The anatomy of revolution

Transcriber’s Notes:

Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.

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THE _Anatomy of_ REVOLUTION

[Illustration]

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_Books By Crane Brinton_

The Anatomy Of Revolution The Lives Of Talleyrand

THE _Anatomy of_ REVOLUTION

_By Crane Brinton_ Associate Professor Of History, Harvard University

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC. _Publishers_ · _New York_

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Copyright, 1938, by W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC. 70 Fifth Avenue, New York

_First Edition_

Printed In The United States Of America

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To Alden And Helen Hoag, Who Listened To It All

Contents

Foreword 9

_Chapter_ I. THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF REVOLUTIONS 11

I. THE NECESSITY FOR A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH, 11. II. THE BARE ELEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC METHODS, 16. III. THE APPLICATION OF SCIENTIFIC METHODS TO THIS STUDY, 21. IV. LIMITATIONS OF THE SUBJECT, 31.

_Chapter_ II. THE OLD REGIMES 38

I. THE DIAGNOSIS OF PRELIMINARY SIGNS, 38. II. STRUCTURAL WEAKNESSES, ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL, 39. III. THE DESERTION OF THE INTELLECTUALS, 52. IV. CLASSES AND CLASS ANTAGONISMS, 63. V. SUMMARY, 79.

_Chapter_ III. FIRST STAGES OF REVOLUTION 82

I. THE ETERNAL FIGARO, 82. II. THE EVENTS OF THE FIRST STAGES, 85. III. SPONTANEITY OR PLANNING? 94. IV. THE ROLE OF FORCE, 105. V. THE HONEYMOON, 111.

_Chapter_ IV. TYPES OF REVOLUTIONISTS 113

I. THE CLICHÉS, 113. II. ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL POSITION: RANK AND FILE, 117. III. ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL POSITION: LEADERS, 123. IV. CHARACTER AND DISPOSITION, 129. V. SUMMARY, 145.

_Chapter_ V. THE RULE OF THE MODERATES 148

I. THE PROBLEM OF THE MODERATES, 148. II. EVENTS DURING THE RULE OF THE MODERATES, 151. III. DUAL SOVEREIGNTY, 161. IV. WEAKNESSES OF THE MODERATES, 166. V. THE FAILURE OF THE MODERATES, 176.

_Chapter_ VI. THE ACCESSION OF THE EXTREMISTS 179

I. THE COUP D’ÉTAT, 179. II. ORGANIZATION OF THE EXTREMISTS, 181. III. FITNESS OF THE EXTREMISTS, 193. IV. THE MACHINERY OF DICTATORSHIP, 206.

_Chapter_ VII. REIGNS OF TERROR AND VIRTUE 212

I. PERVASIVENESS OF THE TERROR, 212. II. THE TERROR AND THE OUTSIDER, 214. III. THE TERROR AND THE INSIDER: THE RELIGIOUS PARALLEL, 220. IV. WHAT MAKES THE TERROR? 236.

_Chapter_ VIII. THERMIDOR 244

I. UNIVERSALITY OF THE THERMIDOREAN REACTION, 244. II. AMNESTY AND REPRESSION, 247. III. RETURN OF THE CHURCH, 255. IV. THE SEARCH FOR PLEASURE, 261. V. SUMMARY, 270.

_Chapter_ IX. A SUMMARY OF THE WORK OF REVOLUTIONS 272

I. CHANGES IN INSTITUTIONS AND IDEAS, 272. II. SOME TENTATIVE UNIFORMITIES, 286. III. A PARADOX OF REVOLUTION, 299.

Bibliographical Appendix 303

I. HISTORICAL WRITING ON THE FOUR REVOLUTIONS, 303. II. THE WISDOM OF THE AGES, 310. III. THE MARXISTS, 312. IV. THE SOCIOLOGY OF REVOLUTIONS, 315.

Index 321

Foreword

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

Crane Brinton

PEACHAM, VERMONT. July 2, 1938.

