himself engaged with the House of Commons in a struggle chiefly over
taxes. Out of the conflict there emerged the Petition of Right of
1628, in which the Commons forced the King’s consent to a statement
of definite limitations on the royal power: Charles promised not to
raise forced loans, not to quarter soldiers on unwilling householders,
not to permit officers to exercise martial law in time of peace, not
to send anyone to prison without showing cause why he had done so.
Emboldened by this success, the Commons under the leadership of the
emotional Sir John Eliot went on to refuse to grant the King the usual
form of customs’ revenue--tonnage and poundage--and to insist in an
aggressive and indeed revolutionary way on their privileges. At a
final debate on March 2, 1629, two men, Denzil Holles and Valentine,
held down the Speaker in his chair by force while Eliot proposed a
ringing declaration on the illegality of paying tonnage and poundage
without a grant from Parliament. Conservatives pushed forward to free
the Speaker. There followed a riotous debate fully worthy of the
standards set later by the National Assembly in France, but somehow
or other in the confusion Eliot’s resolutions were put through before
the royal order dissolving the Parliament could be carried out. The
parliamentarians had made a grand gesture of protest. From that day, no
Parliament met in England for eleven years. Eliot, jailed for rioting,
maintained that the King had no power over a member of the House of
Commons. He died a most effective martyr in 1632.
In the years of personal rule Charles, aided by his two great
supporters, Strafford and Laud, did his best to organize the government
of England in accordance with notions of efficient centralization and
expert rule which were the chief political heritage of the Renaissance.
He did a job in some ways surprisingly good. But he may, as
nineteenth-century liberal historians fondly believed, have been going
against the basic grain of the English character and the basic mold of
English institutions; he was most certainly going bankrupt. A clash
with the Scotch Presbyterians probably merely hastened the inevitable.
Charles called a Parliament in the spring of 1640, but dissolved it
after less than a month. A Scotch army now invaded England, and Charles
had to buy it off. To get money he had to call another Parliament.
The Short Parliament was, therefore, but a breaking of the ground for
the Long Parliament, which met on November 3, 1640, was dissolved on
April 20, 1653, and was brought briefly to life again in 1659, just
before the restoration of the Stuarts. The life of this extraordinary
assembly thus spans almost completely the twenty years of the English
revolution.
The Long Parliament got to work at once, for on November 11, 1640,
a week after it first met, Pym moved the impeachment of Strafford
for high treason. The impeachment, held up by the more conservative
House of Lords, was turned early in 1641 into a bill of attainder.
Impeachment involved at least the forms of judicial action, whereas
attainder was a simple legislative act. The Lords were willing enough
to abandon Strafford, if not to try him, and on May 12th he fell under
the executioner’s ax. Less than eight years later that ax was to reach
his royal master.
Actual outbreak of armed hostilities between Charles and the
Parliament was not to come for another year. Parliament voted by a
majority of eleven the Grand Remonstrance, a long summing-up of all
the grievances accumulated against the King in the seventeen years
of his reign. Charles replied to this vote of want of confidence by
attempting to arrest six members of Parliament, Lord Kimbolton in the
Lords, Pym, Hampden, Haselrig, Holles, and Strode in the Commons, who
had compromised themselves by entering into technically treasonous
negotiations with the invading Scotch army. Charles rashly came down to
the House of Commons himself with armed men and attempted to seize the
members. He was met with something of the kind of passive resistance
the French Third Estate displayed at the royal session of June 17,
1789, when Louis XVI ordered them to give up attempting to form a
National Assembly. The threatened members fled to the City of London,
and Charles was again checkmated. The Commons were now so aggressively
successful that they decided to take over the military by naming
officers in the militia and train-bands. Charles, in turn, began to
build up his own army, and set up his standard at Nottingham in August,
1642. The Civil War had begun.
Where in this long and closely knit series of events you wish to say
the English revolution fairly began is partly a subjective matter.
Somewhere between the calling of the Long Parliament in 1640, and the
outbreak of the war two years later, the first critical steps in the
revolution were undertaken. Perhaps the execution of Strafford is a
good dramatic date, or Charles’s futile attempt to seize the five
members in the Commons. At any rate, by the summer of 1642 the English
revolution had taken on unmistakable form.
Events in America moved hardly more rapidly. In a sense, you can
maintain that the American revolution really began in 1765 with the
Stamp Act; or at any rate that the agitation which culminated in the
repeal of that Act was a kind of rehearsal for the great movement of
the seventies. The imperial government was determined to do something
about the American colonists, and Townshend’s mild duties on tea,
glass, lead and a few other articles imported into America were
accompanied by an attempt to collect them in an efficient modern way.
Under Townshend’s act His Majesty’s customs houses in America were
equipped with a hopeful and willing bureaucracy. The result was a
series of clashes with increasingly well-organized groups of Americans.
