I. HISTORICAL WRITING ON THE FOUR REVOLUTIONS,

303. II. THE WISDOM OF THE AGES, 310. III. THE MARXISTS, 312. IV. THE SOCIOLOGY OF REVOLUTIONS, 315.

INDEX 321

FOREWORD

This book is a modified and expanded form of lectures delivered in Boston in February and March, 1938, on the foundation of the Lowell Institute. I wish here to thank the officers of the Lowell Institute for giving me the opportunity to initiate this study, and my audience for the co-operation an audience—perhaps without knowing it—always gives. I wish also to thank those of my friends and colleagues with whom I have discussed the subject of this book for the last two years, and especially Professor L. J. Henderson, the effects of whose care, taste and judgment ought to be evident everywhere in a work he has gone over with great thoroughness; Professor W. S. Ferguson, who first called to my attention the inadequacy of important parts of my uniformities when applied to Athenian history; Professor R. B. Merriman, who very kindly placed the manuscript of his study of seventeenth-century revolutions at my disposal, and discussed it with me to the great profit of the present work; Professors Frederick Merk and A. M. Schlesinger and Dr. Richard Leopold, Americanists most gentle with me and helpful in my invasion of a field not my own; Dr. George Pettee; and Professor Penfield Roberts and Dr. O. H. Taylor who, if there is anything in the adage that solvitur ambulando, have had a large part in this book. Finally, I am very grateful to my research assistant, Miss Bernice Hempel, for patient and discerning help alike in the gathering and in the organizing of my materials.

CRANE BRINTON

PEACHAM, VERMONT. July 2, 1938.

Chapter ONE THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF REVOLUTIONS

I. The Necessity for a Scientific Approach

We are today very much aware of revolution. The bare word itself is likely to set stirring a whole set of sentiments and associations in the mind of any modern man or woman. For some, perhaps for most in the older democracies of the West, these sentiments are not far from fear and dislike. For others, revolution is still a word of good promise, a beginning of better things, a necessary part of the progress of the race. Once, indeed, and not so very long ago, hopeful liberals could believe that certain favored countries—England, the United States, Germany, the good little countries of Europe like Switzerland and Holland, possibly even the classic land of revolution, France—had outgrown this kind of political instability. Freedom in the long run might slowly broaden down from precedent to precedent everywhere, even in South and Central America. All this seems, like so many other Victorian hopes, very distant to us now.

For our postwar world has produced a series of revolutions by no means limited to lands in general political disrepute. Russia in 1917, Central Europe in 1918-19, Italy in 1923, Spain in 1931, Germany again in 1933, all underwent violent changes of government to which the name revolution is usually attached. Some of these revolutionary movements were, indeed, not strictly in the nineteenth-century pattern: they were put through, not in the name of liberty, equality, fraternity, but in the name of authority, discipline, power. They were, if you like, authoritarian, conservative, reactionary. Hitler and Mussolini did not talk the language of Hampden, Patrick Henry, Mirabeau, Mazzini, nor even that of Marx and Engels.

The older democracies, as yet apparently stable politically, have undergone a series of economic strains which certainly appear more serious than similar strains they survived successfully enough in the nineteenth century. The breakdown of the Versailles settlement, the return of international anarchy, the difficulties of government finances, contributed further to a sense of insecurity in these democracies. Recent events in Russia have, to put it mildly, bewildered and discouraged those outside that country who in one degree or another looked hopefully on the Russian revolution. The whole tone of writing on politics has changed, especially in countries like England, France, and the United States. Prophets of doom are now almost as common as prophets of progress used to be in the good old days when we could blandly rejoice in clichés like “Evolution, not Revolution.”

Even in the United States, where pleasant memories of 1776 are incorporated into such unrevolutionary bodies as the Daughters of the American Revolution, the great crash of 1929 set all sorts of people to worrying about, or hoping for, a catastrophic overturn. Sober people in conservative circles began to discuss whether a little farm in Vermont wouldn’t give them subsistence and reasonable safety from the wandering robber-bands of the coming Reign of Terror. Hopeful radicals, too well read in Marx, began to discuss whether economic privation might not make a majority of American workers realize that they are a proletariat, and not a group of potential capitalists. Down through Hollywood and the columnists there ran the naïvely cynical catch phrase, “Comes the revolution....”

It is, then, almost impossible for us in these days to be indifferent toward revolutions. Yet we shall not go far towards understanding them unless we can maintain toward them, if not indifference, at least detachment. This last word, one may hope, is not just a favorable way of saying what “indifference” says unfavorably. A physician may feel far from indifferent towards his patient, but he will not be a good physician unless he is detached in his observation and treatment of his patient’s malady. We may dodge here a whole lurking set of philosophical difficulties, and say simply that what we commonly call modern science has as one of its basic elements the detachment of the scientist. The scientist, as a private person, may love and hate, hope and fear; as a scientist, he must try to leave all this behind when he enters his laboratory or his study.

To attempt to maintain in the analysis of human affairs the detachment of the physicist or the chemist is very difficult, and to a great many upright and intelligent people seems unprofitable, even treasonous. You should, they feel, hate Hitler all the time, before, while, and after you start explaining him; otherwise your explanation may edge into extenuation.

But to understand all is by no means to pardon all. At any rate, the scientific understanding of the place of the mosquito in yellow fever has not led us to tolerance of, or indifference to, that particular type of mosquito. Quite the contrary. We cannot, of course, expect such immediate and apparently spectacular results as were obtained with yellow fever from the study of man in society, from what are a bit optimistically called the social sciences—anthropology, economics, political science, history, sociology, and the like. But we may well consider the possibility of approaching the study of revolutions in something of the spirit the natural scientist carries to his work.

Our aim in the following study is the modest one of attempting to establish, as the scientist might, certain first approximations of uniformities to be noted in the course of four successful revolutions in modern states; the English revolution of the 1640’s, the American revolution, the great French revolution, and the recent—or present—revolution in Russia. We must make clear at the start some of the limitations of our study: this is not the only, nor necessarily the best, way of studying revolutions; this study does not pretend to be a complete sociology of revolutions; it deliberately limits its field to four relatively well-studied revolutions; its conclusions are to be taken to refer to these four revolutions, and any extension of such conclusions to other revolutions, or to revolutions in general, is to be undertaken with caution and humility.

Were we attempting to find an ideal type for revolution, were we seeking a kind of Platonic idea of revolution, we might be fairly reproached with picking four nice neat revolutions which made almost too good a case, too perfect a pattern. But we are making no such attempt. It should be very clear that not all revolutions, past, present, and future, will conform to the pattern here drawn. Our four revolutions are not necessarily even “typical” in the sense the word “typical” has for literary critics or moralists. They are simply four important revolutions with which we have chosen to begin a work of systematization still in its infancy. Subtler systematizations will come later, from other and more advanced workers. Above all, we do not here claim any prophetic wisdom. We do not expect to be able to predict from this study just when and where the next revolution will break out on this earth.

At this point it may be objected that the social sciences have been aping the natural sciences for several centuries, and got no further forward, that they ought therefore to try and stand on their own feet, that they ought to work out their own methods without bothering about what has been done in the natural sciences. There is a kernel of truth in this objection. Certainly writers like Fourier or Herbert Spencer, who have proclaimed themselves literally the Newtons or the Darwins of social science, appear to have gone wrong from the start. A prophetic soul drawing upon philosophy and the arts—a Spengler, for instance—will probably make at least as much sense out of the study of men in society as will the social scientist who tries to take over unaltered the methods and materials of physics or biology. Yet one hesitates to turn the study of men in society wholly over to the Spenglers. The long tradition of what may be called rationalism has in our society made conquests not to be lightly abandoned even in this postwar world. That tradition makes it imperative to attempt to continue, and extend, the kind of work we call scientific.

There has, indeed, been a great deal of nonsense written under the protecting name of science. It is easy to sympathize with Mr. Max Lerner’s outburst: “I am frankly skeptical when people working on the study of societies begin arming themselves with scalpels, slide-rules and test-tubes. For they are promising more than they can possibly fulfill. The protestations of complete objectivity that we have been hearing from students of society in the past quarter century take on a religious note: it is as if they were washing themselves in the blood of the scientific lamb.” Some of Mr. Lerner’s objections to the appeal to science and to scientific detachment are probably those of the romantic lover of his fellow-men, and are almost wholly irreducible by logic or experience; but some are those of the skeptic and critic, and such objections can be shown to rest in good part on a misunderstanding of scientific method not by any means limited to Mr. Lerner. So common is this misunderstanding that we must attempt here to put the matter as clearly as possible in a very few words. This will be in no sense a detour; it will be an essential approach to our subject.

II. The Bare Elements of Scientific Methods

First, not even the “exact” sciences like astronomy or physics are exact in the sense of “absolute” or “infallible.” Their firmest laws or uniformities are to be regarded as tentative. They may be upset at any time by further work. But at any given moment they are not to be tampered with unless they prove unreliable in relation to observed facts. A few mystics, inhibited in our crass society from the delights of navel-gazing, have made too much of the contemporary revolution in physics. Newton’s laws have not been “disproved”; nor has the principle of indeterminacy been so firmly established as to make all men equally good at the game of poker. What has happened in modern physics, as far as a layman can judge, is that the physicist has been sharply reminded that even his neatest uniformities are not absolutes, but are subject to correction, that he is safer in regarding these uniformities as based on observations rather than on the will of God, or the nature of things, or on reality.

This brings us easily to the second point. Science makes no attempt to study or describe reality—certainly not ultimate reality. Science is not even concerned with truth, in the sense that word has for theologians, for most philosophers, and for a good many other people. The desire to find a final cause, an unmoved mover, a Ding an sich, seems to be so common in men that we have no grounds for believing that this search is not, in one form or another, a fairly constant element in human society. Only, scientists as scientists can have no part in such a search. This by no means need be taken as indicating that the search is silly, and ought to be stopped. Some scientists have lately been, as private persons, very active in the search, and indeed, after the manner of such searches, successful. Faith has long since found God in unlikelier places than the atom. But such discoveries are not the discoveries of science. That discipline is based, not on faith, but on skepticism, on a skepticism that will not even worry itself over its status in the universe. And so the scientist works on serenely, undisturbed by the philosopher’s final thrust: that to be constantly skeptical is to believe in doubt, which is after all a form of faith.

Third, the scientist by no means confines himself to “the facts and nothing but the facts.” Dangerous metaphysical depths yawn at this point, but we shall have to try and go ahead in spite of them. The popularization of Baconian ideas on induction is probably the chief source of the erroneous notion that the scientist does nothing to the facts he laboriously and virtuously digs up, except to let them fall neatly into a place they have made for themselves. Actually the scientist cannot work without a conceptual scheme; and though the relation between facts and conceptual schemes is not by any means clear it is at least clear that a conceptual scheme involves something besides facts.

Let no one be frightened of the technical term “conceptual scheme.” It is really very simple: thunder and lightning impinge on our senses of hearing and sight—probably the mere differentiating of this sound and this flash from other sounds and flashes means that we are employing a conceptual scheme; certainly when we think of Jupiter with his bolts, Thor with his hammer, or the electrical discharge of modern physics, we have clearly arranged our sense-perceptions in accordance with definite conceptual schemes. We possess, indeed, the basic elements of three different theories of thunder and lightning, three different uniformities in these phenomena. But the only important reasons why we should prefer our electrical discharge to Jupiter or Thor as a conceptual scheme is that it is more useful, and that we can by using it get on better also with other conceptual schemes we use for similar purposes. But in the sense which the word true has for the theologian, and most moralists and philosophers, our electrical discharge is not a bit truer than the old notions about Jupiter and Thor.

We may even use two contradictory conceptual schemes, choosing one or the other at convenience, or from habit. We are all of us educated out of the old Ptolemaic conceptual scheme, which saw the sun moving about a stationary earth, into the Copernican conceptual scheme, which sees the earth moving about a stationary sun. Einstein, of course, used a conceptual scheme different from both of these, but most of us are not yet up to Einstein; in daily life we all, however, contentedly say “the sun rises,” and should be very pedantic indeed if we insisted on saying in Copernican terms “the earth has revolved into sight of the sun.” More important is the present situation in respect to conceptual schemes in modern physics. We learn, as far as laymen can learn in such matters, that physicists find it convenient in the study of certain problems to regard the electron as a particle, or at least a point, and in the study of other problems to regard it as a wave. Some physicists, many of them of very great distinction indeed, are troubled by this contradiction, and have sought to work out a single conceptual scheme which will make the electron a nice logical unity again. One suspects, however, that these physicists have left in them a little of the philosopher, and that it is their philosophical selves that demand unity in the electron. For other physicists get on admirably with this logically impossible electron, wave when they want it to be a wave, particle when they want it to be a particle. As scientists, they are quite content to solve their problems, which deal wholly with this world and can be solved in this world, though no doubt not in the next, without regard for ultimate truth.

The scientist, then, goes to work roughly in some such fashion as this: he starts with a conceptual scheme of some sort, and questions, or even hypotheses, he frames in terms of that scheme; he then hunts for a suitable supply of facts—and a fact in the natural sciences we define with Professor L. J. Henderson as “an empirically verifiable statement about phenomena in terms of a conceptual scheme”; these facts he seeks to arrange in uniformities or theories which will answer his questions, and perhaps suggest other questions; he then immerses himself again in the hunt for facts, and emerges with new or modified uniformities. The scientist is not interested in where his conceptual scheme came from, or whether it preceded or followed on facts, or whether it is “subjective” and the facts “objective.” These questions he leaves to the philosophers, who have not settled them yet after two thousand years of debate. But the scientist does, by his recognition that a conceptual scheme is as essential to his activity as are observed facts, emancipate himself completely from self-styled “scientific” materialists, positivists, empiricists, who naively assert that our sense-perceptions are somehow in themselves an orderly and sole reality, or a “reflection” of such a reality. For, note particularly, the facts with which the scientist deals are not phenomena, sense-perceptions, the “external world,” those dear absolutes of innocent positivists, but merely statements about phenomena. A properly verifiable statement about Cromwell is then as much a fact as the reading of a thermometer in a laboratory.

