by these standards, a varied lot. In the years 1789-92 they include
noblemen like the King’s cousin, the Duke of Orléans, Mirabeau, the
Lameths, Lafayette; lawyers in vast numbers, from well-known Parisian
lawyers like Camus to obscure but thoroughly respectable provincial
lawyers like young Robespierre from Arras (who had once written his
name de Robespierre), or rising barristers like Danton, come to
Paris from a peasant background in Champagne; men of science like
the astronomer Bailly, the chemist Lavoisier, and the mathematician
Monge; and, nursed by the new power of the press, journalists like
Marat and Desmoulins, publicists like Brissot, provincial bourgeois
of Chartres, and Condorcet, a marquis and a _philosophe_. After 1792,
extremely few new leaders came to the top. The men who ran France in
1793-94 were, perhaps, somewhat less refined or distinguished than the
hopeful intellectuals of Mme. Roland’s circle; and they would have
seemed very barbarous at Versailles in 1788. They were not, however,
of very different social origins from the men who really ran the old
France--the literate bourgeoisie from which were ultimately recruited
the bureaucracy.
Of the striking respectability and excellent social standing of the men
who signed our Declaration of Independence most Americans are fully
aware. Of its fifty-six signers thirty-three held college degrees and
only about four had little or no formal education. There were five
doctors, eleven merchants, four farmers, twenty-two lawyers, three
ministers. Twelve were sons of ministers. Nearly all were affluent.
Sam Adams, who seems among the more disreputable of our leaders, came
from a merchant family of some means, and graduated from Harvard in
1740, where he was listed fifth out of twenty-two in those mysterious
lists which before Professor S. E. Morison’s researches we all thought
directly measured social standing. Even the Tories, though they flung
words like “rabble” about very freely, could consistently reproach
the revolutionary leaders with nothing worse in this respect than
being amateurs in the art of governing. “From shopkeepers, tradesmen,
and attorneys they are become statesmen and legislators.... Almost
every individual of the governing party in America fills at present,
in his own fancy, a station not only superior to what he had ever
filled before, but to what he had ever expected to fill,” writes a
conservative, or moderate, in the _Middlesex Journal_ for April 6, 1776.
We need not go into the social origins of the leaders of the moderates
in the English revolution. They are clearly among the highest in the
land. The immoderates present an interesting spectacle, a mixture
of gentlemen of good breeding, of self-educated careerists and of
humble men inspired by a fury as yet divine, as yet without benefit
of psychoanalysis. Cromwell himself, of course, was an East Anglian
country gentleman, whose family tree ramified into a good deal of the
new wealth originating in Tudor confiscations. Ireton, who became his
son-in-law, was of similar antecedents, as were many other Independent
leaders in old and new England. Ludlow the regicide was a son of Sir
Henry Ludlow of Wiltshire, and went to Trinity, Cambridge. Even John
Lilburne the Leveller is described as “of good family” dating back to
the fourteenth century, and seems to have been typical of the lesser
gentry whose sons not infrequently passed over into trade. We know
little of the social origins of such men as Winstanley the Digger or
Edward Sexby, a soldier of Cromwell’s regiment who appears later as
a kind of international agent of republicanism. Robert Everard, with
Winstanley a leader of the curious communistic group known as the
Diggers, was a captain in the army and is described as a “gentleman
of liberal education.” John Rogers the Millenarian was the son of an
Anglican clergyman and a Royalist.
Russia presents a case more nearly parallel to our other countries in
respect to the social origins of the leaders of her revolution than
might at first sight seem likely in a proletarian revolution. Perhaps
the moderates in Russia held power so briefly and so uncomfortably that
they hardly count. Kadets like Miliukov, a historian of good family,
Tereschenko, a Kiev sugar millionaire, the Octobrist Guchkov, a wealthy
Moscow merchant, and poor old Prince Lvov remind us of the rich Puritan
lords and merchants of the English revolution, the well-born Feuillants
of the French revolution. The Menshevik and Social-Revolutionary
leaders were mostly intellectuals, petty officials, trade union and
co-operative leaders; some of their most eloquent orators came from
Georgia, “the Gironde of the Russian revolution.” Kerensky was a
radical lawyer of provincial bureaucratic stock from the little Volga
town of Simbirsk, now called Ulianovsk, in memory of a greater than
Kerensky who also hailed from Simbirsk. As a matter of fact, V. I.
