to it, once the first steps in actual revolution have been taken, not
merely hostile individuals and parties--this any government finds--but
a rival government, better organized, better staffed, better obeyed.
This rival government is of course illegal, but not all of its leaders
and followers are from the beginning consciously aiming to supplant
the legal government. Very often they think of themselves as merely
supplementing it, perhaps also as preserving it in a revolutionary
course. Yet a rival government they are, and no mere critics or
opponents. At a given revolutionary crisis they step naturally and
easily into the place of the defeated government.
This process does indeed work itself out in the old regimes before the
first steps in revolution are taken. Puritans in England, Whigs in
America, Third Estate in France, the Kadets and compromisist Socialists
in Russia, all had organizations that demanded their allegiance and
that enabled them to fight the old regime with revolution at least
in the back of their minds. But the process is much more clear, more
sharply edged--except perhaps in America--at the stage we have now
reached.
Once the first stage in revolution is over, the struggle that arises
between moderates and extremists comes to be a struggle between
two rival governmental machines. That of the moderates, the legal
government, bar inherited some of the prestige that goes with being
established, some of the financial resources--actual or potential--of
the old government, most of its liabilities, all of its institutions.
Try to alter these latter as it may, it finds them annoyingly
persistent, extremely difficult to blot out. The legal government is
unpopular with many just because it is an obvious and responsible
government, because it has to shoulder some of the unpopularity of the
government of the old regime.
The illegal government of the extremists, however, has to face no
such difficulties. It has the prestige which recent events have given
to attackers, to those who can claim to be in the forefront of the
revolution. It has, as governments go, relatively few responsibilities.
It does not have to try to use, if only temporarily, the worn-out
machinery, the institutions of the old regime. It has, on the
contrary, for the moment the great advantage of using the efficient
machinery gradually constructed by the revolutionists, both moderates
and extremists, from the time when they began under the old regime
to emerge as a pressure group. Indeed, the final capture of this
machinery--or this organization, if you prefer--seems to be what really
determines the final victory of the extremists over the moderates, long
before that final victory is apparent in events. Why the moderates do
not keep control of the organization they have done so much to initiate
and to mold is a question that permits of no simple answer. We may hope
that some answer will emerge from a more detailed study of the fate
of the moderates. We must first, however, see how well the foregoing
analysis fits the facts in our four revolutions.
Charles and the Long Parliament were clearly dual sovereigns from the
actual outbreak of hostilities in 1642 if not from the very first
session of 1640. Once the Civil War was decided against Charles,
Parliament, under the control of the moderates, found itself the legal
government. But almost immediately it was confronted by the radical New
Model Army, which very soon began to take the kind of action that in
this world only a government can take. The fact that Charles was still
on the scene and the existence of the Scotch Army complicated the
situation in the three or four years before the execution of Charles
in 1649, but the broad lines of the duel between the newly legal
government of the Presbyterian moderates in Parliament and the illegal
government of the extremist Independents in the New Model Army are
clear.
In America this dual sovereignty is most obvious in the years before
the final break in 1776. The lines between the legal and the illegal
government were obscured, especially in a colony like Massachusetts,
by the fact that town meetings and colonial legislatures were part of
the legal government, but were often controlled by men active in the
illegal government. None the less, the machinery which culminated in
the continental congresses--in themselves illegal bodies--was clearly
used by revolutionists against constituted authority.
While the moderates in France, the Feuillants, or constitutional
monarchists, still controlled the legislative body and the formal
machinery of the centralized state, their increasingly republican
opponents controlled the network of Jacobin societies which made up
the frame of the other, or illegal, government. Through their control
of these societies they worked into the control of many of the units
of local government, and from this position of vantage were able to
expel the Feuillant moderates and destroy the monarchy. The process was
then repeated with the Girondin moderates controlling the legislative
body and the Montagnard extremists controlling the important units
of the Jacobin network and at least one exceedingly important local
governmental unit--the Paris Commune. In the crisis of June 2, 1793,
the illegal government again won out over the legal.
In Russia the _dvoevlastie_ is plain. The provisional government which
emerged from the February revolution had through its connection with
the Duma some claim to legitimacy. Though it absorbed more and more
Socialists of various stripes in the next six months, thus exhibiting
the leftward movement we have found in all our societies, it remained
moderate and quite conscious of its legality. On the other side the
Bolsheviks and a few allied radical groups had by late summer obtained
control of the network of soviets and stood as an illegal government
facing the legal one. Soviet means no more than “council” and had
originally in Russia no more connotations than its English equivalent
has for us. The soviets were local councils of trade-unionists,
soldiers, sailors, peasants, and suitable intellectuals. They sprang
up naturally enough with the dissolution of the Czarist power in 1917,
all the more since memories of the abortive revolution of 1905, which
had also made use of the soviet form, were fresh in the minds of
everyone. The Bolsheviks, wisely concentrating on the soviets while the
attention of the compromisists was increasingly taken by participation
in the legal government, were able to wrest control of key soviets in
Petrograd, Moscow, and major industrial towns from the compromisists.
