V. Summary

To sum up, it should by now be clear that it takes almost as many kinds of men and women to make a revolution as to make a world. It is probable that, especially in their crisis periods, our revolutions threw up into positions of prominence and even of responsibility men of the kind who would in normal or healthy societies not attain similar positions. Notably, great revolutions would appear to put idealists in possession of power they do not ordinarily have. They would seem also to give scope for special talents, such as Marat had, for yellow journalism and muck-raking of a very lively sort. They certainly create a number of empty places to fill, and give an opportunity to clever young men who may also be unscrupulous. They probably insure a bit more public attention, for a while at least, to the chronic rebel and complainer, as well as to the lunatic fringe of peddlers of social and political nostrums.

But they do not re-create mankind, nor do they even make use of a completely new and hitherto suppressed set of men and women. In all four of our revolutions, even in the Russian revolution, the rank and file was composed of quite ordinary men and women, probably a bit superior to their less active fellows in energy and willingness to experiment, and in the English, American, and French revolutions, even in their crisis periods, people of substantial property. These revolutionists were not in general afflicted with anything the psychiatrist could be called in about. They were certainly not riffraff, scoundrels, scum of the earth. They were not even worms turning. Nor were their leaders by any means an inferior lot suddenly elevated to positions of power which they could not worthily occupy. There is no question that in the turmoil of revolutions a good many scoundrels rise to the top—though they can also rise to the top without benefit of revolution, as a glance at some of the phases of either the Grant or the Harding administrations should amply prove. But the level of ability, of ability in an almost technical sense, the ability to handle men and to administer a complex social system, the level of ability suggested by names like Hampden, Pym, Cromwell, Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Mirabeau, Talleyrand, Carnot, Cambon, Danton, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, is certainly very high.

All this by no means amounts to asserting the paradox that there are no real differences between revolutions and ordinary times. On the contrary, especially in their crisis periods, revolutions are like nothing else on earth. But you cannot altogether explain the differences between societies in revolution and societies in equilibrium by suggesting that a whole new crew operates during a revolution; by saying, if you dislike a particular revolution and all its works, that the scoundrels and the bums put it over on the good souls; or if you happen to like and approve a particular revolution, that the heroes and sages turned out the corrupt old gang. It just isn’t as simple as all that. Since on the whole the evidence would seem to show that revolutionists are more or less a cross-section of common humanity, an explanation for the undoubted fact that during certain phases of a revolution they behave in a way we should not expect such people to behave, must be sought in changes worked on them by the conditions they live under, by their revolutionary environment.

Chapter FIVE THE RULE OF THE MODERATES

I. The Problem of the Moderates

In the summer of 1792 Lafayette, with some of his officers, left the French Army and passed over to the Austrian lines. He was promptly put in prison by the Austrians, to whom he was a dangerous firebrand of revolution. Lafayette was, however, a good deal more fortunate than many of his fellow-heroes of 1789 who elected to stay in France, and who were guillotined as dangerous reactionaries and counter-revolutionists. Fedor Linde, a moderate Socialist who in April, 1917, moved the Finnish Regiment to a mutinous demonstration against the pro-Ally and still more moderate Miliukov, was later sent to the front as a government commissar under Kerensky and there was lynched by mutinous soldiers who refused to obey his commands. In 1647 Denzil Holles, of whom we took note briefly back in 1629, as he was helping to hold down the Speaker in his chair, was with ten other Presbyterian members excluded from Parliament for “endeavoring to overthrow the rights and liberties of the subjects.” He did indeed return briefly to his seat again in 1648, but was soon forced to flee to France to save his life. A famous phrase from the French revolution puts the thing neatly: “The revolution, like Saturn, devours its children.”

The honeymoon was in these revolutions short; very soon after the old regime had fallen there began to be evident signs that the victors were not as unanimous about what was to be done to remake the country as had appeared in the first triumphant speeches and ceremonies. Those who had directly taken over the mechanism of government were in all four of our societies men of the kind usually called moderates. They represented the richer, better known and higher placed of the old opposition to the government, and it is only to be expected that they should take over from that government. Indeed, as we have seen, their assumption of responsibility is almost a spontaneous act. So strong is this feeling that the moderates should take over power that it prevailed even in Russia in February, 1917. It looks to us now as though a Socialist coalition of some kind—Social-Revolutionary and Menshevik groups, with possibly even Bolshevik adhesions—might just as well have assumed power right away in that month. The Kadets and other bourgeois groups clearly had few strong roots in the country. And yet Lvov and his well-meaning moderates had little difficulty in assuming at least nominal control.

The moderates, once in power, turned out to have less homogeneity and party discipline than they seemed to have when they were in opposition. They were faced with the difficult task of reforming existing institutions, or making a new constitution, and taking care at the same time of the ordinary work of governing. They were also confronted very soon with armed enemies, and found themselves engaged in a foreign or civil war, or in both together. They found against them an increasingly strong and intransigeant group of radicals and extremists who insisted that the moderates were trying to stop the revolution, that they had betrayed it, that they were as bad as the rulers of the old regime—indeed, much worse, since they were traitors as well as fools and scoundrels. After a period, brief in Russia, longer in France and England, there came a show of force between moderates and extremists, a show of force in many ways quite like that earlier one between the old government and the revolutionists, and the moderates were beaten. They fled into exile, they were put into prison ultimately to face the scaffold, guillotine, or firing-squad, or if they were lucky or obscure enough, they dropped out of sight and were forgotten. The extremists in their turn took power.

This process was not quite the same in the American revolution, where on the whole it may be said that extremists like the Independents, the Jacobins, and the Bolsheviks, did not attain undivided rule. Nevertheless, as we shall see, in America rather earlier in the revolutionary process a struggle between moderates and radicals had been fought out, and had ended with victory for the radicals. The fruit of that victory was the Declaration of Independence. We may say then that in all our revolutions there is a tendency for power to go from Right to Center to Left, from the conservatives of the old regime to the moderates to the radicals or extremists. As power moves along this line, it gets more and more concentrated, more and more narrows its base in the country and among the people, since at each important crisis the defeated group has to drop out of politics. To put it in another way: after each crisis the victors tend to split into a more conservative wing holding power and a more radical one in opposition. Up to a certain stage, each crisis sees the radical opposition triumphant. The details of this process vary naturally from revolution to revolution. Its stages are not identical in length or in their time-sequence. In America power never got as far Left as it did in the other countries.

Nevertheless this struggle between moderates and extremists is a stage in our revolutions as definite as those we have studied in previous chapters, and by its very existence provides us with a useful if somewhat simple uniformity. Before we attempt to make refinements in this observation, before we try to discern uniformities in the conduct of moderates and extremists, we must review briefly the course of events during the rule of the moderates.

II. Events During the Rule of the Moderates

With the outbreak of the Civil War in the summer of 1642, Royalists and Parliamentarians stood opposed in arms. By the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644, and certainly by that of Naseby in 1645, the Royalist cause had become, in a military sense, hopeless. But almost from the first clear break with Charles, the Parliamentarians had won their revolution. The Royalists did but play more effectively the role played in America by the Tories, in France by the Royalists and clericals in the provinces, the émigrés abroad, in Russia by the numerous White Armies which opposed the Bolsheviks until 1921. We are not here so much interested in the Royalists as in the Parliamentarians. Within these latter there is from 1642 on an increasingly evident division between groups which we may call roughly moderates and extremists.

The division is not at first a simple one between two parties. At the extreme right of the Parliamentarians were a few moderate Episcopalians just touched with puritan notions, and usually also constitutional monarchists. Many of this group were on the whole indifferent to religious questions, felt that church matters would settle themselves decently if the political difficulties could be adjusted. Between these men and the moderate Royalists, who somewhat reluctantly chose to stand with their king, there was actually very little difference. Next came the great moderate party, Presbyterian in religion, puritan in ethics, monarchist at heart, but monarchist in what was to become the Whig tradition of the monarch who reigns but does not govern. The left wing of the Presbyterians, early disillusioned with the idea of monarchy by their hatred for Charles, merged easily with the main group of the extremists. These in the English revolution are called the Independents, extreme Calvinists who insisted upon the independence of each separate congregation. Their notions of church government were substantially those well known in this country as Congregationalism. With them for most political purposes were other groups that subsequently made up the English nonconformists or dissenters—notably the Baptists. The New Model Army, through which these radicals made themselves an effective force in the revolution, contained individuals espousing almost every conceivable kind of evangelical religious belief, and a good many varieties of economic and social beliefs. But the group did work as a group, and its core was certainly Independent. To the left were other groups, Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchy men, whom we shall consider in a later chapter.

Now the fact that Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents are in the English revolution respectively conservatives, moderates, and extremists, is a bit confusing to the modern reader. For the extreme idealists, these seventeenth-century Englishmen are fighting over religious matters, fighting for ideals, and he finds it absurd to equate them with Frenchmen fighting for worldly liberty, equality, and fraternity, and shocking to compare them with Russians fighting for crude economic interests. On the other hand, the modern convert to the economic interpretation of history is likely to regard these religious differences as mere “ideologies,” or pretexts for a quarrel which was really a simple economic one. To him, the Presbyterians were small gentry or bourgeois business men, the Independents petty bourgeois traders, artisans, and yeomen farmers who quarreled after they had disposed of the feudal upper classes. Both the idealist and the materialist are here clearly wrong. Politics, economics, church government, and theology are inextricably mingled in the minds and sentiments of seventeenth-century Englishmen. Their conflicts are conflicts between human beings, not between the abstractions of the philosopher, the economist, or the sociologist. We must here observe the ways in which these conflicts worked out. From many points of view, it is profitable to regard these conflicts as exhibiting the sequence of domination first by conservatives, then by moderates, then by extremists. Naturally these conservatives, moderates, and extremists were not identical with similar groups in later revolutions. As compared with the men of 1789 or of 1917, they read different books, disputed over different ideas, just as they wore different clothes. Yet the course of their revolution does display a striking identity with our other revolutions in the relation between political organization and human temperaments. The Presbyterian “compromisers” were pushed aside by more determined and extreme men, just as were the Feuillants and Girondins in France and the Kadets and compromisist Socialist groups in Russia.

Under the leadership of the Westminster Assembly, a Presbyterian synod which began its meetings in the summer of 1643, that part of England under parliamentary control was brought under the famed Scottish Covenant. Crosses, images, crucifixes were torn down, the stained glass removed from the churches, sermons lengthened, and liturgy simplified. Parliament became the supreme law of the land. But already there were signs that the Presbyterian rule was not to go unchallenged. Marston Moor was not a Presbyterian victory. It was won by Cromwell and his “Ironsides”; and these men were not good Presbyterians. They were Independents, and some were Anabaptists, Antinomians, Heaven knows what! It is said that someone complained to Cromwell because one of his officers was an Anabaptist, and received the reply, “Admit he be, shall that render him incapable to serve the public? Take heed of being too sharp ... against those to whom you can object little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning matters of religion.”

When the New Model Army was constructed from the nucleus of Cromwell’s Ironsides, and had won the Battle of Naseby, army and Parliament, Independent and Presbyterian, extremists and moderates, found themselves in opposition on various questions, notably on religious toleration and on what was to be done about Charles I. The Presbyterians wanted an established state church, built on their own notions of church government and theology, with a minimum of toleration towards papists and prelatists on the right and the sects on the left. And they most certainly wanted a king, even if that king were Charles Stuart. The Independents wanted what they called toleration. They certainly didn’t mean what a nineteenth-century Englishman or an American meant by religious toleration, and when they got into power they were very far from practicing toleration, even in the sense in which they had preached it. But at least while they were in opposition they agreed that religious belief was a personal matter and that the state should not seek to impose identical religious practices and organization on its citizens. As for the King, most of them by 1645 were sure Charles Stuart would never do. Cromwell was probably never a doctrinaire republican, but a great many of his men certainly were.

No single event marks exactly the transfer of power from the moderates to the extremists in England. The process had gone pretty far when Cornet Joyce of the army in June, 1646, seized the King at Holmby House as he was about to yield to the Parliament and consent for three years to govern as a Presbyterian king. It was almost completed when two months later Parliament at the dictation of the army reluctantly consented to the exclusion of eleven of its own members, conspicuous leaders of the Presbyterian group. Charles took the occasion of the quarrel to attempt to further his own interests. His complicated intrigues ended in nothing better than a brief war between the Scottish Presbyterians and the Cromwellians, in which for a moment the moderates could look up hopefully. Cromwell defeated the Scotch at Preston Pans in August, 1648, and the army was in undisputed control in Great Britain. After this the formal end of the moderates at Pride’s Purge in December was unimportant. Colonel Pride and a few soldiers were stationed at the door of the House of Commons to turn back the unsuitable members as they came. Ninety-six Presbyterians were thus excluded, leaving a group of fifty or sixty regular voting members on whom the extremists could rely. The Long Parliament had become the Rump.

In America the conflict never took quite such clear lines. We may say that the conservatives were those Tories who never really complained about the imperial government, the moderates those merchants and prosperous landowners who in a sense began the whole movement by their agitation against the Stamp Act, and the radicals that by no means united group which finally put through the Declaration of Independence. There was thus a kind of three-way struggle going on among these groups in the ten years preceding the outbreak of hostilities with the British Army. In this struggle the radicals exhibited an extraordinary technical skill in the practical politics of revolution. As John Adams later wrote of the organizations which, starting with local committees of correspondence and committees of safety, worked up to the continental congresses: “What an engine! France imitated it and produced a revolution.... And all Europe was inclined to imitate it for the same revolutionary purpose.”

The radicals really won their decisive victory by organizing as they did the first Continental Congress in 1774. Professor A. M. Schlesinger admirably summarizes the work of this Congress: “The radicals had achieved several important ends. They had reproduced on a national scale a type of organization and a species of tactics that in many parts of British America had enabled a determined minority to seize control of affairs ... they had snatched from the merchant class the weapons which the latter had fashioned to advance their own selfish interests in former years, and had now reversed the weapons on them, in an attempt to secure ends desired solely by the radicals. Finally, they had defined—nationalized—the issue at stake in such a manner as to afford prestige to radical groups, wherever they were to be found, and to weaken the hold of the moderate elements, on the ground that the latter were at variance with the Continental Congress.”

The taking of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, in France sealed the defeat of the most conservative group, the true Royalists. The victorious revolutionists did not long remain in harmony, and the process of transfer of power to the left began in a few months. In October of the same year the King and Queen were riotously brought back to Paris from Versailles in what are known as the October Days. These events sent into exile the leaders of the moderate conservatives, men like Mounier who greatly admired the English Constitution, and wished France to have a bicameral legislature with a House of Lords and a House of Commons, and a real king. For the next few years a group of moderates centering about men like Mirabeau, Lafayette and the Lameths, were opposed by a group of radicals centering around men—Pétion, Robespierre, Danton, Brissot—soon to be leaders of the rival republican groups of Gironde and Mountain, but at present united against the moderates. The moderates succeeded in making the Constitution, and starting the new regime off. But war between France and the Central European powers of Austria and Prussia broke out, certain provisions of the Constitution, notably those concerning religion and the monarchy, failed to work well, Louis himself was suspected of treason by many of his subjects, and in the general political turmoil the active and well-organized radicals overthrew the monarchy in the famous attack on the Tuileries Palace in Paris on August 10, 1792.

Avowed monarchists and such mild reformers and liberals as Lafayette were thus excluded from power, and France became a republic. But the final and critical defeat of the moderates in France is better placed on June 2, 1793. In matters of this sort, as in any splitting up of historical events into periods, there may be legitimate differences of interpretation. Conservatives, moderates, and radicals and extremists are not in any of our societies absolutely clear-cut and definite groups, nor is the transference of power from one to another very often a single event agreed upon by all to be such. You may feel that no moderate could have voted the end of the French monarchy. None the less it would seem that the right wing of the republicans, known to history as the Girondins, and to their contemporaries as the Brissotins, were really moderates upon whom circumstances forced actions to them disagreeably radical and extreme. Notably they did not wish the death of the King. They were mostly prosperous bourgeois, lawyers and intellectuals, and after the trial of the King in January, 1793, they became very sure that the revolution had gone far enough, that it ought to be stopped. Whatever their past, they had now become moderates. By the early months of 1793 they had lost control of the Paris Jacobin Club and with it most of the other revolutionary clubs and the whole network of organizations which had helped the radicals achieve their ends in the early days of the revolution. They could not command the support of the hesitating and more or less neutral mass of deputies in the Convention who were called the Plain. Their enemies were better organized, more aggressive, and perhaps more unscrupulous. They were certainly more successful.

Just as with the Presbyterians in England, there came the demand that these now moderate leaders be excluded from the Convention and brought under arrest. In a test of strength in the Convention on June 2, 1793, the extremists took care to surround the meeting-place of that body with sympathetic Parisian militiamen, back of whom assembled a large and hostile crowd. The Convention tried to stand on their representative dignity and to refuse to permit the arrest of the twenty-two members demanded by the Mountain. Headed by their president, they solemnly marched out to ensure that their position be respected as the embodiment of the will of the people. The deputies made the circuit of the gardens, finding an unyielding row of bayonets at every gate, and a “people” with a temporary will of its own. They returned indoors and voted the arrest of the twenty-two Girondins. The radical Montagnards were now in undisputed command.

Events moved rather faster in Russia, but their sequence is almost identical with those in England and in France. The first provisional government headed nominally by Prince Lvov, really by Miliukov, was made up mostly of Kadets, the left wing of middle-class groups in the old Duma, but no more than “progressives,” “liberals,” or “democrats” in Western political terminology. There were several representatives of more conservative groups, and only one Socialist, Kerensky. After a life of less than two months, this government broke down over the question of continuing an “imperialist” war on the side of the allies. Miliukov was forced out for too great compliance with the imperialism of the allies, and a number of Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries accepted positions in the new government. In July Kerensky took the formal leadership after a crisis, and in September the Kadets finally withdrew altogether, leaving Kerensky at the head of a very shaky moderate Socialist government.

The Socialists who thus consented to co-operate with bourgeois governments in the prosecution of the war were christened by the Bolsheviks “compromisist.” Such Socialists came from almost all the fractions into which this political faith had split in twentieth-century Russia, where the usual doctrinal differences within Marxism were complicated by those which looked back into Russian history for a peculiarly deep-seated Slavic village-communism. In the specific Russian situation, these Social-Revolutionaries, Trudoviks, Narodniks, Mensheviks, must be called moderates. They did not hope to introduce the dictatorship of the proletariat. They wanted to win the war, and they were willing to make use of parliamentary methods to secure social reforms. They had long been distrustful of the Kadets, but under the pressure of events they consented to co-operate with them. The Kadets themselves suffered the fate of the Puritan Episcopalians and the Feuillants; they were pushed out by their collaborators to the Left.

The Bolsheviks refused to take part in any of these governments. They insisted that the bourgeois revolution of February must sooner or later be followed by the proletarian revolution Marx had preached and predicted. Lenin, who returned from a Swiss exile in April to enjoy a few months of bourgeois freedom, decided that the proletarian revolution might be brought off in Russia. His party was by no means unanimously agreed, but his leadership kept the small band together, and the blunders of the compromisists, together with the heritage of defeat and disorganization, played into his hands. In July a premature rising of workers in Petrograd was apparently given local and reluctant leadership by some of the party, and its failure sent Lenin into hiding, and Trotsky and Lunacharsky to prison. The subsequent swing of the pendulum to the Right ended with the abortive attempt of General Kornilov to march on Petrograd, and in this whole process the Bolsheviks gradually acquired new courage and a new following. Lenin from hiding held a guiding hand. Trotsky was released, and elected president of a Petrograd soviet now in Bolshevik control. Lenin, back secretly in Petrograd, presided at a final meeting of the party Central Committee, and an insurrection was decided upon. In a masterly exhibition of revolutionary technique, a military revolution committee made sure of the Petrograd garrison, other groups contrived to hamstring the press and communications, and on the agreed day the Bolsheviks took over Petrograd with astonishingly little difficulty and almost no bloodshed. Even the siege of the Winter Palace, which forms the high point of the uprising, has a comic-opera touch. The October revolution in Petrograd was almost as bloodless as Pride’s Purge or June 2, 1793, the corresponding events in the English and French revolutions. In Moscow there was real fighting, but there, too, the Bolsheviks were successful within a week. Kerensky fled, and the rule of the moderates in Russia was over.

III. Dual Sovereignty

The Russian revolution affords the neatest example of a uniformity that lies beyond the somewhat superficial uniformity of sequence of power from conservatives to moderates to extremists, from Right to Center to Left. This is at once an institution and a process; or better, a process that works through a very similar set of institutions. Theorists and historians of the Russian revolution refer to it as the dvoevlastie, a word usually translated as dual power, but containing overtones that make it better translated, perhaps, as dual sovereignty. We must go briefly into the general situation to which this word refers.

The problem of sovereignty has long been in itself sufficient to keep hundreds of political philosophers busy and happy. Here once more, having other work to do, we must resign ourselves to abstention from these philosophical delights. In a normal Western society, it may well be difficult or impossible to locate any one person, or group of persons, who possesses the final, authoritative power to decide questions concerning what the society is to do. The pluralists would seem to be, from the point of view of description of social processes, quite right. Even the broader political policies of a modern state seem to be arrived at by so elaborately natural a process of adjusting the desires of conflicting groups, that to say that a single and identifiable “sovereign” determines these policies is nonsense. And yet in a normal society there is at least one co-ordinated chain of institutions through which conflicting groups do finally adjust their conflicts, for the moment at least, in action. That co-ordination may seem inefficient and irrational when academically analyzed, and it may well be so complicated that even the politicians who make it work do not understand it. For men are as often as not unaware of how they do things they do very successfully.

But it does work, and through it questions at issue are decided—or forgotten, which is also a kind of deciding. Those who do not like the decision may try to alter it by a very great variety of action, from agitation to conspiracy or sabotage. Socially powerful or numerous groups may under favoring conditions even go so far as to nullify a given decision: the example of the Eighteenth Amendment in the United States will occur to everyone. On the whole, however, the decisions become law, and overt disobedience becomes criminal.

When another and conflicting chain of institutions provides another and conflicting set of decisions, then you have a dual sovereignty. Within the same society, two sets of institutions, leaders, and laws demand obedience, not in one single respect, but in the whole interwoven series of actions which make up life for the average man. Thus the nullification of the Prohibition Amendment by many citizens over large areas of the United States did not in itself mean that there was in this country a revolutionary situation of dual sovereignty. Were a similar nullification extended by, let us say, a strengthened amalgamation of the American Federation of Labor and the Committee for Industrial Organization from the Fourteenth Amendment on through to the common law of property; were this amalgamation to enforce laws of its own on workers in factories; were it to take over many of the functions of local government in relation to markets, sanitation, police, and so on—we should clearly have dual sovereignty. We should, as a matter of fact, have a state of affairs something like that in Russia in the summer of 1917.

In all our revolutions, however, the legal government finds opposed to it, once the first steps in actual revolution have been taken, not merely hostile individuals and parties—this any government finds—but a rival government, better organized, better staffed, better obeyed. This rival government is of course illegal, but not all of its leaders and followers are from the beginning consciously aiming to supplant the legal government. Very often they think of themselves as merely supplementing it, perhaps also as preserving it in a revolutionary course. Yet a rival government they are, and no mere critics or opponents. At a given revolutionary crisis they step naturally and easily into the place of the defeated government.

This process does indeed work itself out in the old regimes before the first steps in revolution are taken. Puritans in England, Whigs in America, Third Estate in France, the Kadets and compromisist Socialists in Russia, all had organizations that demanded their allegiance and that enabled them to fight the old regime with revolution at least in the back of their minds. But the process is much more clear, more sharply edged—except perhaps in America—at the stage we have now reached.

Once the first stage in revolution is over, the struggle that arises between moderates and extremists comes to be a struggle between two rival governmental machines. That of the moderates, the legal government, bar inherited some of the prestige that goes with being established, some of the financial resources—actual or potential—of the old government, most of its liabilities, all of its institutions. Try to alter these latter as it may, it finds them annoyingly persistent, extremely difficult to blot out. The legal government is unpopular with many just because it is an obvious and responsible government, because it has to shoulder some of the unpopularity of the government of the old regime.

The illegal government of the extremists, however, has to face no such difficulties. It has the prestige which recent events have given to attackers, to those who can claim to be in the forefront of the revolution. It has, as governments go, relatively few responsibilities. It does not have to try to use, if only temporarily, the worn-out machinery, the institutions of the old regime. It has, on the contrary, for the moment the great advantage of using the efficient machinery gradually constructed by the revolutionists, both moderates and extremists, from the time when they began under the old regime to emerge as a pressure group. Indeed, the final capture of this machinery—or this organization, if you prefer—seems to be what really determines the final victory of the extremists over the moderates, long before that final victory is apparent in events. Why the moderates do not keep control of the organization they have done so much to initiate and to mold is a question that permits of no simple answer. We may hope that some answer will emerge from a more detailed study of the fate of the moderates. We must first, however, see how well the foregoing analysis fits the facts in our four revolutions.

Charles and the Long Parliament were clearly dual sovereigns from the actual outbreak of hostilities in 1642 if not from the very first session of 1640. Once the Civil War was decided against Charles, Parliament, under the control of the moderates, found itself the legal government. But almost immediately it was confronted by the radical New Model Army, which very soon began to take the kind of action that in this world only a government can take. The fact that Charles was still on the scene and the existence of the Scotch Army complicated the situation in the three or four years before the execution of Charles in 1649, but the broad lines of the duel between the newly legal government of the Presbyterian moderates in Parliament and the illegal government of the extremist Independents in the New Model Army are clear.

In America this dual sovereignty is most obvious in the years before the final break in 1776. The lines between the legal and the illegal government were obscured, especially in a colony like Massachusetts, by the fact that town meetings and colonial legislatures were part of the legal government, but were often controlled by men active in the illegal government. None the less, the machinery which culminated in the continental congresses—in themselves illegal bodies—was clearly used by revolutionists against constituted authority.

While the moderates in France, the Feuillants, or constitutional monarchists, still controlled the legislative body and the formal machinery of the centralized state, their increasingly republican opponents controlled the network of Jacobin societies which made up the frame of the other, or illegal, government. Through their control of these societies they worked into the control of many of the units of local government, and from this position of vantage were able to expel the Feuillant moderates and destroy the monarchy. The process was then repeated with the Girondin moderates controlling the legislative body and the Montagnard extremists controlling the important units of the Jacobin network and at least one exceedingly important local governmental unit—the Paris Commune. In the crisis of June 2, 1793, the illegal government again won out over the legal.