Tarring and feathering of informers, stealing sequestered goods from
under the noses of customs officers, jeering at British troops, led up
to the more dramatic incidents enshrined in the textbooks: the seizure
of the _Gaspee_ at Providence, the Boston Massacre of 1770, the Boston
Tea Party, the burning of the _Peggy Stewart_ at Annapolis.
The closing of the port of Boston, the dispatch of Gage and his troops
to Massachusetts, the Quebec Act itself, were all really measures taken
by the imperial government against colonies already in revolt. You may,
if you are interested in such matters, discuss at length the question
as to just when the American revolution is to be considered as formally
beginning. You may go as late as the first Continental Congress in
1774, or the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, or even the most
famous Fourth of July in 1776. But the complex group-struggles out of
which revolutions actually grow only later turn into formal sources for
patriotic ritual. The first steps in the American revolution were many
and spread over something like a decade. Only an absolutist mind could
insist that out of this long process a given detail be isolated as the
beginning of the American revolution.
The French revolution of 1789 may be said to have been incubating for
several decades. Overt and definite resistance to the royal government,
as in the parliaments of Charles I and in the American colonial
assemblies, is not to be found in France, which was wholly without
such representative bodies. The nearest thing to such a body was the
_parlement de Paris_, a kind of supreme court composed of judges who
were nobles and held their positions by heredity. It was precisely this
_parlement_, followed by the provincial _parlements_, that began in the
1780’s an open quarrel with the Crown, which culminated in a dramatic
defiance of royal power and the forced exile of the judges. Popular
opinion, at least in Paris, was overwhelmingly with the judges, and
privileged nobles though they were, they became heroes and martyrs for
a day.
Meanwhile, approaching bankruptcy had forced the King to call in 1787
an Assembly of Notables, a kind of hastily gathered special commission
of prominent nobles, from whom Louis XVI in good eighteenth-century
style no doubt expected enlightenment. This he certainly obtained, for
the Assembly contained many upper-class intellectuals, like Lafayette,
who were convinced that France must cease to be a “despotism,” must
endow itself with an up-to-date constitution of the kind the new states
of the American union were making fashionable. The Assembly of Notables
was accordingly very divided and doubtful about ways of filling the
empty treasury, but clear that further consultation with the nation was
necessary. The Crown finally yielded, brought back into the government
the Swiss commoner, Necker, who had a reputation as a financial wizard,
and summoned a meeting of the Estates-General for the spring of 1789.
This Estates-General had last met in 1614, and there was some
uncertainty as to how one went about electing it. The antiquarians
came to the rescue, however, and three hundred representatives of the
First Estate, or clergy, three hundred of the Second, or nobility, and
six hundred of the Third, or commons, were chosen, practically in time
for the first meeting. The double representation of the Third Estate
had no precedent in 1614 or earlier. It was, in fact, a revolutionary
step, a concession wrung from the King, an admission that in some way
or another the Third Estate was more important than the others. In the
old constitution, however, final decisions were made by the orders
as units; that is, if the Clergy and the Nobles as separate houses
agreed on a policy, they could carry it, two to one, even against the
dissenting Third Estate. When the Estates met in May, 1789, the great
question was whether to follow the old constitution and vote by orders,
or to vote in one great assembly of twelve hundred members in which the
doubled Third Estate, plus the “liberals” among the other two orders,
would have a clear majority. Louis had characteristically permitted
this problem to remain vague and unsettled, and only after the Third
Estate had insisted on one great assembly did he royally insist on
three separate ones.
The issue out of which the French revolution formally grew was this
simple one of vote by orders or vote by individuals in one assembly.
The Third Estate stood pat, and refused to transact any business until
the other orders joined it in what was to be called--and the name
was a sound piece of propaganda for the revolutionists--the National
Assembly. There are certain dramatic moments in a two-months’ struggle
which was essentially parliamentary and lacking in the more physical
kinds of violence. Shut out by a royal blunder from their usual meeting
place, the Third Estate on June 20, 1789, met hastily in a large indoor
tennis court, and swore not to disperse until they had endowed France
with a constitution.
Thanks partly to David’s famous painting, which is more symbolic
than realistic, this episode is now second only to the taking of the
Bastille in the patriotic ritual of the present Third French Republic.
Actually more important was the glowering defiance of the Third Estate
when in a plenary royal session of June 23rd the King called on all
the prestige and pageantry of the Crown to enforce voting by separate
orders. At this session the Third Estate remained behind after the
King’s withdrawal, and Mirabeau is said to have made his famous reply
to a request from the King’s Grand Master of Ceremonies that they in
turn withdraw: “We are assembled here by the will of the nation, and we
will not leave except by force.” Shortly afterwards the King yielded,
though probably not to Mirabeau’s rhetoric. By the beginning of July
the National Assembly had been duly constituted, and was ready to put
the Enlightenment, so long in France a matter of theory, into practice.