Fourth, though the scientist is very careful indeed about matters of definition, and is as disdainful of sloppiness and bad thinking as any logician can be, he distrusts rigidity and attempts at perfection here as elsewhere. He is interested less in beauty and neatness of definition than in having his definitions fit not his sentiments and aspirations, but the facts. Above all, he does not dispute over words. He is less interested in the accurate theoretical distinction between a mountain and a hill than he is in making sure that he is dealing with concrete elevations on this earth. He does not expect class-terms to be perfect, mutually exclusive; when he distinguishes between a plant and an animal, he is not at all offended if you call his attention to a living thing that seems to belong to both his classes at once. He sets to work studying the living thing and will, if necessary, modify his class-terms. But he is quite willing also, if it proves more convenient, to set up a new class-term of borderline plant-animals. This simple willingness to be guided by convenience is of course one of the amazing things about the scientist and one of the most difficult for us who have not had a scientific training to adapt ourselves to. Most of us are early trained to prefer our opinions to our convenience.

Finally, scientific thinking cannot be, except perhaps in suggesting problems, what nowadays most of us know well enough as wishful thinking. The scientist’s own hopes and fears, his own standards of what he would like to have prevail on this earth, must be kept as far as possible out of his work, and especially out of his observations of, or dealings with, facts. How far such hopes and fears and standards enter into his choice of conceptual schemes, how far they influence the kind of questions he asks, are difficult problems we may perhaps be permitted to dodge. Sufficient that the techniques of most of the established sciences provide a very effective check on the cruder forms of wishful thinking. History—because it has been so long an art and a craft perhaps the most respectable of the social sciences—provides in the technical training undergone by most professional historians a surprisingly effective and not wholly dissimilar check on the more violent forms of partisan writing and thinking.

All in all, there is no reason why we should feel that the natural scientist uses methods, sets standards, forever quite unattainable by the social scientist. Natural science as the more innocent materialists of the last century saw it—exact, infallible, a cosmos built on induction—must seem remote to a struggling economist or sociologist. But natural science as it has always been understood by its ablest practitioners and is now widely understood—natural science as expounded methodologically by a Poincaré—is no such thin substitute for Divine Providence, no such metaphysical abstraction. Only God is exact, infallible, omniscient, unchanging, and modern science has been content to leave the search for God to disciplines fitted by long success for such a search.

III. The Application of Scientific Methods to This Study

Of the bare elements of scientific thinking—conceptual scheme, facts, logical operations, uniformities—the social sciences in general come out well on the score of facts. Even in the field of history, where neither laboratory nor questionnaire methods of research are available, our existing supply of facts is surprisingly good. You cannot draw Cromwell back to life, but neither can you call the dinosaurs back to life. What we know about Cromwell is in many ways as reliable as what we know about dinosaurs. To say that history is a fable agreed upon, or a set of tricks played upon the dead, is to slander, or at least to misjudge, the great body of industrious and sober workers who have carried on the study of history. Notably the last century or so has seen the formation of a body of research workers in history who, with all their faults, maintain standards comparable in some ways to those maintained by similar groups in the natural sciences. These research workers do not indeed uncover the simple raw material of facts. The humblest antiquarian arranges the facts he digs out of his documents into some kind of pattern. Such a process of arrangement, however, is not the conscious theorizing of the physical scientist. It was never even learned as the scientist learns the theoretical scaffolding of his science, but was acquired almost as the manual worker acquires a craft. It is this craftsman’s technique for the gathering, winnowing, and assaying of facts about the behavior of men in the past that is the great strength of the professional historian. If you asked such a historian what a fact is, he would probably be greatly puzzled at the question, and usually quite unable to answer in adequate general terms. Any good philosopher could convict him of complete epistemological naïveté. But in his daily work the historian shows a very keen appreciation of the difference between a fact and a theory, and a real ability to manipulate and arrange facts.

We shall, then, rely on the historians to supply us with the necessary facts. For the English, American, and even for the French, revolutions, the body of reputable and reasonably detached historical writing is very large indeed. Passions still run high over the French revolution, but they are being cooled slowly in an increasing flood of printer’s ink; the chief trouble, indeed, is to choose from among this enormous mass of material. The Russian revolution is still too near us to be regarded by professional historians as capable of the kind of treatment the guild likes to give. Its source material is scattered about, and much of it is still withheld from scholars. Language is a barrier only gradually being overcome here in the West. Yet our supply of facts about the Russian revolution is by no means so slight, or so poor in quality, as to hinder our enterprise. Twenty years is a long time, and the early stages of the Russian revolution have been surveyed, if not sine ira et studio, at least with relative detachment. And then both lovers and haters of the present regime in Russia are almost equally articulate, and can be balanced off one against the other by anyone who cares to take the trouble.

Our conceptual scheme will give us a great deal more difficulty than will our supply of facts. In the social sciences, at least, the distinction between a conceptual scheme and a metaphor is still an uncertain one, and there is no great harm in looking at our present problem as a search for a framework of not too-literary metaphor to hold together the details of our revolutions. Yet one of the most obvious of such metaphors, that of a storm, has several faults. One can outline it readily: at first there are the distant rumblings, the dark clouds, the ominous calm before the outbreak, all this corresponding to what our textbooks used confidently to list as “causes” of the revolution; then comes the sudden onset of wind and rain, clearly the beginnings of the revolution itself; the fearful climax follows, with the full violence of wind, rain, thunder, and lightning, even more clearly the Reign of Terror; at last comes the gradual subsidence, the brightening skies, sunshine again, as in the orderly days of the Restoration. But all this is too literary and too dramatic for our purposes, too close altogether to the metaphor as used by prophets and preachers. Insofar as it can be brought into use as a conceptual scheme it rests on a science, that of meteorology, which has little direct help to offer the social scientist.

At almost the opposite side there is the conceptual scheme of a social system in equilibrium, as best developed in Pareto’s The Mind and Society. The tender-minded are often annoyed by the term equilibrium, which has for them mechanistic overtones damaging to the dignity of man. In modern science, however, the term has proved useful in fields such as chemistry and physiology, well outside that of the mechanics in which it had its origin. Furthermore, the word as the practicing scientist uses it has no metaphysical connotations whatever. The concepts of a physico-chemical system in equilibrium, a social system in equilibrium, John Jones’s body in equilibrium, do not in the least prejudice the immortality of anyone’s soul, nor the ultimate victory of Vitalists over Mechanists. The concept of equilibrium helps us to understand, and sometimes to use or to control, specific machines, chemicals, and even medicines. It may some day help us to understand, and within limits to mold, men in society.

Its use in the study of revolutions is in principle clear. A society in perfect equilibrium might be—purely theoretically—defined as a society every member of which had at a given moment all that he could possibly desire and was in a state of absolute contentment. Obviously any real society can be in but an imperfect equilibrium, a condition in which the varying and conflicting desires and habits of individuals and groups of individuals are in complex mutual adjustment, an adjustment so complex that no mathematical treatment of it seems possible at present. As new desires arise, or as old desires grow stronger in various groups, or as environmental conditions change, and as institutions fail to change, a relative disequilibrium may arise, and what we call a revolution breaks out. We know that in the human body, for instance, the disequilibrium we call disease is accompanied by certain definite reactions which tend to restore the body to something like what it was before the onset of the disease. It seems quite likely that in a social system in disequilibrium there is something of the same kind of reaction towards the old conditions, and that this helps explain why revolutions do not turn out entirely as revolutionists want them to. The old adjustments tend to re-establish themselves, and produce what in history is known as the reaction or the restoration. In social systems, as in the human organism, a kind of natural healing force, a vis medicatrix naturae tends almost automatically to balance one kind of change with another and restorative change.

This conceptual scheme of the social equilibrium is probably in the long run the most useful for the sociologist of revolutions. It is for our purposes, however, a bit too ambitious. It needs for full success a more accurate grasp of more numerous variables than we can at present manage. Though it need not necessarily be formulated in precise mathematical terms, it ought to be formulated in terms more close to those of mathematics than we can honestly employ. In other words, it is better suited to a complete sociology of revolutions, or a “dynamics of revolution,” than to our modest study of the anatomy of four specific revolutions. We are here attempting merely a preliminary analysis, attempting to classify and systematize at a relatively low level of complexity.

Though it has one very grave defect, the best conceptual scheme for our purposes would seem to be one borrowed from pathology. We shall regard revolutions—wholly, be it understood, for convenience, and with no implications of eternal and absolute validity, and with no moral overtones—as a kind of fever. The outlines of our fever chart work out readily enough. In the society during the generation or so before the outbreak of revolution, in the old regime, there will be found signs of the coming disturbance. Rigorously, these signs are not quite symptoms, since when the symptoms are fully enough developed the disease is already present. They are perhaps better described as prodromal signs, indications to the very keen diagnostician that a disease is on its way, but not yet sufficiently developed to be the disease. Then comes a time when the full symptoms disclose themselves, and when we can say the fever of revolution has begun. This works up, not regularly but with advances and retreats, to a crisis, frequently accompanied by delirium, the rule of the most violent revolutionists, the Reign of Terror. After the crisis comes a period of convalescence, usually marked by a relapse or two. Finally the fever is over, and the patient is himself again, perhaps in some respects actually strengthened by the experience, immunized at least for a while from a similar attack, but certainly not wholly made over into a new man. The parallel goes through to the end, for societies which undergo the full cycle of revolution are perhaps in some respects the stronger for it; but they by no means emerge entirely remade.

This conceptual scheme may be used without committing its users in any sense to an organic theory of society. The organic theory, the motion of a “body politic,” is a metaphor developed by political philosophers into a kind of metaphysics. A good German idealist can find almost anything he wants in the organic theory, from the categorical imperative to a justification of anti-Semitism and a condemnation of parliamentary democracy. The word “society” is used in this study as a convenient way of designating the observed behavior of men in groups, their interactions, and that is all. We find it convenient to apply to certain observed changes in given societies a conceptual scheme borrowed from medicine. We should find it inconvenient and misleading to extend that conceptual scheme and talk of a body politic, with a soul, a general will, heart, nerves, and so on. When, for instance, we apply terms like “prodrome,” “fever,” “crisis,” to the French revolution, we are very definitely not thinking of a personified France which suffers all these. To some this distinction may seem only a verbal one, and unimportant. It is, however, based on one of the most important distinctions in human thinking—the distinction between metaphysics and science.

The really grave defect of this fever chart lies deeper, in the apparently unalterable fact that our ordinary language, to which words like “fever,” “disease,” and “crisis” clearly belong, is only in small part logical. The intellectuals of our generation are rather inclined to worry over the non-logical overtones of words, which is perhaps a good sign for the social sciences. Mathematicians, most scientists, and even symbolic logicians, manage to say what they mean, and can communicate exactly with one another. When, however, a given act by a given person, John Doe, is referred to by five separate reporters as persevering, firm, determined, obstinate, and pig-headed, you obviously learn as much about the feelings of the reporters towards John Doe as about John Doe himself. The reporters are trying to spread abroad their own feelings, not to describe John Doe. Many people from Thucydides through Bacon and Machiavelli to Pareto have understood this use of words. It has been noted even by people like Jeremy Bentham and Mr. Stuart Chase, who cannot perhaps be said to have fully understood it. In our own day a dozen disciplines, from psychology and philology to political theory, have made us keenly aware that propaganda lurks in every syllable, in every accent. This awareness seems not to have resulted in any appreciable drying-up of propaganda.

Now nobody wants to have a fever. The very word is full of unpleasant suggestions. Our use of terms borrowed from medicine is likely, at the very least, to arouse in many readers sentiments which bar further understanding. We seem to be damning revolutions by comparing them with a disease. To those of liberal sympathies and hopes we shall seem to be condemning in advance such great efforts of the free human spirit as the French revolution. To the Marxists our whole inquiry has probably been suspect from the moment we wrote doubtingly about the American proletariat, and our conceptual scheme will appear to them simply the expected bourgeois dishonesty. Yet it seems too bad to offend even the Marxists unnecessarily. Protestations of good intent are probably useless, but we may none the less record that consciously at least we are aware of no feelings of dislike for revolutions in general. We do indeed dislike cruelty whether in revolutions or in stable societies. But the thought of revolutions sets up in us no train of unhappy associations. Unconsciously and subconsciously we may well feel horror of revolution to our thoroughly bourgeois marrow, but without benefit of Freud we dare not commit ourselves about our unconscious. Of more persuasive force with the distrustful is perhaps the fact that, biologically, fever in itself is a good thing rather than a bad thing for the organism that survives it. To use a figure of speech, the fever burns up the wicked germs, as the revolution destroys wicked people and harmful and useless institutions. On close and fair inspection our conceptual scheme may even seem to have overtones of implication too favorable, rather than too unfavorable, to revolutions in general.

Facts and conceptual scheme being thus disposed of, it remains to consider the possibility of finding some kind of uniformities in the way in which our facts fit into our conceptual scheme. Most of us would assume that on the rough level of common sense some kind of uniformities can be discerned in history. But at least among professional historians there is a tendency to deny that these uniformities are real and important, and we must therefore give the matter brief attention. In a recent review of Professor W. C. Abbott’s magisterial edition of Cromwell’s speeches and writings, a learned and conventional English historian wrote that “it is unfortunate that Professor Abbott has thought to elucidate the English revolution by comparing it with the American and French revolutions. Revolutionary technique undoubtedly interests a world familiar with the writings of Marx and Trotsky and the method of Lenin, but comparisons in history as elsewhere are odious and revolutions are more remarkable for their particular differences than for their common elements.” This is undoubtedly an extreme view, and the English have for the last century and more been insistent that their revolution was unique—so unique as to have been practically no revolution at all.

A full consideration of the problem of historical uniformities would be very long, and might well end in the cloudland of metaphysics. We shall have to be content with the crude assertion that the doctrine of the absolute uniqueness of events in history seems nonsense. History is essentially an account of the behavior of men, and if the behavior of men is not subject to any kind of systematizing, this world is even more cock-eyed than the seers would have it. But you have only to look at a page of Theophrastus or of Chaucer to realize that Greeks of more than two thousand years ago and Englishmen of six centuries ago seem extraordinarily like Americans of today. Even Mr. Christopher Morley’s jazz version of The Trojan Horse does not seem unreal. Comparisons may be odious, but they form the basis of literature as well as of science, and provide a good deal of the staple of everyday conversation.

As we have seen, an essential element in any attempt to work scientifically is the detachment of the scientist. In the historian, this is the ability to keep his observations of what has happened uninfluenced by what he would like to have happened, or to happen. We have already encountered this difficulty in our discussion of a conceptual scheme, where to think of a revolution as a fever seems at first sight a way of condemning the revolution, of giving it a bad name. It must be repeated that in all the social sciences genuine scientific detachment is difficult to attain, and in any “absolute” or “pure” sense impossible of attainment. Even in the natural sciences, desire to prove an hypothesis or a theory of one’s own may bring to the distortion of facts some of the most powerful sentiments in human beings. But the natural scientist does not want to improve a molecule or an amoeba—at least, not “morally.” Upon the social scientist, however, there pours the full force of those sentiments we call moral as well as those we call selfish. He can hardly avoid wanting to change what he is studying: not to change it as the chemist changes elements he compounds, but to change it as the missionary changes the man he converts. Yet this is just what the social scientist must try to avoid as a better man would avoid the devil. One of the hardest things on this earth to do is to describe men or institutions without wanting to change them, a thing so hard that most people are not even aware that the two processes are separable. Yet separated they must be if we are to get anywhere with the social sciences.