In Russia the dvoevlastie is plain. The provisional government which emerged from the February revolution had through its connection with the Duma some claim to legitimacy. Though it absorbed more and more Socialists of various stripes in the next six months, thus exhibiting the leftward movement we have found in all our societies, it remained moderate and quite conscious of its legality. On the other side the Bolsheviks and a few allied radical groups had by late summer obtained control of the network of soviets and stood as an illegal government facing the legal one. Soviet means no more than “council” and had originally in Russia no more connotations than its English equivalent has for us. The soviets were local councils of trade-unionists, soldiers, sailors, peasants, and suitable intellectuals. They sprang up naturally enough with the dissolution of the Czarist power in 1917, all the more since memories of the abortive revolution of 1905, which had also made use of the soviet form, were fresh in the minds of everyone. The Bolsheviks, wisely concentrating on the soviets while the attention of the compromisists was increasingly taken by participation in the legal government, were able to wrest control of key soviets in Petrograd, Moscow, and major industrial towns from the compromisists. There is here a curious detailed parallel with the French revolution. The final insurrectionary victory of the Bolsheviks was achieved without complete control of the general network of soviets, just as that of the Montagnards was achieved without control of the whole network of Jacobin clubs. In each case control of the most important units of the illegal government was sufficient.

IV. Weaknesses of the Moderates

At this stage in revolution, then, the moderates in control of the formal machinery of government are confronted by the extremists in control of machinery devised for propaganda, pressure-group work, even insurrection, but now increasingly used as machinery of government. This stage ends with the triumph of the extremists and the merging of the dual sovereignty into a single one. We must now inquire into the reasons for the failure of the moderates in these revolutions to hold power.

There is first the paradox we have previously noted, that in the early stages of revolution the control of the machinery of government is in itself a source of weakness for those who hold such control. Little by little the moderates find themselves losing the credit they had gained as opponents of the old regime, and taking on more and more of the discredit innocently associated by the hopeful many with the status of heir to the old regime. Forced on the defensive, they make mistake after mistake, partly because they are so little used to being on the defensive. They are in a position from which only a superhuman wisdom could extricate them; and the moderates are among the most human of revolutionaries.

Faced with the opposition of more radical groups organized in the network we have called the illegal government, the moderates have broadly but three choices: they may try to suppress the illegal government; they may try to get control of it themselves; or they may let it alone. Actually their policy shifts around among these three policies, combining one with another; in these circumstances, the net effect is to produce a fourth policy, which amounts to a positive encouragement of their enemies in the illegal government.

In the revolutions we are studying the moderates are particularly handicapped in their efforts to suppress these enemy organizations. The revolutions were all made in the name of freedom, were all associated with what the Marxists call a bourgeois individualistic ideology. The moderates found themselves obliged to observe certain “rights” of their enemies—notably those of freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly. What is more, many if not most of the moderates sincerely believed in such rights, held that truth is great and will prevail. Had it not just prevailed against the tyranny of the old regime? Even when under pressure the moderate begins to try to suppress an extremist newspaper, forbid an extremist meeting, jail a few extremist leaders, his conscience troubles him. More important, any unsuppressed extremists raise a mighty howl. The moderates are betraying the revolution; they are using exactly the same methods the villainous tyrants of the old regime had used.

The Russian revolution is here an excellent example. The Kadets and compromisists between February and October could not conveniently suppress Bolshevik propaganda, nor indeed any form of Bolshevik political activity. When they tried to do so after a premature Bolshevik rising, the street troubles in Petrograd known as the “July Days,” they were met by protests from all sorts of people, including notably the Bolsheviks. This was despotism, this was Czarism of the worst sort. Had not the February revolution brought political freedom, freedom of the press and association, to Russia forever? Kerensky mustn’t make use of the kind of weapons the Czars had used. In 1938 Stalin of course can use methods worthy of Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible, but that is only to say that the Russian revolution is over. In 1917, however, even had Kerensky been the sort of man who could successfully organize repressive measures—and he plainly was not that sort of man—what we are bound to call public opinion would not in those days have permitted the execution of such measures. Much the same situation is to be found in France, where the Jacobins were permitted free speech and free association, and firmly and publicly insisted on their rights as free men to get ready for a dictatorship.

Nor are the moderates more successful in their attempts to get—or rather to retain—control of the machinery which they and the extremists had jointly built up as a means of overthrowing the old regime. For this there seems to be no single preponderant reason. The moderates are, of course, occupied with a good deal of the work of actual governing, and they have less time for army committees or Jacobin clubs or soviet meetings. They feel themselves perhaps a trifle superior to such activity. They are temperamentally unfitted for the rougher and dirtier work of the politics of direct action. They have moral scruples. They are not quite the noble souls historical legend makes out the Girondin moderates in the French revolution to have been; indeed many of them, like Brissot and Kerensky, have a good many of the gifts of the political manipulator. But they are in power, and they seem to set about quite naturally cultivating the sober virtues that go with power. Such virtues, however, make them inadequate leaders of militant revolutionary societies.

Whatever the explanation, the fact of the uniformity is clear. This particular failure of the moderates is well shown in the French revolution. The Jacobin network of societies of “Friends of the Constitution” was in its inception hardly to the Left of Lafayette and his friends. When, however, it began to move further to the Left the Fayettists made a few feeble efforts to retain control, and then went off and founded their own society, the Feuillants. The Feuillants, however, could not spread beyond narrow upper-class and intellectual Parisian circles. Later groups founded here and there throughout the country as “Friends of the Monarchy,” or “Friends of Peace,” tried to compete with the Jacobins, but with very little luck. If they gave bread to the poor, the Jacobins cried out that they were attempting bribery. If they did nothing, the Jacobins complained that they lacked social conscience. Finally the Jacobins worked out a fairly systematic procedure. They would hire a few hoodlums—sometimes it was not necessary to hire them—to break up a meeting of the rival Friends of Peace, and would then send a deputation to the municipal authorities asking that the Friends of Peace be closed as a public nuisance. The authorities were either Jacobins themselves, or more afraid of the Jacobins than of the Friends of Peace, so that the matter received a suitable revolutionary solution.

Similarly the Presbyterians found themselves powerless to control the spread of Independency, not only in the army, but in local parishes. And in Russia the compromisists found the Bolsheviks formidable in all the important soviets. A detailed study of the Petrograd soviet from February to October will show how cleverly the party of Lenin took advantage of every mistake of its opponents, how successfully it burrowed from within, spreading its control from factory soviets on up until finally the city soviet was captured. Such a study will also show the compromisists gradually losing ground, in spite of the great oratorical gifts of leaders like Tseretelli, Chkheidze and Kerensky.

There is, indeed, an almost organic weakness in the position of the moderates. They are placed between two groups, the disgruntled but not yet silenced conservatives and the confident, aggressive extremists. There are still freedom of speech and the other political rights, so that even conservatives have a voice. Now the moderates seem in all these revolutions to be following the slogan used so conspicuously for French politics of the Cartel des Gauches in 1924: no enemies to the Left. They still distrust the conservatives, against whom they have so recently risen; and they are reluctant to admit that the extremists, with whom they so recently stood united, can actually be their enemies. All the force of the ideas and sentiments with which the moderates entered the revolution give them a sort of twist toward the Left. Emotionally they cannot bear to think of themselves as falling behind in the revolutionary process. Moreover, many of them hope to outbid the extremists for popular support, to beat them at their own game. But only in normal times can you trust in the nice smooth clichés of politics like “beat them at their own game.” The moderates fail by this policy of “no enemies to the Left” to reconcile these enemies to the Left; and they make it quite impossible to rally to their support any of the not yet quite negligible conservatives. Then, after the moderates get thoroughly frightened about the threatening attitude of the extremists, they turn for help to the conservatives, and find there just aren’t any. They have emigrated, or retired to the country, hopeless and martyred in spirit. Needless to say, a martyred conservative is no longer a conservative, but only another maladjusted soul. This last turn of theirs towards the conservatives, however, finishes the moderates. Alone, unsupported in control of a government as yet by no means in assured and habitual control of a personnel, civil or military, they succumb easily to insurrection. It is significant that Pride’s Purge, the French crisis of June 2, 1793, and the Petrograd October revolution were all hardly more than coups d’état.

In the English, French, and Russian revolutions it is possible to distinguish one critical measure around which all these currents converge, a measure which, espoused by the moderates, cuts them off from support on the Right and leaves the radicals in a position to use this very measure against its authors. Such are the Root-and-Branch Bill in the English, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in the French, and Order Number One in the Russian, revolutions.

The Root-and-Branch Bill originated in a petition with 15,000 signatures presented to the House of Commons late in 1640, asking for the abolition of Episcopacy “with all its roots and branches.” Naturally the moderate Episcopalians, from Hyde and Falkland to Digby, were against a measure which destroyed their Church; and just as naturally the Presbyterians were inclined to favor it. It is possible that politically minded moderates like Pym might have left the bill alone, but the refusal of the bishops to give up their seats in the House of Lords seems to have determined Pym to support the bill. This espousal made almost every Episcopalian a Royalist, and when the Civil War broke out in 1642 the Presbyterians were stranded on the extreme Right of the party groupings within the region controlled by the Parliamentarians. They could find no possible allies except to the Left. The Independents—and Cromwell had first actually introduced the Root-and-Branch Bill to the House—could now argue that presbyters were no better than bishops, that the reasons which held for the abolition of one held incontrovertibly for the abolition of the other. Later, when the moderates proved incapable of carrying the war to a successful conclusion, measures like the Self-Denying Ordinance and the creation of the New Model Army had to be accepted by a Presbyterian majority which yet was not by any means a commanding majority, and which had left itself with no possibility of conservative support.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy emerged after months of discussion in the National Assembly as a charter for renewed Christianity in France. The moderates who put it through seem mostly to have been sincere men, bad Catholics in some ways, perhaps, but rather because they had absorbed some of the practical worldly spirit of the age than because they were outright anti-clericals. Yet their measure alienated the good Catholics and merely encouraged the violent anti-clericals to try to root out the “vile superstitions” of Christianity altogether. The Civil Constitution in all innocence provided for the election of parish priests by the same local electoral bodies that chose lay officials for the new government positions, and for the election of bishops by the same departmental body that elected representatives to the Legislative Assembly. It scrapped all the historic dioceses of old France, and substituted nice, nearly uniform dioceses identical with the new départements into which France was governmentally divided. It did consent to “notify” the Pope of such elections.

Since the property of the Church as a corporation had been taken over to serve as security for the new paper money of the revolution, the assignats, the State was to support the expenses of the clergy under the new constitution. The election of priests and bishops by bodies to which Protestants, Jews, and avowed atheists were eligible was so completely uncanonical that no Pope could for a moment have considered accepting it. Although there was the usual diplomatic delay, the break between the Pope and the revolutionary government was inevitable, and with it the powerful and conservative group of Catholics was forced irreconcilably into opposition. A schism began which extended to every village in the land. But the new Constitutional Church was hardly more acceptable to the real radicals than the old Orthodox Church, and as the critical days of the Terror drew nearer the moderates found themselves saddled with the protection of a church which returned them no important support.

Order Number One emerged from no such long debate as did the Root-and-Branch Bill and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Indeed, it is not quite fair to list it as a definite measure sponsored by the moderates, though the soviet leader most prominent in the group which prepared it was the moderate N. D. Sokolov, and the compromisists energetically promulgated it. The Order emerged in the very last days of the February revolution from the headquarters of the Petrograd soviet. It was addressed to the army, and in addition to the usual revolutionary measures towards a standing army of the old regime—abolition of salutes, social and political equality of privates with officers, and so on—it provided for elected company and battalion committees which were to have entire charge of arms, above all of those of officers; and it ordered that every military unit obey the soviets in political matters. The military committee of the Duma might be obeyed in military matters, provided the soviet did not object in a specific case. The Order was devised primarily with the Petrograd garrison in mind, but its main provisions were rapidly taken up at the front. This order at once convinced the conservatives that there was nothing to be hoped for from the revolution, and put even the more liberal officers in a state of mind to welcome later attempts at a conservative coup d’état. It made the subsequent task of the moderates in bringing Russia back to military efficiency for the war on Germany more difficult than ever. And it by no means served to reconcile the soldiers themselves with the continuation of the war. Most of the popularity of Order Number One eventually redounded to the credit of the Bolsheviks; most of its unpopularity came back on the compromisists. This is the typical fate of the moderates in these revolutions.

Again, the moderates are in all our societies confronted sooner or later with the task of fighting a war; and they prove poor war leaders. In England the fighting broke out in 1642, and before the first Civil War was over Cromwell and the Independents had made themselves indispensable, and were on the threshold of power. Foreign war in France broke out in the spring of 1792, and a few months later the monarchy had fallen; the war went very badly in the spring of 1793, and in June the moderate Girondins, who had on the French side been the most eager for war, were turned out by the Montagnards. The Russian revolution was born in the midst of a disastrous war, and the Russian moderates never had a chance at peaceful administration. The fact is clear. The moderates cannot seem to succeed in war. The reasons why are less clear. No doubt the commitment of the moderates to protect the liberties of the individual is a factor. You cannot organize an army if you take Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity at all seriously.

Modern wars seem to carry with them the necessity for organizing civil government along military lines, for the exercise of strong, centralized governmental authority in which the liberty of the individual is far from a matter of first concern, in which there is very little debate, very little of the government by discussion so prized by the moderates, very little compromise and moderation. War, said Madison, is the mother of executive aggrandizement, and even here in America our wars have borne him out. But in the midst of a revolution the executive that gets aggrandized is not the moderate executive. The Reigns of Terror in France and in Russia are in part explicable as the concentration of power in a government of national defense made necessary by the fact of war. This is by no means a complete explanation of the Reigns of Terror. But certainly the necessity for a strong centralized government to run the war is one of the reasons why the moderates failed. They simply could not provide the discipline, the enthusiasm, the unpondered loyalty necessary to fight a war, and they went out.

V. The Failure of the Moderates

To the kindly souls who for the most part wrote the history from which we get our notions of modern revolutions, this failure of the moderates was a great tragedy. The moderates appear as good men worsted by circumstances and unscrupulous opponents. They seem to be idealists crushed by a harsh world, but thereby sure of the resurrection history holds out to the just. The gentle Falkland and the scholarly Condorcet smile down upon us from the only heaven to which mere mortals hold the key; and if historians have not yet admitted Kerensky into their heaven, the reason may be no more than that the poor man is still inescapably here on earth.

Perhaps most of the moderates would be better or at least more normal men than their extremist opponents. Yet, leaders and led together, they make a motley lot, by no means easily catalogued by Marxist or by psychologist. And the traditional notion that they were idealists and that they failed because in the rough give-and-take the idealist must always fail is here peculiarly misleading. It is more accurate to risk the paradox: they failed because they were in so many respects what is usually called realists; that is, some of them were reasonably well adapted to a common-sense world.

Pym and Mirabeau, who died peacefully before the defeat of the moderates was evident, still enjoy reputations as skilled politicians, as sensible moderates. Over most of the others there hangs something of the kind of reputation most definite and clear with Kerensky. The eloquent compromisist leader seems to us a man of words, an orator who could move crowds but could not guide them, an impractical and incompetent person in the field of action. The Gironde seems much the same, as also the lesser Presbyterian leaders like Holles. It seems emptily paradoxical to list these people as realists. Yet realists of a kind they were. They used grand words and phrases grandly, as a consolation and a joy to their listeners and to themselves. But they did not believe in them as the radicals believed in them; they did not intend to try to pursue them to their logical conclusions in action. They were, in short, using words in the way most men in normal societies, including such realistic politicians as Gladstone, use them. They would not seem realists to a hard-headed horse-trader. But within the limits which tradition and ritual have set for the work of such people as they—part priest, part administrator, part actor, part teacher—they were good quiet practitioners.

But the times were turned topsy-turvy, and as the crisis of the revolution approached, only the man with a touch—or more—of fanatic idealism in him, or at least with the ability to act the part of such a fanatic, could attain to leadership. The normal social roles of realism and idealism are reversed in the acute phases of a revolution. We shall return to this topic in our next chapter. Here we need only note that the outward evidences of the approach of this kind of crisis appear as a heightened form of class antagonism. The moderates by definition are not great haters, are not endowed with the effective blindness which keeps men like Robespierre and Lenin undistracted in their rise to power. In normal times, ordinary men are not capable of feeling for groups of their fellow-men hatred as intense, continuous, and uncomfortable as that preached by the extremists in revolution. Hatred is a heroic emotion, and heroic emotions are exhausting. The poor may hate the rich, the Protestant the Catholic, the bourgeois the noble, the Southerner the Yankee, and so on endlessly. But this hate is normally in human beings a routine and consoling hate, a part of life, like food, drink, and loving, integrated with an existence as alien to the possibility of revolution as that of a vegetable.

The moderates, then, do not really believe in the big words they have to use. They do not really believe a heavenly perfection is suddenly coming to men on earth. They are all for compromise, common sense, toleration, comfort. In a normal society, these desires are part of their strength and give them their hold over their fellows, who share at least their desire for comfort. But in these three revolutions large numbers of men were for the moment lifted by desire and emotion to a point where they seemed to despise even comfort. The moderates could not deal politically with such men; they could not take the first steps which are necessary if such men are to be understood. The moderates were cut off from the immoderates by a gap neither philosophy nor common sense could fill. There is an adage that in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king. In one of his subtler short stories, The Kingdom of the Blind, Mr. H. G. Wells has exposed the weakness of this apothegm. In the heat of a violent revolution, its weakness is perhaps even more apparent than in the imaginary Andean valley of Mr. Wells’s tale. The moderates we have been dealing with were all very human and very fallible; but even had they been as wise as the heroes of Plutarch, as wise as Washington, it would seem that they must have failed. For we are here in a land fabulous, but real, where the wisdom and common sense of the moderate are not wisdom and common sense, but folly.

Chapter SIX THE ACCESSION OF THE EXTREMISTS

I. The Coup d’état

The struggle between the moderates and the extremists, which begins almost as soon as the dramatic overthrow of the old regime is effected, is marked by a series of exciting episodes: here street-fighting, there a forced seizure of property, almost everywhere heated debates, attempted repressions, a steady stream of violent propaganda. Tempers are strained to the breaking point over matters that in a stable society are capable of an almost automatic solution. There is an almost universal state of tension. The fever is working its way to a crisis. As with many fevers, its progress is in detail jerky, with now an apparent improvement and then a sudden jump ahead. But the cumulative effect is unmistakable. With the final overthrow of the moderates the revolution may be said to have entered its crisis stage.

Before we attempt to describe the behavior of men in societies in such a crisis, we shall have to go a bit further into the process by which the extremists acceded to power. In a sense, such an analysis will be but pointing out in reverse what we have already said of the moderates: the reasons why the extremists succeeded are but the other side of the reasons why the moderates failed. Where the moderates were weak, the extremists were strong. The actual steps by which the extremists rise to power are, however, too important to be left with this general statement. We must parallel our analysis of moderate weaknesses with an analysis of extremist strengths.

The extremists win out because they secure control of the illegal government and turn it in a decisive coup d’état against the legal government. The problem of the dual sovereignty is solved by the revolutionary acts in which the Independents, the Jacobins, and the Bolsheviks seized power. But the moderates had once shared with them the control of the organizations which they had turned against the government. The key to the success of the extremists lies in their monopoly of these organizations—New Model Army and Independent churches, Jacobin clubs, and soviets.

They obtain this monopoly by ousting, usually in a series of conflicts, any and all opponents from these organizations. The discipline, single-mindedness, and centralization of authority which mark the rule of the triumphant extremists are first developed and brought to perfection in the revolutionary groups. The characteristics which were formed in the growth of the illegal government remain those of the radicals after the illegal government becomes the legal. Indeed, many of these useful characteristics were first molded even further back in the days of the old regime, when the extremists were very small concentrated groups subject to the full “tyranny” of the government. The Independents gained discipline and devotion from a long series of persecutions which began under Elizabeth, whose famed love of tolerance was not extended to Catholics or Brownists. The French radicals were not as badly treated under the old regime as their descendants and historians like to think, but the censorship, the Bastille, and the lettres de cachet were real enough, even if they rarely fell to the lot of the rank and file of the enlightened. As for Russia, its extremists were molded in the most melodramatic traditions of oppression, were backed by almost a century of secret organization, plotting, oaths, and martyrdom.

What emerges from this longer past and from the recent conflict with the moderates is a fighting group with the newly acquired habit of winning. You cannot say exactly why a given football team succeeds in winning most of the time, let alone why an army or a revolutionary party wins. The variables are so many even in the simplest case that no sensible man would make predictions based wholly on the most apparent and perhaps most important variable of all—the quality of the human material. Gamblers know this, if historians and sociologists do not. That our revolutionists were successful and admirably organized groups we know, and we can make some attempt to point out in what ways they succeeded, what particular kinds of strength they exhibited. We cannot give any neat formula for success in building a revolutionary group, cannot measure exactly why these revolutionists succeeded and others failed.

II. Organization of the Extremists

The first thing likely to strike an observer of the successful extremists in the English, French, and Russian revolutions, and indeed, the not quite so radical patriots who put through the American revolution, is their fewness in numbers. The membership of the formal organizations which did the work of beating the moderates was never more than a small minority of the total population. Their active membership was of course always smaller than the membership on the books. It is not easy to get exact figures, whether for membership or for populations, but the following figures are not erroneous enough to be misleading. The New Model Army was created at a membership of 22,000, and was not more than 40,000 in its most obstreperous days. The population of England was somewhere between three and five millions. The Jacobins at the most generous estimate numbered in their struggle with the moderates about 500,000. The population of France was probably over rather than under twenty millions. The Communist party in Russia has always prided itself on its numerical smallness; this is no unwieldy bourgeois party, full of indifferent members who cast a lazy vote, or don’t even vote at all. Figures again are uncertain, but it seems likely that at no time during the revolution did the Communist party number even 1 per cent of a population of well over one hundred million. In America the difficulty of even approximate figures is greater, since the patriots were not organized into a single body. It is clearly not fair to take the relatively small continental armies as exactly measuring the strength of the patriot—or Whig—group. Nevertheless, the best authorities are agreed that if you count out avowed Tories and the very numerous indifferent or neutral, the group which actively engineered, supported, and fought the American revolution is a minority, probably not more than 10 per cent of the population.

It is easy to remark that though the facts clearly show that these revolutionary groups are very small minorities indeed, all politically active groups are minorities, and that in these revolutions the radicals in some way “represented” or “carried out” what the soul, will, genius, of their nations demanded. This may well be so in terms familiar to the metaphysician, but the relation involved is one which at present we cannot pretend to be able to study by the methods we have laid down in this book. Perhaps the Jacobins were the agents of the general will of the French people; but the general will is a metaphysical concept the relation of which with tangible Jacobins we cannot possibly measure here.

Trotsky in one of his less realistic moods has a fine time reconciling the fewness of the Bolsheviks in 1917 with the largeness of Russia, and with the various groups clearly hostile to the Bolsheviks. “The Bolsheviks,” he writes, “took the people as preceding history had created them, and as they were called to achieve the Revolution. The Bolsheviks saw it as their mission to stand at the head of this people. Those against the insurrection were ‘everybody’—except the Bolsheviks. But the Bolsheviks were the people.” Here again “everybody” in quotation marks is obviously different from everybody without quotation marks; and though we can as scientists, perhaps, make use of everybody, we can do nothing at all with “everybody.”

We can, however, say that in all our societies these radicals were very conscious, and usually very proud, of their small numbers. They felt definitely set off from their countrymen, consecrated to a cause which their countrymen were certainly not consciously and actively equal to. Some of the radicals may have satisfied themselves that they really represented the better selves of their fellow-countrymen, that they were the reality of which the others were the potentiality. But here and now they were very sure that they were superior to the inert and flabby many. The English saints of the seventeenth century, the elect of a God more exclusive than any poor worldly king, made no attempt to conceal their contempt for the damned masses—and dukes and earls were of course masses for these determined Puritans. The Jacobins inherited from the Enlightenment a belief in the natural goodness or the natural reasonableness of the common man, and this belief put a limit to their expressed scorn for their fellows. But the scorn is there, and the Jacobin was almost as loftily consecrated as was the Independent. The Bolsheviks were brought up to believe that dialectical materialism works through an elite of the laboring classes, and that the peasants in particular were incapable of working out their own salvation. The Bolsheviks therefore took their fewness naturally enough, and their superiority as well.

There is also a good deal of evidence that as the revolutions go on, a very large number of people just drop out of active politics, make no attempt to register their votes. Now it may be that most of these people again are at heart in sympathy with the active radicals; but on the whole it looks as if most of them were cowed conservatives or moderates, men and women not anxious for martyrdom, but quite incapable of the mental and moral as well as physical strain of being a devoted extremist in the crisis of a revolution. We have very clear evidence of this dropping out of the ordinary man in two of our revolutions, and we may assume that it is one of the uniformities we are seeking.

In Russia, the February revolution brought in universal suffrage as a matter of course. Russia had at last caught up with the West. At the first elections almost everybody, men and women alike, took the opportunity to vote in various local elections. But very shortly there set in a noticeable decline in the total number of votes cast. In the June, 1917, elections for the Moscow district dumas the Social-Revolutionary groups received 58 per cent of the votes; in the September elections the Bolsheviks received 52 per cent. A clear gain for the Bolsheviks by democratic methods? Not at all. In June the Social-Revolutionaries got 375,000 votes out of 647,000 cast; in September the Bolsheviks got 198,000 out of 381,000 cast. In three months half the electorate dropped out. Trotsky himself has a simple explanation for this; “many small-town people who, in the vapor of the first illusions, had joined the Compromisers fell back soon after into political non-existence.” The same story is graphically recorded in French municipal and national elections between the rosy days of 1789, when everyone who could stagger to the polls voted, and 1793, when in some cases less than a tenth of the qualified voters actually voted. They did not vote for Bolsheviks or Jacobins, and it seems more than likely that if most Englishmen could have voted at all in 1648, they would not have voted for Independents, Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchy Men, or Millenarians. The great numbers of qualified voters just don’t vote; in Trotsky’s compact phrase, they are politically non-existent.

Their political non-existence is not achieved without a good deal of help from the extremists. The elections are supposedly free and open, but the extremists are not hindered by any beliefs in freedom they may have expressed in other days. They soon take to steps familiar in this country through the history of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Tammany Hall. They beat up well-known aristocrats and such-like class enemies, they start riots at polling places or in electoral assemblies, they break windows and start street fights, they howl down moderate candidates, they bring to bear good journalists, skilled at libel and innuendo, and in a hundred ways which any realistic student of politics can uncover with a little study, they make it very difficult for ordinary, peaceful, humdrum men and women to go to the polls and cast their votes for the moderates to whom ordinary, peaceful, humdrum men and women seem attracted. Not that terrorism alone scares off the ordinary man. Mere laziness, an inability to give to political affairs the ceaseless attention revolutions demand, is also instrumental in keeping the man in the street from expressing himself. He gets fed up with the constant meetings, the deputations, the papers, the elections of dog-catchers, general inspectors, presidents, the committees, the rituals, the ceaseless moil and toil of self-government on a more than Athenian basis. At any rate he quits, and the extremists have the field to themselves.

