument to get things done in a
particular situation, however strange such an analysis might seem to
conventionally minded contemporaries of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin.
Bills of Rights, codes, and constitutions were in effect charters of
the new ruling classes. Liberty as an ideal was one thing; liberty in
politics was another and less exalted matter.
These revolutions all saw much transfer of property by confiscation or
forced sale. They saw the fall of one ruling class and its succession
by another ruling class recruited in part, at least, from individuals
who were before the revolution outside the ruling class. They were
accompanied by a definite and concrete demand for the abolition of
poverty, for the equal sharing of wealth; the men who guided the
Russian revolution continued long after its crisis period to insist
that they were economic egalitarians, that Russia would not recognize
private property in land and in capital goods. Marxist thought still
separates our four revolutions into two different classes: the English,
French, and American, all of which it considers to have been in their
final results “bourgeois” revolutions, inevitable victories of business
and industry over landed aristocracy; and the Russian revolution, in
its final phases a true “proletarian” revolution. We may nevertheless
be more impressed with the fact that in all four revolutions economic
power changed hands, and that a newly amalgamated “ruling class” in the
new Russia as in the new France directed the economic as well as the
political life of the society.
In more detail, the English revolution took land from the more devoted
Cavaliers and ecclesiastical property from the more unyielding
Episcopalians and Presbyterians and gave it to typical Puritans,
business men and clergymen alike. The church livings came back at the
Restoration of 1660 into Anglican hands, but save for the property
of a few great lords very close to Charles II, confiscated Royalist
lands remained in the possession of their new owners. Most of these
owners made their peace with the Stuart government, and thus was laid
the foundation for the ruling class under which England won an empire
in the next two centuries, a ruling class in which landed wealth and
industrial wealth were almost inextricably mixed, and which proved to
be a very good ruling class.
The concrete economic changes in France follow a similar pattern.
Lands confiscated from clergy and _émigré_ nobles were acquired by
revolutionists, and for the most part remained in the possession of the
purchasers even after the Restoration of 1814. Much of this land no
doubt finally ended up in the possession of small independent peasants,
and helped to put the final touches on the establishment of that very
French class, universally regarded among writers and politicians as
the core of modern France. But much of this transaction also benefited
the middle class, and certainly the French ruling class _after_ the
revolution represents as striking a mixture of old wealth and new, of
land and trade, as did the English.
In Russia the differences are not as great as they ought to be
according to Marxist theory. There has been a transfer of economic
power from one group to another rather than an equal sharing of
economic power, an equal distribution of consumers’ goods, an end
of struggle over economic goods or power--but you may put the
Marxist formula as you like. The new Russian bureaucracy seems to
be a privileged class which enjoys wealth in the form of consumers’
goods without yet possessing it in the forms we conventionally call
“property.” At any rate, almost all reporters are agreed that in Russia
in 1938 there is nothing like an equal distribution of consumers’
goods. What seems to have taken place is a development of the lines of
movement of Russian economic history. Just as the French revolution
put the finishing touches on the position of the peasantry, but by no
means “gave” them the land suddenly, so the present status of Russian
agriculture and industry seems to be a development of slavophile and
other elements favoring collective farming over the _kulaks_, and of
almost world-wide tendencies favoring large-scale bureaucratically
managed industry over small independent competitive concerns. Here as
in other countries the revolution certainly does not draw institutions
out of a hat--nor out of a book, not even out of so impressive a book
as _Das Kapital_.
None of these revolutions quite substituted a brand-new ruling class
for the old one, at least not unless one thinks of a “class” without
bothering about the human beings who make up the class, which is a
favorite procedure of the Marxists. What happens is that by the end of
the convalescent period there is well begun a kind of amalgamation,
in which the enterprising, adaptable, or lucky individuals of the old
privileged classes are for most practical purposes tied up with those
individuals of the old suppressed classes who, probably through the
same gifts, were able to rise. This _amalgame_ is especially noticeable
in the army and the civil service, but it is almost as conspicuous in
business and industry, and higher politics. A detailed study of the
social origins of Bonaparte’s officers, or the officers in the present
Red Army, or of the men who actually ran the government of England in
1670, France in 1810, Russia in 1938, would certainly confirm this
analysis. Moreover, the new men in the post-revolutionary ruling
classes have made distinct compromises with the older ones, with that
old world from which the crisis period of the revolution is so extreme
a revulsion. Your Downings, Fouchés and Kalinins have no longer the
fine freedom a Trotsky can enjoy. They are no longer revolutionaries,
but rulers, and as such they are in some respects bound to “learn” from
their predecessors.
It is in the social arrangements that most intimately and immediately
touch the average man that the actual changes effected by our
revolutions seem slightest. The grand attempts at reform during the
crisis period try to alter John Jones’s relations with his wife, his
children, try to give him a new religion, new personal habits. The
Thermidoreans abandon most of this attempt, and in the end John Jones
stands on certain matters about where he stood when the revolution
began. Our study of revolutions should confirm something that sensible
men have always known and that exasperated reformers have occasionally
come to admit, at least to themselves--that in some very important ways
the behavior of men changes with a slowness almost comparable to the
kind of change the geologist studies.
We may take as an illustration of the foregoing uniformity the attempts
of certain of our revolutionists to alter radically and quickly phases
of the law of the family. Le Play has shown that the uniformities of
the family are among the stablest and most persistent things in our
Western civilization. The ardent Leftist revolutionist in the last
few centuries has, therefore, naturally enough, tended to dislike
this monogamous Christian family, to him a bulwark of individual
selfishness, social snobbery, intellectual stuffiness, snarled up with
testamentary red tape, dedicated to the myth of masculine superiority,
hardened into rigidity by religious sanctions, a festering center which
must be cleaned up before men and women can live as God, Nature, or
Science intended them to live. The French revolution saw no widespread
attempt to destroy the family, and indeed its generally middle-class
course is filled with pious praise of the family virtues. But the
humanitarians did put through some far-reaching legislation in this
field, such as generous laws of adoption and other measures tending
to break down the rigid, almost Roman, family law of the old regime.
Notably they attempted to make illegitimate children absolutely equal
in every respect with legitimate children. As the law to put this
into effect was passed, a glowing orator remarked: “There are no more
bastards in France.” We need hardly add that he was mistaken. In a
monograph on _French Revolutionary Legislation on Illegitimacy_,
the present author has tried to show how even the good bourgeois who
passed this law were emotionally too entangled in the traditional
family feelings to try to put it into effect. They _said_ that bastards
were free and equal to legitimate children; but they could not bring
themselves to _act_ as if they really believed or wanted it to be
so. On the whole, the traditional family in its French form emerged
unscathed from the revolution.
Russia has seen a much more determined attack on the monogamous
Christian family, legislation making divorce even easier than in
Nevada, legalizing abortion, encouraging collective household
arrangements, establishing _crèches_ and kindergartens, bringing
children up as far as possible outside the home, and so on. Let there
be no misunderstanding. Russian idealists who sought to do all of
this were not nasty-minded folk seeking to make life easier for the
sensualist. Quite the contrary, they had, as we have tried very hard
to show, a strong streak of Puritanism. To this day, a young Russian
Communist would be shocked to the fibers of his being at the sight of
almost any American newspaper and periodical stand. These idealists
thought the bourgeois family corrupting, and agreed with Mr. Shaw
that marriage combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum
of opportunity. Their legislation was aimed at achieving the ideals
behind Christian monogamy though destroying what they regarded as the
corrupting family institutions within which it was hedged.
Here again we are not in the position of historians working with
good sources, but through the conflicting reports coming to us from
Russia of the 1930’s we can make out that the reformers have failed,
that the Christian monogamous family has survived the old Bolsheviks
in Russia. Recent legislation, as we have seen, has not only hedged
legalized abortion so much as to limit it to cases of the strictest
medical necessity, but has actually set up premiums for large families.
Divorce has been made more difficult. Filial piety and indeed all the
conventional bourgeois family virtues are now in high honor in press,
movie, stage, and school.
To take a very specific example, homosexuality was, for the old
Bolsheviks, an abnormality, possibly open to medical treatment, but not
of course a crime. They didn’t like it, but they were too consistent
and open-minded to treat it as a crime. Naturally they had no narrow
bourgeois disgust for the practice. But in March, 1934, homosexuality
was made a crime with a three- to eight-year prison penalty. We cannot
refrain from adding that the Webbs explain this with their usual
obligingness: “It is understood that this action followed the discovery
of centers of demoralization of boys, due to the influence of certain
foreigners, who were summarily expelled from soviet territory.” But
even with the foreigners expelled, Russia retains the law. The fact is
that Russian _sentiments_ on the subject of homosexuality are nearly
constant; only Russian _ideas_ on the subject are variable, and in the
long run the constant prevails.
The whole subject of change in the routines of the daily life of John
Jones, in the more intimate of his relations with his fellows and his
environment, is none too well explored. Here again common sense, with
its decisive “human nature doesn’t change,” is much too absolute. But
it does appear that our revolutions had but slight permanent effect on
the important little things of life for John Jones. What is perhaps
loosely called the “Industrial Revolution” had certainly a much greater
effect, forced John into a more difficult series of adjustments than
did our revolutions. And none of our societies seems to have undergone
changes as complete as those undergone by Turkish society since the
World War or by Japanese society in the last fifty years. It is
tempting to record the apparent paradox that Western society is in
some respects more slow to change than Eastern society. But the truth
is much more complex than any such paradox. Both the Turks and the
Japanese seem to have preserved intact through social and economic
change a series of national disciplines. In our Western societies,
family, moral and religious disciplines have in a similar way served as
a balance to very important social and economic changes, of which the
revolutions we have studied are only a part.
