of very practical abilities, men of the kind that even cautious and
hard-headed conservatives must recognize as worthy of respect. Such
men may have lived in obscurity simply because they had not been
disturbed; or they may have been the victims of some such stoppage in
the circulation of the élite, the career open to talents, as we noted
in a previous chapter. Cromwell is a classic example of a man who might
have remained a simple country gentleman with an undistinguished career
in the House of Commons had it not been for the Puritan revolution.
Of Washington himself a similar generalization can be made. We shall
come back again to this question of the soundness of revolutionary
leadership.
So far we have said nothing of the men of blood, of Carrier and the
_noyades_ of Nantes, of Collot d’Herbois and the _mitraillades_ of
Lyons, of those to us nameless agents of the Cheka whose work made the
French Reign of Terror seem mild in comparison, or of those English
agents of the so-called Cromwellian settlement of Ireland who for
long-time effectiveness perhaps hold the record among Terrorists. We
shall later come to the problem of terroristic methods during the
crisis period of our revolutions. Here we are simply interested in
pointing out that among the personnel of the revolutionists are a
number of men who have been singled out by posterity as examples of the
kind of monster that comes to the surface in revolutions. No one can
deny the fact of such emergence, nor the fact that such men can hardly
be understood save with the help of criminology and abnormal psychology.
Carrier himself is a perfectly good example of these men. However
much Republican apologists may try to soften down the melodramatic
accounts his enemies have left of his activities at Nantes, the fact
remains that he did so speed up the revolutionary courts that it became
much easier to drown convicted persons in batches in the river Loire
than to wait for the slow-moving guillotine. Carrier was a provincial
lawyer who had got himself elected to the Convention by joining his
local club and repeating the stock phrases of the Enlightenment. He
was sent as a representative on mission to Nantes, and there power
seems to have gone to his head. Moreover, Nantes was on the edge of
the always dangerous Vendée, and Carrier may well have been driven to
cleaning up his enemies in a group by fear of conspiracy against his
own life. He certainly put up a bold front, swaggered about town, gave
entertainments, talked big, and left behind him festering hatreds that
brought his downfall and condemnation to death after the Terror was
over.
Carrier reminds one of Mr. James T. Farrell’s gangsters. There is the
bravado, the consciousness of life lived at the level of melodrama, the
new, crude sense of power, the constant haunting fear of reprisals,
the childish immediacy of purpose. What one does not find in Carrier
is a specific pathological love of bloodshed, a diseased mind of the
sort linked with the name of the Marquis de Sade. Indeed, this latter
kind of insanity is more often found among the jailers, thugs, and
hangers-on of revolution than among its leaders, even leaders at the
level of Carrier. And of course to many people the most revolting acts
in general are the acts of revolutionary mobs--the September massacres
at Paris in 1792, for instance, which are very closely paralleled by
the history of lynching in America. Here there crop up some of the
most shocking instances of human cruelty; but they are by no means
specifically to be associated with revolutions. Pogroms and lynchings
are at least as bad. Revolutions and mobs are not interchangeable
terms; you can and usually do have one without the other. The kind of
cruelty more properly associated with revolutions is the cruelty--to
some people more revolting than the cruelty of mobs--of judicial
murders done in cold blood, and on principle.
There is another type commonly, but erroneously, held to come to the
top in revolutions. This is the crack-brained schemer, the fantastic
doctrinaire, the man who has a crazy gadget which will bring Utopia.
Briefly, perhaps, in the honeymoon stage the lunatic fringe has its
innings, and in the English revolution rather more than its innings,
at least in print. But revolutions are a serious business, not to be
distracted by eccentricities. Once the line of revolutionary orthodoxy
is established--and though as we shall see it is a grim and rigid line,
it is not a crazy and aberrant one--once this orthodoxy is established
the lunatics, mild or serious, are pretty well kept down. There are
Marxist revolutions, natural rights revolutions, but none for the
Single Tax, Social Credit, Theosophy or Extra Sensory Perception. It
is only your very stable societies, like Victorian England, that can
afford to turn a Hyde Park over to the lunatic fringe. Even if you
think Cromwell, Washington, Robespierre, Napoleon, Lenin, and Stalin
all belong to this lunatic fringe, you will have to admit that in their
day of power they clamped down pretty hard on other and discordant
lunatics.
