Part 20

Chapter NINE A SUMMARY OF THE WORK OF REVOLUTIONS

I. Changes in Institutions and Ideas

With that tendency to absolutism which common sense shares with some more formal metaphysics, we are likely to think of the kind of revolution we have been studying as a cataclysmic break with the past. The revolution “marks a new era” or “ends forever the abuses of the old regime” or “digs a gulf between the old X and the new.” On the other hand, when disillusioned liberals like Mr. E. D. Martin come to turn against the revolutionary tradition, they conclude as sweepingly that in effect revolutions change nothing of importance--except perhaps for the worse--that revolutions are unpleasant and perhaps avoidable interludes in a nation’s history. Now it should be clear that our present study of the English, American, French and Russian revolutions can hardly permit any such absolute answers to the question: What did these revolutions really change? Some institutions, some laws, even some human habits, they clearly changed in very important ways; other institutions, laws and habits they changed in the long run but slightly, if at all. It may be that what they changed is more--or less--significant for the sociologist than what they did not change. But we cannot begin to decide this last matter until we have got the actual changes straight. We are considering here, of course, those changes which are apparent at the end of the revolutionary fever, those changes which the history books are likely to catalogue as “permanent.” With the changes promised but not achieved by the extremists, as with the many dramatic changes in the lives of the individual actors in the revolution, we are not here directly concerned at the moment.

Politically the revolution ends the worst abuses, the worst inefficiencies of the old regime. It settles for a time at least the kind of internal conflict out of which the “dual sovereignty” arose. The machinery of government works more smoothly after than immediately before the revolution. France is here a typical case. The old overlapping jurisdictions, the confusions and the compromises inherited from the thousand-year struggle between the centripetal forces of the Crown and the centrifugal forces of the feudal nobility, the welter of accumulated precedents, were all replaced by the work of the French revolution. An able bureaucracy operating within neatly subordinated administrative areas, a legal system efficiently codified, an excellent army well staffed and well provided for, enabled Napoleon to do much that his Bourbon predecessors could not possibly have done. Tocqueville long ago pointed out that the French revolution came to complete the work of a long line of French monarchs, to make centralized power in France effective and complete.

Here is one detail among many. In the old France, weights and measures varied from region to region, indeed from town to town. A bushel at Toulouse might be much more than a bushel at neighboring Montauban. Worse yet, the very names of measures might be wholly different words. The coinage was, like the present English coinage, partly duodecimal, and very hard to handle by long division. What the revolution did about all this is familiar to every schoolboy. It substituted the uniform system of weights and measures known as the metric system, a system which has made its way without benefit of revolution through most of the world outside the British Empire and the United States.

This achievement of governmental efficiency is really the most striking uniformity we can note in estimating the political changes effected by our revolutions. With suitable allowances for local differences, for accidents and for the inevitable residue of the unique with which all history and sociology must deal, England, America, and Russia also emerged from their revolutions with more efficient and more centralized governments. The process is less clear in England, partly because it took place before the full maturing of economic and cultural forces tending to promote such forms of efficiency as the metric system or the Code Napoléon. But, for all its complexities, the English government after 1660 was much better geared to the needs of the nation of shopkeepers than was the England of 1620, with knights’ fees, ship money, benevolences, Star Chamber, Court of High Commission, and the other appurtenances of the immature Stuart despotism. Parliament after 1660 was more completely master of England than the first two Stuarts had been.

Russia is in this respect as in so many still a subject for dispute. Violent opponents of Stalin insist that the new bureaucrats are just as inefficient, pettily tyrannical and stupid as they were said to have been under the Czars. Some of the sentiments involved in statements of this sort would seem to be more or less a constant of Russian life, and to a certain extent of life under any government. Gogol’s admirable comedy, The Inspector-General, deals as certainly with uniformities as any scientist could. Yet all in all future historians will probably have to admit that as a piece of political machinery the soviet system worked better than did that of the Czars, that the soviet bureaucracy was on the whole a more capable one than that of the Czars. You may not like the first Five Year Plan, but you must admit that beneath its parade of statistics lies a concrete economic achievement greater than anything the old regime could show for a similar period.

