Part 9

Louis XVI had in 1789 a fairly trustworthy armed force. His French troops were perhaps open to propaganda by the patriots. But he had important household troops, mercenaries recruited from foreign peoples, chiefly Swiss and German, and not accessible to French agitators. That the Swiss would die for him, or for their duty, was proved three years later at the storming of the Tuileries. He had, especially in the artillery, a capable set of officers, most of whom could be relied upon at this stage. Yet at the decisive moment, the rioting in Paris in July, he and his advisers failed to use the military. Again we edge into history-in-the-conditional, but one cannot avoid wondering what would have happened had a few disciplined troops with street guns attempted the reduction of Paris in July, 1789. Napoleon was later to show that such a force could readily beat down civilian resistance, and this fact was to be amply confirmed in 1848 and 1871. Louis might have failed. But the point is that he didn’t even try. Once again a government has failed to make adequate use of force.

Petrograd in 1917 is the most perfect example of this important role of the military and the police. Everyone, from Czarist to Trotskyite, admits that what turned somewhat chaotic and aimless street demonstrations into a revolution was the failure of the elaborate government plan to restore order in Petrograd. And that plan failed because at the critical moment the soldiers refused to march against the people, but regiment by regiment came over instead to join them. Again, such is the advantage which a disciplined force with modern artillery possesses over even the most inspired civilian revolutionists, there can be little doubt that if the Cossacks and a few of the famous regiments of the line, the Preobrazhensky, for instance, had been warmly loyal to the government, even the somewhat incompetent rulers of Petrograd could probably have put down the disturbance. Whether another and worse riot was not inevitable within a few months under existing conditions of failure in war is not a matter that concerns us here.

This striking failure on the part of the rulers to use force successfully is not, however, likely to be an isolated and chance phenomenon. Indeed, it seems intimately bound up with that general ineptness and failure of the ruling class we have noticed in a previous chapter. Long years of decline have undermined the discipline of the troops, bad treatment has given the private soldiers a common cause with civilians, the officers have lost faith in the conventional and stupid military virtues. There is no co-ordinating command, no confidence, no desire for action. Or if there are some of these things, they exist only in isolated individuals, and are lost among the general incompetence, irresolution, and pessimism. The conservative cause--even the cause of Charles I--seems a lost cause from the start. The American case is somewhat different. Here we have an inept colonial government, but not an inept native ruling class.

We can then with some confidence attribute the failure of the conservatives to use force skillfully to the decadence of a ruling class. After all, we are dealing with fairly large groups of the kind we are accustomed to treating as subjects for sociological generalization. When, however, we attempt to bring the four crowned heads of our societies under some such general rule, we can hardly help feeling that we have no adequate statistical basis. Yet Charles I, George III, Louis XVI, and Nicholas II display such remarkable similarities that one hesitates to call in chance as an explanation. Trotsky confidently asserts that a decaying society will inevitably head up into the kind of incompetence displayed by these monarchs. We dare not display quite as much confidence, but we must bring forward these uniformities in the behavior of four men as a valid part of our observed uniformities. At any rate their being what they were had an important part in that process through which the revolutionists won their preliminary and decisive victories over incompetent authority.

At the very least, one can discern in all these monarchs mistakes which point to their lack of a reasonably objective thing, the technical skill necessary to rule men. If a baseball player strikes out consistently over a long stretch of games, and fields badly, it may be because of poor eyesight, or family troubles, or a lot of other reasons, but the simple fact remains that he is a poor ball-player. Our four kings were poor kings, though they were all good family men, men on the whole whom we should probably list as good, or at least as well-meaning. Nicholas was petty and jealous, as well as ignorant and superstitious, and by conventional Christian moral standards probably the worst of the lot. But he was far from being a cruel tyrant. Louis was kindly, well-meaning, but singularly unsuited to affairs of state. Both men were deficient intellectually, were very much under the domination of determined, passionate, proud, and ignorant wives, and both have left diaries which display amazing parallels in obtuseness. Louis went hunting on Bastille Day and in his diary records “Nothing”; Nicholas in a similar crisis records “Walked long and killed two crows; had tea by daylight.”