Their fewness is indeed one of the great sources of the extremists’ strength. Great numbers are almost as unwieldy in politics as on the battlefield. In the politics of revolutions what counts is the ability to move swiftly, to make clear and final decisions, to push through to a goal without regard for injured human dispositions. For such a purpose the active political group must be small. You cannot otherwise obtain the single-mindedness and devotion, the energy and the discipline, necessary to defeat the moderates. You cannot in large numbers maintain the fever of fanaticism long enough to secure the ultimate victory. The masses do not make revolutions. They may be enlisted for some impressive pageantry once the active few have won the revolution. Our contemporary revolutions, both of the Right and the Left, have achieved apparent miracles of mass participation. But the impressive demonstrations the camera records in Germany and Russia ought not to deceive the careful student of politics. Neither Bolshevik nor Nazi victory over the moderates was achieved by the participation of the many; both were achieved by small, disciplined, principled, fanatical bodies.

Nor at this stage of revolution do the victorious radicals make use of the plebiscite. They do not dare risk anything like a free election. Only later, when the crisis is followed by a convalescence, by a return to normal ways, does the plebiscite stage arrive. This interval may not be a very long one, and in the case of Rightist revolutions may be very brief, since the full fury of the Ideal rarely inspires the men of the Right. But certainly for the revolutions we are here studying, the generalization holds: the plebiscite is absent from the struggle between extremists and moderates, and is not used by the extremists even after their accession to power.

The extremists are not only few; they are fanatically devoted to their cause. Their awareness of being few seems correlated with the intensity of their fanaticism. One feeds upon and strengthens the other. With their objects, with the content of their dreams of a better world, we shall concern ourselves later. For those who think that only in the service of a personal God can feelings properly defined as “fanatical” be aroused, our application of the word to Jacobins and Bolsheviks may seem illegitimate. But this is surely an undue narrowing of a clear and useful word. Bolsheviks and Jacobins were as convinced as any Calvinist that they alone were right, that what they proposed was the only possible course. All of our revolutionary radicals displayed a willingness to work hard, to sacrifice their peace and security, to submit to discipline, to submerge their personalities in the group. They were all aware of the spiritual difficulties of keeping “always at the height of revolutionary circumstances,” as the Jacobins used to put it; but to a surprising extent they overcame these difficulties and maintained on this earth an esprit de corps, an active moral union, that is far beyond the powers of ordinary men in ordinary circumstances to attain and to maintain.

And they are disciplined. Partly, as we have explained, this is an inheritance from their oppressed past. It correlates with their fewness and with their fanatical strength. The New Model Army is an excellent example. It defeated the haphazard aggregations which the ordinary recruiting methods of the Royalists opposed to it; it defeated the cream of the opposing forces, the cavalry recruited from faithful country gentlemen and their dependents. The New Model was recruited from ardent Puritans, vouched for by men who knew them; and it was submitted to a brief but effective course of training incomparably more severe than any that had yet been used in English military history. The result was a fine army—and a compact body of hard revolutionists who could cut through the best intentions and the best rhetoric of the moderates. The discipline of the Jacobins was not military, but it was very rigorous, and indeed resembled the kind of discipline which a militant religious body imposes on its members. The Jacobins were always scrutinizing their own membership, submitting to the ordeal of an épuration, literally a “purification,” perhaps in contemporary terms a “purge.” The slightest deviation from the established order of the day might bring a warning and possible expulsion. With the Spartan ways of the Russian Communist party in the early days of the soviet state most of us are familiar; it is a point on which all reporters, kindly and unkindly, are agreed.

The extremists put their disciplined skill into the realization of the revolutionary ends. There has been worked out in the last few hundred years an elaborate technique of revolutionary action, of which the Russian Communists were the latest heirs. A good deal has been written about this technique, which is in part simply the technique of any successful pressure group: propaganda, electioneering, lobbying, parading, street-fighting, delegation-making, direct pressure on magistrates, sporadic terrorism of the tar-and-feather or castor-oil variety. Jacobins, Communists, and Sons of Liberty did a notably good job at this sort of thing. But it is rather surprising to note how many of these techniques can be found in England, and especially in London, as early as the seventeenth century. In this respect, as in many others, the English revolution is clearly of a modern type. Here is a bit that might have come from the French revolution: during the debate on the Militia Order, a crowd of apprentices “came into the House of Commons and kept the door open, and their hats on ... and called out as they stood ‘Vote, vote,’ and in this arrogant posture stood until the votes passed.” One suspects that these apprentices did not march in spontaneously. This is the kind of thing that takes organization.

Finally, the extremists follow their leaders with a devotion and a unanimity not to be found among the moderates. Theories of democratic equality, which crop up at the start of all our revolutions, prove no obstacle to the development among the extremists of something very like the “Führer” principle we associate with Fascist movements. Here it is the moderates who live up to their theories, and in the early stages of the revolutions it is not uncommon to find complaints that So-and-so is arrogating to himself powers no good man would want to possess. Mirabeau and Kerensky, to take neat examples, were accused by moderates and extremists alike of aiming at a personal dictatorship. Yet Robespierre and Lenin followed in their footsteps—almost literally—and this time only the cheering could be heard. This magnifying of the principle of leadership runs right through the organization, from the subalterns up to the great national heroes—Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin.

On the whole, this leadership is effective, and especially so at the very top. Now if they are seen as full and rounded human beings, there are unquestionably differences among the men who make up the general staffs of the extremists. The psychologist and the novelist—indeed the historian as well—could not lump them all together. Yet they have in common one aspect which is of great importance to the sociologist; they combine, in varying degrees, very high ideals and a complete contempt for the inhibitions and principles which serve most other men as ideals. They present a strange variant of Plato’s pleasant scheme: they are not philosopher-kings but philosopher-killers. They have the realistic, the practical touch very few of the moderate leaders had, and yet they have also enough of the prophet’s fire to hold followers who expect the New Jerusalem around the next corner. They are practical men unfettered by common sense, Machiavellians in the service of the Beautiful and the Good.

A bit from Lenin will make the point clear. At a secret meeting of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party just before the October revolution, Lenin was urging insurrection on the more tender-minded of his colleagues, who thought that the Bolsheviks ought to respect the will of the majority of Russians, which was clearly against them. “We are inclined to consider the systematic preparation of an uprising as something in the nature of a political sin,” said he. “To wait until the Constituent Assembly, which will clearly not be with us, is senseless.” There is the practical Lenin, unworried by a democratic dogma that stands in his way. After the October revolution he writes in Pravda of “the crisis which has arisen as a result of the lack of correspondence between the elections to the Constituent Assembly and the will of the people and the interests of the toiling and exploited classes.” Here the will of the people is somehow at bottom the will of the minority party of Bolsheviks. We are back again in the midst of democratic dogma. Parallel cases could readily be drawn from Robespierre, Cromwell, and even, one fears, from Jefferson.

Hypocrisy? To those of little imagination or experience of the world, such acts must always seem hypocritical. But, on a less heroic scale, they are far too much a part of normal human action to deserve so opprobrious a label. The Robespierre who, as an enlightened young man, had held capital punishment wrong did not hypocritically send his enemies to the guillotine. He had convinced himself that his enemies were scarcely men at all; they were sinners, corrupt souls, agents of a worse-than-Satan, and their removal from this earth wasn’t really capital punishment in the conventional sense at all. You could still treat ordinary criminals in full accord with the most humanitarian principles of jurisprudence. Most of us make this sort of compromise with ourselves often enough in daily life. But with us comfort, convenience, habit, even common sense, determine the limits of compromise. For the revolutionary extremist such limits are off; in the delirium, in the crisis, there is an extraordinary reversal of the roles played in normal times by the real and the ideal. Here briefly and at last the blind—or the seer—is king; plain earthly seeing, the kind that concerns the oculist, is for once of very little use. The seers have just enough of it to keep their positions of leadership. Cromwell, indeed, had a good deal of what seems an English sense of the contingent, and Lenin was certainly no academic idealist. Robespierre is in some ways the most unadulterated seer of the lot.

Yet all of them, including even Robespierre, were what the world calls men of action. They could and did get things done, were administrators and executives, ran organizations for which tradition and routine had not yet been able to build up much that worked automatically. If they have left behind them a reputation for unusual ruthlessness, this may be in part a reflection of the ill repute terrorism has for most of us. And the ruthlessness, in the proper service of the ideal, went while they were alive into the making of their leadership. Cromwell gained credit among the Saints for his Irish massacres. The guillotine in France was for a few months the “holy guillotine.” Trotsky, early in his famous rallying of the Bolshevik troops in the Civil War, ordered shot the commander, commissar, and one soldier out of ten in a Petrograd workers’ regiment that had fled the enemy, and to the dismay of gentler colleagues showed no hesitation about continuing the policy of discipline through bloodshed. Trotsky became briefly a savior and a hero. We are a long way from Order Number One!

For most men, there is a gap between their deeds and their professions, between what they are and what they would like to be, between what they are and what they think they are. Normally, however, they manage to keep the gap small enough, or turn their attention away from one side of it or the other, so that they are not unduly troubled by it. For the leaders of the extremists in times of revolution the gap looks to an outside observer enormous, bigger than it ever is in normal times. A few men, like Fouché, seem to have been terrorists to save their own skins. But, in general, only a sincere extremist in a revolution can kill men because he loves man, attain peace through violence, and free men by enslaving them. Such contrasts in action would paralyze a conventionally practical leader, but the extremist seems quite undisturbed by it. Where the ordinary man would be troubled by something like a split personality, where his conscience or his sense of reality, or both, would be haunted, the extremist goes boldly ahead. Wide though the gap between the real and the ideal is in the crisis period, he can cross it at his own convenience. He has, for the moment, the best of both worlds. He can manipulate with equal skill the concrete and complex human beings on committees, deputations, bureaus, ministries, all the unsettling problems of administration, and yet use gracefully and convincingly the abstract, indispensable, haunting words which have in revolutions such magic power over large groups of men.

It is this last gift that seems to lie all but wholly beyond the capacity of the most ambitious hypocrite. The great leaders of the Terrors are fitted for their task by a genuine vocation, a vocation which in ordinary times would exclude them from political power. Their belief in the Absolute is not assumed, and is as real as their ability to handle the contingent. And for once the Absolute is practical politics. F. W. Maitland has a passage, suggested by Coleridge, which puts the point neatly: “Coleridge has remarked how, in times of great political excitement, the terms in which political theories are expressed become, not more and more practical, but more and more abstract and impractical. It is in such times that men clothe their theories in universal terms.... The absolute spirit is abroad. Relative or partial good seems a poor ideal. It is not of these, or those men that we speak, of this nation or that age, but of Man.”

III. Fitness of the Extremists

The transition from opposition to power is not a sudden one for the extremists. The whole point about the dvoevlastie, the dual sovereignty, is that it is not a struggle between government and opposition, between ins and outs, but between two governments within the same state. Under the old regime perhaps no more than a pressure group, the revolutionists’ organization gradually takes over, in the confusion of the first stages of actual revolution, governmental powers which are never thereafter wholly subordinated to the provisional government, the almost legal heir of the old regime. The process is especially clear in Russia, though it is substantially uniform in all our revolutions.

Practically all the soviets, even in the market towns, did administrative work from the very beginning. Trotsky, here in his role of historian, gives some good succinct examples: “The soviet in Saratov was compelled to interfere in economic conflicts, to arrest manufacturers, confiscate the tramway belonging to Belgians, introduce workers’ control, and organize production in the abandoned factories.... In the Urals the soviets frequently instituted courts of justice for the trial of citizens, created their own militia in several factories, paying for its equipment out of the factory cash-box, organized a workers’ inspection which assembled raw materials and fuel for the factories, superintended the sale of manufactured goods and established a wage-scale. In certain districts of the Urals, the soviets took the land from the landlords and put it under social cultivation.” Obviously, in parts of Russia the slogan “All power to the Soviets” had become a bit superfluous even before the October revolution.

In France the “Societies of Friends of the Constitution,” at their formation in 1789 hardly more than pressure groups, or possibly French variants of the Yankee caucus, had by June 2, 1793, taken over a good many functions normally carried out by governmental bodies. When the “constituted authorities,” as the Jacobins respectfully called governing councils and legislatures, failed to do what the Jacobins wanted, the Jacobins went ahead and did it themselves. Notably the whole repressive legislation on the non-juring (Catholic) clergy was anticipated in practice by the Jacobin clubs in the provinces. The clubs were organized like parliamentary bodies, with elaborate rules on debating, with committees, officers, minutes, and indeed all the apparatus of a proper legislature. Sometimes a club would overawe or persuade municipal or departmental officers into an approved Jacobin policy; sometimes, failing in this, a club would almost openly pass laws and decrees. Those of the members who protested against this shocking interference with authorities chosen by popular election—and many did protest on just such grounds—were thereby ticketed as moderates, and were lucky if they avoided the guillotine later.

That the men who made the American revolution were by no means unexercised in the art of actual governing has long been a commonplace of proud Anglo-Saxon writers on both sides of the Atlantic. What we must note here is that that preparation had by no means been wholly of the conventional legal sort. Not only in town meeting and colonial legislatures, but in caucuses, committees, and congresses that bear a close parallel with soviets and Jacobin clubs, the American radicals were schooled to take over the government from the agents of the Crown. We shall see in the next chapter that they did not hesitate to use terroristic means to preserve, as they had used to attain, that power.

In England the situation is complicated by the fact that though the illegal organization headed up in the New Model Army, the various Independent congregations were also in their way agents of the extremists in their drive to power. The army itself, of course, began very soon after Naseby to interfere in politics in a way no conventional army does; and the first expulsion of Presbyterians from Parliament was initiated and carried through by army resolutions and an army committee. But the Independents, and especially the Independent clergy, had much earlier taken a hand in matters very terrestrial indeed. As Professor Grierson has said, “It is not what Laud did that Baxter [a Puritan divine] seems to complain of, so much as what he would not allow them, the parish pastors, to do, viz., to exercise a moral discipline co-extensive with the parish.” And by a moral discipline a Puritan meant something co-extensive with the whole of human life.

The extremists are not, then, politically innocent or inexperienced; they have had a long experience of oppression, and a briefer, but very intensive, training in actual government before they come to full power. To call either leaders or rank and file inexperienced, “pure theorists,” and “metaphysicians,” as has long been the habit especially among political writers in English, is misleading. Neither their aims nor their methods are those that good Victorians like Bagehot or Maine could approve or sympathize with. They are certainly heaven-storming idealists, scornful of compromise. But they are not academic theorists totally unadapted to action. On the contrary, they are admirably adapted, almost in the sense a biologist gives to adaptation, to the special, the unique environment of the crisis. That is why they succeed.

The actual overthrow of the moderates is usually a very neat job, an excellent example of the skill of the revolutionary leaders and the close adaptation of the revolutionary organizations to their functions. It is, as we have seen, by no means a great popular uprising. The crowds whose confused milling about makes an exact account of the taking of the Bastille or the February revolution in Petrograd impossible for the historian, do not interfere with the professional dispatch with which Pride’s Purge, the purge of the Girondins, and the October revolution were put through. In France the extremists reached power in two of these coups d’état. The first, the overthrow of the monarchy on August 10, 1792, was achieved through an elaborate but never confused collaboration of various organs of the illegal government—Jacobin and other political clubs, the fédérés, local militia from all over France assembled in Paris to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, and the ward organizations out of which the revolutionary Parisian Commune was made. Almost the same elements were integrated ten months later for the easier task of bullying the Convention into giving up the Girondins. Danton, Marat, possibly Robespierre, and certainly a number of less famous but very skilled secondary leaders formed a general staff which engineered both of these coups.

The October revolution was elaborately prepared, and has been clearly described in Trotsky’s own History of the Russian Revolution. We need not here go into details of this preparation. But a quotation from Trotsky will show how the details were taken care of: “The typographical workers, through their union, called to the attention of the Committee [the Military-Revolution Committee in Petrograd, the general staff of the October revolution] an increase in Black Hundred leaflets and brochures. It was decided that in all suspicious cases the printers’ union should come for instructions to the Military-Revolution Committee. This control was the most effective of all possible forms of control over the printed agitation of the counter-revolution.” Naturally; printed agitation has to have printers as well as legal freedom of the press. In a dozen such ways the moderates were hamstrung in the last few days before the Bolshevik insurrection. There was no nonsense about a general strike; there was simply a co-ordinated series of seizures of centers of power, press, post and telegraph, banks, and ministries.

The dramatic seizure of Charles I by Cornet Joyce on June 3, 1647, at Holmby House is perhaps the first assumption of sovereign power by the New Model. When Charles asked Joyce whence he had his commission to remove him, Joyce is said to have replied, pointing to his soldiers drawn up on the lawn, “There is my commission.” The reply will serve in all our revolutions. Once the extremists are in power, there is no more finicky regard for the liberties of the individual or for the forms of legality. The extremists, after clamoring for liberty and toleration while they were in opposition, turn very authoritarian when they reach power. There is no need for us to sigh over this, or grow indignant, or talk of hypocrisy. We are attempting to discern uniformities in the behavior of men during certain revolutions in specific social systems, and this seems to be one of the uniformities.

“It was but a bare six months,” writes Gardiner, “since the Independent leaders [Cromwell and Vane] who now permitted some hundreds of sufferers to be excluded for conscience’s sake from the University of Oxford, had been striving to lay the foundations of a broad system of toleration in The Heads of the Proposals and had even taken into consideration a scheme for extending that toleration to the Roman Catholic priesthood itself.” Later under the Rump a strict censorship of the press was instituted, and the various canons and tastes of Puritanism enforced as far as possible by government policy. Similarly in France and Russia the new government clamped down at once on its enemies and began to build up the machinery of the coming Terror. Where, as in France and Russia, the army had lost its discipline under active attempts to introduce Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, discipline was reintroduced with a good deal of firmness. Mr. Chamberlin describes the Russian situation: “The Bolshevik military authorities now began to talk about the harmful and disruptive influence of army committees very much as Kornilov, Denikin, and the old army officers had spoken in 1917; and strict obedience to the orders of the officers gradually became embedded in the discipline of the Red Army.”

The Heads of Proposals and The Agreement of the People, radical platforms adopted by the army under Leveller influence, had proposed something very close to what came to be conventional nineteenth-century democracy—equal electoral districts, frequent parliaments, specific limitations on the executive power, even universal manhood suffrage. Cromwell seems never to have been in any sense a doctrinaire rebel, and indeed probably had many of the sentiments about authority and tradition one would expect from a country gentleman. If he suffered at all in mind about the situation, it was probably because the good old parliamentary institutions could not be restored. Certainly the last thing that could be done was to hold an open and free election on any conceivable franchise. The so-called Parliament of Saints which met in 1653 after the dissolution of the Rump was hardly more than a council sent up from trustworthy Independent groups and chosen by caucus methods.

Similarly in France, the victors of June 2nd did not dare go to the people. As a gesture they promulgated the so-called Constitution of 1793, based on universal suffrage, bill of rights, and the rest of the paraphernalia of democracy, but they took good care to go no further than printing it. It was never put into effect.

The Bolsheviks had for months attacked the Provisional government for not calling a constituent assembly. Such an assembly was finally chosen by universal suffrage just before the Bolshevik coup. In it the Bolsheviks were in a minority. Lenin dissolved this constituent assembly in January, 1918, with a light heart, but many of his followers, in spite of their Marxist training, were really hurt by such a defiance of democratic sentiments and traditions. Many good Jacobins were also worried by the fact of their new dictatorship.

Theory came to provide a salve to wounded consciences. The theory of revolutionary dictatorship is very nearly identical in all three of our revolutions. Liberty for everyone, liberty full, free, and fair, is of course the ultimate goal. But such liberty at present would mean that men corrupted by the bad old ways would be able to realize their wicked plans, restore the bad old institutions, and frustrate the good men. On reflection, the extremist continues, it is clear that we must distinguish between liberty for those who deserve it, and liberty for those who don’t, which latter is, of course, false liberty, pseudo-liberty, license or anarchy. God had given liberty to the Saints—true liberty, which is obedience to Him—but he clearly did not give liberty to sinners. You repress papists as you would repress devils. To argue that such sinners ought to be left alone would have seemed to seventeenth-century English Puritans as absurd as it would to us to suggest that yellow-fever-bearing mosquitoes be left alone. Robespierre himself phrased it with classic neatness: the revolutionary government, he said, was the despotism of liberty against tyranny. For Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a necessary transitional stage, in which the last vestiges of capitalistic methods and capitalistic mentality are wiped out. Ruthless use of force will be necessary in this period—unfortunately of indeterminate length. Once a capitalist, always a capitalist, apparently. But when men are finally brothers, then the freedom of the classless society will finally begin.

Solaced by the knowledge that they are serving Liberty—in the high, true sense of the word—by a rigorous application of what to the unbeliever seems tyranny, the extremists go ahead to consolidate their power through institutions. Before we attempt a brief, generalized description of these institutions, we may note another uniformity. With the triumph of the extremists as we have defined them, the process of transfer of power from Right to Left ceases. The extremists are not indeed exempt from the difficulty other triumphant groups had faced from the very beginning of the revolutionary process. They develop internal conflicts, tend to split up into groups too hostile among themselves for co-operation. But these groups cannot be neatly ranged from Right to Left; and their dissension is ended quickly and without even the turmoil and confusion of a coup d’état. The dissensions have by now become so subtly doctrinal, so remote from the masses of the population, that they can be centered on a few leaders. And they are settled by the banishment or “judicial murder”—as it seems to the defeated partisans—of some of these leaders. What began with large-scale popular uprisings has now come to the dramatic intimacy of a courtroom.

France is here the clearest case. The victorious Montagnards of June 2nd divided into three major factions, that of which Robespierre stands as the head, that of Danton, and that of Hébert. There were, of course, sub-factions, wheels within wheels, and had Marat not been assassinated in the summer of 1793, there might have been still further complications. Robespierre, eventually victorious, rationalized the situation as a conflict between the true revolutionaries on one hand and the Ultra-revolutionaries (Hébert) and the Citra-revolutionaries (Danton) on the other. He was, to himself, the golden and virtuous mean between proletarian vice and bourgeois corruption. The actual situation is almost unbelievably complicated, and only the narrative historian with plenty of space to command can disentangle it. Both Dantonists and Hébertists, “traitors” and “anarchists,” were condemned before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and went to the guillotine in two large and rather miscellaneous batches. For the next few months, the “faction of Robespierre” was in complete control of France.

The victorious Independents in England in 1649 found themselves facing an astonishing variety of sects which had been carried along to triumph in the general good work for the cause of complete toleration of all Dissenters. We shall in a moment have a word to say about the doctrinal aspect of these groups. Meantime we may note that not only did Cromwell continue to keep down papists, prelatists, and Presbyterians, but he and his officers saw to it that Fifth Monarchy Men, Diggers, Levellers, Millenarians, Quakers, and the rest were not allowed to try out their wilder schemes in practice. The Diggers could dig no more in this earth. The old tactics of “no enemy to the Left,” which had held ever since the beginning of the revolution, were now definitely abandoned. As Professor Trevelyan has written, “All revolutionists, the moment they undertake the actual responsibilities, become in some sort conservatives. Robespierre guillotined the Anarchists. The first administrative act of the [English] Regicides was to silence the Levellers.” There are, then, if you like, those more extreme than the group we have called the extremists. But such men are of the lunatic fringe. They are the impractical people erroneously thought by some conservatives to be typical revolutionists. They definitely do not attain power.

The Russian situation is still somewhat obscured in respect to the opposition to official Bolshevism after October, 1917, and this obscurity seems in some ways thicker than ever today. Nevertheless it is clear that even while Lenin was alive, and especially in the year or so after the October revolution, there were a good many stresses and strains within the Bolshevik party, and that Lenin and his followers suppressed opposing groups even when they claimed to be more “revolutionary” than the Leninists. Thanks to the excellent discipline of the Bolshevik party and to the particularly pressing nature of the war against the Whites and the Allies, these quarrels were not as public as they had been in England and in France. The recent Moscow trials seem to belong to a different phase of revolution, or rather, are internal difficulties of a specific state that has gone through the cycle of revolution. In spite of certain superficial analogies, they do not seem to be a part of the uniformity we are here discussing.

These little opposition factions are inextricably woven in with various eccentric groups which are not completely stilled until the height of the Terror—if even then. They represent, as we have seen, the lunatic fringes common to any complex civilization, and they are especially active and vocal in the early stages of our revolutions, and during the struggle between moderates and extremists. They are less important in the actual course of these revolutions than conservative historians, and conservatives generally, like to make out. But they are interesting variations in the main body of revolutionary orthodoxy, and they illuminate in many ways the general history of heresy and heretics.

“Never did the human mind attain such a magnificent height of self-assertiveness as in England about the year 1650,” wrote Lytton Strachey. And certainly what we now think of as almost a racially founded British love for the middle-of-the-road is not very evident in these years. Strachey ironically lists the possibility of becoming a Behmenist, a Bidellian, a Coppinist, a Salmonist, a Dipper, a Traskite, a Tyronist, a Philadelphian, Christadelphian, or Seventh Day Baptist, omitting the subject he was actually writing about, Ludovic Muggleton, founder of the still-existing Muggletonians. The terms mean almost as little to us today as do those with which John Goodwin is referred to in the third volume of Gangraena: “a monotonous sectary, a compound of Socinianism, Arminianism, Libertinism, Antinomianism, Independency, Popery and Skepticism.” This is a marvelous compound of contradictions, as though a man today were called a mixture of Communism, Hitlerism, Fascism, Republicanism and Prohibitionism. As Mr. Gooch has said, the English revolution presents some of the most remarkable communistic speculations in history. As early as 1647 John Hare published a pamphlet, Plain English to our Wilful Bearers of Normanism, in which he attacked the institution of private property without being very clear about what might take its place. Chamberlen, in his Poor Man’s Advocate, urged the nationalization of all Crown and Church possessions, the resumption of all common lands that had been enclosed. This land was to be called the national stock, and was to be administered for the benefit of the poor.

The Diggers, however, are the most remarkable of these communistic groups, if only because they tried to put their ideas into practice. The movement was prefaced by an obscure pamphlet of December, 1648, with a title quite characteristic of the age, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Early in April of 1649 one Everard, a cashiered soldier of the New Model, with a few followers came to St. George’s Hill in Surrey “and began to dig, and sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots, and beans.” A voice, said Everard, had bidden him dig and plow the earth and receive the fruits thereof. They did not intend to meddle with enclosed land, but simply to take what was common and untilled and make it fruitful. For the time being General Fairfax, who seems to have regarded them as harmless fanatics, left them to their digging.

The apocalyptic touch is even more striking, if possible, in the Millenarians or Fifth Monarchy men. These held that the fourth monarchy of the Bible was drawing to a close, and that the fifth monarchy, or reign of the saints, was at hand.... They, of course, were the saints. They split, however, over the question as to whether or not it was proper for them to aid divine providence. Some of them held that the Lord was in himself quite equal to the task of overthrowing the mighty of this world; others believed that it was lawful, and presumably helpful, to combat the Lord’s enemies with the material sword, and hasten the day when the saints should possess riches and reign with Him on earth. Their dilemma reminds one somewhat of that facing nineteenth-century Socialists, forced to choose between the militants and the revisionists.