Nor is it possible to isolate a revolutionary type labeled “criminal,”
“degenerate,” and neatly conforming to some anthropometric standards.
Attempts to do this sort of thing have certainly been made. There are
probably those who hold that revolutionists have a fixed cephalic
index, or that they are predominantly dark-haired. Certainly there are
many revolutionists who, like Carrier, behave as criminals behave in
stable societies; but the proportion of such revolutionists does not
seem extraordinarily high.
A more characteristic revolutionary type is the disputatious,
contrary-minded person who loves to stand out from the crowd of
conformists. Indeed, one of our revolutionary groups, the English
Puritans, was filled with this especially rugged anarchism. Not only
do individuals stand out in this respect; the group as a whole sets
itself off deliberately from the great and the fashionable. As a social
historian has written: “Whatever was in fashion is what the Puritan
would not wear. When ruffs were in vogue, he wore a large falling band;
when pickadillies [ruffs] were out of request [1638], and wide falling
bands of delicate lawn edged with fine lace came in, he wore a very
small band. Fashionable shoes were wide at the toe; his were sharp.
Fashionable stockings were, as a rule, of any color except black; his
were black. His garters were short, and, before all, his hair was
short. Even at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, short hair was a mark of
Puritanism.”
The type is seen most clearly, however, in certain individuals. John
Lilburne, the English Leveller, is virtue incarnate and uncomfortable.
He seems to have come of a family of rugged individuals, for his
father, a gentleman of Durham, is said to have been the last Englishman
to have recourse to the feudal right to ask for judgment through
ordeal by combat in a civil suit. John was steadily addicted to
contention, and attacked Presbyterians and Independents as bitterly
as he had earlier attacked the Court. Indeed, as an historian has
written, “Lilburne was tried in almost every court in the kingdom,
under varying conditions, during a period of some twenty years, for
libels on the Government of the day, King, Parliament, Commonwealth,
and Protector. One of the first duties that devolved upon the judges
of the Commonwealth was to deal with this gentleman.” Yet he seems to
have preserved a good deal of social pride along with that intellectual
and spiritual pride which is one of the marks of the English Puritan.
On trial in 1653, he told his judge, a self-made man of artisan
background who had risen with Cromwell, that “it was fitter for him
[the judge] to sell thimbles and bodkins than to sit in judgment on
a person so much his superior.” Henry Marten, the regicide, who ought
to have been a good judge of such matters, said that if the world were
emptied of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John and
John would quarrel with Lilburne. Lilburne’s pamphlets are full of the
self-righteousness of those who fight always for the right, and who
seem to take delight in the uncomfortable position to which the poet
later assigned the right--
“Right forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.”
We are close to the martyrs.
Lilburne’s motives were no doubt of the highest. He believed in
absolute democracy, and his platform of manhood suffrage, biennial
parliaments, religious toleration, equality before the law, was one day
to secure pretty complete acceptance in England. But in 1645 only a
very doctrinaire person, only a fanatic, could have held this platform
possible of immediate realization. Lilburne was not only a disputatious
man, a courter of martyrdom; he was what the world commonly calls an
idealist, and suggests a consideration of a type which occurs very
frequently in these revolutions. It does not seem altogether wise to
single out any one type as the perfect revolutionist, but if you must
have such a type, then you will do well to consider, not the embittered
failure, not the envious upstart, not the bloodthirsty lunatic, but
the idealist. Idealists, of course, are in our own times the cement of
a stable, normal society. It is good for us all that there should be
men of noble aspirations, men who have put behind them the dross of
this world for the pure word, for the idea and the ideal as the noblest
philosophers have known them. But in normal times such idealists do not
seem, at least in Western society, to occupy positions of power and
responsibility. In normal times today we look up to our idealists,
and occasionally give them prizes and honorary degrees, but we do not
choose them to rule over us. We notably refuse to let them make our
foreign policies.
