Part 8

Socialists and liberals alike were agreed that the Czar must abdicate. Nicholas himself had started from Headquarters for his palace at Tsarskoe Selo near Petrograd, but was held up at Pskov by the increasing disorders. Here, on March 15th, he decided to abdicate in favor of his brother, the Grand Duke Michael. What centralized power there was in Russia seems to have been in the hands of a committee of the Duma, and this committee waited on Michael in person. Kerensky, who was on the committee, seems at this juncture to have been as neurotically dramatic as usual; at Michael’s refusal to accept the Crown he went into a transport of delight. Russia was to be a republic. Michael’s own decision to refuse seems to have been dictated by personal cowardice. One of the nice problems of history in the conditional centers around the question of what would have happened had this Romanov been a man of courage, decision, and ability. No one can say, but the question reminds us that even in its most sociological moments, history cannot neglect the drama of personality and chance.

With Michael’s abdication on March 16, 1917, the Russian revolution had clearly begun. There were repercussions in the provinces, and in some remote spots the fall of the Romanovs was not realized for weeks. But the work of those eight days had destroyed a centralized bureaucratic government at its most vital point--its head and nerve-center. Much in Russia was unchanged by the February revolution, but politically a week had done what it had taken years to do in England and France. The Romanovs had gone much more rapidly than the Stuarts and the Bourbons.

III. Spontaneity or Planning?

Even from the foregoing sketch of the first steps in four revolutions, it should be clear that to the narrative historian the differences in the four are striking. The English revolution was begun in one of the oldest, best established of representative bodies; the American revolution began chiefly in New England, among people used to town meetings and colonial legislatures; the French revolution developed out of the meetings of a legislative body with no immediate precedents, staffed by men unused to parliamentary life; the Russian revolution started in street riots in the capital city, and went on without benefit of any parliamentary body, since even the old Duma met only through an emergency committee. There are differences of personality, differences of time and place. Charles raising his standard in hope at Nottingham in 1642 seems worlds apart from the abject Nicholas, buffeted about the northern plains in a railroad train at the mercy of striking workers and troops in revolt, drearily abdicating in the provincial gloom of Pskov. There may even be racial differences. The orderly and almost chivalrous Civil War of the English seems at first sight something quite unlike the madness of July 14th, or the tragicomic spectacle of metropolitan Petrograd in the hands of a mob without even a good slogan.

Yet this last should give us pause. At the informal level of mere dramatic or narrative likenesses, these early stages of revolution have similarities as striking as their differences. Speaker Lenthall defying Charles come to seize the five members, Mirabeau thundering his challenge to the bewildered Grand Master of Ceremonies at the royal session of June 23rd, Patrick Henry warning a king of the unfortunate fate of certain other rulers--these seem to be speaking the same language, assuming the same effective postures. The English House of Commons in the pandemonium of its final session in 1629 seems much like the French National Assembly during its frequent heated moments, and not worlds apart from certain important sessions of the Petrograd soviet.

For the emotions of men in groups, and the rhetoric and gestures necessary to bring out and make effective for action these emotions, are more uniform than the rationalist likes to think them. Any representative body of several hundred responds in definite ways to certain definite stimuli, and it does this the more certainly and invariably because it cannot respond to logic, cannot confront a new situation with complete experimental freedom. Especially are excited representative bodies much alike, whether they are composed of “irresponsible” Russians, “excitable” Frenchmen, or “sensible” Englishmen. We need not be surprised if in these early stages of revolution there are clear parallels in the behavior of men in such groups.

It is, however, more important for us to see whether there are not in these four revolutions uniformities which can be grouped together, related to the whole course of the movements, given a place in our conceptual scheme of the fever. What evidence have we here that we are dealing with a process which has definite and common stages? Do these first steps in revolution take place under conditions sociologically similar even if dramatically dissimilar?

