Part 13

While the moderates in France, the Feuillants, or constitutional monarchists, still controlled the legislative body and the formal machinery of the centralized state, their increasingly republican opponents controlled the network of Jacobin societies which made up the frame of the other, or illegal, government. Through their control of these societies they worked into the control of many of the units of local government, and from this position of vantage were able to expel the Feuillant moderates and destroy the monarchy. The process was then repeated with the Girondin moderates controlling the legislative body and the Montagnard extremists controlling the important units of the Jacobin network and at least one exceedingly important local governmental unit--the Paris Commune. In the crisis of June 2, 1793, the illegal government again won out over the legal.

In Russia the dvoevlastie is plain. The provisional government which emerged from the February revolution had through its connection with the Duma some claim to legitimacy. Though it absorbed more and more Socialists of various stripes in the next six months, thus exhibiting the leftward movement we have found in all our societies, it remained moderate and quite conscious of its legality. On the other side the Bolsheviks and a few allied radical groups had by late summer obtained control of the network of soviets and stood as an illegal government facing the legal one. Soviet means no more than “council” and had originally in Russia no more connotations than its English equivalent has for us. The soviets were local councils of trade-unionists, soldiers, sailors, peasants, and suitable intellectuals. They sprang up naturally enough with the dissolution of the Czarist power in 1917, all the more since memories of the abortive revolution of 1905, which had also made use of the soviet form, were fresh in the minds of everyone. The Bolsheviks, wisely concentrating on the soviets while the attention of the compromisists was increasingly taken by participation in the legal government, were able to wrest control of key soviets in Petrograd, Moscow, and major industrial towns from the compromisists. There is here a curious detailed parallel with the French revolution. The final insurrectionary victory of the Bolsheviks was achieved without complete control of the general network of soviets, just as that of the Montagnards was achieved without control of the whole network of Jacobin clubs. In each case control of the most important units of the illegal government was sufficient.

IV. Weaknesses of the Moderates

At this stage in revolution, then, the moderates in control of the formal machinery of government are confronted by the extremists in control of machinery devised for propaganda, pressure-group work, even insurrection, but now increasingly used as machinery of government. This stage ends with the triumph of the extremists and the merging of the dual sovereignty into a single one. We must now inquire into the reasons for the failure of the moderates in these revolutions to hold power.

There is first the paradox we have previously noted, that in the early stages of revolution the control of the machinery of government is in itself a source of weakness for those who hold such control. Little by little the moderates find themselves losing the credit they had gained as opponents of the old regime, and taking on more and more of the discredit innocently associated by the hopeful many with the status of heir to the old regime. Forced on the defensive, they make mistake after mistake, partly because they are so little used to being on the defensive. They are in a position from which only a superhuman wisdom could extricate them; and the moderates are among the most human of revolutionaries.

Faced with the opposition of more radical groups organized in the network we have called the illegal government, the moderates have broadly but three choices: they may try to suppress the illegal government; they may try to get control of it themselves; or they may let it alone. Actually their policy shifts around among these three policies, combining one with another; in these circumstances, the net effect is to produce a fourth policy, which amounts to a positive encouragement of their enemies in the illegal government.

In the revolutions we are studying the moderates are particularly handicapped in their efforts to suppress these enemy organizations. The revolutions were all made in the name of freedom, were all associated with what the Marxists call a bourgeois individualistic ideology. The moderates found themselves obliged to observe certain “rights” of their enemies--notably those of freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly. What is more, many if not most of the moderates sincerely believed in such rights, held that truth is great and will prevail. Had it not just prevailed against the tyranny of the old regime? Even when under pressure the moderate begins to try to suppress an extremist newspaper, forbid an extremist meeting, jail a few extremist leaders, his conscience troubles him. More important, any unsuppressed extremists raise a mighty howl. The moderates are betraying the revolution; they are using exactly the same methods the villainous tyrants of the old regime had used.