In this study we shall make this attempt to describe without evaluating. It will not be a complete success, for here on this earth completion is rare. Absolute detachment is a polar region, unfit for human life; but one might well make an effort to get out of the steaming jungles, and come a bit closer to the pole. In less figurative language: it is impossible to study revolutions without having sentiments about them, but it is quite possible to keep your sentiments relatively more out of your study than in. And an inch gained here is worth several ells on less fertile frontiers of the mind.

IV. Limitations of the Subject

This willingness to put up with, indeed this expectation of, partial and incomplete results is one of the distinguishing marks of science. It would be possible to start out with the intention of discovering uniformities in all recorded revolutions. To begin with, the hardest conceivable task is, however, rather the privilege of the philosopher than that of the scientist. At any rate, it seems now scientifically unprofitable and therefore unwise to ask the question: What have all known revolutions in common? The very question shows the logical limitations of the subject: we can never know all revolutions. Any answer would have to make up in scope and assurance what it would lack in concreteness. You might ask: What have all known men in common? The systematist in biology could indeed list certain uniformities under homo sapiens. But the commoner kind of answer would be that men all have souls, or that they are all created equal, or even, as Cicero discovered, that “Nihil est enim unum uni tam simile, tam par, quam omnes inter nosmet ipsos sumus.” (For no one thing is as like, as equal, to another one as we human beings are like and equal one to another.) These answers are all very important, but they are not quite the sort of thing we are after.

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.”

All this, however, is rather less than what the Marxists seem to mean when they talk about the revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries as deliberately the work of a class-conscious bourgeoisie. Not having the benefit of the writings of Marx to go by, nor indeed those of the still little known Adam Smith, even eighteenth-century revolutionists and discontented spirits used a very non-economic vocabulary. Of course the Marxist, aided by Freud, can reply neatly that economic motivation drove these bourgeois at an un- or sub-conscious level. The trouble with this, from the point of view of the person brought up in the conventions of professional historical research, is that the subconscious never, or rarely, writes documents or makes speeches. If we confine ourselves to what these bourgeois said and did, we find plenty of evidence that separate groups—the American merchants, for instance—felt specific economic grievances, but no signs that bourgeois, entrepreneurs, business men, were aware that as a class their interests in free economic expansion were blocked by existing “feudal” arrangements. Indeed in France a great many business men were more annoyed by the semi-free trade treaty of 1786 with England than by any other governmental step. Certainly one finds no trace of men in England or America or France saying: “Organized feudalism is preventing the triumph of middle-class capitalism. Let us rise against it.” Nor, as a matter of fact, were there in these countries just before the revolutions any serious economic barriers to prevent the clever lad, even in the lower classes, from making money if he possessed the money-making gifts. Dozens of careers—a Pâris-Duverney, an Edmund Burke, a John Law, a John Hancock—show this. Certainly one cannot deny that class antagonisms existed in these countries; but so far as we can judge, these class antagonisms do not seem to have a clear and simple economic basis. In twentieth-century Russia, of course, these antagonisms were expressed in the language of economics, even though here we shall probably also find that human sentiments as well as human interests are involved.

To sum up so far, if we look at economic life in these societies in the years preceding revolution, we note first, that they have been on the whole prosperous; second, that their governments are chronically short of money—shorter, that is, than most governments usually are; third, that certain groups feel that governmental policies are against their particular economic interests; fourth, that, except in Russia, class economic interests are not openly advanced in propaganda as a motive for attempting to overturn existing political and social arrangements. It is interesting to note here that Professor R. B. Merriman, in a study of six seventeenth-century revolutions in England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Naples, finds that they all had in common a financial origin, all began as protests against taxation.

If now we turn from the stresses and strains of economic life to the actual workings of the machinery of government, we find a much clearer situation. Here, again, we must not posit a normal condition in which this machinery works perfectly. Government here on earth is at best a rough and ready thing, and the governed will always find something to grumble about, from favoritism in distributing low-number automobile license plates to post-office pen points. But there are obviously degrees of governmental inefficiency, and degrees of patience on the part of the governed. In our four societies the governments seem to have been relatively inefficient, and the governed relatively impatient.

Indeed, the near-bankruptcy of a government in a prosperous society might be regarded as good a priori evidence of its inefficiency, at least in the old days when governments undertook few social or “socialized” services. France in 1789 is a striking example of a society the government of which simply no longer works well. For generations French kings and their ministers had fought the particularistic tendencies of the provinces to get out of the control of Paris by devising a whole series of agencies of centralization, which may be said in a sense to run from the missi dominici of Charlemagne to the intendants of Richelieu and Louis XIV. Almost as if they had been Anglo-Saxons, however, they destroyed very little of the old in the process, so that France in 1789 was like an attic stuffed full of all kinds of old furniture—including some fine new chairs that just wouldn’t fit in the living room. We need not go too deeply into the details of the situation, which can perhaps be summed up graphically by saying that in the sense in which you could make a map of the United States showing all our administrative areas—townships, counties, states—you could not possibly make one map of the administrative areas of old France. Even the confusion added to an administrative map of the United States by the various, and relatively new, federal commissions, bureaus, agencies, administrations, does not begin to equal that of France in 1789. You would need at least half a dozen maps to show the criss-cross units of paroisse, seigneurie, baillage, sénéchaussée, généralité, gouvernement, pays d’état et d’élection, les cinq grosses fermes, pays de grande et de petite gabelle—and this is but a beginning.

There is told about Louis XV one of those revealing anecdotes the actual historical truth of which is unimportant, since they reflect contemporary opinion of a concrete condition. Traveling in the provinces, his majesty saw that a town hall or some such building in which he was to be received had a leaky roof. “Ah, if I were only a minister, I’d have that fixed,” he remarked. A government of which such a tale could be told was perhaps despotic, but most certainly inefficient. In general, it would seem the inefficiency is more readily recognized by those who suffer from it than is the despotism.

The incompetence of the English government under the first two Stuarts is much less clear, but one can safely say that the central government was not as well run, especially under James I, as it had been under Elizabeth. What is most striking in the English situation is the total inadequacy to modern government of a tax system based on the modest needs of a feudal central government. For the government of James I was beginning to be a modern government, to undertake certain elementary social services, and to rest on a bureaucracy and an army that had to be paid in cash. The chronic need for money which confronted James I and Charles I was by no means a result of riotous living and courtly extravagance, but was for the most part brought on by expenses no modern government could have avoided. And yet their income was on the whole determined and collected by old-fashioned medieval methods. At any rate it is clear that the Stuarts needed money; but their attempts to fill their coffers were awkward, hand-to-mouth expedients that brought them into sharp quarrels with the only people from whom they could collect money—the gentry and the middle class. Their struggles with Parliament threw the whole machinery of English government out of gear.

In America the failure of the machinery was a double one. First, the central colonial administration in Westminster had been allowed to grow in the hit-or-miss fashion Anglophiles have long regarded as the height of political wisdom. In this crisis, however, muddling through clearly was not enough. The attempted reform in colonial administration after the Seven Years’ War only made matters worse, as did Turgot’s attempted reforms in France, since it was carried out in a series of advances and retreats, cajolings and menaces, blowings-hot and blowings-cold. Second, within most of the colonies the machinery of government had never been properly adjusted to the frontier. The newer western regions of many colonies complained that representation, courts, administrative areas, were rigged in favor of the older seaboard settlements.

The breakdown of Czarist administration is now so much a commonplace that one is tempted to suspect that it has been a bit exaggerated. Looking at the decades preceding 1917—for in all these countries we have been considering the background of the revolutions and not their actual outbreaks—it seems possible to maintain that the government of Russia in peacetime, at least, was perhaps a bit more of a going concern than the other governments we have been studying. From Catherine the Great to Stolypin a great deal of actual improvement can be seen in Russian government. But one thing is clear from the hundred years preceding 1914. Russia could not organize herself for war, and failure in war had, especially in 1905, brought with it a partial collapse of the machinery of internal administration. We must be very careful here to stick to facts and to avoid judgments which have so insinuated themselves into our awareness of Russia that we regard them as facts. It may be that there is some wild oriental element in the Russian soul that makes Russians both incompetent and submissive politically, subject, however, to fits of alcoholic rebellion. This soul is certainly very hard to observe scientifically; and even in literature one may hesitate to label Dostoevski more Russian than Turgenev, who seems far from wild, oriental, drunken or mystic. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that the Russian governmental breakdown, clear in 1917 or even 1916, was by no means clear, say, in 1912.

Finally, one of the most evident uniformities we can record is the effort made in each of our societies to reform the machinery of government. Nothing can be more erroneous than the picture of the old regime as an unregenerate tyranny, sweeping to its end in a climax of despotic indifference to the clamor of its abused subjects. Charles I was working to “modernize” his government, to introduce into England some of the efficient methods of the French. Strafford is in some ways but an unlucky Richelieu. George III and his ministers were trying very hard to pull together the scattered organs of British colonial government. Indeed, it was this attempt at reform, this desire to work out a new colonial “system,” that gave the revolutionary movement in America a start. In both France and Russia, there is a series of attempted reforms, associated with names like Turgot, Malesherbes, Necker, and Stolypin. It is true that these reforms were incomplete, that they were repealed or nullified by sabotage on the part of the privileged. But they are on the record, an essential part of the process that issued in revolution in these countries.

III. The Desertion of the Intellectuals

So far we have fixed our attention on the machinery of economic and political life, and have tried to distinguish signs of any approaching breakdown. Let us now turn to the state of mind—or better, feeling—of various groups within these societies. First we may ask the question, does the disorganization of the government find a counterpart in the organization of its opponents? We shall have later to deal with what are nowadays well known as “pressure groups,” men and women organized in societies with special aims, societies which bring all sorts of pressure—from propaganda and lobbying to terrorism—to the attaining of their aims. Such societies in one form or another are apparently a constituent part of all modern states and the mere fact of their existence cannot be taken as a symptom of revolution, or we should have to regard the A.S.P.C.A. or anti-billboard associations as signs of a coming second American revolution. There seems to be no simple and sole test to determine when and under what conditions the existence of pressure groups may be taken as a symptom of approaching political instability. The pre-revolutionary decades in our four societies do show, however, an intensity of action on the part of pressure groups, an action more and more directed as time goes on towards the radical alteration of existing government. Certain groups, indeed, begin to go beyond lobbying and propaganda, begin to plan and organize direct action, or at least a supplanting of the government in some dramatic way.

In America the merchant’s committees organized to resist measures for imperial control did a great deal of quite modern pressure-group work, from straight propaganda to stirring up popular demonstrations and to intercolonial co-operation through resolutions, conferences, and so on. They form the prelude to those efficient revolutionary cells, the correspondence committees Sam Adams handled so well in the 1770’s. Similar organizations are to be found lower down the social scale, where they edge over into boisterous tavern parties. In many of the colonies, the legislatures could be used for pressure-group work against the imperial government in a way not possible in the other societies we are studying. The New England town meeting provided a ready-made framework for this kind of agitation.

In France, the work of Cochin has shown how what he calls the sociétés de pensée, informal groups gathered together to discuss the great work of the Enlightenment, gradually turned to political agitation and finally helped steer elections to the Estates-General of 1789. Though the official school of historians in the Third Republic has always distrusted such notions, it is difficult for an outsider not to feel that Cochin has put his finger on the essential form of group action which turned mere talk and speculation into revolutionary political work. Freemasonry, even French Republican historians admit, had a place in the preparation of the revolution. Masonic activity in eighteenth-century France was clearly no dark plot, but it certainly was far from being purely social, recreational, or educational. Almost all the ambitious nobles and bankers, almost all the intellectuals, were freemasons. Even at the time, clerical conservatives were shocked at what they considered the subversive aspects of freemasonry.

In Russia, societies of all degrees of hostility to things as they were had long flourished. Nihilists, anarchists, socialists of all stripes, liberals, westernizers, and anti-westernizers, expressed themselves in various ways from bomb-throwing to voting at Duma elections. One gathers from a consideration of the last years of the Czarist regime that the diversity and cross-purposes of its opponents did much to keep that regime in the saddle. Certainly the Russian revolution had plenty of advance publicity, and the role of pressure groups in its preparation is singularly clear.

England here is a less clear case. Nevertheless there are definite indications of systematic opposition of merchants and some of the gentry to measures like Ship Money, and the parliamentary majorities which were rolled up against Charles after the period of personal government were the product of embryo pressure groups, as a glance at the very prolific pamphlet literature of the time will show. Moreover, the English revolution was the last of the great social overturns within the active domination of specifically Christian ideas. In a sense, the pressure groups most obvious in seventeenth-century England are simply the Puritan churches, and especially the churches called Independent. Their very existence was as much a menace to Charles as was that of the Bolshevik party to Nicholas.

It must be noted that some of these pressure groups, the American merchant’s committees, the French sociétés de pensée and freemasons, for instance, would not in the heyday of their action have admitted they were working for a revolution, certainly not for a violent revolution. What perhaps separates them from pressure groups like the A.S.P.C.A. or anti-billboard associations—which we can surely agree are not to be taken as symptomatic of revolution—is their basic aim at a radical change in important political processes. Thus the American merchants were really aiming to reverse the whole new imperial policy of Westminster; the French who prepared the elections to the Third Estate were aiming at a new “constitution” for France. On the other hand, some of the Russian organizations were from the very start violently revolutionary; but these were not the important elements in the Russian situation from 1905 to 1917, any more than the antinomians or anarchistic religious sects were in England before 1639.

There were, then, pressure groups with purposes more or less revolutionary in all these societies. Their activity is seen against a background of political and moral discussion which in these societies seems particularly intense. We come now to a symptom of revolution well brought out in Mr. Lyford P. Edwards’s Natural History of Revolution, and there described as the “transfer of the allegiance of the intellectuals.” Although the word “desertion” has perhaps unfortunate moral overtones, the shorter phrase “desertion of the intellectuals” is so much more convenient that we propose to use it, rather than the longer one, in this study.