Modern Western society has indeed gone through in the last few
centuries changes so continuous that, if we adopt the very plausible
concept of social equilibrium, we must expect to find certain forces
pulling in the opposite direction, in the direction of stability. These
forces are not as a rule articulate. They do not seem to interest
intellectuals as much as do forces making for change. They are perhaps
a bit undignified, and certainly undramatic. Insofar as they do get
themselves translated into language, they appear in a variety of
logical disguises difficult to penetrate. But they are there, and
as we have seen, they set a definite limit to what the reformer or
revolutionist can do. Bastardy can hardly stand up against logic or
biology; but bastardy exists by virtue neither of logic nor of biology,
but by virtue of well-established, slow-changing human sentiments. Men
may feel tearfully sorry for poor children stigmatized from birth for
something clearly not their fault; but hitherto not even revolution
has prevailed against those perhaps ignoble but certainly persistent
sentiments behind the “man-made” and “artificial” distinction between
children born after a certain rite has been performed and those born
without benefit of such a rite. The rite seems fragile, changeable,
unimportant--a mere matter of trivial words and gestures. Actually it
has proved effective against much grander words and more striking
gestures, as well as against whole batteries of logic. For it is, to
use Pareto’s terminology, associated with the “persistent aggregates,”
patterns of sentiments and behavior very slow to change.
All this amounts to the statement that in our Western society men have
continued to hold certain sentiments and to conform to certain set ways
of doing things even after they have changed what they say about these
sentiments and these acts. Our revolutions seem in many ways to have
changed men’s minds more completely than they changed men’s habits.
This is by no means to say that they changed nothing at all, that what
men think is of no importance. Ideas are not quite magicians in this
world, or Robespierre would not have fallen, and Trotsky would today be
in Moscow and not in Mexico. But they are not to be dismissed as having
no part in the social change. Indeed, what our Marxist friends would
call the “ideological” changes effected by our revolutions deserve
careful consideration.
One may distinguish two contrasting roles played by these ideas born
of revolution. First, our revolutions in the end would seem to have
taken the sting out of the radical ideas and slogans of their early
days. They achieved the necessary miracle of reconciling aspiring men
to the substantial failure of their aspirations. They turned what were
originally verbal instruments of revolt, means of moving men to social
action against the existing order, into something we shall have to be
up-to-date and call the myths, folklore, symbols, stereotypes, rituals,
of their respective societies. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” which
once was the trumpet call to the storming of heaven on earth, is now
in the Third French Republic no more than a bit of national liturgy, a
comforting reminder that Frenchmen are the privileged heirs of a heroic
past. There are signs that in Russia even so explosive a phrase as
“Workers of the world, unite!” can be accommodated to the conservative,
restraining necessities of ritual. After all, as too-logical radicals
have pointed out, the Bible itself is full of good revolutionary
doctrine; what organized Christianity has done with the Bible organized
Communism ought to be able to do with a much simpler book like _Das
Kapital_.
A second role is a more positive one. Even in their use as ritual,
these ideas are not purely passive, mere bits of mumbo-jumbo. We cannot
here go into the important and involved question of the role of these
myths and symbols in a society. We certainly must avoid the stupid
question as to whether such symbols “cause” any kind of social change.
Here as almost everywhere in the social sciences the cart-and-horse
formula of causation is useless, and indeed misleading. Sufficient
for us that in all our societies we find that the memory of the great
revolution is enshrined in practices that seem to be an essential
part of the national state as a going concern. Insofar as men are
today in England, France, America, and Russia heartened by awareness
of membership in a nation, guided perhaps, and certainly consoled, by
the nobler and more abstract beliefs, made conscious of some kind of
security, of a status, by all sorts of ritualistic acts associated with
the State or with the Church as a department of the State, fortified
by the prospects still held out in the grand words of a Milton,
a Jefferson, a Danton, a Lenin--insofar as men are so moved, the
revolutions we have studied have given largely to the content of their
emotions. In England, in America, in France, the memory of their great
overturns has become a factor in the stability of existing society:
in Russia, unless all signs fail, a similar state of affairs has just
about been reached.
Yet our revolutions have also left behind a tradition of successful
revolt. What is to established, contented, conforming, conventional
men merely a ritualistic satisfaction, remains for discontented men a
spur to activate their discontent. Our modern Western revolutionary
tradition is to a certain extent cumulative, and the latest
revolutionists in the tradition, the Russians, have carried their
awareness of revolutionary history almost to an obsession. Trotsky,
for instance, though he naturally never uses the conceptual scheme of
the fever as we have employed it, seems constantly to be watching the
course of the Russian revolution almost clinically, constantly looking
for events to take courses observed before in France, in England,
or wherever men have revolted in the name of the many against the
few. If Mussolini and Hitler are equally interested in such clinical
observations, this is but proof of our modern assumption that there are
uniformities in history.
Again this tradition of revolt is an imponderable, but it seems to
have gone into the making of the Western democracies, and to be one
of the elements that is in its full form lacking in the development
of Italy and Germany, where democratic revolutions have been abortive
or at best unimpressive. To state the existence of this revolutionary
tradition is not necessarily to make a judgment of value. We bring
it forth as an observable fact, one not to be effectively denied by
partisans of any stripe. Its exact influence in the complex equilibrium
of our present societies we cannot here attempt to determine. Notably,
we find great difficulties in estimating how far it has taken root in
Russia. Possibly the Communism of Stalin is but “fascism of the Left.”
But the whole temper of the Western democracies is influenced, surely,
by the fact that they were born of one kind of revolution, with one
kind of “ideal”--that is still best summarized as “Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity.”
_II. Some Tentative Uniformities_
When all necessary concessions are made to those who insist that events
in history are unique, it remains true that the four revolutions we
have studied do display some striking uniformities. Our conceptual
scheme of the fever can be worked out so as to bring these uniformities
clearly to mind. We shall find it worth while, in attempting to
summarize the work of these revolutions, to recapitulate briefly the
main points of comparison on which our uniformities are based.
We must be very tentative about the prodromal symptoms of revolution.
Even retrospectively, diagnosis of the four societies we studied was
very difficult, and there is little ground for belief that anyone today
has enough knowledge and skill to apply formal methods of diagnosis to
a contemporary society and say, in this case revolution will or will
not occur shortly. But some uniformities do emerge from a study of the
old regimes in England, America, France, and Russia.
First, these were all societies on the whole on the upgrade
economically before the revolution came, and the revolutionary
movements seem to originate in the discontents of not unprosperous
people who feel restraint, cramp, annoyance, rather than downright
crushing oppression. Certainly these revolutions are not started by
down-and-outers, by starving, miserable people. These revolutionists
are not worms turning, not children of despair. These revolutions are
born of hope, and their philosophies are formally optimistic.
Second, we find in our pre-revolutionary society definite and indeed
very bitter class antagonisms, though these antagonisms seem rather
more complicated than the cruder Marxists will allow. It is not a case
of feudal nobility against bourgeoisie in 1640, 1776, and 1789, or
of bourgeoisie against proletariat in 1917. The strongest feelings
seem generated in the bosoms of men--and women--who have made money,
or at least who have enough to live on, and who contemplate bitterly
the imperfections of a socially privileged aristocracy. Revolutions
seem more likely when social classes are fairly close together than
when they are far apart. “Untouchables” very rarely revolt against
a God-given aristocracy, and Haiti gives one of the few examples of
successful slave revolutions. But rich merchants whose daughters
can marry aristocrats are likely to feel that God is at least as
interested in merchants as in aristocrats. It is difficult to say why
the bitterness of feeling between classes almost equal socially seems
so much stronger in some societies than others--why, for instance, a
Marie Antoinette should be so much more hated than a Barbara Hutton;
but at any rate the existence of such bitterness can be observed in our
pre-revolutionary societies, which is, clinically speaking, enough for
the moment.
Third, there is what we have called the desertion of the intellectuals.
This is in some respects the most reliable of the symptoms we are
likely to meet. Here again we need not try to explain all the hows and
whys, need not try to tie up the desertion of the intellectuals with a
grand and complete sociology of revolutions. We need state simply that
it can be observed in all four of our societies.
Fourth, the governmental machinery is clearly inefficient, partly
through neglect, through a failure to make changes in old institutions,
partly because new conditions--in the societies we have studied,
pretty specifically conditions attendant on economic expansion and
the growth of new monied classes, new ways of transportation, new
business methods--these new conditions laid an intolerable strain on
governmental machinery adapted to simpler, more primitive, conditions.
Fifth, the old ruling class--or rather, many individuals of the old
ruling class--come to distrust themselves, or lose faith in the
traditions and habits of their class, grow intellectual, humanitarian,
or go over to the attacking groups. Perhaps a larger number of them
than usual lead lives we shall have to call immoral, dissolute, though
one cannot be as sure about this as a symptom as about the loss of
habits and traditions effective among a ruling class. At any rate, the
ruling class becomes politically inept.
The dramatic events that start things moving, that bring on the
fever of revolution, are in three of our four revolutions intimately
connected with the financial administration of the state. In the
fourth, Russia, the breakdown of administration under the burdens of an
unsuccessful war is only in part financial. But in all our societies
the inefficiency and inadequacy of the governmental structure of the
society come out clearly in the very first stages of the revolution.