The Russian revolution is here an excellent example. The Kadets and compromisists between February and October could not conveniently suppress Bolshevik propaganda, nor indeed any form of Bolshevik political activity. When they tried to do so after a premature Bolshevik rising, the street troubles in Petrograd known as the “July Days,” they were met by protests from all sorts of people, including notably the Bolsheviks. This was despotism, this was Czarism of the worst sort. Had not the February revolution brought political freedom, freedom of the press and association, to Russia forever? Kerensky mustn’t make use of the kind of weapons the Czars had used. In 1938 Stalin of course can use methods worthy of Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible, but that is only to say that the Russian revolution is over. In 1917, however, even had Kerensky been the sort of man who could successfully organize repressive measures--and he plainly was not that sort of man--what we are bound to call public opinion would not in those days have permitted the execution of such measures. Much the same situation is to be found in France, where the Jacobins were permitted free speech and free association, and firmly and publicly insisted on their rights as free men to get ready for a dictatorship.

Nor are the moderates more successful in their attempts to get--or rather to retain--control of the machinery which they and the extremists had jointly built up as a means of overthrowing the old regime. For this there seems to be no single preponderant reason. The moderates are, of course, occupied with a good deal of the work of actual governing, and they have less time for army committees or Jacobin clubs or soviet meetings. They feel themselves perhaps a trifle superior to such activity. They are temperamentally unfitted for the rougher and dirtier work of the politics of direct action. They have moral scruples. They are not quite the noble souls historical legend makes out the Girondin moderates in the French revolution to have been; indeed many of them, like Brissot and Kerensky, have a good many of the gifts of the political manipulator. But they are in power, and they seem to set about quite naturally cultivating the sober virtues that go with power. Such virtues, however, make them inadequate leaders of militant revolutionary societies.

Whatever the explanation, the fact of the uniformity is clear. This particular failure of the moderates is well shown in the French revolution. The Jacobin network of societies of “Friends of the Constitution” was in its inception hardly to the Left of Lafayette and his friends. When, however, it began to move further to the Left the Fayettists made a few feeble efforts to retain control, and then went off and founded their own society, the Feuillants. The Feuillants, however, could not spread beyond narrow upper-class and intellectual Parisian circles. Later groups founded here and there throughout the country as “Friends of the Monarchy,” or “Friends of Peace,” tried to compete with the Jacobins, but with very little luck. If they gave bread to the poor, the Jacobins cried out that they were attempting bribery. If they did nothing, the Jacobins complained that they lacked social conscience. Finally the Jacobins worked out a fairly systematic procedure. They would hire a few hoodlums--sometimes it was not necessary to hire them--to break up a meeting of the rival Friends of Peace, and would then send a deputation to the municipal authorities asking that the Friends of Peace be closed as a public nuisance. The authorities were either Jacobins themselves, or more afraid of the Jacobins than of the Friends of Peace, so that the matter received a suitable revolutionary solution.

Similarly the Presbyterians found themselves powerless to control the spread of Independency, not only in the army, but in local parishes. And in Russia the compromisists found the Bolsheviks formidable in all the important soviets. A detailed study of the Petrograd soviet from February to October will show how cleverly the party of Lenin took advantage of every mistake of its opponents, how successfully it burrowed from within, spreading its control from factory soviets on up until finally the city soviet was captured. Such a study will also show the compromisists gradually losing ground, in spite of the great oratorical gifts of leaders like Tseretelli, Chkheidze and Kerensky.

