Part 4

We shall, then, study four revolutions which on the surface seem to have certain resemblances, and deliberately avoid certain other types of revolution. Our four took place in the post-medieval Western world, were “popular” revolutions carried out in the name of “freedom” for a majority against a privileged minority, and were successful; that is, they resulted in the revolutionists’ becoming the legal government. Anything like a complete sociology of revolutions would have to take account of other kinds of revolution, and notably of two, the revolution initiated by authoritarians or oligarchies, or conservatives, that is, the “Rightist” revolution; and the abortive revolution.

No doubt there are sentimental distortions involved in distinguishing our four revolutions as “popular,” but even words heavily encrusted with sentiments have reference to concrete things; and the English, French, American, and Russian revolutions were attempts to ensure a different kind of life from that aimed at in the Fascist revolution in Italy and the National Socialist revolution in Germany. If, however, these Fascist revolutions seem too recent to be judged, or even to be catalogued, fairly, we may find in the time of troubles in Athens at the end of the fifth century B.C. less controversial evidence. Here the revolution of 411 B.C. was the work of the conservative or oligarchic group, and was directed against the old democratic constitution under which Athens had been ruled since Cleisthenes, if not since Solon. In the Council of Four Hundred set up by the successful revolutionists, the extreme oligarchs split with the moderates. After the assassination of the extremist Phrynicus, and the arrival of bad news from the front, the moderate Theramenes was able to take over power and set up a “mixed” constitution, seeking to combine the best of democracy and oligarchy. Then the fleet, in general strongly democratic, won the battle of Cyzicus, and paved the way to a fairly complete restoration of democracy in 410.

The final victory of Sparta led in 404 to a similar revolutionary cycle in Athens, beginning with the extreme oligarchic rule of the Thirty Tyrants and ending again with the restoration of democratic forms. In these movements, the sequence--to use perhaps misleading modern political analogies--is from Right to Center to Left, or from Extremists to Moderates to the Old Gang, a sequence clearly quite different from that we shall encounter in England, France, and Russia. Those devoted to the concept of social equilibrium will note that in these Athenian revolutions the tendency seems to be toward the restoration of old habits and old institutions; and there is much here--the role of political clubs, for instance, and the varied uses of violence--familiar to any student of modern revolutions. Yet the sequence of power, the time-scale, and much else in these Athenian revolutions mark them off from those we have chosen to study, and suggest that they belong at least to a different sub-class.

Of abortive revolutions we have numerous examples. Needless to say, abortiveness is not measured by the failure of revolutionary movements to live up to the ideals professed by their leaders. We mean by abortive simply the failure of organized groups in revolt. Thus the American Civil War is really an almost classical example of an abortive revolution. So too is the Paris Commune of 1871. The European revolutions of 1848 were on the surface mostly abortive, though in many countries they helped bring about important and comparatively permanent administrative and constitutional changes. An abortive revolution may, of course, mold the defeated revolutionary group to an even more heroic determination, and pave the way to continued underground resistance, plotting, propaganda. The blood of martyrs has built council halls and presidential palaces as well as churches. The abortive revolution is especially important in the welding together of oppressed nationalities, which after a few heroic uprisings attain a pitch of exalted patriotism and self-pity that makes them almost unbeatable. Contemporary Ireland and Poland were born of a long series of revolutions that failed, and in their final emergence as independent nations they bear the clear and unlovely scars of these great moral victories. Indeed, in a complete study of revolutions, there would have to be a special sub-class for revolutions in which a territorial or “national” group rises against another and dominating territorial or national group.

Three of our four revolutions--the English, French, and Russian, have courses in general surprisingly similar. All have a social or class rather than a territorial or nationalistic basis, though Oxford and Lancashire, the Vendée, and the Ukraine, suggest that one cannot wholly neglect these latter factors. All are begun in hope and moderation, all reach a crisis in a reign of terror, and all end in something like dictatorship--Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin. The American revolution does not quite follow this pattern, and is therefore especially useful to us as a kind of control.