There is a time--the first few weeks or months--when it looks as if a
determined use of force on the part of the government might prevent the
mounting excitement from culminating in an overthrow of the government.
These governments attempted such a use of force in all four instances,
and in all four their attempt was a failure. This failure indeed proved
a turning point during the first stages, and set up the revolutionists
in power.
Yet one is impressed in all four instances more with the ineptitude of
the governments’ use of force than with the skill of their opponents’
use of force. We are here speaking of the situation wholly from a
military and police point of view. It may be that the majority of
the people are discontented, loathe the existing government, wish
it overthrown. Nobody knows. They don’t take plebiscites _before_
revolutions. In the actual clash--even Bastille Day, Concord, or
the February Days in Petrograd--only a minority of the people is
actively engaged. But the government hold over its own troops is
poor, its troops fight half-heartedly or desert, its commanders are
stupid, its enemies acquire a nucleus of the deserting troops or of a
previous militia, and the old gives place to the new. Yet, such is the
conservative and routine-loving nature of the bulk of human beings, so
strong are habits of obedience in most of them, that it is almost safe
to say that no government is likely to be overthrown until it loses the
ability to make adequate use of its military and police powers. That
loss of ability may show itself in the actual desertion of soldiers
and police to the revolutionists, or in the stupidity with which the
government manages its soldiers and police, or in both ways.
The events we have grouped under the name of first stages do not
of course unroll themselves in exactly the same order in time, nor
with exactly the same content, in all four of our revolutions. But
we have listed the major elements--and they fall into a pattern of
uniformities--financial breakdown, organization of the discontented to
remedy this breakdown (or threatened breakdown), revolutionary demands
on the part of these organized discontented, demands which if granted
would mean the virtual abdication of those governing, attempted use of
force by the government, its failure, and the attainment of power by
the revolutionists. These revolutionists have hitherto been acting as
an organized and nearly unanimous group, but with the attainment of
power it is clear that they are not united. The group which dominates
these first stages we call the moderates. They are not always in a
numerical majority in this stage--indeed it is pretty clear that if
you limit the moderates to the Kadets they were not in a majority in
Russia in February, 1917. But they seem the natural heirs of the old
government, and they have their chance. In three of our revolutions
they are sooner or later driven from office to death or exile.
Certainly there is to be seen in England, France and Russia a process
in which a series of crises--some involving violence, street-fighting
and the like--deposes one set of men and puts in power another and more
radical set. In these revolutions power passes by violent or at least
extra-legal methods from Right to Left, until at the crisis period the
extreme radicals, the complete revolutionists, are in power. There are,
as a matter of fact, usually a few even wilder and more lunatic fringes
of the triumphant extremists--but these are not numerous or strong
and are usually suppressed or otherwise made harmless by the dominant
radicals. It is therefore approximately true to say that power passes
on from Right to Left until it reaches the extreme Left.
The rule of the extremists we have called the crisis period. This
period was not reached in the American revolution, though in the
treatment of Loyalists, in the pressure to support the army, in some
of the phases of social life, you can discern in America many of the
phenomena of the Terror as it is seen in our three other societies.
We cannot here attempt to go into the complicated question as to why
the American revolution stopped short of a true crisis period, why the
moderates were never ousted in this country. We must repeat that we are
simply trying to establish certain uniformities of description, and are
not attempting a complete sociology of revolutions.
The extremists are helped to power no doubt by the existence of a
powerful pressure towards centralized strong government, something
which in general the moderates are not capable of providing,
while the extremists, with their discipline, their contempt for
half-measures, their willingness to make firm decisions, their
freedom from libertarian qualms, are quite able and willing to
centralize. Especially in France and Russia, where powerful foreign
enemies threatened the very existence of the nation, the machinery of
government during the crisis period was in part constructed to serve as
a government of national defense. Yet though modern wars, as we know
in this country, demand a centralization of authority, war alone does
not seem to account for all that happened in the crisis period in those
countries.
What does happen may be a bit oversimply summarized as follows:
emergency centralization of power in an administration, usually
a council or commission, and more or less dominated by a “strong
man”--Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin; government without any effective
protection for the normal civil rights of the individual--or if
this sounds unrealistic, let us say the normal private life of
the individual; setting up of extraordinary courts and a special
revolutionary police to carry out the decrees of the government and
to suppress all dissenting individuals or groups; all this machinery
ultimately built up from a relatively small group--Independents,
Jacobins, Bolsheviks--which has a monopoly on all governmental action.
Finally, governmental action becomes a much greater part of all
human action than in these societies in their normal condition: this
apparatus of government is set to work indifferently on the mountains
and molehills of human life--it is used to pry into and poke about
corners normally reserved for priest or physician, or friend, and it
is used to regulate, control, plan, the production and distribution of
economic wealth on a national scale.
This pervasiveness of the Reign of Terror in the crisis period is
partly explicable in terms of the pressure of war necessities and
of economic struggles as well as of other variables: but it must
probably also be explained as in part the manifestation of an effort
to achieve intensely religious ends here on earth. The little band of
violent revolutionists who form the nucleus of all action during the
Terror behave as men have been observed to behave before when under
the influence of active religious faith. Independents, Jacobins,
Bolsheviks, all sought to make all human activity here on earth conform
to an ideal pattern, which, like all such patterns, seems deeply rooted
in their sentiments. A striking uniformity in all these patterns is
their asceticism, or if you prefer, their condemnation of what we
may call the minor as well as the major vices. Essentially, however,
these patterns are a good deal alike, and all resemble closely what we
may call conventional Christian ethics. Independents, Jacobins, and
Bolsheviks, at least during the crisis period, really make an effort to
enforce behavior in literal conformity with these codes or patterns.
Such an effort means stern repression of much that many men have been
used to regarding as normal; it means a kind of universal tension in
which the ordinary individual can never feel protected by the humble
routines to which he has been formed: it means that the intricate
network of interactions among individuals--a network which is still
to the few men devoted to its intelligent study almost a complete
mystery--this network is temporarily all torn apart. John Jones, the
man in the street, the ordinary man, is left floundering.
We are almost at the point of being carried away into the belief that
our conceptual scheme is something more than a mere convenience, that
it does somehow describe “reality.” At the crisis, the collective
patient does seem helpless, thrashing his way through a delirium.
But we must try to avoid the emotional, metaphorical appeal, and
concentrate on making clear what seems to be the really important point
here. Most of us are familiar with the favorite old Tory metaphor:
the violent revolutionist tears down the noble edifice society lives
in, or burns it down, and then fails to build up another, and poor
human beings are left naked to the skies. That is not a good metaphor,
save perhaps for purposes of Tory propaganda. Even at the height of a
revolutionary crisis period, more of the old building is left standing
than is destroyed. But the whole metaphor of the building is bad. We
may take instead an analogy from the human nervous system, or think
of an immensely complicated gridwork of electrical communications.
Society then appears as a kind of a network of interactions among
individuals, interactions for the most part fixed by habit, hardened
and perhaps adorned as ritual, dignified into meaning and beauty
by elaborately interwoven strands of interaction we know as law,
theology, metaphysics, and similar noble beliefs. Now sometimes many
of these interwoven strands of noble beliefs can be cut out, and
others inserted. During the crisis period of our revolutions some such
process seems to have taken place; but the whole network itself seems
so far never to have been altered suddenly and radically, and even the
noble beliefs tend to fit into the network in the same places. If you
kill off _all_ the people who live within the network, you don’t so
much change the network of course as destroy it. And in spite of our
prophets of doom, this type of destruction is rare in human history.
Certainly in none of our revolutions was there even a very close
approach to it.
What did happen, under the pressure of class struggle, war, religious
idealism, and a lot more, was that the hidden and obscure courses
which many of the interactions in the network follow were suddenly
exposed, and passage along them made difficult in the unusual
publicity and, so to speak, self-consciousness. The courses of other
interactions were blocked, and the interactions went on with the
greatest of difficulties by all sorts of detours. The courses of
still other interactions were confused, short-circuited, paired off
in strange ways. Finally, the pretensions of the fanatical leaders of
the revolution involved the attempted creation of a vast number of
new interactions. Now though for the most part these new interactions
affected chiefly those strands we have called the noble beliefs--law,
theology, metaphysics, mythology, folklore, high-power abstractions in
general--still some of them did penetrate at an experimental level into
the obscurer and less dignified part of the network of interactions
among human beings and put a further strain on it. Surely it is
no wonder that under these conditions men and women in the crisis
period should behave as they would not normally behave, that in the
crisis period nothing should seem as it used to seem, that, indeed, a
famous passage from Thucydides, written two thousand years before our
revolutions, should seem like a clinical report:
“When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed
carried the revolutionary spirit further and further, and determined
to outdo the report of all who had preceded them by the ingenuity of
the enterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of
words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by
them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal
courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the
disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing.
Frantic energy was the true quality of a man. A conspirator who
wanted to be safe was a recreant in disguise. The lover of violence
was always trusted, and his opponent suspected. He who succeeded
in a plot was deemed knowing, but a still greater master in craft
was he who detected one. On the other hand, he who plotted from the
first to have nothing to do with plots was a breaker up of parties
and a poltroon who was afraid of the enemy. In a word, he who could
outstrip another in a bad action was applauded, and so was he who
encouraged to evil one who had no idea of it.... The tie of party was
stronger than the tie of blood, because a partisan was more ready to
dare without asking why.”
