Part 7

V. Summary

In summing up, the most striking thing we must note is that all of these preliminary signs--government deficits, complaints over taxation, governmental favoring of one set of economic interests over another, administrative entanglements and confusions, desertion of the intellectuals, loss of self-confidence among many members of the ruling class, conversion of many members of that class to the belief that their privileges are unjust or harmful to society, the intensification of social antagonisms, the stoppage at certain points (usually in the professions, the arts, perhaps the white-collar jobs generally) of the career open to talents, the separation of economic power from political power and social distinction--some, if not most of these signs may be found in almost any modern society at any time. With the wisdom of hindsight, we can now say that in four, or at least in three, of our societies these--and no doubt other signs we have omitted to consider--existed in some unusual combination and intensities before revolution ensued. But clearly we must infer from what we have just done that in its earlier stages diagnosis of revolution is extremely difficult, and certainly cannot be reduced to a neat formula, a recipe, a set of rules. This is also true of the diagnosis of human illnesses. The best diagnosticians, we are told on good authority, could not possibly analyze out and put into formal logical sequence all the steps they take in the clinical diagnosis of disease.

We are not, however, left altogether helpless before some mystic gift for short-term prophecy in the successful diagnostician. His methods are not those of magic, but rather the gift for making what is, until familiarity has made it easy, the difficult and rarely explicit synthesis of past experience and present observation into a successful generalization--or hunch if you prefer. And we can in this instance hazard something further as to signs of revolution in our four societies. In all of them, and especially in France and in Russia, there is as the actual outbreak of revolution approaches increasing talk about revolution, increasing consciousness of social tension, increasing “cramp” and irritation. Prophets of evil there always are, and we need not lay much stress on any specific prediction of a given revolution, such as the Marquis d’Argenson made forty years before the French revolution. But when such fears--or hopes--become something like common property, when they are, to use a very aged metaphor to which the invention of the radio has given an ironic twist, in the air, then it is fairly safe to take this general sentiment as a pretty conclusive sign of revolution. Even then, however, we have a sign difficult to use. For people never seem to expect revolution for themselves, but only for their children. The actual revolution is always a surprise. This is true even for Russia, where the revolution had long been in the air.

It must, however, be really in the air, and not simply in the mouths of professional seers or timid conservatives. It must, above all, go beyond the intellectuals. For, valuable as the desertion of the intellectuals is as a sign if found with others, as part of a syndrome, in itself alone this desertion proves nothing. After all, one of the great functions of the intellectuals in Western society has always been to shake ordinary mortals out of their unthinking optimism, and Cassandra has perhaps as much claim as Plato to be founder of a great academic tradition. But Cassandra’s successors have not quite achieved her unhappy infallibility.

Chapter THREE FIRST STAGES OF REVOLUTION

I. The Eternal Figaro

There is in the Marriage of Figaro of Beaumarchais, first performed at Paris in 1784, a famous soliloquy by Figaro in which much of what we have laboriously analyzed in the previous chapter is dramatically focused in a few pages. Figaro himself is the able young man unjustly kept down by the pressure of a social system built on privilege. As the scene opens he is waiting in the darkness to surprise in an assignation his bride and his master, the Count Almaviva. His first reflections on feminine inconstancy pass over very rapidly into a violent attack on his noble master. “Because you are a great lord, you think you are a great genius! ... nobility, fortune, rank, appointments; all this makes a man so proud! But what have you done to deserve so many good things? You took the trouble to get born!” Then he looks back on the struggles that have filled his life--his obscure birth, his education in chemistry, pharmacy, surgery, all barely sufficing, because of his lack of high birth, to give him the privilege of practicing veterinary medicine; his venture in playwrighting, and his inevitable clash with the censor; his turn to writing on state finance, and the resulting prison term; another essay in literature, this time in journalism, and another suppression; rejection as candidate for a government job, since unfortunately he was fitted for the post; a turn as gambler, when his noble patrons took most of his profits; and his final return to his old trade as barber-surgeon.

