for our purpose, in the historiography of the French revolution.
Augustin Cochin used to describe this opposition as that between the
_thèse des circonstances_ and the _thèse du complot_, the explanation
by circumstances and the explanation by plot. Those who on the whole
regarded the revolution as a good thing maintained that the people
of France, and especially the people of Paris, were goaded into
revolt by the oppression of king and court, that the circumstances of
their social, political, and economic life in 1789 are in themselves
adequate explanation of what happened. Given such circumstances, and
men and women of French blood, and you have revolution as naturally,
as _automatically_, in a sense, as you have an explosion when a spark
strikes gunpowder.
This figure may be applied to specific steps in the revolutionary
process. The Bastille riots, for instance, were not planned in any
sense. Paris heard of the dismissal of Necker, noted that the King
was concentrating troops around Paris, and in a million forgotten
conversations spread the fear that the King and his party were about to
dismiss the revolutionary National Assembly and rule by armed force.
Paris therefore rose in its might, and with a sure instinct seized on
the Bastille as a symbol of the hated old regime, and destroyed it. The
sovereign people were self-guided in all this, moved if you like by a
natural force, by a hatred of injustice, and were led by hundreds of
small men, by noncommissioned officers of the revolution, but not by
any general staff, not by any small group who had deliberately planned
an aggression.
The opposite theory maintains that the whole revolutionary movement
in France was the work of a scheming and unprincipled minority,
freemasons, _philosophes_, professional agitators. These people in the
second half of the eighteenth century got control of the press and the
platform, and persistently indoctrinated the literate part of France
with a hatred for established institutions, and especially for the
Church. As the government found itself in increasingly bad financial
straits, these plotters wormed their way into its councils, and finally
secured the promise of an Estates-General. By clever electioneering
in a populace not used to representative assemblies, they filled the
Third Estate with members of their sect, and succeeded in penetrating
even the ranks of the First and Second Estates. They had been used
to working together, and thanks to years of discussion of political
reform, they knew what they wanted. The more determined and initiated
of these plotters could therefore control the actions of the large and
shapeless National Assembly, though they were a minority of its twelve
hundred members.
Bastille Day seems very different to the writers of this school. Louis
was concentrating troops to protect, not to dissolve, the National
Assembly, to protect it from the minority of wild radicals who were
abusing its machinery. Fearing defeat, these radicals stirred up Paris
in a hundred ways: they sent orators to street corners and cafés;
they distributed radical news-sheets and pamphlets; they sent agents
to spread discontent among the royal troops, and especially among the
French Guard; they even subsidized prostitutes to get at the soldiers
more effectively. Everything was planned ahead for a more propitious
moment, and when the dismissal of Necker afforded that moment, the
signal was given and Paris rose. But not spontaneously. Somewhere a
general staff--Mirabeau was on it, and most of the popular figures
in the National Assembly--was working, carefully sowing the seeds of
rebellion.
With the appropriate changes, this sort of opposition can be made out
in all our revolutions. To the Stuart partisans--and they still find
their way into print--the Great Rebellion was an unhappily successful
conspiracy of gloomy money-grubbing Calvinists against the Merrie
England of tradition. More commonly, since the Whigs gave the tone
to modern England, the Parliamentarians are seen as liberty-loving
children of Magna Charta, who rose quite naturally and spontaneously
against unbearable Stuart tyranny. American Loyalists always maintained
that the best of the country was with them, that the Whigs had won
by superior organization and chicanery. Most of us, of course,
were brought up to regard George III as a personal tyrant, a hirer
of Hessians, a man who wished to grind the Americans into unmanly
submission. The American revolution was to us the spontaneous reply of
injured freemen to British insolence.