We cannot here go into the fascinating subject of the personalities of all these monarchs. George III was high-minded, stupid, and stubborn, which is a very bad combination indeed in a ruler. Charles is humanly the most attractive of the four; there is a sound basis for the romantic legend woven around him. But he was a bad king for a number of reasons, of which the chief were perhaps first an almost complete inability to understand what was going on in the hearts and heads of those of his subjects commonly called Puritans--and this emphatically includes the Scotch Calvinists--and, second, a tendency to high-minded intrigue. In politics, high-mindedness and intrigue are much safer if kept decently apart. This much, in summary, we may conclude about our kings. However much they differed as men, they were alike in being wholly unable to make effective use of force, even had they possessed it, at the first stages of the revolution.

For our revolutions, then, we may put this last uniformity very simply: they were successful in their first stages; they became actual revolutions instead of mere discussions, complaints, and riotings, only after revolutionists had beaten, or won over, the armed forces of the government. We cannot attempt to erect uniformities for other revolutions or for revolutions in general. But we may here suggest in very tentative and hypothetical form the generalization that no government has ever fallen before revolutionists until it has lost control over its armed forces or lost the ability to use them effectively; and conversely that no revolutionists have ever succeeded until they have got a predominance of effective armed force on their side.

V. The Honeymoon

The first stage of revolution ends in all four of our societies with the victory of the revolutionists after what is rather dramatic than serious bloodshed. The hated old regime has been conquered so easily! The way is open to the regeneration men have been so long talking about, so long hoping for. Even the Russian February revolution, though it broke out in the midst of the misery and shame of defeat at the hands of Germans and Austrians, was cradled in the hope and joy that seems a natural heritage of revolutions. Russians all over the world heard the good news with delight. Liberals were as happy as their ancestors had been in ’76 and ’89. Now Russia was washed clean of the stain of absolutism, could take her place with confidence in the ranks of her sister democracies of the West, join with a new effectiveness in the crusade against the sole remaining forces of darkness, the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs.

The honeymoon stage of revolution is most perfectly developed in France, where the revolution came in peacetime, and at the end of a great intellectual movement called the Enlightenment which had prepared men’s minds for a new and practical miracle. Wordsworth’s lines are familiar:

“France standing on the top of golden hours, And human nature seeming born again.” But poets in a dozen languages set to work to celebrate the regeneration of France and of mankind. And not only poets. Sober business men, professional men, country gentlemen, people who in the twentieth century tend to regard revolution with horror, joined in the rejoicing. Far away in unenlightened Russia noblemen illuminated their houses in honor of the fall of the Bastille. Americans and Englishmen rejoiced that the ancient enemy had come to join the self-governing peoples. Frenchmen themselves were for a brief happy moment almost unanimous. The King had seen the error of his ways, had embraced the paladin Lafayette, had come freely to his good city of Paris to hear the cheers of the heroes of the Bastille.

Yet the honeymoon period even in France was brief, briefer yet in Russia, in England and in America never quite so clear and so definite. In the first stages, and at the critical moment when the test of force comes, the old regime is faced by a solid opposition. The opposition is indeed composed of various groups, is never that myth a “united people.” But it is welded by the necessity of effectively opposing the government into a genuine political unit, into something more than a chance coalition of contradictory elements. Its victory is, if we are willing to take the terms critically and not sentimentally, the victory of the “people” over its “oppressors.” It has shown itself stronger and abler than the old government in this time of crisis. It has now become the government, and is facing a new set of problems. When it actually gets to work on those problems the honeymoon is soon over.

Chapter FOUR TYPES OF REVOLUTIONISTS

I. The Clichés

It would clearly be helpful in our inquiry if we could at this point isolate the revolutionist as a type. To pursue our analogy of the fever, may it not be that certain individuals act as “carriers,” and that they can be classified, labeled, described in economic and sociological terms as well as in those of psychology or common sense? This is at any rate a lead which seems worth following.

There are, however, several ways in which such a pursuit might lead us astray. We must beware of regarding revolutionists, and revolutionary leaders in particular, as literally bearing disease germs of revolution. Here as throughout this study, our conceptual scheme must never be allowed to lead us into fantasy. It must be a convenience, not an obsession. We must more than ever avoid using terms of praise or dispraise, which lurk in every corner of this particular field. For the simple word “revolutionist” is likely to call up in the minds of most of us a relatively uncritical personification, the sort of loose change of daily intercourse that serves us well enough to get on with “poet” or “professor” or “Frenchman.”