Scattered throughout the soliloquy are a train of epigrams which delighted fashionable audiences in the old regime, and were taken up throughout the country. Indeed, families would come up to Paris chiefly to see the Marriage of Figaro, and hear French wit at its best directed against a wicked government. Here are a few of Beaumarchais’ most famous jibes: “Not being able to degrade the human spirit, they get revenge by mistreating it.” “Only little men fear little writings.” “For the job an accountant was necessary; a dancer got it.” “To get on in this world, savoir faire is worth more than savoir.” And, of course, that bitter jibe at the Count’s attainments--“qu’avez-vous fait pour tant de biens? vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître.” Here in this one speech are so many indications of the coming revolution that, with the wisdom of after-the-fact that comes so naturally to the historian, we can say the revolution is already almost full-blown in Figaro. Including, of course, the fact that, after a long vacillation, the censor did not stop Beaumarchais’ play.

The years just preceding the actual outbreak of revolution witness a crescendo of protests against the tyranny of the government, a hail of pamphlets, plays, addresses, an outburst of activity on the part of interested pressure groups. Facing all this, the government certainly does not live up to the reputation its opponents seek to make for it. Its tyrannous attempts at suppressing the rebellious opposition may perhaps fail because that opposition is too strong, resourceful, and virtuous; or its attempts may fail because they are carried out half-heartedly and inefficiently by governmental agents more than half won over to the opposition. The fact remains that they do fail.

Even the period of the personal rule of Charles I which preceded the English revolution was not altogether as quiet and successful as it seemed on the surface to be. Many Puritan divines escaped Laud’s attempt to drive them from the Established Church, and the others found plenty of independent pulpits and printing presses. Strafford might write in 1638 that “the People are in great quietness and, if I be not much mistaken, well-satisfied if not delighted with his Majesty’s gracious government and protection”; but he was much mistaken. At the very least these eleven years of personal government were but the calm before the storm.

In our other three societies we do not even find this deceptive calm, but a steady growth of revolutionary agitation. In America hardly a colony escaped some form of rioting in the period between the Stamp Act and Lexington, and all of them saw a steady growth of agitation through merchants’ committees, correspondence committees, Sons of Liberty, and similar groups. The French government in the 1780’s drew nearer and nearer to bankruptcy, and with each expedient to avoid bankruptcy brought nearer the calling of the Estates-General and the signal for revolution. As for Russia, it was a society strikingly conscious of the possibilities of revolution. Upper-class Russians had for more than a generation been turning their uneasiness into the smooth coin of conversation: “sitting upon a volcano,” “after us the deluge,” “the storm is rising.” In 1905 and 1906, under pressure of defeat by the Japanese, a kind of dress rehearsal of the great revolution took place. The patriotic enthusiasms of 1914 for a while stilled conspicuous preparation for revolution, but military defeat in 1915 and 1916 brought back conditions that grew daily more and more like those of 1905.

II. The Events of the First Stages

The Russian revolution began more dramatically and definitely with a single event--street riots in Petrograd in 1917--than did any of our other revolutions. Yet even in Russia it took four or five days for the revolutionists themselves to realize that the confused milling around of Petrograd crowds might bring about the fall of the Romanovs. History and patriotic ritual have singled out dramatic episodes--the battles at Lexington and Concord, the fall of the Bastille--as beginning revolutions. But though contemporaries were aware of the dramatic quality of such events, they were not always sure that they had turned revolutionary agitation into revolution. The first steps in revolution are by no means always dear to the revolutionists themselves, and the transition from agitation to action is rarely a sudden and definite thing.