Our revolution was, perhaps predominantly, a territorial and nationalistic revolution, animated throughout by patriotic American hatred for the British. On the other hand, it was also in part a social and class movement, and as time went on its social character came out more and more strongly. It never quite went through a reign of terror, though it had many terroristic aspects, usually soft-pedaled in school and popular histories. All in all, the American revolution presents a number of interesting problems, and the attempt to integrate some of its aspects with our other three revolutions promises to extend, without unduly stretching, the limits of this study. But we must always remember that the American revolution was in a sense an incomplete one, that it does not fit perfectly our conceptual scheme, that it does not show the victory of the extremists over the moderates. We must be even more cautious than with the other revolutions when we attempt to discern uniformities in the anatomy of the American revolution.

We choose then, deliberately, to isolate four revolutions for analysis, quite aware that there are many other revolutions on record. This procedure has another distinct advantage, that it enables us to dodge a good deal of unprofitable debate over the definition of “revolution.” Pages have been spent on the question as to whether to speak of an “Industrial Revolution” (which began about 1760 and is in a sense still going on) is or is not an abuse of the word “revolution.” Writers on politics have worried over the differences between political and social revolution, between a coup d’état, a putsch, and a revolution. We propose to avoid this tangle by the simple, if metaphysically somewhat disingenuous, device of declaring that since the movements with which we are concerned are commonly called revolutions, they may be so called once more.

The difference between a revolution and other kinds of changes in societies is, to judge from many past uses of the term, logically nearer to that between a mountain and a hill than to that, say, between the freezing point and the boiling point of a given substance. The physicist can measure boiling points exactly; the social scientist cannot measure change by any such exact thermometer, and say exactly when ordinary change boils over into revolutionary change. One might flirt with the notion of a “revolt point” for different social systems; England’s being at, say, 200° in some conventional scale, France’s at 150°, Japan’s at 400°, and so on. But this would be nonsense of the type altogether too common in the social sciences, which have long been in the habit of putting up mathematical false fronts. In actual practice, we let use distinguish for us between a hill and a mountain, and there is no harm in accepting the decision of use as to what to call a revolution. The important element in scientific definition is that the definition should be based on facts, and enable us to handle facts better; precision and neatness come definitely second, and are defects if they are achieved by the neglect or distortion of facts. Obviously in present usage the word revolution is a class-term covering quite a number of concrete phenomena, from the introduction of the spinning-mule to the ejection of Porfirio Diaz, and the job of the systematist is to cling to the general term and devise useful sub-classifications within it.

To such simple truths are we reduced even before we enter fully into the study of actual revolutions. Yet the really obvious, the really commonplace, does not often find its way into print. What gets there much more often is the literary commonplace, the cliché and the stereotype, the beliefs men have about things and beings they never deal with directly. The world of the pulp magazines is a world of literary commonplaces. Many an intellectual in the world usually rated above the pulps is driven by a no doubt commendable horror of the literary commonplace into an equal horror of the obvious. The scientist can afford no such indulgence. The first job of the scientist is to be obvious, for only on a firm foundation in the obvious can he build securely the more complex fabric of a developed science. He may even have to be a bit insistent and repetitive about the obvious; for in this modern world of ours, where so much of our experience is the vicarious experience of sermons, books, pictures, plays, even the simple souls who love commonplaces have literary commonplaces fobbed off on them instead of the real thing.

We shall, then, hope that whatever uniformities we can detect in the revolutions we are analyzing will turn out to be obvious, to be just what any sensible man already knew about revolutions. We shall be genuinely disappointed if the anatomy of revolutions does not turn out to be a familiar one. It will seem a sufficient gain if these uniformities can be listed, recorded, as uniformities. Those whose appetites demand great discoveries are, then, warned in advance. Here they will find poor fare. Nor is this said in any spirit of mock humility. A literary saw, now almost folk-wisdom, but still pretty literary, is scornful over the mountain which labored and brought forth only a ridiculous mouse. That mountain has perhaps never had due recognition for what is surely a rather remarkable biological feat. Moreover, the mouse was at least alive. Most mountains, when they go in for this sort of thing, produce nothing better than lava, steam, and hot air.

