simply: they were successful in their first stages; they became actual
revolutions instead of mere discussions, complaints, and riotings,
only after revolutionists had beaten, or won over, the armed forces
of the government. We cannot attempt to erect uniformities for other
revolutions or for revolutions in general. But we may here suggest
in very tentative and hypothetical form the generalization that
no government has ever fallen before revolutionists until it has
lost control over its armed forces or lost the ability to use them
effectively; and conversely that no revolutionists have ever succeeded
until they have got a predominance of effective armed force on their
side.
_V. The Honeymoon_
The first stage of revolution ends in all four of our societies with
the victory of the revolutionists after what is rather dramatic than
serious bloodshed. The hated old regime has been conquered so easily!
The way is open to the regeneration men have been so long talking
about, so long hoping for. Even the Russian February revolution, though
it broke out in the midst of the misery and shame of defeat at the
hands of Germans and Austrians, was cradled in the hope and joy that
seems a natural heritage of revolutions. Russians all over the world
heard the good news with delight. Liberals were as happy as their
ancestors had been in ’76 and ’89. Now Russia was washed clean of the
stain of absolutism, could take her place with confidence in the ranks
of her sister democracies of the West, join with a new effectiveness
in the crusade against the sole remaining forces of darkness, the
Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs.
The honeymoon stage of revolution is most perfectly developed in
France, where the revolution came in peacetime, and at the end of a
great intellectual movement called the Enlightenment which had prepared
men’s minds for a new and practical miracle. Wordsworth’s lines are
familiar:
“France standing on the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming born again.”
But poets in a dozen languages set to work to celebrate the
regeneration of France and of mankind. And not only poets. Sober
business men, professional men, country gentlemen, people who in the
twentieth century tend to regard revolution with horror, joined in the
rejoicing. Far away in unenlightened Russia noblemen illuminated their
houses in honor of the fall of the Bastille. Americans and Englishmen
rejoiced that the ancient enemy had come to join the self-governing
peoples. Frenchmen themselves were for a brief happy moment almost
unanimous. The King had seen the error of his ways, had embraced the
paladin Lafayette, had come freely to his good city of Paris to hear
the cheers of the heroes of the Bastille.
Yet the honeymoon period even in France was brief, briefer yet in
Russia, in England and in America never quite so clear and so definite.
In the first stages, and at the critical moment when the test of force
comes, the old regime is faced by a solid opposition. The opposition
is indeed composed of various groups, is never that myth a “united
people.” But it is welded by the necessity of effectively opposing the
government into a genuine political unit, into something more than a
chance coalition of contradictory elements. Its victory is, if we are
willing to take the terms critically and not sentimentally, the victory
of the “people” over its “oppressors.” It has shown itself stronger and
abler than the old government in this time of crisis. It has now become
the government, and is facing a new set of problems. When it actually
gets to work on those problems the honeymoon is soon over.
_Chapter_ FOUR TYPES OF REVOLUTIONISTS
_I. The Clichés_
It would clearly be helpful in our inquiry if we could at this point
isolate the revolutionist as a type. To pursue our analogy of the
fever, may it not be that certain individuals act as “carriers,”
and that they can be classified, labeled, described in economic and
sociological terms as well as in those of psychology or common sense?
This is at any rate a lead which seems worth following.
There are, however, several ways in which such a pursuit might lead us
astray. We must beware of regarding revolutionists, and revolutionary
leaders in particular, as literally bearing disease germs of
revolution. Here as throughout this study, our conceptual scheme must
never be allowed to lead us into fantasy. It must be a convenience, not
an obsession. We must more than ever avoid using terms of praise or
dispraise, which lurk in every corner of this particular field. For the
simple word “revolutionist” is likely to call up in the minds of most
of us a relatively uncritical personification, the sort of loose change
of daily intercourse that serves us well enough to get on with “poet”
or “professor” or “Frenchman.”