Charles I came to the throne in 1624, and almost immediately found himself engaged with the House of Commons in a struggle chiefly over taxes. Out of the conflict there emerged the Petition of Right of 1628, in which the Commons forced the King’s consent to a statement of definite limitations on the royal power: Charles promised not to raise forced loans, not to quarter soldiers on unwilling householders, not to permit officers to exercise martial law in time of peace, not to send anyone to prison without showing cause why he had done so. Emboldened by this success, the Commons under the leadership of the emotional Sir John Eliot went on to refuse to grant the King the usual form of customs’ revenue--tonnage and poundage--and to insist in an aggressive and indeed revolutionary way on their privileges. At a final debate on March 2, 1629, two men, Denzil Holles and Valentine, held down the Speaker in his chair by force while Eliot proposed a ringing declaration on the illegality of paying tonnage and poundage without a grant from Parliament. Conservatives pushed forward to free the Speaker. There followed a riotous debate fully worthy of the standards set later by the National Assembly in France, but somehow or other in the confusion Eliot’s resolutions were put through before the royal order dissolving the Parliament could be carried out. The parliamentarians had made a grand gesture of protest. From that day, no Parliament met in England for eleven years. Eliot, jailed for rioting, maintained that the King had no power over a member of the House of Commons. He died a most effective martyr in 1632.

In the years of personal rule Charles, aided by his two great supporters, Strafford and Laud, did his best to organize the government of England in accordance with notions of efficient centralization and expert rule which were the chief political heritage of the Renaissance. He did a job in some ways surprisingly good. But he may, as nineteenth-century liberal historians fondly believed, have been going against the basic grain of the English character and the basic mold of English institutions; he was most certainly going bankrupt. A clash with the Scotch Presbyterians probably merely hastened the inevitable. Charles called a Parliament in the spring of 1640, but dissolved it after less than a month. A Scotch army now invaded England, and Charles had to buy it off. To get money he had to call another Parliament. The Short Parliament was, therefore, but a breaking of the ground for the Long Parliament, which met on November 3, 1640, was dissolved on April 20, 1653, and was brought briefly to life again in 1659, just before the restoration of the Stuarts. The life of this extraordinary assembly thus spans almost completely the twenty years of the English revolution.

The Long Parliament got to work at once, for on November 11, 1640, a week after it first met, Pym moved the impeachment of Strafford for high treason. The impeachment, held up by the more conservative House of Lords, was turned early in 1641 into a bill of attainder. Impeachment involved at least the forms of judicial action, whereas attainder was a simple legislative act. The Lords were willing enough to abandon Strafford, if not to try him, and on May 12th he fell under the executioner’s ax. Less than eight years later that ax was to reach his royal master.

Actual outbreak of armed hostilities between Charles and the Parliament was not to come for another year. Parliament voted by a majority of eleven the Grand Remonstrance, a long summing-up of all the grievances accumulated against the King in the seventeen years of his reign. Charles replied to this vote of want of confidence by attempting to arrest six members of Parliament, Lord Kimbolton in the Lords, Pym, Hampden, Haselrig, Holles, and Strode in the Commons, who had compromised themselves by entering into technically treasonous negotiations with the invading Scotch army. Charles rashly came down to the House of Commons himself with armed men and attempted to seize the members. He was met with something of the kind of passive resistance the French Third Estate displayed at the royal session of June 17, 1789, when Louis XVI ordered them to give up attempting to form a National Assembly. The threatened members fled to the City of London, and Charles was again checkmated. The Commons were now so aggressively successful that they decided to take over the military by naming officers in the militia and train-bands. Charles, in turn, began to build up his own army, and set up his standard at Nottingham in August, 1642. The Civil War had begun.

Where in this long and closely knit series of events you wish to say the English revolution fairly began is partly a subjective matter. Somewhere between the calling of the Long Parliament in 1640, and the outbreak of the war two years later, the first critical steps in the revolution were undertaken. Perhaps the execution of Strafford is a good dramatic date, or Charles’s futile attempt to seize the five members in the Commons. At any rate, by the summer of 1642 the English revolution had taken on unmistakable form.

