civil government along military lines, for the exercise of strong,
centralized governmental authority in which the liberty of the
individual is far from a matter of first concern, in which there is
very little debate, very little of the government by discussion so
prized by the moderates, very little compromise and moderation. War,
said Madison, is the mother of executive aggrandizement, and even
here in America our wars have borne him out. But in the midst of a
revolution the executive that gets aggrandized is not the moderate
executive. The Reigns of Terror in France and in Russia are in part
explicable as the concentration of power in a government of national
defense made necessary by the fact of war. This is by no means a
complete explanation of the Reigns of Terror. But certainly the
necessity for a strong centralized government to run the war is one of
the reasons why the moderates failed. They simply could not provide the
discipline, the enthusiasm, the unpondered loyalty necessary to fight a
war, and they went out.
_V. The Failure of the Moderates_
To the kindly souls who for the most part wrote the history from which
we get our notions of modern revolutions, this failure of the moderates
was a great tragedy. The moderates appear as good men worsted by
circumstances and unscrupulous opponents. They seem to be idealists
crushed by a harsh world, but thereby sure of the resurrection history
holds out to the just. The gentle Falkland and the scholarly Condorcet
smile down upon us from the only heaven to which mere mortals hold
the key; and if historians have not yet admitted Kerensky into their
heaven, the reason may be no more than that the poor man is still
inescapably here on earth.
Perhaps most of the moderates would be better or at least more normal
men than their extremist opponents. Yet, leaders and led together,
they make a motley lot, by no means easily catalogued by Marxist or by
psychologist. And the traditional notion that they were idealists and
that they failed because in the rough give-and-take the idealist must
always fail is here peculiarly misleading. It is more accurate to risk
the paradox: they failed because they were in so many respects what is
usually called realists; that is, some of them were reasonably well
adapted to a common-sense world.
Pym and Mirabeau, who died peacefully before the defeat of the
moderates was evident, still enjoy reputations as skilled politicians,
as sensible moderates. Over most of the others there hangs something
of the kind of reputation most definite and clear with Kerensky. The
eloquent compromisist leader seems to us a man of words, an orator
who could move crowds but could not guide them, an impractical and
incompetent person in the field of action. The Gironde seems much the
same, as also the lesser Presbyterian leaders like Holles. It seems
emptily paradoxical to list these people as realists. Yet realists
of a kind they were. They used grand words and phrases grandly, as
a consolation and a joy to their listeners and to themselves. But
they did not believe in them as the radicals believed in them; they
did not intend to try to pursue them to their logical conclusions in
action. They were, in short, using words in the way most men in normal
societies, including such realistic politicians as Gladstone, use
them. They would not seem realists to a hard-headed horse-trader. But
within the limits which tradition and ritual have set for the work of
such people as they--part priest, part administrator, part actor, part
teacher--they were good quiet practitioners.
But the times were turned topsy-turvy, and as the crisis of the
revolution approached, only the man with a touch--or more--of fanatic
idealism in him, or at least with the ability to act the part of such
a fanatic, could attain to leadership. The normal social roles of
realism and idealism are reversed in the acute phases of a revolution.
We shall return to this topic in our next chapter. Here we need only
note that the outward evidences of the approach of this kind of crisis
appear as a heightened form of class antagonism. The moderates by
definition are not great haters, are not endowed with the effective
blindness which keeps men like Robespierre and Lenin undistracted in
their rise to power. In normal times, ordinary men are not capable of
feeling for groups of their fellow-men hatred as intense, continuous,
and uncomfortable as that preached by the extremists in revolution.
Hatred is a heroic emotion, and heroic emotions are exhausting. The
poor may hate the rich, the Protestant the Catholic, the bourgeois the
noble, the Southerner the Yankee, and so on endlessly. But this hate is
normally in human beings a routine and consoling hate, a part of life,
like food, drink, and loving, integrated with an existence as alien to
the possibility of revolution as that of a vegetable.
The moderates, then, do not really believe in the big words they have
to use. They do not really believe a heavenly perfection is suddenly
coming to men on earth. They are all for compromise, common sense,
toleration, comfort. In a normal society, these desires are part of
their strength and give them their hold over their fellows, who share
at least their desire for comfort. But in these three revolutions large
numbers of men were for the moment lifted by desire and emotion to a
point where they seemed to despise even comfort. The moderates could
not deal politically with such men; they could not take the first steps
which are necessary if such men are to be understood. The moderates
were cut off from the immoderates by a gap neither philosophy nor
common sense could fill. There is an adage that in the kingdom of the
blind the one-eyed man is king. In one of his subtler short stories,
_The Kingdom of the Blind_, Mr. H. G. Wells has exposed the weakness
of this apothegm. In the heat of a violent revolution, its weakness is
perhaps even more apparent than in the imaginary Andean valley of Mr.
