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.