There is, indeed, an almost organic weakness in the position of the moderates. They are placed between two groups, the disgruntled but not yet silenced conservatives and the confident, aggressive extremists. There are still freedom of speech and the other political rights, so that even conservatives have a voice. Now the moderates seem in all these revolutions to be following the slogan used so conspicuously for French politics of the Cartel des Gauches in 1924: no enemies to the Left. They still distrust the conservatives, against whom they have so recently risen; and they are reluctant to admit that the extremists, with whom they so recently stood united, can actually be their enemies. All the force of the ideas and sentiments with which the moderates entered the revolution give them a sort of twist toward the Left. Emotionally they cannot bear to think of themselves as falling behind in the revolutionary process. Moreover, many of them hope to outbid the extremists for popular support, to beat them at their own game. But only in normal times can you trust in the nice smooth clichés of politics like “beat them at their own game.” The moderates fail by this policy of “no enemies to the Left” to reconcile these enemies to the Left; and they make it quite impossible to rally to their support any of the not yet quite negligible conservatives. Then, after the moderates get thoroughly frightened about the threatening attitude of the extremists, they turn for help to the conservatives, and find there just aren’t any. They have emigrated, or retired to the country, hopeless and martyred in spirit. Needless to say, a martyred conservative is no longer a conservative, but only another maladjusted soul. This last turn of theirs towards the conservatives, however, finishes the moderates. Alone, unsupported in control of a government as yet by no means in assured and habitual control of a personnel, civil or military, they succumb easily to insurrection. It is significant that Pride’s Purge, the French crisis of June 2, 1793, and the Petrograd October revolution were all hardly more than coups d’état.

In the English, French, and Russian revolutions it is possible to distinguish one critical measure around which all these currents converge, a measure which, espoused by the moderates, cuts them off from support on the Right and leaves the radicals in a position to use this very measure against its authors. Such are the Root-and-Branch Bill in the English, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in the French, and Order Number One in the Russian, revolutions.

The Root-and-Branch Bill originated in a petition with 15,000 signatures presented to the House of Commons late in 1640, asking for the abolition of Episcopacy “with all its roots and branches.” Naturally the moderate Episcopalians, from Hyde and Falkland to Digby, were against a measure which destroyed their Church; and just as naturally the Presbyterians were inclined to favor it. It is possible that politically minded moderates like Pym might have left the bill alone, but the refusal of the bishops to give up their seats in the House of Lords seems to have determined Pym to support the bill. This espousal made almost every Episcopalian a Royalist, and when the Civil War broke out in 1642 the Presbyterians were stranded on the extreme Right of the party groupings within the region controlled by the Parliamentarians. They could find no possible allies except to the Left. The Independents--and Cromwell had first actually introduced the Root-and-Branch Bill to the House--could now argue that presbyters were no better than bishops, that the reasons which held for the abolition of one held incontrovertibly for the abolition of the other. Later, when the moderates proved incapable of carrying the war to a successful conclusion, measures like the Self-Denying Ordinance and the creation of the New Model Army had to be accepted by a Presbyterian majority which yet was not by any means a commanding majority, and which had left itself with no possibility of conservative support.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy emerged after months of discussion in the National Assembly as a charter for renewed Christianity in France. The moderates who put it through seem mostly to have been sincere men, bad Catholics in some ways, perhaps, but rather because they had absorbed some of the practical worldly spirit of the age than because they were outright anti-clericals. Yet their measure alienated the good Catholics and merely encouraged the violent anti-clericals to try to root out the “vile superstitions” of Christianity altogether. The Civil Constitution in all innocence provided for the election of parish priests by the same local electoral bodies that chose lay officials for the new government positions, and for the election of bishops by the same departmental body that elected representatives to the Legislative Assembly. It scrapped all the historic dioceses of old France, and substituted nice, nearly uniform dioceses identical with the new départements into which France was governmentally divided. It did consent to “notify” the Pope of such elections.

Since the property of the Church as a corporation had been taken over to serve as security for the new paper money of the revolution, the assignats, the State was to support the expenses of the clergy under the new constitution. The election of priests and bishops by bodies to which Protestants, Jews, and avowed atheists were eligible was so completely uncanonical that no Pope could for a moment have considered accepting it. Although there was the usual diplomatic delay, the break between the Pope and the revolutionary government was inevitable, and with it the powerful and conservative group of Catholics was forced irreconcilably into opposition. A schism began which extended to every village in the land. But the new Constitutional Church was hardly more acceptable to the real radicals than the old Orthodox Church, and as the critical days of the Terror drew nearer the moderates found themselves saddled with the protection of a church which returned them no important support.