Even the subtlest thinker, the most delicate and conscientious artist
in words, has to come down in daily life to something very close to
the clichés that serve the man in the street. You and I, of course, do
not picture poets as long-haired, delicate, bohemian and tubercular,
nor professors as impractical, absent-minded, kindly and bearded,
nor Frenchmen as polite, dapper, wax-mustached, ladies’ men. But we
cannot go into Proustian intricacies with ourselves when we use such
words, nor can we use them as rigorously as a scientific systematist.
We get along with them as best we may, adjusting them roughly to our
experience and our sentiments.
Now what “revolutionist” means at this level to various persons and
various groups is in itself an important element in a full sociology of
revolutions. What all sorts of people feel about revolution is perhaps
most easily studied in the clichés which arise out of words like
“revolutionist” and “revolutionary,” or their more concrete parallels,
“Jacobin,” “Bolshevik,” “red,” and the like. We cannot attempt such a
study here, but we must look a bit further into a few of these clichés,
if only as a warning and a contrast.
Probably for most Americans in the fourth decade of the twentieth
century the word “revolutionist” carries unpleasant overtones. At
the level of the Hearst papers or the Macfadden publications, a
revolutionist appears as a seedy, wild-eyed, unshaven, loud-mouthed
person, given to soapbox oratory and plotting against the government,
ready for, and yet afraid of, violence. Even at slightly more
sophisticated levels, one suspects many of our countrymen feel much the
same about revolutionists, or at any rate are convinced that they are
pronouncedly queer people, failures under pre-revolutionary conditions,
sufferers from inferiority complexes, envious of their betters, or
just downright ornery, “agin the government” on principle and by
disposition. Other and more favorable pictures of the revolutionist
no doubt arise in other minds. To judge by some of our proletarian
writers--not themselves proletarians--the revolutionist is a sturdy,
broad-shouldered steelworker, uncorrupted by the falsities the
bourgeois call education, but well-versed in Marx and Lenin, strong,
kindly, a warrior-spirit with just a redeeming touch of Shelley about
him.
Now the social uses of beliefs of this sort are plain enough. In an
old bourgeois society like the United States, sentiments hostile to
revolutionists are probably important factors in maintaining social
stability. Revolutionists were all right in 1776, but not in 1938. Any
society that is a going concern must apparently contain large numbers
of people who feel this way about revolutionists. Even in Russia, where
memories of violent revolution are still fresh, a concerted effort
is being made by the government to discredit living, flesh-and-blood
revolutionists. Revolution was all right in 1917, but not in 1938. On
the other side, it is clear that radicals and extremists who think of
revolutionists as fine fellows, as heroes and martyrs, are also aiding
in their own social discipline, strengthening themselves for the fray.
The social scientist, however, cannot let the matter rest here. He must
attempt an objective classification of revolutionists, as complicated
as his data about them makes necessary. We can say with confidence that
even a hasty review of the four revolutions with which we are concerned
is very far from confirming either set of clichés we have outlined. And
notably, since the derogatory set is commoner in this country, such a
review by no means confirms the notion that our revolutionists were
seedy, loud-mouthed, bomb-throwing failures in the old regimes. If we
include, as we must, those who took the first steps in revolution as
well as those who ruled in the reign of terror, our type becomes still
less simple.
Let us take a random list of names as they come to mind: Hampden, Sir
Harry Vane, John Milton, Sam Adams, John Hancock, Washington, Thomas
Paine, Lafayette, Marat, Talleyrand, Hébert, Miliukov, Konavalov,
Kerensky, Chicherin, Lenin. All are revolutionists; all opposed
constituted authority with force of arms. The list includes great
nobles, gentlemen, merchants, journalists, a professor of history,
a political boss, a ward-heeler. It includes several very rich men
and one or two poor men. It includes many who would by conventional
Christian standards seem to have been good men; and it includes several
who would by such standards seem to have been very wicked men. It
includes some who were important people in their pre-revolutionary
days, some who were quite unknown, and two, perhaps three, who were
apparent failures in life until the revolution gave them a chance to
rise. Surely it is no easy task to find a least common denominator for
a list like this.