Ulianov, better known by his revolutionary name of Lenin, came from
exactly the same social class as Kerensky. His father was an inspector
of schools at Simbirsk, a position of much more social standing in
bureaucratic Czarist Russia than it would seem to us to be--very
definitely in the superior bourgeoisie.
The other Bolshevik leaders are a varied lot: intellectual Jews like
Trotsky (born Bronstein) and Kamenev (born Rosenfeld), both educated
men, by no means typical Ghetto Jews; Felix Dzerzhinsky, of noble
Polish-Lithuanian stock; Sverdlov, by training a chemist; Kalinin,
whom one might call a professional peasant; Stalin (born Djugashvili),
of Georgian peasant-artisan stock, destined by his mother for the
priesthood, and actually for some time a student in a seminary;
Chicherin, of stock sufficiently aristocratic to hold himself at least
as well-born as Lord Curzon; Antonov-Ovseënko, Red Army leader with the
fine bourgeois inheritance of a hyphenated name. The negotiations at
Brest-Litovsk, however, afford a neat synopsis of Bolshevik leadership
and proof of its non-proletarian character. When the first Russian
delegation was sent to that town to meet the Germans it included as
samples of the proletarian achievements of the revolution one specimen
each of sailor, worker, and peasant. The peasant is said, no doubt by
malicious enemies of the working class, to have distinguished himself
chiefly by his interest in the liquor supply. When, however, the
negotiations really got going after a recess, the Russians dropped
their ornamental sailor, worker, and peasant, and were represented by
men of course not the social equals of the high-born Germans opposite
them, but, one suspects, their cultural superiors--Joffe, Kamenev,
Pokrovsky, Karakhan--and by a somewhat neurotic lady-Bolshevik, Mme.
Bitzenko, who had won her spurs by shooting a Czarist official in
the bad old days. But, of course, even orthodox Marxism admits that
the proletariat cannot lift itself by its own bootstraps, and that
its leaders must therefore come from classes sufficiently privileged
to have had an education fitting them to interpret the subtleties of
Marxist theology.
Finally, the inexperience, the “newness,” of the revolutionary
leaders has generally been exaggerated in our textbooks. They had,
especially in Russia, a long training in the direction of dissenting
and persecuted little societies, the revolutionary groups. And
revolutionists as a group are so much like any other human beings
that to learn the art of leading them is to have gone a long way in
political apprenticeship. Even in France, the members of the National
Assembly were not as politically innocent as they are supposed to have
been. Many had had business experience, or had been diplomatists,
or civil servants, or had taken part in local politics in provinces
which had their own estates. All of them were used to the politics
of pressure groups. These revolutionary leaders are mostly far from
academic, unworldly, pure theorists; they do not step suddenly from the
cloister to the council hall. Their training may have subtly unfitted
them for leading a stable society; but that is another, and at present
insoluble, problem. They are certainly fitted for leadership in an
unstable society.
We have, then, found that both rank and file and leaders of active
revolutionary groups cannot be catalogued neatly as coming from any one
social or economic group. They are not even strikingly, precociously,
young. Their leaders are usually in middle age, the thirties and
forties, and thus younger than most of the politically prominent in
stable societies, which naturally incline to the rule of the old. But
the St. Justs and the Bonapartes, the boys in their twenties, are the
exception, not the rule. The leadership of the Russian revolution
which, with the distortion that comes from contemporaneousness, we are
likely to regard as the most “radical,” was on the average the oldest
in years of all our revolutions. The revolutionists tend to represent a
fairly complete cross-section of their communities, with a sprinkling
of the very highest ranks of their societies--men like Lafayette, for
instance, whom Mr. Lothrop Stoddard calls “misguided superiors”--and,
as far as the active ruling groups go, extremely few of the submerged,
downtrodden, lowest ranks. This is as true of the Bolsheviks as of
the Puritans and the Jacobins. Bums, hoboes, the mob, the rabble,
the riffraff, may be recruited to do the street-fighting and the
manor-burning of revolutions, but they emphatically do not make, do not
run, revolutions--not even proletarian revolutions.