These revolutions were all made in the name of freedom, were all directed against the tyranny of the few and towards the rule of the many. This whole phase of revolutions is peculiarly involved with the existence of certain sentiments in human beings which make it very hard to apply the methods of science to the study of men in society. Yet it would seem that the full importance of such matters as democracy, civil rights, written constitutions, and indeed the whole apparatus of popular government lies rather within that vague and important field the Marxists like to call ideology than in the field of concrete political agencies which we are now studying. Certainly one is struck by the fact that all our revolutions promoted the efficiency of the government rather than the “right” of the individual to a romantic freedom to be himself. Even the traditional apparatus of popular government can be analyzed as an instrument to get things done in a particular situation, however strange such an analysis might seem to conventionally minded contemporaries of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. Bills of Rights, codes, and constitutions were in effect charters of the new ruling classes. Liberty as an ideal was one thing; liberty in politics was another and less exalted matter.

These revolutions all saw much transfer of property by confiscation or forced sale. They saw the fall of one ruling class and its succession by another ruling class recruited in part, at least, from individuals who were before the revolution outside the ruling class. They were accompanied by a definite and concrete demand for the abolition of poverty, for the equal sharing of wealth; the men who guided the Russian revolution continued long after its crisis period to insist that they were economic egalitarians, that Russia would not recognize private property in land and in capital goods. Marxist thought still separates our four revolutions into two different classes: the English, French, and American, all of which it considers to have been in their final results “bourgeois” revolutions, inevitable victories of business and industry over landed aristocracy; and the Russian revolution, in its final phases a true “proletarian” revolution. We may nevertheless be more impressed with the fact that in all four revolutions economic power changed hands, and that a newly amalgamated “ruling class” in the new Russia as in the new France directed the economic as well as the political life of the society.

In more detail, the English revolution took land from the more devoted Cavaliers and ecclesiastical property from the more unyielding Episcopalians and Presbyterians and gave it to typical Puritans, business men and clergymen alike. The church livings came back at the Restoration of 1660 into Anglican hands, but save for the property of a few great lords very close to Charles II, confiscated Royalist lands remained in the possession of their new owners. Most of these owners made their peace with the Stuart government, and thus was laid the foundation for the ruling class under which England won an empire in the next two centuries, a ruling class in which landed wealth and industrial wealth were almost inextricably mixed, and which proved to be a very good ruling class.

The concrete economic changes in France follow a similar pattern. Lands confiscated from clergy and émigré nobles were acquired by revolutionists, and for the most part remained in the possession of the purchasers even after the Restoration of 1814. Much of this land no doubt finally ended up in the possession of small independent peasants, and helped to put the final touches on the establishment of that very French class, universally regarded among writers and politicians as the core of modern France. But much of this transaction also benefited the middle class, and certainly the French ruling class after the revolution represents as striking a mixture of old wealth and new, of land and trade, as did the English.

In Russia the differences are not as great as they ought to be according to Marxist theory. There has been a transfer of economic power from one group to another rather than an equal sharing of economic power, an equal distribution of consumers’ goods, an end of struggle over economic goods or power--but you may put the Marxist formula as you like. The new Russian bureaucracy seems to be a privileged class which enjoys wealth in the form of consumers’ goods without yet possessing it in the forms we conventionally call “property.” At any rate, almost all reporters are agreed that in Russia in 1938 there is nothing like an equal distribution of consumers’ goods. What seems to have taken place is a development of the lines of movement of Russian economic history. Just as the French revolution put the finishing touches on the position of the peasantry, but by no means “gave” them the land suddenly, so the present status of Russian agriculture and industry seems to be a development of slavophile and other elements favoring collective farming over the kulaks, and of almost world-wide tendencies favoring large-scale bureaucratically managed industry over small independent competitive concerns. Here as in other countries the revolution certainly does not draw institutions out of a hat--nor out of a book, not even out of so impressive a book as Das Kapital.