With this we may put a quotation from a much humbler source, an obscure
Siberian co-operative leader protesting against Red and White Terror
alike. Mr. Chamberlin quotes:
“And we ask and appeal to society, to the contending political
groups and parties: When will our much-suffering Russia outlive the
nightmare that is throttling it, when will deaths by violence cease?
Doesn’t horror seize you at the sight of the uninterrupted flow of
human blood? Doesn’t horror seize you at the consciousness that the
deepest, most elementary bases of the existence of human society are
perishing: the feeling of humanity, the consciousness of the value
of life, of human personality, the feeling and consciousness of the
necessity of legal order in the state?... Hear our cry and despair:
we return to prehistoric times of the existence of the human race; we
are on the verge of the death of civilization and culture; we destroy
the great cause of human progress, for which many generations of our
worthier ancestors labored.”
Certainly, however, none of our revolutions quite ended in the death
of civilization and culture. The network was stronger than the forces
trying to destroy or alter it, and in all of our societies the crisis
period was followed by a convalescence, by a return to most of the
simpler and more fundamental courses taken by interactions in the
old network. More especially, the religious lust for perfection,
the crusade for the Republic of Virtue, died out, save among a tiny
minority whose actions could not longer take place directly in
politics. An active, proselyting, intolerant, ascetic, chiliastic faith
became fairly rapidly an inactive, indifferent, worldly, ritualistic
faith.
The equilibrium has been restored and the revolution is over. But this
does not mean that nothing has been changed. Some new and useful tracks
or courses in the network of interactions that makes society have been
established, some old and inconvenient ones--you may call them unjust
if you like--have been eliminated. There is something heartless in
saying that it took the French revolution to produce the metric system
and to destroy _lods et ventes_ and similar feudal inconveniences,
or the Russian revolution to bring Russia to use the modern calendar
and to eliminate a few useless letters in the Russian alphabet.
These tangible and useful results look rather petty as measured by
the brotherhood of man and the achievement of justice on this earth.
The blood of the martyrs seems hardly necessary to establish decimal
coinage.
Yet those who feel that revolution is heroic need not despair. The
revolutionary tradition is an heroic one, and the noble beliefs which
seem necessary to all societies are in our Western democracies in part
a product of the revolutions we have been studying. Our revolutions
made tremendous and valuable additions to those strands in the
network of human interactions which can be isolated as law, theology,
metaphysics and, in the abstract sense, ethics. Had these revolutions
never occurred, you and I might still beat our wives or cheat at cards
or avoid walking under ladders, but we might not be able to rejoice in
our possession of certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, or in the comforting assurance that one more push
will bring the classless society.
When one compares the whole course of these revolutions, certain
tentative uniformities suggest themselves. If the Russian revolution at
the end of our series is compared with the English at its beginning,
there seems to be a development of conscious revolutionary technique.
This is of course especially clear since Marx made the history of
revolutionary movements of the past a necessary preparation for
revolutionists of the present. Lenin and his collaborators had a
training in the technique of insurrection which Independents and
Jacobins lacked. Robespierre seems almost a political innocent
when his revolutionary training is compared with that of any good
Bolshevik leader. Sam Adams, it must be admitted, seems a good deal
less innocent. All in all, it is probable that this difference in the
explicitness of self-conscious preparation for revolution, this growth
of a copious literature of revolution, this increasing familiarity of
revolutionary ideas, is not one of the very important uniformities we
have to record. It is a conspicuous uniformity, but not an important
one. Revolutions are still not a form of logical action. The Bolsheviks
do not seem to have guided their actions by the “scientific” study of
revolutions to an appreciably greater degree than the Independents or
the Jacobins. They simply adapted an old technique to the days of the
telegraph and railroad trains.
This last suggests another conspicuous but not very important tendency
in our four revolutions. They took place in societies increasingly
influenced by the “Industrial Revolution,” increasingly subject to
those changes in scale which our modern conquests of time and space
have brought to societies. Thus the Russian revolution directly
affected more people and more square miles of territory than any
previous revolution; its sequence of events compresses into a few
months what in England in the seventeenth century had taken years to
achieve; in its use of the printing press, telegraph, radio, airplanes
and the rest it seems, as compared with our other revolutions,
definitely a streamlined affair. But again we may well doubt whether
such changes of scale are in themselves really important factors. Men’s
desires are the same, whether they ride towards their achievement in
airplanes or on horseback. Revolutions may be bigger nowadays, but
surely not better. The loudspeaker does not change the words.
Finally, at the risk of being tedious, we must come back to some of the
problems of methods in the social sciences which were suggested in our
first chapter. We must admit that the theorems, the uniformities, which
we have been able to put forward in terms of our conceptual scheme, are
vague. They cannot be stated in quantitative terms, cannot be used for
purposes of prediction or control. But at the very outset we warned the
reader not to expect too much. Even such vague theorems as that of the
desertion of the intellectuals, that of the role of force in the first
stages of revolution, that of the part played by “religious” enthusiasm
in the period of crisis, that of the pursuit of pleasure during
Thermidor, are, one hopes, not without value for the study of men in
society. In themselves they amount to little, but they suggest certain
possibilities in further work.
In the first place, by their very inadequacies they point to the
necessity for a more rigorous treatment of the problems involved,
challenging those who find them incomplete and unsatisfactory to do a
better job. In the second place, they will serve the purpose of all
first approximations in scientific work--they will suggest further
study of the facts, especially in those fields where the attempt to
make first approximations has uncovered an insufficient supply of
the necessary facts. Notably here the facts for a study of class
antagonisms are woefully inadequate. So, too, are the facts for a study
of the circulation of the elite in pre-revolutionary societies. But
there are a hundred such holes, some of which can surely be filled.
Our first approximations will then lead the way to another’s second
approximations. No scientist should ask more.
_III. A Paradox of Revolution_
Wider uniformities will, to judge by the past of science, some day
emerge from more complete studies of the sociology of revolutions. Here
we dare not hazard much that we have not already brought out in the
course of our analysis of four specific revolutions. After all, these
are but four revolutions of what seems to be the same type, revolutions
in what may be not too uncritically called the democratic tradition.
So precious a word is “revolution” to many in that tradition, and
especially to Marxists, that they indignantly refuse to apply it to
such movements as the relatively bloodless but certainly violent and
illegal assumption of power by Mussolini or Hitler. These movements,
we are told, were not revolutions because they did not take power from
one class and give it to another. Obviously with a word in some ways
as imprecise as “revolution” you can play all sorts of tricks like
this. But for the scientific study of social change it seems wise to
apply the word revolution to the overthrow of an established and legal
parliamentary government by Fascists. If this is so, then our four
revolutions are but one kind of revolution, and we must not attempt
to make them bear the strain of generalizations meant to apply to all
revolutions.
It is even more tempting to try to fit these revolutions into something
like a philosophy of history. But the philosophy of history is almost
bound to lead into the kind of prophetic activity we have already
firmly forsworn. It may be that mankind is now in the midst of a
universal “time of troubles” from which it will emerge into some
kind of universal authoritarian order. It may be that the democratic
revolutionary tradition is no longer a living and effective one. It
may be that the revolutions we have studied could only have taken
place in societies in which “progress” was made a concrete thing
by opportunities for economic expansion which cannot recur in our
contemporary world, with no more frontiers and no more big families.
It may even be that the Marxists are right, and that imperialistic
capitalism is now digging its own grave, preparing the inevitable
if long-delayed world revolution of the proletariat. There are many
possibilities, as to which it is almost true that one man’s guess is
as good as another’s. Certainly a conscientious effort to study four
great revolutions in the modern world as a scientist might cannot end
in anything as ambitious and as unscientific as social prognosis.
We need not, however, end on a note of blank skepticism. It would
seem that there are, from the study of these revolutions, three major
conclusions to be drawn: first, that, in spite of their undeniable and
dramatic differences, they do present certain simple uniformities of
the kind we have tried to bring together under our conceptual scheme of
the fever; second, that they point sharply to the necessity of studying
men’s deeds and men’s words without assuming that there is always a
logical connection between the two, since throughout their courses,
and especially at their crises, they frequently exhibit men saying one
thing and doing another; third, that they indicate that in general many
things men do, many human habits, sentiments, dispositions, cannot
be changed at all rapidly, that the attempt made by the extremists
to change them by law, terror, and exhortation fails, that the
convalescence brings them back not greatly altered.
As to what the experience of a great revolution does to the society
that experiences it, we cannot conclude here too widely without
trespassing on wider fields of history and sociology. Yet it does seem
that the patient emerges stronger in some respects from the conquered
fever, immunized in this way and that from attacks that might be more
serious. It is an observable fact that in all our societies there was
a certain flourishing, a peak of varied cultural achievements, after
the revolutions. Certainly we may not moralize too much about the
stupidities and cruelties of revolutions, may not lift up our hands in
horror. It is quite possible that wider study would show that feeble
and decadent societies do not undergo revolutions, that revolutions
are, perversely, a sign of strength and youth in societies.
Certainly one quiet person emerges from his study, not indeed untouched
by a good deal of horror and disgust, but moved also with admiration
for a deep and unfathomable strength in men which, because of the
softer connotations of the word, he is reluctant to call spiritual.
Montaigne saw and felt it long ago: “I see not one action, or three,
or a hundred, but a commonly accepted state of morality so unnatural,
especially as regards inhumanity and treachery, which are to me the
worst of all sins, that I have not the heart to think of them without
horror; and they excite my wonder almost as much as my detestation.