No doubt we shall be aided by making a distinction between the men
who dominate in the early stages of a revolution--on the whole the
moderates--and those who dominate in the crisis stage--on the whole
the extremists. But it will not do to say that only our extremists
are real revolutionists. After all, even George Washington seems to
have taken an oath of loyalty to the British Crown, and his breaking
that oath would have been treason had the American revolution failed.
We have been taught by Whig historians to believe that Essex and Pym
were defending the sacred laws of England, and that therefore they
weren’t real revolutionists. This was not, by any means, the current
opinion in Europe in the 1640’s, where the Parliamentarians were
regarded as shocking rebels against their king; and monarchy was in
seventeenth-century Europe as solidly rooted in the sentiments which
give force to law as the American Constitution seems rooted with us in
this country at the present time. No, we must list the moderates among
our revolutionists, even though they were defending the higher law
against the lower, and weren’t just nasty anarchists and rebels.
_II. Economic and Social Position: Rank and File_
One of the most useful approaches to the problem of the personnel of
revolutionary movements is from the relatively objective indications
of the economic and social status of those who take part in the
uprising. Now it is very difficult to find out much about the rank
and file of the revolutionists. Like the private soldier in war,
the ordinary revolutionist is inarticulate and nameless. For the
French revolution, however, some such study is not impossible. In the
surviving records of the Jacobin Clubs, which served as centers of
revolutionary action, and resemble both the Russian soviets and the
American corresponding committees, we have a large number of lists of
members--imperfect, of course, but still lists. Some years ago the
present writer made a study of these lists, and, aided by tax-rolls and
other documents in French local archives, was able to arrive at certain
rough statistical generalizations about these revolutionists. Some of
these generalizations must be here summarized from the author’s _The
Jacobins: A Study in the New History_.
In general, it is possible to arrive at some statistical approximation
of the social and economic positions of these Jacobin revolutionists in
pre-revolutionary France. There are tax-rolls extant for various years
between 1785 and 1790, and on these many of the Jacobins can be found,
with the sums they were assessed at. As these were direct taxes not too
far out of proportion to income, it is possible thus to get a rough
estimate of Jacobin wealth. Occupations are usually given, and this is
a useful indication of social position. Finally, it is also possible
to study certain clubs at specific moments in the revolution, so that
a sample can be taken during the early or moderate period, and another
during the later rule of the extremists. Here, briefly, are some of the
results.
For twelve clubs, with a total membership of 5,405 over the whole
course of the revolution, 1789-95, in both its moderate and its
violent phases: 62 per cent of the members were middle class, 28 per
cent working class, 10 per cent peasants. For twelve clubs in the
moderate period, 1789-92, with a membership of 4,037: 66 per cent
were middle class, 26 per cent working class, 8 per cent peasants.
For forty-two clubs in the violent period, 1793-95, with a membership
of 8,062: 57 per cent were middle class, 32 per cent working class,
11 per cent peasants. The tax-rolls confirm what occupational and
social classification suggests. In eight clubs considered over the
whole period of revolution, club members paid an average tax of 32.12
_livres_, where the average tax for all male citizens of the towns
considered was 17.02 _livres_; in twenty-six clubs considered in the
violent period only, club members paid 19.94 _livres_, male citizens
14.45 _livres_. Thus, though there was certainly a tendency for the
clubs to be recruited in the violent period from social strata a bit
lower, on the whole one is forced to the conclusion that “the Jacobin
was neither a nobleman nor a beggar, but almost anything in between.
The Jacobins represent a complete cross-section of their communities.”
Other relatively objective indices help us a bit. It was often possible
to list the ages of members of the clubs during the revolution.