Chapter TWO THE OLD REGIMES

I. The Diagnosis of Preliminary Signs

From France, which has long carried out a kind of linguistic Free Trade, comes the phrase “old regime.” Applied to the history of France, it covers roughly the society of the last two-thirds of the eighteenth century, the generation or two preceding the revolution of 1789. We may reasonably extend its use to describe the varied societies out of which our revolutions emerged. Following our conceptual scheme, we shall look in these societies for something like a revolutionary prodrome, for a set of preliminary signs of the coming revolution.

Such a search must not be undertaken without one important caution. Disorder in some sense appears to be endemic in all societies, and certainly in our Western society. The historian turned diagnostician can find evidences of disorders and discontents in almost any society he chooses to study. If a stable, or healthy, society is defined as one in which there are no expressions of discontent with the government or with existing institutions, in which no laws are ever broken, then there are no stable or healthy societies. Not even the totalitarian state, one suspects, can live up to this standard.

Our normal or healthy society, then, will not be one in which there are no criticisms of the government or the ruling class, no gloomy sermons on the moral decay of the times, no Utopian dreams of a better world around the corner, no strikes, no lock-outs, no unemployment, no crime waves, no New Deals. All we can expect of what we may call a healthy society is that there should be no striking excess of this sort of thing, and perhaps also that most people should behave as if they felt that, with all its faults, the society were a going concern. Then we may look about for the kind of signs just described--discontents expressed in words or deeds--and try to estimate their seriousness. We shall, of course, very soon find that we are dealing with a large number of variables, that for given societies studied in their old regimes these variables combine variously and in different proportions, and that in some cases certain variables are apparently absent altogether or nearly so. We are surely unlikely to find in all the cases we study one clear, omnipresent symptom, so that we could say: when you find x or y in a society, you know that a revolution is a month, or a year, or a decade, or any time in the future. On the contrary, symptoms are apt to be many, varied, and by no means neatly combined in a pattern. We shall be lucky if, to borrow another medical term, they form a recognizable syndrome.

II. Structural Weaknesses, Economic and Political

As good children of our age, we are bound to start any such study as this with the economic situation. All of us, no matter how little sympathy we may have with organized communism, betray the extent of Marx’s influence in the social studies--and of the influences that influenced Marx--by the naturalness with which we ask the question: “What had economic interests to do with it all?” Now it is incontestable that in all four of the societies we are studying the years preceding the outbreak of revolution witnessed unusually serious economic, or at least financial, difficulties of a special kind. The first two Stuarts were in perpetual conflict with their parliaments over taxes, and the years just before 1640 resounded with complaints about Ship Money, benevolences, tonnage and poundage and other terms now strange to us, but once capable of making a hero of a very rich Buckinghamshire gentleman named John Hampden, who was financially quite able to pay much larger taxes than he did. Americans need not be reminded of the part trouble over taxation played in the years just before the shot fired at Concord defied all the laws of acoustics. “No taxation without representation” may be rejected by all up-to-date historians as in itself an adequate explanation of the beginnings of the American revolution, but the fact remains that it was in the 1770’s a slogan capable of exciting our fathers to action. In 1789 the French Estates-General, the calling of which precipitated the revolution, was made unavoidable by the bad financial state of the government. Official France in 1789 was financially in as unhappy a way as, until our own times, one would have believed it possible for a government to be. In Russia in 1917 financial collapse did not perhaps stand out so prominently because the Czarist regime had achieved an all-round collapse in all fields of governmental activity, from war to village administration. But three years of war had put such a strain on Russian finances that, even with the support of the Allies, high prices and scarcity were by 1917 most obvious factors in the general tension.