The first steps in the French revolution had been taken.
Those who insist that you must have violence before you can label
revolution as begun will date the great French revolution from July
14, 1789, when a Paris mob, aided by soldiers who had gone over to
the popular side, took the gloomy fortress-prison of the Bastille on
the eastern edge of the city. Bastille Day is the French republican
Fourth of July, a great holy day in one of the best organized of our
contemporary nationalist religions. As such it has been surrounded
by legends, endowed with a martyrology, safely withdrawn from the
unedifying touch of history. To an outsider, the taking of the Bastille
seems an involved and confusing process, at least as much the result of
the weakness of the royal governor, De Launay, as of the strength of
the besiegers. What is important for us is that Paris was in the hands
of a mob for three days, and that this mob was clearly shouting against
the King, shouting for the National Assembly. After the rioting had
died down, the National Assembly--or rather, the revolutionary majority
in the Assembly--could proceed in the useful assurance that the people
were on its side, could feel that it had _carte blanche_ to neglect
royal protests as it went about its task of remaking France.
The revolution in Russia got under way with great speed. As we have
seen in a previous chapter, there were plenty of precedents for
a Russian uprising, and several generations of Russians had been
discussing the inevitable coming of the storm. The first steps which
led up to the February revolution of 1917, however, took even advanced
leaders like Kerensky somewhat by surprise. Socialist parties the
world over had been used to celebrating March 8th as Women’s Day. On
that day--February 23rd of the old Russian calendar, whence the name,
February revolution, by which it has gone down in history--crowds
of women workers from the factory districts poured into the streets
calling for bread. Each day thereafter crowds increased. Orators of the
radical group harangued at street corners. Soldiers from the large
Petrograd wartime garrison mingled with the crowds, seemed indeed to
sympathize with them. Even the Cossacks were not hostile to the people,
or at any rate, seemed to lack stomach for fighting.
Meanwhile the authorities were consulting, and as piecemeal measures
failed to work, they decided on March 11th to repress the troubles
in accordance with a fine neat plan already drawn up on paper for
just such emergency. But the plan didn’t work. The soldiers of the
garrison, anxious not to be sent to the front, began to waver. On
March 12th the first of the mutinies broke out, and one after another
the famous regiments of the Imperial Army poured out of the barracks,
but to join, not to shoot on, the crowds. Obscure leaders, sergeants,
factory foremen and the like arose and directed their little groups at
strategic points. Out of all the confusion and madness which makes the
detailed record of events in this week the despair of the historian,
one clear fact came out. There was no imperial government left in the
capital, no formal government at all. Gradually there emerged the
nucleus of the Soviet government to come, organized through trade
unions, Socialist groups, and other working-class sources. The Czar and
his advisers, too bewildered and incompetent to control the movement,
did prevent the legal Duma from taking control. Instead, moderates
of all sorts got together to form the nucleus of the provisional
government to come. In such a chaotic condition, indeed, it would seem
that the action of the moderates is a uniformity of revolutions. Their
sentiments and training impel them to try and put a stop to disorder,
to salvage what they can of established routines.
Socialists and liberals alike were agreed that the Czar must abdicate.
Nicholas himself had started from Headquarters for his palace at
Tsarskoe Selo near Petrograd, but was held up at Pskov by the
increasing disorders. Here, on March 15th, he decided to abdicate in
favor of his brother, the Grand Duke Michael. What centralized power
there was in Russia seems to have been in the hands of a committee of
the Duma, and this committee waited on Michael in person. Kerensky,
who was on the committee, seems at this juncture to have been as
neurotically dramatic as usual; at Michael’s refusal to accept
the Crown he went into a transport of delight. Russia was to be a
republic. Michael’s own decision to refuse seems to have been dictated
by personal cowardice. One of the nice problems of history in the
conditional centers around the question of what would have happened had
this Romanov been a man of courage, decision, and ability. No one can
say, but the question reminds us that even in its most sociological
moments, history cannot neglect the drama of personality and chance.
With Michael’s abdication on March 16, 1917, the Russian revolution had
clearly begun. There were repercussions in the provinces, and in some
remote spots the fall of the Romanovs was not realized for weeks. But
the work of those eight days had destroyed a centralized bureaucratic
government at its most vital point--its head and nerve-center. Much
in Russia was unchanged by the February revolution, but politically a
week had done what it had taken years to do in England and France. The
Romanovs had gone much more rapidly than the Stuarts and the Bourbons.