Finally, some Russian _émigrés_ still seem to believe that a minority
of unscrupulous Bolsheviks somehow engineered both the February and
the October revolutions. Marxism attaches no shame to revolution, and
admits the importance of planning and leadership in revolutionary
movements. Therefore, though official Communist explanations by no
means soft-pedal Czarist guilt and oppression, though they insist that
the people of Russia in February, 1917, wholeheartedly and nearly
unanimously rose against the Czar, still they admit, and indeed glory
in, the role of leaders consciously planning a revolution. At least,
this was the explanation accepted in orthodox Marxist circles, and it
is classically stated in the first volume of Trotsky’s _History of the
Russian Revolution_. There are signs in Stalinite Russia of a reversion
to something analogous to an American schoolbook explanation of our
own revolution; Czarist tyranny and the spontaneous popular uprising
are emphasized, the tactics of a revolutionary minority minimized.
Indeed, that these two conflicting, and in their exaggerated forms
antithetical, explanations of the first steps in revolution should
arise is in itself a clear uniformity to be got from the comparative
study of revolutions. Very early indeed these two interpretations
arise, the victorious revolutionists attributing their success to the
rise of the many against intolerable tyranny, the defeated supporters
of the old regime attributing their failure to the unscrupulous tactics
of a minority of clever, wicked men. Neither explanation is interested
primarily in facts or the scientific interpretation of facts; both are
aimed at satisfying human sentiments. It is interesting to note that
even the revolutionists’ explanation seeks to gloss over violence,
seems in a way ashamed of the fact of revolution. This again is
perfectly natural, since once in power the revolutionists wish to stay
in power. A useful help to this end is a general feeling among the
governed that it is wrong to resist those in authority. By and large,
successful revolutionists do not often subscribe to Jefferson’s desire
to see a revolution every twenty years or so; rather, they endeavor
to create a myth of their own revolution, which becomes the last one
necessary. Marxist theory even anticipates this, since the proletarian
revolution ushers in the classless society, where there will be no
class struggle, and no need for revolution.
It is, however, possible for us to go further than simply noting
this division of opinion among the lovers and the haters of a given
revolution. We may venture the generalization that there is some
truth in both the explanation by circumstances and the explanation by
plot. This may seem to many in 1938 a characteristically liberal and
wishy-washy solution, a stupid adhesion to an outdated notion of a
golden mean. But it does seem to have a more satisfactory relation with
the facts than either extreme explanation.
Bastille Day may again serve as an example. There is plenty of
evidence that organized groups did help stir up trouble in Paris in
those July days. We know that the radical groups, the “patriots”
in the Assembly at Versailles, had close connections with Paris
politicians. A kind of skeletal political organization had been left
over from the Paris elections to the Third Estate, and these Parisian
electors helped greatly to bring a new municipal organization, and
a new National Guard, out of the confusion of the riots. Most of
the Royalist description of agents circulating in the crowds, of
inflammatory pamphleteering, even perhaps of subsidized prostitutes,
is substantially true. What is not true is that these elements of
planning can be traced to any one or two small plotting groups, to
the Duc d’Orléans, or to a few freemasons. The word “plot” is indeed
a bad one--except for the purposes of Rightist propaganda, where it
proves very useful indeed. Rather we must say that there is evidence of
the activities of a number of groups of the kind any careful observer
of societies knows well--pressure groups, embryo political parties,
semi-religious sects, gatherings on the lunatic fringe. There is,
however, no evidence that these very dissimilar groups were in July,
1789, managed from any one center, controlled by a small scheming
directorate.
On the contrary, there is every evidence that once the dismissal of
Necker got these various groups excited, what followed was in a sense
spontaneous mob action. No one has yet said the final word on the
psychology of crowds, but it is fairly well accepted that the behavior
of crowds cannot be completely gauged in advance by the cleverest of
mob leaders. Actually it is clear that in Paris in those days there
was not one mob, but at least several dozens. People came out in the
street because their neighbors were already out. They paraded up and
down, shouting and singing, stopping now and then for another drink,
or to hear another street-corner orator. Self-constituted leaders of
little groups certainly supplemented any planned action. The decision
to march on the Bastille seems to have been taken independently in
several quarters. No one knows for sure who first had the brilliant
idea of going to the Invalides Hospital to secure small arms. The
rioting seems to have died out less because the Bastille fell than
because the rioters were tired out. Three days is a long time to be
riotous, or drunk, or both.