Indeed, one of the distinguishing marks of a revolution is this: that
in revolutionary times the idealist at last gets a chance to try and
realize his ideals. Revolutions are full of men who hold very high
standards of human conduct, the kind of standards which have for
several thousand years been described by some word or phrase which has
the overtones that “idealistic” has for us today. There is no need for
us to worry over the metaphysical, nor even the semantic, implications
of the term. We all know an idealist when we see one, and certainly
when we hear one.
Robespierre would have been an idealist in any society. There is a
familiar story of how the young Robespierre resigned a judgeship rather
than inflict the death penalty, which ran counter to his humanitarian
eighteenth-century upbringing. Historians have pretty well destroyed
that story, as they have so many others from the cherry tree to Alfred
and the cakes. But, except in the very narrowest and least useful
senses of the word, such stories are in many important ways usually
“true.” This story about Robespierre suggests that he was a good child
of the Enlightenment. One need only read some of his speeches, full of
the simplicities, the moral aphorisms, the aspirations of that innocent
age, to realize that he was quite capable of resigning, or buying, a
judgeship rather than abandon his ideals. He would, indeed, kill for
his ideals.
Those ideals, as they got formed by 1793, may seem to us somewhat
less than heroic, and they were certainly bolstered by a good deal of
personal ambition and sheer vanity in Robespierre. But there they were:
Robespierre wanted a France where there should be neither rich nor
poor, where men should not gamble, nor get drunk, nor commit adultery,
nor cheat, nor rob, nor kill--where, in short, there would be neither
petty nor grand vices--a France ruled by upright and intelligent men
elected by the universal suffrage of the people, men wholly without
greed or love of office, and delightedly stepping down at yearly
intervals to give place to their successors, a France at peace with
herself and the world--but surely this is enough? Robespierre’s
personal rectitude is now hardly questioned even by historians hostile
to what he stood for; in his own day, and especially immediately
after his fall, he was accused of almost every possible crime and
moral delinquency. He seems actually not even to have had any of the
fashionable vices--no drink, no gaming, no women. Modern historians
claim to have evidence that for a brief time in Paris he kept a
mistress. If he did, one supposes it must have been out of motives of
fancied hygiene; or possibly for a few weeks the country lawyer had
ideas of living as did the fashionable Parisians. The Robespierre of
the Terror, however, had certainly put such ideas behind him, and was,
as the Incorruptible, a living symbol of the Republic of Virtue in his
public and private life.
Now this idealist type is by no means simple. Cromwell should clearly
not be listed primarily under this category, and yet there is something
of the puritanical “seeker” in Cromwell, something that makes his
tortuous policy--indeed his double-dealing--very hard to understand if
you insist on seeing human beings as logically consistent wholes. Both
Lenin and Trotsky are strange compounds of idealism and realism. This
coupling of idealism and realism does not mean simply that they both on
occasion could use realistic methods to attain ends dictated by their
ideals. Robespierre, Cromwell, Gladstone, or Woodrow Wilson could
do that. It means that they were also capable of pursuing realistic
immediate ends. Lenin, of course, was a very skillful propagandist
and organizer, with a great deal of what we shall have to call
executive ability. But, at least in 1917, he seems to have thought that
world-wide revolution was just around the corner, and that absolute
economic equality could be introduced immediately in Russia. The New
Economic Policy of 1921 is a clear indication that Lenin would not
pursue his ideals to the bitter end of defeat and martyrdom.