There is here a curious detailed parallel with the French revolution.
The final insurrectionary victory of the Bolsheviks was achieved
without complete control of the general network of soviets, just as
that of the Montagnards was achieved without control of the whole
network of Jacobin clubs. In each case control of the most important
units of the illegal government was sufficient.
_IV. Weaknesses of the Moderates_
At this stage in revolution, then, the moderates in control of the
formal machinery of government are confronted by the extremists in
control of machinery devised for propaganda, pressure-group work, even
insurrection, but now increasingly used as machinery of government.
This stage ends with the triumph of the extremists and the merging of
the dual sovereignty into a single one. We must now inquire into the
reasons for the failure of the moderates in these revolutions to hold
power.
There is first the paradox we have previously noted, that in the early
stages of revolution the control of the machinery of government is in
itself a source of weakness for those who hold such control. Little by
little the moderates find themselves losing the credit they had gained
as opponents of the old regime, and taking on more and more of the
discredit innocently associated by the hopeful many with the status
of heir to the old regime. Forced on the defensive, they make mistake
after mistake, partly because they are so little used to being on the
defensive. They are in a position from which only a superhuman wisdom
could extricate them; and the moderates are among the most human of
revolutionaries.
Faced with the opposition of more radical groups organized in the
network we have called the illegal government, the moderates have
broadly but three choices: they may try to suppress the illegal
government; they may try to get control of it themselves; or they may
let it alone. Actually their policy shifts around among these three
policies, combining one with another; in these circumstances, the net
effect is to produce a fourth policy, which amounts to a positive
encouragement of their enemies in the illegal government.
In the revolutions we are studying the moderates are particularly
handicapped in their efforts to suppress these enemy organizations. The
revolutions were all made in the name of freedom, were all associated
with what the Marxists call a bourgeois individualistic ideology. The
moderates found themselves obliged to observe certain “rights” of
their enemies--notably those of freedom of speech, of the press, of
assembly. What is more, many if not most of the moderates sincerely
believed in such rights, held that truth is great and will prevail.
Had it not just prevailed against the tyranny of the old regime?
Even when under pressure the moderate begins to try to suppress an
extremist newspaper, forbid an extremist meeting, jail a few extremist
leaders, his conscience troubles him. More important, any unsuppressed
extremists raise a mighty howl. The moderates are betraying the
revolution; they are using exactly the same methods the villainous
tyrants of the old regime had used.
The Russian revolution is here an excellent example. The Kadets and
compromisists between February and October could not conveniently
suppress Bolshevik propaganda, nor indeed any form of Bolshevik
political activity. When they tried to do so after a premature
Bolshevik rising, the street troubles in Petrograd known as the “July
Days,” they were met by protests from all sorts of people, including
notably the Bolsheviks. This was despotism, this was Czarism of the
worst sort. Had not the February revolution brought political freedom,
freedom of the press and association, to Russia forever? Kerensky
mustn’t make use of the kind of weapons the Czars had used. In 1938
Stalin of course can use methods worthy of Peter the Great or Ivan the
Terrible, but that is only to say that the Russian revolution is over.
In 1917, however, even had Kerensky been the sort of man who could
successfully organize repressive measures--and he plainly was not that
sort of man--what we are bound to call public opinion would not in
those days have permitted the execution of such measures. Much the same
situation is to be found in France, where the Jacobins were permitted
free speech and free association, and firmly and publicly insisted on
their rights as free men to get ready for a dictatorship.
Nor are the moderates more successful in their attempts to get--or
rather to retain--control of the machinery which they and the
extremists had jointly built up as a means of overthrowing the old
regime. For this there seems to be no single preponderant reason.
The moderates are, of course, occupied with a good deal of the work
of actual governing, and they have less time for army committees or
Jacobin clubs or soviet meetings. They feel themselves perhaps a trifle
superior to such activity. They are temperamentally unfitted for the
rougher and dirtier work of the politics of direct action. They have
moral scruples. They are not quite the noble souls historical legend
makes out the Girondin moderates in the French revolution to have been;
indeed many of them, like Brissot and Kerensky, have a good many of the
gifts of the political manipulator. But they are in power, and they
seem to set about quite naturally cultivating the sober virtues that
go with power. Such virtues, however, make them inadequate leaders of
militant revolutionary societies.