What holds for the taking of the Bastille holds for the general
preparatory work and the first stages of revolutions as we have
discussed them in this chapter. The Russian February revolution
centered in Petrograd in one week and seems like the Bastille riots
on a larger scale. Trotsky has done some of his best writing in his
description of the February revolution and in his balanced accounting
of what must be considered spontaneous popular risings and what must
be attributed to conscious revolutionary tactics. Kerensky writes
flatly that the revolution “came of its own accord, unengineered by
anyone, born in the chaos of the collapse of Tsardom.” Trotsky admits
that no one planned or expected the revolution when it did come, that
it developed out of ordinary Socialist manifestations and a mild
bread-riot. But that development, he adds, was led by “conscious and
tempered workers, educated for the most part by the party of Lenin.” We
may question the last part of this statement, but there can be no doubt
that in the last few days of the Petrograd riots leaders of the coming
soviet and leaders of the coming provisional government combined to
force out the Czarist government.
The role of the pressure group is especially conspicuous in the
early stages of the American revolution. As early as April, 1763,
the merchants of Boston organized a “Society for Encouraging Trade
and Commerce with the Province of Massachusetts Bay” with a standing
committee of fifteen to watch trade affairs and call meetings. Accounts
of their activities were sent to merchants in other colonies. To
combat the Stamp Act the radicals organized themselves as “Sons of
Liberty,” a mass organization which met at times openly, at times
secretly, to promote the work of revolution. Their vigilance committees
“maintained a sort of Holy Inquisition with the sales and purchases
of every man of business, into the outgoings and incomings of private
households, and with the reported opinions of individuals.” Town and
county in the North, the county in the South, provided a framework for
public meetings and resolutions. The Committees of Correspondence,
organized originally as private pressure groups, were later skillfully
manipulated by Sam Adams until they had partly supplanted the more
conservative town meetings. Adams called into meeting in 1773 a joint
committee for Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, Brookline, and Cambridge
which was able to swamp the now fairly conservative merchant vote.
Throughout the movement, violence was employed whenever it seemed
necessary, from grand affairs like the Boston Tea Party to isolated
beating of Tories.
Yet the most realistic of our modern historians will hardly go so
far as to assert that the American revolution was plotted by a tiny
minority. The net effect of a dozen years of British mistakes, of
concessions and retractions, blowings-hot and blowings-cold, together
with a great variety of American agitation, was to produce in 1775
a widespread popular backing for the Continental Congress in its
resistance to George III. It is quite impossible to say how many Whigs,
how many Tories, and how many indifferent or neutral persons there
were in the thirteen colonies at the outbreak of armed hostilities.
Probably there were proportionately more Tories than there were extreme
Royalists in France in 1789 and many more than there were Czarists in
Russia in 1917; and there were probably fewer Tories in revolutionary
America than partisans of the Stuarts in England in 1642. But in all
these cases it is a matter of proportion. The American revolution
was, like the others, in part the result of an active, able, and far
from infinitesimal minority working on a large majority group with
grievances enough to be stirred up effectively when the right time came.
To sum the matter up in a metaphor: the school of circumstances
regards revolutions as a wild and natural growth, its seeds sown among
tyranny and corruption, its development wholly determined by forces
outside itself or at any rate outside human planning; the school
of plot regards revolutions as a forced and artificial growth, its
seeds carefully planted in soil worked over and fertilized by the
gardener-revolutionists, mysteriously brought to maturity by these same
gardeners against the forces of nature. Actually, we must reject both
extremes, for they are nonsense, and hold that revolutions do grow
from seeds sown by men who want change, and that these men do do a lot
of skillful gardening; but that the gardeners are not working against
Nature, but rather in soil and in a climate propitious to their work;
and that the final fruits represent a collaboration between men and
Nature.