In comparison with the wealth of imagination the English put into the effort to bring heaven to earth, the other two revolutions seem poverty-stricken. Perhaps the old Anglo-Saxon belief that the French lack imaginative depth is valid, but surely this cannot be brought up against the Russians. Perhaps the answer is simply that as sources of imaginative inspiration neither the Enlightenment of the eighteenth-century philosophes nor the dialectic materialism of the Marxist can hold a candle to the King James version of the Bible. Yet France was by no means unproductive on the side of the lunatic fringe. The Enragés, led by Varlet and Roux, and based largely on the poorer sections of Paris, seem to have held a vaguely communistic doctrine. At any rate, they were definitely against the rich, against the new merchant aristocracy. The Hébertistes, another popular Parisian group sometimes confused with the Enragés, had largely yellow journalists and ward spoilsmen as leaders, but their main body must have nourished vaguely Utopian dreams. Then there was the incredible little circle around Catherine Théot, “Mother of God”—with Robespierre designated at least as one of the manifestations of God. It does indeed seem likely that republican professors in France are right, and that much of this was stirred up by Robespierre’s enemies to make him seem ridiculous; for even at the crisis period of revolutions some men retain a sense of humor. Yet the fact remains that Catherine Théot and her circle existed.

In Russia the completeness and quickness of the Bolshevik victory probably explains the relative lack of rival Utopias. It is true that from 1918 to 1921 the Bolsheviks were forced to fight off Whites and Allies on a dozen fronts, and that in a region like the Ukraine, for instance, you can find everything from Czarist rulers through mild narodniks and partisan or guerilla rulers to pure Reds. But there is a dog-eat-dog cruelty in the Russian revolution that seems to exclude the mild delusions of an Everard or a Catherine Théot.

IV. The Machinery of Dictatorship

The dictatorship of the extremists is embodied in governmental forms as a rough-and-ready centralization. In detail these forms vary in our different societies, but the Commonwealth in England, the gouvernement révolutionnaire in France and the Bolshevik dictatorship during the period of “war communism” in Russia all display uniformities of the kind the systematist in biology or zoology would not hesitate to catalogue as uniformities. Notably the making of final decisions in a wide range of matters is taken away from local and secondary authorities, especially if those authorities have been “democratically” elected, and is concentrated on a few persons in the national capital. Though names like Cromwell, Robespierre, and Lenin stand out as those of rulers, and although these men did exercise unquestioned power in many ways, the characteristic form of this supreme authority is that of a committee. The government of the Terror is a dictatorship in commission.

This centralized executive commission—Committee of Public Safety, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (Vtsik)—rests on a supine if talkative legislative body—Rump, Convention, All-Russian Congress of Soviets—and gets its orders carried out by an extemporized bureaucracy, largely recruited from party workers, and from that club-sect-pressure-group we have seen as the body of the extremist group. The old law courts cannot work, at least in their traditional manner. They are therefore supplemented by extraordinary courts, revolutionary tribunals, or are wholly transformed by new appointments and by special jurisdictions. Finally, a special sort of revolutionary police appears. The Russian Cheka is familiar to everyone with the slightest knowledge of recent history. In France the comité de surété générale and the comités révolutionnaires fulfilled these police functions; in the English revolution they were carried out very effectively by the new Independent parish clergy, aided by various ad hoc committees in the army. But in England the whole fabric of governmental centralization was rudimentary and simple—Cromwell’s own anomalous dictatorship, the new Court set up by the Rump in March, 1650, in which legislative, administrative, and judicial powers were as thoroughly combined as ever in the Star Chamber, the curious experiment of the Major Generals in 1655-56. The fact of the centralization in England is, however, unquestionable. Even the sacred functions of that holiest guardian of English local liberties, the Justice of the Peace, were under attack all during the domination of the extremists.

These extemporized dictatorships were faced not only with the ordinary problems of government, but with civil and foreign war, and with at least a certain number of actual reform measures which they had to try to put through. Notably in the French and Russian revolutions, the new government had to administer what, to avoid dispute as to the meaning of Socialism, we may call measures of economic planning—fixed prices and wages, managed currency, food rationing, and so on. We need not here bother with the problem as to whether in France these were purely war measures or not. The point is that the government found itself obliged to try to administer them. In Russia, of course, there were conscious efforts to embody Marxist Socialism in working institutions.

But these were all very rough-and-ready forms of dictatorship. The governments of the Terror were on the whole much less efficient, less effectively absolute than many peacetime governments with nowhere near their reputation for absoluteness. Indeed, one of the reasons why they seem so tyrannical and hard to bear, even retrospectively, is precisely because they were so inefficient. They got their big tasks done—saved England, France, and Russia from dissolution or conquest, but they did it very messily and, in detail, very badly. The actual administrators were usually inexperienced, were often petty fanatics, often incompetent blow-hards who had risen to prominence in the clubs or the party. They were under tremendous pressure from above to get results. They were frequently in charge of operations very close to the heart of the revolution as an economic movement—confiscation of Royalist estates and clerical livings in England, disposition of the confiscated lands of clergy and émigrés in France, nationalization of land and factories in Russia—which gave them grand opportunities for graft. They had to work with a population many if not most of whom were distrustful or hostile. Small wonder then that these reigns of terror stand out rather for irregular acts of violence, that their full history is a matter of incredible complexity. Nothing is more illuminating in the study of these revolutions than the study of local history. Here you see the Terror as it really was, no steady and efficient rule from above, as in an army or in Sparta, but a state of suspense and fear, a dissolution of the sober little uniformities of provincial life. Much depends on the accidents of personality—a sensible squire, a moderate and able local revolutionary or two, and a given village may go through a revolution fairly serenely. In others, terror may rule as bitterly as in the capital.

This inefficiency of the governments of the crisis period comes out clearly in their attempts to regulate and control the economic life of the state. This whole matter has probably very little to do with the general problem of what is known as “economic planning.” Again we must emphasize that we are concerned only with the anatomies of certain specific revolutions. Suffice it to say that in France in 1793-94 and in Russia in 1918-21 armies were fed and supplied with munitions, and some civilians kept alive at any rate, under a pretty absolute state control of economic activity. The French maximum meant of course price- and wage-fixing, and the Russian war communism was an even more complete form of central planning. Yet in France violation of the maximum was as frequent as bootlegging used to be in this country, and the detailed history of the maximum seen as part of local history would certainly provide some amusing bits. In Russia illegal trading in the war years was again very like our bootlegging. The famous Sukharevka Market in Moscow was occasionally raided but on the whole winked at by Lenin’s government. All city dwellers who could possibly do so made trips to the country to bargain with peasants for forbidden food supplies. Here again the intimate little details of daily life are fascinating, and call for the full talents of the social historian.

There seems to be a pretty unanimous admission by historians, even when they are hostile to revolutions in general, that during the crisis period ordinary crimes of violence are rare. There may be plenty of cruelty and corruption among these new administrators and judges, the new regime may be very far from insuring peace and order, but conventional robbers, cutthroats, kidnapers, and their like are not very active. Your good stupid Tory has a simple explanation: they’ve all got government jobs. We can, however, hardly accept this as a blanket explanation. It seems likely that the ordinary criminals are for the moment pretty well cowed by the general crusade against ordinary vice and crime which is a part of the crisis period and to which we are coming shortly. Petty thieves and in several instances even prostitutes were summarily disposed of by what amounts to lynch law during the French revolution, and similar instances can be found in England and Russia. One need not accept it as a general suggestion that you can always cow criminals by lynching; here, as throughout this book, we are studying a particular set of events, seeking some rough uniformities, and making no attempt at general conclusions in any such field as criminology. It may be that in the general tension, in the extraordinary widening of public concerns until privacy is almost impossible, so private a thing as ordinary crime is difficult. The criminal is disturbed, not only by fear of being lynched, but by an indefinable general fear which he shares with ordinary citizens. For fear needs no object, and in the Terror often has none. It must be remembered that this crisis period is brief—a few months, a few years at the most. At any rate, again a simple uniformity stands out: a considerable lessening in the number of ordinary crimes is to be noted during the crisis period. Mr. Chamberlin notes that Moscow in 1918-19 was a very safe place to live in—if you could get enough to eat and keep warm.

There is usually a short period between the overthrow of the moderates and the full impact of the Terror. The machinery of the Terror, for one thing, hastily assembled though it is, cannot be assembled overnight. Though the earlier history of the revolution has had its share of violence, there has been an interlude or so of apparent peace at times during the struggle between the moderates and the extremists. The pressure of foreign enemies and their émigré allies is not immediately at its strongest. Yet as the weeks go on the forces that make for the Terror come into full operation.

We have in this chapter briefly described the rise of the extremists, and have attempted to analyze the reasons for their victory. We have taken them to the point where they have disposed of all important conflicting groups, and have consolidated their position by installing a centralized system of government. For the next few months, or for a year or so, the extremists can be as extreme as they like. No one dare challenge them. We have come to that crisis in the fever of revolution men commonly call the Reign of Terror. This very important subject must be treated in a separate chapter.

Chapter SEVEN REIGNS OF TERROR AND VIRTUE

I. Pervasiveness of the Terror

“August 8, 1775. Riflemen took a man in New Milford, Connecticut, a most incorrigible Tory, who called them d—d rebels, etc., and made him walk before them to Litchfield, which is twenty miles, and carry one of his own geese all the way in his hand. When they arrived there, they tarred him, and made him pluck his goose, and then bestowed the feathers on him, drummed him out of the company, and obliged him to kneel down and thank them for their lenity.” The Jacobins of Rodez in southern France drew up a list of “damned dogs of noblemen” and others unworthy of wearing a mustache, the new symbol of patriotism, republican virility and orthodoxy. It then ordered its committee of surveillance to see that any such persons daring to wear a mustache were seized and shaved, “taking good care to get the job done without soap, and with the dullest razor available.” Shaving seems in some ways a ritual performance lifted above the ordinary acts of the toilet, for on October 3, 1775, the New York Sons of Liberty “in solemn Congress assembled” took a vote of thanks: “to Mr. Jacob Vredenburgh, barber, for his firm, spirited, and patriotic conduct in refusing to complete an operation vulgarly called shaving, which he had begun on the face of Captain John Croser, commander ... of one of his Majesty’s transports.... It is to be wished that all gentlemen of the razor will follow this wise, prudent, interesting example.”

The undignified little details are important, for they help bring home to us the pervasiveness of the Reign of Terror. There is not only the melodrama of the block, the guillotine and the firing-squad, not only the heightened struggle for power among the great of the new order, not only the tension of foreign and civil war, there is also the tragi-comedy of thousands of little lives invaded by heroic concerns which are ordinarily not theirs at all. The Terror touches great and small with the obsessive power of a fashion; it holds men as little of the common weal ever holds them, unless they are professionally devoted to the study or practice of politics. During the Terror, politics becomes as real, as pressing, as unavoidable for John Jones or Jacques Duval as food and drink, wife or mistress, his job and the weather. Political indifference, that mainstay of the modern state, becomes impossible for even the most selfish, the most unworldly.

This participation in the common thing, in the drama of the revolutionary state, means different things to those we may call outsiders and those we may call insiders. The opposition is purely one of convenience. No doubt there are insensible gradations from the ardent revolutionary extremist—the admirably drawn Evariste Gamelin of Anatole France’s The Gods Are Athirst, for instance—through the neutral and colorless Center to skulking and repressed anti-revolutionaries. But in broad lines the division between the many outside the revolutionary cult and the small active band of orthodox believers in the new dispensation is worth making. Let us look first at the Terror as it affects the life of the outsider.

II. The Terror and the Outsider

This ordinary outsider is not the actively hostile person, the émigré in fact or, as the French actually put it, the émigré d’esprit, the émigré who has quit spiritually if not in the flesh. He is not the disgruntled moderate. He is simply the man who makes up the bulk of modern societies, the man who on the whole accepts what others do in politics, the man who fairly soon gets on the band-wagon. Especially in its crisis period, the revolution is awfully hard on this outsider. It may provide him with a certain number of spectacles in the form of various celebrations of the new revolutionary cults—processions, trees of liberty, festivals of reason, and so on. But certainly in the French revolution there are many indications that the outsiders got very tired of this, that in the long run they found the old Catholic ceremonials more to their liking. One wonders whether in the long run the mass ceremonials which Stalin as well as Hitler and Mussolini seem to manage so well will not also wear a bit thin. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that our modern revolutionists are much better stage managers than their predecessors.

The revolutionary mania for renaming seems also to tend to confuse and annoy the outsider. The English confined their efforts largely to the names of persons, where they achieved some remarkable results. We are all familiar with Praise God Barebone, and Put-thy-Trust-in-Christ-and-Flee-Fornication Williams is perhaps more than a legend. The Puritans of course drew chiefly from the Bible and from evangelical abstractions—Faith, Prudence, Charity, and so on.

The French drew from the virtuous days of Roman republicanism, from the abstractions of the Enlightenment, and from their own leaders and martyrs. Babeuf, the forerunner of Socialism, became Gracchus Babeuf. Claude Henri, Comte de St. Simon, kept his Christian names, but dropped the compromising contact with a saint, and became Claude Henri Bonhomme. The unfortunate Leroys (Kings) found it well to change to Laloys (Laws) or something equally patriotic. One faithful Jacobin had his child republicanly baptized Libre Constitution Leturc. The French, however, did not stop with persons. Corrupt street names were changed, the Place Louis XV becoming Place de la Révolution, the rue de la Couronne becoming rue de la Nation. Place names underwent wholesale changes that must have added greatly to the wartime disruption of the mail service. Most of the Saints were dropped, which alone would cause a lot of trouble. Lyons, having sinned against the revolution by siding with the Federalists, on being taken by troops of the Convention was re-christened Commune Affranchie (Freed Town). Le Havre became Havre-Marat. In the conventional greeting of one’s fellows, monsieur became citoyen. For a while the word “roi” was under a taboo as definite as the kind the anthropologist studies, and was actually cut out of classic authors like Racine. There was an attempt, possibly serious, possibly journalistic, to change “reine abeille” into “abeille pondeuse”—“queen bee” into “laying bee.”

In their determination to uproot everything of the contaminated past, the French revolutionists decided to revolutionize the calendar, to do away with names like January, which recalled the vicious old Roman god Janus, or July, which recalled the even more vicious Roman tyrant, Julius Caesar. So they made twelve new months, and named them, in melodious French, after the glorious works of Nature—germinal, the month of buds, fructidor, the month of ripening, brumaire, the month of mists. Although the French boasted the universality of their revolutionary aims and principles, they were apparently undisturbed by the narrow limitation of their new calendar to French climatic conditions. The calendar is, of course, most inappropriate to Australia, and even to the American midwest.

The Russians, in addition to their fondness for personal revolutionary noms de guerre, have been particularly addicted to changing place names, and unlike the French, have hitherto made them stick, insofar at least as the names were those of good Stalinists. Catherine the Great, in particular, had put herself on the map as successfully as did Alexander the Great, but she has vanished altogether from Soviet Russia. Ekaterinodar has become Krasnodar, Ekaterineburg Sverdlovsk, and Ekaterinoslav Dnepropetrovsk. The familiar Nizhni Novgorod has only recently, with a loss of euphony and great associations, become Gorki. Stalin, for a living man, has done very well for himself. Stalinabad is perhaps the most exotic of the Stalin towns, but most effectively symbolic no doubt was the changing of Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad—not the only place where Stalin has replaced the Czar. From long Socialist tradition, “comrade” took the place occupied by “citizen” in the French revolution. Children, too, were given names as suitable to the day as were Praise God and Libre Constitution to their day. Vladilen, a telescoping of Vladimir and Lenin, is one of the most shockingly unconventional to an old Russian.

This renaming is clearly one of the uniformities we can list for all our revolutions. Even the moderate American revolution indulged in some renaming. Boston saw King Street and Queen Street give way to names like Federal and State, thoroughly suited to the new regime; but for some reason or other the tainted name of Hanover Street survived. The American name for a certain harmful fly is the Hessian fly, a name given it in revolutionary days. A kind of cousin of that fly is known in the South as the Abe Lincoln bug, which is a reminder of the fact that what we call the Civil War was essentially an abortive revolution.

There is no need to worry much over an explanation of this rage for renaming. Names are to the savage associated with magic, and we are constantly reminded in these days of our own nearness to the savage. Change a name and you change the thing. It’s all very simple. We are here, however, interested rather in the effect of all this renaming on the outsider, and we can be reasonably sure that it affords an example of the kind of thing that begins to wear on him. The revolution in names is petty enough. But for John Jones life is an accumulation of petty matters; and John is not built to support a very complete set of changes in the trivial details of which his habits are made. Witness Rip Van Winkle.

There is also, of course, the strain of living under the kind of government we have in the last chapter described as the government of the Terror. Even the humblest person, the person most indifferent to politics, can never tell when the lightning is going to strike him or his household, when he may be haled into court as a class enemy or a counter-revolutionary. Detailed study of this constant threat, this omnipresence of the government, cannot be attempted here. We may, however, take up briefly two phases which particularly affect the outsider.

First, as we shall see shortly from the point of view of the insider, all these revolutions have at their crisis a quality unmistakably puritanical or ascetic or, to use an overworked word, idealistic. There is a serious attempt by those in authority to eradicate the minor vices, as well as what some might feel inclined to call the major pleasures. With what the Saints in England tried to do in the seventeenth century most Americans are familiar, if only from repercussions in New England. But Americans, who have always exaggerated the French capacity for the pleasures of the senses, are perhaps not so aware of the fact that in ’93 and ’94 there was an earnest attempt to clean up Paris, to shut up brothels, gaming houses, to eliminate actual drunkenness. Virtue was the order of the day. You couldn’t even be lazy. Some Jacobin would be sure to report you to the club, with the suggestion that the best place to cure you of unrepublican laziness was the army. The puritanism of the Bolsheviks may seem even more paradoxical, but it most certainly existed, and we shall return shortly to its consideration.

Now there is no doubt that in the better world towards which we all in some measure aspire, drinking, whoring, gambling, laziness, boastfulness, and a whole lot of things we all condemn, will simply not exist. But it seems equally undeniable that here and now on this earth, and for some generations back, a fairly large number of human beings have been and are addicted to one or more of these pursuits, regarding them—not always consciously with the intellect—as necessary compensations for dullness or other inadequacies in their daily lives. We must again remind ourselves that we are not dealing with moral questions, not praising or condemning, but trying to arrange facts in a useful order. It seems then that the following uniformity is clear: the extremists’ attempt to enforce a life without the ordinary vices within a fairly short time puts a strain on the outsider very hard for him, or her, to bear.

Not only is the outsider denied access to what he probably regards as legitimate amusement; the new authorities will not even leave him to himself. Revolutions are very hard indeed on privacy. Gorki once wrote that “Lenin was a man who prevented people from leading their accustomed lives as no one before him was able to do.” This is no doubt a rhetorical exaggeration, but one can see what Gorki is getting at. And as people have a certain inertia in the direction of leading their “accustomed lives,” we can perhaps understand better why Stalin rather than Trotsky has proved to be Lenin’s successor. In the crisis period the revolution comes to hound John Jones in whatever he does. In a revolution even the conventional back-biting, gossip and hatreds of ordinary social life are intensified beyond endurance. The Jacobins, especially in the provinces, were eager to pick up any bit of gossip that would show a reform was needed. Citizen W should keep his dog tied up, citizen X should be made to marry the girl, citizen Y should be admonished against outbursts of temper, rich citizen Z should be made to give his consent to the marriage of his daughter to a poor but honest Jacobin youth in good standing with the club. One expects this sort of thing from one’s own family and friends, but not, even in the totalitarian state, from the government. The Germans have a delightful proverb, which may perhaps give them some solace today: “The soup is never eaten as hot as it’s cooked.” But certainly in the crisis period of revolutions there is an effort to force it steaming down the throat of the ordinary citizen. In the long run, he can’t stand it, and his cooks learn their lesson and allow it to cool off a bit. But that is in the period of convalescence from the revolutionary fever.

Shut out from his ordinary pleasures and vices, constrained to fight for, or at least to cheer long, loud, and conspicuously for the revolutionary state in its struggle with foreign and civil foes, exposed to privation and suffering from scarcity attendant on war and the inevitable inefficiencies of the new government, urged to the “height of revolutionary circumstances” on every hand, in press, theater, pulpit, rostrum, mass demonstration, above all inescapably caught in the common and very exhausting nervous excitement which marks the crisis period, John Jones sooner or later finds these strains insupportable, and gets ready to welcome anyone who can throw the extremists out. Perhaps no one of these strains would be in itself unbearable, though it does seem likely that there is a kind of saturation point in large-scale, obsessive political propaganda after which such propaganda actually backfires. We may hope to learn more in this respect from contemporary German and Russian experience. At any rate, the converging series of pressures outlined above seems clearly to have put too great a strain on the outsider in our revolutions.

III. The Terror and the Insider: The Religious Parallel

To the insider, to the true believer, the revolution appears as a very different thing in this crisis period, though one may guess that for some of the less ardent insiders much of what has been said about the outsiders begins, after a while, to hold true also. The revolution begins to take too much out of him, and he begins to have his hesitations and his doubts, to be bored with the endless ceremonies, deputations, committees, tribunals, militia work, and the other chores necessary to achieve the reign of virtue on earth. He, too, becomes an outsider. But the true faithful stay to the end, to the block, the guillotine, the firing-squad, or exile.

Now to this insider it would seem that the service of the revolution supplies many of the satisfactions commonly supplied by what we call religion. This analogy with religion has been frequently made. It has been applied, not only to the English revolution where its fitness is undisputed, but also to the French and Russian revolutions. Since both Jacobins and Bolsheviks were violently hostile to Christianity and boasted themselves atheists or at least deists, this analogy has given a great deal of offense both to Christians and to their enemies. For the Marxist in particular the assertion that his behavior has similarities with the behavior of men under the acknowledged influence of religion is like a red rag to a bull. Nor is the Marxist wholly unjustified in his anger, for the glib phrase, “Oh, the Communists are just another fanatical sect,” is frequently thrown out by shallow conservatives as at once a reproach and a dismissal. Actually, to judge from past experience, it would seem that large numbers of men can be brought to do certain very important things of the kind the Communists want to have done only under the influence of what we call religion; that is, some pattern of more or less similar sentiments, moral aspirations, and ritualistic practices. Marxism as a religion has already got a great deal done; Marxism as a “scientific theory” alone would hardly have got beyond the covers of Das Kapital and the learned journals.

But the dispute sketched above is endless, and we are not rash enough to suppose we can settle it. Those who use the term “religion” in this connection seem to us to be trying to describe a phenomenon of the world of sense-experience, one that needs to be integrated with other phenomena of revolutions. It is certainly true, however, that this use apparently arouses in many persons emotions unfavorable to the continued objective study of the subject. Anyone who could suggest a neutral term as effectively pointing to the same phenomena as does the term “religion” would be performing a great service for sociology. No such term at present existing, we shall have to continue to use the word “religion.” We must insist that this word does not refer necessarily and exclusively to a formally theistic cult like Christianity; and above all, that it does not necessarily imply belief in the “supernatural.” We take it that in the present analysis the important thing about a religious belief is that under its influence men work very hard and excitedly in common to achieve here or somewhere an ideal, a pattern of life not at the moment universally—or even largely—achieved. Religion attempts to close in favor of the best of human hopes the gap between what men are and what men would like to be; at least in its young and active phase, it will not for a moment admit that such a gap can long exist.

To discern the element of religion in the behavior of the ardent extremist is not to deny the existence of economic motives. Indeed, at this stage some of the most acute phases of the struggle among classes are to be noticed, and form one of the uniformities we can clearly consider established. Whatever the place of economic class struggles in the days just before the revolution—and in our four revolutions it takes varied forms by no means adequately summed up in phrases such as “feudal nobility,” “middle class,” and “proletariat”—once the revolution gets going these class struggles have at least one phase common in all four societies. The property of many, if not most, of those openly and stubbornly identified with the beaten parties is confiscated for the benefit of the successful parties, identified as “the people.” Furthermore, as the different moderate groups are defeated their property, too, is commonly confiscated in the same way.

In the English revolution the Royalists lost a large part of their property, mostly in land; and though lay Presbyterians were not as a rule subjected to confiscation of property unless they were actively on the wrong side in politics, there was a great deal of easing Presbyterians and other unacceptable ecclesiastics out of their livings. Laurence Washington, a clergyman, the father of the John of Virginia, and a direct ancestor of George, was “plundered” as the phrase went in 1643, cause he was said to have said that the parliamentary army had more papists in it than there were around the King. That is to say, he was deprived of his living. We need hardly be reminded that Loyalist property was confiscated during the American revolution. Indeed the late J. F. Jameson concludes that in a quiet way—quiet at least for revolutions—the American revolution effected in its whole course a very sensible democratization, or spreading into smaller units, of ownership of property in this country. Both in France and in Russia the revolutions saw the confiscation primarily of land, but even in France to some extent also of capital, and their redistribution. We need not go into detail here on these agrarian problems. Sufficient to state that many of those who came to the top in the crisis period, both leaders and followers, had good reason to hope that by staying on top their economic status would be consistently better than it had been. This is true regardless of what theories and ideals, laissez-faire or Socialism, were appealed to as guiding the new distribution.

But though we must recognize the economic motive, as we recognize the drive to centralization to repel attacks from within and without, our picture is incomplete until we consider those elements unavoidably called religious. Partly because the economic and political elements are in their conventional sense familiar to most people nowadays, partly because these religious elements appear to be among the most important variables in the situation, we are here emphasizing them. They seem to be among the most important variables because their presence in an acute form gives a different and much more pervasive tone to the political and economic elements of struggle, which frequently occur by themselves in very similar form and even somewhat similar intensity in situations we do not commonly label revolutionary. It is also true that in the growth of Wesleyan Methodism in eighteenth-century England, for instance, in times not to be called revolutionary, one finds actively religious behavior among large numbers of people, behavior in many ways like that we are going to analyze in our revolutionary insider. But Wesleyanism was politically conservative on the whole, and not directed at a given social and political system. The whole point, indeed, of the three revolutions we are about to analyze is that religious enthusiasms, organization, ritual and ideas appear inextricably bound up with economic and political aims.

The insiders in all three of our complete revolutions, and indeed to a certain extent in the fourth, the American revolution, seem to have wished to put into life here on earth some of the order, the discipline, the contempt for the easy vices, which the Calvinist sought to put there. Indeed our first revolution, the English, is commonly labeled the Calvinist or Puritan revolution. Here we may expect a protest from the Communists, an indignant assertion that Marx put such Christian weaknesses as a desire to subdue the flesh well behind him, that his followers are all for an abundance of food and drink, and the other good things of this world for everybody. We shall return to that question in a moment. In the meantime we can begin to see some lurking ascetic tendency in Communism if we reflect on how indignant good Communists would be over the slogan “wine, women, and song for everybody.”