_III. Spontaneity or Planning?_
Even from the foregoing sketch of the first steps in four revolutions,
it should be clear that to the narrative historian the differences
in the four are striking. The English revolution was begun in one of
the oldest, best established of representative bodies; the American
revolution began chiefly in New England, among people used to town
meetings and colonial legislatures; the French revolution developed out
of the meetings of a legislative body with no immediate precedents,
staffed by men unused to parliamentary life; the Russian revolution
started in street riots in the capital city, and went on without
benefit of any parliamentary body, since even the old Duma met only
through an emergency committee. There are differences of personality,
differences of time and place. Charles raising his standard in hope
at Nottingham in 1642 seems worlds apart from the abject Nicholas,
buffeted about the northern plains in a railroad train at the mercy
of striking workers and troops in revolt, drearily abdicating in the
provincial gloom of Pskov. There may even be racial differences.
The orderly and almost chivalrous Civil War of the English seems at
first sight something quite unlike the madness of July 14th, or the
tragicomic spectacle of metropolitan Petrograd in the hands of a mob
without even a good slogan.
Yet this last should give us pause. At the informal level of mere
dramatic or narrative likenesses, these early stages of revolution
have similarities as striking as their differences. Speaker Lenthall
defying Charles come to seize the five members, Mirabeau thundering his
challenge to the bewildered Grand Master of Ceremonies at the royal
session of June 23rd, Patrick Henry warning a king of the unfortunate
fate of certain other rulers--these seem to be speaking the same
language, assuming the same effective postures. The English House of
Commons in the pandemonium of its final session in 1629 seems much
like the French National Assembly during its frequent heated moments,
and not worlds apart from certain important sessions of the Petrograd
soviet.
For the emotions of men in groups, and the rhetoric and gestures
necessary to bring out and make effective for action these emotions,
are more uniform than the rationalist likes to think them. Any
representative body of several hundred responds in definite ways
to certain definite stimuli, and it does this the more certainly
and invariably because it cannot respond to logic, cannot confront
a new situation with complete experimental freedom. Especially are
excited representative bodies much alike, whether they are composed
of “irresponsible” Russians, “excitable” Frenchmen, or “sensible”
Englishmen. We need not be surprised if in these early stages of
revolution there are clear parallels in the behavior of men in such
groups.
It is, however, more important for us to see whether there are not in
these four revolutions uniformities which can be grouped together,
related to the whole course of the movements, given a place in our
conceptual scheme of the fever. What evidence have we here that we are
dealing with a process which has definite and common stages? Do these
first steps in revolution take place under conditions sociologically
similar even if dramatically dissimilar?
One uniformity is crystal-clear. In all four of our societies, the
existing government attempted to collect monies from people who refused
to pay. All four of our revolutions started among people who objected
to certain taxes, who organized to protest them, and who finally
reached the point of agitating for the elimination and replacement of
the existing government. This does not necessarily mean that those who
resisted taxation foresaw or wished a radical revolution. It does mean
that the transition from talking about necessary great changes--for
in all our societies, as we have seen, something was in the air--to
concrete action, was made under the stimulus of an unpopular form of
taxation.
A second uniformity is quite as clear, though the consequences that
derive from it are much more obscure. The events in this stage, these
first steps in revolution, do most certainly bring out of the confused
discontents of the old regime two parties into clear opposition, and
indeed into preliminary violence. These parties we may call briefly the
party of the old regime and the party of the revolution. Moreover, by
the end of this period of the first stages, the party of the revolution
has won. The muddy waters of doubt and debate are momentarily cleared.
The revolution, hardly begun, seems over. In England after the Long
Parliament had disposed of Strafford and wrung concessions from the
King, in America after Concord, and that greatest of moral victories,
Bunker Hill, in France after the fall of the Bastille, in Russia after
the abdication, there is a brief period of joy and hope, the illusory
but charming honeymoon of that impossible pair, the Real and the Ideal.
That our four revolutions ran through some such early stage as this,
in which the opposition between old and new crystallized dramatically,
and the new won a striking victory, is too evident for the most
old-fashioned narrative historian to deny. Over the reasons why this
stage developed as it did, however, there is still a running dispute
among writers who concern themselves with such matters--historians,
political theorists, sociologists, essayists. The heart of the
dispute is a matter which must be got straight before anything like a
sociology of revolutions is possible. Briefly, one set of disputants
maintains that these glorious first steps in revolution are taken
almost spontaneously by a united nation rising in its might and virtue
to check its oppressors; another maintains that these first steps are
the fruition of a series of interlocking plots initiated by small but
determined groups of malcontents. By and large the first view is that
taken by persons favorable to a given revolution, the second by persons
hostile to it, or at least loyal to the memory of the old regime.
There are, however, all sorts of variations on the theme, and different
commentators have differently balanced these elements of spontaneity
and planning.