One uniformity is crystal-clear. In all four of our societies, the existing government attempted to collect monies from people who refused to pay. All four of our revolutions started among people who objected to certain taxes, who organized to protest them, and who finally reached the point of agitating for the elimination and replacement of the existing government. This does not necessarily mean that those who resisted taxation foresaw or wished a radical revolution. It does mean that the transition from talking about necessary great changes--for in all our societies, as we have seen, something was in the air--to concrete action, was made under the stimulus of an unpopular form of taxation.

A second uniformity is quite as clear, though the consequences that derive from it are much more obscure. The events in this stage, these first steps in revolution, do most certainly bring out of the confused discontents of the old regime two parties into clear opposition, and indeed into preliminary violence. These parties we may call briefly the party of the old regime and the party of the revolution. Moreover, by the end of this period of the first stages, the party of the revolution has won. The muddy waters of doubt and debate are momentarily cleared. The revolution, hardly begun, seems over. In England after the Long Parliament had disposed of Strafford and wrung concessions from the King, in America after Concord, and that greatest of moral victories, Bunker Hill, in France after the fall of the Bastille, in Russia after the abdication, there is a brief period of joy and hope, the illusory but charming honeymoon of that impossible pair, the Real and the Ideal.

That our four revolutions ran through some such early stage as this, in which the opposition between old and new crystallized dramatically, and the new won a striking victory, is too evident for the most old-fashioned narrative historian to deny. Over the reasons why this stage developed as it did, however, there is still a running dispute among writers who concern themselves with such matters--historians, political theorists, sociologists, essayists. The heart of the dispute is a matter which must be got straight before anything like a sociology of revolutions is possible. Briefly, one set of disputants maintains that these glorious first steps in revolution are taken almost spontaneously by a united nation rising in its might and virtue to check its oppressors; another maintains that these first steps are the fruition of a series of interlocking plots initiated by small but determined groups of malcontents. By and large the first view is that taken by persons favorable to a given revolution, the second by persons hostile to it, or at least loyal to the memory of the old regime. There are, however, all sorts of variations on the theme, and different commentators have differently balanced these elements of spontaneity and planning.

This opposition is clearest, and in some ways quite adequately typical for our purpose, in the historiography of the French revolution. Augustin Cochin used to describe this opposition as that between the thèse des circonstances and the thèse du complot, the explanation by circumstances and the explanation by plot. Those who on the whole regarded the revolution as a good thing maintained that the people of France, and especially the people of Paris, were goaded into revolt by the oppression of king and court, that the circumstances of their social, political, and economic life in 1789 are in themselves adequate explanation of what happened. Given such circumstances, and men and women of French blood, and you have revolution as naturally, as automatically, in a sense, as you have an explosion when a spark strikes gunpowder.

This figure may be applied to specific steps in the revolutionary process. The Bastille riots, for instance, were not planned in any sense. Paris heard of the dismissal of Necker, noted that the King was concentrating troops around Paris, and in a million forgotten conversations spread the fear that the King and his party were about to dismiss the revolutionary National Assembly and rule by armed force. Paris therefore rose in its might, and with a sure instinct seized on the Bastille as a symbol of the hated old regime, and destroyed it. The sovereign people were self-guided in all this, moved if you like by a natural force, by a hatred of injustice, and were led by hundreds of small men, by noncommissioned officers of the revolution, but not by any general staff, not by any small group who had deliberately planned an aggression.

The opposite theory maintains that the whole revolutionary movement in France was the work of a scheming and unprincipled minority, freemasons, philosophes, professional agitators. These people in the second half of the eighteenth century got control of the press and the platform, and persistently indoctrinated the literate part of France with a hatred for established institutions, and especially for the Church. As the government found itself in increasingly bad financial straits, these plotters wormed their way into its councils, and finally secured the promise of an Estates-General. By clever electioneering in a populace not used to representative assemblies, they filled the Third Estate with members of their sect, and succeeded in penetrating even the ranks of the First and Second Estates. They had been used to working together, and thanks to years of discussion of political reform, they knew what they wanted. The more determined and initiated of these plotters could therefore control the actions of the large and shapeless National Assembly, though they were a minority of its twelve hundred members.