Events in America moved hardly more rapidly. In a sense, you can maintain that the American revolution really began in 1765 with the Stamp Act; or at any rate that the agitation which culminated in the repeal of that Act was a kind of rehearsal for the great movement of the seventies. The imperial government was determined to do something about the American colonists, and Townshend’s mild duties on tea, glass, lead and a few other articles imported into America were accompanied by an attempt to collect them in an efficient modern way. Under Townshend’s act His Majesty’s customs houses in America were equipped with a hopeful and willing bureaucracy. The result was a series of clashes with increasingly well-organized groups of Americans. Tarring and feathering of informers, stealing sequestered goods from under the noses of customs officers, jeering at British troops, led up to the more dramatic incidents enshrined in the textbooks: the seizure of the Gaspee at Providence, the Boston Massacre of 1770, the Boston Tea Party, the burning of the Peggy Stewart at Annapolis.

The closing of the port of Boston, the dispatch of Gage and his troops to Massachusetts, the Quebec Act itself, were all really measures taken by the imperial government against colonies already in revolt. You may, if you are interested in such matters, discuss at length the question as to just when the American revolution is to be considered as formally beginning. You may go as late as the first Continental Congress in 1774, or the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, or even the most famous Fourth of July in 1776. But the complex group-struggles out of which revolutions actually grow only later turn into formal sources for patriotic ritual. The first steps in the American revolution were many and spread over something like a decade. Only an absolutist mind could insist that out of this long process a given detail be isolated as the beginning of the American revolution.

The French revolution of 1789 may be said to have been incubating for several decades. Overt and definite resistance to the royal government, as in the parliaments of Charles I and in the American colonial assemblies, is not to be found in France, which was wholly without such representative bodies. The nearest thing to such a body was the parlement de Paris, a kind of supreme court composed of judges who were nobles and held their positions by heredity. It was precisely this parlement, followed by the provincial parlements, that began in the 1780’s an open quarrel with the Crown, which culminated in a dramatic defiance of royal power and the forced exile of the judges. Popular opinion, at least in Paris, was overwhelmingly with the judges, and privileged nobles though they were, they became heroes and martyrs for a day.

Meanwhile, approaching bankruptcy had forced the King to call in 1787 an Assembly of Notables, a kind of hastily gathered special commission of prominent nobles, from whom Louis XVI in good eighteenth-century style no doubt expected enlightenment. This he certainly obtained, for the Assembly contained many upper-class intellectuals, like Lafayette, who were convinced that France must cease to be a “despotism,” must endow itself with an up-to-date constitution of the kind the new states of the American union were making fashionable. The Assembly of Notables was accordingly very divided and doubtful about ways of filling the empty treasury, but clear that further consultation with the nation was necessary. The Crown finally yielded, brought back into the government the Swiss commoner, Necker, who had a reputation as a financial wizard, and summoned a meeting of the Estates-General for the spring of 1789.

This Estates-General had last met in 1614, and there was some uncertainty as to how one went about electing it. The antiquarians came to the rescue, however, and three hundred representatives of the First Estate, or clergy, three hundred of the Second, or nobility, and six hundred of the Third, or commons, were chosen, practically in time for the first meeting. The double representation of the Third Estate had no precedent in 1614 or earlier. It was, in fact, a revolutionary step, a concession wrung from the King, an admission that in some way or another the Third Estate was more important than the others. In the old constitution, however, final decisions were made by the orders as units; that is, if the Clergy and the Nobles as separate houses agreed on a policy, they could carry it, two to one, even against the dissenting Third Estate. When the Estates met in May, 1789, the great question was whether to follow the old constitution and vote by orders, or to vote in one great assembly of twelve hundred members in which the doubled Third Estate, plus the “liberals” among the other two orders, would have a clear majority. Louis had characteristically permitted this problem to remain vague and unsettled, and only after the Third Estate had insisted on one great assembly did he royally insist on three separate ones.

The issue out of which the French revolution formally grew was this simple one of vote by orders or vote by individuals in one assembly. The Third Estate stood pat, and refused to transact any business until the other orders joined it in what was to be called--and the name was a sound piece of propaganda for the revolutionists--the National Assembly. There are certain dramatic moments in a two-months’ struggle which was essentially parliamentary and lacking in the more physical kinds of violence. Shut out by a royal blunder from their usual meeting place, the Third Estate on June 20, 1789, met hastily in a large indoor tennis court, and swore not to disperse until they had endowed France with a constitution.