Wells’s tale. The moderates we have been dealing with were all very
human and very fallible; but even had they been as wise as the heroes
of Plutarch, as wise as Washington, it would seem that they must have
failed. For we are here in a land fabulous, but real, where the wisdom
and common sense of the moderate are not wisdom and common sense, but
folly.
_Chapter_ SIX THE ACCESSION OF THE EXTREMISTS
_I. The_ Coup d’état
The struggle between the moderates and the extremists, which begins
almost as soon as the dramatic overthrow of the old regime is effected,
is marked by a series of exciting episodes: here street-fighting,
there a forced seizure of property, almost everywhere heated debates,
attempted repressions, a steady stream of violent propaganda. Tempers
are strained to the breaking point over matters that in a stable
society are capable of an almost automatic solution. There is an almost
universal state of tension. The fever is working its way to a crisis.
As with many fevers, its progress is in detail jerky, with now an
apparent improvement and then a sudden jump ahead. But the cumulative
effect is unmistakable. With the final overthrow of the moderates the
revolution may be said to have entered its crisis stage.
Before we attempt to describe the behavior of men in societies in such
a crisis, we shall have to go a bit further into the process by which
the extremists acceded to power. In a sense, such an analysis will be
but pointing out in reverse what we have already said of the moderates:
the reasons why the extremists succeeded are but the other side of
the reasons why the moderates failed. Where the moderates were weak,
the extremists were strong. The actual steps by which the extremists
rise to power are, however, too important to be left with this general
statement. We must parallel our analysis of moderate weaknesses with an
analysis of extremist strengths.
The extremists win out because they secure control of the illegal
government and turn it in a decisive _coup d’état_ against the legal
government. The problem of the dual sovereignty is solved by the
revolutionary acts in which the Independents, the Jacobins, and the
Bolsheviks seized power. But the moderates had once shared with them
the control of the organizations which they had turned against the
government. The key to the success of the extremists lies in their
monopoly of these organizations--New Model Army and Independent
churches, Jacobin clubs, and soviets.
They obtain this monopoly by ousting, usually in a series of conflicts,
any and all opponents from these organizations. The discipline,
single-mindedness, and centralization of authority which mark the
rule of the triumphant extremists are first developed and brought to
perfection in the revolutionary groups. The characteristics which were
formed in the growth of the illegal government remain those of the
radicals after the illegal government becomes the legal. Indeed, many
of these useful characteristics were first molded even further back
in the days of the old regime, when the extremists were very small
concentrated groups subject to the full “tyranny” of the government.
The Independents gained discipline and devotion from a long series of
persecutions which began under Elizabeth, whose famed love of tolerance
was not extended to Catholics or Brownists. The French radicals were
not as badly treated under the old regime as their descendants and
historians like to think, but the censorship, the Bastille, and
the _lettres de cachet_ were real enough, even if they rarely fell
to the lot of the rank and file of the enlightened. As for Russia,
its extremists were molded in the most melodramatic traditions of
oppression, were backed by almost a century of secret organization,
plotting, oaths, and martyrdom.
What emerges from this longer past and from the recent conflict with
the moderates is a fighting group with the newly acquired habit of
winning. You cannot say exactly why a given football team succeeds in
winning most of the time, let alone why an army or a revolutionary
party wins. The variables are so many even in the simplest case that no
sensible man would make predictions based wholly on the most apparent
and perhaps most important variable of all--the quality of the human
material. Gamblers know this, if historians and sociologists do not.
That our revolutionists were successful and admirably organized groups
we know, and we can make some attempt to point out in what ways they
succeeded, what particular kinds of strength they exhibited. We cannot
give any neat formula for success in building a revolutionary group,
cannot measure exactly why _these_ revolutionists succeeded and others
failed.
_II. Organization of the Extremists_
The first thing likely to strike an observer of the successful
extremists in the English, French, and Russian revolutions, and
indeed, the not quite so radical patriots who put through the American
revolution, is their fewness in numbers. The membership of the formal
organizations which did the work of beating the moderates was never
more than a small minority of the total population. Their active
membership was of course always smaller than the membership on the
books. It is not easy to get exact figures, whether for membership or
for populations, but the following figures are not erroneous enough
to be misleading. The New Model Army was created at a membership of
22,000, and was not more than 40,000 in its most obstreperous days. The
population of England was somewhere between three and five millions.
The Jacobins at the most generous estimate numbered in their struggle
with the moderates about 500,000. The population of France was probably
over rather than under twenty millions. The Communist party in Russia
has always prided itself on its numerical smallness; this is no
unwieldy bourgeois party, full of indifferent members who cast a lazy
vote, or don’t even vote at all. Figures again are uncertain, but it
seems likely that at no time during the revolution did the Communist
party number even 1 per cent of a population of well over one hundred
million. In America the difficulty of even approximate figures is
greater, since the patriots were not organized into a single body. It
is clearly not fair to take the relatively small continental armies
as exactly measuring the strength of the patriot--or Whig--group.