Yet in all of these societies, it is the government that is in financial difficulties, not the societies themselves. To put the matter negatively, our revolutions did not occur in societies economically backward, nor in societies undergoing widespread economic misery or depression. You will not find in these societies of the old regime anything like unusually widespread economic want. In a specific instance, of course, the standard against which want or depression is measured must be the standard of living more or less acceptable to a given group at a given time. What satisfied an English peasant in 1640 would be misery and want for an Iowa farmer of 1938. It is possible that certain groups in a society may be in unusual want even though statistically that abstraction “society as a whole” is enjoying an increasing--and almost equally abstract--“national income.” Nevertheless, when national income is rapidly increasing, someone does get the benefit. We must look more carefully at our four societies in this respect.

France in 1789 was a very striking example of a rich society with an impoverished government. The eighteenth century had begun to collect statistics about itself, and though these would not satisfy a modern economist they enable us to be very certain about the increasing prosperity of eighteenth-century France. Any series of indices--foreign trade, population growth, building, manufactures, agricultural production--will show a general upward trend all through the eighteenth century. Here are a few examples: wastelands all over France were being brought under the plow and in the élection of Melun alone in two years from 1783 to 1785 uncultivated land was reduced from 14,500 to 10,000 arpents; Rouen in 1787 produced annually cotton cloth worth fifty millions of livres, having at least doubled its production in a generation; French trade with North Africa (the Barbary Coast) increased from about 1,000,000 livres in 1740 to 6,216,000 livres in 1788; the total French foreign trade had in 1787 increased nearly 100,000,000 livres in the dozen years since the death of Louis XV in 1774.

Even in our imperfect statistics we can distinguish short-term cyclical variations, and it seems clear that in some respects, notably in the wheat harvest, 1788-89 was a bad year. It was, however, by no means a deep trough year like 1932 for this country. If business men in eighteenth-century France had kept charts and made graphs, the lines would have mounted with gratifying consistency through most of the period preceding the French revolution. Now this prosperity was certainly most unevenly shared. The people who got the lion’s share of it seem to have been the merchants, bankers, business men, lawyers, peasants who ran their own farms as businesses; the middle class, as we have come to call it. It was precisely these prosperous people who in the 1780’s were loudest against the government, most reluctant to save it by paying taxes.

In America, of course, with an empty continent available for the distressed, general economic conditions in the eighteenth century show increasing wealth and population, with economic distress a purely relative matter. There can be no talk of starvation, of grinding poverty in the New England of the Stamp Act. Even the minor fluctuations of the business cycle fail to coincide with the revolution, and the early years of the 1770’s were distinctly years of prosperity. There were economic stresses and strains in colonial America, as we shall soon see, but no class ground down with poverty.

Nor is it easy to argue that early Stuart England was less prosperous than late Tudor England had been. There is rather evidence that, especially in the years of personal government which preceded the Long Parliament, England was notably prosperous. Ramsay Muir writes that “England had never known a more steady or more widely diffused prosperity and the burden of taxation was less than in any other country. The coming revolution was certainly not due to economic distress.” Even in the Russia of 1917, apart from the shocking breakdown of the machinery of government under war-strain, the productive capacity of society as a whole was certainly greater than at any other time in Russian history; and to take again the long view, the economic graphs had all been mounting for Russia as a whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the progress in trade and production since the abortive revolution of 1905 had been notable.

Our revolutions, then, clearly were not born in societies economically retrograde; on the contrary, they took place in societies economically progressive. This does not, of course, mean that no groups within these societies cherished grievances mainly economic in character. Two main foci for economic motives of discontent seem to stand out. First, and much the less important, is the actual misery of certain groups in a given society. No doubt in all our societies, even in America, there was a sort of submarginal group of poor people whose release from certain forms of restraint is a very important feature of revolution itself. But in studying the preliminary signs of revolution, these people are not very important. French republican historians have long insisted on the importance of the bad harvest of 1788, the cold winter of 1788-89, and the consequent sufferings of the poor. Bread was relatively dear in that spring when the Estates-General first assembled. There was apparently a tightening up of business conditions in America in 1774-75, but certainly nothing like widespread distress or unemployment. The local sufferings of Boston, considerable under the Port Bill, were really a part of the revolution itself, and not a sign. The winter of 1916-17 was certainly a bad one in Russia, with food rationing in all the cities.