We must, however, be clear as to what we are talking about before we attempt to use the desertion of the intellectuals as a symptom. Intellectuals we may define without undue worry over preciseness as the writers, teachers, and preachers. Further subdivision into the small group of leaders who initiate, or at least stand prominently in the public eye, and the larger group who grind over material they get from the leaders, is not of major importance here. What is important, and somewhat puzzling, is the general position of the intellectuals in our Western society since the Middle Ages. Clearly we must not posit agreement among its intellectuals before we decide that a given society is reasonably stable. Even in the thirteenth century, in which so many of our contemporary thinkers find an enviable unanimity as to fundamentals of belief, the amount of bickering among the intellectuals was in reality very considerable. There were rebels and prophets aplenty throughout the Middle Ages. In modern times we expect the intellectuals to disagree. Moreover, for a number of reasons, writers, teachers, and preachers are to a large degree committed by their function to take a critical attitude towards the daily routine of human affairs. Lacking experience of action under the burden of responsibility, they do not learn how little new action is usually possible or effective. An intellectual as satisfied with the world as with himself would simply not be an intellectual.

Here, as so often in the social sciences, and indeed in the natural sciences, we are dealing with a question where quantitative and qualitative differences shade most confusingly one into the other. Quantitatively, we may say that in a society markedly unstable there seem to be absolutely more intellectuals, at any rate comparatively more intellectuals, bitterly attacking existing institutions and desirous of a considerable alteration in society, business, and government. Purely metaphorically, we may compare intellectuals of this sort to the white corpuscles, guardians of the bloodstream; but there can be an excess of white corpuscles, and when this happens you have a diseased condition.

Qualitatively, we may discern a difference of attitude, partly, no doubt, produced by the numbers and unity of these intellectuals in attack, but partly produced by a subtler reality. Victorian England, for instance, was a society in equilibrium, an equilibrium now in retrospect a bit unstable, but still an equilibrium. Here Carlyle upbraided a generation addicted to Morison’s Pills instead of to heroes, Mill worried uncomfortably over the tyranny of the majority, Matthew Arnold found England short of sweetness and light, Newman sought at Rome an antidote for the poison of English liberalism, Morris urged his countrymen to break up machines and return to the comforts of the Middle Ages, and even Tennyson was worried over his failure to attain to anything more useful than a high, vague, and philosophical discontent. Many, though by no means all, Victorian intellectuals were in disagreement among themselves, united apparently in nothing but a profound dislike for their environment. If, however, you look at them carefully you will find a curious agreement that not too much is to be done right away to remedy matters. It is not, as we are told so often of the scholastic intellectuals of the Middle Ages, that these Victorians were in agreement on fundamental metaphysical and theological assumptions. They weren’t in any such agreement. It is rather that they were in agreement about the less dignified but in some ways more important routines and habits of daily life, and they did not expect the government to change such matters.

The difference between the intellectual atmosphere of a group like the Victorians, writers who cannot be said as a whole to have deserted, and a group which has deserted, will be clear in a moment if we look at that famous group in eighteenth-century France which stood at the center of the great Enlightenment. One has first the impression of immense numbers of intellectuals, great and small, all studying matters political and sociological, all convinced that the world, and especially France, needs making over from the tiniest and more insignificant details to the most general moral and legal principles. Any of the textbooks will give you the roll—Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Raynal, d’Holbach, Volney, Helvétius, d’Alembert, Condorcet, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Beaumarchais—rebels all, men leveling their wit against Church and State or seeking in Nature a perfection that ought to be in France. You will hardly find active literary conservatives like Sam Johnson or Sir Walter Scott, nor even literary neutrals, men pursuing in letters a beauty or an understanding quite outside politics.

Literature in late eighteenth-century France is overwhelmingly sociological. If you look in the yellowing remains of French eighteenth-century journalism, if you try to reconstruct the chatter of salons and clubs, you will find the same chorus of complaints and criticisms of existing institutions, the same search for Nature’s simple plan of perfection in politics. There is both a bitterness and a completeness in this chorus of complaint that you will not find in Victorian complaints. Statistically, one might establish the fact that there were proportionately more intellectuals “against the government” in eighteenth-century France than in nineteenth-century England. But the difference goes beyond statistics, and into what we have called the qualitative difference. The French have a tone, at once more bitter and more hopeful, quite different from the Victorians. That this is not altogether a national difference will be clear to anyone reading the pamphlet literature of the age of Milton. Then the English intellectuals had deserted, as they had not under Victoria.

Russia, too, is a clear example of this desertion of the intellectuals. There is certainly much more than political propaganda in the series of novelists who have made Russian literature a part of the education of us all. But there is unmistakably political and social criticism of Czarist Russia even in the work of the most Olympian of them, Turgenev. And the impression one gets from even a cursory view of Russian intellectual life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is unmistakable; to write, teach, or preach in those days meant being against the government. There are exceptions, and degrees of opposition, but the above statement would probably be accepted even by present-day Russian exiles.

America is not so neat an instance. In Boston, for instance, in the 1760’s and 70’s, a good many of the kind of people we are discussing—intellectuals will have to do—were as firmly as such people are now against so un-Bostonian an activity as sedition. It is clear that Harvard was by no means unanimous against the Crown, let alone in favor of the democratic machinations of her distinguished alumnus, Sam Adams. But if the literary and journalistic output in the colonies between 1750 and 1775—and even if we include the sermons—could be statistically assigned as either for or against the actual policies of the imperial government, there seems little doubt as to the very considerable balance against these policies. The Enlightenment, especially through Locke and Montesquieu, had come to the American colonies. The natural and inalienable rights of man were in this country, as in Europe, concepts introduced by intellectuals.

England may seem at first sight an exception to the desertion of the intellectuals. Lovelace, Suckling, even Donne seem hardly preoccupied with sociology. Yet at a second glance it is quite clear that English literature under the first two Stuarts is far from being the chorus of loyal praise it was in the days of Queen Bess. A glance into Professor Grierson’s Cross Currents in English Literature in the Seventeenth Century will show how much that literature was a dissolvent of the merry England of the Renaissance. Even more important is the fact that in those days there were no real newspapers, and the pamphlet took their place. Now the pamphlet literature of the early seventeenth century in England, quantitatively enormous, even by modern standards, is almost wholly preoccupied with religion or politics—better, religion and politics—about as good an example of the desertion of the intellectuals as could be found. Indeed, as Professor Gooch has written, in the reign of James I “proclamation followed proclamation against the sale of ‘Seditious and Puritan books’ and there was ‘much talk of libels and dangerous writings.’”

To what do these intellectuals desert? To another and better world than that of the corrupt and inefficient old regimes. From a thousand pens and voices there are built up in the years before the revolution actually breaks out what one must now fashionably call the foundations of the revolutionary myth—or folklore, or symbols, or ideology. Some such better world of the ideal is contrasted with this immediate and imperfect world in all the ethical and religious systems under which Western men have lived, and notably in Christianity. It is not quite accurate to assert that for medieval Christianity the other, ideal world is safely put off to heaven. Yet it is clear that with the Reformation and the Renaissance men began to think more earnestly about bringing part of heaven, at any rate, to this earth. What differentiates this ideal world of the revolutionaries from the better world as conceived by more pedestrian persons is a flaming sense of the immediacy of the ideal, a feeling that there is something in all men better than their present fate, a conviction that what is, not only ought not, but need not, be.

We shall later meet these revolutionary ideals in their fully developed forms. Here we need only notice that in the writings and preachings of the English Puritans—and to a lesser extent the constitutional lawyers—in those of the eighteenth-century philosophes, in those of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Marxists, the evil, and indeed illegitimate existing regime is very effectively contrasted with the good, and indeed inevitable, rule of right to come. In England, America, and in France, the essential principle to which men appealed against present conditions was Nature, with its clear and simple laws. Ship Money in England, Stamp Act in America, patents of nobility in France, were all contrary to the law of Nature. Even in England and America, where there was also much appeal to rights to be found in Magna Charta or the common law, the final appeal was always to a law of Nature “engraved in the hearts of men.” As the Puritan Henry Parker wrote in England, the common courts were “furnished only with rules of particular justice, which rules being too narrow for so capacious a subject [the relation of Crown to People] we must refer to those that the original laws of Nature hold out to us.” By the eighteenth century this kind of language had become almost universal among intellectuals. That Nature always counseled what the intellectuals in revolt wanted is an observation we must in these days feel bound to make. It seems likely, however, that for most of those who appealed to her Nature was as definite and explicit as God had once been, and as dialectical materialism was to be.

For the Russian writers and agitators of the Czarist regime, Nature did not play so prominent a part. Not that Nature is lacking in the pages of Tolstoy and his fellows, and the contrast between “artificial” society and “natural” instincts was not disdained even in Socialist propaganda. But the official ideology of most of the Russian radicals was Marxism, and Marxism finds that the existence of capitalists, the rule of the bourgeoisie, is altogether natural. Only, its destruction by the proletariat is also natural, and this destruction is determined by forces quite beyond capitalistic control. The inevitable march of economic forces would then for the Marxists accomplish what the English Puritan expected from God and the French philosophe from Nature and Reason. The essential thing all these pre-revolutionary agitators have in common, the essential ingredient, intellectually at least, in the revolutionary myth, is this abstract, all-powerful force, this perfect ally.

One special point is here worth our attention for a moment. Not only does God, Nature, or dialectical materialism make the victory of the present under-dog certain. The present upper-dog can be shown—perhaps for propaganda purposes must be shown—to have acquired his preponderance by an accident, or a particularly dirty trick, while God or Nature was temporarily off duty. Thus in the English revolution the royalists and indeed the gentry as a whole were labeled “Normans,” descendants of a group of foreign invaders with no right to English soil. John Lilburne, the Leveller, goes so far as to assert that the whole common law was a badge of slavery imposed upon the free people of England by the Norman Conquest. American hatred of absentee British government hardly needed such artificial fanning. The French were told by no less a person than Siéyès that all their trouble came from the usurpations of the Franks over a thousand years ago. French nobleman in 1789 were descendants of barbarous Germans, while French commoners were descendants of civilized Gauls and Romans. Revolution was but restoring the conditions of 450 A.D. Marxism explained the exploiting class without recourse to such pseudo-historical notions. And yet there is plenty of reference in Russian revolutionary agitation to the usurpation of land by the nobles, to their Varangian, or Tartar, or Western, or at any rate foreign origins.

Finally, a great deal of energy has been expended on the question as to whether this revolutionary ideology “causes” revolutionary action, or whether it is merely a sort of superfluous decoration with which the revolutionists cover their real acts and real motives. Most of this discussion is in the highest degree futile, since it is based on a crude notion of causation altogether untenable in fruitful scientific work beyond a very simple level. There is no more point disputing whether Rousseau made the French revolution or the French revolution made Rousseau than in disputing whether egg or chicken came first. We note that in our pre-revolutionary societies the kind of discontents, the specific difficulties about economic, social and political conditions that hard-boiled moderns focus on are invariably accompanied by a very great deal of writing and talking about ideals, about a better world, about some very abstract forces tending to bring about that better world. It is, indeed, the expression of ideas, rather than particular ideas—which may vary enormously in different revolutions—that makes the uniformity. We find that ideas are always a part of the pre-revolutionary situation, and we are quite content to let it go at that. No ideas, no revolution. This does not mean that ideas cause revolutions. It merely means that they form part of the mutually dependent variables we are studying.

IV. Classes and Class Antagonisms

Certain groups in our four societies of the old regimes nourished feelings of dislike, mixed or unmixed with contempt, for other groups. If we avoid the narrow economic connotations of the term, we may call these groups classes; if we realize the struggle was not simply one between two contending classes, feudal vs. bourgeois or bourgeois vs. proletariat, we may even speak of class struggles. This type of struggle in one form or another seems as endemic as many other kinds of violence in the stablest of Western societies. Here again we must not postulate for the normal society with which we contrast our pre-revolutionary societies, a lying down together of the lion and the lamb. But even so, it will soon appear that these class hatreds are stepped up, exacerbated in a noticeable degree in the old regimes. Class distinctions are seen, not as barriers the clever, brave, or ambitious can cross, but as unnatural and unjust privileges, established by wicked men against the express intention of Almighty God, Nature, or Science. These class struggles are by no means simple duels; there are groups within groups, currents within currents. We must try and analyze some of these currents.

In the first place, what may be called the ruling class seems in all four of our societies to be divided and inept. By ruling class we understand, it may be too generously, the people who run things, the people in the public eye—the politicians, the important civil servants, the bankers, the men of affairs, the great landowning nobles, the officers, the priesthood, perhaps even some of the intellectuals. Formal nobility of the blood has in the Western world usually been a much too narrow test of membership in a ruling class. Even in early modern times, the ruling class was something like what we have outlined above, the minority of men and women who seemed to lead dramatic lives, about whom the more exciting scandals arose, who set the fashion, who had wealth, position, or at least reputation, who, in short, ruled. Indeed, in a socially stable society it seems likely that the great masses of poor and middling folk, as also the obscure and unsuccessful people who by birth and training might seem to be in the ruling class, really accept the leadership of those at the top of the social pyramid, and dream rather of joining them than of dislodging them.

Now the ruling classes in our societies seem, and not simply a posteriori because they were in fact overthrown, to have been unsuccessful in fulfilling their functions. It is unlikely that short of Sparta or Prussia the simpler military virtues alone are enough for a ruling class. Such a class ought not, however, to shrink from the use of force to maintain itself, and it ought not to value wit and originality in its own members too highly. Wit, at any rate, it can usually hire adequately enough from other sources. A mixture of the military virtues, of respect for established ways of thinking and behaving, and of willingness to compromise, is probably an adequate rough approximation of the qualities of a successful ruling class—qualities clearly possessed by the Romans of Punic War times, and the English of the eighteenth century, though the latter failed in relations with America.

When numerous and influential members of such a class begin to believe that they hold power unjustly, or that all men are brothers, equal in the eyes of eternal justice, or that the beliefs they were brought up on are silly, or that “after us the deluge,” they are not likely to resist successfully any serious attacks on their social, economic and political position. The subject of the decadence of a ruling class, and the relation of this decadence to revolution, is a fascinating and, like so much of sociology, a relatively unexplored subject. We can here do no more than suggest that this decadence is not necessarily a “moral” decadence if by “moral” you mean what a good evangelical Christian means by that word. Successful ruling classes have not infrequently been quite addicted to cruel sports, drinking, gambling, adultery, and other similar pursuits which we should no doubt all agree to condemn. It is a reasonable assertion that the virtuous Lafayette was a much clearer sign of the unfitness of the French aristocracy to rule than were Pompadour or even Du Barry.