Bastille Day seems very different to the writers of this school. Louis was concentrating troops to protect, not to dissolve, the National Assembly, to protect it from the minority of wild radicals who were abusing its machinery. Fearing defeat, these radicals stirred up Paris in a hundred ways: they sent orators to street corners and cafés; they distributed radical news-sheets and pamphlets; they sent agents to spread discontent among the royal troops, and especially among the French Guard; they even subsidized prostitutes to get at the soldiers more effectively. Everything was planned ahead for a more propitious moment, and when the dismissal of Necker afforded that moment, the signal was given and Paris rose. But not spontaneously. Somewhere a general staff--Mirabeau was on it, and most of the popular figures in the National Assembly--was working, carefully sowing the seeds of rebellion.

With the appropriate changes, this sort of opposition can be made out in all our revolutions. To the Stuart partisans--and they still find their way into print--the Great Rebellion was an unhappily successful conspiracy of gloomy money-grubbing Calvinists against the Merrie England of tradition. More commonly, since the Whigs gave the tone to modern England, the Parliamentarians are seen as liberty-loving children of Magna Charta, who rose quite naturally and spontaneously against unbearable Stuart tyranny. American Loyalists always maintained that the best of the country was with them, that the Whigs had won by superior organization and chicanery. Most of us, of course, were brought up to regard George III as a personal tyrant, a hirer of Hessians, a man who wished to grind the Americans into unmanly submission. The American revolution was to us the spontaneous reply of injured freemen to British insolence.

Finally, some Russian émigrés still seem to believe that a minority of unscrupulous Bolsheviks somehow engineered both the February and the October revolutions. Marxism attaches no shame to revolution, and admits the importance of planning and leadership in revolutionary movements. Therefore, though official Communist explanations by no means soft-pedal Czarist guilt and oppression, though they insist that the people of Russia in February, 1917, wholeheartedly and nearly unanimously rose against the Czar, still they admit, and indeed glory in, the role of leaders consciously planning a revolution. At least, this was the explanation accepted in orthodox Marxist circles, and it is classically stated in the first volume of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. There are signs in Stalinite Russia of a reversion to something analogous to an American schoolbook explanation of our own revolution; Czarist tyranny and the spontaneous popular uprising are emphasized, the tactics of a revolutionary minority minimized.

Indeed, that these two conflicting, and in their exaggerated forms antithetical, explanations of the first steps in revolution should arise is in itself a clear uniformity to be got from the comparative study of revolutions. Very early indeed these two interpretations arise, the victorious revolutionists attributing their success to the rise of the many against intolerable tyranny, the defeated supporters of the old regime attributing their failure to the unscrupulous tactics of a minority of clever, wicked men. Neither explanation is interested primarily in facts or the scientific interpretation of facts; both are aimed at satisfying human sentiments. It is interesting to note that even the revolutionists’ explanation seeks to gloss over violence, seems in a way ashamed of the fact of revolution. This again is perfectly natural, since once in power the revolutionists wish to stay in power. A useful help to this end is a general feeling among the governed that it is wrong to resist those in authority. By and large, successful revolutionists do not often subscribe to Jefferson’s desire to see a revolution every twenty years or so; rather, they endeavor to create a myth of their own revolution, which becomes the last one necessary. Marxist theory even anticipates this, since the proletarian revolution ushers in the classless society, where there will be no class struggle, and no need for revolution.

It is, however, possible for us to go further than simply noting this division of opinion among the lovers and the haters of a given revolution. We may venture the generalization that there is some truth in both the explanation by circumstances and the explanation by plot. This may seem to many in 1938 a characteristically liberal and wishy-washy solution, a stupid adhesion to an outdated notion of a golden mean. But it does seem to have a more satisfactory relation with the facts than either extreme explanation.

