2nd divided into three major factions, that of which Robespierre
stands as the head, that of Danton, and that of Hébert. There were,
of course, sub-factions, wheels within wheels, and had Marat not been
assassinated in the summer of 1793, there might have been still further
complications. Robespierre, eventually victorious, rationalized the
situation as a conflict between the true revolutionaries on one hand
and the Ultra-revolutionaries (Hébert) and the Citra-revolutionaries
(Danton) on the other. He was, to himself, the golden and virtuous mean
between proletarian vice and bourgeois corruption. The actual situation
is almost unbelievably complicated, and only the narrative historian
with plenty of space to command can disentangle it. Both Dantonists
and Hébertists, “traitors” and “anarchists,” were condemned before the
Revolutionary Tribunal, and went to the guillotine in two large and
rather miscellaneous batches. For the next few months, the “faction of
Robespierre” was in complete control of France.
The victorious Independents in England in 1649 found themselves facing
an astonishing variety of sects which had been carried along to triumph
in the general good work for the cause of complete toleration of all
Dissenters. We shall in a moment have a word to say about the doctrinal
aspect of these groups. Meantime we may note that not only did
Cromwell continue to keep down papists, prelatists, and Presbyterians,
but he and his officers saw to it that Fifth Monarchy Men, Diggers,
Levellers, Millenarians, Quakers, and the rest were not allowed to try
out their wilder schemes in practice. The Diggers could dig no more
in this earth. The old tactics of “no enemy to the Left,” which had
held ever since the beginning of the revolution, were now definitely
abandoned. As Professor Trevelyan has written, “All revolutionists,
the moment they undertake the actual responsibilities, become in some
sort conservatives. Robespierre guillotined the Anarchists. The first
administrative act of the [English] Regicides was to silence the
Levellers.” There are, then, if you like, those more extreme than the
group we have called the extremists. But such men are of the lunatic
fringe. They are the impractical people erroneously thought by some
conservatives to be typical revolutionists. They definitely do not
attain power.
The Russian situation is still somewhat obscured in respect to the
opposition to official Bolshevism after October, 1917, and this
obscurity seems in some ways thicker than ever today. Nevertheless it
is clear that even while Lenin was alive, and especially in the year
or so after the October revolution, there were a good many stresses
and strains within the Bolshevik party, and that Lenin and his
followers suppressed opposing groups even when they claimed to be more
“revolutionary” than the Leninists. Thanks to the excellent discipline
of the Bolshevik party and to the particularly pressing nature of the
war against the Whites and the Allies, these quarrels were not as
public as they had been in England and in France. The recent Moscow
trials seem to belong to a different phase of revolution, or rather,
are internal difficulties of a specific state that has gone through the
cycle of revolution. In spite of certain superficial analogies, they do
not seem to be a part of the uniformity we are here discussing.
These little opposition factions are inextricably woven in with various
eccentric groups which are not completely stilled until the height of
the Terror--if even then. They represent, as we have seen, the lunatic
fringes common to any complex civilization, and they are especially
active and vocal in the early stages of our revolutions, and during the
struggle between moderates and extremists. They are less important in
the actual course of these revolutions than conservative historians,
and conservatives generally, like to make out. But they are interesting
variations in the main body of revolutionary orthodoxy, and they
illuminate in many ways the general history of heresy and heretics.
“Never did the human mind attain such a magnificent height of
self-assertiveness as in England about the year 1650,” wrote Lytton
Strachey. And certainly what we now think of as almost a racially
founded British love for the middle-of-the-road is not very evident
in these years. Strachey ironically lists the possibility of becoming
a Behmenist, a Bidellian, a Coppinist, a Salmonist, a Dipper, a
Traskite, a Tyronist, a Philadelphian, Christadelphian, or Seventh Day
Baptist, omitting the subject he was actually writing about, Ludovic
Muggleton, founder of the still-existing Muggletonians. The terms mean
almost as little to us today as do those with which John Goodwin is
referred to in the third volume of _Gangraena_: “a monotonous sectary,
a compound of Socinianism, Arminianism, Libertinism, Antinomianism,
Independency, Popery and Skepticism.” This is a marvelous compound
of contradictions, as though a man today were called a mixture of
Communism, Hitlerism, Fascism, Republicanism and Prohibitionism. As
Mr. Gooch has said, the English revolution presents some of the most
remarkable communistic speculations in history. As early as 1647 John
Hare published a pamphlet, _Plain English to our Wilful Bearers of
Normanism_, in which he attacked the institution of private property
without being very clear about what might take its place. Chamberlen,
in his _Poor Man’s Advocate_, urged the nationalization of all Crown
and Church possessions, the resumption of all common lands that had
been enclosed. This land was to be called the national stock, and was
to be administered for the benefit of the poor.
The Diggers, however, are the most remarkable of these communistic
groups, if only because they tried to put their ideas into practice.