_Chapter_ ONE THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF REVOLUTIONS

_I. The Necessity for a Scientific Approach_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_II. The Bare Elements of Scientific Methods_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_III. The Application of Scientific Methods to This Study_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This conceptual scheme may be used without committing its users in any sense to an organic theory of society. The organic theory, the motion of a “body politic,” is a metaphor developed by political philosophers into a kind of metaphysics. A good German idealist can find almost anything he wants in the organic theory, from the categorical imperative to a justification of anti-Semitism and a condemnation of parliamentary democracy. The word “society” is used in this study as a convenient way of designating the observed behavior of men in groups, their interactions, and that is all. We find it convenient to apply to certain observed changes in given societies a conceptual scheme borrowed from medicine. We should find it inconvenient and misleading to extend that conceptual scheme and talk of a body politic, with a soul, a general will, heart, nerves, and so on. When, for instance, we apply terms like “prodrome,” “fever,” “crisis,” to the French revolution, we are very definitely _not_ thinking of a personified France which suffers all these. To some this distinction may seem only a verbal one, and unimportant. It is, however, based on one of the most important distinctions in human thinking--the distinction between metaphysics and science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

_IV. Limitations of the Subject_

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

We shall, then, study four revolutions which on the surface seem to have certain resemblances, and deliberately avoid certain other types of revolution. Our four took place in the post-medieval Western world, were “popular” revolutions carried out in the name of “freedom” for a majority against a privileged minority, and were successful; that is, they resulted in the revolutionists’ becoming the legal government. Anything like a complete sociology of revolutions would have to take account of other kinds of revolution, and notably of two, the revolution initiated by authoritarians or oligarchies, or conservatives, that is, the “Rightist” revolution; and the abortive revolution.

No doubt there are sentimental distortions involved in distinguishing our four revolutions as “popular,” but even words heavily encrusted with sentiments have reference to concrete things; and the English, French, American, and Russian revolutions were attempts to ensure a different kind of life from that aimed at in the Fascist revolution in Italy and the National Socialist revolution in Germany. If, however, these Fascist revolutions seem too recent to be judged, or even to be catalogued, fairly, we may find in the time of troubles in Athens at the end of the fifth century B.C. less controversial evidence. Here the revolution of 411 B.C. was the work of the conservative or oligarchic group, and was directed against the old democratic constitution under which Athens had been ruled since Cleisthenes, if not since Solon. In the Council of Four Hundred set up by the successful revolutionists, the extreme oligarchs split with the moderates. After the assassination of the extremist Phrynicus, and the arrival of bad news from the front, the moderate Theramenes was able to take over power and set up a “mixed” constitution, seeking to combine the best of democracy and oligarchy. Then the fleet, in general strongly democratic, won the battle of Cyzicus, and paved the way to a fairly complete restoration of democracy in 410.

The final victory of Sparta led in 404 to a similar revolutionary cycle in Athens, beginning with the extreme oligarchic rule of the Thirty Tyrants and ending again with the restoration of democratic forms. In these movements, the sequence--to use perhaps misleading modern political analogies--is from Right to Center to Left, or from Extremists to Moderates to the Old Gang, a sequence clearly quite different from that we shall encounter in England, France, and Russia. Those devoted to the concept of social equilibrium will note that in these Athenian revolutions the tendency seems to be toward the restoration of old habits and old institutions; and there is much here--the role of political clubs, for instance, and the varied uses of violence--familiar to any student of modern revolutions. Yet the sequence of power, the time-scale, and much else in these Athenian revolutions mark them off from those we have chosen to study, and suggest that they belong at least to a different sub-class.

Of abortive revolutions we have numerous examples. Needless to say, abortiveness is not measured by the failure of revolutionary movements to live up to the ideals professed by their leaders. We mean by abortive simply the failure of organized groups in revolt. Thus the American Civil War is really an almost classical example of an abortive revolution. So too is the Paris Commune of 1871. The European revolutions of 1848 were on the surface mostly abortive, though in many countries they helped bring about important and comparatively permanent administrative and constitutional changes. An abortive revolution may, of course, mold the defeated revolutionary group to an even more heroic determination, and pave the way to continued underground resistance, plotting, propaganda. The blood of martyrs has built council halls and presidential palaces as well as churches. The abortive revolution is especially important in the welding together of oppressed nationalities, which after a few heroic uprisings attain a pitch of exalted patriotism and self-pity that makes them almost unbeatable. Contemporary Ireland and Poland were born of a long series of revolutions that failed, and in their final emergence as independent nations they bear the clear and unlovely scars of these great moral victories. Indeed, in a complete study of revolutions, there would have to be a special sub-class for revolutions in which a territorial or “national” group rises against another and dominating territorial or national group.

