the Anatomy of revolution

---

the Anatomy
of revolution

BY CRANE BRINTON
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.
Publishers · New York

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.

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. [12]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 [13]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 [14]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 [15]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 [16]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 [17]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; [18]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 [19]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 [20]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 [21]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 [22]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. [23]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 [24]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 [25]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 [26]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 [27]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 [28]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 [29]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 [30]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 [31]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 [32]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 [33]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 [34]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 [35]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 [36]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 [37]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.

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.

[39]

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 [40]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 [41]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.

[42]

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.” [43]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, [44]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 [45]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 [46]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 [47]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 [48]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, [49]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 [50]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 [51]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 [52]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 [53]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. [54]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 [55]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, [56]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 [57]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 [58]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 [59]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 [60]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 [61]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 [62]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 [63]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 [64]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 [65]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.

[66]

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 [67]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 [68]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, [69]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. [70]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 [71]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 [72]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:

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 [73]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 [74]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 [75]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 [76]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, [77]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 [78]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 [79]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 [80]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 [81]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.

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 [83]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 [84]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 [85]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 [86]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 [87]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. [88]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 [89]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. [90]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 [91]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 [92]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. [93]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 [94]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 [95]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 [96]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 [97]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 [98]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 [99]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 [100]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 [101]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 [102]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 [103]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 [104]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 [105]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. [106]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 [107]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 [108]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, [109]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 [110]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 [111]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:

[112]

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.

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.”

[114]

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 [115]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 [116]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 [117]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 [118]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 [119]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 [120]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 [121]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, [122]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 [123]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 [124]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 [125]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 [126]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; [127]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 [128]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 [129]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 [130]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.

[131]

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 [132]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 [133]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 [134]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 [135]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. [136]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 [137]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 [138]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 [139]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. [140]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 [141]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 [142]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 [143]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 [144]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 [145]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 [146]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, [147]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.

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 [149]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 [150]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.

[151]

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 [152]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 [153]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 [154]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 [155]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 [156]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 [157]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 [158]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 [159]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 [160]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 [161]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 [162]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 [163]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 [164]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 [165]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. [166]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 [167]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 [168]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 [169]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. [170]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 [171]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 [172]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 [173]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 [174]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, [175]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.

[176]

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 [177]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 [178]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.

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 [180]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 [181]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 [182]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 [183]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 [184]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 [185]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 [186]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 [187]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 [188]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, [189]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, [190]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 [191]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 [192]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 [193]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.

[194]

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 [195]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 [196]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, [197]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 [198]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, [199]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. [200]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 [201]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.

[202]

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 [203]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, [204]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.... [205]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 [206]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 [207]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 [208]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 [209]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 [210]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 [211]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.

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 [213]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 [214]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.

[215]

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 [216]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 [217]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 [218]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 [219]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, [220]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 [221]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 [222]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 [223]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 [224]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 [225]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 [226]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 [227]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 [228]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. [229]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 [230]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 [231]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 [232]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! [233]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 [234]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 [235]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 [236]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 [237]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 [238]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 [239]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 [240]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 [241]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 [242]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 [243]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.

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 [245]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 [246]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 [247]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 [248]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 [249]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 [250]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 [251]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, [252]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 [253]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 [254]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 [255]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 [256]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 [257]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 [258]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 [259]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 [260]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 [261]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 [262]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 [263]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.”

[264]

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, [265]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.” [266]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 [267]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 [268]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 [269]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 [270]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.

[271]

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?

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 [273]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 [274]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 [275]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 [276]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.

[277]

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 [278]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 [279]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 [280]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 [281]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 [282]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 [283]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 [284]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 [285]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.”

[286]

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 [287]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 [288]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. [289]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 [290]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 [291]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 [292]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 [293]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 [294]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 [295]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 [296]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 [297]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 [298]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.

[299]

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 [300]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 [301]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 [302]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.

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.

[304]

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.

[305]

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 [306]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.

[307]

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 [308]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 [309]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.

[310]

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, [311]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 [312]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, [313]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 [314]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.

[315]

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 [316]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 [317]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 [318]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. [319]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.

• 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
• [322]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
• [323]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
• [324]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;
• [325]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
• [326]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