_IV. Character and Disposition_
We now face a much more difficult task, one where our information is
neither so objective nor so readily catalogued as our information
about the social and economic status of revolutionists. This is
the problem--psychological at bottom--of seeing how far these
revolutionists belong to types which are normally viewed by John Jones
as queer, eccentric, or downright mad. Now one might quite justifiably
argue _a priori_ that a wholly contented man could not possibly be
a revolutionist. But the trouble is that there are so many ways of
being discontented, as well as contented, on this earth. Indeed, the
cruder Marxists, and the cruder classical economists, make an almost
identical error: they both assume that economics deals exhaustively
with whatever makes men happy or miserable. Men have many incentives
to action which the economist, limited to the study of men’s rational
actions, simply cannot include in his work. They observably do a great
deal that simply makes no sense at all, if we assume them to be guided
_wholly_ by any conceivable rational economic motive: near-starving in
the British Museum to write _Das Kapital_, for instance, or seizing
deserts under the comforting illusion that trade follows the flag, or
making the world quite safe for democracy. Yet clearly a man who takes
part in a revolution before it is demonstrably successful--and after it
is successful it may perhaps be said to have ceased to be a revolution
anyway--is a discontented man, or at least a man shrewd enough to
estimate that there are enough discontented men to be forged into a
group that can make a revolution. We must make some effort to study the
nature of such discontents as seen in individuals.
For here the method of statistical study of large groups of
revolutionists, like the Jacobins, will not work. At most these rank
and file are names, with profession and perhaps some other indication
of social status. Modern interest in social history and the common man
has indeed made available a certain number of old diaries and letters
of common men, and the Russian revolution has done its best to keep
alive the memory of worker this of the Putilov factory or sailor that
of the _Aurora_. Trotsky himself is very eloquent about the role of
these heroic workers, sailors, and peasants in his _History of the
Russian Revolution_, yet he manages to spend as much of his time on
the great names as if he were a mere bourgeois historian. We have, of
course, the blanket denunciations--they are hardly descriptions--of
one side by another. These are much too emotional as a rule to have
any evidential value, except as to the intensity of emotions evoked
during revolutions. Even in our own presumably mild revolution one
notes a Tory who is reported to have said, “It would be a joy to ride
through American blood to the hubs of my chariot wheels.” Of course
these American Tories thought the revolutionists were wild radicals,
scheming inferiors, jealous rabble. On the other hand, most of us
who were brought up without benefit of the new history were taught
in school to regard the Tories as just straight villains, traitors,
morally reprehensible people without economic, social, or indeed any
characteristics that separated them from such villains of fiction
as Simon Legree. So in the French revolution, each side accused the
other of all sorts of moral failings, but rarely got down to effective
details of daily life.
If we cannot for these reasons do much with the political and social
psychology of large groups of revolutionists, we can at least look
over some of the leaders, hoping that the list we decide upon will
not be too unrepresentative. Here at least we can count upon quite a
bit of biographical information. Thanks to those admirable works, the
_Dictionary of National Biography_ and the _Dictionary of American
Biography_, we can even sample some of the lesser leaders, the
noncommissioned officers of revolutions. The French are now at work on
their biographical dictionary, which promises to be even more scholarly
than its Anglo-Saxon prototypes, but as it has only just conquered the
letter “A” it is not of much use to us. Russia is very difficult indeed
from this point of view; there are plenty of brilliant comments on
Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, but they are also very contradictory. On
the lesser figures there is not much trustworthy biographical writing
available in the Western languages, nor for that matter in Russian. We
may note here, however, that the extraordinary proliferation of assumed
names in the Russian revolution probably does not stem with most of
these pseudonymous heroes from any feelings of shame for a criminal
or disgraceful past. Their crimes were no doubt many, but crimes only
against Czarist oppression. Perhaps there was originally some mildly
melodramatic notion that these aliases were useful against the Czarist
police, but soon they became a mere fashion, a revolutionary fad.