_IV. The Role of Force_
A final uniformity to be discerned in these first stages of our
revolutions is perhaps the clearest and most important of all. In each
revolution there is a point, or several points, where constituted
authority is challenged by the illegal acts of revolutionists. In such
instances, the routine response of any authority is to have recourse
to force, police or military. Our authorities made such a response,
_but in each case with a striking lack of success_. Those of the ruling
class responsible for such responses in all our societies proved
signally unable to make adequate use of force. Let us first look at the
facts.
In England there was no considerable standing army, and of course
nothing like a modern police force. Indeed, the question of control
over what standing army there was had been one of the big issues
between the first two Stuarts and their Parliaments. The Crown had
been obliged to quarter its soldiers on private citizens in order to
keep any kind of army together, and this quartering was one of the
grievances most strongly held against Charles I. When a Scotch army
crossed the border, Charles was obliged to call the Long Parliament
to get money to buy this armed force off. When the actual break
between Royalists and Parliamentarians drew near, both sides tried to
constitute an armed force. Charles had the benefit of a devoted noble
officer-class, and enough tenant-followers of noblemen and gentry to
constitute what was by far the strongest armed force controlled by the
government, or conservatives, or party-in-power side in any of our
four revolutions. Yet the Civil War proved that he didn’t have enough
good soldiers, in comparison with the human resources available to the
Parliament. Charles was beaten in the first instance because he lacked
decisive military power.
Similarly in the American revolution, neither the American Tories
nor the British armies were quite strong enough, as in the actual
event they used their armed strength to suppress the revolutionists.
Notably in the earlier stages, the British undertook to introduce
what they knew to be unpopular governmental changes with what now
seems an amazing disregard of police necessities. No doubt the
long tradition of British loyal self-government made it hard for a
British colonial administrator to conceive of any other methods. But
the fact remains that these forces in North America in 1775 were
quite inadequate to enforce authority. How many more men than Gage
actually did have would have been necessary to keep royal order in
Massachusetts Bay is a matter of guesswork, of perhaps unprofitable
history-in-the-conditional. It is, however, unduly complimentary to
rugged Yankee love of independence to suppose that no armed force could
have been large enough to have controlled Massachusetts. Had there been
a Napoleon instead of a Gage, there would perhaps have been a different
end to the fighting. Whether such a policy of repression would not
ultimately have produced a successful revolution anyway is a matter we
are not called upon to discuss. What does concern us is the simple fact
that in America also an important initial failure of the government was
its failure to use force adequately and skillfully.
Louis XVI had in 1789 a fairly trustworthy armed force. His French
troops were perhaps open to propaganda by the patriots. But he had
important household troops, mercenaries recruited from foreign peoples,
chiefly Swiss and German, and not accessible to French agitators.
That the Swiss would die for him, or for their duty, was proved three
years later at the storming of the Tuileries. He had, especially in
the artillery, a capable set of officers, most of whom could be relied
upon at this stage. Yet at the decisive moment, the rioting in Paris
in July, he and his advisers failed to use the military. Again we edge
into history-in-the-conditional, but one cannot avoid wondering what
would have happened had a few disciplined troops with street guns
attempted the reduction of Paris in July, 1789. Napoleon was later to
show that such a force could readily beat down civilian resistance,
and this fact was to be amply confirmed in 1848 and 1871. Louis might
have failed. But the point is that he didn’t even try. Once again a
government has failed to make adequate use of force.
