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.