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.