The important thing to note, however, is that French and Russian history are filled with famines, plagues, bad harvests, sometimes local, sometimes national in sweep, many of which were accompanied by sporadic rioting, but in each case only one by revolution. In neither the English nor the American revolution do we find even this degree of localized want or famine. Clearly, then, the economic distress of the under-privileged, though it may well accompany a revolutionary situation, is not one of the symptoms we need dwell upon. This the subtler Marxists themselves recognize, and Trotsky has written: “In reality, the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would always be in revolt.”

Of much greater importance is the existence among a group, or groups, of a feeling that prevailing conditions limit or hinder their economic activity. We are especially aware of this element in our American revolution, and Professor A. M. Schlesinger has shown how the prosperous merchants, their immediate interests damaged by the new imperial policy of the British government, led an agitation against the legislation of 1764 and 1765 and helped stir up a discontent among the less well-to-do which these merchants later found a bit embarrassing. No doubt, too, that many of the firm spots in the very uneven and wavering policy of the British government--the Stamp Act and subsequent disorders, the announced intention of enforcing the Navigation Act, and so on--did have momentary ill effects on business, did throw men out of work. The currency question was of course mismanaged in a day when common sense did not very effectively supplement ignorance of economic processes. The colonies were always lacking in specie, and business enterprise suffered from this lack. Paper money, to which recourse was inevitable, was also an inevitable source of further quarrels between governors and governed.

The working of economic motives to revolt among possessing classes normally inclined to support existing institutions is especially clear among the aristocrats of tidewater Virginia. Largely dependent on a single crop, tobacco, used to a high standard of living, increasingly indebted to London bankers, many of the planters hoped to recoup their fortunes in the western lands they regarded as clearly belonging to Virginia. George Washington’s own involvements in western land speculations make one of the favorite topics of the debunkers. By the Quebec Act of 1774, however, the British government took the trans-Allegheny lands north of the Ohio from Virginia and other claimant colonies, and incorporated them with Canada. This act gave a grievance to others besides the planter-speculator. The closing of this frontier was also an offense to a class perhaps normally more inclined to revolt--the restless woodsmen and fur traders, and the only slightly less restless small pioneer farmers who had already occupied the Appalachian valleys, and were ready to pour over into the Kentucky and Ohio country. The Quebec Act in itself does not, of course, explain the American revolution; but taken with a long series of other acts, the Stamp Act, the Navigation Act, the Molasses Act, it accounts for the feeling so evident among active and ambitious groups in America that British rule was an unnecessary and incalculable restraint, an obstacle to their full success in life.

In France the years preceding 1789 are marked by a series of measures which antagonized different groups. With striking awkwardness, the government offered with one hand what it withdrew with the other. Tax-reform efforts, never carried through, offended privileged groups without pleasing the unprivileged. Turgot’s attempted introduction of laissez-faire into labor relations offended all the vested interests of the old guilds. The famous tariff reduction treaty with England in 1786 directly affected French textiles for the worse, increased unemployment in Normandy and other regions, and gave the employer class a grievance against the government. So, too, in seventeenth-century England, there is no doubt that the attempt to revive obsolete forms of taxation seemed to London or Bristol merchants a threat to their rising prosperity and importance.

Thus we see that certain economic grievances--usually not in the form of economic distress, but rather a feeling on the part of some of the chief enterprising groups that their opportunities for getting on in this world are unduly limited by political arrangements--would seem to be one of the symptoms of revolution. These feelings must, of course, be raised to an effective social pitch by propaganda, pressure-group action, public meetings, and preferably a few good dramatic riots, like the Boston Tea Party. As we shall see, these grievances, however close they are to the pocketbook, must be made respectable, must touch the soul. What is really but a restraint on a rising and already successful group, or on several such groups, must appear as rank injustice towards everyone in the society. Men may revolt partly or even mainly because they are hindered, or, to use Dr. George Pettee’s expressive word, cramped; but to the world--and, save for a very few hypocrites, also to themselves--they must appear wronged. Revolutions cannot do without the word “justice.”