Trotsky has one of the best critical minds of any Marxist, is even
capable, at moments, of a kind of skepticism about his own aims. The
Civil War of 1917-21 in Russia gave convincing proof of his abilities
both as an orator and as an executive under pressure. Yet the Trotsky
of the exile years seems to be howling for the moon, which is one
definition, perhaps too unkind, of idealism. Had Trotsky remained in
power he might indeed have made his peace with bureaucracy, inequality,
socialism-in-one-country, Thermidorean decadence and all the other
evils he now associates with the name of Stalin. And yet it seems not
unlikely that this intransigeance of Trotsky’s, this insistence on
bringing heaven immediately to earth, this unwillingness to accommodate
his aims to human weakness, or if you like, to human nature, help to
explain why he did not last in post-revolutionary Russia.
Sentimental idealism was of course distinctly out of fashion in
the Russia of 1917. The harsh realities, or at any rate the harsh
_formulas_, of Marxist Socialism had replaced the naïve hopes with
which the French revolution had set out to make this a better world.
In both Lenin and Trotsky you can trace this desire to seem to be
hard-boiled, and it will not do to imply that they did not in some
ways succeed. There is one pure idealist among the Russian leaders,
however, one who presents us with still another variant of the type.
That is Lunacharsky, long Commissar for Education, the artist and
man of culture of the movement. Lunacharsky, in spite of his past as
a revolutionary agitator, was unquestionably a softie. He possessed
the ability to talk movingly about life and education and art, and
carried over into a century where it seemed a little strange something
of Rousseau or of _Paul and Virginia_. The world should be grateful
to him, however, for he helped greatly to prevent the wholesale
destruction of works of art identified offhand with a dissolute
capitalistic past.
There is, finally, the man almost wholly of words, the man who can
hold crowds spellbound, the revolutionary orator. He may be listed as
an idealist, because although part of his role is to egg the crowd
on to acts of violence, he is even more typically the soother, the
preacher, the ritual-maker, the man who holds the crowd together. In
this role his words need hardly have any meaning at all, but commonly
they can be analyzed out into pleasant aspirations and utterances. Much
of Robespierre comes under this head, as do Patrick Henry, Vergniaud,
Tseretelli. The type, of course, exists in all normal societies, and
is usually esteemed. Zinoviev seems in the Russian revolution to have
borne some such role. Lenin realized how useful Zinoviev was as an
orator and even as a kind of Petrograd boss, but he seems to have had a
pretty complete contempt for his sense and intelligence.
V. _Summary_
To sum up, it should by now be clear that it takes almost as many
kinds of men and women to make a revolution as to make a world. It is
probable that, especially in their crisis periods, our revolutions
threw up into positions of prominence and even of responsibility men
of the kind who would in normal or healthy societies not attain similar
positions. Notably, great revolutions would appear to put idealists
in possession of power they do not ordinarily have. They would seem
also to give scope for special talents, such as Marat had, for yellow
journalism and muck-raking of a very lively sort. They certainly create
a number of empty places to fill, and give an opportunity to clever
young men who may also be unscrupulous. They probably insure a bit
more public attention, for a while at least, to the chronic rebel and
complainer, as well as to the lunatic fringe of peddlers of social and
political nostrums.
But they do not re-create mankind, nor do they even make use of a
completely new and hitherto suppressed set of men and women. In all
four of our revolutions, even in the Russian revolution, the rank
and file was composed of quite ordinary men and women, probably a
bit superior to their less active fellows in energy and willingness
to experiment, and in the English, American, and French revolutions,
even in their crisis periods, people of substantial property.
These revolutionists were not in general afflicted with anything
the psychiatrist could be called in about. They were certainly not
riffraff, scoundrels, scum of the earth. They were not even worms
turning. Nor were their leaders by any means an inferior lot suddenly
elevated to positions of power which they could not worthily occupy.
There is no question that in the turmoil of revolutions a good many
scoundrels rise to the top--though they can also rise to the top
without benefit of revolution, as a glance at some of the phases of
either the Grant or the Harding administrations should amply prove.
But the level of ability, of ability in an almost technical sense,
the ability to handle men and to administer a complex social system,
the level of ability suggested by names like Hampden, Pym, Cromwell,
Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Mirabeau, Talleyrand,
Carnot, Cambon, Danton, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, is certainly very high.