The movement was prefaced by an obscure pamphlet of December, 1648,
with a title quite characteristic of the age, _Light Shining in
Buckinghamshire_. Early in April of 1649 one Everard, a cashiered
soldier of the New Model, with a few followers came to St. George’s
Hill in Surrey “and began to dig, and sowed the ground with parsnips,
carrots, and beans.” A voice, said Everard, had bidden him dig and plow
the earth and receive the fruits thereof. They did not intend to meddle
with enclosed land, but simply to take what was common and untilled and
make it fruitful. For the time being General Fairfax, who seems to have
regarded them as harmless fanatics, left them to their digging.
The apocalyptic touch is even more striking, if possible, in the
Millenarians or Fifth Monarchy men. These held that the fourth monarchy
of the Bible was drawing to a close, and that the fifth monarchy, or
reign of the saints, was at hand.... They, of course, were the saints.
They split, however, over the question as to whether or not it was
proper for them to aid divine providence. Some of them held that the
Lord was in himself quite equal to the task of overthrowing the mighty
of this world; others believed that it was lawful, and presumably
helpful, to combat the Lord’s enemies with the material sword, and
hasten the day when the saints should possess riches and reign with
Him on earth. Their dilemma reminds one somewhat of that facing
nineteenth-century Socialists, forced to choose between the militants
and the revisionists.
In comparison with the wealth of imagination the English put into
the effort to bring heaven to earth, the other two revolutions
seem poverty-stricken. Perhaps the old Anglo-Saxon belief that the
French lack imaginative depth is valid, but surely this cannot be
brought up against the Russians. Perhaps the answer is simply that as
sources of imaginative inspiration neither the Enlightenment of the
eighteenth-century _philosophes_ nor the dialectic materialism of the
Marxist can hold a candle to the King James version of the Bible. Yet
France was by no means unproductive on the side of the lunatic fringe.
The _Enragés_, led by Varlet and Roux, and based largely on the poorer
sections of Paris, seem to have held a vaguely communistic doctrine.
At any rate, they were definitely against the rich, against the new
merchant aristocracy. The _Hébertistes_, another popular Parisian group
sometimes confused with the _Enragés_, had largely yellow journalists
and ward spoilsmen as leaders, but their main body must have nourished
vaguely Utopian dreams. Then there was the incredible little circle
around Catherine Théot, “Mother of God”--with Robespierre designated at
least as one of the manifestations of God. It does indeed seem likely
that republican professors in France are right, and that much of this
was stirred up by Robespierre’s enemies to make him seem ridiculous;
for even at the crisis period of revolutions some men retain a sense of
humor. Yet the fact remains that Catherine Théot and her circle existed.
In Russia the completeness and quickness of the Bolshevik victory
probably explains the relative lack of rival Utopias. It is true that
from 1918 to 1921 the Bolsheviks were forced to fight off Whites and
Allies on a dozen fronts, and that in a region like the Ukraine, for
instance, you can find everything from Czarist rulers through mild
_narodniks_ and partisan or guerilla rulers to pure Reds. But there is
a dog-eat-dog cruelty in the Russian revolution that seems to exclude
the mild delusions of an Everard or a Catherine Théot.
_IV. The Machinery of Dictatorship_
The dictatorship of the extremists is embodied in governmental forms
as a rough-and-ready centralization. In detail these forms vary in our
different societies, but the Commonwealth in England, the _gouvernement
révolutionnaire_ in France and the Bolshevik dictatorship during
the period of “war communism” in Russia all display uniformities of
the kind the systematist in biology or zoology would not hesitate
to catalogue as uniformities. Notably the making of final decisions
in a wide range of matters is taken away from local and secondary
authorities, especially if those authorities have been “democratically”
elected, and is concentrated on a few persons in the national capital.
Though names like Cromwell, Robespierre, and Lenin stand out as those
of rulers, and although these men did exercise unquestioned power in
many ways, the characteristic form of this supreme authority is that
of a committee. The government of the Terror is a dictatorship in
commission.
This centralized executive commission--Committee of Public Safety,
the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (Vtsik)--rests on a
supine if talkative legislative body--Rump, Convention, All-Russian
Congress of Soviets--and gets its orders carried out by an extemporized
bureaucracy, largely recruited from party workers, and from that
club-sect-pressure-group we have seen as the body of the extremist
group. The old law courts cannot work, at least in their traditional
manner. They are therefore supplemented by extraordinary courts,
revolutionary tribunals, or are wholly transformed by new appointments
and by special jurisdictions. Finally, a special sort of revolutionary
police appears. The Russian Cheka is familiar to everyone with the
slightest knowledge of recent history. In France the _comité de surété
générale_ and the _comités révolutionnaires_ fulfilled these police
functions; in the English revolution they were carried out very
effectively by the new Independent parish clergy, aided by various
_ad hoc_ committees in the army. But in England the whole fabric of
governmental centralization was rudimentary and simple--Cromwell’s own
anomalous dictatorship, the new Court set up by the Rump in March,
1650, in which legislative, administrative, and judicial powers were as
thoroughly combined as ever in the Star Chamber, the curious experiment
of the Major Generals in 1655-56. The fact of the centralization in
England is, however, unquestionable. Even the sacred functions of that
holiest guardian of English local liberties, the Justice of the Peace,
were under attack all during the domination of the extremists.