Whatever the explanation, the fact of the uniformity is clear. This
particular failure of the moderates is well shown in the French
revolution. The Jacobin network of societies of “Friends of the
Constitution” was in its inception hardly to the Left of Lafayette and
his friends. When, however, it began to move further to the Left the
Fayettists made a few feeble efforts to retain control, and then went
off and founded their own society, the Feuillants. The Feuillants,
however, could not spread beyond narrow upper-class and intellectual
Parisian circles. Later groups founded here and there throughout the
country as “Friends of the Monarchy,” or “Friends of Peace,” tried to
compete with the Jacobins, but with very little luck. If they gave
bread to the poor, the Jacobins cried out that they were attempting
bribery. If they did nothing, the Jacobins complained that they lacked
social conscience. Finally the Jacobins worked out a fairly systematic
procedure. They would hire a few hoodlums--sometimes it was not
necessary to hire them--to break up a meeting of the rival Friends of
Peace, and would then send a deputation to the municipal authorities
asking that the Friends of Peace be closed as a public nuisance. The
authorities were either Jacobins themselves, or more afraid of the
Jacobins than of the Friends of Peace, so that the matter received a
suitable revolutionary solution.
Similarly the Presbyterians found themselves powerless to control the
spread of Independency, not only in the army, but in local parishes.
And in Russia the compromisists found the Bolsheviks formidable in
all the important soviets. A detailed study of the Petrograd soviet
from February to October will show how cleverly the party of Lenin
took advantage of every mistake of its opponents, how successfully it
burrowed from within, spreading its control from factory soviets on
up until finally the city soviet was captured. Such a study will also
show the compromisists gradually losing ground, in spite of the great
oratorical gifts of leaders like Tseretelli, Chkheidze and Kerensky.
There is, indeed, an almost organic weakness in the position of the
moderates. They are placed between two groups, the disgruntled but not
yet silenced conservatives and the confident, aggressive extremists.
There are still freedom of speech and the other political rights, so
that even conservatives have a voice. Now the moderates seem in all
these revolutions to be following the slogan used so conspicuously
for French politics of the _Cartel des Gauches_ in 1924: no enemies
to the Left. They still distrust the conservatives, against whom they
have so recently risen; and they are reluctant to admit that the
extremists, with whom they so recently stood united, can actually be
their enemies. All the force of the ideas and sentiments with which the
moderates entered the revolution give them a sort of twist toward the
Left. Emotionally they cannot bear to think of themselves as falling
behind in the revolutionary process. Moreover, many of them hope to
outbid the extremists for popular support, to beat them at their
own game. But only in normal times can you trust in the nice smooth
clichés of politics like “beat them at their own game.” The moderates
fail by this policy of “no enemies to the Left” to reconcile these
enemies to the Left; and they make it quite impossible to rally to
their support any of the not yet quite negligible conservatives. Then,
after the moderates get thoroughly frightened about the threatening
attitude of the extremists, they turn for help to the conservatives,
and find there just aren’t any. They have emigrated, or retired to
the country, hopeless and martyred in spirit. Needless to say, a
martyred conservative is no longer a conservative, but only another
maladjusted soul. This last turn of theirs towards the conservatives,
however, finishes the moderates. Alone, unsupported in control of a
government as yet by no means in assured and habitual control of a
personnel, civil or military, they succumb easily to insurrection. It
is significant that Pride’s Purge, the French crisis of June 2, 1793,
and the Petrograd October revolution were all hardly more than _coups
d’état_.
In the English, French, and Russian revolutions it is possible to
distinguish one critical measure around which all these currents
converge, a measure which, espoused by the moderates, cuts them off
from support on the Right and leaves the radicals in a position to use
this very measure against its authors. Such are the Root-and-Branch
Bill in the English, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in the
French, and Order Number One in the Russian, revolutions.
The Root-and-Branch Bill originated in a petition with 15,000
signatures presented to the House of Commons late in 1640, asking
for the abolition of Episcopacy “with all its roots and branches.”