The Russians here provide us with a locus classicus. To judge from what appears of them in print, Russian aristocrats for decades before 1917 had been in the habit of bemoaning the futility of life, the backwardness of Russia, the Slavic sorrows of their condition. No doubt this is an exaggeration. But clearly many of the Russian ruling classes had an uneasy feeling that their privileges would not last. Many of them, like Tolstoy, went over to the other side. Others turned liberal, and began that process of granting concessions here and withdrawing them there that we have already noticed in France. Even in court circles, it was quite the fashion by 1916 to ridicule the Czar and his intimates. As Protopopov, a hated Czarist minister, writes: “Even the very highest classes became frondeurs before the revolution; in the grand salons and clubs the policy of the government received harsh and unfriendly criticism. The relations which had been formed in the Czar’s family were analyzed and talked over. Little anecdotes were passed about the head of the state. Verses were composed. Many grand dukes openly attended these meetings.... A sense of the danger of this sport did not awaken until the last moment.”

Finally, when those of them who had positions of political power did use force, they used it sporadically and inefficiently. We shall have more to say about this general problem of the use of force when we come to the first stages of actual revolution. In this connection it will be sufficient that the Russian ruling classes, in spite of their celebrated Asiatic background, were by the late nineteenth century more than half ashamed to use force, and therefore used it badly, so that on the whole those on whom force was inflicted were stimulated rather than repressed. The line in actual practice of government between force and persuasion is a subtle one, not to be drawn by formulas, by “science” or textbooks, but by men skilled in the art of ruling. One of the best signs of the unfitness of the ruling class to rule is the absence of this skill among its members. And this absence is recorded in history in the cumulated minor disturbances and discontents which precede revolution.

Russia remains the classic instance of an inept ruling class, but France is almost as good a case. The salons in which the old regime was torn apart—verbally, of course—were presided over by noblewomen and attended by noblemen. Princes of the blood royal became freemasons, and if they did not quite plot the overthrow of all decency, as witch-hunters like Mrs. Nesta Webster seem to think, at least sought to improve themselves out of their privileges and rank. Perhaps nowhere better than in France is to be seen one of the concomitants of the kind of disintegration of the ruling class we have been discussing. This is the deliberate espousal by members of the ruling class of the cause of discontented or repressed classes—upper-dogs voluntarily turning under-dogs. It is not altogether cynical to hazard the guess that this is sometimes an indication that there is about to be a reversal in the position of the dogs. Lafayette is in some ways a good example of this kind of upper-dog, since he seems to have been an unintelligent and ambitious man, whose course was largely determined by fashion. Lafayette tried to do what his own circle would most admire, and since he could not dance well—and his circle admired good dancing—he went to fight for freedom in America, which was also something his circle admired. But ruling classes cannot profitably fight for freedom—freedom, that is, for the other fellow.

In America this decadence of a ruling class is not a prominent symptom of the coming revolution. Our native ruling class was still young, still in the process of formation, and seen as a class exhibited none of the ineptness we have noted in Russia and France. But of course a large part of our ruling class espoused the American revolution, which is probably one of the reasons why our revolution stopped short of a full-blooded Reign of Terror. As far as the ruling class in England at the time of our revolution is concerned, it was very far from being capable of a resolute course towards America. It managed to hold on in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but only by granting concessions to the middle classes, concessions which its French counterpart refused to grant. Many of these Englishmen were, however, anything but defenders of the established order as regards relations with America. Fox, Burke, the Whigs in general, sided with the Americans even after 1775, and their attitude unquestionably helped give the rebellious Americans heart.

Even in seventeenth-century England this sort of symptom is to be discerned. In the English aristocracy of Jacobean times there is not, of course, exactly the same mixture of weariness, doubt, humanitarian hopes, and irresponsibility we have found in Russia or in France. Yet most of these elements can be found in the group later known as Cavaliers. Picturesque, romantic, appealing though the Cavaliers seem to us now in literature and tradition, it would be hard to maintain that they displayed the solidarity and balance necessary to a ruling class. And the Cavalier legend is not wholly a product of the years after the Great Rebellion. The Cavaliers were romantic even to themselves, and in a harsh world of Puritans and money-making had already begun that search for a golden past so characteristic of the émigrés of later revolutions. Nor are the enlightened or inspired, the Lafayettes or the Tolstoys, altogether lacking in the English ruling classes of the time. Even though you accept the nineteenth-century evaluation of the English as always hard-headed, practical, compromise-loving, you will do well to recall that a Tudor gentleman gave the word “Utopia” to political thought, and that Harrington’s famous Utopia, Oceana, is a seventeenth-century product.

Still, what conceals from us the extent to which many able and ambitious English gentlemen had deserted the established order in early Stuart times is that they deserted, not as did Lafayette, to America and the abstract rights of man, but to God and the way of salvation. Puritanism, in one or another of its many forms, proved attractive not merely to humble men, nor even to traders and bankers, but to many of the gentry and the nobility. Do not forget that Cromwell himself was a gentleman. Finally, what we may call the politico-legal opposition to the first two Stuarts—though separation of political and religious for that time is purely a matter of analysis, the two being inextricably mixed in the feelings of contemporaries—this politico-legal opposition was, as far as leadership went, almost wholly recruited from gentry and nobility. Men like Hampden and Essex resemble Washington in that they are essentially conservatives driven to rebellion by the ineptness of their immediate rulers; they are not, like Lafayette, sentimental deserters of their class.

Except perhaps in America, we find the ruling classes in the old regimes markedly divided, markedly unsuited to fulfill the functions of a ruling class. Some have joined the intellectuals and deserted the established order, have indeed often become leaders in the crusade for a new order; others have turned rebels, less because of hope for the future than because of boredom with the present; others have gone soft, or indifferent, or cynical. Many, possibly even most of the rank-and-file of the ruling classes, the English squire, the French and Russian country nobleman, retained the simple faith in themselves and their position which is apparently necessary to a ruling class. But the tone of life in the upper classes was not set by such as these. Fashion had deserted with the intellectuals. The sober virtues, the whole complex series of value-judgments which guards a privileged class from itself and others, all these were out of fashion at Whitehall, at Versailles, at the old court of St. Petersburg. Esprit de corps is a subtle thing, difficult, indeed impossible, to analyze with the methods of the chemist or the statistician. The intricate balance of sentiments and habits which hold men together in any such group as those we have been discussing may be altered by changes apparently insignificant, and extremely difficult to trace. But the fact of the alteration is clear. The very wit, refinement, the cultural graces so evident in what we know of the Cavaliers, the French aristocrats of Versailles and the salons, the Russian upper classes of the ballet, the opera, the novel, are signs of the decadence, not necessarily moral, but certainly political, of a ruling class.

Nor is it possible, even for those who find the simple forms of the economic interpretation of history inadequate and misleading, to deny that in three of our societies—England, France, and Russia—there are clear signs that the ruling classes were in a very shaky economic position. In each case there had been a notable rise in the standards of living of the nobility and gentry; finer houses, finer clothes, the luxuries brought by the decorative arts, by sculpture, painting, and music all cost a great deal of money, and were not in a purely economic sense good investments. Though the prohibitions against a gentleman’s making money in business were by no means as absolute, even in France, as they sometimes appear in textbooks of history, it is a fact that most gentlemen had neither the gifts nor the training for such money-making. Most of them lived from agricultural rents, which could not be stretched to meet their rising costs, and from pensions, sinecures, and other aids from the government, which were at least as inelastic. Notably for the French and Russian upper classes, it is clear that some of the discontent which undermined their esprit de corps at the outbreak of the revolution had its origin in their economic difficulties.

So much for the upper or ruling classes. The classes immediately beneath them in the social structure display in England, France, and Russia, and to a lesser degree in America, a more than ordinary dislike for their superiors. Here once more we are confronted with the problem of what is normal in class relationships in Western societies. The view that in a normal society there are no class antagonisms is as much to be rejected as the Marxist view that in such societies—at least up to the present—the class struggle has been unceasingly and equally bitter and ferocious. A picture of our Old South, for instance, which sees contented, well-fed slaves, prosperous artisans and traders with no dislike for their gentlemanly patrons, a serene plantation aristocracy nobly patriarchal, is plain nonsense; but so, too, is one which sees only smoldering discontent among the slaves, envy and hatred among poor whites, pride and fear among the planters. Men in Western societies have never been free, equal, and brothers; there has always been political, social, and economic inequality among groups within these societies, groups we commonly call classes. The existence of antagonisms among classes is a fact, however much it may be to the interest of the ruling class to deny it. But the various antagonisms, by no means purely economic, which set class against class are in a normal society subordinated to other concerns, wider or narrower, cut across by other conflicts, subdued by other interests. At any rate they are not concentrated, embittered, strengthened by an almost unanimous support from the intellectuals, as we shall find they were in the old regimes we are studying.

In England, where we have usually been taught to believe that class hatreds were minimized by the good relations between country gentlemen and villagers, by the absorption of younger sons of the nobility in the middle classes, by some English sense of solidarity and decency, the seventeenth century saw a bitter class struggle. The following quotation from Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson is not only a fair specimen of the feelings of a middle-class Puritan towards the nobility; it can stand as a sample of the kind of intense, and always highly moral, atmosphere of such class antagonisms in other pre-revolutionary societies: “The court of the King [James I] was a nursery of lust and intemperance ... the nobility of the land was utterly debased.... The generality of the gentry of the land soon learned the court fashion, and every great house in the country soon became a sty of uncleanness. Then began murder, incest, adultery, drunkenness, swearing, fornication, and all sorts of ribaldry to be countenanced vices because they held such conformity to the court example.” Or, more gently:

“courtesy, Which oft is sooner found in lowly sheds With smoky rafters, than in tapst’ry halls And courts of princes, where it first was nam’d And yet is most pretended.”

This was not written by an eighteenth-century disciple of Rousseau, but by John Milton.

We need hardly labor the point that both the French and the Russian middle classes hated, and envied, and felt morally superior to their aristocracies, and that their writings are filled with passages indicative of the strength and spread of these sentiments. At fourteen years Manon Phlipon, later as Madame Roland something more than Egeria to the Girondin party, told her mother after a week spent with a lady of the suite of the Dauphiness, “Another few days and I shall detest these people so much that I shan’t be able to control my hatred.” And to her mother’s question as to what harm these aristocrats did her she answered, “It’s just feeling the injustice, thinking every moment about the absurdity of it all.” The higher the French bourgeois rose, the closer he came in his way of life to the aristocracy, the more vividly in some respects he felt the gap which separated him from his neighbor with four quarters of nobility. “It wasn’t the taxes,” wrote Rivarol in his memoirs, “nor the lettres de cachet, nor all the other abuses of authority; it wasn’t the vexations of the intendants, nor the ruinous delays of justice which most irritated the nation; it was the prejudice of nobility. What proves this is that it was the bourgeois, the men of letters, the financiers, in fine all those who were envious of the nobility, who raised against the nobility the petty bourgeois of the towns and the peasants in the country.”

How far the lower classes or the proletariat really were stirred against their betters in these societies is not wholly clear, save perhaps in Russia. In England there can be little doubt that the more prosperous artisan classes in the big cities, and in regions like East Anglia the peasantry, were won over to Puritanism; and this meant hostility to the Anglican upper classes. Mixed inextricably with the religious fervor and phrases of the pamphlet literature is a great deal of social hatred, which later came out fully as the revolution moved towards its radical extreme. The French peasantry in many, perhaps most regions, showed by acts in 1789 that they hated their absentee landlords, or the institutions of land tenure, but conclusive evidence that this hatred was much stronger and more universal than it had been for several hundred years has not yet been produced. We cannot be sure whether they hated individuals or a status. Certainly the old notion, evident even in the work of Taine, that the French peasantry were in 1789 smarting under a sharpened double oppression from government and from seigneurs, is at least a revolutionary myth rather than an historical fact. A great deal of work remains to be done in the objective study of the actual sentiments of suppressed or oppressed classes at the bottom of the social scale.

The Russian proletariat, at least in the cities, had certainly been exposed to several generations of Marxist propaganda, and had acquired, so far as its elite goes, a sense of mission against nobles and middle class alike. As the first manifesto of the Social Democratic party, issued in 1898 before the split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, put it: “The farther one goes to the East of Europe the weaker, baser and more cowardly becomes the bourgeoisie and the larger cultural and political tasks fall to the lot of the proletariat. On its strong shoulders the Russian working class must bear and will bear the cause of conquering political liberty. This is necessary, but only as the first step toward the achievement of the great historic mission of the proletariat: the creation of a social order in which there will be no place for the exploitation of man by man. The Russian proletariat will cast off from itself the yoke of the autocracy in order with all the greater energy to continue the struggle with capitalism and with the bourgeoisie until the final victory of socialism.” Just how the Russian peasants felt towards classes above them is a difficult problem. We may assume a good deal of variety, as also in eighteenth-century France, depending on local conditions, the character of the landlord, the prosperity of the peasants themselves. There is some indication that by the twentieth century one can risk the generalization: the more prosperous the peasants, the more discontented. But here, as throughout the range of our study, trustworthy materials of one kind are scarce: neither historians nor sociologists have paid sufficient systematic attention to the sentiments towards other groups which seem to prevail in a given social group or class.

We have noted the ineptness of the ruling classes, and the existence among the middle and parts of the lower of more than normally strong sentiments hostile to the ruling classes. It remains to consider how far these class lines were rigid, how far, in particular the “career open to talents,” existed in these societies. One might well argue a priori that in Western societies any approach to a rigid caste-system which would bar the possibility of rise to the able but low-born, any stoppage of what Pareto calls the circulation of the elites, would be a very important preliminary symptom of revolution. Able men do seem to get born in the humblest ranks, and an accumulation of able and discontented men would provide splendid natural leaders for groups restive and ready for revolt. Yet this test of the career open to talents is one of the hardest to apply to our societies. The normal standard for a Western society is here very difficult indeed to sketch, even as roughly as we have done for our other variables.