As far as the rank and file of these clubs went, the notion that
revolutionists are recruited from the young and irresponsible was
not borne out. For ten clubs the average age varied from 38.3 years
to 45.4 years, and for all ten together came to 41.8 years. These
were clearly not foolhardy youngsters. Nor were they footloose
itinerants, shock troops imported from revolutionary urban centers
like Paris. Out of 2,949 members of fifteen clubs, only 378, or 13
per cent, had moved into the towns since the outbreak of trouble in
1789. The actual membership of the clubs varied as the revolutionary
movement grew more and more extreme--or in modern terms, went more
and more to the Left. Many moderates emigrated or were guillotined,
many disreputable extremists, often though by no means always from
the lower classes, only “made” the clubs later on. Yet in six clubs
with a total membership from 1789 to 1795 of 3,028, something over 31
per cent managed to stay on the books for the whole period, to have
been successively good monarchists, good Girondists, good Montagnards.
It is not true that the personality of these clubs became dominantly
lower or working class after the fall of the monarchy in 1792, nor even
that their newer recruits were largely from the proletariat. And it is
quite clear that these people are not on the whole failures in their
earlier environment; rather they represent the abler, more ambitious
and successful of the inhabitants of a given town. It is as if our
Rotarians today were revolutionists.
A similar statistical study could probably not be made for the English
revolution since lists corresponding to the Jacobin membership lists
are not available. The material certainly exists for such a study
of the actual membership of the soviets in, say, the crucial year
1917, but it would have to be put together from scattered sources
available only in Russia. We know a good deal about the membership
of our own American revolutionary groups, from merchants’ committees
and corresponding committees to continental congresses. Even for the
English revolution we have enough scattered material to permit some
generalizations about the personnel of the movement.
In the early stages of the English revolution there can be no doubt
about the respectability and economic prosperity of the men who backed
Parliament. Baxter, somewhat exaggeratedly, but with a kernel of truth,
writes that when the Great Rebellion broke out “it was the moderate
Conformists and Episcopal Protestants who had long been crying of
Innovations, Arminianism, Popery, Monopolies, illegal taxes and the
danger of arbitrary government, who raised the war.” The merchants of
London, Bristol and other towns, great lords, small landowning gentry,
all rose in sedition against their king. Even in what we may call the
extremist or crisis period of the English revolution, which begins
in 1646 or 1647 when the tension between the New Model Army and the
Presbyterians becomes acute, your revolutionists are very far from
riffraff. Even Baxter reports of that army--which was to the English
revolution what the Jacobins were to the French and the Bolsheviks to
the Russian revolutions--that “abundance of the common troopers and
many of the officers I found to be honest, sober, orthodox men, and
others tractable, ready to hear the truth, and of upright intentions.”
An historian has estimated that when the New Model “took the field
in 1645, of its thirty-seven chief officers, nine were of noble,
twenty-one of gentle birth, and only seven not gentlemen by birth.”
The English lower classes, or at least the more proletarian elements
as opposed to independent artisans, on the whole stood aloof from
the conflict. Even the wilder sectarians seem to have been recruited
from humble, but by no means poverty-stricken people, men who had
taught themselves to follow the theological disputes, men on the whole
representing the more active and ambitious of their class. The poorer
peasants, especially in the North and West, actually sided with the
King and against the revolutionists.
In America we have already pointed out the well-known fact that
it was the merchants who first organized opposition to the Crown.
This opposition was echoed by many planters in the southern coastal
plain, and by many very respectable yeoman farmers of the Piedmont.
It is quite true that there are numerous signs of the pretty active
participation of what a good conservative would regard as the dregs
of the population. The Boston Sons of Liberty, who performed most of
the actual work of violence there, were recruited from workingmen and
actually met habitually in the counting-room of a distillery. The
Tories, whom it is now more fashionable to call Loyalists, naturally
saw their opponents as a pretty shabby lot. Hutchinson writes of the
Boston town meeting that it is “constituted of the lowest class of
the people under the influence of a few of the higher class, but of
intemperate and furious dispositions and of desperate fortunes. Men of
property and the best character have deserted these meetings, where
they are sure of being affronted.”