Order Number One emerged from no such long debate as did the Root-and-Branch Bill and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Indeed, it is not quite fair to list it as a definite measure sponsored by the moderates, though the soviet leader most prominent in the group which prepared it was the moderate N. D. Sokolov, and the compromisists energetically promulgated it. The Order emerged in the very last days of the February revolution from the headquarters of the Petrograd soviet. It was addressed to the army, and in addition to the usual revolutionary measures towards a standing army of the old regime--abolition of salutes, social and political equality of privates with officers, and so on--it provided for elected company and battalion committees which were to have entire charge of arms, above all of those of officers; and it ordered that every military unit obey the soviets in political matters. The military committee of the Duma might be obeyed in military matters, provided the soviet did not object in a specific case. The Order was devised primarily with the Petrograd garrison in mind, but its main provisions were rapidly taken up at the front. This order at once convinced the conservatives that there was nothing to be hoped for from the revolution, and put even the more liberal officers in a state of mind to welcome later attempts at a conservative coup d’état. It made the subsequent task of the moderates in bringing Russia back to military efficiency for the war on Germany more difficult than ever. And it by no means served to reconcile the soldiers themselves with the continuation of the war. Most of the popularity of Order Number One eventually redounded to the credit of the Bolsheviks; most of its unpopularity came back on the compromisists. This is the typical fate of the moderates in these revolutions.

Again, the moderates are in all our societies confronted sooner or later with the task of fighting a war; and they prove poor war leaders. In England the fighting broke out in 1642, and before the first Civil War was over Cromwell and the Independents had made themselves indispensable, and were on the threshold of power. Foreign war in France broke out in the spring of 1792, and a few months later the monarchy had fallen; the war went very badly in the spring of 1793, and in June the moderate Girondins, who had on the French side been the most eager for war, were turned out by the Montagnards. The Russian revolution was born in the midst of a disastrous war, and the Russian moderates never had a chance at peaceful administration. The fact is clear. The moderates cannot seem to succeed in war. The reasons why are less clear. No doubt the commitment of the moderates to protect the liberties of the individual is a factor. You cannot organize an army if you take Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity at all seriously.

Modern wars seem to carry with them the necessity for organizing civil government along military lines, for the exercise of strong, centralized governmental authority in which the liberty of the individual is far from a matter of first concern, in which there is very little debate, very little of the government by discussion so prized by the moderates, very little compromise and moderation. War, said Madison, is the mother of executive aggrandizement, and even here in America our wars have borne him out. But in the midst of a revolution the executive that gets aggrandized is not the moderate executive. The Reigns of Terror in France and in Russia are in part explicable as the concentration of power in a government of national defense made necessary by the fact of war. This is by no means a complete explanation of the Reigns of Terror. But certainly the necessity for a strong centralized government to run the war is one of the reasons why the moderates failed. They simply could not provide the discipline, the enthusiasm, the unpondered loyalty necessary to fight a war, and they went out.

V. The Failure of the Moderates

To the kindly souls who for the most part wrote the history from which we get our notions of modern revolutions, this failure of the moderates was a great tragedy. The moderates appear as good men worsted by circumstances and unscrupulous opponents. They seem to be idealists crushed by a harsh world, but thereby sure of the resurrection history holds out to the just. The gentle Falkland and the scholarly Condorcet smile down upon us from the only heaven to which mere mortals hold the key; and if historians have not yet admitted Kerensky into their heaven, the reason may be no more than that the poor man is still inescapably here on earth.

Perhaps most of the moderates would be better or at least more normal men than their extremist opponents. Yet, leaders and led together, they make a motley lot, by no means easily catalogued by Marxist or by psychologist. And the traditional notion that they were idealists and that they failed because in the rough give-and-take the idealist must always fail is here peculiarly misleading. It is more accurate to risk the paradox: they failed because they were in so many respects what is usually called realists; that is, some of them were reasonably well adapted to a common-sense world.