Even the subtlest thinker, the most delicate and conscientious artist in words, has to come down in daily life to something very close to the clichés that serve the man in the street. You and I, of course, do not picture poets as long-haired, delicate, bohemian and tubercular, nor professors as impractical, absent-minded, kindly and bearded, nor Frenchmen as polite, dapper, wax-mustached, ladies’ men. But we cannot go into Proustian intricacies with ourselves when we use such words, nor can we use them as rigorously as a scientific systematist. We get along with them as best we may, adjusting them roughly to our experience and our sentiments.

Now what “revolutionist” means at this level to various persons and various groups is in itself an important element in a full sociology of revolutions. What all sorts of people feel about revolution is perhaps most easily studied in the clichés which arise out of words like “revolutionist” and “revolutionary,” or their more concrete parallels, “Jacobin,” “Bolshevik,” “red,” and the like. We cannot attempt such a study here, but we must look a bit further into a few of these clichés, if only as a warning and a contrast.

Probably for most Americans in the fourth decade of the twentieth century the word “revolutionist” carries unpleasant overtones. At the level of the Hearst papers or the Macfadden publications, a revolutionist appears as a seedy, wild-eyed, unshaven, loud-mouthed person, given to soapbox oratory and plotting against the government, ready for, and yet afraid of, violence. Even at slightly more sophisticated levels, one suspects many of our countrymen feel much the same about revolutionists, or at any rate are convinced that they are pronouncedly queer people, failures under pre-revolutionary conditions, sufferers from inferiority complexes, envious of their betters, or just downright ornery, “agin the government” on principle and by disposition. Other and more favorable pictures of the revolutionist no doubt arise in other minds. To judge by some of our proletarian writers--not themselves proletarians--the revolutionist is a sturdy, broad-shouldered steelworker, uncorrupted by the falsities the bourgeois call education, but well-versed in Marx and Lenin, strong, kindly, a warrior-spirit with just a redeeming touch of Shelley about him.

Now the social uses of beliefs of this sort are plain enough. In an old bourgeois society like the United States, sentiments hostile to revolutionists are probably important factors in maintaining social stability. Revolutionists were all right in 1776, but not in 1938. Any society that is a going concern must apparently contain large numbers of people who feel this way about revolutionists. Even in Russia, where memories of violent revolution are still fresh, a concerted effort is being made by the government to discredit living, flesh-and-blood revolutionists. Revolution was all right in 1917, but not in 1938. On the other side, it is clear that radicals and extremists who think of revolutionists as fine fellows, as heroes and martyrs, are also aiding in their own social discipline, strengthening themselves for the fray.

The social scientist, however, cannot let the matter rest here. He must attempt an objective classification of revolutionists, as complicated as his data about them makes necessary. We can say with confidence that even a hasty review of the four revolutions with which we are concerned is very far from confirming either set of clichés we have outlined. And notably, since the derogatory set is commoner in this country, such a review by no means confirms the notion that our revolutionists were seedy, loud-mouthed, bomb-throwing failures in the old regimes. If we include, as we must, those who took the first steps in revolution as well as those who ruled in the reign of terror, our type becomes still less simple.

Let us take a random list of names as they come to mind: Hampden, Sir Harry Vane, John Milton, Sam Adams, John Hancock, Washington, Thomas Paine, Lafayette, Marat, Talleyrand, Hébert, Miliukov, Konavalov, Kerensky, Chicherin, Lenin. All are revolutionists; all opposed constituted authority with force of arms. The list includes great nobles, gentlemen, merchants, journalists, a professor of history, a political boss, a ward-heeler. It includes several very rich men and one or two poor men. It includes many who would by conventional Christian standards seem to have been good men; and it includes several who would by such standards seem to have been very wicked men. It includes some who were important people in their pre-revolutionary days, some who were quite unknown, and two, perhaps three, who were apparent failures in life until the revolution gave them a chance to rise. Surely it is no easy task to find a least common denominator for a list like this.