Bastille Day may again serve as an example. There is plenty of evidence that organized groups did help stir up trouble in Paris in those July days. We know that the radical groups, the “patriots” in the Assembly at Versailles, had close connections with Paris politicians. A kind of skeletal political organization had been left over from the Paris elections to the Third Estate, and these Parisian electors helped greatly to bring a new municipal organization, and a new National Guard, out of the confusion of the riots. Most of the Royalist description of agents circulating in the crowds, of inflammatory pamphleteering, even perhaps of subsidized prostitutes, is substantially true. What is not true is that these elements of planning can be traced to any one or two small plotting groups, to the Duc d’Orléans, or to a few freemasons. The word “plot” is indeed a bad one--except for the purposes of Rightist propaganda, where it proves very useful indeed. Rather we must say that there is evidence of the activities of a number of groups of the kind any careful observer of societies knows well--pressure groups, embryo political parties, semi-religious sects, gatherings on the lunatic fringe. There is, however, no evidence that these very dissimilar groups were in July, 1789, managed from any one center, controlled by a small scheming directorate.

On the contrary, there is every evidence that once the dismissal of Necker got these various groups excited, what followed was in a sense spontaneous mob action. No one has yet said the final word on the psychology of crowds, but it is fairly well accepted that the behavior of crowds cannot be completely gauged in advance by the cleverest of mob leaders. Actually it is clear that in Paris in those days there was not one mob, but at least several dozens. People came out in the street because their neighbors were already out. They paraded up and down, shouting and singing, stopping now and then for another drink, or to hear another street-corner orator. Self-constituted leaders of little groups certainly supplemented any planned action. The decision to march on the Bastille seems to have been taken independently in several quarters. No one knows for sure who first had the brilliant idea of going to the Invalides Hospital to secure small arms. The rioting seems to have died out less because the Bastille fell than because the rioters were tired out. Three days is a long time to be riotous, or drunk, or both.

What holds for the taking of the Bastille holds for the general preparatory work and the first stages of revolutions as we have discussed them in this chapter. The Russian February revolution centered in Petrograd in one week and seems like the Bastille riots on a larger scale. Trotsky has done some of his best writing in his description of the February revolution and in his balanced accounting of what must be considered spontaneous popular risings and what must be attributed to conscious revolutionary tactics. Kerensky writes flatly that the revolution “came of its own accord, unengineered by anyone, born in the chaos of the collapse of Tsardom.” Trotsky admits that no one planned or expected the revolution when it did come, that it developed out of ordinary Socialist manifestations and a mild bread-riot. But that development, he adds, was led by “conscious and tempered workers, educated for the most part by the party of Lenin.” We may question the last part of this statement, but there can be no doubt that in the last few days of the Petrograd riots leaders of the coming soviet and leaders of the coming provisional government combined to force out the Czarist government.

The role of the pressure group is especially conspicuous in the early stages of the American revolution. As early as April, 1763, the merchants of Boston organized a “Society for Encouraging Trade and Commerce with the Province of Massachusetts Bay” with a standing committee of fifteen to watch trade affairs and call meetings. Accounts of their activities were sent to merchants in other colonies. To combat the Stamp Act the radicals organized themselves as “Sons of Liberty,” a mass organization which met at times openly, at times secretly, to promote the work of revolution. Their vigilance committees “maintained a sort of Holy Inquisition with the sales and purchases of every man of business, into the outgoings and incomings of private households, and with the reported opinions of individuals.” Town and county in the North, the county in the South, provided a framework for public meetings and resolutions. The Committees of Correspondence, organized originally as private pressure groups, were later skillfully manipulated by Sam Adams until they had partly supplanted the more conservative town meetings. Adams called into meeting in 1773 a joint committee for Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, Brookline, and Cambridge which was able to swamp the now fairly conservative merchant vote. Throughout the movement, violence was employed whenever it seemed necessary, from grand affairs like the Boston Tea Party to isolated beating of Tories.