None of these revolutions quite substituted a brand-new ruling class for the old one, at least not unless one thinks of a “class” without bothering about the human beings who make up the class, which is a favorite procedure of the Marxists. What happens is that by the end of the convalescent period there is well begun a kind of amalgamation, in which the enterprising, adaptable, or lucky individuals of the old privileged classes are for most practical purposes tied up with those individuals of the old suppressed classes who, probably through the same gifts, were able to rise. This amalgame is especially noticeable in the army and the civil service, but it is almost as conspicuous in business and industry, and higher politics. A detailed study of the social origins of Bonaparte’s officers, or the officers in the present Red Army, or of the men who actually ran the government of England in 1670, France in 1810, Russia in 1938, would certainly confirm this analysis. Moreover, the new men in the post-revolutionary ruling classes have made distinct compromises with the older ones, with that old world from which the crisis period of the revolution is so extreme a revulsion. Your Downings, Fouchés and Kalinins have no longer the fine freedom a Trotsky can enjoy. They are no longer revolutionaries, but rulers, and as such they are in some respects bound to “learn” from their predecessors.

It is in the social arrangements that most intimately and immediately touch the average man that the actual changes effected by our revolutions seem slightest. The grand attempts at reform during the crisis period try to alter John Jones’s relations with his wife, his children, try to give him a new religion, new personal habits. The Thermidoreans abandon most of this attempt, and in the end John Jones stands on certain matters about where he stood when the revolution began. Our study of revolutions should confirm something that sensible men have always known and that exasperated reformers have occasionally come to admit, at least to themselves--that in some very important ways the behavior of men changes with a slowness almost comparable to the kind of change the geologist studies.

We may take as an illustration of the foregoing uniformity the attempts of certain of our revolutionists to alter radically and quickly phases of the law of the family. Le Play has shown that the uniformities of the family are among the stablest and most persistent things in our Western civilization. The ardent Leftist revolutionist in the last few centuries has, therefore, naturally enough, tended to dislike this monogamous Christian family, to him a bulwark of individual selfishness, social snobbery, intellectual stuffiness, snarled up with testamentary red tape, dedicated to the myth of masculine superiority, hardened into rigidity by religious sanctions, a festering center which must be cleaned up before men and women can live as God, Nature, or Science intended them to live. The French revolution saw no widespread attempt to destroy the family, and indeed its generally middle-class course is filled with pious praise of the family virtues. But the humanitarians did put through some far-reaching legislation in this field, such as generous laws of adoption and other measures tending to break down the rigid, almost Roman, family law of the old regime. Notably they attempted to make illegitimate children absolutely equal in every respect with legitimate children. As the law to put this into effect was passed, a glowing orator remarked: “There are no more bastards in France.” We need hardly add that he was mistaken. In a monograph on French Revolutionary Legislation on Illegitimacy, the present author has tried to show how even the good bourgeois who passed this law were emotionally too entangled in the traditional family feelings to try to put it into effect. They said that bastards were free and equal to legitimate children; but they could not bring themselves to act as if they really believed or wanted it to be so. On the whole, the traditional family in its French form emerged unscathed from the revolution.

Russia has seen a much more determined attack on the monogamous Christian family, legislation making divorce even easier than in Nevada, legalizing abortion, encouraging collective household arrangements, establishing crèches and kindergartens, bringing children up as far as possible outside the home, and so on. Let there be no misunderstanding. Russian idealists who sought to do all of this were not nasty-minded folk seeking to make life easier for the sensualist. Quite the contrary, they had, as we have tried very hard to show, a strong streak of Puritanism. To this day, a young Russian Communist would be shocked to the fibers of his being at the sight of almost any American newspaper and periodical stand. These idealists thought the bourgeois family corrupting, and agreed with Mr. Shaw that marriage combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. Their legislation was aimed at achieving the ideals behind Christian monogamy though destroying what they regarded as the corrupting family institutions within which it was hedged.