Nevertheless, the best authorities are agreed that if you count out
avowed Tories and the very numerous indifferent or neutral, the
group which actively engineered, supported, and fought the American
revolution is a minority, probably not more than 10 per cent of the
population.
It is easy to remark that though the facts clearly show that these
revolutionary groups are very small minorities indeed, all politically
active groups are minorities, and that in these revolutions the
radicals in some way “represented” or “carried out” what the soul,
will, genius, of their nations demanded. This may well be so in terms
familiar to the metaphysician, but the relation involved is one which
at present we cannot pretend to be able to study by the methods we
have laid down in this book. Perhaps the Jacobins were the agents
of the general will of the French people; but the general will is a
metaphysical concept the relation of which with tangible Jacobins we
cannot possibly measure here.
Trotsky in one of his less realistic moods has a fine time reconciling
the fewness of the Bolsheviks in 1917 with the largeness of Russia,
and with the various groups clearly hostile to the Bolsheviks. “The
Bolsheviks,” he writes, “took the people as preceding history had
created them, and as they were called to achieve the Revolution.
The Bolsheviks saw it as their mission to stand at the head of this
people. _Those against the insurrection were ‘everybody’--except
the Bolsheviks. But the Bolsheviks were the people._” Here again
“everybody” in quotation marks is obviously different from everybody
without quotation marks; and though we can as scientists, perhaps, make
use of everybody, we can do nothing at all with “everybody.”
We can, however, say that in all our societies these radicals were very
conscious, and usually very proud, of their small numbers. They felt
definitely set off from their countrymen, consecrated to a cause which
their countrymen were certainly not consciously and actively equal to.
Some of the radicals may have satisfied themselves that they really
represented the better selves of their fellow-countrymen, that they
were the reality of which the others were the potentiality. But here
and now they were very sure that they were superior to the inert and
flabby many. The English saints of the seventeenth century, the elect
of a God more exclusive than any poor worldly king, made no attempt to
conceal their contempt for the damned masses--and dukes and earls were
of course masses for these determined Puritans. The Jacobins inherited
from the Enlightenment a belief in the natural goodness or the natural
reasonableness of the common man, and this belief put a limit to
their expressed scorn for their fellows. But the scorn is there, and
the Jacobin was almost as loftily consecrated as was the Independent.
The Bolsheviks were brought up to believe that dialectical materialism
works through an elite of the laboring classes, and that the peasants
in particular were incapable of working out their own salvation. The
Bolsheviks therefore took their fewness naturally enough, and their
superiority as well.
There is also a good deal of evidence that as the revolutions go on,
a very large number of people just drop out of active politics, make
no attempt to register their votes. Now it may be that most of these
people again are at heart in sympathy with the active radicals; but
on the whole it looks as if most of them were cowed conservatives or
moderates, men and women not anxious for martyrdom, but quite incapable
of the mental and moral as well as physical strain of being a devoted
extremist in the crisis of a revolution. We have very clear evidence of
this dropping out of the ordinary man in two of our revolutions, and we
may assume that it is one of the uniformities we are seeking.
In Russia, the February revolution brought in universal suffrage as
a matter of course. Russia had at last caught up with the West. At
the first elections almost everybody, men and women alike, took the
opportunity to vote in various local elections. But very shortly
there set in a noticeable decline in the total number of votes cast.
In the June, 1917, elections for the Moscow district dumas the
Social-Revolutionary groups received 58 per cent of the votes; in
the September elections the Bolsheviks received 52 per cent. A clear
gain for the Bolsheviks by democratic methods? Not at all. In June
the Social-Revolutionaries got 375,000 votes out of 647,000 cast; in
September the Bolsheviks got 198,000 out of 381,000 cast. In three
months half the electorate dropped out. Trotsky himself has a simple
explanation for this; “many small-town people who, in the vapor of
the first illusions, had joined the Compromisers fell back soon after
into political non-existence.” The same story is graphically recorded
in French municipal and national elections between the rosy days of
1789, when everyone who could stagger to the polls voted, and 1793,
when in some cases less than a tenth of the qualified voters actually
voted. They did not vote for Bolsheviks or Jacobins, and it seems more
than likely that if most Englishmen could have voted at all in 1648,
they would not have voted for Independents, Levellers, Diggers, Fifth
Monarchy Men, or Millenarians. The great numbers of qualified voters
just don’t vote; in Trotsky’s compact phrase, they are politically
non-existent.