One might start with a characteristic American assumption, and say that in this country at least we have full freedom of opportunity. Very well, let us take at random some self-made contemporaries—Babe Ruth, Henry Ford, Rudy Vallée, Sinclair Lewis. It would be comforting to be able to say confidently that in the societies of the old regimes these able men would have been kept down by hard-and-fast caste lines, condemned to obscurity or to revolt. Unfortunately, it would not be true. We must not, indeed, be indecently sure about such hypothetical matters. The professional athlete as such could probably not have attained in any other society than our own the wealth Mr. Ruth has nor as much honor—public attention, if you prefer—save perhaps in the Rome of the gladiators. Yet in early feudal society sheer physical strength might have won him knighthood, and even in later societies noble patronage might have carried him far. Mr. Ford may be taken as the entrepreneur-inventor, and though one doubts whether any other society than our own would have made him a national hero, it is likely that in eighteenth-century France or in twentieth-century Russia he could have secured substantial financial success. Mr. Vallée is the man who amuses, and Western society has usually rewarded adequately, and sometimes highly, those who could amuse it. Perhaps aristocracies have never quite concealed their contempt and democracies have made no attempt to conceal their admiration for those who amused them. Yet actors, musicians, jesters and their like seem not, in spite of the example of Figaro, to have been greatly irked by their social status in the past. Certainly the French eighteenth century was kind enough to them, even economically. As for Mr. Lewis, he would presumably have been in his element among the philosophes, and with proper national and racial adjustments, among the Gorkys and the Chekhovs. He would have made proportionately quite as much money, and have been even more honored.

We are dealing with very subtle variables of human sentiments. At all times and in all societies, probably, some men feel that they have abilities which are denied free play by existing social, political, and economic restrictions. Some men always feel balked, cramped, kept-down, and some of them really are. Probably in societies on the eve of revolution there are very large numbers of such men. Yet it is very difficult to put one’s finger on those kinds of activity, those fields of distinction, where this restraint is most felt. Here as elsewhere the given situation is always a complex of restraints, no one or two or three of which would, without additional elements of disturbance, be anything but a quite normal social fact. Moreover, there are other elements besides restraint. Men conditioned to loyalty may put up with great hardships. Fact and feeling seem to vary independently. Thus in Western society there has always been—say in comparison with Hindu caste-society—a very high degree of the “career open to talents.” The circulation of the elites has always gone on. We can here but glance at our societies and see whether there were any special limitations to that circulation in the years prior to the revolution.

In eighteenth-century France, the way to wealth and fame was open practically unrestricted to business men, adventurers, adventuresses, actors, artists, writers—to Pâris-Duverney, to Cagliostro, to Mme. Du Barry, to Talma, to Watteau, to Voltaire. The way to political power was much harder, though the Abbé Dubois, an apothecary’s son, could attain its highest peak. On the whole, substantial political power, the power of making programs and policies, was open to the courtier talents even more than to noble birth; administrative power was almost entirely in the hands of the noblesse de robe, an hereditary, conscientious, and not incapable bureaucracy. Social position, the highest honors, we are frequently told, went only to those who could show four quarters of nobility. Certainly a privileged nobility did exist, and was disliked in the abstract by many a bourgeois who had no concrete experience of it. Twentieth-century Russia is in many ways a close parallel in these respects. A privileged nobility topped the social system, and closed the very highest social honor to plebeian talent. This class was disliked and bitterly disliked by those who saw it from the outside; and no doubt many of its individual members were insufferably haughty, overbearing, dissolute, vain, empty-headed, and the rest, just as if they had come from the pages of A Tale of Two Cities. Yet the way to fame and fortune was far from closed in pre-revolutionary Russia, with new industries rising, with an active theatrical, ballet, and musical life, with university and administrative positions open to ambitious and able young men even from the villages. Rasputin you may perhaps regard as an unhealthy example of the career open to talents, but you can hardly deny that the Siberian monk reached the top.

One clue to this problem of the circulation of the elite may lie in a stoppage of that circulation in a particular and very delicate spot, such as the professions, and especially the “intellectual” professions; that is, among people especially liable to the feeling of frustration, of being excluded from good things. One is struck in studying French society in the years just preceding the revolution with a kind of jam in the stream of bright young men descending on Paris to write and talk their way to fortune. Mercier in his Tableau de Paris tells how every sunny day young men may be seen on the quays, washing and drying their only shirts, ruffled and lacy symbol of high social status. There are also in Russia signs of pressure in competition in the ranks of what we should call “white-collar men,” intellectuals, bureaucrats, clerks, and the like. We know that a similar stoppage in the society of the Weimar Republic had a great deal to do with the Nazi revolution of 1933. This symptom is, like most others that indicate strong social tensions, nearly lacking in eighteenth-century America, and extremely difficult to trace, partly for lack of proper historical materials, in the English revolution. Naturally enough, a stoppage in the circulation of the elite into journalism, literature, and such professions is likely to be rapidly reflected in the desertion of the intellectuals.

Finally, social antagonisms seem to be at their strongest when a class has attained to wealth, but is, or feels itself, shut out from the highest social distinction, and from positions of evident and open political power. This, broadly speaking, does describe the situation of the Calvinist gentry and merchants in seventeenth-century England, the colonial aristocracy and merchants of America, at least in relation to the British ruling class, the French bourgeois of the eighteenth and the Russian bourgeois of the nineteenth centuries. Individuals in each society might rise from ranks even lower than the middle class, and surmount all these barriers. Even as a class, the bourgeoisie in all four societies really had a determining voice in major political decisions even before the revolutions. But the countries were “run” by other, and privileged, beings, and from the highest social distinctions the bourgeoisie as a class were hopelessly excluded. Moreover, this exclusion was symbolized, manifested continuously in all but the most remote rural districts. Long before Marx, long before Harrington’s Oceana, practical men knew that political power and social distinction are the handmaids of economic power. Where wealth cannot buy everything—everything of this world, at any rate—you have a fairly reliable preliminary sign of revolution.

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.

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.

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.

A similar statistical study could probably not be made for the English revolution since lists corresponding to the Jacobin membership lists are not available. The material certainly exists for such a study of the actual membership of the soviets in, say, the crucial year 1917, but it would have to be put together from scattered sources available only in Russia. We know a good deal about the membership of our own American revolutionary groups, from merchants’ committees and corresponding committees to continental congresses. Even for the English revolution we have enough scattered material to permit some generalizations about the personnel of the movement.

In the early stages of the English revolution there can be no doubt about the respectability and economic prosperity of the men who backed Parliament. Baxter, somewhat exaggeratedly, but with a kernel of truth, writes that when the Great Rebellion broke out “it was the moderate Conformists and Episcopal Protestants who had long been crying of Innovations, Arminianism, Popery, Monopolies, illegal taxes and the danger of arbitrary government, who raised the war.” The merchants of London, Bristol and other towns, great lords, small landowning gentry, all rose in sedition against their king. Even in what we may call the extremist or crisis period of the English revolution, which begins in 1646 or 1647 when the tension between the New Model Army and the Presbyterians becomes acute, your revolutionists are very far from riffraff. Even Baxter reports of that army—which was to the English revolution what the Jacobins were to the French and the Bolsheviks to the Russian revolutions—that “abundance of the common troopers and many of the officers I found to be honest, sober, orthodox men, and others tractable, ready to hear the truth, and of upright intentions.” An historian has estimated that when the New Model “took the field in 1645, of its thirty-seven chief officers, nine were of noble, twenty-one of gentle birth, and only seven not gentlemen by birth.” The English lower classes, or at least the more proletarian elements as opposed to independent artisans, on the whole stood aloof from the conflict. Even the wilder sectarians seem to have been recruited from humble, but by no means poverty-stricken people, men who had taught themselves to follow the theological disputes, men on the whole representing the more active and ambitious of their class. The poorer peasants, especially in the North and West, actually sided with the King and against the revolutionists.

In America we have already pointed out the well-known fact that it was the merchants who first organized opposition to the Crown. This opposition was echoed by many planters in the southern coastal plain, and by many very respectable yeoman farmers of the Piedmont. It is quite true that there are numerous signs of the pretty active participation of what a good conservative would regard as the dregs of the population. The Boston Sons of Liberty, who performed most of the actual work of violence there, were recruited from workingmen and actually met habitually in the counting-room of a distillery. The Tories, whom it is now more fashionable to call Loyalists, naturally saw their opponents as a pretty shabby lot. Hutchinson writes of the Boston town meeting that it is “constituted of the lowest class of the people under the influence of a few of the higher class, but of intemperate and furious dispositions and of desperate fortunes. Men of property and the best character have deserted these meetings, where they are sure of being affronted.”

Actually the line between Tory and Whig is a very irregular one, depending on much besides economic status, as can be seen from the late J. F. Jameson’s The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement. If the rich gentlemen of “Tory Row” in Cambridge sided with the Crown, there were plenty of sober, respectable farmers, merchants, and lawyers, who turned revolutionist. Such men were likely to be shocked at the doings of wild young apprentices in the Sons of Liberty, but this did not necessarily turn them to the British side, though it made them critical of the Congress. A good sign of the respectability of revolution is the adhesion of the clergy, which save for the Episcopalians was in most colonies general. As a disgruntled Tory put it, “The high sons of liberty include the ministers of the gospel, who instead of preaching to their flocks meekness, sobriety, attention to their different employments, and a steady obedience to the laws of Britain, belch from the pulpits liberty, independence, and a steady perseverance in endeavoring to shake off their allegiance to the mother country. The independent ministers have ever been ... the instigators and abettors of every persecution and conspiracy.”

To sum up we shall have to agree with Jameson that the strength of the revolutionary movement in the long run lay with the plain people—not with the mob or “rabble,” for American society was rural and not urban—but with country artisans, small farmers, and frontiersmen. But we shall also have to agree with Alexander Graydon that “the opposition to the claims of Britain originated with the better sort: it was truly aristocratical in its commencement.”

The February revolution in Russia seems to have been welcomed by all classes save the most conservative of conservatives—a few army officers, a few members of the Court and the old nobility. No one knows who made the February revolution, but there can be no doubt as to its popularity. Almost everyone, liberal noble, banker, industrialist, lawyer, doctor, civil servant, kulak, and workingman, was glad to co-operate in giving the Czarist regime its final blow. Even the Bolsheviks, whose sudden victory in the October revolution of 1917 makes the time-scheme of the Russian revolution so very different from those of the English and French revolutions, were by no means what confirmed haters of revolution call riffraff, rabble, “the masses.” They seem to have been recruited chiefly from the more enterprising, able, and skilled workingmen in the factories of Petrograd, Moscow, and specialized industrial centers like Ivanovo-Vosnessensk or the Don basin. Their most important leaders were largely drawn from the middle class. One might perhaps argue that the Kadets, led by Miliukov, were so early discouraged that they may not be counted as a revolutionary party. But the Mensheviks and S-R (Socialist-Revolutionary) party, later scorned as “Compromisists” by triumphant Bolshevik historians, are most certainly revolutionary elements. The Mensheviks may have been mostly intellectuals, but the S-R were also recruited from the prosperous peasants, from the people who ran the co-operatives, from small shopkeepers and the like.

III. Economic and Social Position: Leaders

Hitherto we have been considering the main bodies of the revolutionists, and have found that on the whole they by no means represent the dregs of society, even in the great proletarian uprising, and that they commonly include members of almost every social and economic group in a given society, except possibly the very top of the social pyramid. And yet the Essexes, Washingtons, and Lafayettes are very close to the top. Even in Russia, Brusilov, a distinguished Czarist general, lived to serve the Soviet government in the 1920 drive on Warsaw.

Let us now see what we can make of the leaders, judging them first by the comparatively objective standards of their social origins and economic status. With the Jacobins the present writer was able to make some study of the purely local leaders, the men who normally don’t get into history. From the careers of dozens of these subalterns of revolution, a conclusion seemed clear: “the leaders are substantially of the same social standing as the rank and file. Possibly there are, among the leaders during the Terror, more men who seem definitely, in 1789, failures, or at least at odds with their environment. Yet the proportion of these village Marats is not striking.”

As for the national leaders in the French revolution, they are, judged by these standards, a varied lot. In the years 1789-92 they include noblemen like the King’s cousin, the Duke of Orléans, Mirabeau, the Lameths, Lafayette; lawyers in vast numbers, from well-known Parisian lawyers like Camus to obscure but thoroughly respectable provincial lawyers like young Robespierre from Arras (who had once written his name de Robespierre), or rising barristers like Danton, come to Paris from a peasant background in Champagne; men of science like the astronomer Bailly, the chemist Lavoisier, and the mathematician Monge; and, nursed by the new power of the press, journalists like Marat and Desmoulins, publicists like Brissot, provincial bourgeois of Chartres, and Condorcet, a marquis and a philosophe. After 1792, extremely few new leaders came to the top. The men who ran France in 1793-94 were, perhaps, somewhat less refined or distinguished than the hopeful intellectuals of Mme. Roland’s circle; and they would have seemed very barbarous at Versailles in 1788. They were not, however, of very different social origins from the men who really ran the old France—the literate bourgeoisie from which were ultimately recruited the bureaucracy.

Of the striking respectability and excellent social standing of the men who signed our Declaration of Independence most Americans are fully aware. Of its fifty-six signers thirty-three held college degrees and only about four had little or no formal education. There were five doctors, eleven merchants, four farmers, twenty-two lawyers, three ministers. Twelve were sons of ministers. Nearly all were affluent. Sam Adams, who seems among the more disreputable of our leaders, came from a merchant family of some means, and graduated from Harvard in 1740, where he was listed fifth out of twenty-two in those mysterious lists which before Professor S. E. Morison’s researches we all thought directly measured social standing. Even the Tories, though they flung words like “rabble” about very freely, could consistently reproach the revolutionary leaders with nothing worse in this respect than being amateurs in the art of governing. “From shopkeepers, tradesmen, and attorneys they are become statesmen and legislators.... Almost every individual of the governing party in America fills at present, in his own fancy, a station not only superior to what he had ever filled before, but to what he had ever expected to fill,” writes a conservative, or moderate, in the Middlesex Journal for April 6, 1776.

We need not go into the social origins of the leaders of the moderates in the English revolution. They are clearly among the highest in the land. The immoderates present an interesting spectacle, a mixture of gentlemen of good breeding, of self-educated careerists and of humble men inspired by a fury as yet divine, as yet without benefit of psychoanalysis. Cromwell himself, of course, was an East Anglian country gentleman, whose family tree ramified into a good deal of the new wealth originating in Tudor confiscations. Ireton, who became his son-in-law, was of similar antecedents, as were many other Independent leaders in old and new England. Ludlow the regicide was a son of Sir Henry Ludlow of Wiltshire, and went to Trinity, Cambridge. Even John Lilburne the Leveller is described as “of good family” dating back to the fourteenth century, and seems to have been typical of the lesser gentry whose sons not infrequently passed over into trade. We know little of the social origins of such men as Winstanley the Digger or Edward Sexby, a soldier of Cromwell’s regiment who appears later as a kind of international agent of republicanism. Robert Everard, with Winstanley a leader of the curious communistic group known as the Diggers, was a captain in the army and is described as a “gentleman of liberal education.” John Rogers the Millenarian was the son of an Anglican clergyman and a Royalist.