_The practice of these egregious villainies has as much the mark of
strength and vigor of soul as of error and disorder._”
Berkman the anarchist, who loathes the Russian revolution, tells a
story which may represent merely his own bias, but which may none the
less serve as a brief symbolical epilogue to this study. Berkman says
he asked a good Bolshevik acquaintance during the period of attempted
complete communization under Lenin why the famous Moscow cabmen, the
izvoschiks, who continued in diminished numbers to flit about Moscow
and to get enormous sums in paper roubles for their services, were not
nationalized like practically everything else. The Bolshevik replied,
“We found that if you don’t feed human beings they continue to live
somehow. But if you don’t feed the horses, the stupid beasts die.
That’s why we don’t nationalize the cabmen.” That is not an altogether
cheerful story, and in some ways one may regret the human capacity
to live without eating. But clearly if we were as stupid--or as
sensible--as horses we should have no revolutions.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX
The following bibliography is not intended to be a scholarly one.
It does not even include all the somewhat varied sources which have
gone into this study of revolutions. It is intended solely as a guide
to individuals or groups who may wish to attempt the difficult but
rewarding study of revolutions. As such, it is merely suggestive, but
it is complete enough so that anyone using all the leads these books
and their bibliographies offer would soon find himself very completely
immersed in the subject.
_I. Historical Writing on the Four Revolutions_
The first part of this bibliography aims to introduce the reader to
some of the best-known historical writing about the four revolutions
with which we are here concerned. Some of the later and not yet tested
writing on these periods will also be included. But here least of all
could anything like completeness be attempted. A full bibliography of
French history alone from 1750 to 1815 would list books enough to fill
a library; at a guess, including pamphlets and articles in periodicals,
there would be well over three hundred thousand titles. Writings on
the Russian revolution are already almost as numerous, and even more
varied. The reader will simply find in these books an opportunity to
check the supply of facts from which we have attempted to discover
uniformities in the course of our revolutions.
A. ENGLAND
Eduard Bernstein, _Cromwell and Communism_. London, 1930. A belated
but useful translation of the famous revisionist’s _Sozialismus und
Demokratie in der grossen englischen Revolution_ which appeared in
German before the war. This is a necessary correction to the purely
political and conventional interests of Gardiner, and even of Firth.
L. F. Brown, _The Political Activities of the Baptists and Fifth
Monarchy Men in England during the Interregnum_. Washington, 1912.
C. H. Firth, _Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England_.
3rd edition. London, 1924. The great work of our generation on Cromwell.
S. R. Gardiner, _A History of England, 1603-1642_; _A History of
the Great Civil War, 1642-1649_; _A History of the Commonwealth and
Protectorate, 1649-1656_. Various editions and volumes. The whole work
is usually in some 17 volumes. This is the “classic” history of the
period, written in the last half of the nineteenth century. It is a
sound but rather dull political history, but it does not touch at all
on much that would interest us in the fields of economic, social, and
intellectual history.
G. P. Gooch, _English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century_. 2nd
edition with notes and appendices by H. J. Laski. Cambridge, England,
1927. Indispensable.
H. J. C. Grierson, _Cross Currents in English Literature of the
Seventeenth Century_. London, 1929. Excellent intellectual history.
T. C. Pease, _The Leveller Movement_. Washington, 1916. A very useful
monograph, especially as a corrective to Bernstein’s socialistic view
of Lilburne and the Levelers.
L. von Ranke, _A History of England principally in the Seventeenth
Century_. English translation, London, 1875. Another classic of
narrative history.
G. M. Trevelyan, _England under the Stuarts_. New York, 1930. Perhaps
the best of our modern manuals, though distinctly in the traditions
of pleasant British liberalism, which are always a bit shocked by the
facts of revolution. This book has a convenient bibliography.
B. AMERICA
C. W. Alvord, _The Mississippi Valley in British Politics_. 2 vols.
Cleveland, 1917. An important monograph opening up an important field
neglected in earlier studies of the American revolution.
C. M. Andrews, _Colonial Background of the American Revolution_. New
Haven, 1924.
C. L. Becker, _The Eve of the Revolution_ (Vol. 11 of the _Chronicles
of America_). New Haven, 1921. _The Declaration of Independence._ New
York, 1922. Both these books bring to the study of political change a
rare and thorough knowledge of how men think and feel.
G. L. Beer, _British Colonial Policy, 1754-1756_. New York, 1907. The
last volume of a thorough monographic treatment of the old British
Empire, especially with respect to matters of trade and taxation.
B. Faÿ, _The Revolutionary Spirit in France and in the United States_.
English translation, New York, 1927. Extremely valuable for the study
of ideas.
J. F. Jameson, _The American Revolution Considered as a Social
Movement_. Princeton, 1926. Suggestive, and in many ways a pioneer
essay. But a long and thorough monograph with the same title would be
useful. Recent Marxist attempts to do something of the sort have not
amounted to much.
J. C. Miller, _Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda_. Boston, 1936. One of
the best studies of revolutionary propaganda and technique available
for any revolution.
A. M. Schlesinger, _Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution_.
New York, 1918. This monograph brought the realistic study of the
American revolution a tremendous leap forward.
G. O. Trevelyan, _The American Revolution. George III and Charles
James Fox_, the concluding part of _The American Revolution_. Bound
with the above in a uniform edition of 6 vols., New York, 1920-1922.
This is a “classic” with the overtones of being dated which the word
often carries. Written by a distinguished Whig historian, it is more
favorable to American “rights” in the War of Independence than most of
the foregoing American books. It seems to our generation to omit very
important economic and social considerations.
M. C. Tyler, _The Literary History of the American Revolution_. 2 vols.
New York, 1897. Also a “classic” but not by any means dated.
C. H. Van Tyne, _A History of the Founding of the American Republic_.
2 vols. Boston, 1922, 1929. A standard work of professional historical
scholarship.
C. FRANCE
A. Aulard, _The French Revolution: A Political History_. English
translation. 4 vols., New York, 1910. The best example of official
Republican history of the great revolution, by one who was in some ways
a spiritual descendant of the Girondins. Leftist and anti-clerical bias.
C. Brinton, _A Decade of Revolution, 1789-1799_. New York, 1934.
G. Bruun, _Europe and the French Imperium, 1799-1814_. New York,
1938. This book and the preceding one, volumes 12 and 13 of _The
Rise of Modern Europe_, edited by W. L. Langer, provide a critical
bibliographical guide to the period of the French revolution, and
incorporate the important modern research in the field.
A. Cochin, _Les sociétés de pensée et la démocratie_. Paris, 1921.
Essential to the study of the work of pressure groups in the
preparation of the revolution. Conservative bias.
P. Gaxotte, _The French Revolution_. English translation, New York,
1932. Perhaps the most sensible of modern works written avowedly
from a point of view far to the Right--Royalist, in fact. But since
almost all Americans get their knowledge of the French revolution from
conventional anti-clerical Republican professors of the Third Republic,
Gaxotte’s work is recommended as an antidote.
A. Lichtenberger, _Le socialisme et la révolution française_. Paris,
1899.
A. Mathiez, _The French Revolution_. English translation, New
York, 1928. _La vie chère et le mouvement social sous la Terreur._
Paris, 1927. Mathiez was the heir of the Mountain as Aulard was of
the Gironde. Mathiez is a reliable investigator of facts, and he
was interested in the kind of facts we are now interested in. His
generalizations are ruled by an extremely innocent version of the
doctrine of economic interpretation of history. Although he indignantly
denied he was partisan, he clearly belongs rather far to the Left.
D. Mornet, _Les origines intellectuelles de la révolution française_.
Paris, 1933. Most of the necessary material implied in the title,
conveniently assembled. Mornet has conventional French Republican
notions about the role of the _philosophes_ in the preparation of the
revolution. Excellent bibliography.
F. Rocquain, _The Revolutionary Spirit preceding the French
Revolution_. English translation, abridged, London, 1894. An attempt to
lessen attention on the writings of the _philosophes_ and turn it to
concrete quarrels and grievances in the last years of the old regime.
H. A. Taine, _The Origins of Contemporary France_. English translation,
6 vols., New York, 1876-1894. The classic attack on the revolution
and all its works, written by a disappointed liberal and French
patriot after the War of 1870. Still a mine of information, though its
particular bias is no longer shared by many in the modern world.
D. RUSSIA
The total output of books on Russia since 1917 is enormous, and little
of it measures up to the more rigorous standards academic historians
like to impose. It is suggested that an intelligent reader of the
following would not, however, be hopelessly misinformed about the
movement, and could attempt to integrate his knowledge of what has been
going on in Russia with what has gone on in other modern revolutions.
W. R. Batsell, _Soviet Rule in Russia_. New York, 1929. A clear,
factual analysis of the machinery of government. The recent
constitutional changes do not seriously alter Batsell’s picture.
W. H. Chamberlin, _The Russian Revolution_. 2 vols., New York, 1935.
A careful piece of work, written by an American with a command of
Russian sources. Chamberlin is not a Communist, but save to more rigid
Marxists, his work will appear reasonably detached. Good bibliography.
Eugene Lyons, _Assignment in Utopia_. New York, 1937. Lyons is an
American radical whose long residence as a newspaper correspondent in
Russia turned him against Stalin’s rule. When allowance is made for
this bias, the book remains the best account in English of “Thermidor
in Russia”--though see under Trotsky below.
James Mavor, _The Russian Revolution_. New York, 1928. A brief account.
L. Trotsky, _The History of the Russian Revolution_. English
translation, 3 vols., New York, 1936 (also a single-volume edition).