That the Puritans were in some sense puritanical we can take in stride as a reasonable assumption. Indeed, at present it is probably more useful to try to show that the historical Puritans both in old and new England were not quite the complete killjoys the school of H. L. Mencken would make them out to have been. As for the Jacobins, their legislation and above all their somewhat informal administration in 1793-94 had striking analogies with the kind of things the English Puritans tried to put over. The Jacobins were in principle against gambling, drunkenness, sexual irregularities of all sorts, ostentatious display of poverty, idleness, thieving, and of course in general all sorts of crimes. In practice they felt at liberty to enforce abstention from these vices and to insist with force on the carrying out of positive acts of virtue—such as selling goods always at the legal fixed maximum price, even if a little bootlegging seemed quite safe, attending celebrations in honor of the Supreme Being on décadi, expressing in public the opinion that William Pitt was a corrupt villain, and the English nation a lot of pathetic slaves. Such a system of action they sought to enforce by making each man his own detective, God’s own private spy, much as was said to have been done in Calvin’s own Geneva.

Those who chiefly did the prying were the members of the local clubs, urged on by the local leaders, just as with the Puritans it was the parish clergy, aided by the active elders of the church, who saw to it that the sheep were properly shepherded. The most undignified matters, apparently the most insignificant also, might under these conditions set a parish or a community on end. The first dissension in the English Separatist Church at Amsterdam, we are told, arose not over any point of doctrine or ritual, but over the lace on Mrs. Francis Johnson’s sleeve. One could find dozens of parallels for this in the behavior of the Jacobins. There was the lively debate in a little club in Normandy over the question whether citizen doctor X wasn’t making his professional calls on aristocrats too long, his calls on patriots too short. And the great row at Bourgoin when the secretary announced that he wasn’t going to wear the red Liberty cap because it didn’t become him. This shocking display of vanity overcoming patriotism unleashed the full fury of the virtuous Republicans of Bourgoin, and the secretary was lucky to escape with his life.

The other-worldliness of the Russian revolutionists affords a problem more apparent than important, or even real. It is quite true that “philosophically” modern Communism is based on materialism, that it denies the immortality of the soul and indeed the existence of a soul, that it insists men must be happy here on earth, enjoying the good things of this earth. But surely it is most important if you wish to understand the problems of men in society to find out what men do, how they behave, as well as what they say on paper or in the pulpit that they are doing, or want to do, or ought to do. It is also quite true that Communists, fellow-travelers, as the Communists like to call their sentimental followers among the intellectuals, and the brethren of the Left in general in this country tend to be extremely indignant when their behavior is analyzed as we propose to analyze it. Here, as so often, indignation is not refutation.

That the Bolshevik leaders were almost all ascetics is perhaps a commonplace. Lenin was notably austere and contemptuous of ordinary comfort, and at the height of his power his apartments in the Kremlin were of barrack-like simplicity. Some of Lenin’s sayings sound like the bourgeois Calvinists as analyzed by Max Weber, or even by Mr. R. H. Tawney: “Carry out an accurate and honest account of money, manage economically, don’t loaf, don’t steal, maintain the strictest discipline in labor.” Indeed, the general tone among the high command of Bolshevism was in those early years that of a consecrated and almost monastic group. In a Russia where men were starving or freezing it was for one thing pretty impolitic for leaders to look too sleek and well-fed. But just as the pressure of the war is not a complete explanation for the Terror, so neither necessity nor policy explains the asceticism of the Bolsheviks. They felt, as the Puritans had felt, that the ordinary vices and weaknesses of human beings are disgusting, that the good life cannot be led until they are eliminated. Early the Bolsheviks prohibited the national drink, vodka, and almost all the early soviets took steps against prostitution, gambling, night life, and so on. Theoretically the Bolsheviks thought women should be free, for instance, free from the shocking limitations bourgeois laws had put upon them; hence the notable freedom allowed in Russia as to marriage, divorce, abortion, and other phases of family and sex relationships. But the Bolsheviks did not intend by this that women were to be free to behave as they were sure they secretly behaved—or wanted to behave—in dissolute old bourgeois society. On the contrary, they expected their women to behave as they would behave in the classless society—and though vague, that is a pretty strict canon.

Even today, when apparently the crisis stage is over in Russia, there are numerous survivals of the intense asceticism of the true Communist party members of the crisis period. In their innocent book on Soviet Russia, the innocent Webbs declare that there is no asceticism in Russia, of course, and then go on and explain how the Comsomols (Communist Youth) are encouraged to take the pledge—not for any silly evangelical reasons, heavens, no, but because drinking anything alcoholic is “a breach of the rule requiring maintenance of perfect health.” Petting, too, is very definitely discouraged as unworthy of the Communist Youth, especially when it is done in public. “Nothing pornographic is allowed in literature or in any form of art. There is less public sex appeal in evidence in Russia than in any Western land.” Since the Webbs wrote this, the Russians seem to have relaxed a bit in their public restraints, and the Germans, in the freshness of their revolution, have gone very puritanical in such matters. Berlin, which used to provide the broadest range of sexual activity in the world, has now outwardly taken on a Lutheran and Teutonic virtue, while the existence of public prostitution in Moscow and Leningrad can hardly escape even visiting members of the British Labour party.

The Russians of old being notoriously dirty about their public places—almost as dirty as we Americans are—the new regime has made it a point of discipline that no litter, papers, and such-like truck be left in public parks, streets, and stations. Indeed, membership in the Communist party itself, always a very select and disciplined minority, demanded for years, and to a certain extent still demands, the exercise of a great deal of self-restraint, a willingness to live simply, to work hard, to conform to very high standards of personal morality. As usual in such circumstances, and as we have already noted for the Puritans and the Jacobins, self-restraint was apparently not enough, and there grew up in Russia all sorts of official and unofficial methods of spying, prying, checking-up on the actions of individuals, and controlling them by Terrorist methods. Many of these agencies are now serving the Stalinite reaction, as similar agencies in France and in England served the Thermidorean reaction and the Stuart restoration.

Now groups thoroughly disciplined into lives almost as unnaturally ascetic as those our Puritans, Jacobins, and Bolshevists sought to impose have existed for relatively long periods. The Spartiates contrived to support an almost heroic Communism for several centuries. But this discipline is of slow growth, intimately tied up with the kind of behavior in men that changes with geological slowness. A revolution cannot manufacture this kind of discipline overnight, and perhaps the violence—and here is meant rather spiritual violence than mere bloodshed—of the Terror is in some sense an overcompensation for the inability of the extremists to carry their ordinary brothers along with them. The Terror is a desperate overshooting of the mark. Again, the existence in individuals of a certain amount of inclination to meddle with their neighbor’s private affairs is probably a useful thing, part of what cements societies together. But here, too, the ardent revolutionists overshoot the mark and make life unbearable for their neighbors.

There are traces of this kind of organized asceticism, this crusade against the customary vices, even in the American revolution, where the crisis stage was never as intense as in our other revolutions. There were many restrictive measures justified chiefly as necessary to the efficient prosecution of the war against George III. There were others quite as obviously dictated by the traditions of middle-class Protestant ethics which had long been established in the Middle Colonies and in New England. But here and there one encounters the true accent of revolutionary idealism. Here is a passage worthy of Robespierre: “Titles are the offspring of monarchical and arbitrary governments. While the object of the present war with Great Britain was reconciliation, the titles of excellency, honorable, etc., were submitted to by the people of America, but since the Declaration of Independence, the colonies have divorced monarchy forever, and become free, independent states. It becomes then necessary to adopt the simple language of free governments.... Let us leave the titles of excellency and honorable to the abandoned servants of a tyrant King ... while we satisfy ourselves with beholding our senators, governors, and generals rich in real excellence and honor.”

The Baltimore Committee which in April, 1775, “recommended to the people of the county not to encourage or attend the approaching fair because of its tendency to encourage horse-racing, gaming, drunkenness, and other dissipation” was going beyond the strict necessities of the situation. Again we find a neat illustration from the pen of a Connecticut patriot writing in July, 1775: “Wednesday evening last, a number of ladies and gentlemen collected at a place called East Farms, in Connecticut, where they had a needless entertainment, and made themselves extremely merry with a good glass of wine. Such entertainments and diversions can hardly be justified upon any occasion; but at such a day as this, when everything around us has a threatening aspect, they ought to be discountenanced, and every good man should use his influence to suppress them.”

Our orthodox and successful extremists, then, are crusaders, fanatics, ascetics, men who seek to bring heaven to earth. No doubt many of them are hypocrites, career-seekers masquerading as believers, no doubt many of them climb on the band-wagon for selfish motives. Yet it is most unrealistic to hold that men may not be allowed to reconcile their interests with their ideas. Many an ardent and sincere follower of Robespierre, many a seeker after Calvinist truth, was able, with the best of conscience, to buy lands confiscated from the unrepublican or the ungodly. Our extremists are also, as the intimate details of their daily lives should convince us, for the most part quite ordinary people, with the loves and hatreds, aspirations and doubts, hopes and fears, of ordinary people. Once the crisis period is over, they will, save for the few born martyrs, cease to be crusaders, fanatics, ascetics. Their revolutionary beliefs will be softly cushioned in a comfortable ritual, will be a consolation and a habit rather than a constant prick of the ideal. But now, in the crisis period, they are in what we may call the active phase of a religion. Let us briefly take up some of the striking characteristics of this phase in our three societies.

Calvinism, Jacobinism, Marxism, are all rigidly deterministic. All believe that what happens here below is foreordained, predestined to follow a course which no mere human being can alter, least of all those who oppose respectively Calvinism, Jacobinism, or Marxism. In fact, the more priest and prelate storm and rage, the more certain is the Calvinists’ victory. The acts of aristocrats, traitors, Pitts and Cobourgs can but make the triumph of the French Republic greater. The harder the Rockefellers and the Morgans work, the more capitalistic their behavior, the sooner will come the inevitable glorious and final uprising of the proletariat. God for the Calvinist, Nature-Reason for the Jacobin, Dialectical or Scientific Materialism for the Marxist, provide comforting assurance that the believer is on the side that must win. Obviously the belief that you can’t lose will in most—not all—cases make you a better fighter.

Those whom God, Nature, or Science has chosen are quite willing to advertise the fact of this choice, and, indeed, display an inconsistency which is purely logical, and not at all of the emotions, in that they seem very anxious to help the inevitable come about. Rigid determinists are also usually ardent proselyters, presumably on the grounds that they are instruments of the inevitable, the means through which the inevitable realizes itself. They do not, however, seem to behave as if they held that resistance to their proselyting, refusal of unbelievers to accept their message, were also determined, inevitable, and even pardonable.

At any rate, our revolutionists all sought to spread the gospel of their revolution. What we now call “nationalism” is certainly present as an element in all these revolutionary gospels. But at least in the earlier years, and during the crisis of a revolution, crude notions of national expansion do not prevail. The lucky people to whom the gospel has been revealed wish to spread it properly abroad. In the Messianic fervor of the crisis period, aggressive nationalism is not on the surface. Underneath it doubtless helps drive the revolutionists on, and in the period of reaction it emerges into the light, barely if at all disguised as the “destiny” of a chosen people and its leader. The Jacobins announced they were bringing the blessings of freedom to all the people of the earth, and such is the power of imagination that some men still think of Napoleon as agent of the new freedom. The Bolsheviks are present to all our generation as great apostles of a world-wide revolution. Most of us can still remember the days when fearful folk in conservative lands looked under their beds each night for emissaries of Moscow.

The Calvinists as Christians, of course, were ardent proselyters. But the victorious English Independents were also capable of mixing their religious with political propaganda, were anxious to win the world over to their superior form of society. Cromwell’s famous collaborator, Admiral Blake, used to spread the gospel in foreign lands. Thanks to the example of England, Blake said, “All kingdoms will annihilate tyranny and become republics.” England had done so already. France was following in her wake; and as the natural gravity of the Spaniards rendered them somewhat slower, he gave them ten years. All Europe is shortly to be republican—and this in the 1650’s! Those who today boast or bemoan that soon the Western world will be all Communist, or all Fascist, or all Democratic, might ponder awhile the circumstances of this remark of Blake’s.

A good deal of ink and oratory has been expended over this effort of the extremists to propagate their faiths among the nations. Conservatives in other nations are naturally very suspicious. Moscow gold must be at the bottom of every liberal or radical movement; there is an organized international plot to establish the world-rule of atheistic Jacobinism and destroy Christianity. Probably in most cases these fears and suspicions are much exaggerated. The revolutionists are usually too poor, and too occupied at home, to devote more than a small part of their energies to these foreign missions. There are, moreover, in the other countries usually enough disgruntled natives to form a solid nucleus for revolutionary action. The importation into these countries of English, French, or Russian phrases and other revolutionary fashions is the most natural thing in the world.

At any rate, there is no doubt about the fact of the uniformity. Even in the seventeenth century, when the world was so much larger, so much slower to cross, the English revolution spread itself abroad. Edward Sexby at Bordeaux proposed to the French radicals a republican constitution which was to be called L’Accord du Peuple—an adaptation of the English Agreement of the People—and was obliged in consequence to flee the town. In Holland at the news of trouble in England, “the people began to take sides for one or the other of the parties and with such fervor that in many cases they came to blows.” This sounds a lot like the behavior of Federalists and Republicans in the United States in the 1790’s, when the French revolution provided most of the dramatic material of American politics. But the point need not be labored. Similar examples from the Russian revolution will occur to almost everyone.

The religious parallel may be pushed a bit further. Our revolutionists are convinced that they are the elect, destined to carry out the will of God, Nature, or Science. That feeling was particularly strong among the Russian Communists, where in pure logic it should be less strong than among the Calvinists, believers in a personal God. The opponents of these revolutionists are not just political enemies, not just mistaken men, grafters, log-rollers, or damned fools; they are sinners, and must not merely be beaten—they must be wiped out. Hence the justification of the guillotine and the firing-squad. For our revolutionists display that vigorous intolerance which in the logic of the emotions as well as in that of the intellect, follows perfectly on the conviction of being absolutely, eternally, monopolistically right. If there is but one truth, and you have that truth completely, toleration of differences means an encouragement to error, crime, evil, sin. Indeed, toleration in this sense is harmful to the tolerated, as well as very trying on the tolerator. As Bellarmine said, it is a positive benefit to obstinate heretics to kill them because the longer they live the more damnation they heap upon themselves.

These revolutionary faiths are very interesting in their eschatologies, their notions of final ends like heaven and hell. The English revolution was dominated by some of the wilder as well as by the more conventional of Christian eschatologies. The Millenarians expected the second coming year after year. The rule of the Saints was just around the corner. The Jacobins had a much less concrete notion of heaven, and this heaven was to be definitely here on earth—the republic of Virtue which we have seen as Robespierre’s ideal. After the dictatorship of the revolutionary government, this perfect republic was to appear, and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, would be more than a slogan. To hardened Americans a republic doesn’t sound at all like a heaven, but we must believe that it was very different for the earnest Jacobin of 1794. The Russian heaven is the classless society, to be attained after the purgatory of the dictatorship of the proletariat has slowly put an end to the worldly miseries of the class struggle. It seems that even the Stalinists admit being still in purgatory. The specific content of life in the classless society is somewhat vaguely described by most Communists; and Marx himself, unlike Mohammed, went into no details about his heaven. There will be competition, one gathers, but no struggle, and certainly no struggle over economic goods. Competition will be on a lofty plane, as among artists. Perhaps there will be competition in love? At any rate, as in a more robust heaven, the old German Valhalla, the heroes will fight all day, but at night their wounds will heal.

All of these faiths were incorporated in social groups, and hence had rituals. The present writer has elsewhere described at some length the Jacobin ritual, a strange hodgepodge of Catholic, Protestant, classical and other elements, with Republican creeds, Republican baptisms and prayers, even with a revolutionary sign of the cross in the name of Marat, Le Pelletier, la liberté ou la mort. Communist ritual is less crudely imitative, and perhaps less rich. But it is just as definite, as you will find in talking to an initiated Communist. Marx’s Das Kapital, of course, is hardly ever read in orthodox circles except ritualistically. The French revolutionists had their saints and martyrs, especially the murdered Marat: the apotheosis of Lenin, clearly begun in his lifetime, has become a cult centered around his tomb in Moscow. Lenin is perhaps, like Jeremy Bentham preserved in University College, London, a purely secularist saint; but a saint he is. Stalin, we are told, has had to fight very hard the tendency of simple Russian folk to mix a certain amount of superstition with their natural devotion to their present great leader. He would not care to be classed with the old icons. Smaller groups, like the Communist Youth, are brought up in an atmosphere of ritual, are in this respect more like some of the social side-shows of our Protestant churches than like comparatively secular groups such as the Boy Scouts.

Religious symbolism goes along with this ritual, and was especially developed in France. During the Terror, one met symbolic devices everywhere: the eye of surveillance, seeking out the enemies of the Republic; the triangle of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; the Phrygian cap of liberty, the bonnet rouge; the carpenter’s level, symbolizing equality; any kind of mound, which served as symbol for the beneficent Mountain, the party that had carried out the revolution to its logical end. Most of these and many other symbols are to be found in the elaborate pageant of the 20th Prairial at Paris, when Robespierre personally supervised the festival of the Supreme Being. The Russians, aided by modern poster technique, have made a similar, if less pedantic, use of symbols to hold the people together in a Communist society.

IV. What Makes the Terror?

In the crisis periods of all four of our revolutions we may distinguish the same set of variables, differently combined and mixed with all sorts of contingent factors to produce the specific situations the narrative historian of these revolutions tends to regard as unique. There are no doubt a very great number of these variables, but for the purposes of a first approximation we may here distinguish seven. These seem not to be related one to another in any important one-way causal relationship. They seem, indeed, more or less like the independent variables of the mathematician, though it is inconceivable that they should be strictly independent. The temptation to single out one of them as the “cause” of the Terror is, like the temptation to find a hero or a villain in any situation, hard to resist. And each one of them has a history, goes back at least to the last generation or two of the old regime.

They are all woven together in a complicated pattern of reality; but without all of them—and this is the important point—you would not have a Reign of Terror, would not have a full crisis in the revolution. The problem of their possible independence need not worry us. Temperature and pressure are independent variables in the mathematical formulation of the laws of thermodynamics; but ice can form at 0° centigrade only if the pressure is negligibly small. We have already stressed this point, perhaps beyond the bounds of good writing. But the old notion of simple, linear, one-way causation is so rooted in our habits of thought, is indeed so useful to us in daily life, that we almost instinctively demand an explanation of a complex situation like the Terror which will enable us to isolate a villain-cause—or a hero-cause.

First, there is what we may call the habit of violence, the paradoxical situation of a people conditioned to expect the unexpected. The more violent and terroristic periods of our revolutions come only after a series of troubles have prepared the way. Not until after several years of civil war in England did the Independents carry out their rigorous measures against the habitual ways of “Merrie England.” The Terror in France in a formal sense does not begin until late in 1793; sporadic outbreaks like the Great Fear of 1789 and the September Massacres of 1792 simply help to establish the mood necessary for a Terror. Even in Russia, where events were telescoped together in a shorter period than in any of our other revolutions, organized violence under the patronage of the government does not clearly appear until the autumn of 1918, a year and a half after the outbreak against the Czar. A telegram from Petrovsky to all soviets is quoted by Mr. Chamberlin, who sees in this the signal for organized Terror. “Last of all, the rear of our armies must be finally cleared of all White Guardism and all scoundrelly conspirators against the power of the working class and the poorest peasants. Not the least wavering, not the least indecision in the application of mass terror.”

This telegram brings forward a second and most important variable—the pressure of a foreign and civil war. War necessities help explain the rapid centralization of the government of the Terror, the hostility to dissenters within the group—they now seem deserters—the widespread excitement which our generation knows well enough by the cant term “war psychosis.” Both in France and in Russia there is a rough correlation between the military situation of the revolutionary armies and the violence of the Terror; as the danger of defeat grows, so does the number of victims of revolutionary tribunals. There is, however, a certain lag, and the Terror continues after the worst of the military danger is over. We may again recall that in England the Irish and the Scotch fulfilled the function of the foreign enemy, even though Great Britain kept free of the continent during the whole period. And both in America and in England the crisis period was accompanied by a formal war, largely a civil war. No sensible person would wish to deny the important place these wars have in the total situation we have called the crisis period.

Third, there is the newness of the machinery of this centralized government. The extremists are certainly not—and we have already emphasized this point—altogether without experience in handling men, though they have dealt with revolutionists, not with all men. Their long apprenticeship in the cause of the revolution has been a political training of a sort. And in many ways their new network of institutions is able to use some of the routine channels used by the old government. This is especially true in local government. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that the institutions of the Terror are in a sense new, that they do not work smoothly, that those charged with administering them, even if they are not politically inexperienced, are administratively inexperienced. The machinery of the Terror works in fits and starts, and frequently jams badly. Conflicts between administrators arise, and are settled in no routine manner, but by violence. Each failure of the machine annoys those who are trying to run it, and impels them to a new and sudden decision, to another act of violence. This in turn further jams the machinery. It is our old friend the vicious circle.

Fourth, this is also a time of acute economic crisis—not merely what we now call a depression, but a definite shortage of the necessities of life. Again it must be recalled that the Terror does not come at once, in the very beginning of the revolution, but is preceded by a time of troubles very disrupting to the ordinary processes of production. Capital gets frightened and begins to leave the country. Business men hesitate to undertake new enterprises or to continue on the same basis with the old. Peasant risings lessen agricultural production. Then comes the war with its demand for men and munitions. The ensuing dictatorship of the victorious extremists is in part an economic dictatorship, a supervision of the whole economic life of the country, controlled currency, price-fixing, food-rationing, a socialism of the fact long before Marx. The difficulty of distributing inadequate supplies further tries the temper of administrators, adds to the opportunities of denunciators and spies, serves to maintain and sharpen the peculiar excitement, the universal jumpiness of the Terror. It adds to the tenseness of the class struggles which we have already discerned in our study of the old regimes.

In one form or another our fifth variable, class struggles, clearly appears in the crises of all our revolutions. The hatred of Puritan for Cavalier, of Jacobin for aristocrats, Federalists, and other enemies of the Republic of Virtue, the hatred of Bolsheviks for Whites, Kadets and compromisists, of American Whigs for Tories, was in itself an elaborate compound. One element in this compound was probably about what the Marxist means when he talks about the class struggle. At any rate, by the time of the Terror the different antagonistic groups within the society have polarized into the orthodox revolutionists in power and the somewhat mixed bloc of their enemies. Heightened like all other tensions and conflicts by the course of the revolution, these class antagonisms now take on a sharpness they normally possess only in the writings and speeches of intellectuals and agitators. The party spirit, which is in one element probably but one form of the antagonism between classes, here seizes upon the most trivial symbols to make men aware of their irreconciliable differences. Thus the Jacobins adopted the term “sans-culottes” as a rallying cry to emphasize the class struggle. The culottes are the knee-breeches of the silk-stockinged gentlemen of the old regime, and those without culottes presumably wore the long trousers of the common man, the workingman. The Russian revolution was filled with the slogans of the class struggle in the narrow Marxist sense. Now though there was much more than class struggles in our revolutions, and though these struggles are not quite as simply determined as many believers in the economic interpretation of history sometimes make out, it would be very foolish to deny the importance of one of the variables in the Terror—those antagonisms between groups or “classes” largely held together by economic interests and by a common social and intellectual heritage, a common way of life, which our generation knows as the class struggle.

Our sixth variable is even more obviously than the others an abstraction, a presumably useful way of gathering together a great number of concrete facts. It is not logically on an exact level with our other variables, and would not fit into a nice series of philosophical categories. This is a variable based on observation of the behavior of the relatively small group of leaders formed during the revolution and now in control of the government of the Terror. Much of their behavior is affected, like the behavior of their followers and fellow-citizens, by the other variables in our list, and no doubt by much that has escaped us. But some very important elements in their behavior depend on the fact that they are leaders, that they have gone through a certain apprenticeship in revolutionary tactics, that they have been selected, almost in a Darwinian sense, for their ability to manipulate an extremist revolutionary group. This does not mean that they are necessarily or even usually “impractical” men, “theoreticians,” “metaphysicians,” or any other of the names simple critics like Taine invented for them. It does mean that they are not formed for compromise, for the dull expedients of politics in unexcited, relatively stable societies. It does mean that they are formed to push on to extremes, to use their special influence to heighten the already high tension of life in society. Like all politicians, they have learned the skills necessary for success in their trade; they have come to feel their trade is something like a game, as indeed it is; but they are reckless players, apt to play to the gallery, and always trying for a home run. No good revolutionary leader would ever bunt. Moreover, they are at least as jealous of one another as, to use another comparison, actors, and each one must always try for the center of the stage. What in more ordinary times has been lately no more than a conventional struggle for power among politicians is thus in the crisis period of revolutions stepped up to a murderous intensity.

Finally, there is the variable we have dwelt upon at length in an earlier part of this chapter. This is the element of religious faith shared by Independents, Jacobins, Bolsheviks. We need not here repeat what we have just written about the religious aspect of the Reigns of Terror. But it is this element that makes the Reigns of Terror also Reigns of Virtue, heroic attempts to close once for all the gap between human nature and human aspirations. This is but one of the variables, but it is a very important one. Religious aims and emotions help to differentiate the crises of our revolutions from ordinary military or economic crises, and to give to the Reigns of Terror and Virtue their extraordinary mixture of spiritual fury, of exaltation, of devotion and self-sacrifice, of cruelty, madness and high-grade humbug.

Now all these elements are in constant interaction one with another, a change in one effecting complex corresponding changes in all the others, and hence in the total situation. We must not think of them in terms of horse and cart, or chicken and egg, or of one billiard ball hitting another. It is instead as complicated and mad a chase as we conceive that of the molecules in a physico-chemical system. Thus the stresses and strains of the early stages of our revolutions make it easier to work the nation into war—witness the war-provoking Girondins in France—and the war itself increases the stresses, accustoms people to violence and suspense. War makes for economic scarcity and economic scarcity sharpens the class struggle, and so on in a merry round-robin. All these effects, up to the end of the crisis period, are cumulative. Each old habit sloughed off, each definite break with the past at once invites others and increases the strain upon everybody, or nearly everybody, in the social system.

For it would seem to be an observable fact of human behavior that large numbers of men can stand only so much interference with the routines and rituals of their daily existence. It would also seem that most men cannot long stand the strain of prolonged effort to live in accordance with very high ideals. The outsider in the crisis period is pushed to the limit of his endurance by interference with some of his most prized and intimate routines; the insider is held to a pitch of spiritual effort and excitement beyond his powers of endurance. For both sorts of men there would seem to be a limit to their social action as real as the limit a chemist finds for a chemical reaction. Human beings can go only so far and so long under the stimulus of an ideal. Social systems composed of human beings can endure for but a limited time the concerted attempt to bring heaven to earth which we call the Reign of Terror and Virtue. Thermidor comes as naturally to societies in revolution as an ebbing tide, as calm after a storm, as convalescence after fever, as the snapping-back of a stretched elastic band. Such figures of speech, taken from established uniformities in the physical world, seem to impose themselves. Perhaps, in spite of the efforts of philosophers, theologians, moralists, political theorists, social scientists, and a good many other inspired thinkers in the last two thousand years, social systems are still almost as perversely unaffected by revolutionary good intentions as tides or rubber bands.