All this by no means amounts to asserting the paradox that there
are no real differences between revolutions and ordinary times.
On the contrary, especially in their crisis periods, revolutions
are like nothing else on earth. But you cannot altogether explain
the differences between societies in revolution and societies in
equilibrium by suggesting that a whole new crew operates during a
revolution; by saying, if you dislike a particular revolution and all
its works, that the scoundrels and the bums put it over on the good
souls; or if you happen to like and approve a particular revolution,
that the heroes and sages turned out the corrupt old gang. It just
isn’t as simple as all that. Since on the whole the evidence would seem
to show that revolutionists are more or less a cross-section of common
humanity, an explanation for the undoubted fact that during certain
phases of a revolution they behave in a way we should not expect such
people to behave, must be sought in changes worked on them by the
conditions they live under, by their revolutionary environment.
_Chapter_ FIVE THE RULE OF THE MODERATES
_I. The Problem of the Moderates_
In the summer of 1792 Lafayette, with some of his officers, left
the French Army and passed over to the Austrian lines. He was
promptly put in prison by the Austrians, to whom he was a dangerous
firebrand of revolution. Lafayette was, however, a good deal more
fortunate than many of his fellow-heroes of 1789 who elected to stay
in France, and who were guillotined as dangerous reactionaries and
counter-revolutionists. Fedor Linde, a moderate Socialist who in April,
1917, moved the Finnish Regiment to a mutinous demonstration against
the pro-Ally and still more moderate Miliukov, was later sent to the
front as a government commissar under Kerensky and there was lynched
by mutinous soldiers who refused to obey his commands. In 1647 Denzil
Holles, of whom we took note briefly back in 1629, as he was helping
to hold down the Speaker in his chair, was with ten other Presbyterian
members excluded from Parliament for “endeavoring to overthrow the
rights and liberties of the subjects.” He did indeed return briefly to
his seat again in 1648, but was soon forced to flee to France to save
his life. A famous phrase from the French revolution puts the thing
neatly: “The revolution, like Saturn, devours its children.”
The honeymoon was in these revolutions short; very soon after the old
regime had fallen there began to be evident signs that the victors were
not as unanimous about what was to be done to remake the country as had
appeared in the first triumphant speeches and ceremonies. Those who had
directly taken over the mechanism of government were in all four of our
societies men of the kind usually called moderates. They represented
the richer, better known and higher placed of the old opposition to
the government, and it is only to be expected that they should take
over from that government. Indeed, as we have seen, their assumption of
responsibility is almost a spontaneous act. So strong is this feeling
that the moderates should take over power that it prevailed even in
Russia in February, 1917. It looks to us now as though a Socialist
coalition of some kind--Social-Revolutionary and Menshevik groups, with
possibly even Bolshevik adhesions--might just as well have assumed
power right away in that month. The Kadets and other bourgeois groups
clearly had few strong roots in the country. And yet Lvov and his
well-meaning moderates had little difficulty in assuming at least
nominal control.
The moderates, once in power, turned out to have less homogeneity and
party discipline than they seemed to have when they were in opposition.
They were faced with the difficult task of reforming existing
institutions, or making a new constitution, and taking care at the same
time of the ordinary work of governing. They were also confronted very
soon with armed enemies, and found themselves engaged in a foreign or
civil war, or in both together. They found against them an increasingly
strong and intransigeant group of radicals and extremists who insisted
that the moderates were trying to stop the revolution, that they
had betrayed it, that they were as bad as the rulers of the old
regime--indeed, much worse, since they were traitors as well as fools
and scoundrels. After a period, brief in Russia, longer in France and
England, there came a show of force between moderates and extremists,
a show of force in many ways quite like that earlier one between the
old government and the revolutionists, and the moderates were beaten.
They fled into exile, they were put into prison ultimately to face the
scaffold, guillotine, or firing-squad, or if they were lucky or obscure
enough, they dropped out of sight and were forgotten. The extremists in
their turn took power.