This will probably be Trotsky’s masterpiece. A vivid narrative,
heightened by excursions into Marxist interpretation, mostly very keen
and even sensible. Chamberlin and Trotsky, read together, make the best
introduction possible to the study of the Russian revolution. Trotsky’s
_The Revolution Betrayed_, New York, 1937, is a bitter and interesting
attack on the present regime in Russia, which he himself has christened
“Thermidorean.”
S. and B. Webb, _Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?_, 2 vols.,
New York, 1936. For American readers, this is probably the best and
most persuasive defense of the present regime in Russia, and may be
recommended as an antidote to the writings of disenchanted liberals
and angry Trotskyites. But it is a very soft and academic book, and
the Webbs are surely at least as much doctrinaires as others who have
written on Russia.
_II. The Wisdom of the Ages_
The formal study of revolutions as a part of the science of sociology
is a very recent thing. But revolutions are not new, nor is serious
thinking on revolutions new. From Plato and Aristotle on one can
collect a very valuable set of remarks on different phases of
revolution, mostly from books not primarily concerned with revolutions.
We have not here attempted to do more than give a random sample of
what might be done with this sort of thing. Most of the men we have
chosen to cite below were not purely intellectuals in anything like the
modern sense, and it would seem that, unsystematic though this section
of our bibliography is, it contains more wisdom about revolutions than
our fourth section, in which we list a few contemporary works formally
concerned with the sociology of revolutions. Most contemporary writers
on matters sociological are of course intellectuals.
Plato, _The Republic_, especially Books VIII and IX.
Aristotle, _Politics_. Book V is the famous discussion of revolutions,
but the whole work, and especially Book II, is almost as pertinent.
Polybius, _History_. Book VI contains the well-known account of the
reasons for Roman political stability, which by contrast throws a good
deal of light on our subject, political instability.
Thucydides, _History_. Book III, 82.2 begins one of the best clinical
reports ever written on what we have called the crisis of revolutions.
Machiavelli, _Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius_. Almost
every chapter contains something of use for the student of revolution.
Book I, Chapters XXV and XXVI, are especially recommended for the
light they throw on differences between revolutions like those of
England and France and those of contemporary Turkey or Italy.
Sainte-Beuve, “Le Cardinal de Retz,” in _Causeries du Lundi_, vol.
5, especially the passage beginning “ces pages de ses Mémoires qu’on
pourrait intituler: _Comment les révolutions commencent_.” The
interested reader may well wish to follow this up by reading De Retz’s
own memoirs, which are easily available in numerous editions in French.
There is an English version in Everyman’s Library.
Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in France_. This by no means
dispassionate work none the less contains a good deal that no student
of revolutions can neglect.
Bagehot, _Physics and Politics_. This book, together with Maine’s
_Ancient Law_, sets forth a point of view about social change which
denies the possibility of achieving large-scale reforms by revolution.
Like the work of Burke, which they supplement and clarify, they must
be met and understood before the objective study of revolutions can be
carried very far.
Pareto, _The Mind and Society_. This is a study of general sociology,
almost all parts of which are germane to our purposes in this book.
Chapters IX and X deal especially with the problem of social stability
and instability, but are hard to understand without reference to the
rest of the work. A careful study of L. J. Henderson, _Pareto’s General
Sociology: A Physiologist’s Interpretation_ (Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1935) will help get around this difficulty. Pareto is cited here as in
a sense summing up, clarifying and codifying views about revolution
contained in this section of our bibliography. All such views--neither
“anti-intellectualist” nor “conservative” adequately describes
them--are anathema to most Marxists and “liberals” in present-day
America. But they have been held so long and so firmly by men who were
not altogether fools nor villains that the least the liberal can do is
examine them.
Le Play, _L’organisation de la famille_; also the volumes of _Les
ouvriers européens_. Le Play and his school merit our attention for
much the same reason as does Polybius. Le Play studied the family with
great care, and came to certain conclusions about the persistence of
certain sentiments and actions among men which no student of attempted
social change can afford to neglect.
F. S. Oliver, _The Endless Adventure_. Oliver was a conservatively
minded Englishman who in this volume wrote about one of the least
revolutionary of statesmen, Robert Walpole. Again it is useful to us
because if we do not understand social stability we cannot hope to
understand social instability. Walpole himself is as perfect an example
of the man fitted to preserve an old society as Lenin is of the man
fitted to guide a new society.
_III. The Marxists_
There is no doubt that Marx and his followers have made great
contributions to our understanding of revolutions--contributions almost
as great as those they have made to the making of revolutions. We
cannot, however, regard even the best Marxist writing as an altogether
satisfactory approach to the scientific study of revolutions. Indeed
their use of the sacred word “science” resembles in many ways the
use made of the same word by the disciples of Mary Baker Eddy.
Marxist thought is a mixture of useful and genuinely objective
observations properly framed as uniformities, and of prophecies,
moral exhortations, theological and philosophical speculation, and
other elements we may loosely call propaganda. The concept of the
class struggle, for instance, belongs to the first sort; in itself, it
is a fruitful notion, and one which has enriched sociology, in spite
of the exaggerations and simplicities with which it has been applied
by many Marxists. The notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat
belongs in a sense to both sorts; it is a useful lead in the study of
past revolutions, but it is also in Marxist hands an ideal, a goal, a
prophecy. Finally, the notion of the classless society is almost wholly
a bit of theology or, more specifically, eschatology.
In any given work by a Marxist, the disentanglement of what we may
call the _scientific_ elements from what we may call, with an equal
desire to use good rather than bad words, the _moralistic_ elements is
almost as difficult as a similar operation on the work of the classical
economists. In each case it has to be made separately. We need here
only caution against certain of the more specific forms in which
Marxist moral fervor and good intentions may be found distorting their
work as scientists.
First there is pure fervor, writing obviously intended for the
faithful, writing which from its very form is clearly a kind of
rhapsody. Then there is writing definitely aimed at achieving a
specific revolutionary end, writing closely aimed at action, writing
not even meant by the writer to be detached and objective. There is
the much-too-simple application of formulas and clichés to specific
situations. Much of this writing is sincere and earnest, and the
writers really believe that they are applying scientific methods
to sociological problems. The narrow application of the economic
interpretation of history is a very frequent example of this kind of
thing. All human action is by the more innocent Marxists interpreted
as the logical application of economic interests to a concrete
situation. It must be said in fairness to Marx, Engels, and their
greater followers that they are not themselves usually guilty of such
unrealistic simplification.
Finally, current Marxist writing is confused by the number of sects
that have developed within the movement, each one claiming to be
orthodox. Of the sect which in a _de facto_ way can most clearly
claim orthodoxy, that established in power in Russia today, one may
say that it represents a kind of hardening of doctrine, a fixation of
theory into dogma which may in the long run permit a good deal more
actual open-mindedness and experiment than is now possible. In the
meantime official Marxism has become a conservative and established
belief--which may well explain why in America good rebels like Mr.
Max Eastman and subtle but conscientious theorists like Mr. Kenneth
Burke are so worried over its inadequacies; have, indeed, begun a more
radical “revisionism” than any yet attempted.
The literature is enormous, and we do not intend to do more than list
below a few general elementary discussions of Marxism, and a few of
the more important works of the great men in the tradition. We have
deliberately chosen, wherever possible, works in which the concrete
discussion of actual revolutions is more important than pure theory.
M. M. Bober, _Karl Marx’s Interpretation of History_. Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1927.
Max Eastman, _Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution_. New York,
1927.
Sidney Hook, _Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx_. New York, 1933.
H. J. Laski, _Communism_. New York, 1927.
A. D. Lindsay, _Karl Marx’s Capital: an introductory essay_. New ed.
Oxford, 1937.
V. Pareto, _Les systèmes socialistes_. Paris, 1902.
[E. Burns], _A Handbook of Marxism_. New York, 1935. This is one of the
most useful of the various collections of bits of the writings of the
great Marxists. It includes some of the most important work of Marx,
Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, _The Communist Manifesto_. Edited by
D. Ryazanoff. London, 1930. The rich notes in this full-sized volume
expand the brief original Manifesto into a critical commentary on
Marxism.
Of Marx the following is a suggested beginning, neglecting entirely
the ponderous _Capital: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte_,
_Revolution and Counter-Revolution, or Germany in 1848_, _Civil War
in France_ (sometimes called the _Paris Commune_) and _The Poverty of
Philosophy_.
Of Engels: _The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844_,
_Landmarks of Scientific Socialism_ (Anti-Dühring).
Of Lenin: _Imperialism_, _The State and Revolution_. (Both of these are
in a handy single volume issued by the Vanguard Press, New York, 1926.)
_IV. The Sociology of Revolutions_
The following section contains a selected list of modern books on
revolutions in general. Such writing is necessarily very varied
indeed. Some of the books listed below are careful studies by trained
sociologists; some are the work of cranks with a variety of cutting
tools to grind; some, directly in the Marxist tradition, seem to
belong here rather than in the preceding section because of their
direct preoccupation with the sociology of revolutions. We have been
obliged to be fairly narrow in our interpretation of the subject. In a
sense almost everything that appears nowadays on social and political
problems might be catalogued as dealing at some point with the
sociology of revolutions. To take a wide and somewhat random choice of
well-known figures, most of the important work of men like Spengler, H.
G. Wells, Ortega y Gasset, and A. J. Toynbee touches upon the question
of revolutions and social change. But a bibliography as inclusive as
this would be pointless or endless. We have, therefore, simply made
a choice of general books on the specific subject of the comparative
study of revolution.