Thanks partly to David’s famous painting, which is more symbolic than realistic, this episode is now second only to the taking of the Bastille in the patriotic ritual of the present Third French Republic. Actually more important was the glowering defiance of the Third Estate when in a plenary royal session of June 23rd the King called on all the prestige and pageantry of the Crown to enforce voting by separate orders. At this session the Third Estate remained behind after the King’s withdrawal, and Mirabeau is said to have made his famous reply to a request from the King’s Grand Master of Ceremonies that they in turn withdraw: “We are assembled here by the will of the nation, and we will not leave except by force.” Shortly afterwards the King yielded, though probably not to Mirabeau’s rhetoric. By the beginning of July the National Assembly had been duly constituted, and was ready to put the Enlightenment, so long in France a matter of theory, into practice. The first steps in the French revolution had been taken.

Those who insist that you must have violence before you can label revolution as begun will date the great French revolution from July 14, 1789, when a Paris mob, aided by soldiers who had gone over to the popular side, took the gloomy fortress-prison of the Bastille on the eastern edge of the city. Bastille Day is the French republican Fourth of July, a great holy day in one of the best organized of our contemporary nationalist religions. As such it has been surrounded by legends, endowed with a martyrology, safely withdrawn from the unedifying touch of history. To an outsider, the taking of the Bastille seems an involved and confusing process, at least as much the result of the weakness of the royal governor, De Launay, as of the strength of the besiegers. What is important for us is that Paris was in the hands of a mob for three days, and that this mob was clearly shouting against the King, shouting for the National Assembly. After the rioting had died down, the National Assembly--or rather, the revolutionary majority in the Assembly--could proceed in the useful assurance that the people were on its side, could feel that it had carte blanche to neglect royal protests as it went about its task of remaking France.

The revolution in Russia got under way with great speed. As we have seen in a previous chapter, there were plenty of precedents for a Russian uprising, and several generations of Russians had been discussing the inevitable coming of the storm. The first steps which led up to the February revolution of 1917, however, took even advanced leaders like Kerensky somewhat by surprise. Socialist parties the world over had been used to celebrating March 8th as Women’s Day. On that day--February 23rd of the old Russian calendar, whence the name, February revolution, by which it has gone down in history--crowds of women workers from the factory districts poured into the streets calling for bread. Each day thereafter crowds increased. Orators of the radical group harangued at street corners. Soldiers from the large Petrograd wartime garrison mingled with the crowds, seemed indeed to sympathize with them. Even the Cossacks were not hostile to the people, or at any rate, seemed to lack stomach for fighting.

Meanwhile the authorities were consulting, and as piecemeal measures failed to work, they decided on March 11th to repress the troubles in accordance with a fine neat plan already drawn up on paper for just such emergency. But the plan didn’t work. The soldiers of the garrison, anxious not to be sent to the front, began to waver. On March 12th the first of the mutinies broke out, and one after another the famous regiments of the Imperial Army poured out of the barracks, but to join, not to shoot on, the crowds. Obscure leaders, sergeants, factory foremen and the like arose and directed their little groups at strategic points. Out of all the confusion and madness which makes the detailed record of events in this week the despair of the historian, one clear fact came out. There was no imperial government left in the capital, no formal government at all. Gradually there emerged the nucleus of the Soviet government to come, organized through trade unions, Socialist groups, and other working-class sources. The Czar and his advisers, too bewildered and incompetent to control the movement, did prevent the legal Duma from taking control. Instead, moderates of all sorts got together to form the nucleus of the provisional government to come. In such a chaotic condition, indeed, it would seem that the action of the moderates is a uniformity of revolutions. Their sentiments and training impel them to try and put a stop to disorder, to salvage what they can of established routines.