Russia presents a case more nearly parallel to our other countries in respect to the social origins of the leaders of her revolution than might at first sight seem likely in a proletarian revolution. Perhaps the moderates in Russia held power so briefly and so uncomfortably that they hardly count. Kadets like Miliukov, a historian of good family, Tereschenko, a Kiev sugar millionaire, the Octobrist Guchkov, a wealthy Moscow merchant, and poor old Prince Lvov remind us of the rich Puritan lords and merchants of the English revolution, the well-born Feuillants of the French revolution. The Menshevik and Social-Revolutionary leaders were mostly intellectuals, petty officials, trade union and co-operative leaders; some of their most eloquent orators came from Georgia, “the Gironde of the Russian revolution.” Kerensky was a radical lawyer of provincial bureaucratic stock from the little Volga town of Simbirsk, now called Ulianovsk, in memory of a greater than Kerensky who also hailed from Simbirsk. As a matter of fact, V. I. Ulianov, better known by his revolutionary name of Lenin, came from exactly the same social class as Kerensky. His father was an inspector of schools at Simbirsk, a position of much more social standing in bureaucratic Czarist Russia than it would seem to us to be—very definitely in the superior bourgeoisie.

The other Bolshevik leaders are a varied lot: intellectual Jews like Trotsky (born Bronstein) and Kamenev (born Rosenfeld), both educated men, by no means typical Ghetto Jews; Felix Dzerzhinsky, of noble Polish-Lithuanian stock; Sverdlov, by training a chemist; Kalinin, whom one might call a professional peasant; Stalin (born Djugashvili), of Georgian peasant-artisan stock, destined by his mother for the priesthood, and actually for some time a student in a seminary; Chicherin, of stock sufficiently aristocratic to hold himself at least as well-born as Lord Curzon; Antonov-Ovseënko, Red Army leader with the fine bourgeois inheritance of a hyphenated name. The negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, however, afford a neat synopsis of Bolshevik leadership and proof of its non-proletarian character. When the first Russian delegation was sent to that town to meet the Germans it included as samples of the proletarian achievements of the revolution one specimen each of sailor, worker, and peasant. The peasant is said, no doubt by malicious enemies of the working class, to have distinguished himself chiefly by his interest in the liquor supply. When, however, the negotiations really got going after a recess, the Russians dropped their ornamental sailor, worker, and peasant, and were represented by men of course not the social equals of the high-born Germans opposite them, but, one suspects, their cultural superiors—Joffe, Kamenev, Pokrovsky, Karakhan—and by a somewhat neurotic lady-Bolshevik, Mme. Bitzenko, who had won her spurs by shooting a Czarist official in the bad old days. But, of course, even orthodox Marxism admits that the proletariat cannot lift itself by its own bootstraps, and that its leaders must therefore come from classes sufficiently privileged to have had an education fitting them to interpret the subtleties of Marxist theology.

Finally, the inexperience, the “newness,” of the revolutionary leaders has generally been exaggerated in our textbooks. They had, especially in Russia, a long training in the direction of dissenting and persecuted little societies, the revolutionary groups. And revolutionists as a group are so much like any other human beings that to learn the art of leading them is to have gone a long way in political apprenticeship. Even in France, the members of the National Assembly were not as politically innocent as they are supposed to have been. Many had had business experience, or had been diplomatists, or civil servants, or had taken part in local politics in provinces which had their own estates. All of them were used to the politics of pressure groups. These revolutionary leaders are mostly far from academic, unworldly, pure theorists; they do not step suddenly from the cloister to the council hall. Their training may have subtly unfitted them for leading a stable society; but that is another, and at present insoluble, problem. They are certainly fitted for leadership in an unstable society.

We have, then, found that both rank and file and leaders of active revolutionary groups cannot be catalogued neatly as coming from any one social or economic group. They are not even strikingly, precociously, young. Their leaders are usually in middle age, the thirties and forties, and thus younger than most of the politically prominent in stable societies, which naturally incline to the rule of the old. But the St. Justs and the Bonapartes, the boys in their twenties, are the exception, not the rule. The leadership of the Russian revolution which, with the distortion that comes from contemporaneousness, we are likely to regard as the most “radical,” was on the average the oldest in years of all our revolutions. The revolutionists tend to represent a fairly complete cross-section of their communities, with a sprinkling of the very highest ranks of their societies—men like Lafayette, for instance, whom Mr. Lothrop Stoddard calls “misguided superiors”—and, as far as the active ruling groups go, extremely few of the submerged, downtrodden, lowest ranks. This is as true of the Bolsheviks as of the Puritans and the Jacobins. Bums, hoboes, the mob, the rabble, the riffraff, may be recruited to do the street-fighting and the manor-burning of revolutions, but they emphatically do not make, do not run, revolutions—not even proletarian revolutions.

IV. Character and Disposition

We now face a much more difficult task, one where our information is neither so objective nor so readily catalogued as our information about the social and economic status of revolutionists. This is the problem—psychological at bottom—of seeing how far these revolutionists belong to types which are normally viewed by John Jones as queer, eccentric, or downright mad. Now one might quite justifiably argue a priori that a wholly contented man could not possibly be a revolutionist. But the trouble is that there are so many ways of being discontented, as well as contented, on this earth. Indeed, the cruder Marxists, and the cruder classical economists, make an almost identical error: they both assume that economics deals exhaustively with whatever makes men happy or miserable. Men have many incentives to action which the economist, limited to the study of men’s rational actions, simply cannot include in his work. They observably do a great deal that simply makes no sense at all, if we assume them to be guided wholly by any conceivable rational economic motive: near-starving in the British Museum to write Das Kapital, for instance, or seizing deserts under the comforting illusion that trade follows the flag, or making the world quite safe for democracy. Yet clearly a man who takes part in a revolution before it is demonstrably successful—and after it is successful it may perhaps be said to have ceased to be a revolution anyway—is a discontented man, or at least a man shrewd enough to estimate that there are enough discontented men to be forged into a group that can make a revolution. We must make some effort to study the nature of such discontents as seen in individuals.

For here the method of statistical study of large groups of revolutionists, like the Jacobins, will not work. At most these rank and file are names, with profession and perhaps some other indication of social status. Modern interest in social history and the common man has indeed made available a certain number of old diaries and letters of common men, and the Russian revolution has done its best to keep alive the memory of worker this of the Putilov factory or sailor that of the Aurora. Trotsky himself is very eloquent about the role of these heroic workers, sailors, and peasants in his History of the Russian Revolution, yet he manages to spend as much of his time on the great names as if he were a mere bourgeois historian. We have, of course, the blanket denunciations—they are hardly descriptions—of one side by another. These are much too emotional as a rule to have any evidential value, except as to the intensity of emotions evoked during revolutions. Even in our own presumably mild revolution one notes a Tory who is reported to have said, “It would be a joy to ride through American blood to the hubs of my chariot wheels.” Of course these American Tories thought the revolutionists were wild radicals, scheming inferiors, jealous rabble. On the other hand, most of us who were brought up without benefit of the new history were taught in school to regard the Tories as just straight villains, traitors, morally reprehensible people without economic, social, or indeed any characteristics that separated them from such villains of fiction as Simon Legree. So in the French revolution, each side accused the other of all sorts of moral failings, but rarely got down to effective details of daily life.

If we cannot for these reasons do much with the political and social psychology of large groups of revolutionists, we can at least look over some of the leaders, hoping that the list we decide upon will not be too unrepresentative. Here at least we can count upon quite a bit of biographical information. Thanks to those admirable works, the Dictionary of National Biography and the Dictionary of American Biography, we can even sample some of the lesser leaders, the noncommissioned officers of revolutions. The French are now at work on their biographical dictionary, which promises to be even more scholarly than its Anglo-Saxon prototypes, but as it has only just conquered the letter “A” it is not of much use to us. Russia is very difficult indeed from this point of view; there are plenty of brilliant comments on Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, but they are also very contradictory. On the lesser figures there is not much trustworthy biographical writing available in the Western languages, nor for that matter in Russian. We may note here, however, that the extraordinary proliferation of assumed names in the Russian revolution probably does not stem with most of these pseudonymous heroes from any feelings of shame for a criminal or disgraceful past. Their crimes were no doubt many, but crimes only against Czarist oppression. Perhaps there was originally some mildly melodramatic notion that these aliases were useful against the Czarist police, but soon they became a mere fashion, a revolutionary fad.

At this point there is some danger of our falling into a dreary catalogue. At the risk of seeming to turn aside from strictly scientific systematizing, we shall have to group our facts as we go along under certain human types or characters. This is a process which has been done successfully by a great many shrewd observers of human behavior, from Theophrastus through Molière to Sainte-Beuve and Bagehot. It is perhaps in some respects a more useful way of classifying men than formal psychology or formal sociology has yet worked out. These are not, one hopes, imaginary characters. If they are one-tenth as real as Alceste or the Penurious Man they are more real than anyone the average sociologist ever dealt with.

We may begin with the gentleman-revolutionist, whom Mr. Lothrop Stoddard calls the “misguided superior,” the man born on top, but perversely unwilling to stay there. He is by no means a simple person, and indeed sometimes manages to combine an astonishing number of revolutionary traits. It must be admitted that with many of these misguided superiors in our four societies, dislike for the ways of their class is apparently partly motivated by their inability to succeed in certain activities honored in that class. You need not be a debunking historian to admit that Lafayette revolted against the Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette partly because he cut so awkward a figure there. Liberty, fortunately, did not need to be courted in a minuet. We must not seem to be cynical in these matters. Lafayette’s love of liberty was no doubt morally a far better thing than if he had loved place, pension, or mistress. But we must infer from his actions that he had very early realized that nothing short of a love of liberty would get him very far. And so today, when you find in one of our colleges a well-nurtured youth turned Communist, you can be almost certain that he is not captain of the football team nor secretary of Chi Phi Digamma. He may indeed be Phi Beta Kappa. This condition we need not here either applaud or condemn, but simply note.

It would, however, be cynical—and hence quite unscientific—to deny that many of these misguided superiors are also moved by what we shall have to call sincere idealism. Their own social group comes to seem to them dissolute, or dull, or cruel, or heartless. They see the possibilities of a better world. They are influenced by the writings of the intellectuals, who have begun their desertion of the established order. They come to struggle for God’s kingdom on this earth. They are usually, of course, uncomfortable on this earth, but for a whole lot of reasons, many of which cannot be simply dismissed as being in the province of the psychiatrist. Shelley, who never actually got a chance at revolution outside poetry, is a familiar example of this sensitive, and often neurotic, type. Dzerzhinsky, the Polish aristocrat who gave life to the terrible Cheka, was a delicate and sincere fanatic. The Marquis de St. Huruge, who figures disreputably in the disorders and street-fighting of the French revolution, was apparently pretty crazy, and not even a gentleman. Condorcet, also a marquis, was a gentleman and scholar, and if he had a good deal of the vanity that goes naturally enough with both, and very little of the sense that sometimes goes with either, was at heart a kind and sensitive man.

Others desert their class and join the revolution for the ignoble but sometimes socially very useful reason that they think the signs point to the victory of the revolution. Sometimes these men are like Mirabeau, rather shady characters who have for some time compromised themselves by irregular lives. Sometimes they are men like Talleyrand, careful, sensible men whose main desire is to keep in a position of honor and affluence, and who have no sense of loyalty to abstract notions of right and wrong. And, of course, in the early stages of our revolutions, even the Russian, plenty of rich and influential men of no extraordinary intelligence or stupidity joined the revolution because the revolution was fashionable, and an apparent success. Often these men, who had not been directly in political power, were flattered by the prospect of political power—men like the Duc d’Orléans or Bailly or Tereschenko or Konovalov. But they were essentially fairly ordinary human beings, no fitter subjects for hagiography—Christian, Freudian, or Marxist—than you or I.

If we leave the superiors, those who belong by birth or upbringing to the ruling classes, and who yet side with revolt, and turn to leaders who come from classes below the ruling one, we shall find the same very great variety of what we must tritely call human nature. We shall find fools, scoundrels, idealists, professional agitators, diplomatists, lunatics, cowards, and heroes.

Now it would be useless to deny that among those who come to the top in the troubled times of revolution are many who probably never would have been heard of in normal times. Some of these were certainly failures in the old society, men who were unable to attain the objects of their ambition. In spite of all that an able defender like Professor L. R. Gottschalk has written to prove Marat’s learning and respectability, it is still true that on the whole the Friend of the People was not a success before the revolution. Marat was a self-educated man of humble stock, with a habit of presenting himself with academic degrees and honorary distinctions his biographers—and even his contemporaries—were not always able to confirm. He tried very hard to storm the Parnassus of the philosophes, but was never admitted. Like most enlightened eighteenth-century men of letters, he dabbled in natural science, and emerged with a variant of the old phlogiston theory of combustion, the originality and truth of which were not properly appreciated by his jealous contemporaries. Lavoisier and the “new chemistry” were triumphing in the 1780’s, and Marat failed to recognize the meaning of the revolution in this science.

When the Estates-General met in 1789 he was a disappointed intellectual, a man who had failed of acceptance by that little band of writers and talkers who in late eighteenth-century France perhaps enjoyed more unalloyed admiration from the public than such folk have ever enjoyed. No Frenchman could at that epoch have coined a term like “brain-trust”; but if he had it would have carried no such ironic overtones of scorn as it does in twentieth-century America. Marat, rejected by these admired leaders of opinion, was in 1789 full to the brim with envy and hatred of everything established and esteemed in France. Soon revolutionary journalism was to give him an ample outlet. He became the watch-dog of the revolution—a mad watch-dog, always in his l’Ami du Peuple at work scenting plots against the people, always hating those in power, even when they were of his own party, always crying for blood and revenge. A most unpleasant fellow, no doubt. Whether he was a more unpleasant one than certain journalists of normal and unrevolutionary twentieth-century America, it is hard to say. Journalism was very new in France in 1790, and people expected a good deal. Marat at least had one excuse. He was suffering from an incurable skin disease which gave to his life an almost unbearable nervous tension.

Yet the failures are by no means all of the relatively simple type of Marat. Sam Adams was certainly a failure when judged by the standards of thrifty, sober New England. He had no money sense whatever, ran through a small inheritance, was constantly in debt; let his wife and children get along as they could while he organized his famous caucus and committees of correspondence. He is by no means a figure for the copy-books. Yet Adams could do certain things extremely well, and if these things were not in the 1770’s as financially rewarding as they are now, Adams at least reaped less tangible rewards in his own time—and he did become governor of Massachusetts. Adams’s gifts, of course, as they are deftly analyzed in Mr. J. C. Miller’s recent study, are those of the expert propagandist and organizer. It is hard to believe that today the advertising business would leave a man of his parts undiscovered and unrewarded.