Brooks Adams, _The Theory of Social Revolutions_. New York, 1913. One
of the earliest predictions of the decline of the West. Should be read
with Mr. George Soule’s book below.
Arthur Bauer, _Essai sur les révolutions_. Paris, 1908. Approaches
the problem from the psychology of the individual and his activity
in crowds. Has an interesting conceptual scheme of revolutions as a
general phenomenon.
C. Delisle Burns, _The Principles of Revolution_. London, 1920. From
the point of view of modern anti-intellectualism, an unrealistic study
of “rationalizations.”
L. P. Edwards, _The Natural History of Revolutions_. Chicago, 1927.
Unpretentious, suggestive, tentative. One of the best introductions to
the subject available in English. Mr. Edwards does not pretend to do
more than sketch the essential problems and indicate possible further
work. Admirably free from special pleading.
T. Geiger, _Die Masse und ihre Aktion: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der
Revolutionen_. Stuttgart, 1926. A psychological study, with a Marxist
tinge. To a non-German, a bit in the clouds.
H. M. Hyndman, _The Evolution of Revolution_. London, 1927. By one of
the pioneers of Marxist Socialism in England. Not very illuminating
nowadays.
G. Lebon, _The Psychology of Revolution_. English translation. New
York, 1913. Lebon’s reputation as a social psychologist has sunk
considerably. This is the work of a frightened anti-intellectualist.
Arthur Liebert, _Vom Geist der Revolutionen_. Berlin, 1919. A brief
discussion of the rational and emotional origins of revolution, and an
analysis of the crisis period.
Leon de Poncius, _Les forces secrètes de la révolution_. Paris, 1929. A
good example of the kind of writing which attributes modern revolutions
to wicked conspirators--in this case Jews and freemasons. For those who
do not read French, the works of Mrs. Nesta Webster may be recommended
as an adequate sample of this approach. See especially her _Secret
Societies and Subversive Movements_, London, 1924, and _The French
Revolution: A Study in Democracy_. New York, 1920.
C. Malaparte, _Coup d’état, the Technique of Revolution_. English
translation, New York, 1932. An annoyingly bright young Italian Fascist
intellectual writes on _the only_ way to make a revolution. As narrow
and, in a perverted sense, idealistic as any Marxist writing.
E. D. Martin, _Farewell to Revolution_. New York, 1935. A very able and
sensible writer on political and social problems has here allowed his
fears to lead him into writing a bad book. Mr. Martin, as his choice
of title indicates, is writing a book _against_ revolutions of all
sorts. Hastily assembled from inadequate materials. Stands up badly in
comparison with L. P. Edwards’s book above.
R. W. Postgate, _How to Make a Revolution_. New York, 1934. An English
Leftist, formerly a Communist and now apparently just Labour, writes
rather wistfully about the possibilities of a decent, respectable
revolution in Western countries. A good deal of useful discussion
of the techniques of modern revolutionary parties of the Left, with
touches of very English humor.
_Revolution from 1789 to 1906._ London, 1920. Mr. Postgate has here
made a handy collection of constitutions, bills of rights, manifestoes
and similar documents touching the important revolutionary movements of
the period.
S. A. Reeves, _The Natural Laws of Social Convulsions_. New York, 1933.
A most ambitious attempt to apply the methods of the physical sciences
to the subject. Mr. Reeves is not skeptical enough to be a scientist.
He emerges with forty-five “natural” or “cosmic” laws, of which Law
XLV is a not unfair example: “Man would rather Die, even in Prolonged
Agony, than to Think.” The work of a doctrinaire person on the edge of
the lunatic fringe, and much influenced by the position of men like
Herbert Spencer, it has none the less a good deal of useful material.
E. Rosenstock-Hüssy, _Die europäische Revolutionen_. Jena, 1931.
Written in what to an American seems the German cloud-cuckoo-land
of beautiful and inexact ideas, choosing convenient and rejecting
inconvenient facts, something in the tradition of Spengler, but with
the kindly hopes of a man of good will. Full of interesting suggestions
and flashes of insight, poetic to a prosaic nature. An English version
by the author is promised.
S. D. Schmalhausen, Editor, _Recovery through Revolution_. New York,
1933. Chapters contributed by Louis Fischer, Harold Laski, Carleton
Beals, Robert Briffault, G. Salvemini, and others. Rapid narrative
accounts of the principal fields of revolutionary activity since the
war, Germany, Russia, China, South America, Italy, and Spain.
H. See, _Evolution et révolutions_. Paris, 1929. A somewhat pedestrian
examination of the English, French, and American revolutions, those
of the nineteenth century and the Russian revolution. Excellent brief
bibliographies for the revolutions discussed.
P. A. Sorokin, _Social and Cultural Dynamics_. Vol. III, _Fluctuations
of Social Relationships, War and Revolutions_. New York, 1937. Mr.
Sorokin’s general position is an emotional dislike for the contemporary
world, which is, he thinks, about to undergo a worse series of wars
and revolutions than any the human race has yet had to put up with.
This Volume III has a most imposing set of statistics to show that
revolutions have been more or less endemic in Western civilization.
Some such conclusion might have been made safely without all these
statistics, which in detail are not altogether reliable. They tend to
exaggerate the amount of violence and bloodshed since 1900.
G. Soule, _The Coming American Revolution_. New York, 1934. A
thoughtful, temperate book written by one of the more temperate of
American “liberals.” The book deals much more widely with the general
subject of revolutions than its title would indicate.
INDEX
Abbott, Professor W. C., 29
Abortive revolution, 33, 34
Adams, John, 156
Adams, Sam, 53, 59, 104, 116, 124, 135, 297
_Agreement of the People, The_, 198
Albemarle, 250, 261
All-Russian Central Executive Committee, 207
All-Russian Congress of Soviets, 207
American Civil War, 33
American Revolution, 34, 50, 84, 88, 100, 106, 155, 165, 195, 216, 229
Anabaptists, 154
Antinomians, 154
Antonov-Ovseënko, 127
Arnold, Matthew, 57
Articles of Confederation, the, 253
Asceticism, 227
Assembly of Notables, the, 89
Babeuf, 215
Bacon, 27
Bagehot, 131
Bailly, 124, 134
Barebone, Praise-God, 214
Bastille Day, 92, 97, 98, 102, 289
Baxter, 120
Beaumarchais, 82
Bentham, Jeremy, 27, 235
Berkman, Alexander, 301
Bitzenko, Madame, 127
Blake, Admiral, 232, 250
Bolsheviks, 122, 128, 166, 180, 221, 268
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 247
Boston Massacre, 88
Boston Port Bill, 43
Boston Tea Party, 46, 88, 104
Brest-Litovsk, 127
Brissot, 124, 157
Brissotins, 157
Brusilov, 123
Bunker Hill, 97
Burke, Edmund, 47
Cabarrus, Teresia de, 261
Cagliostro, 77
Camus, 124
Career open to talent, 75
Carlyle, 57
Carrier, 137
Cassandra, 81
Catherine the Great, 216
Cavaliers, 68
Ceremonial, 214, 235
Chamberlin, W. H., 198, 204, 210, 238
Charles I, 50, 51, 84, 106, 109
Charles II, 259
Chase, Stuart, 27
Chaucer, 29
Cheka, 133, 137, 207
Chicherin, 116, 127
Chkheidze, 170
Cicero, 31
Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the, 172
Class struggle, 64, 71, 79, 222, 240
Cochin, A., 53, 98
Coleridge, 193
Comité de surété générale, 207
Comités révolutionnaires, 207
Committee of Public Safety, 206
Committees of Correspondence, 104
Communist party, the, 182, 188
Compromisists, 123, 159, 170
Comsomol, 227
Conceptual scheme, 17, 23, 25, 244, 292
Concord, 97, 289
Condorcet, 124, 133, 176
Conservative revolution, 32
Continental Congress, 89, 156
Convention, the, 207
Criminals and revolution, 139, 209
Cromwell, 69, 125, 137, 143, 189, 190, 191, 245, 247, 251
Danton, 124, 157, 197, 201, 284