Here again we are not in the position of historians working with good sources, but through the conflicting reports coming to us from Russia of the 1930’s we can make out that the reformers have failed, that the Christian monogamous family has survived the old Bolsheviks in Russia. Recent legislation, as we have seen, has not only hedged legalized abortion so much as to limit it to cases of the strictest medical necessity, but has actually set up premiums for large families. Divorce has been made more difficult. Filial piety and indeed all the conventional bourgeois family virtues are now in high honor in press, movie, stage, and school.

To take a very specific example, homosexuality was, for the old Bolsheviks, an abnormality, possibly open to medical treatment, but not of course a crime. They didn’t like it, but they were too consistent and open-minded to treat it as a crime. Naturally they had no narrow bourgeois disgust for the practice. But in March, 1934, homosexuality was made a crime with a three- to eight-year prison penalty. We cannot refrain from adding that the Webbs explain this with their usual obligingness: “It is understood that this action followed the discovery of centers of demoralization of boys, due to the influence of certain foreigners, who were summarily expelled from soviet territory.” But even with the foreigners expelled, Russia retains the law. The fact is that Russian sentiments on the subject of homosexuality are nearly constant; only Russian ideas on the subject are variable, and in the long run the constant prevails.

The whole subject of change in the routines of the daily life of John Jones, in the more intimate of his relations with his fellows and his environment, is none too well explored. Here again common sense, with its decisive “human nature doesn’t change,” is much too absolute. But it does appear that our revolutions had but slight permanent effect on the important little things of life for John Jones. What is perhaps loosely called the “Industrial Revolution” had certainly a much greater effect, forced John into a more difficult series of adjustments than did our revolutions. And none of our societies seems to have undergone changes as complete as those undergone by Turkish society since the World War or by Japanese society in the last fifty years. It is tempting to record the apparent paradox that Western society is in some respects more slow to change than Eastern society. But the truth is much more complex than any such paradox. Both the Turks and the Japanese seem to have preserved intact through social and economic change a series of national disciplines. In our Western societies, family, moral and religious disciplines have in a similar way served as a balance to very important social and economic changes, of which the revolutions we have studied are only a part.

Modern Western society has indeed gone through in the last few centuries changes so continuous that, if we adopt the very plausible concept of social equilibrium, we must expect to find certain forces pulling in the opposite direction, in the direction of stability. These forces are not as a rule articulate. They do not seem to interest intellectuals as much as do forces making for change. They are perhaps a bit undignified, and certainly undramatic. Insofar as they do get themselves translated into language, they appear in a variety of logical disguises difficult to penetrate. But they are there, and as we have seen, they set a definite limit to what the reformer or revolutionist can do. Bastardy can hardly stand up against logic or biology; but bastardy exists by virtue neither of logic nor of biology, but by virtue of well-established, slow-changing human sentiments. Men may feel tearfully sorry for poor children stigmatized from birth for something clearly not their fault; but hitherto not even revolution has prevailed against those perhaps ignoble but certainly persistent sentiments behind the “man-made” and “artificial” distinction between children born after a certain rite has been performed and those born without benefit of such a rite. The rite seems fragile, changeable, unimportant--a mere matter of trivial words and gestures. Actually it has proved effective against much grander words and more striking gestures, as well as against whole batteries of logic. For it is, to use Pareto’s terminology, associated with the “persistent aggregates,” patterns of sentiments and behavior very slow to change.

All this amounts to the statement that in our Western society men have continued to hold certain sentiments and to conform to certain set ways of doing things even after they have changed what they say about these sentiments and these acts. Our revolutions seem in many ways to have changed men’s minds more completely than they changed men’s habits. This is by no means to say that they changed nothing at all, that what men think is of no importance. Ideas are not quite magicians in this world, or Robespierre would not have fallen, and Trotsky would today be in Moscow and not in Mexico. But they are not to be dismissed as having no part in the social change. Indeed, what our Marxist friends would call the “ideological” changes effected by our revolutions deserve careful consideration.