Petrograd in 1917 is the most perfect example of this important
role of the military and the police. Everyone, from Czarist to
Trotskyite, admits that what turned somewhat chaotic and aimless
street demonstrations into a revolution was the failure of the
elaborate government plan to restore order in Petrograd. And that
plan failed because at the critical moment the soldiers refused to
march against the people, but regiment by regiment came over instead
to join them. Again, such is the advantage which a disciplined force
with modern artillery possesses over even the most inspired civilian
revolutionists, there can be little doubt that if the Cossacks and
a few of the famous regiments of the line, the Preobrazhensky, for
instance, had been warmly loyal to the government, even the somewhat
incompetent rulers of Petrograd could probably have put down the
disturbance. Whether another and worse riot was not inevitable within a
few months under existing conditions of failure in war is not a matter
that concerns us here.
This striking failure on the part of the rulers to use force
successfully is not, however, likely to be an isolated and chance
phenomenon. Indeed, it seems intimately bound up with that general
ineptness and failure of the ruling class we have noticed in a previous
chapter. Long years of decline have undermined the discipline of the
troops, bad treatment has given the private soldiers a common cause
with civilians, the officers have lost faith in the conventional
and stupid military virtues. There is no co-ordinating command, no
confidence, no desire for action. Or if there are some of these things,
they exist only in isolated individuals, and are lost among the
general incompetence, irresolution, and pessimism. The conservative
cause--even the cause of Charles I--seems a lost cause from the
start. The American case is somewhat different. Here we have an inept
_colonial_ government, but not an inept native ruling class.
We can then with some confidence attribute the failure of the
conservatives to use force skillfully to the decadence of a ruling
class. After all, we are dealing with fairly large groups of the
kind we are accustomed to treating as subjects for sociological
generalization. When, however, we attempt to bring the four crowned
heads of our societies under some such general rule, we can hardly
help feeling that we have no adequate statistical basis. Yet Charles
I, George III, Louis XVI, and Nicholas II display such remarkable
similarities that one hesitates to call in chance as an explanation.
Trotsky confidently asserts that a decaying society will inevitably
head up into the kind of incompetence displayed by these monarchs. We
dare not display quite as much confidence, but we must bring forward
these uniformities in the behavior of four men as a valid part of our
observed uniformities. At any rate their being what they were had an
important part in that process through which the revolutionists won
their preliminary and decisive victories over incompetent authority.
At the very least, one can discern in all these monarchs mistakes
which point to their lack of a reasonably objective thing, the
technical skill necessary to rule men. If a baseball player strikes
out consistently over a long stretch of games, and fields badly, it
may be because of poor eyesight, or family troubles, or a lot of other
reasons, but the simple fact remains that he is a poor ball-player.
Our four kings were poor kings, though they were all good family men,
men on the whole whom we should probably list as good, or at least as
well-meaning. Nicholas was petty and jealous, as well as ignorant and
superstitious, and by conventional Christian moral standards probably
the worst of the lot. But he was far from being a cruel tyrant. Louis
was kindly, well-meaning, but singularly unsuited to affairs of state.
Both men were deficient intellectually, were very much under the
domination of determined, passionate, proud, and ignorant wives, and
both have left diaries which display amazing parallels in obtuseness.
Louis went hunting on Bastille Day and in his diary records “Nothing”;
Nicholas in a similar crisis records “Walked long and killed two crows;
had tea by daylight.”
We cannot here go into the fascinating subject of the personalities of
all these monarchs. George III was high-minded, stupid, and stubborn,
which is a very bad combination indeed in a ruler. Charles is humanly
the most attractive of the four; there is a sound basis for the
romantic legend woven around him. But he was a bad king for a number
of reasons, of which the chief were perhaps first an almost complete
inability to understand what was going on in the hearts and heads of
those of his subjects commonly called Puritans--and this emphatically
includes the Scotch Calvinists--and, second, a tendency to high-minded
intrigue. In politics, high-mindedness and intrigue are much safer if
kept decently apart. This much, in summary, we may conclude about our
kings. However much they differed as men, they were alike in being
wholly unable to make effective use of force, even had they possessed
it, at the first stages of the revolution.