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.”