Three of our four revolutions--the English, French, and Russian, have courses in general surprisingly similar. All have a social or class rather than a territorial or nationalistic basis, though Oxford and Lancashire, the Vendée, and the Ukraine, suggest that one cannot wholly neglect these latter factors. All are begun in hope and moderation, all reach a crisis in a reign of terror, and all end in something like dictatorship--Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin. The American revolution does not quite follow this pattern, and is therefore especially useful to us as a kind of control.

Our revolution was, perhaps predominantly, a territorial and nationalistic revolution, animated throughout by patriotic American hatred for the British. On the other hand, it was also in part a social and class movement, and as time went on its social character came out more and more strongly. It never quite went through a reign of terror, though it had many terroristic aspects, usually soft-pedaled in school and popular histories. All in all, the American revolution presents a number of interesting problems, and the attempt to integrate some of its aspects with our other three revolutions promises to extend, without unduly stretching, the limits of this study. But we must always remember that the American revolution was in a sense an incomplete one, that it does not fit perfectly our conceptual scheme, that it does not show the victory of the extremists over the moderates. We must be even more cautious than with the other revolutions when we attempt to discern uniformities in the anatomy of the American revolution.

We choose then, deliberately, to isolate four revolutions for analysis, quite aware that there are many other revolutions on record. This procedure has another distinct advantage, that it enables us to dodge a good deal of unprofitable debate over the definition of “revolution.” Pages have been spent on the question as to whether to speak of an “Industrial Revolution” (which began about 1760 and is in a sense still going on) is or is not an abuse of the word “revolution.” Writers on politics have worried over the differences between political and social revolution, between a _coup d’état_, a _putsch_, and a revolution. We propose to avoid this tangle by the simple, if metaphysically somewhat disingenuous, device of declaring that since the movements with which we are concerned are commonly called revolutions, they may be so called once more.

The difference between a revolution and other kinds of changes in societies is, to judge from many past uses of the term, logically nearer to that between a mountain and a hill than to that, say, between the freezing point and the boiling point of a given substance. The physicist can measure boiling points exactly; the social scientist cannot measure change by any such exact thermometer, and say exactly when ordinary change boils over into revolutionary change. One might flirt with the notion of a “revolt point” for different social systems; England’s being at, say, 200° in some conventional scale, France’s at 150°, Japan’s at 400°, and so on. But this would be nonsense of the type altogether too common in the social sciences, which have long been in the habit of putting up mathematical false fronts. In actual practice, we let use distinguish for us between a hill and a mountain, and there is no harm in accepting the decision of use as to what to call a revolution. The important element in scientific definition is that the definition should be based on facts, and enable us to handle facts better; precision and neatness come definitely second, and are defects if they are achieved by the neglect or distortion of facts. Obviously in present usage the word revolution is a class-term covering quite a number of concrete phenomena, from the introduction of the spinning-mule to the ejection of Porfirio Diaz, and the job of the systematist is to cling to the general term and devise useful sub-classifications within it.

To such simple truths are we reduced even before we enter fully into the study of actual revolutions. Yet the really obvious, the really commonplace, does not often find its way into print. What gets there much more often is the literary commonplace, the cliché and the stereotype, the beliefs men have about things and beings they never deal with directly. The world of the pulp magazines is a world of literary commonplaces. Many an intellectual in the world usually rated above the pulps is driven by a no doubt commendable horror of the literary commonplace into an equal horror of the obvious. The scientist can afford no such indulgence. The first job of the scientist is to be obvious, for only on a firm foundation in the obvious can he build securely the more complex fabric of a developed science. He may even have to be a bit insistent and repetitive about the obvious; for in this modern world of ours, where so much of our experience is the vicarious experience of sermons, books, pictures, plays, even the simple souls who love commonplaces have literary commonplaces fobbed off on them instead of the real thing.

We shall, then, hope that whatever uniformities we can detect in the revolutions we are analyzing will turn out to be obvious, to be just what any sensible man already knew about revolutions. We shall be genuinely disappointed if the anatomy of revolutions does not turn out to be a familiar one. It will seem a sufficient gain if these uniformities can be listed, recorded, as uniformities. Those whose appetites demand great discoveries are, then, warned in advance. Here they will find poor fare. Nor is this said in any spirit of mock humility. A literary saw, now almost folk-wisdom, but still pretty literary, is scornful over the mountain which labored and brought forth only a ridiculous mouse. That mountain has perhaps never had due recognition for what is surely a rather remarkable biological feat. Moreover, the mouse was at least alive. Most mountains, when they go in for this sort of thing, produce nothing better than lava, steam, and hot air.