Their political non-existence is not achieved without a good deal of
help from the extremists. The elections are supposedly free and open,
but the extremists are not hindered by any beliefs in freedom they
may have expressed in other days. They soon take to steps familiar in
this country through the history of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and
Tammany Hall. They beat up well-known aristocrats and such-like class
enemies, they start riots at polling places or in electoral assemblies,
they break windows and start street fights, they howl down moderate
candidates, they bring to bear good journalists, skilled at libel
and innuendo, and in a hundred ways which any realistic student of
politics can uncover with a little study, they make it very difficult
for ordinary, peaceful, humdrum men and women to go to the polls and
cast their votes for the moderates to whom ordinary, peaceful, humdrum
men and women seem attracted. Not that terrorism alone scares off the
ordinary man. Mere laziness, an inability to give to political affairs
the ceaseless attention revolutions demand, is also instrumental in
keeping the man in the street from expressing himself. He gets fed up
with the constant meetings, the deputations, the papers, the elections
of dog-catchers, general inspectors, presidents, the committees, the
rituals, the ceaseless moil and toil of self-government on a more than
Athenian basis. At any rate he quits, and the extremists have the field
to themselves.
Their fewness is indeed one of the great sources of the extremists’
strength. Great numbers are almost as unwieldy in politics as on
the battlefield. In the politics of revolutions what counts is the
ability to move swiftly, to make clear and final decisions, to push
through to a goal without regard for injured human dispositions. For
such a purpose the active political group must be small. You cannot
otherwise obtain the single-mindedness and devotion, the energy and
the discipline, necessary to defeat the moderates. You cannot in large
numbers maintain the fever of fanaticism long enough to secure the
ultimate victory. The masses do not make revolutions. They may be
enlisted for some impressive pageantry once the active few have won
the revolution. Our contemporary revolutions, both of the Right and
the Left, have achieved apparent miracles of mass participation. But
the impressive demonstrations the camera records in Germany and Russia
ought not to deceive the careful student of politics. Neither Bolshevik
nor Nazi victory over the moderates was achieved by the participation
of the many; both were achieved by small, disciplined, principled,
fanatical bodies.
Nor at this stage of revolution do the victorious radicals make use of
the plebiscite. They do not dare risk anything like a free election.
Only later, when the crisis is followed by a convalescence, by a return
to normal ways, does the plebiscite stage arrive. This interval may
not be a very long one, and in the case of Rightist revolutions may be
very brief, since the full fury of the Ideal rarely inspires the men
of the Right. But certainly for the revolutions we are here studying,
the generalization holds: the plebiscite is absent from the struggle
between extremists and moderates, and is not used by the extremists
even after their accession to power.
The extremists are not only few; they are fanatically devoted to their
cause. Their awareness of being few seems correlated with the intensity
of their fanaticism. One feeds upon and strengthens the other. With
their objects, with the content of their dreams of a better world, we
shall concern ourselves later. For those who think that only in the
service of a personal God can feelings properly defined as “fanatical”
be aroused, our application of the word to Jacobins and Bolsheviks may
seem illegitimate. But this is surely an undue narrowing of a clear
and useful word. Bolsheviks and Jacobins were as convinced as any
Calvinist that they alone were right, that what they proposed was the
only possible course. All of our revolutionary radicals displayed a
willingness to work hard, to sacrifice their peace and security, to
submit to discipline, to submerge their personalities in the group.
They were all aware of the spiritual difficulties of keeping “always
at the height of revolutionary circumstances,” as the Jacobins used to
put it; but to a surprising extent they overcame these difficulties and
maintained on this earth an _esprit de corps_, an active moral union,
that is far beyond the powers of ordinary men in ordinary circumstances
to attain and to maintain.
And they are disciplined. Partly, as we have explained, this is an
inheritance from their oppressed past. It correlates with their fewness
and with their fanatical strength. The New Model Army is an excellent
example. It defeated the haphazard aggregations which the ordinary
recruiting methods of the Royalists opposed to it; it defeated the
cream of the opposing forces, the cavalry recruited from faithful
country gentlemen and their dependents. The New Model was recruited
from ardent Puritans, vouched for by men who knew them; and it was
submitted to a brief but effective course of training incomparably more
severe than any that had yet been used in English military history.
The result was a fine army--and a compact body of hard revolutionists
who could cut through the best intentions and the best rhetoric of the
moderates. The discipline of the Jacobins was not military, but it
was very rigorous, and indeed resembled the kind of discipline which
a militant religious body imposes on its members. The Jacobins were
always scrutinizing their own membership, submitting to the ordeal of
an _épuration_, literally a “purification,” perhaps in contemporary
terms a “purge.” The slightest deviation from the established order of
the day might bring a warning and possible expulsion. With the Spartan
ways of the Russian Communist party in the early days of the soviet
state most of us are familiar; it is a point on which all reporters,
kindly and unkindly, are agreed.