At this point there is some danger of our falling into a dreary
catalogue. At the risk of seeming to turn aside from strictly
scientific systematizing, we shall have to group our facts as we go
along under certain human types or characters. This is a process
which has been done successfully by a great many shrewd observers of
human behavior, from Theophrastus through Molière to Sainte-Beuve
and Bagehot. It is perhaps in some respects a more useful way of
classifying men than formal psychology or formal sociology has yet
worked out. These are not, one hopes, imaginary characters. If they are
one-tenth as real as Alceste or the Penurious Man they are more real
than anyone the average sociologist ever dealt with.
We may begin with the gentleman-revolutionist, whom Mr. Lothrop
Stoddard calls the “misguided superior,” the man born on top, but
perversely unwilling to stay there. He is by no means a simple person,
and indeed sometimes manages to combine an astonishing number of
revolutionary traits. It must be admitted that with many of these
misguided superiors in our four societies, dislike for the ways of
their class is apparently partly motivated by their inability to
succeed in certain activities honored in that class. You need not be a
debunking historian to admit that Lafayette revolted against the Court
of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette partly because he cut so awkward a
figure there. Liberty, fortunately, did not need to be courted in a
minuet. We must not seem to be cynical in these matters. Lafayette’s
love of liberty was no doubt morally a far better thing than if he had
loved place, pension, or mistress. But we must infer from his actions
that he had very early realized that nothing short of a love of liberty
would get him very far. And so today, when you find in one of our
colleges a well-nurtured youth turned Communist, you can be almost
certain that he is not captain of the football team nor secretary of
Chi Phi Digamma. He may indeed be Phi Beta Kappa. This condition we
need not here either applaud or condemn, but simply note.
It would, however, be cynical--and hence quite unscientific--to deny
that many of these misguided superiors are also moved by what we shall
have to call sincere idealism. Their own social group comes to seem
to them dissolute, or dull, or cruel, or heartless. They see the
possibilities of a better world. They are influenced by the writings of
the intellectuals, who have begun their desertion of the established
order. They come to struggle for God’s kingdom on this earth. They are
usually, of course, uncomfortable on this earth, but for a whole lot
of reasons, many of which cannot be simply dismissed as being in the
province of the psychiatrist. Shelley, who never actually got a chance
at revolution outside poetry, is a familiar example of this sensitive,
and often neurotic, type. Dzerzhinsky, the Polish aristocrat who gave
life to the terrible Cheka, was a delicate and sincere fanatic. The
Marquis de St. Huruge, who figures disreputably in the disorders and
street-fighting of the French revolution, was apparently pretty crazy,
and not even a gentleman. Condorcet, also a marquis, was a gentleman
and scholar, and if he had a good deal of the vanity that goes
naturally enough with both, and very little of the sense that sometimes
goes with either, was at heart a kind and sensitive man.
Others desert their class and join the revolution for the ignoble
but sometimes socially very useful reason that they think the signs
point to the victory of the revolution. Sometimes these men are like
Mirabeau, rather shady characters who have for some time compromised
themselves by irregular lives. Sometimes they are men like Talleyrand,
careful, sensible men whose main desire is to keep in a position of
honor and affluence, and who have no sense of loyalty to abstract
notions of right and wrong. And, of course, in the early stages of our
revolutions, even the Russian, plenty of rich and influential men of no
extraordinary intelligence or stupidity joined the revolution because
the revolution was fashionable, and an apparent success. Often these
men, who had not been directly in political power, were flattered by
the prospect of political power--men like the Duc d’Orléans or Bailly
or Tereschenko or Konovalov. But they were essentially fairly ordinary
human beings, no fitter subjects for hagiography--Christian, Freudian,
or Marxist--than you or I.
If we leave the superiors, those who belong by birth or upbringing to
the ruling classes, and who yet side with revolt, and turn to leaders
who come from classes below the ruling one, we shall find the same very
great variety of what we must tritely call human nature. We shall find
fools, scoundrels, idealists, professional agitators, diplomatists,
lunatics, cowards, and heroes.