Pym and Mirabeau, who died peacefully before the defeat of the moderates was evident, still enjoy reputations as skilled politicians, as sensible moderates. Over most of the others there hangs something of the kind of reputation most definite and clear with Kerensky. The eloquent compromisist leader seems to us a man of words, an orator who could move crowds but could not guide them, an impractical and incompetent person in the field of action. The Gironde seems much the same, as also the lesser Presbyterian leaders like Holles. It seems emptily paradoxical to list these people as realists. Yet realists of a kind they were. They used grand words and phrases grandly, as a consolation and a joy to their listeners and to themselves. But they did not believe in them as the radicals believed in them; they did not intend to try to pursue them to their logical conclusions in action. They were, in short, using words in the way most men in normal societies, including such realistic politicians as Gladstone, use them. They would not seem realists to a hard-headed horse-trader. But within the limits which tradition and ritual have set for the work of such people as they--part priest, part administrator, part actor, part teacher--they were good quiet practitioners.

But the times were turned topsy-turvy, and as the crisis of the revolution approached, only the man with a touch--or more--of fanatic idealism in him, or at least with the ability to act the part of such a fanatic, could attain to leadership. The normal social roles of realism and idealism are reversed in the acute phases of a revolution. We shall return to this topic in our next chapter. Here we need only note that the outward evidences of the approach of this kind of crisis appear as a heightened form of class antagonism. The moderates by definition are not great haters, are not endowed with the effective blindness which keeps men like Robespierre and Lenin undistracted in their rise to power. In normal times, ordinary men are not capable of feeling for groups of their fellow-men hatred as intense, continuous, and uncomfortable as that preached by the extremists in revolution. Hatred is a heroic emotion, and heroic emotions are exhausting. The poor may hate the rich, the Protestant the Catholic, the bourgeois the noble, the Southerner the Yankee, and so on endlessly. But this hate is normally in human beings a routine and consoling hate, a part of life, like food, drink, and loving, integrated with an existence as alien to the possibility of revolution as that of a vegetable.

The moderates, then, do not really believe in the big words they have to use. They do not really believe a heavenly perfection is suddenly coming to men on earth. They are all for compromise, common sense, toleration, comfort. In a normal society, these desires are part of their strength and give them their hold over their fellows, who share at least their desire for comfort. But in these three revolutions large numbers of men were for the moment lifted by desire and emotion to a point where they seemed to despise even comfort. The moderates could not deal politically with such men; they could not take the first steps which are necessary if such men are to be understood. The moderates were cut off from the immoderates by a gap neither philosophy nor common sense could fill. There is an adage that in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king. In one of his subtler short stories, The Kingdom of the Blind, Mr. H. G. Wells has exposed the weakness of this apothegm. In the heat of a violent revolution, its weakness is perhaps even more apparent than in the imaginary Andean valley of Mr. Wells’s tale. The moderates we have been dealing with were all very human and very fallible; but even had they been as wise as the heroes of Plutarch, as wise as Washington, it would seem that they must have failed. For we are here in a land fabulous, but real, where the wisdom and common sense of the moderate are not wisdom and common sense, but folly.

Chapter SIX THE ACCESSION OF THE EXTREMISTS

I. The Coup d’état

The struggle between the moderates and the extremists, which begins almost as soon as the dramatic overthrow of the old regime is effected, is marked by a series of exciting episodes: here street-fighting, there a forced seizure of property, almost everywhere heated debates, attempted repressions, a steady stream of violent propaganda. Tempers are strained to the breaking point over matters that in a stable society are capable of an almost automatic solution. There is an almost universal state of tension. The fever is working its way to a crisis. As with many fevers, its progress is in detail jerky, with now an apparent improvement and then a sudden jump ahead. But the cumulative effect is unmistakable. With the final overthrow of the moderates the revolution may be said to have entered its crisis stage.