Naturally the moderate Episcopalians, from Hyde and Falkland to Digby,
were against a measure which destroyed their Church; and just as
naturally the Presbyterians were inclined to favor it. It is possible
that politically minded moderates like Pym might have left the bill
alone, but the refusal of the bishops to give up their seats in the
House of Lords seems to have determined Pym to support the bill. This
espousal made almost every Episcopalian a Royalist, and when the Civil
War broke out in 1642 the Presbyterians were stranded on the extreme
Right of the party groupings within the region controlled by the
Parliamentarians. They could find no possible allies except to the
Left. The Independents--and Cromwell had first actually introduced the
Root-and-Branch Bill to the House--could now argue that presbyters were
no better than bishops, that the reasons which held for the abolition
of one held incontrovertibly for the abolition of the other. Later,
when the moderates proved incapable of carrying the war to a successful
conclusion, measures like the Self-Denying Ordinance and the creation
of the New Model Army had to be accepted by a Presbyterian majority
which yet was not by any means a commanding majority, and which had
left itself with no possibility of conservative support.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy emerged after months of discussion
in the National Assembly as a charter for renewed Christianity in
France. The moderates who put it through seem mostly to have been
sincere men, bad Catholics in some ways, perhaps, but rather because
they had absorbed some of the practical worldly spirit of the age than
because they were outright anti-clericals. Yet their measure alienated
the good Catholics and merely encouraged the violent anti-clericals to
try to root out the “vile superstitions” of Christianity altogether.
The Civil Constitution in all innocence provided for the election
of parish priests by the same local electoral bodies that chose lay
officials for the new government positions, and for the election of
bishops by the same departmental body that elected representatives to
the Legislative Assembly. It scrapped all the historic dioceses of old
France, and substituted nice, nearly uniform dioceses identical with
the new _départements_ into which France was governmentally divided. It
did consent to “notify” the Pope of such elections.
Since the property of the Church as a corporation had been taken over
to serve as security for the new paper money of the revolution, the
_assignats_, the State was to support the expenses of the clergy under
the new constitution. The election of priests and bishops by bodies
to which Protestants, Jews, and avowed atheists were eligible was so
completely uncanonical that no Pope could for a moment have considered
accepting it. Although there was the usual diplomatic delay, the break
between the Pope and the revolutionary government was inevitable, and
with it the powerful and conservative group of Catholics was forced
irreconcilably into opposition. A schism began which extended to every
village in the land. But the new Constitutional Church was hardly more
acceptable to the real radicals than the old Orthodox Church, and
as the critical days of the Terror drew nearer the moderates found
themselves saddled with the protection of a church which returned them
no important support.
Order Number One emerged from no such long debate as did the
Root-and-Branch Bill and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Indeed,
it is not quite fair to list it as a definite measure sponsored
by the moderates, though the soviet leader most prominent in the
group which prepared it was the moderate N. D. Sokolov, and the
compromisists energetically promulgated it. The Order emerged in the
very last days of the February revolution from the headquarters of
the Petrograd soviet. It was addressed to the army, and in addition
to the usual revolutionary measures towards a standing army of the
old regime--abolition of salutes, social and political equality of
privates with officers, and so on--it provided for elected company
and battalion committees which were to have entire charge of arms,
above all of those of officers; and it ordered that every military
unit obey the soviets in political matters. The military committee of
the Duma might be obeyed in military matters, provided the soviet did
not object in a specific case. The Order was devised primarily with
the Petrograd garrison in mind, but its main provisions were rapidly
taken up at the front. This order at once convinced the conservatives
that there was nothing to be hoped for from the revolution, and put
even the more liberal officers in a state of mind to welcome later
attempts at a conservative _coup d’état_. It made the subsequent task
of the moderates in bringing Russia back to military efficiency for
the war on Germany more difficult than ever. And it by no means served
to reconcile the soldiers themselves with the continuation of the war.
Most of the popularity of Order Number One eventually redounded to
the credit of the Bolsheviks; most of its unpopularity came back on
the compromisists. This is the typical fate of the moderates in these
revolutions.
Again, the moderates are in all our societies confronted sooner or
later with the task of fighting a war; and they prove poor war leaders.
In England the fighting broke out in 1642, and before the first
Civil War was over Cromwell and the Independents had made themselves
indispensable, and were on the threshold of power. Foreign war in
France broke out in the spring of 1792, and a few months later the
monarchy had fallen; the war went very badly in the spring of 1793, and
in June the moderate Girondins, who had on the French side been the
most eager for war, were turned out by the Montagnards. The Russian
revolution was born in the midst of a disastrous war, and the Russian
moderates never had a chance at peaceful administration. The fact is
clear. The moderates cannot seem to succeed in war. The reasons why are
less clear. No doubt the commitment of the moderates to protect the
liberties of the individual is a factor. You cannot organize an army if
you take Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity at all seriously.