Yet the most realistic of our modern historians will hardly go so far as to assert that the American revolution was plotted by a tiny minority. The net effect of a dozen years of British mistakes, of concessions and retractions, blowings-hot and blowings-cold, together with a great variety of American agitation, was to produce in 1775 a widespread popular backing for the Continental Congress in its resistance to George III. It is quite impossible to say how many Whigs, how many Tories, and how many indifferent or neutral persons there were in the thirteen colonies at the outbreak of armed hostilities. Probably there were proportionately more Tories than there were extreme Royalists in France in 1789 and many more than there were Czarists in Russia in 1917; and there were probably fewer Tories in revolutionary America than partisans of the Stuarts in England in 1642. But in all these cases it is a matter of proportion. The American revolution was, like the others, in part the result of an active, able, and far from infinitesimal minority working on a large majority group with grievances enough to be stirred up effectively when the right time came.

To sum the matter up in a metaphor: the school of circumstances regards revolutions as a wild and natural growth, its seeds sown among tyranny and corruption, its development wholly determined by forces outside itself or at any rate outside human planning; the school of plot regards revolutions as a forced and artificial growth, its seeds carefully planted in soil worked over and fertilized by the gardener-revolutionists, mysteriously brought to maturity by these same gardeners against the forces of nature. Actually, we must reject both extremes, for they are nonsense, and hold that revolutions do grow from seeds sown by men who want change, and that these men do do a lot of skillful gardening; but that the gardeners are not working against Nature, but rather in soil and in a climate propitious to their work; and that the final fruits represent a collaboration between men and Nature.

IV. The Role of Force

A final uniformity to be discerned in these first stages of our revolutions is perhaps the clearest and most important of all. In each revolution there is a point, or several points, where constituted authority is challenged by the illegal acts of revolutionists. In such instances, the routine response of any authority is to have recourse to force, police or military. Our authorities made such a response, but in each case with a striking lack of success. Those of the ruling class responsible for such responses in all our societies proved signally unable to make adequate use of force. Let us first look at the facts.

In England there was no considerable standing army, and of course nothing like a modern police force. Indeed, the question of control over what standing army there was had been one of the big issues between the first two Stuarts and their Parliaments. The Crown had been obliged to quarter its soldiers on private citizens in order to keep any kind of army together, and this quartering was one of the grievances most strongly held against Charles I. When a Scotch army crossed the border, Charles was obliged to call the Long Parliament to get money to buy this armed force off. When the actual break between Royalists and Parliamentarians drew near, both sides tried to constitute an armed force. Charles had the benefit of a devoted noble officer-class, and enough tenant-followers of noblemen and gentry to constitute what was by far the strongest armed force controlled by the government, or conservatives, or party-in-power side in any of our four revolutions. Yet the Civil War proved that he didn’t have enough good soldiers, in comparison with the human resources available to the Parliament. Charles was beaten in the first instance because he lacked decisive military power.

Similarly in the American revolution, neither the American Tories nor the British armies were quite strong enough, as in the actual event they used their armed strength to suppress the revolutionists. Notably in the earlier stages, the British undertook to introduce what they knew to be unpopular governmental changes with what now seems an amazing disregard of police necessities. No doubt the long tradition of British loyal self-government made it hard for a British colonial administrator to conceive of any other methods. But the fact remains that these forces in North America in 1775 were quite inadequate to enforce authority. How many more men than Gage actually did have would have been necessary to keep royal order in Massachusetts Bay is a matter of guesswork, of perhaps unprofitable history-in-the-conditional. It is, however, unduly complimentary to rugged Yankee love of independence to suppose that no armed force could have been large enough to have controlled Massachusetts. Had there been a Napoleon instead of a Gage, there would perhaps have been a different end to the fighting. Whether such a policy of repression would not ultimately have produced a successful revolution anyway is a matter we are not called upon to discuss. What does concern us is the simple fact that in America also an important initial failure of the government was its failure to use force adequately and skillfully.