Actually the line between Tory and Whig is a very irregular one,
depending on much besides economic status, as can be seen from the
late J. F. Jameson’s _The American Revolution Considered as a Social
Movement_. If the rich gentlemen of “Tory Row” in Cambridge sided with
the Crown, there were plenty of sober, respectable farmers, merchants,
and lawyers, who turned revolutionist. Such men were likely to be
shocked at the doings of wild young apprentices in the Sons of Liberty,
but this did not necessarily turn them to the British side, though it
made them critical of the Congress. A good sign of the respectability
of revolution is the adhesion of the clergy, which save for the
Episcopalians was in most colonies general. As a disgruntled Tory put
it, “The high sons of liberty include the ministers of the gospel, who
instead of preaching to their flocks meekness, sobriety, attention to
their different employments, and a steady obedience to the laws of
Britain, belch from the pulpits liberty, independence, and a steady
perseverance in endeavoring to shake off their allegiance to the mother
country. The independent ministers have ever been ... the instigators
and abettors of every persecution and conspiracy.”
To sum up we shall have to agree with Jameson that the strength of the
revolutionary movement in the long run lay with the plain people--not
with the mob or “rabble,” for American society was rural and not
urban--but with country artisans, small farmers, and frontiersmen. But
we shall also have to agree with Alexander Graydon that “the opposition
to the claims of Britain originated with the better sort: it was truly
aristocratical in its commencement.”
The February revolution in Russia seems to have been welcomed by
all classes save the most conservative of conservatives--a few army
officers, a few members of the Court and the old nobility. No one knows
who made the February revolution, but there can be no doubt as to its
popularity. Almost everyone, liberal noble, banker, industrialist,
lawyer, doctor, civil servant, _kulak_, and workingman, was glad to
co-operate in giving the Czarist regime its final blow. Even the
Bolsheviks, whose sudden victory in the October revolution of 1917
makes the time-scheme of the Russian revolution so very different from
those of the English and French revolutions, were by no means what
confirmed haters of revolution call riffraff, rabble, “the masses.”
They seem to have been recruited chiefly from the more enterprising,
able, and skilled workingmen in the factories of Petrograd, Moscow, and
specialized industrial centers like Ivanovo-Vosnessensk or the Don
basin. Their most important leaders were largely drawn from the middle
class. One might perhaps argue that the Kadets, led by Miliukov, were
so early discouraged that they may not be counted as a revolutionary
party. But the Mensheviks and S-R (Socialist-Revolutionary) party,
later scorned as “Compromisists” by triumphant Bolshevik historians,
are most certainly revolutionary elements. The Mensheviks may have
been mostly intellectuals, but the S-R were also recruited from the
prosperous peasants, from the people who ran the co-operatives, from
small shopkeepers and the like.
_III. Economic and Social Position: Leaders_
Hitherto we have been considering the main bodies of the
revolutionists, and have found that on the whole they by no means
represent the dregs of society, even in the great proletarian uprising,
and that they commonly include members of almost every social and
economic group in a given society, except possibly the very top of
the social pyramid. And yet the Essexes, Washingtons, and Lafayettes
are very close to the top. Even in Russia, Brusilov, a distinguished
Czarist general, lived to serve the Soviet government in the 1920 drive
on Warsaw.
Let us now see what we can make of the leaders, judging them first
by the comparatively objective standards of their social origins and
economic status. With the Jacobins the present writer was able to make
some study of the purely local leaders, the men who normally don’t
get into history. From the careers of dozens of these subalterns of
revolution, a conclusion seemed clear: “the leaders are substantially
of the same social standing as the rank and file. Possibly there are,
among the leaders during the Terror, more men who seem definitely, in
1789, failures, or at least at odds with their environment. Yet the
proportion of these village Marats is not striking.”