Chapter EIGHT THERMIDOR

I. Universality of the Thermidorean Reaction

As we have had to note in earlier attempts to fit our four revolutions into our conceptual scheme, this fitting cannot be done with finicky exactness. It is quite impossible to say that the crisis of a given revolution ended at 4:03 P.M. on August 6th of a given year. France does indeed furnish us with an instance almost as precise as this. The end of the crisis in France may be dated from the fall of Robespierre on July 27, 1794, or on the ninth Thermidor, year II of the poetic new French calendar. The ensuing slow and uneven return to quieter, less heroic times has long been known to French historians as the Thermidorean reaction. The Marxists, and especially the Trotskyites, have recently been applying the word to the Russian revolution, so that we may adopt it, as we did “old regime,” as a term in general acceptance. All our revolutions had their Thermidors, though in no two were the sequence of events, the time schedules, the ups and downs of daily life, anything like identical.

In terms of our conceptual scheme, we shall have to call Thermidor a convalescence from the fever of revolution, even though “convalescence” suggests something nice, and seems therefore to be a way of praising the Thermidorean reaction. We can but repeat previous assertions that no such eulogistic sense is here intended. We continue to try to discover first approximations of uniformities in phenomena we mean neither to praise nor to blame, neither to cherish nor to damn.

In England the beginning of the Thermidorean period, the convalescence, is not to be put with any preciseness. The year or so following the execution of Charles I represents the height of the crisis in England, and as long as the Rump sat some strong flavor of revolution remained. Perhaps the best date for the English Thermidor is Cromwell’s dissolution of the Rump on April 20, 1653, when the great general made some celebrated and un-English remarks about the resemblance between the mace and a jester’s staff. With Cromwell installed as Protector under the “instrument of Government” of 1653—the English actually did indulge themselves once in a written constitution—Thermidor may be said to be well on its way. In 1657 Cromwell became Lord Protector, half a king at least, and with the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 the great English revolution may be said to end.

The fall of Robespierre in France had been brought about largely by a conspiracy among outwardly orthodox Jacobin deputies to the Convention, men for the most part seriously involved in war-profiteering, parliamentary corruption, stock speculation and other activities unworthy of citizens of the Republic of Virtue. Fear of the “Incorruptible” Robespierre seems to have been one of the main reasons for their action. They were successful, not unaided by Robespierre’s lack of political wisdom. The Thermidoreans themselves had apparently not intended to end the Terror; the guillotining of Robespierre was just another in a long list of revolutionary guillotinings to which they had now become well accustomed. But for once public opinion got to work, and Frenchmen made it clear that they were through with the “tigers athirst for blood.” The reaction continued at a fairly steady rate for some years, both under the declining Convention and the new government of the Directory. There were definite relapses, as one might expect in a convalescence. Especially in the summer of 1799, after French defeats abroad, there was a striking revival of Jacobinism. The clubs re-opened, and the good old slogans resounded once more in public halls, in cafes, and on street corners. A few months later Napoleon Bonaparte had achieved his coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire, and the French convalescence was nearly over. The actual restoration of the Bourbons in 1814 is hardly a part of the course of revolution in France. It was rather an accident, a consequence of such purely personal factors as Napoleon’s megalomaniac insistence on fighting all Europe to the bitter end in 1813-14, Talleyrand’s knack for calling the turn, and the good intentions of Alexander I of Russia.

The Russian revolution may perhaps in a sense be still going on. The Trotskyites hold that Stalin and his crowd are Thermidoreans, and that this Russian revolution, at any rate, is pretty well over. Complete detachment in such matters is certainly difficult at this moment. But it does seem clear that the crisis period in Russia is over, that at most Russia is now in a rather long and disturbed convalescence from the fever of revolution. We may perhaps regard the period of war communism, 1917-21, as the first and main crisis of the Russian revolution. With the New Economic Policy of 1921 began Russia’s Thermidor. Lenin’s death and the subsequent rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky led up to a second crisis, or rather relapse during convalescence, which we may date at the more acute periods of violent enforcement of the first Five Year Plan. But as many an observer has noted, this secondary crisis lacked the hopeful idealism of the first, lacked its improvisations and its adventures, lacked its active foreign and White Guard enemies, and looks from even our brief historical perspective much like characteristic acts of the “tyrants” who came to power during other Thermidors—the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, for instance, or the Napoleonic enforcement of the Continental System. Since 1933, this second crisis has been rapidly abating, and at present evidences of reaction in Russia abound.

II. Amnesty and Repression

Politically the most striking uniformity to be noted in the period of convalescence is the ultimate establishment of a “tyrant” in something like the old Greek sense of the word, an unconstitutional ruler brought to power by revolution or stasis. This uniformity has been frequently noted: Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin, all seem to confirm it. Indeed, in the Federalist period in the United States there were Jeffersonians ungrateful enough to suggest that Washington was a perfectly good example of the tyrant born of revolution. There is nothing very puzzling about the phenomenon. After a revolution has undergone the crisis and the accompanying centralization of power, some strong leader must handle that centralized power when the mad religious energy of the crisis period has burned itself out. Dictatorships and revolutions are inevitably closely associated, because revolutions to a certain extent break down, or at least weaken, laws, customs, habits, beliefs which bind men together in society; and when laws, customs, habits, beliefs tie men together insufficiently, force must be used to remedy that insufficiency. Military force is for short terms the most efficient kind of force available for social and political uses, and military force demands a hierarchy of obedience culminating in a generalissimo. Polybius has here some appropriate remarks about the military virtues of Republican Rome. All this, however, is pretty much a commonplace of our times.

The rule of one man does not come immediately with the Thermidorean reaction. Even Cromwell, the earliest established of the three, did not become uncontested ruler with the dissolution of the Rump. The reaction to the crisis is at first slow and uncertain. The habit of violence is by now thoroughly established. There is left from the crisis a tendency to dramatic steps and whole-hog measures. Even sober and peace-loving men have moments of excited relapses to the jitters of the Terror. Seen in this light, the recent Moscow purges and trials are no indication that the Russian revolution has had an unusually long life, that it fails to fit our pattern. These melodramatic displays are no more than the expected aftermath of revolution in a land and among peoples unblessed with Magna Carta, Blackstone, and Gilbert and Sullivan.

As time goes on, the pressures the Terror applied to ordinary men are relaxed: the special tribunals give place to more regular ones, the revolutionary police are absorbed into the regular police—which are not necessarily the equivalent of London bobbies; they may be agents of the OGPU—and the block, guillotine or firing-squad are reserved for the more dramatic criminals. It is not, of course, that political life shortly assumes the idyllic stability some of our own contemporaries like to describe as the Rule of Law, and which, one suspects, was never quite as nice as appears in their books—not even in staid nineteenth-century England, or in the thirteenth century where St. Thomas lived so pleasantly. The taste and habit of political violence lives on in coups d’état, in purges, in well-staged trials. But John Jones, Jacques Duval, Ivan Ivanovich, the man in the street, is no longer included in the cast—he is now left to his normal role of spectator or supernumerary.

Gradually, too, the politically proscribed are amnestied, and come back, sometimes to be caught up again in the scramble of competitive politics; sometimes to become part of that staff of modern life, the bureaucracy; sometimes to live quietly as private citizens. The process is naturally the reverse of the process in which these men and women had been driven out. They go from Right to Left, and come back from Left to Right—first the almost pure radicals, then the moderates, then moderate conservatives, until the final restoration brings back remnants of the old gang. Such at least was the process in France and in England. After 1653, the Presbyterians took heart and began to emerge into politics, followed by the more moderate Episcopalians and Royalists, until in 1660 the Stuarts and their courtiers returned. In France the succession was very exact and ratified by formal bills of amnesty: first the Girondins—those who had survived—came back, while tears were shed over, and monuments erected to, the innocent victims of the bloodthirsty tiger Robespierre; then the Feuillants, the Lafayette-Lameth crowd; then the out-and-out Royalists and such-like émigrés, whom Napoleon, however, was able to control fairly well; then finally, in 1814, the Bourbons themselves.

So far the Romanovs have not returned to Russia, and only a very rash prophet would prophesy their ultimate return, or indeed any kind of formal restoration of hereditary monarchy. We must not ask our revolutions to make too neat a picture. It is clear, however, that save for the final monarchical restoration, the process we have outlined above has been going on slowly in Russia, at least since Lenin’s death. Even the aristocrats can go back if they make the proper submission and get the proper publicity—which was true of Napoleonic France. As for the numerous variants of revolutionary belief, it is clear that gathered around Stalin today are many men who were far from orthodox in 1917. Even the sainted Gorki was what in France would be called a rallié, a man who rallied to the Communist regime only after the worst of the Terror was safely over. On the other hand, almost all the old Bolsheviks, the men who ruled Russia in the period of crisis, have by now been liquidated. Stalin in 1938 can hardly make any direct human contact with his revolutionary past.

The personnel of government in the Thermidorean period and in the new-old regime that finally emerges from the revolution is likely to be varied in origin. Napoleon was served by old aristocrats of the noblesse d’épée, by bureaucrats trained in the old regime, by Fayettists, by Girondins and even by a few once-violent Jacobins. Of men like Albemarle, Shaftesbury, and Downing, who stood high in the government of Charles II after his restoration, it has been written: “They were of the same school as Blake and Vane; they represented the most solid political attainments of the Cromwellian party.” Downing’s career is an especially good example of how men of ability and a certain moral elasticity can traverse revolutions. He was graduated from Harvard in 1642, and went to England at the happy moment of Puritan supremacy. He soon rose high in the ranks of the Cromwellians, devoting his talents especially to diplomacy. He contrived to turn his coat at just the right time, and was accepted in the service of the new king. It is from this early and somewhat atypical Harvard man that Downing Street in London takes its name. Even in Russia, though by now old Bolsheviks are almost completely weeded out of the very highest councils, there are undoubtedly many of them, their fires well banked, in the great new bureaucracy.

The new governing classes in all our societies are then a very miscellaneous lot, with very little in common as regards social origins, education, and earlier party affiliations. They have in common a certain adaptability. They have survived a rigorous if somewhat arbitrary selection. They seem, after the heroes of the Terror, tame and unenterprising in many ways. But they usually do a pretty good job in getting institutions, laws, routines, all the necessary standard ways of doing things, once more working.

Along with amnesty to former moderates there goes on a reverse process of repression and persecution of unrepentant revolutionists of all sorts. The further the reaction moves to the Right, the wider its definition of revolutionists to be duly restrained as suitable reaction against the honors of the Reign of Terror. The Thermidoreans themselves are by no means unwilling to apply terroristic methods in the proper direction. The White Terrors are as real as the Red. Even in England, the well-known Clarendon Code of the Restoration conforms closely enough to the general pattern of repression later carried out in France and in Russia. The clever and unprincipled extremist is almost always able to weather the White Terror—witness Fouché again. It is only the convinced and persistent extremists who suffer.

As for the more active and violent leaders of the original Terror, they are of course eliminated, either by exile or by death. They are now declared to have been fanatics, villains, bloodthirsty tyrants, scoundrels. They become very convenient scapegoats, explanations of the difficulties the new regime has getting things settled. If there is one very dramatic scapegoat, and he is already dead, so much the better. Cromwell’s body was dug up after the Stuart Restoration and hanged at Tyburn, along with Ireton’s and Bradshaw’s. He became a tyrant, an ogre, a blasphemer, and so remained on the whole until in the nineteenth century Carlyle started the rehabilitation which has made him a hero. Except for a small sect led by the late Albert Mathiez, Robespierre has never recovered the status of hero. The Thermidoreans made Robespierre a prime scapegoat, the leader of the gang of terrorists, a vain and capricious tyrant, a bloody villain. Lenin, of course, died a saint, but fortunately for Stalin Trotsky made a grand scapegoat. Recent events have shown that in this respect Russia is still in its Thermidorean period, and the process of finding big and little scapegoats seems to be going on merrily in that country.

The lift of the ideal has gone by now. The new ruling class settles down to do as good a job as it can. But it clearly intends also to enjoy life, to possess the privileges and wealth a ruling class has hitherto always had. This new ruling class is certainly not going to try to achieve Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, for everyone in the society. It is quite content with the stratification which has worked itself out during the revolution. It will settle its own internal conflicts as far as it can, in the traditional way of ruling classes. There will be none of the dangerous direct appeals to the people, no risks of great popular uprisings. We have already noted how as the crisis period approaches the people come less and less into active politics, how the extremists reach power through what is no more than a coup d’état. With the Thermidoreans this process continues, until the political changes, the transfers of power during this period—and they are numerous, and by no means altogether regular and orderly—are hardly more than palace revolutions. When all is quiet and safe the victors will risk a plebiscite. Appearances have to be kept up, and a certain number of stereotypes about the will of the people have by now got fairly well established in the mind of John Jones.

John Jones may well be somewhat tired of political turmoil. But he is certainly not in the Thermidorean period in a generally prosperous condition. One of the most striking uniformities we can discern in this period is that, notably in France and Russia, but to a certain extent also in the England of the 1650’s and the America of the Articles of Confederation, there was more widespread economic suffering, especially among the poorest classes, than during the Terror, or during the last years of the old regime. When the Thermidoreans in France abandoned price-fixing and food-rationing, prices rocketed, paper money went on its classic decline, and the poor were left in a very bad way. There seems to be a general agreement that there was more actual suffering in France in the winters of 1795 and 1796 than at any other time in the revolutionary era. Yet save for a few pathetic bread riots at Paris and in some of the large cities, riots easily put down by the government, nothing happened. Similarly in Russia, there seems to be no doubt that the liquidation of the kulaks and the great famine during the first Five Year Plan brought a greater toll of death and misery than even the period of war communism. Possibly the explanation of the failure of this suffering to produce a rising is that suffering is not in itself a spur to effective revolt; perhaps it is merely that the new ruling class in Thermidor can and does use force with an effectiveness the old ruling class did not command; perhaps it is also that by Thermidor the great mass of people neither rich nor poor, not at any rate quite on the margin of existence, is worn out, exhausted, fed up with the experiences of the crusade for the Republic of Virtue.

The lift of the ideal has also gone out of the wars the revolutionists have been waging to spread their gospel. It is doubtless true that these wars were never wholly devoted to the spreading of this gospel, and certainly the catchwords of the gospel continue to be used long after the heroic period of the crisis. But aggressive nationalism gradually supplants the missionary spirit, a Messianic crusade gradually becomes clearly a war of conquest. Cromwell turned English energies to the reconquest of Ireland and then to the re-establishment of English prestige abroad. The seizure of Jamaica is a little thing if compared with Napoleon’s conquests, but it is cut from the same sociological pattern. With Sexby and Blake in earlier years, patriotism had taken the form of wishing to make all Europe republican; by the middle of the decade of the fifties, English patriotism had returned to more normal channels. That under the Directory and Napoleon French nationalism conformed to the pattern we have sketched above should be clear even to the idolaters of Napoleon.

In Russia in the early days of the revolution nationalism in the aggressive sense was virtuously abandoned according to the best tenets of Marx; in the purely cultural sense nationalism became the prized basis of soviet federalism. To many admirers of the Russian revolution it will not be at all clear that Russia has also conformed to our pattern, has fitted in with the uniformity by which Messianic revolutionary proselyting in other lands becomes the aggressive nationalism with which we are familiar. The skeptical can only reply that the boasted federal equality of the national groups within the Soviet Union has not proved incompatible with practical domination by the Great Russians, though unquestionably the Soviet government has been in most respects more “liberal” towards the other national groups than was Czarist Russia, and more successful in integrating them into the larger unity of the U.S.S.R. But more important for our purposes is the clear reappearance of ordinary nationalism in Stalin’s Russia. This has not yet taken the aggressive forms French nationalism took under Napoleon, largely because the present international situation of Russia is very different from that of France at the end of the eighteenth century. But evidence of the existence of a strong national spirit in contemporary Russia is abundant; it can be found in the abandonment of the attempt to foment revolution in other countries, and a return to the policy of nationalistic alliances, in the deliberate encouragement of the patriotic study of Russian history, in the tone of the Russian press, in all phases of Russian cultural life. Of course the nice Marxist internationalist slogans are still repeated. Napoleon, “Child and Champion of Jacobinism,” also made abundant and effective use even of such compromising revolutionary terms as “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” But he did not fool all his contemporaries, and he certainly ought not to fool historians.

III. Return of the Church

The position of the recognized religions of the old regimes is one of the very best indicators of the nature and extent of these Thermidorean reactions. We saw in the last chapter that the extremists had developed what we had to call a religion of their own, an active, crusading, intolerant faith that sent its devotees storming the gates of heaven on earth. Naturally enough during their supremacy the extremists persecuted the old established faiths, Catholic and Protestant alike. The English Independents persecuted papists, prelatists, and Presbyterians with a zeal perhaps diminishing in that order. In France the Catholic Church had been long a target for the philosophes. The victorious Jacobins were not altogether of one mind either as to the treatment of the Catholic Church or as to just what sort of substitute might be desirable. Cults of Reason, of the Fatherland, of the Supreme Being, all had their advocates. Most of them could agree on banning the non-juring Catholics who were loyal to the Pope. At the height of the Terror the most violent “dechristianizers” had their way in some regions, destroying or defacing churches, guillotining or banishing priests, staging burlesques of Catholic ceremonials. Fouché at Nevers caused to be inscribed over the gate of the cemetery the confident assertion: Death is an eternal Sleep.

The Bolsheviks were brought up in a hatred for the Greek Orthodox Church at least as violent as that which the Jacobins felt for the Roman Catholic. They had a firm belief, nourished by much repetition, that religion is “the opium of the people.” They thought of themselves as men of science and hence atheists. Once in power the Bolsheviks began an active campaign against the churches, though especially in the early days of war communism they had a good deal else to do, and left the clergy to struggle along by itself. There were the usual acts of violence against persons of the clergy and against the church buildings, shutting of the monasteries, and so on. Priests were of course classed in the non-productive group, and suffered more than other men from lack of food during the great scarcity. Yet one gets the impression that in Russia sheer terrorism directed against organized Christianity was not quite as intense as it had been in France. The Bolsheviks had a great belief in the power of proper education, and planned from the first a state monopoly which should insure the young against exposure to the danger of infection with Christian notions. For adults the government trusted in anti-religious propaganda, in museums exposing the fakes and horrors of the old religion, and in the general spread of enlightenment and desire for the good things of this world. The “League of the Militant Godless” was formed with government support, the presses and the artists got to work on posters, the newspapers went enthusiastically into this relatively safe pursuit, and for a while in the 1920’s foreign observers might not unreasonably report that Christianity in Russia seemed well on the way to extinction.

No such confident conclusion seems safe in 1938. It is very difficult indeed to get trustworthy information on the present status of organized Christianity in Russia. On this subject, even more than on most subjects, Westerners traveling in Russia find what they want to find. But it does seem definitely established that now after twenty years of Bolshevik supremacy Christianity has not been wiped out in Russia, is not even limited to older people brought up before the revolution. The League of the Militant Godless announced in 1930 that the government had closed only 3,380 out of the 50,000 churches of Czarist Russia. At the tenth anniversary meeting of the League, the president stated that 50 per cent of Russian youth were still Christian. In 1936 the League complained that priests in various parts of Russia have cleverly adapted themselves to Communism, have insinuated themselves into the collective farms, have taken to appearing at trade-union meetings. A recent Catholic traveler reported in the Commonweal that in a conducted tour he was not shown any of the famous “atheist museums” and that on inquiry he found that the whole business of anti-Christian propaganda was being very much soft-pedaled.

On every hand one finds bits of evidence all pointing to the same conclusion: under the Thermidorean rule of Stalin, the Orthodox Church is gradually coming back into a recognized and secure position in Russian life. This is not to say that the Militant Godless are not still active, nor that they will in their turn find themselves persecuted. Nor is it to assert that the Orthodox Church is today exactly what it was in the days of the Czars. On the contrary, it is evident that its clergy, once known for their conservatism and inaction, have been stirred to a real effort of adaptation to new circumstances. But it does mean that the rites of the church still go on in a Russia no longer perhaps exactly the Holy Russia of old, but by no means cut off from an institution identified with a thousand years of her history.

In France the reconciliation of the Thermidoreans and the old church went on so rapidly that within less than a decade from the “dechristianizing” movement of the Terror Napoleon could sign a Concordat with the Pope which officially re-established Roman Catholicism as the State Church of France. During the worst of the Terror, Catholics in France had had to hold their services in secret, in spite of the fact that freedom of worship was guaranteed by law. With the fall of Robespierre they began to risk public services in the buildings still spared them. As more and more moderates were amnestied, the government became more and more friendly, and the last four years of the eighteenth century saw France with complete religious freedom and with almost complete separation of Church and State. Napoleon and many of the new ruling class felt the need of winning the Catholics over completely, and the formal Concordat was negotiated. The re-established Catholic Church was not, however, in exactly the same legal position as under the old regime, when it had been the sole recognized faith. Protestants and Jews were by the new laws given equal status with the Catholics.

Organized Christianity does not enter in the same way into the American revolution. In England, however, there is a striking similarity to the broad lines of development in France and Russia. The established faith of the old regime was the Church of England, in many ways, liturgically, theologically, governmentally, not very far removed from the Catholic tradition. The new revolutionary faith was Calvinism in its various forms, of which the Independent finally triumphed. Under Independent rule the Anglican worship, and indeed rival forms of Calvinist worship, were kept down. On paper, at least, this religious persecution was even more violent than that in France and in Russia. The disputants in the pamphlet warfare among the sects were learned men with abundant vocabularies and firm convictions. On the other hand, save in Ireland, there was rather less violence and bloodshed in immediately religious quarrels during the English revolution than in those of France and Russia. With the repressing of the more radical sects, and especially the Quakers, the swing back begins in England. In the later years of Cromwell Presbyterians and even Anglicans reasserted themselves in public life and carried on their religious services in virtual freedom. When Charles II came back the Church of England was re-established in very nearly its old prestige and privileges, and the cycle took its usual form with the persecution of the sects that had made the revolution.

The history of the accepted religious faiths of the old regimes is then one of the very clearest uniformities our study of revolutions affords. One might almost make a graph, in which the prestige of the old organized faith might be seen to follow a fairly regular curve, lowest at the worst of the Terror, gradually climbing back during the Thermidorean reaction to a position almost as high as that from which it had started in the old regime. Such a graph would be deceptively simple, especially if its interpretation involved the notion that the restored church was exactly its old self once more. Neither men nor institutions pass through the crisis of revolution unchanged. The priests who had undergone persecution were never afterwards the same men who had once enjoyed the security of the old regime, any more than the émigrés who returned from exile were the same men who had once been unchallenged members of a ruling class. We shall later consider the transformation of institutions apparently restored after the revolution. Here we may say a word about the émigré priests, nobles, rich men, whose return to public life is one of the characteristic phenomena of Thermidor.

It would be most satisfying morally to conclude that the old clergy return purified and strengthened by the test of persecution and exile, that the old rulers return chastened and wise. But no such conclusion seems possible. There are exceptions, like the Duc de Richelieu, who had learned moderation and the art of ruling men during his long exile in Russia, and who returned to serve Louis XVIII faithfully but well. In general, however, the religious as well as the moral and political sentiments and ideas of the émigrés are narrowed, intensified, strained into complete unpliability by the bitterness of their lot. The Catholicism of Joseph de Maistre has a rigidity and harshness not common in the faith into which he had grown up during the old regime.

For only in the world of the Alger books is adversity always a good teacher. In the world into which the English Royalists, the French and Russian émigrés, were thrust, adversity on the whole taught romantic and unquestioning acceptance of loyalties which they thought were old, but which were really new and high-powered abstractions drawn from their recent experiences in the arena. They returned having forgotten much and having learned a great deal—mostly knowledge neither useful nor realistic. This whole subject of what happens to the émigrés and to the defeated, cowed moderates, is a fascinating one, and one which deserves to be further studied by competent persons. In spite of much good research at the level of narrative history, it remains one of the most obscure parts of the sociology of revolution. But in any case the returned émigrés do not have the field to themselves, do not by any means determine the final course of the reaction to the revolution. Even in England in 1660 and in France in 1814, the more extreme among the returned émigrés did not get things done as they wanted them. The Downings and the Albemarles, the Talleyrands and the Fouchés, the men on the scene, had got much too far ahead of them.

IV. The Search for Pleasure

The full flavor of the Thermidorean reaction is reserved for the social historian. In the dress, amusements, in the petty details of the daily lives of ordinary men and women, the full extent of the popular abandonment of the Republic of Virtue becomes clear. So marked is this let-down that even the historian feels it, and most nineteenth-century liberal historians hardly concealed their disgust and disappointment when they came to record the indecent pleasures of the English Restoration or of the French Directory. The austerities of the good life according to Calvin or Robespierre seemed a noble standard, a goal towards which men might struggle with a heroism that adorns a work of history. The doings of a society in which a Nell Gwyn or a Teresa de Cabarrus were apparently the most important actors could hardly be edifying to anybody, and could be made instructive only with the addition of proper sermonizing. Scandal writers, romantic biographers, and other purveyors to a corrupt public taste have of course fallen with delight on the ripe tidbits of the Thermidors, but the high-minded men who write serious history have passed by these periods holding their hands to their noses. From one source or another, however, we can find what we need to know about the social history of our societies in this particular phase of revolution. We shall try to avoid being shocked or titillated, and to see how the obvious moral looseness of the Thermidorean reactions fits in with the uniformities we have been working out. But first for a brief review of the facts.

Within a few days of the guillotining of Robespierre and his more conspicuous followers Parisians began to indulge publicly and with gusto in a whole series of pleasures denied them during the tension of the Terror. Politicians may have thought that “Terror will not cease to be the order of the day until the last enemies of the Republic have perished,” but ordinary men and women for once imposed their obvious wants and needs directly on the politicians. One gets the impression that few phenomena in the course of the French revolution were more genuinely “popular” and “spontaneous” than the revulsion from the restraints of the Terror. The people of Paris took Robespierre’s death as a signal that the lid was off.

Dance halls were opened up all over Paris, prostitutes began operating “with their former audacity” (to quote a police report), well-dressed prosperous young men most unrepublicanly drunk began running about and cracking dour, virtuous Republicans over the head. These young men were the famous jeunesse dorée, a gilded youth with no illusions about a Republic of Virtue, and which would nowadays certainly be labeled Fascist at once. Both male and female costume had during the crisis period tended towards sobriety, the women being wrapped in flowing Roman robes and in more than Roman virtue. Now all was changed. The men’s clothes became extremely foppish, with tight trousers, elaborate waistcoats, and stocks that mounted beyond the chin. The women’s dressmakers were still classically inspired, but with a sure erotic sense they concentrated their efforts on the skillful revealing of the breasts. The costume directoire is an excellent symbol of the period.