One may distinguish two contrasting roles played by these ideas born of revolution. First, our revolutions in the end would seem to have taken the sting out of the radical ideas and slogans of their early days. They achieved the necessary miracle of reconciling aspiring men to the substantial failure of their aspirations. They turned what were originally verbal instruments of revolt, means of moving men to social action against the existing order, into something we shall have to be up-to-date and call the myths, folklore, symbols, stereotypes, rituals, of their respective societies. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” which once was the trumpet call to the storming of heaven on earth, is now in the Third French Republic no more than a bit of national liturgy, a comforting reminder that Frenchmen are the privileged heirs of a heroic past. There are signs that in Russia even so explosive a phrase as “Workers of the world, unite!” can be accommodated to the conservative, restraining necessities of ritual. After all, as too-logical radicals have pointed out, the Bible itself is full of good revolutionary doctrine; what organized Christianity has done with the Bible organized Communism ought to be able to do with a much simpler book like Das Kapital.

A second role is a more positive one. Even in their use as ritual, these ideas are not purely passive, mere bits of mumbo-jumbo. We cannot here go into the important and involved question of the role of these myths and symbols in a society. We certainly must avoid the stupid question as to whether such symbols “cause” any kind of social change. Here as almost everywhere in the social sciences the cart-and-horse formula of causation is useless, and indeed misleading. Sufficient for us that in all our societies we find that the memory of the great revolution is enshrined in practices that seem to be an essential part of the national state as a going concern. Insofar as men are today in England, France, America, and Russia heartened by awareness of membership in a nation, guided perhaps, and certainly consoled, by the nobler and more abstract beliefs, made conscious of some kind of security, of a status, by all sorts of ritualistic acts associated with the State or with the Church as a department of the State, fortified by the prospects still held out in the grand words of a Milton, a Jefferson, a Danton, a Lenin--insofar as men are so moved, the revolutions we have studied have given largely to the content of their emotions. In England, in America, in France, the memory of their great overturns has become a factor in the stability of existing society: in Russia, unless all signs fail, a similar state of affairs has just about been reached.

Yet our revolutions have also left behind a tradition of successful revolt. What is to established, contented, conforming, conventional men merely a ritualistic satisfaction, remains for discontented men a spur to activate their discontent. Our modern Western revolutionary tradition is to a certain extent cumulative, and the latest revolutionists in the tradition, the Russians, have carried their awareness of revolutionary history almost to an obsession. Trotsky, for instance, though he naturally never uses the conceptual scheme of the fever as we have employed it, seems constantly to be watching the course of the Russian revolution almost clinically, constantly looking for events to take courses observed before in France, in England, or wherever men have revolted in the name of the many against the few. If Mussolini and Hitler are equally interested in such clinical observations, this is but proof of our modern assumption that there are uniformities in history.

Again this tradition of revolt is an imponderable, but it seems to have gone into the making of the Western democracies, and to be one of the elements that is in its full form lacking in the development of Italy and Germany, where democratic revolutions have been abortive or at best unimpressive. To state the existence of this revolutionary tradition is not necessarily to make a judgment of value. We bring it forth as an observable fact, one not to be effectively denied by partisans of any stripe. Its exact influence in the complex equilibrium of our present societies we cannot here attempt to determine. Notably, we find great difficulties in estimating how far it has taken root in Russia. Possibly the Communism of Stalin is but “fascism of the Left.” But the whole temper of the Western democracies is influenced, surely, by the fact that they were born of one kind of revolution, with one kind of “ideal”--that is still best summarized as “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”

II. Some Tentative Uniformities

When all necessary concessions are made to those who insist that events in history are unique, it remains true that the four revolutions we have studied do display some striking uniformities. Our conceptual scheme of the fever can be worked out so as to bring these uniformities clearly to mind. We shall find it worth while, in attempting to summarize the work of these revolutions, to recapitulate briefly the main points of comparison on which our uniformities are based.

We must be very tentative about the prodromal symptoms of revolution. Even retrospectively, diagnosis of the four societies we studied was very difficult, and there is little ground for belief that anyone today has enough knowledge and skill to apply formal methods of diagnosis to a contemporary society and say, in this case revolution will or will not occur shortly. But some uniformities do emerge from a study of the old regimes in England, America, France, and Russia.