_Chapter_ TWO THE OLD REGIMES

_I. The Diagnosis of Preliminary Signs_

From France, which has long carried out a kind of linguistic Free Trade, comes the phrase “old regime.” Applied to the history of France, it covers roughly the society of the last two-thirds of the eighteenth century, the generation or two preceding the revolution of 1789. We may reasonably extend its use to describe the varied societies out of which our revolutions emerged. Following our conceptual scheme, we shall look in these societies for something like a revolutionary prodrome, for a set of preliminary signs of the coming revolution.

Such a search must not be undertaken without one important caution. Disorder in some sense appears to be endemic in all societies, and certainly in our Western society. The historian turned diagnostician can find evidences of disorders and discontents in almost any society he chooses to study. If a stable, or healthy, society is defined as one in which there are no expressions of discontent with the government or with existing institutions, in which no laws are ever broken, then there are no stable or healthy societies. Not even the totalitarian state, one suspects, can live up to this standard.

Our normal or healthy society, then, will not be one in which there are no criticisms of the government or the ruling class, no gloomy sermons on the moral decay of the times, no Utopian dreams of a better world around the corner, no strikes, no lock-outs, no unemployment, no crime waves, no New Deals. All we can expect of what we may call a healthy society is that there should be no striking excess of this sort of thing, and perhaps also that most people should behave as if they felt that, with all its faults, the society were a going concern. Then we may look about for the kind of signs just described--discontents expressed in words or deeds--and try to estimate their seriousness. We shall, of course, very soon find that we are dealing with a large number of variables, that for given societies studied in their old regimes these variables combine variously and in different proportions, and that in some cases certain variables are apparently absent altogether or nearly so. We are surely unlikely to find in all the cases we study one clear, omnipresent symptom, so that we could say: when you find _x_ or _y_ in a society, you know that a revolution is a month, or a year, or a decade, or any time in the future. On the contrary, symptoms are apt to be many, varied, and by no means neatly combined in a pattern. We shall be lucky if, to borrow another medical term, they form a recognizable syndrome.

_II. Structural Weaknesses, Economic and Political_

As good children of our age, we are bound to start any such study as this with the economic situation. All of us, no matter how little sympathy we may have with organized communism, betray the extent of Marx’s influence in the social studies--and of the influences that influenced Marx--by the naturalness with which we ask the question: “What had economic interests to do with it all?” Now it is incontestable that in all four of the societies we are studying the years preceding the outbreak of revolution witnessed unusually serious economic, or at least financial, difficulties of a special kind. The first two Stuarts were in perpetual conflict with their parliaments over taxes, and the years just before 1640 resounded with complaints about Ship Money, benevolences, tonnage and poundage and other terms now strange to us, but once capable of making a hero of a very rich Buckinghamshire gentleman named John Hampden, who was financially quite able to pay much larger taxes than he did. Americans need not be reminded of the part trouble over taxation played in the years just before the shot fired at Concord defied all the laws of acoustics. “No taxation without representation” may be rejected by all up-to-date historians as in itself an adequate explanation of the beginnings of the American revolution, but the fact remains that it was in the 1770’s a slogan capable of exciting our fathers to action. In 1789 the French Estates-General, the calling of which precipitated the revolution, was made unavoidable by the bad financial state of the government. Official France in 1789 was financially in as unhappy a way as, until our own times, one would have believed it possible for a government to be. In Russia in 1917 financial collapse did not perhaps stand out so prominently because the Czarist regime had achieved an all-round collapse in all fields of governmental activity, from war to village administration. But three years of war had put such a strain on Russian finances that, even with the support of the Allies, high prices and scarcity were by 1917 most obvious factors in the general tension.

Yet in all of these societies, it is the _government_ that is in financial difficulties, not the societies themselves. To put the matter negatively, our revolutions did not occur in societies economically backward, nor in societies undergoing widespread economic misery or depression. You will not find in these societies of the old regime anything like unusually widespread economic want. In a specific instance, of course, the standard against which want or depression is measured must be the standard of living more or less acceptable to a given group at a given time. What satisfied an English peasant in 1640 would be misery and want for an Iowa farmer of 1938. It is possible that certain groups in a society may be in unusual want even though statistically that abstraction “society as a whole” is enjoying an increasing--and almost equally abstract--“national income.” Nevertheless, when national income is rapidly increasing, someone does get the benefit. We must look more carefully at our four societies in this respect.