With the abandonment of price-fixing and in the inflation which followed, a class of newly rich speculators, war profiteers and clever politicians arose. Parliamentary scandals do indeed crop up in earlier periods of the revolutions, even in the crisis period. Corruption can be pretty well proved for certain members of the English Long Parliament and the French Convention even in their great days. But in these earlier periods exposure was followed by swift and sure punishment. Now, in Thermidor, no one seems to care very much and certainly nothing is done. There is gossip, and in some quarters indignation. But mostly politicians who grafted successfully were admired, as they later were to be in the United States.

Still jittery over the Terror, fearing its return, uncertain of their wealth and position, often quite uneducated in the patrician arts, the Thermidoreans spent their money freely and vulgarly. They gambled, they raced horses and fought cocks, they were mad about dancing. All this they did noisily and with little regard for the traditional decencies of the eighteenth century. In these short years the real basis for the romantic taste of nineteenth-century France was laid. The ladies of the period are famous for their gaiety and abandon. Their leader was Teresia de Cabarrus, once mistress of the corrupt representative Tallien, and now his wife. She was universally known, in a phrase that displays the cynicism of the age, as “Our Lady of Thermidor.”

All of us know the age of Charles II as an extreme reaction from the rule of the Saints. Restoration drama has, especially since Victorian times, been a symbol for naughtiness, for the kind of play no nice person could witness without blushing. Nell Gwyn has, in the national memory, ruled in triumph over a court life in which vice was as aristocratic as the most virtuous commoner could wish and suspect it to be. As a matter of fact, the Puritan code of manners and morals was never perfectly established, even in the years immediately following the death of Charles I. The less public pleasures were always possible, and prohibitions against horse-racing, bear-baiting, Christmas and other heathen festivals were subject to the same kind of nullification the Eighteenth Amendment received in this country. The very harshness of some of the Puritan prohibitions was in itself an indication that the Puritans were having a hard time getting all Englishmen to behave in such a way that they would not “stink in the nostrils of the just.”

Yet the Puritan rule was in fact harsh and rigid enough to give non-Puritans plenty of grievances, and in its main lines the Thermidorean reaction was as real in England as it was to be in France. There was not in England the same mixture of parvenus and tired and lucky aristocrats as in France, and esthetically speaking the reaction in England was on a much higher lever than that in France. But in the frank return to the pleasures of the senses, to gambling, drinking, dancing, open love-making, to a light and cynical literature, to a frank joy in clothes and other vanities, the two countries present a very close parallel. Nor was the English Restoration altogether without a lushness of taste which chaster souls find offensive. Especially in female costume the contrast to the sobrieties of the early period is very striking. The ladies wore dresses of riotous and often conflicting colors, put on towering lace headdresses, fantastic patches and generous cosmetics on their faces, wore and displayed elaborately brocaded petticoats.

We need hardly labor this point about the loosening of moral restraints in the Thermidorean period in England and in France. We shall have to be more careful in establishing the facts about any such loosening of moral restraints in Soviet Russia. Here the facts are certainly not yet clear in the histories. Kindly and not very earthy souls like the Webbs see in Russia today an orderly society, half-workshop and half-nursery. Disillusioned radicals like Mr. Eugene Lyons see most of the major public sins of capitalistic countries magnified among the bureaucrats of Stalin’s gang, and the minor private vices, especially those of ostentation and comfort-seeking, at least as common among these bureaucrats as among our own corrupt middle classes. It does seem reasonably clear that no such striking and rapid shift from the public pursuit of virtue to the public pursuit of pleasure has taken place in Russia as took place in France and in England. But again we must not expect our uniformities to be suspiciously exact. In its broad lines, the Russian Thermidor runs as true to form morally and socially as we have seen it does politically.

In the first place, Thermidor in Russia began in Lenin’s own lifetime, with the coming of the New Economic Policy in 1921. Private property and private trading were once more permitted in Russia. The new class of entrepreneurs who rose out of this situation, the Nepmen, remind one forcibly of the similar class of profiteers who rose in France out of the abandonment of price-fixing after the fall of Robespierre. They were never quite sure of their status, and they carried over into their now legal activities a good many of the habits they had acquired in their bootlegging days under the Terror. As a class, they were “exceptionally vulgar, profiteering, crude, and noisy.” In the next few years prostitution, gambling, and other un-Marxist pleasures returned so obviously to Moscow and Leningrad that only the most convinced of “fellow-travelers” were unable to see them. Most foreigners in Russia since 1917 have perhaps been prevented from what we may hopefully call the normal use of their eyesight less by the activities of Communist officials entrusted with the task of guiding foreigners than by their own strong religious conviction that all must be well in the Marxist heaven. Yet until the Five Year Plan was initiated, the return of the bourgeois vices was so obvious, especially in the middle twenties, that even foreign Communists noticed the fact.

Stalin’s apparent return to Communism in 1928-29 is really no more significant than Napoleon’s apparent repudiation of the corruptness and moral looseness of the Directory once he had achieved secure power by the coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire. There seems to be in all our societies a certain reaction to the Thermidorean reaction, notably in this matter of the public pursuit of pleasure. Men in great numbers can no more devote themselves heroically and permanently to sin than to holiness. The thousand dance halls said to have been opened up in Paris immediately after the Terror could have kept going profitably only if most of the population of Paris wanted to dance most of the time. And in spite of Anglo-Saxon ideas to the contrary, Parisians are really not built that way.

What happens in the years following the crisis of the Terror is a kind of seesaw between moral restraint and moral looseness, at the end of which a kind of equilibrium is arrived at in which most men and women behave in respect to such matters as gambling, drinking, love-making, the adornment of their persons, and the use of leisure, about the way their grandfathers and grandmothers had behaved. If we look at Stalin’s Russia and ask ourselves how far there seems to be opportunity for the old Adam and the old Eve to come out in the lives of Russians we shall get a more accurate measure of the reality of Thermidor in Russia than we could get from any amount of Marxist or anti-Marxist theorizing.

Mr. Eugene Lyons tells with malicious delight the story of the bafflement and anger of a correspondent of the New York Jewish Freiheit, a Communist paper, when he was excluded from a government reception in Russia because he did not have a dinner jacket. Dinner jackets a part of the dictatorship of the proletariat! Nothing could be more absurd, illogical and wholly natural. The dinner jacket satisfies a number of human needs—the anthropologist could analyze most of them for you—and there seems to be no evidence that any of our revolutions had much long-run effect on these needs. A commissar needs a dinner jacket at least as much as a Congressman or a D.A.R. lecturer.

Detail after detail might be brought forward to show how the dictatorship of the proletariat in contemporary Russia is by no means the dictatorship of virtue we have seen prevailing in the crisis periods of our revolutions. Jazz, for instance, was long prohibited in Russia. Jazz was clearly the product of a decadent bourgeois civilization, an indecent way of stimulating what no good Marxist would want, or need, to have stimulated, one of the protean forms of “opium for the people” in capitalistic countries. Communists would dance from sheer joy to innocent, spring-like music. In the late twenties, however, the fox-trot and similar dances began to seep into Communist Russia, and nowadays we are told that American dance music is played as frequently and as badly in Russia as in the rest of Europe.

No one dramatic event like the fall of Robespierre can be used to date Thermidor in Russia. But a whole series of little matters of daily life combine to make an impressive case for the reality of the Russian reaction. A youth leader appears at a national youth congress in a necktie, a step which when first taken must have been as shocking as would be in this country the appearance of a Commencement speaker in overalls. A fashion show is held in Moscow, and mannequins actually parade, gliding and smiling with conventional lack of abandon, almost as if they were poor little wage-slaves in Paris or New York. Lipsticks and other cosmetics begin to appear even in the shops patronized by working girls. Stories of crime, “human interest” stories, begin to appear in the pages of newspapers hitherto superior to such capitalistic drivel, and hitherto consecrated to the pure heights of politics. Movies are made in which are to be seen recognizable human beings, insignificant, comic, stupid, jealous, even Russian, rather than bloodless abstractions representing Capitalism, the Landlord, Communism, the Proletariat, Man in Revolt.

The Bolsheviks had been very superior about the family. It was an institution of the old regime, interwoven with all sorts of religious elements, inevitably conservative in its social action. The family was a stuffy little nest breeding selfishness, jealousy, love of property, indifference towards the great needs of society. The family kept the young indoctrinated with the stupidities of the old. The Bolsheviks would break up the family, encourage divorce, educate the children to the true selflessness of Communism, get them used to collective enterprises and collective social life, get rid of the influence of the church in family relations. Now there seems to be no doubt that in contemporary Russia Stalin’s government is deliberately attempting to inculcate the old family virtues. Movies, plays, novels have restored respect for parents, the old family ties, to honor again. Gallantry towards women seems to be coming back; and gallantry towards women is a shocking survival of feudalism, a symbol of their inferior position in society. Divorce, once about as easy and inexpensive as it could possibly be, has now been made more expensive and more difficult. More important, the government seems to be encouraging the spread of a sentiment that marriage is a serious and permanent affair, something made in heaven as heaven now seems understood in Russia. Abortion, which the old Bolsheviks proudly made as legal and as easy as appendectomy in America, and almost as frequent, has now been forbidden by law save where it can be certified as necessary to preserve the woman’s life. Stalin is actually taking measures to encourage large families. And underlying these various measures, and much more important as a general indication of what is going on in Russia than any one of them, is an atmosphere we should almost call Victorian. The present rulers of Russia seem to be trying deliberately to cultivate the kind of sentiments characteristic of societies in equilibrium—the domestic affections, simple patriotism, love of work and routine, obedience to those in power, dislike for individual eccentricities, in short, what Pareto called the “persistent aggregates.”

Pursuing these ends, Stalin has recently decreed that Marxist debunking of Russian history is to cease, that Russians are once more to learn of the glories of the Russian past. The Byzantine missionaries who brought Christianity to Russia are no longer to be painted as fools and villains, agents of what was clearly capitalistic imperialism, abject persons like contemporary missionaries bringing Bible, rum and syphilis to the South Seas. On the contrary, Christianity in Russia is to be seen as an essential step in preparing the barbarous Slavs for higher things. Peter the Great and Catherine are no longer to be made cruel despots. They, too, were great architects of Russia’s destiny, without whom millions of other Slavs and Asiatics might not now enjoy the blessings of Communism. Perhaps Stalin hopes that his people will love him the more, once they learn how many other Stalins have in the past ruled over them as Czars.

V. Summary

Thermidor is then not by any means something unique, limited to the French revolution from which it takes its name. We have found in all three of our societies which underwent the full cycle of revolution a similar moral let-down, a similar process of concentration of power in the hands of a “tyrant” or “dictator,” a similar seeping back of exiles, a similar revulsion against the men who had made the Terror, a similar return to old habits in daily life.

Even in the United States, which did not undergo quite the same sort of crisis as the other countries, which did not have a real Reign of Terror and Virtue, the decade of the 1780’s displays in incomplete forms some of the marks of Thermidor. There were a relaxation of war discipline and war tension and a grand renewed scramble for wealth and pleasure. There were much financial speculation and much sheer suffering. Shays’s Rebellion, a most ineffectual gesture, reminds one of the feeble attempts of suffering Frenchmen and Russians to protest against the newly rich of their Thermidors. There was even a moral let-down in this country. “Sober Americans of 1784,” writes Jameson, “lamented the spirit of speculation which war and its attendant disturbances had generated, the restlessness of the young, disrespect for tradition and authority, increase of crime, the frivolity and extravagance of society.” All this sounds very like the original Thermidor in France.

In some sense the phenomenon of reaction and restoration seems almost inevitably a part of the process of revolution. At any rate it seems hard for the most optimistic lover of revolution to deny that we have found such a phenomenon in all of the four societies we have chosen to study. The very, very faithful may still maintain that the great revolution in Russia has proved itself exempt from this reaction, that in Russia the noble aims of revolutionists in Western society have at last achieved an unsullied reality. We ourselves cannot fit the facts of Stalin’s regime to any such interpretation. Yet the fact of Thermidor, even the fact of formal restoration as in 1660 and 1814, does not mean that revolution has changed nothing. We shall in the next chapter attempt to answer the very difficult question: Just what changes did these revolutions effect?

Chapter NINE A SUMMARY OF THE WORK OF REVOLUTIONS

I. Changes in Institutions and Ideas

With that tendency to absolutism which common sense shares with some more formal metaphysics, we are likely to think of the kind of revolution we have been studying as a cataclysmic break with the past. The revolution “marks a new era” or “ends forever the abuses of the old regime” or “digs a gulf between the old X and the new.” On the other hand, when disillusioned liberals like Mr. E. D. Martin come to turn against the revolutionary tradition, they conclude as sweepingly that in effect revolutions change nothing of importance—except perhaps for the worse—that revolutions are unpleasant and perhaps avoidable interludes in a nation’s history. Now it should be clear that our present study of the English, American, French and Russian revolutions can hardly permit any such absolute answers to the question: What did these revolutions really change? Some institutions, some laws, even some human habits, they clearly changed in very important ways; other institutions, laws and habits they changed in the long run but slightly, if at all. It may be that what they changed is more—or less—significant for the sociologist than what they did not change. But we cannot begin to decide this last matter until we have got the actual changes straight. We are considering here, of course, those changes which are apparent at the end of the revolutionary fever, those changes which the history books are likely to catalogue as “permanent.” With the changes promised but not achieved by the extremists, as with the many dramatic changes in the lives of the individual actors in the revolution, we are not here directly concerned at the moment.

Politically the revolution ends the worst abuses, the worst inefficiencies of the old regime. It settles for a time at least the kind of internal conflict out of which the “dual sovereignty” arose. The machinery of government works more smoothly after than immediately before the revolution. France is here a typical case. The old overlapping jurisdictions, the confusions and the compromises inherited from the thousand-year struggle between the centripetal forces of the Crown and the centrifugal forces of the feudal nobility, the welter of accumulated precedents, were all replaced by the work of the French revolution. An able bureaucracy operating within neatly subordinated administrative areas, a legal system efficiently codified, an excellent army well staffed and well provided for, enabled Napoleon to do much that his Bourbon predecessors could not possibly have done. Tocqueville long ago pointed out that the French revolution came to complete the work of a long line of French monarchs, to make centralized power in France effective and complete.

Here is one detail among many. In the old France, weights and measures varied from region to region, indeed from town to town. A bushel at Toulouse might be much more than a bushel at neighboring Montauban. Worse yet, the very names of measures might be wholly different words. The coinage was, like the present English coinage, partly duodecimal, and very hard to handle by long division. What the revolution did about all this is familiar to every schoolboy. It substituted the uniform system of weights and measures known as the metric system, a system which has made its way without benefit of revolution through most of the world outside the British Empire and the United States.

This achievement of governmental efficiency is really the most striking uniformity we can note in estimating the political changes effected by our revolutions. With suitable allowances for local differences, for accidents and for the inevitable residue of the unique with which all history and sociology must deal, England, America, and Russia also emerged from their revolutions with more efficient and more centralized governments. The process is less clear in England, partly because it took place before the full maturing of economic and cultural forces tending to promote such forms of efficiency as the metric system or the Code Napoléon. But, for all its complexities, the English government after 1660 was much better geared to the needs of the nation of shopkeepers than was the England of 1620, with knights’ fees, ship money, benevolences, Star Chamber, Court of High Commission, and the other appurtenances of the immature Stuart despotism. Parliament after 1660 was more completely master of England than the first two Stuarts had been.

Russia is in this respect as in so many still a subject for dispute. Violent opponents of Stalin insist that the new bureaucrats are just as inefficient, pettily tyrannical and stupid as they were said to have been under the Czars. Some of the sentiments involved in statements of this sort would seem to be more or less a constant of Russian life, and to a certain extent of life under any government. Gogol’s admirable comedy, The Inspector-General, deals as certainly with uniformities as any scientist could. Yet all in all future historians will probably have to admit that as a piece of political machinery the soviet system worked better than did that of the Czars, that the soviet bureaucracy was on the whole a more capable one than that of the Czars. You may not like the first Five Year Plan, but you must admit that beneath its parade of statistics lies a concrete economic achievement greater than anything the old regime could show for a similar period.

These revolutions were all made in the name of freedom, were all directed against the tyranny of the few and towards the rule of the many. This whole phase of revolutions is peculiarly involved with the existence of certain sentiments in human beings which make it very hard to apply the methods of science to the study of men in society. Yet it would seem that the full importance of such matters as democracy, civil rights, written constitutions, and indeed the whole apparatus of popular government lies rather within that vague and important field the Marxists like to call ideology than in the field of concrete political agencies which we are now studying. Certainly one is struck by the fact that all our revolutions promoted the efficiency of the government rather than the “right” of the individual to a romantic freedom to be himself. Even the traditional apparatus of popular government can be analyzed as an instrument to get things done in a particular situation, however strange such an analysis might seem to conventionally minded contemporaries of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. Bills of Rights, codes, and constitutions were in effect charters of the new ruling classes. Liberty as an ideal was one thing; liberty in politics was another and less exalted matter.

These revolutions all saw much transfer of property by confiscation or forced sale. They saw the fall of one ruling class and its succession by another ruling class recruited in part, at least, from individuals who were before the revolution outside the ruling class. They were accompanied by a definite and concrete demand for the abolition of poverty, for the equal sharing of wealth; the men who guided the Russian revolution continued long after its crisis period to insist that they were economic egalitarians, that Russia would not recognize private property in land and in capital goods. Marxist thought still separates our four revolutions into two different classes: the English, French, and American, all of which it considers to have been in their final results “bourgeois” revolutions, inevitable victories of business and industry over landed aristocracy; and the Russian revolution, in its final phases a true “proletarian” revolution. We may nevertheless be more impressed with the fact that in all four revolutions economic power changed hands, and that a newly amalgamated “ruling class” in the new Russia as in the new France directed the economic as well as the political life of the society.

In more detail, the English revolution took land from the more devoted Cavaliers and ecclesiastical property from the more unyielding Episcopalians and Presbyterians and gave it to typical Puritans, business men and clergymen alike. The church livings came back at the Restoration of 1660 into Anglican hands, but save for the property of a few great lords very close to Charles II, confiscated Royalist lands remained in the possession of their new owners. Most of these owners made their peace with the Stuart government, and thus was laid the foundation for the ruling class under which England won an empire in the next two centuries, a ruling class in which landed wealth and industrial wealth were almost inextricably mixed, and which proved to be a very good ruling class.

The concrete economic changes in France follow a similar pattern. Lands confiscated from clergy and émigré nobles were acquired by revolutionists, and for the most part remained in the possession of the purchasers even after the Restoration of 1814. Much of this land no doubt finally ended up in the possession of small independent peasants, and helped to put the final touches on the establishment of that very French class, universally regarded among writers and politicians as the core of modern France. But much of this transaction also benefited the middle class, and certainly the French ruling class after the revolution represents as striking a mixture of old wealth and new, of land and trade, as did the English.

In Russia the differences are not as great as they ought to be according to Marxist theory. There has been a transfer of economic power from one group to another rather than an equal sharing of economic power, an equal distribution of consumers’ goods, an end of struggle over economic goods or power—but you may put the Marxist formula as you like. The new Russian bureaucracy seems to be a privileged class which enjoys wealth in the form of consumers’ goods without yet possessing it in the forms we conventionally call “property.” At any rate, almost all reporters are agreed that in Russia in 1938 there is nothing like an equal distribution of consumers’ goods. What seems to have taken place is a development of the lines of movement of Russian economic history. Just as the French revolution put the finishing touches on the position of the peasantry, but by no means “gave” them the land suddenly, so the present status of Russian agriculture and industry seems to be a development of slavophile and other elements favoring collective farming over the kulaks, and of almost world-wide tendencies favoring large-scale bureaucratically managed industry over small independent competitive concerns. Here as in other countries the revolution certainly does not draw institutions out of a hat—nor out of a book, not even out of so impressive a book as Das Kapital.

None of these revolutions quite substituted a brand-new ruling class for the old one, at least not unless one thinks of a “class” without bothering about the human beings who make up the class, which is a favorite procedure of the Marxists. What happens is that by the end of the convalescent period there is well begun a kind of amalgamation, in which the enterprising, adaptable, or lucky individuals of the old privileged classes are for most practical purposes tied up with those individuals of the old suppressed classes who, probably through the same gifts, were able to rise. This amalgame is especially noticeable in the army and the civil service, but it is almost as conspicuous in business and industry, and higher politics. A detailed study of the social origins of Bonaparte’s officers, or the officers in the present Red Army, or of the men who actually ran the government of England in 1670, France in 1810, Russia in 1938, would certainly confirm this analysis. Moreover, the new men in the post-revolutionary ruling classes have made distinct compromises with the older ones, with that old world from which the crisis period of the revolution is so extreme a revulsion. Your Downings, Fouchés and Kalinins have no longer the fine freedom a Trotsky can enjoy. They are no longer revolutionaries, but rulers, and as such they are in some respects bound to “learn” from their predecessors.

It is in the social arrangements that most intimately and immediately touch the average man that the actual changes effected by our revolutions seem slightest. The grand attempts at reform during the crisis period try to alter John Jones’s relations with his wife, his children, try to give him a new religion, new personal habits. The Thermidoreans abandon most of this attempt, and in the end John Jones stands on certain matters about where he stood when the revolution began. Our study of revolutions should confirm something that sensible men have always known and that exasperated reformers have occasionally come to admit, at least to themselves—that in some very important ways the behavior of men changes with a slowness almost comparable to the kind of change the geologist studies.

We may take as an illustration of the foregoing uniformity the attempts of certain of our revolutionists to alter radically and quickly phases of the law of the family. Le Play has shown that the uniformities of the family are among the stablest and most persistent things in our Western civilization. The ardent Leftist revolutionist in the last few centuries has, therefore, naturally enough, tended to dislike this monogamous Christian family, to him a bulwark of individual selfishness, social snobbery, intellectual stuffiness, snarled up with testamentary red tape, dedicated to the myth of masculine superiority, hardened into rigidity by religious sanctions, a festering center which must be cleaned up before men and women can live as God, Nature, or Science intended them to live. The French revolution saw no widespread attempt to destroy the family, and indeed its generally middle-class course is filled with pious praise of the family virtues. But the humanitarians did put through some far-reaching legislation in this field, such as generous laws of adoption and other measures tending to break down the rigid, almost Roman, family law of the old regime. Notably they attempted to make illegitimate children absolutely equal in every respect with legitimate children. As the law to put this into effect was passed, a glowing orator remarked: “There are no more bastards in France.” We need hardly add that he was mistaken. In a monograph on French Revolutionary Legislation on Illegitimacy, the present author has tried to show how even the good bourgeois who passed this law were emotionally too entangled in the traditional family feelings to try to put it into effect. They said that bastards were free and equal to legitimate children; but they could not bring themselves to act as if they really believed or wanted it to be so. On the whole, the traditional family in its French form emerged unscathed from the revolution.

Russia has seen a much more determined attack on the monogamous Christian family, legislation making divorce even easier than in Nevada, legalizing abortion, encouraging collective household arrangements, establishing crèches and kindergartens, bringing children up as far as possible outside the home, and so on. Let there be no misunderstanding. Russian idealists who sought to do all of this were not nasty-minded folk seeking to make life easier for the sensualist. Quite the contrary, they had, as we have tried very hard to show, a strong streak of Puritanism. To this day, a young Russian Communist would be shocked to the fibers of his being at the sight of almost any American newspaper and periodical stand. These idealists thought the bourgeois family corrupting, and agreed with Mr. Shaw that marriage combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. Their legislation was aimed at achieving the ideals behind Christian monogamy though destroying what they regarded as the corrupting family institutions within which it was hedged.

Here again we are not in the position of historians working with good sources, but through the conflicting reports coming to us from Russia of the 1930’s we can make out that the reformers have failed, that the Christian monogamous family has survived the old Bolsheviks in Russia. Recent legislation, as we have seen, has not only hedged legalized abortion so much as to limit it to cases of the strictest medical necessity, but has actually set up premiums for large families. Divorce has been made more difficult. Filial piety and indeed all the conventional bourgeois family virtues are now in high honor in press, movie, stage, and school.

To take a very specific example, homosexuality was, for the old Bolsheviks, an abnormality, possibly open to medical treatment, but not of course a crime. They didn’t like it, but they were too consistent and open-minded to treat it as a crime. Naturally they had no narrow bourgeois disgust for the practice. But in March, 1934, homosexuality was made a crime with a three- to eight-year prison penalty. We cannot refrain from adding that the Webbs explain this with their usual obligingness: “It is understood that this action followed the discovery of centers of demoralization of boys, due to the influence of certain foreigners, who were summarily expelled from soviet territory.” But even with the foreigners expelled, Russia retains the law. The fact is that Russian sentiments on the subject of homosexuality are nearly constant; only Russian ideas on the subject are variable, and in the long run the constant prevails.

The whole subject of change in the routines of the daily life of John Jones, in the more intimate of his relations with his fellows and his environment, is none too well explored. Here again common sense, with its decisive “human nature doesn’t change,” is much too absolute. But it does appear that our revolutions had but slight permanent effect on the important little things of life for John Jones. What is perhaps loosely called the “Industrial Revolution” had certainly a much greater effect, forced John into a more difficult series of adjustments than did our revolutions. And none of our societies seems to have undergone changes as complete as those undergone by Turkish society since the World War or by Japanese society in the last fifty years. It is tempting to record the apparent paradox that Western society is in some respects more slow to change than Eastern society. But the truth is much more complex than any such paradox. Both the Turks and the Japanese seem to have preserved intact through social and economic change a series of national disciplines. In our Western societies, family, moral and religious disciplines have in a similar way served as a balance to very important social and economic changes, of which the revolutions we have studied are only a part.

Modern Western society has indeed gone through in the last few centuries changes so continuous that, if we adopt the very plausible concept of social equilibrium, we must expect to find certain forces pulling in the opposite direction, in the direction of stability. These forces are not as a rule articulate. They do not seem to interest intellectuals as much as do forces making for change. They are perhaps a bit undignified, and certainly undramatic. Insofar as they do get themselves translated into language, they appear in a variety of logical disguises difficult to penetrate. But they are there, and as we have seen, they set a definite limit to what the reformer or revolutionist can do. Bastardy can hardly stand up against logic or biology; but bastardy exists by virtue neither of logic nor of biology, but by virtue of well-established, slow-changing human sentiments. Men may feel tearfully sorry for poor children stigmatized from birth for something clearly not their fault; but hitherto not even revolution has prevailed against those perhaps ignoble but certainly persistent sentiments behind the “man-made” and “artificial” distinction between children born after a certain rite has been performed and those born without benefit of such a rite. The rite seems fragile, changeable, unimportant—a mere matter of trivial words and gestures. Actually it has proved effective against much grander words and more striking gestures, as well as against whole batteries of logic. For it is, to use Pareto’s terminology, associated with the “persistent aggregates,” patterns of sentiments and behavior very slow to change.