Desmoulins, 124
Diaz, Porfirio, 36
Dictatorship, 34, 200, 248
Digby, 172
Diggers, 126, 152, 204
Disorder, endemic, 38
Downing, 250, 261
Du Barry, Madame, 77
Dubois, Abbé, 77
Dzerzhinsky, Felix, 127, 133
Economic change, 276
Economic motivation, 47, 70, 79, 129, 223, 239
Economic prosperity, 41
Economic want, 41, 43
Edwards, Lyford P., 55
Eliot, Sir John, 85
Emigration, 260
English Revolution, 40, 50, 72, 84, 85, 100, 106, 151, 164,
195, 197, 202, 214, 245, 259, 263
_Enragés_, the, 205
Episcopalians, 151
Equilibrium, 24, 33, 295
Essex, 69, 116
Estates-General, the, 90
Everard, Robert, 126
Falkland, 172, 176
February Revolution, 92, 103, 122, 289
Feuillants, 153, 165, 169
Fifth Monarchy Men, 152
Figaro, 82
Force, use of, 106
Ford, Henry, 75
Foreign war, role of, 175, 238
Fouché, 192, 251, 256, 261
Fourier, 15
France, Anatole, 213
Freemasons, 53
French Revolution, 40, 48, 84, 89, 107, 117, 165, 185, 194,
199, 201, 215, 245, 255, 258, 262
French revolutionary calendar, 215
Freud, 46
Friends of Peace, 170
Gage, 88, 107
_Gaspee_, the, 88
George III, 51, 100, 109
Gironde, 157
Girondins, the, 153, 169
Gogol, 275
Gooch, Professor G. P., 60, 204
Goodwin, John, 203
Gorki, 216, 219, 250
Gottschalk, Professor L. R., 134
Grand Duke Michael, 94
Grand Remonstrance, 87
Graydon, Alexander, 122
Grierson, Professor, 59, 195
Guchkov, 126
Gwyn, Nell, 261
Hampden, John, 40, 69, 87, 116
Hancock, John, 47, 116
Hare, John, 204
Haselrig, 87
_Heads of the Proposals, The_, 198
Hébert, 116, 201
_Hébertistes_, 205
Henderson, Professor L. J., 19
Henry, Patrick, 95, 145
d’Herbois, Collot, 137
Historical method, 21, 22
Holles, Denzil, 86, 87, 148, 177
Holmby House, 155, 197
Homosexuality, 281
House of Commons, five members of, 87
Hutchinson, Governor, 121
Hutchinson, Mrs. Lucy, 72
Hutton, Barbara, 287
Hyde, 172
Idealism and revolution, 217
Idealists and revolution, 142, 190
Ideas, role of, 63
Independents, 54, 140, 152, 172, 180, 202
Induction, 17
Industrial Revolution, 35
Ireton, 125, 252
Jacobins, 117, 123, 129, 165, 168, 180, 188, 194, 212,
219, 221, 234
James I, 49
Jameson, J. F., 121, 223
Jefferson, 101, 190, 284
Joffe, 127
Johnson, Mrs. Francis, 225
“July Days,” 168
Kadets, 123, 149, 153, 159, 289
Kalinin, 127
Kamenev, 126, 127
_Kapital, Das_, 129, 221, 284
Karakhan, 127
Kerensky, 92, 103, 116, 126, 159, 168, 170, 176, 189
Kimbolton, Lord, 87
Konavalov, 116, 134
Kornilov, 160
Ku Klux Klan, 185
Lafayette, 65, 67, 90, 112, 116, 124, 128, 132, 148, 157
Lameths, the, 124, 157
Laud, 84
Lavoisier, 124
Law, John, 47
Leaders, revolutionary, 124
League of the Militant Godless, 257
Lenin, 115, 116, 126, 144, 160, 189, 190, 191, 199, 219,
226, 235, 246, 252, 284, 297
Lenthall, 95
Le Play, 279
Lerner, Max, 15
Levellers, 152, 199
Lewis, Sinclair, 75
Lilburne, John, 62, 125, 140
Linde, Fedor, 148
Long Parliament, 86, 97, 106
Louis XV, 49
Louis XVI, 107, 109
Ludlow, 125
Lunacharsky, 145, 160
Lunatic fringe, 139
Lvov, Prince, 126, 159
Lyons, Eugene, 265, 267
Machiavelli, 27
Machinery of government, 238
Madison, 175
Maitland, F. W., 193
Malesherbes, 52
Marat, 116, 124, 134, 197, 201, 235
Marie Antoinette, 287
Marston Moor, 151
Marten, Henry, 141
Martin, E. D., 272
Marx, Karl, 39, 115, 224, 235, 254, 296
Marxists, 28, 46, 61, 129, 167, 176, 221, 224, 275, 300
Mathiez, Albert, 252
Maximum, Law of the, 209
Mencken, H. L., 225
Mensheviks, 123, 149, 159
Mercier, L. S., 78
Merriman, Professor R. B., 48
Military Revolution Committee, 197
Militia Order, 189
Miliukov, 116, 123, 126, 148, 159
Mill, 57
Millenarians, 204, 234
Miller, J. C., 136
Milton, John, 72, 116, 284
Minorities, role of, 182
Mirabeau, 91, 95, 99, 124, 133, 157, 176, 189
Molasses Act, 45
Molière, 131
Monge, 124
Montaigne, 301
Morison, Professor S. E., 125
Morley, Christopher, 29
Morris, 57
Mounier, 157
Mountain, 157
Muir, Ramsay, 42
Napoleon, 107, 250
Narodniks, 159
Naseby, 151
National Assembly, 91
Nationalism, 232, 254
Nationalistic revolution, 34
Natural law, 61
Navigation Act, 44, 45
Necker, 52, 90, 98, 102
New Economic Policy, 265
Newman, 57
New Model Army, 120, 152, 154, 164, 172, 182, 187
Nicholas II, 93, 109
October revolution, 160, 171, 197
Order Number One, 173
d’Orléans, Duc, 102, 124, 134
Paine, Thomas, 116, 130
Pareto, V., 24, 27, 75
Parliament, Short, 86
Paris Commune of 1871, 33
Pâris-Duverney, 47, 77
Parlements, 89
Parliament of Saints, 199
Peasantry, 73
_Peggy Stewart_, the, 88
Pétion, 157
Petition of Right, 85
Petrovsky, 238
Pettee, Dr. George, 46
Philosophes, 58, 60
Pitt, William, 225
Plato, 81
Plebiscites, 186, 289
Poincaré, H., 21
Pokrovsky, 127
Presbyterians, 120, 140, 152, 165, 172
Pressure groups, 52, 53, 54, 99, 185
Preston Pans, 155
Pride’s Purge, 155, 171
Proletariat, 73, 74
Propaganda, 27, 62, 168
Protopopov, 66
Puritans, 129, 139, 224
Pym, 87, 116, 176
Quebec Act, 45, 88
Rasputin, 78
Religious symbolism, 236
Renaming, 214
Revolution, abortive, 33, 34;
American, 34, 50, 84, 88, 100, 106, 155, 165, 195, 216, 229;
conservative, 32;
criminals and, 139, 209;
definitions of, 35;
English, 40, 50, 72, 84, 85, 100, 106, 151, 164, 195,
197, 202, 214, 245, 259, 263;
February, 92, 103, 122, 289;
French, 40, 48, 84, 89, 107, 117, 165, 185, 194, 199,
201, 215, 245, 255, 258, 262;
idealism and, 217;
idealists and, 142, 190;
nationalistic, 34;
October, 160, 171, 197;
Russian, 40, 51, 84, 85, 92, 100, 108, 158, 165, 184,
194, 197, 199, 202, 216, 246, 256, 265;
territorial, 33
Revolutions of 1848, 33
Revolutionary proselyters, 232
Revolutionist, clichés about, 114
Richelieu, 260
Rivarol, 73
Robespierre, 124, 142, 157, 189, 190, 191, 197, 201,
245, 252, 283, 297
Rogers, John, 126
Roland, Madame, 72, 124
Root-and-Branch Bill, 172
Rousseau, 63
Ruling class, 64, 278
Rump, 155, 199, 207, 245
Russian revolution, 40, 51, 84, 85, 92, 100, 108, 158,
165, 184, 194, 197, 199, 202, 216, 246, 256, 265
Sade, Marquis de, 138
Sainte-Beuve, 131
St. Huruge, Marquis de, 133
St. Simon, Comte de, 215
Schlesinger, Professor Arthur M., 44, 156
Scientific method, 16, 30
Self-denying ordinance, 172
Sexby, Edward, 125, 233
Shaftesbury, 250
Shays’s Rebellion, 270
Shelley, 115, 133
Ship Money, 54
Short Parliament, 86
Siéyès, 62
Signers of Declaration of Independence, 124
Smith, Adam, 46
Social change, 278
Socialist-Revolutionary party, 123, 149, 159
Sociétés de pensée, 53
Society for Encouraging Trade and Commerce with
the Province of Massachusetts Bay, 104
Sokolov, N. D., 174
Sons of Liberty, 84, 104, 121, 188, 212
Sovereignty, problem of, 161
Spencer, H., 15
Stalin, 127, 168, 216, 219, 236, 246, 247, 250, 257,
266, 269
Stamp Act, 42, 44, 45
_Stewart_, the _Peggy_, 88
Stoddard, Lothrop, 128
Stolypin, 52
Strachey, Lytton, 203
Strafford, 51, 84, 97
Strode, 87
Sukharevka Market, 209
Sverdlov, 127
Taine, 73
Talleyrand, 116, 133, 261
Tallien, 263
Talma, 77
Tammany Hall, 185
Tawney, R. H., 226
Tax reform, 45
Tennyson, 57
Tereschenko, 126, 134
Theophrastus, 29, 131
Théot, Catherine, 205
Third Estate, 90
Thucydides, 27, 294
Tocqueville, A. de, 273
Townshend, 88
Trevelyan, Professor G. M., 202
Trotsky, 44, 100, 103, 126, 130, 144, 160, 183, 185,
192, 194, 219, 246, 252, 283, 285
Trudoviks, 159
Tseretelli, 145, 170
Turgenev, 58
Turgot, 45, 52
Uniformities, 36, 96, 105, 167, 201, 206, 244, 247,
271, 274, 286, 299
Valentine, 86
Vallée, Rudy, 75
Vane, Sir Harry, 116, 250
Vergniaud, 145
Violence, role of, 92, 138, 179, 212, 237
Voltaire, 77
Washington, George, 45, 69, 116, 137, 247
Washington, Laurence, 223
Watteau, 77
Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 227, 265
Weber, Max, 226
Webster, Mrs. Nesta, 67
Wells, H. G., 178
Westminster Assembly, 153
Winstanley, 125, 126
Wordsworth, 111
Zinoviev, 145
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in
the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have
been corrected.
Punctuation has been made consistent.
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