France in 1789 was a very striking example of a rich society with an impoverished government. The eighteenth century had begun to collect statistics about itself, and though these would not satisfy a modern economist they enable us to be very certain about the increasing prosperity of eighteenth-century France. Any series of indices--foreign trade, population growth, building, manufactures, agricultural production--will show a general upward trend all through the eighteenth century. Here are a few examples: wastelands all over France were being brought under the plow and in the _élection_ of Melun alone in two years from 1783 to 1785 uncultivated land was reduced from 14,500 to 10,000 arpents; Rouen in 1787 produced annually cotton cloth worth fifty millions of _livres_, having at least doubled its production in a generation; French trade with North Africa (the Barbary Coast) increased from about 1,000,000 _livres_ in 1740 to 6,216,000 _livres_ in 1788; the total French foreign trade had in 1787 increased nearly 100,000,000 _livres_ in the dozen years since the death of Louis XV in 1774.

Even in our imperfect statistics we can distinguish short-term cyclical variations, and it seems clear that in some respects, notably in the wheat harvest, 1788-89 was a bad year. It was, however, by no means a deep trough year like 1932 for this country. If business men in eighteenth-century France had kept charts and made graphs, the lines would have mounted with gratifying consistency through most of the period preceding the French revolution. Now this prosperity was certainly most unevenly shared. The people who got the lion’s share of it seem to have been the merchants, bankers, business men, lawyers, peasants who ran their own farms as businesses; the middle class, as we have come to call it. It was precisely these prosperous people who in the 1780’s were loudest against the government, most reluctant to save it by paying taxes.

In America, of course, with an empty continent available for the distressed, general economic conditions in the eighteenth century show increasing wealth and population, with economic distress a purely relative matter. There can be no talk of starvation, of grinding poverty in the New England of the Stamp Act. Even the minor fluctuations of the business cycle fail to coincide with the revolution, and the early years of the 1770’s were distinctly years of prosperity. There were economic stresses and strains in colonial America, as we shall soon see, but no class ground down with poverty.

Nor is it easy to argue that early Stuart England was less prosperous than late Tudor England had been. There is rather evidence that, especially in the years of personal government which preceded the Long Parliament, England was notably prosperous. Ramsay Muir writes that “England had never known a more steady or more widely diffused prosperity and the burden of taxation was less than in any other country. The coming revolution was certainly not due to economic distress.” Even in the Russia of 1917, apart from the shocking breakdown of the machinery of government under war-strain, the productive capacity of society as a whole was certainly greater than at any other time in Russian history; and to take again the long view, the economic graphs had all been mounting for Russia as a whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the progress in trade and production since the abortive revolution of 1905 had been notable.

Our revolutions, then, clearly were not born in societies economically retrograde; on the contrary, they took place in societies economically progressive. This does not, of course, mean that no groups within these societies cherished grievances mainly economic in character. Two main foci for economic motives of discontent seem to stand out. First, and much the less important, is the actual misery of certain groups in a given society. No doubt in all our societies, even in America, there was a sort of submarginal group of poor people whose release from certain forms of restraint is a very important feature of revolution itself. But in studying the preliminary signs of revolution, these people are not very important. French republican historians have long insisted on the importance of the bad harvest of 1788, the cold winter of 1788-89, and the consequent sufferings of the poor. Bread was relatively dear in that spring when the Estates-General first assembled. There was apparently a tightening up of business conditions in America in 1774-75, but certainly nothing like widespread distress or unemployment. The local sufferings of Boston, considerable under the Port Bill, were really a part of the revolution itself, and not a sign. The winter of 1916-17 was certainly a bad one in Russia, with food rationing in all the cities.

The important thing to note, however, is that French and Russian history are filled with famines, plagues, bad harvests, sometimes local, sometimes national in sweep, many of which were accompanied by sporadic rioting, but in each case only one by revolution. In neither the English nor the American revolution do we find even this degree of localized want or famine. Clearly, then, the economic distress of the under-privileged, though it may well accompany a revolutionary situation, is not one of the symptoms we need dwell upon. This the subtler Marxists themselves recognize, and Trotsky has written: “In reality, the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would always be in revolt.”