Now it would be useless to deny that among those who come to the top in
the troubled times of revolution are many who probably never would have
been heard of in normal times. Some of these were certainly failures
in the old society, men who were unable to attain the objects of their
ambition. In spite of all that an able defender like Professor L. R.
Gottschalk has written to prove Marat’s learning and respectability,
it is still true that on the whole the _Friend of the People_ was
not a success before the revolution. Marat was a self-educated man
of humble stock, with a habit of presenting himself with academic
degrees and honorary distinctions his biographers--and even his
contemporaries--were not always able to confirm. He tried very hard
to storm the Parnassus of the _philosophes_, but was never admitted.
Like most enlightened eighteenth-century men of letters, he dabbled
in natural science, and emerged with a variant of the old phlogiston
theory of combustion, the originality and truth of which were not
properly appreciated by his jealous contemporaries. Lavoisier and the
“new chemistry” were triumphing in the 1780’s, and Marat failed to
recognize the meaning of the revolution in this science.
When the Estates-General met in 1789 he was a disappointed
intellectual, a man who had failed of acceptance by that little band
of writers and talkers who in late eighteenth-century France perhaps
enjoyed more unalloyed admiration from the public than such folk have
ever enjoyed. No Frenchman could at that epoch have coined a term like
“brain-trust”; but if he had it would have carried no such ironic
overtones of scorn as it does in twentieth-century America. Marat,
rejected by these admired leaders of opinion, was in 1789 full to the
brim with envy and hatred of everything established and esteemed in
France. Soon revolutionary journalism was to give him an ample outlet.
He became the watch-dog of the revolution--a mad watch-dog, always in
his _l’Ami du Peuple_ at work scenting plots against the people, always
hating those in power, even when they were of his own party, always
crying for blood and revenge. A most unpleasant fellow, no doubt.
Whether he was a more unpleasant one than certain journalists of normal
and unrevolutionary twentieth-century America, it is hard to say.
Journalism was very new in France in 1790, and people expected a good
deal. Marat at least had one excuse. He was suffering from an incurable
skin disease which gave to his life an almost unbearable nervous
tension.
Yet the failures are by no means all of the relatively simple type of
Marat. Sam Adams was certainly a failure when judged by the standards
of thrifty, sober New England. He had no money sense whatever, ran
through a small inheritance, was constantly in debt; let his wife and
children get along as they could while he organized his famous caucus
and committees of correspondence. He is by no means a figure for the
copy-books. Yet Adams could do certain things extremely well, and
if these things were not in the 1770’s as financially rewarding as
they are now, Adams at least reaped less tangible rewards in his own
time--and he did become governor of Massachusetts. Adams’s gifts,
of course, as they are deftly analyzed in Mr. J. C. Miller’s recent
study, are those of the expert propagandist and organizer. It is hard
to believe that today the advertising business would leave a man of his
parts undiscovered and unrewarded.
Thomas Paine, who managed to involve himself in two revolutions, the
American and the French, is still another revolutionist who amounted
to very little before the revolution. When he sailed for America
in 1774 he was thirty-eight, certainly no longer a young man. He
came from East-Anglian Quaker artisan stock, and had picked up an
eighteenth-century education, chiefly in the sciences and in the
philosophy of the Enlightenment, while pursuing half a dozen different
occupations from privateering to stay-making and shopkeeping. He had
made an unsuccessful marriage, been in and out of the excise service
twice, acquired a reputation as the town “atheist” of Lewes in Sussex,
and had led an unsuccessful and somewhat premature attempt at lobbying
in the interest of his fellow-excisemen. This attempt, which resulted
in his second and final dismissal from the service, also brought him
to the attention of Benjamin Franklin, who encouraged him to emigrate.
But Paine arrived in Philadelphia like many another European, an
unsuccessful man looking for a new start. The revolution gave it to
him, and _Common Sense_ made him a distinguished publicist. Paine was
the professional radical, the crusading journalist, the religious
rationalist, a man who in quiet times could hardly have been more than
another Bradlaugh, another Ingersoll.