No doubt we shall be aided by making a distinction between the men who dominate in the early stages of a revolution--on the whole the moderates--and those who dominate in the crisis stage--on the whole the extremists. But it will not do to say that only our extremists are real revolutionists. After all, even George Washington seems to have taken an oath of loyalty to the British Crown, and his breaking that oath would have been treason had the American revolution failed. We have been taught by Whig historians to believe that Essex and Pym were defending the sacred laws of England, and that therefore they weren’t real revolutionists. This was not, by any means, the current opinion in Europe in the 1640’s, where the Parliamentarians were regarded as shocking rebels against their king; and monarchy was in seventeenth-century Europe as solidly rooted in the sentiments which give force to law as the American Constitution seems rooted with us in this country at the present time. No, we must list the moderates among our revolutionists, even though they were defending the higher law against the lower, and weren’t just nasty anarchists and rebels.

II. Economic and Social Position: Rank and File

One of the most useful approaches to the problem of the personnel of revolutionary movements is from the relatively objective indications of the economic and social status of those who take part in the uprising. Now it is very difficult to find out much about the rank and file of the revolutionists. Like the private soldier in war, the ordinary revolutionist is inarticulate and nameless. For the French revolution, however, some such study is not impossible. In the surviving records of the Jacobin Clubs, which served as centers of revolutionary action, and resemble both the Russian soviets and the American corresponding committees, we have a large number of lists of members--imperfect, of course, but still lists. Some years ago the present writer made a study of these lists, and, aided by tax-rolls and other documents in French local archives, was able to arrive at certain rough statistical generalizations about these revolutionists. Some of these generalizations must be here summarized from the author’s The Jacobins: A Study in the New History.

In general, it is possible to arrive at some statistical approximation of the social and economic positions of these Jacobin revolutionists in pre-revolutionary France. There are tax-rolls extant for various years between 1785 and 1790, and on these many of the Jacobins can be found, with the sums they were assessed at. As these were direct taxes not too far out of proportion to income, it is possible thus to get a rough estimate of Jacobin wealth. Occupations are usually given, and this is a useful indication of social position. Finally, it is also possible to study certain clubs at specific moments in the revolution, so that a sample can be taken during the early or moderate period, and another during the later rule of the extremists. Here, briefly, are some of the results.

For twelve clubs, with a total membership of 5,405 over the whole course of the revolution, 1789-95, in both its moderate and its violent phases: 62 per cent of the members were middle class, 28 per cent working class, 10 per cent peasants. For twelve clubs in the moderate period, 1789-92, with a membership of 4,037: 66 per cent were middle class, 26 per cent working class, 8 per cent peasants. For forty-two clubs in the violent period, 1793-95, with a membership of 8,062: 57 per cent were middle class, 32 per cent working class, 11 per cent peasants. The tax-rolls confirm what occupational and social classification suggests. In eight clubs considered over the whole period of revolution, club members paid an average tax of 32.12 livres, where the average tax for all male citizens of the towns considered was 17.02 livres; in twenty-six clubs considered in the violent period only, club members paid 19.94 livres, male citizens 14.45 livres. Thus, though there was certainly a tendency for the clubs to be recruited in the violent period from social strata a bit lower, on the whole one is forced to the conclusion that “the Jacobin was neither a nobleman nor a beggar, but almost anything in between. The Jacobins represent a complete cross-section of their communities.”

Other relatively objective indices help us a bit. It was often possible to list the ages of members of the clubs during the revolution. As far as the rank and file of these clubs went, the notion that revolutionists are recruited from the young and irresponsible was not borne out. For ten clubs the average age varied from 38.3 years to 45.4 years, and for all ten together came to 41.8 years. These were clearly not foolhardy youngsters. Nor were they footloose itinerants, shock troops imported from revolutionary urban centers like Paris. Out of 2,949 members of fifteen clubs, only 378, or 13 per cent, had moved into the towns since the outbreak of trouble in 1789. The actual membership of the clubs varied as the revolutionary movement grew more and more extreme--or in modern terms, went more and more to the Left. Many moderates emigrated or were guillotined, many disreputable extremists, often though by no means always from the lower classes, only “made” the clubs later on. Yet in six clubs with a total membership from 1789 to 1795 of 3,028, something over 31 per cent managed to stay on the books for the whole period, to have been successively good monarchists, good Girondists, good Montagnards. It is not true that the personality of these clubs became dominantly lower or working class after the fall of the monarchy in 1792, nor even that their newer recruits were largely from the proletariat. And it is quite clear that these people are not on the whole failures in their earlier environment; rather they represent the abler, more ambitious and successful of the inhabitants of a given town. It is as if our Rotarians today were revolutionists.