Of much greater importance is the existence among a group, or groups, of a feeling that prevailing conditions limit or hinder their economic activity. We are especially aware of this element in our American revolution, and Professor A. M. Schlesinger has shown how the prosperous merchants, their immediate interests damaged by the new imperial policy of the British government, led an agitation against the legislation of 1764 and 1765 and helped stir up a discontent among the less well-to-do which these merchants later found a bit embarrassing. No doubt, too, that many of the firm spots in the very uneven and wavering policy of the British government--the Stamp Act and subsequent disorders, the announced intention of enforcing the Navigation Act, and so on--did have momentary ill effects on business, did throw men out of work. The currency question was of course mismanaged in a day when common sense did not very effectively supplement ignorance of economic processes. The colonies were always lacking in specie, and business enterprise suffered from this lack. Paper money, to which recourse was inevitable, was also an inevitable source of further quarrels between governors and governed.

The working of economic motives to revolt among possessing classes normally inclined to support existing institutions is especially clear among the aristocrats of tidewater Virginia. Largely dependent on a single crop, tobacco, used to a high standard of living, increasingly indebted to London bankers, many of the planters hoped to recoup their fortunes in the western lands they regarded as clearly belonging to Virginia. George Washington’s own involvements in western land speculations make one of the favorite topics of the debunkers. By the Quebec Act of 1774, however, the British government took the trans-Allegheny lands north of the Ohio from Virginia and other claimant colonies, and incorporated them with Canada. This act gave a grievance to others besides the planter-speculator. The closing of this frontier was also an offense to a class perhaps normally more inclined to revolt--the restless woodsmen and fur traders, and the only slightly less restless small pioneer farmers who had already occupied the Appalachian valleys, and were ready to pour over into the Kentucky and Ohio country. The Quebec Act in itself does not, of course, explain the American revolution; but taken with a long series of other acts, the Stamp Act, the Navigation Act, the Molasses Act, it accounts for the feeling so evident among active and ambitious groups in America that British rule was an unnecessary and incalculable restraint, an obstacle to their full success in life.

In France the years preceding 1789 are marked by a series of measures which antagonized different groups. With striking awkwardness, the government offered with one hand what it withdrew with the other. Tax-reform efforts, never carried through, offended privileged groups without pleasing the unprivileged. Turgot’s attempted introduction of _laissez-faire_ into labor relations offended all the vested interests of the old guilds. The famous tariff reduction treaty with England in 1786 directly affected French textiles for the worse, increased unemployment in Normandy and other regions, and gave the employer class a grievance against the government. So, too, in seventeenth-century England, there is no doubt that the attempt to revive obsolete forms of taxation seemed to London or Bristol merchants a threat to their rising prosperity and importance.

Thus we see that certain economic grievances--usually not in the form of economic distress, but rather a feeling on the part of some of the chief enterprising groups that their opportunities for getting on in this world are unduly limited by political arrangements--would seem to be one of the symptoms of revolution. These feelings must, of course, be raised to an effective social pitch by propaganda, pressure-group action, public meetings, and preferably a few good dramatic riots, like the Boston Tea Party. As we shall see, these grievances, however close they are to the pocketbook, must be made respectable, must touch the soul. What is really but a restraint on a rising and already successful group, or on several such groups, must appear as rank injustice towards everyone in the society. Men may revolt partly or even mainly because they are hindered, or, to use Dr. George Pettee’s expressive word, _cramped_; but to the world--and, save for a very few hypocrites, also to themselves--they must appear _wronged_. Revolutions cannot do without the word “justice.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_III. The Desertion of the Intellectuals_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_IV. Classes and Class Antagonisms_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_V. Summary_

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

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

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

_Chapter_ THREE FIRST STAGES OF REVOLUTION

_I. The Eternal Figaro_

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

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

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

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

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

_II. The Events of the First Stages_

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

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

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

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

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

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

Events in America moved hardly more rapidly. In a sense, you can maintain that the American revolution really began in 1765 with the Stamp Act; or at any rate that the agitation which culminated in the repeal of that Act was a kind of rehearsal for the great movement of the seventies. The imperial government was determined to do something about the American colonists, and Townshend’s mild duties on tea, glass, lead and a few other articles imported into America were accompanied by an attempt to collect them in an efficient m