Thomas Paine, who managed to involve himself in two revolutions, the American and the French, is still another revolutionist who amounted to very little before the revolution. When he sailed for America in 1774 he was thirty-eight, certainly no longer a young man. He came from East-Anglian Quaker artisan stock, and had picked up an eighteenth-century education, chiefly in the sciences and in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, while pursuing half a dozen different occupations from privateering to stay-making and shopkeeping. He had made an unsuccessful marriage, been in and out of the excise service twice, acquired a reputation as the town “atheist” of Lewes in Sussex, and had led an unsuccessful and somewhat premature attempt at lobbying in the interest of his fellow-excisemen. This attempt, which resulted in his second and final dismissal from the service, also brought him to the attention of Benjamin Franklin, who encouraged him to emigrate. But Paine arrived in Philadelphia like many another European, an unsuccessful man looking for a new start. The revolution gave it to him, and Common Sense made him a distinguished publicist. Paine was the professional radical, the crusading journalist, the religious rationalist, a man who in quiet times could hardly have been more than another Bradlaugh, another Ingersoll.

On the other hand, revolution not infrequently brings to the top men of very practical abilities, men of the kind that even cautious and hard-headed conservatives must recognize as worthy of respect. Such men may have lived in obscurity simply because they had not been disturbed; or they may have been the victims of some such stoppage in the circulation of the élite, the career open to talents, as we noted in a previous chapter. Cromwell is a classic example of a man who might have remained a simple country gentleman with an undistinguished career in the House of Commons had it not been for the Puritan revolution. Of Washington himself a similar generalization can be made. We shall come back again to this question of the soundness of revolutionary leadership.

So far we have said nothing of the men of blood, of Carrier and the noyades of Nantes, of Collot d’Herbois and the mitraillades of Lyons, of those to us nameless agents of the Cheka whose work made the French Reign of Terror seem mild in comparison, or of those English agents of the so-called Cromwellian settlement of Ireland who for long-time effectiveness perhaps hold the record among Terrorists. We shall later come to the problem of terroristic methods during the crisis period of our revolutions. Here we are simply interested in pointing out that among the personnel of the revolutionists are a number of men who have been singled out by posterity as examples of the kind of monster that comes to the surface in revolutions. No one can deny the fact of such emergence, nor the fact that such men can hardly be understood save with the help of criminology and abnormal psychology.

Carrier himself is a perfectly good example of these men. However much Republican apologists may try to soften down the melodramatic accounts his enemies have left of his activities at Nantes, the fact remains that he did so speed up the revolutionary courts that it became much easier to drown convicted persons in batches in the river Loire than to wait for the slow-moving guillotine. Carrier was a provincial lawyer who had got himself elected to the Convention by joining his local club and repeating the stock phrases of the Enlightenment. He was sent as a representative on mission to Nantes, and there power seems to have gone to his head. Moreover, Nantes was on the edge of the always dangerous Vendée, and Carrier may well have been driven to cleaning up his enemies in a group by fear of conspiracy against his own life. He certainly put up a bold front, swaggered about town, gave entertainments, talked big, and left behind him festering hatreds that brought his downfall and condemnation to death after the Terror was over.

Carrier reminds one of Mr. James T. Farrell’s gangsters. There is the bravado, the consciousness of life lived at the level of melodrama, the new, crude sense of power, the constant haunting fear of reprisals, the childish immediacy of purpose. What one does not find in Carrier is a specific pathological love of bloodshed, a diseased mind of the sort linked with the name of the Marquis de Sade. Indeed, this latter kind of insanity is more often found among the jailers, thugs, and hangers-on of revolution than among its leaders, even leaders at the level of Carrier. And of course to many people the most revolting acts in general are the acts of revolutionary mobs—the September massacres at Paris in 1792, for instance, which are very closely paralleled by the history of lynching in America. Here there crop up some of the most shocking instances of human cruelty; but they are by no means specifically to be associated with revolutions. Pogroms and lynchings are at least as bad. Revolutions and mobs are not interchangeable terms; you can and usually do have one without the other. The kind of cruelty more properly associated with revolutions is the cruelty—to some people more revolting than the cruelty of mobs—of judicial murders done in cold blood, and on principle.

There is another type commonly, but erroneously, held to come to the top in revolutions. This is the crack-brained schemer, the fantastic doctrinaire, the man who has a crazy gadget which will bring Utopia. Briefly, perhaps, in the honeymoon stage the lunatic fringe has its innings, and in the English revolution rather more than its innings, at least in print. But revolutions are a serious business, not to be distracted by eccentricities. Once the line of revolutionary orthodoxy is established—and though as we shall see it is a grim and rigid line, it is not a crazy and aberrant one—once this orthodoxy is established the lunatics, mild or serious, are pretty well kept down. There are Marxist revolutions, natural rights revolutions, but none for the Single Tax, Social Credit, Theosophy or Extra Sensory Perception. It is only your very stable societies, like Victorian England, that can afford to turn a Hyde Park over to the lunatic fringe. Even if you think Cromwell, Washington, Robespierre, Napoleon, Lenin, and Stalin all belong to this lunatic fringe, you will have to admit that in their day of power they clamped down pretty hard on other and discordant lunatics.

Nor is it possible to isolate a revolutionary type labeled “criminal,” “degenerate,” and neatly conforming to some anthropometric standards. Attempts to do this sort of thing have certainly been made. There are probably those who hold that revolutionists have a fixed cephalic index, or that they are predominantly dark-haired. Certainly there are many revolutionists who, like Carrier, behave as criminals behave in stable societies; but the proportion of such revolutionists does not seem extraordinarily high.

A more characteristic revolutionary type is the disputatious, contrary-minded person who loves to stand out from the crowd of conformists. Indeed, one of our revolutionary groups, the English Puritans, was filled with this especially rugged anarchism. Not only do individuals stand out in this respect; the group as a whole sets itself off deliberately from the great and the fashionable. As a social historian has written: “Whatever was in fashion is what the Puritan would not wear. When ruffs were in vogue, he wore a large falling band; when pickadillies [ruffs] were out of request , and wide falling bands of delicate lawn edged with fine lace came in, he wore a very small band. Fashionable shoes were wide at the toe; his were sharp. Fashionable stockings were, as a rule, of any color except black; his were black. His garters were short, and, before all, his hair was short. Even at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, short hair was a mark of Puritanism.”

The type is seen most clearly, however, in certain individuals. John Lilburne, the English Leveller, is virtue incarnate and uncomfortable. He seems to have come of a family of rugged individuals, for his father, a gentleman of Durham, is said to have been the last Englishman to have recourse to the feudal right to ask for judgment through ordeal by combat in a civil suit. John was steadily addicted to contention, and attacked Presbyterians and Independents as bitterly as he had earlier attacked the Court. Indeed, as an historian has written, “Lilburne was tried in almost every court in the kingdom, under varying conditions, during a period of some twenty years, for libels on the Government of the day, King, Parliament, Commonwealth, and Protector. One of the first duties that devolved upon the judges of the Commonwealth was to deal with this gentleman.” Yet he seems to have preserved a good deal of social pride along with that intellectual and spiritual pride which is one of the marks of the English Puritan. On trial in 1653, he told his judge, a self-made man of artisan background who had risen with Cromwell, that “it was fitter for him [the judge] to sell thimbles and bodkins than to sit in judgment on a person so much his superior.” Henry Marten, the regicide, who ought to have been a good judge of such matters, said that if the world were emptied of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John and John would quarrel with Lilburne. Lilburne’s pamphlets are full of the self-righteousness of those who fight always for the right, and who seem to take delight in the uncomfortable position to which the poet later assigned the right—

“Right forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.”

We are close to the martyrs.

Lilburne’s motives were no doubt of the highest. He believed in absolute democracy, and his platform of manhood suffrage, biennial parliaments, religious toleration, equality before the law, was one day to secure pretty complete acceptance in England. But in 1645 only a very doctrinaire person, only a fanatic, could have held this platform possible of immediate realization. Lilburne was not only a disputatious man, a courter of martyrdom; he was what the world commonly calls an idealist, and suggests a consideration of a type which occurs very frequently in these revolutions. It does not seem altogether wise to single out any one type as the perfect revolutionist, but if you must have such a type, then you will do well to consider, not the embittered failure, not the envious upstart, not the bloodthirsty lunatic, but the idealist. Idealists, of course, are in our own times the cement of a stable, normal society. It is good for us all that there should be men of noble aspirations, men who have put behind them the dross of this world for the pure word, for the idea and the ideal as the noblest philosophers have known them. But in normal times such idealists do not seem, at least in Western society, to occupy positions of power and responsibility. In normal times today we look up to our idealists, and occasionally give them prizes and honorary degrees, but we do not choose them to rule over us. We notably refuse to let them make our foreign policies.

Indeed, one of the distinguishing marks of a revolution is this: that in revolutionary times the idealist at last gets a chance to try and realize his ideals. Revolutions are full of men who hold very high standards of human conduct, the kind of standards which have for several thousand years been described by some word or phrase which has the overtones that “idealistic” has for us today. There is no need for us to worry over the metaphysical, nor even the semantic, implications of the term. We all know an idealist when we see one, and certainly when we hear one.

Robespierre would have been an idealist in any society. There is a familiar story of how the young Robespierre resigned a judgeship rather than inflict the death penalty, which ran counter to his humanitarian eighteenth-century upbringing. Historians have pretty well destroyed that story, as they have so many others from the cherry tree to Alfred and the cakes. But, except in the very narrowest and least useful senses of the word, such stories are in many important ways usually “true.” This story about Robespierre suggests that he was a good child of the Enlightenment. One need only read some of his speeches, full of the simplicities, the moral aphorisms, the aspirations of that innocent age, to realize that he was quite capable of resigning, or buying, a judgeship rather than abandon his ideals. He would, indeed, kill for his ideals.

Those ideals, as they got formed by 1793, may seem to us somewhat less than heroic, and they were certainly bolstered by a good deal of personal ambition and sheer vanity in Robespierre. But there they were: Robespierre wanted a France where there should be neither rich nor poor, where men should not gamble, nor get drunk, nor commit adultery, nor cheat, nor rob, nor kill—where, in short, there would be neither petty nor grand vices—a France ruled by upright and intelligent men elected by the universal suffrage of the people, men wholly without greed or love of office, and delightedly stepping down at yearly intervals to give place to their successors, a France at peace with herself and the world—but surely this is enough? Robespierre’s personal rectitude is now hardly questioned even by historians hostile to what he stood for; in his own day, and especially immediately after his fall, he was accused of almost every possible crime and moral delinquency. He seems actually not even to have had any of the fashionable vices—no drink, no gaming, no women. Modern historians claim to have evidence that for a brief time in Paris he kept a mistress. If he did, one supposes it must have been out of motives of fancied hygiene; or possibly for a few weeks the country lawyer had ideas of living as did the fashionable Parisians. The Robespierre of the Terror, however, had certainly put such ideas behind him, and was, as the Incorruptible, a living symbol of the Republic of Virtue in his public and private life.

Now this idealist type is by no means simple. Cromwell should clearly not be listed primarily under this category, and yet there is something of the puritanical “seeker” in Cromwell, something that makes his tortuous policy—indeed his double-dealing—very hard to understand if you insist on seeing human beings as logically consistent wholes. Both Lenin and Trotsky are strange compounds of idealism and realism. This coupling of idealism and realism does not mean simply that they both on occasion could use realistic methods to attain ends dictated by their ideals. Robespierre, Cromwell, Gladstone, or Woodrow Wilson could do that. It means that they were also capable of pursuing realistic immediate ends. Lenin, of course, was a very skillful propagandist and organizer, with a great deal of what we shall have to call executive ability. But, at least in 1917, he seems to have thought that world-wide revolution was just around the corner, and that absolute economic equality could be introduced immediately in Russia. The New Economic Policy of 1921 is a clear indication that Lenin would not pursue his ideals to the bitter end of defeat and martyrdom.

Trotsky has one of the best critical minds of any Marxist, is even capable, at moments, of a kind of skepticism about his own aims. The Civil War of 1917-21 in Russia gave convincing proof of his abilities both as an orator and as an executive under pressure. Yet the Trotsky of the exile years seems to be howling for the moon, which is one definition, perhaps too unkind, of idealism. Had Trotsky remained in power he might indeed have made his peace with bureaucracy, inequality, socialism-in-one-country, Thermidorean decadence and all the other evils he now associates with the name of Stalin. And yet it seems not unlikely that this intransigeance of Trotsky’s, this insistence on bringing heaven immediately to earth, this unwillingness to accommodate his aims to human weakness, or if you like, to human nature, help to explain why he did not last in post-revolutionary Russia.

Sentimental idealism was of course distinctly out of fashion in the Russia of 1917. The harsh realities, or at any rate the harsh formulas, of Marxist Socialism had replaced the naïve hopes with which the French revolution had set out to make this a better world. In both Lenin and Trotsky you can trace this desire to seem to be hard-boiled, and it will not do to imply that they did not in some ways succeed. There is one pure idealist among the Russian leaders, however, one who presents us with still another variant of the type. That is Lunacharsky, long Commissar for Education, the artist and man of culture of the movement. Lunacharsky, in spite of his past as a revolutionary agitator, was unquestionably a softie. He possessed the ability to talk movingly about life and education and art, and carried over into a century where it seemed a little strange something of Rousseau or of Paul and Virginia. The world should be grateful to him, however, for he helped greatly to prevent the wholesale destruction of works of art identified offhand with a dissolute capitalistic past.

There is, finally, the man almost wholly of words, the man who can hold crowds spellbound, the revolutionary orator. He may be listed as an idealist, because although part of his role is to egg the crowd on to acts of violence, he is even more typically the soother, the preacher, the ritual-maker, the man who holds the crowd together. In this role his words need hardly have any meaning at all, but commonly they can be analyzed out into pleasant aspirations and utterances. Much of Robespierre comes under this head, as do Patrick Henry, Vergniaud, Tseretelli. The type, of course, exists in all normal societies, and is usually esteemed. Zinoviev seems in the Russian revolution to have borne some such role. Lenin realized how useful Zinoviev was as an orator and even as a kind of Petrograd boss, but he seems to have had a pretty complete contempt for his sense and intelligence.