All this amounts to the statement that in our Western society men have continued to hold certain sentiments and to conform to certain set ways of doing things even after they have changed what they say about these sentiments and these acts. Our revolutions seem in many ways to have changed men’s minds more completely than they changed men’s habits. This is by no means to say that they changed nothing at all, that what men think is of no importance. Ideas are not quite magicians in this world, or Robespierre would not have fallen, and Trotsky would today be in Moscow and not in Mexico. But they are not to be dismissed as having no part in the social change. Indeed, what our Marxist friends would call the “ideological” changes effected by our revolutions deserve careful consideration.

One may distinguish two contrasting roles played by these ideas born of revolution. First, our revolutions in the end would seem to have taken the sting out of the radical ideas and slogans of their early days. They achieved the necessary miracle of reconciling aspiring men to the substantial failure of their aspirations. They turned what were originally verbal instruments of revolt, means of moving men to social action against the existing order, into something we shall have to be up-to-date and call the myths, folklore, symbols, stereotypes, rituals, of their respective societies. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” which once was the trumpet call to the storming of heaven on earth, is now in the Third French Republic no more than a bit of national liturgy, a comforting reminder that Frenchmen are the privileged heirs of a heroic past. There are signs that in Russia even so explosive a phrase as “Workers of the world, unite!” can be accommodated to the conservative, restraining necessities of ritual. After all, as too-logical radicals have pointed out, the Bible itself is full of good revolutionary doctrine; what organized Christianity has done with the Bible organized Communism ought to be able to do with a much simpler book like Das Kapital.

A second role is a more positive one. Even in their use as ritual, these ideas are not purely passive, mere bits of mumbo-jumbo. We cannot here go into the important and involved question of the role of these myths and symbols in a society. We certainly must avoid the stupid question as to whether such symbols “cause” any kind of social change. Here as almost everywhere in the social sciences the cart-and-horse formula of causation is useless, and indeed misleading. Sufficient for us that in all our societies we find that the memory of the great revolution is enshrined in practices that seem to be an essential part of the national state as a going concern. Insofar as men are today in England, France, America, and Russia heartened by awareness of membership in a nation, guided perhaps, and certainly consoled, by the nobler and more abstract beliefs, made conscious of some kind of security, of a status, by all sorts of ritualistic acts associated with the State or with the Church as a department of the State, fortified by the prospects still held out in the grand words of a Milton, a Jefferson, a Danton, a Lenin—insofar as men are so moved, the revolutions we have studied have given largely to the content of their emotions. In England, in America, in France, the memory of their great overturns has become a factor in the stability of existing society: in Russia, unless all signs fail, a similar state of affairs has just about been reached.

Yet our revolutions have also left behind a tradition of successful revolt. What is to established, contented, conforming, conventional men merely a ritualistic satisfaction, remains for discontented men a spur to activate their discontent. Our modern Western revolutionary tradition is to a certain extent cumulative, and the latest revolutionists in the tradition, the Russians, have carried their awareness of revolutionary history almost to an obsession. Trotsky, for instance, though he naturally never uses the conceptual scheme of the fever as we have employed it, seems constantly to be watching the course of the Russian revolution almost clinically, constantly looking for events to take courses observed before in France, in England, or wherever men have revolted in the name of the many against the few. If Mussolini and Hitler are equally interested in such clinical observations, this is but proof of our modern assumption that there are uniformities in history.

Again this tradition of revolt is an imponderable, but it seems to have gone into the making of the Western democracies, and to be one of the elements that is in its full form lacking in the development of Italy and Germany, where democratic revolutions have been abortive or at best unimpressive. To state the existence of this revolutionary tradition is not necessarily to make a judgment of value. We bring it forth as an observable fact, one not to be effectively denied by partisans of any stripe. Its exact influence in the complex equilibrium of our present societies we cannot here attempt to determine. Notably, we find great difficulties in estimating how far it has taken root in Russia. Possibly the Communism of Stalin is but “fascism of the Left.” But the whole temper of the Western democracies is influenced, surely, by the fact that they were born of one kind of revolution, with one kind of “ideal”—that is still best summarized as “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”

II. Some Tentative Uniformities

When all necessary concessions are made to those who insist that events in history are unique, it remains true that the four revolutions we have studied do display some striking uniformities. Our conceptual scheme of the fever can be worked out so as to bring these uniformities clearly to mind. We shall find it worth while, in attempting to summarize the work of these revolutions, to recapitulate briefly the main points of comparison on which our uniformities are based.

We must be very tentative about the prodromal symptoms of revolution. Even retrospectively, diagnosis of the four societies we studied was very difficult, and there is little ground for belief that anyone today has enough knowledge and skill to apply formal methods of diagnosis to a contemporary society and say, in this case revolution will or will not occur shortly. But some uniformities do emerge from a study of the old regimes in England, America, France, and Russia.

First, these were all societies on the whole on the upgrade economically before the revolution came, and the revolutionary movements seem to originate in the discontents of not unprosperous people who feel restraint, cramp, annoyance, rather than downright crushing oppression. Certainly these revolutions are not started by down-and-outers, by starving, miserable people. These revolutionists are not worms turning, not children of despair. These revolutions are born of hope, and their philosophies are formally optimistic.

Second, we find in our pre-revolutionary society definite and indeed very bitter class antagonisms, though these antagonisms seem rather more complicated than the cruder Marxists will allow. It is not a case of feudal nobility against bourgeoisie in 1640, 1776, and 1789, or of bourgeoisie against proletariat in 1917. The strongest feelings seem generated in the bosoms of men—and women—who have made money, or at least who have enough to live on, and who contemplate bitterly the imperfections of a socially privileged aristocracy. Revolutions seem more likely when social classes are fairly close together than when they are far apart. “Untouchables” very rarely revolt against a God-given aristocracy, and Haiti gives one of the few examples of successful slave revolutions. But rich merchants whose daughters can marry aristocrats are likely to feel that God is at least as interested in merchants as in aristocrats. It is difficult to say why the bitterness of feeling between classes almost equal socially seems so much stronger in some societies than others—why, for instance, a Marie Antoinette should be so much more hated than a Barbara Hutton; but at any rate the existence of such bitterness can be observed in our pre-revolutionary societies, which is, clinically speaking, enough for the moment.

Third, there is what we have called the desertion of the intellectuals. This is in some respects the most reliable of the symptoms we are likely to meet. Here again we need not try to explain all the hows and whys, need not try to tie up the desertion of the intellectuals with a grand and complete sociology of revolutions. We need state simply that it can be observed in all four of our societies.

Fourth, the governmental machinery is clearly inefficient, partly through neglect, through a failure to make changes in old institutions, partly because new conditions—in the societies we have studied, pretty specifically conditions attendant on economic expansion and the growth of new monied classes, new ways of transportation, new business methods—these new conditions laid an intolerable strain on governmental machinery adapted to simpler, more primitive, conditions.

Fifth, the old ruling class—or rather, many individuals of the old ruling class—come to distrust themselves, or lose faith in the traditions and habits of their class, grow intellectual, humanitarian, or go over to the attacking groups. Perhaps a larger number of them than usual lead lives we shall have to call immoral, dissolute, though one cannot be as sure about this as a symptom as about the loss of habits and traditions effective among a ruling class. At any rate, the ruling class becomes politically inept.

The dramatic events that start things moving, that bring on the fever of revolution, are in three of our four revolutions intimately connected with the financial administration of the state. In the fourth, Russia, the breakdown of administration under the burdens of an unsuccessful war is only in part financial. But in all our societies the inefficiency and inadequacy of the governmental structure of the society come out clearly in the very first stages of the revolution. There is a time—the first few weeks or months—when it looks as if a determined use of force on the part of the government might prevent the mounting excitement from culminating in an overthrow of the government. These governments attempted such a use of force in all four instances, and in all four their attempt was a failure. This failure indeed proved a turning point during the first stages, and set up the revolutionists in power.

Yet one is impressed in all four instances more with the ineptitude of the governments’ use of force than with the skill of their opponents’ use of force. We are here speaking of the situation wholly from a military and police point of view. It may be that the majority of the people are discontented, loathe the existing government, wish it overthrown. Nobody knows. They don’t take plebiscites before revolutions. In the actual clash—even Bastille Day, Concord, or the February Days in Petrograd—only a minority of the people is actively engaged. But the government hold over its own troops is poor, its troops fight half-heartedly or desert, its commanders are stupid, its enemies acquire a nucleus of the deserting troops or of a previous militia, and the old gives place to the new. Yet, such is the conservative and routine-loving nature of the bulk of human beings, so strong are habits of obedience in most of them, that it is almost safe to say that no government is likely to be overthrown until it loses the ability to make adequate use of its military and police powers. That loss of ability may show itself in the actual desertion of soldiers and police to the revolutionists, or in the stupidity with which the government manages its soldiers and police, or in both ways.

The events we have grouped under the name of first stages do not of course unroll themselves in exactly the same order in time, nor with exactly the same content, in all four of our revolutions. But we have listed the major elements—and they fall into a pattern of uniformities—financial breakdown, organization of the discontented to remedy this breakdown (or threatened breakdown), revolutionary demands on the part of these organized discontented, demands which if granted would mean the virtual abdication of those governing, attempted use of force by the government, its failure, and the attainment of power by the revolutionists. These revolutionists have hitherto been acting as an organized and nearly unanimous group, but with the attainment of power it is clear that they are not united. The group which dominates these first stages we call the moderates. They are not always in a numerical majority in this stage—indeed it is pretty clear that if you limit the moderates to the Kadets they were not in a majority in Russia in February, 1917. But they seem the natural heirs of the old government, and they have their chance. In three of our revolutions they are sooner or later driven from office to death or exile. Certainly there is to be seen in England, France and Russia a process in which a series of crises—some involving violence, street-fighting and the like—deposes one set of men and puts in power another and more radical set. In these revolutions power passes by violent or at least extra-legal methods from Right to Left, until at the crisis period the extreme radicals, the complete revolutionists, are in power. There are, as a matter of fact, usually a few even wilder and more lunatic fringes of the triumphant extremists—but these are not numerous or strong and are usually suppressed or otherwise made harmless by the dominant radicals. It is therefore approximately true to say that power passes on from Right to Left until it reaches the extreme Left.

The rule of the extremists we have called the crisis period. This period was not reached in the American revolution, though in the treatment of Loyalists, in the pressure to support the army, in some of the phases of social life, you can discern in America many of the phenomena of the Terror as it is seen in our three other societies. We cannot here attempt to go into the complicated question as to why the American revolution stopped short of a true crisis period, why the moderates were never ousted in this country. We must repeat that we are simply trying to establish certain uniformities of description, and are not attempting a complete sociology of revolutions.

The extremists are helped to power no doubt by the existence of a powerful pressure towards centralized strong government, something which in general the moderates are not capable of providing, while the extremists, with their discipline, their contempt for half-measures, their willingness to make firm decisions, their freedom from libertarian qualms, are quite able and willing to centralize. Especially in France and Russia, where powerful foreign enemies threatened the very existence of the nation, the machinery of government during the crisis period was in part constructed to serve as a government of national defense. Yet though modern wars, as we know in this country, demand a centralization of authority, war alone does not seem to account for all that happened in the crisis period in those countries.

What does happen may be a bit oversimply summarized as follows: emergency centralization of power in an administration, usually a council or commission, and more or less dominated by a “strong man”—Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin; government without any effective protection for the normal civil rights of the individual—or if this sounds unrealistic, let us say the normal private life of the individual; setting up of extraordinary courts and a special revolutionary police to carry out the decrees of the government and to suppress all dissenting individuals or groups; all this machinery ultimately built up from a relatively small group—Independents, Jacobins, Bolsheviks—which has a monopoly on all governmental action. Finally, governmental action becomes a much greater part of all human action than in these societies in their normal condition: this apparatus of government is set to work indifferently on the mountains and molehills of human life—it is used to pry into and poke about corners normally reserved for priest or physician, or friend, and it is used to regulate, control, plan, the production and distribution of economic wealth on a national scale.

This pervasiveness of the Reign of Terror in the crisis period is partly explicable in terms of the pressure of war necessities and of economic struggles as well as of other variables: but it must probably also be explained as in part the manifestation of an effort to achieve intensely religious ends here on earth. The little band of violent revolutionists who form the nucleus of all action during the Terror behave as men have been observed to behave before when under the influence of active religious faith. Independents, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, all sought to make all human activity here on earth conform to an ideal pattern, which, like all such patterns, seems deeply rooted in their sentiments. A striking uniformity in all these patterns is their asceticism, or if you prefer, their condemnation of what we may call the minor as well as the major vices. Essentially, however, these patterns are a good deal alike, and all resemble closely what we may call conventional Christian ethics. Independents, Jacobins, and Bolsheviks, at least during the crisis period, really make an effort to enforce behavior in literal conformity with these codes or patterns. Such an effort means stern repression of much that many men have been used to regarding as normal; it means a kind of universal tension in which the ordinary individual can never feel protected by the humble routines to which he has been formed: it means that the intricate network of interactions among individuals—a network which is still to the few men devoted to its intelligent study almost a complete mystery—this network is temporarily all torn apart. John Jones, the man in the street, the ordinary man, is left floundering.

We are almost at the point of being carried away into the belief that our conceptual scheme is something more than a mere convenience, that it does somehow describe “reality.” At the crisis, the collective patient does seem helpless, thrashing his way through a delirium. But we must try to avoid the emotional, metaphorical appeal, and concentrate on making clear what seems to be the really important point here. Most of us are familiar with the favorite old Tory metaphor: the violent revolutionist tears down the noble edifice society lives in, or burns it down, and then fails to build up another, and poor human beings are left naked to the skies. That is not a good metaphor, save perhaps for purposes of Tory propaganda. Even at the height of a revolutionary crisis period, more of the old building is left standing than is destroyed. But the whole metaphor of the building is bad. We may take instead an analogy from the human nervous system, or think of an immensely complicated gridwork of electrical communications. Society then appears as a kind of a network of interactions among individuals, interactions for the most part fixed by habit, hardened and perhaps adorned as ritual, dignified into meaning and beauty by elaborately interwoven strands of interaction we know as law, theology, metaphysics, and similar noble beliefs. Now sometimes many of these interwoven strands of noble beliefs can be cut out, and others inserted. During the crisis period of our revolutions some such process seems to have taken place; but the whole network itself seems so far never to have been altered suddenly and radically, and even the noble beliefs tend to fit into the network in the same places. If you kill off all the people who live within the network, you don’t so much change the network of course as destroy it. And in spite of our prophets of doom, this type of destruction is rare in human history. Certainly in none of our revolutions was there even a very close approach to it.

What did happen, under the pressure of class struggle, war, religious idealism, and a lot more, was that the hidden and obscure courses which many of the interactions in the network follow were suddenly exposed, and passage along them made difficult in the unusual publicity and, so to speak, self-consciousness. The courses of other interactions were blocked, and the interactions went on with the greatest of difficulties by all sorts of detours. The courses of still other interactions were confused, short-circuited, paired off in strange ways. Finally, the pretensions of the fanatical leaders of the revolution involved the attempted creation of a vast number of new interactions. Now though for the most part these new interactions affected chiefly those strands we have called the noble beliefs—law, theology, metaphysics, mythology, folklore, high-power abstractions in general—still some of them did penetrate at an experimental level into the obscurer and less dignified part of the network of interactions among human beings and put a further strain on it. Surely it is no wonder that under these conditions men and women in the crisis period should behave as they would not normally behave, that in the crisis period nothing should seem as it used to seem, that, indeed, a famous passage from Thucydides, written two thousand years before our revolutions, should seem like a clinical report:

“When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further, and determined to outdo the report of all who had preceded them by the ingenuity of the enterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man. A conspirator who wanted to be safe was a recreant in disguise. The lover of violence was always trusted, and his opponent suspected. He who succeeded in a plot was deemed knowing, but a still greater master in craft was he who detected one. On the other hand, he who plotted from the first to have nothing to do with plots was a breaker up of parties and a poltroon who was afraid of the enemy. In a word, he who could outstrip another in a bad action was applauded, and so was he who encouraged to evil one who had no idea of it.... The tie of party was stronger than the tie of blood, because a partisan was more ready to dare without asking why.”

With this we may put a quotation from a much humbler source, an obscure Siberian co-operative leader protesting against Red and White Terror alike. Mr. Chamberlin quotes:

“And we ask and appeal to society, to the contending political groups and parties: When will our much-suffering Russia outlive the nightmare that is throttling it, when will deaths by violence cease? Doesn’t horror seize you at the sight of the uninterrupted flow of human blood? Doesn’t horror seize you at the consciousness that the deepest, most elementary bases of the existence of human society are perishing: the feeling of humanity, the consciousness of the value of life, of human personality, the feeling and consciousness of the necessity of legal order in the state?... Hear our cry and despair: we return to prehistoric times of the existence of the human race; we are on the verge of the death of civilization and culture; we destroy the great cause of human progress, for which many generations of our worthier ancestors labored.”

Certainly, however, none of our revolutions quite ended in the death of civilization and culture. The network was stronger than the forces trying to destroy or alter it, and in all of our societies the crisis period was followed by a convalescence, by a return to most of the simpler and more fundamental courses taken by interactions in the old network. More especially, the religious lust for perfection, the crusade for the Republic of Virtue, died out, save among a tiny minority whose actions could not longer take place directly in politics. An active, proselyting, intolerant, ascetic, chiliastic faith became fairly rapidly an inactive, indifferent, worldly, ritualistic faith.

The equilibrium has been restored and the revolution is over. But this does not mean that nothing has been changed. Some new and useful tracks or courses in the network of interactions that makes society have been established, some old and inconvenient ones—you may call them unjust if you like—have been eliminated. There is something heartless in saying that it took the French revolution to produce the metric system and to destroy lods et ventes and similar feudal inconveniences, or the Russian revolution to bring Russia to use the modern calendar and to eliminate a few useless letters in the Russian alphabet. These tangible and useful results look rather petty as measured by the brotherhood of man and the achievement of justice on this earth. The blood of the martyrs seems hardly necessary to establish decimal coinage.

Yet those who feel that revolution is heroic need not despair. The revolutionary tradition is an heroic one, and the noble beliefs which seem necessary to all societies are in our Western democracies in part a product of the revolutions we have been studying. Our revolutions made tremendous and valuable additions to those strands in the network of human interactions which can be isolated as law, theology, metaphysics and, in the abstract sense, ethics. Had these revolutions never occurred, you and I might still beat our wives or cheat at cards or avoid walking under ladders, but we might not be able to rejoice in our possession of certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or in the comforting assurance that one more push will bring the classless society.

When one compares the whole course of these revolutions, certain tentative uniformities suggest themselves. If the Russian revolution at the end of our series is compared with the English at its beginning, there seems to be a development of conscious revolutionary technique. This is of course especially clear since Marx made the history of revolutionary movements of the past a necessary preparation for revolutionists of the present. Lenin and his collaborators had a training in the technique of insurrection which Independents and Jacobins lacked. Robespierre seems almost a political innocent when his revolutionary training is compared with that of any good Bolshevik leader. Sam Adams, it must be admitted, seems a good deal less innocent. All in all, it is probable that this difference in the explicitness of self-conscious preparation for revolution, this growth of a copious literature of revolution, this increasing familiarity of revolutionary ideas, is not one of the very important uniformities we have to record. It is a conspicuous uniformity, but not an important one. Revolutions are still not a form of logical action. The Bolsheviks do not seem to have guided their actions by the “scientific” study of revolutions to an appreciably greater degree than the Independents or the Jacobins. They simply adapted an old technique to the days of the telegraph and railroad trains.

This last suggests another conspicuous but not very important tendency in our four revolutions. They took place in societies increasingly influenced by the “Industrial Revolution,” increasingly subject to those changes in scale which our modern conquests of time and space have brought to societies. Thus the Russian revolution directly affected more people and more square miles of territory than any previous revolution; its sequence of events compresses into a few months what in England in the seventeenth century had taken years to achieve; in its use of the printing press, telegraph, radio, airplanes and the rest it seems, as compared with our other revolutions, definitely a streamlined affair. But again we may well doubt whether such changes of scale are in themselves really important factors. Men’s desires are the same, whether they ride towards their achievement in airplanes or on horseback. Revolutions may be bigger nowadays, but surely not better. The loudspeaker does not change the words.

Finally, at the risk of being tedious, we must come back to some of the problems of methods in the social sciences which were suggested in our first chapter. We must admit that the theorems, the uniformities, which we have been able to put forward in terms of our conceptual scheme, are vague. They cannot be stated in quantitative terms, cannot be used for purposes of prediction or control. But at the very outset we warned the reader not to expect too much. Even such vague theorems as that of the desertion of the intellectuals, that of the role of force in the first stages of revolution, that of the part played by “religious” enthusiasm in the period of crisis, that of the pursuit of pleasure during Thermidor, are, one hopes, not without value for the study of men in society. In themselves they amount to little, but they suggest certain possibilities in further work.

In the first place, by their very inadequacies they point to the necessity for a more rigorous treatment of the problems involved, challenging those who find them incomplete and unsatisfactory to do a better job. In the second place, they will serve the purpose of all first approximations in scientific work—they will suggest further study of the facts, especially in those fields where the attempt to make first approximations has uncovered an insufficient supply of the necessary facts. Notably here the facts for a study of class antagonisms are woefully inadequate. So, too, are the facts for a study of the circulation of the elite in pre-revolutionary societies. But there are a hundred such holes, some of which can surely be filled. Our first approximations will then lead the way to another’s second approximations. No scientist should ask more.

III. A Paradox of Revolution

Wider uniformities will, to judge by the past of science, some day emerge from more complete studies of the sociology of revolutions. Here we dare not hazard much that we have not already brought out in the course of our analysis of four specific revolutions. After all, these are but four revolutions of what seems to be the same type, revolutions in what may be not too uncritically called the democratic tradition. So precious a word is “revolution” to many in that tradition, and especially to Marxists, that they indignantly refuse to apply it to such movements as the relatively bloodless but certainly violent and illegal assumption of power by Mussolini or Hitler. These movements, we are told, were not revolutions because they did not take power from one class and give it to another. Obviously with a word in some ways as imprecise as “revolution” you can play all sorts of tricks like this. But for the scientific study of social change it seems wise to apply the word revolution to the overthrow of an established and legal parliamentary government by Fascists. If this is so, then our four revolutions are but one kind of revolution, and we must not attempt to make them bear the strain of generalizations meant to apply to all revolutions.

It is even more tempting to try to fit these revolutions into something like a philosophy of history. But the philosophy of history is almost bound to lead into the kind of prophetic activity we have already firmly forsworn. It may be that mankind is now in the midst of a universal “time of troubles” from which it will emerge into some kind of universal authoritarian order. It may be that the democratic revolutionary tradition is no longer a living and effective one. It may be that the revolutions we have studied could only have taken place in societies in which “progress” was made a concrete thing by opportunities for economic expansion which cannot recur in our contemporary world, with no more frontiers and no more big families. It may even be that the Marxists are right, and that imperialistic capitalism is now digging its own grave, preparing the inevitable if long-delayed world revolution of the proletariat. There are many possibilities, as to which it is almost true that one man’s guess is as good as another’s. Certainly a conscientious effort to study four great revolutions in the modern world as a scientist might cannot end in anything as ambitious and as unscientific as social prognosis.

We need not, however, end on a note of blank skepticism. It would seem that there are, from the study of these revolutions, three major conclusions to be drawn: first, that, in spite of their undeniable and dramatic differences, they do present certain simple uniformities of the kind we have tried to bring together under our conceptual scheme of the fever; second, that they point sharply to the necessity of studying men’s deeds and men’s words without assuming that there is always a logical connection between the two, since throughout their courses, and especially at their crises, they frequently exhibit men saying one thing and doing another; third, that they indicate that in general many things men do, many human habits, sentiments, dispositions, cannot be changed at all rapidly, that the attempt made by the extremists to change them by law, terror, and exhortation fails, that the convalescence brings them back not greatly altered.

As to what the experience of a great revolution does to the society that experiences it, we cannot conclude here too widely without trespassing on wider fields of history and sociology. Yet it does seem that the patient emerges stronger in some respects from the conquered fever, immunized in this way and that from attacks that might be more serious. It is an observable fact that in all our societies there was a certain flourishing, a peak of varied cultural achievements, after the revolutions. Certainly we may not moralize too much about the stupidities and cruelties of revolutions, may not lift up our hands in horror. It is quite possible that wider study would show that feeble and decadent societies do not undergo revolutions, that revolutions are, perversely, a sign of strength and youth in societies.

Certainly one quiet person emerges from his study, not indeed untouched by a good deal of horror and disgust, but moved also with admiration for a deep and unfathomable strength in men which, because of the softer connotations of the word, he is reluctant to call spiritual. Montaigne saw and felt it long ago: “I see not one action, or three, or a hundred, but a commonly accepted state of morality so unnatural, especially as regards inhumanity and treachery, which are to me the worst of all sins, that I have not the heart to think of them without horror; and they excite my wonder almost as much as my detestation. The practice of these egregious villainies has as much the mark of strength and vigor of soul as of error and disorder.”

Berkman the anarchist, who loathes the Russian revolution, tells a story which may represent merely his own bias, but which may none the less serve as a brief symbolical epilogue to this study. Berkman says he asked a good Bolshevik acquaintance during the period of attempted complete communization under Lenin why the famous Moscow cabmen, the izvoschiks, who continued in diminished numbers to flit about Moscow and to get enormous sums in paper roubles for their services, were not nationalized like practically everything else. The Bolshevik replied, “We found that if you don’t feed human beings they continue to live somehow. But if you don’t feed the horses, the stupid beasts die. That’s why we don’t nationalize the cabmen.” That is not an altogether cheerful story, and in some ways one may regret the human capacity to live without eating. But clearly if we were as stupid—or as sensible—as horses we should have no revolutions.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX

The following bibliography is not intended to be a scholarly one. It does not even include all the somewhat varied sources which have gone into this study of revolutions. It is intended solely as a guide to individuals or groups who may wish to attempt the difficult but rewarding study of revolutions. As such, it is merely suggestive, but it is complete enough so that anyone using all the leads these books and their bibliographies offer would soon find himself very completely immersed in the subject.

I. Historical Writing on the Four Revolutions

The first part of this bibliography aims to introduce the reader to some of the best-known historical writing about the four revolutions with which we are here concerned. Some of the later and not yet tested writing on these periods will also be included. But here least of all could anything like completeness be attempted. A full bibliography of French history alone from 1750 to 1815 would list books enough to fill a library; at a guess, including pamphlets and articles in periodicals, there would be well over three hundred thousand titles. Writings on the Russian revolution are already almost as numerous, and even more varied. The reader will simply find in these books an opportunity to check the supply of facts from which we have attempted to discover uniformities in the course of our revolutions.

A. ENGLAND

Eduard Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism. London, 1930. A belated but useful translation of the famous revisionist’s Sozialismus und Demokratie in der grossen englischen Revolution which appeared in German before the war. This is a necessary correction to the purely political and conventional interests of Gardiner, and even of Firth.