These extemporized dictatorships were faced not only with the ordinary
problems of government, but with civil and foreign war, and with at
least a certain number of actual reform measures which they had to try
to put through. Notably in the French and Russian revolutions, the new
government had to administer what, to avoid dispute as to the meaning
of Socialism, we may call measures of economic planning--fixed prices
and wages, managed currency, food rationing, and so on. We need not
here bother with the problem as to whether in France these were purely
war measures or not. The point is that the government found itself
obliged to try to administer them. In Russia, of course, there were
conscious efforts to embody Marxist Socialism in working institutions.
But these were all very rough-and-ready forms of dictatorship. The
governments of the Terror were on the whole much less efficient, less
effectively absolute than many peacetime governments with nowhere near
their reputation for absoluteness. Indeed, one of the reasons why
they seem so tyrannical and hard to bear, even retrospectively, is
precisely because they were so inefficient. They got their big tasks
done--saved England, France, and Russia from dissolution or conquest,
but they did it very messily and, in detail, very badly. The actual
administrators were usually inexperienced, were often petty fanatics,
often incompetent blow-hards who had risen to prominence in the clubs
or the party. They were under tremendous pressure from above to get
results. They were frequently in charge of operations very close to
the heart of the revolution as an economic movement--confiscation of
Royalist estates and clerical livings in England, disposition of the
confiscated lands of clergy and _émigrés_ in France, nationalization
of land and factories in Russia--which gave them grand opportunities
for graft. They had to work with a population many if not most of whom
were distrustful or hostile. Small wonder then that these reigns of
terror stand out rather for irregular acts of violence, that their
full history is a matter of incredible complexity. Nothing is more
illuminating in the study of these revolutions than the study of local
history. Here you see the Terror as it really was, no steady and
efficient rule from above, as in an army or in Sparta, but a state
of suspense and fear, a dissolution of the sober little uniformities
of provincial life. Much depends on the accidents of personality--a
sensible squire, a moderate and able local revolutionary or two, and a
given village may go through a revolution fairly serenely. In others,
terror may rule as bitterly as in the capital.
This inefficiency of the governments of the crisis period comes out
clearly in their attempts to regulate and control the economic life of
the state. This whole matter has probably very little to do with the
general problem of what is known as “economic planning.” Again we must
emphasize that we are concerned only with the anatomies of certain
specific revolutions. Suffice it to say that in France in 1793-94 and
in Russia in 1918-21 armies were fed and supplied with munitions, and
some civilians kept alive at any rate, under a pretty absolute state
control of economic activity. The French _maximum_ meant of course
price- and wage-fixing, and the Russian war communism was an even more
complete form of central planning. Yet in France violation of the
_maximum_ was as frequent as bootlegging used to be in this country,
and the detailed history of the _maximum_ seen as part of local history
would certainly provide some amusing bits. In Russia illegal trading
in the war years was again very like our bootlegging. The famous
Sukharevka Market in Moscow was occasionally raided but on the whole
winked at by Lenin’s government. All city dwellers who could possibly
do so made trips to the country to bargain with peasants for forbidden
food supplies. Here again the intimate little details of daily life are
fascinating, and call for the full talents of the social historian.
There seems to be a pretty unanimous admission by historians, even
when they are hostile to revolutions in general, that during the
crisis period ordinary crimes of violence are rare. There may be
plenty of cruelty and corruption among these new administrators and
judges, the new regime may be very far from insuring peace and order,
but conventional robbers, cutthroats, kidnapers, and their like are
not very active. Your good stupid Tory has a simple explanation:
they’ve all got government jobs. We can, however, hardly accept this
as a blanket explanation. It seems likely that the ordinary criminals
are for the moment pretty well cowed by the general crusade against
ordinary vice and crime which is a part of the crisis period and to
which we are coming shortly. Petty thieves and in several instances
even prostitutes were summarily disposed of by what amounts to lynch
law during the French revolution, and similar instances can be found
in England and Russia. One need not accept it as a general suggestion
that you can always cow criminals by lynching; here, as throughout
this book, we are studying a particular set of events, seeking some
rough uniformities, and making no attempt at general conclusions in
any such field as criminology. It may be that in the general tension,
in the extraordinary widening of public concerns until privacy is
almost impossible, so private a thing as ordinary crime is difficult.
The criminal is disturbed, not only by fear of being lynched, but by
an indefinable general fear which he shares with ordinary citizens.
For fear needs no object, and in the Terror often has none. It must
be remembered that this crisis period is brief--a few months, a few
years at the most. At any rate, again a simple uniformity stands out: a
considerable lessening in the number of ordinary crimes is to be noted
during the crisis period. Mr. Chamberlin notes that Moscow in 1918-19
was a very safe place to live in--if you could get enough to eat and
keep warm.
There is usually a short period between the overthrow of the moderates
and the full impact of the Terror. The machinery of the Terror,
for one thing, hastily assembled though it is, cannot be assembled
overnight. Though the earlier history of the revolution has had its
share of violence, there has been an interlude or so of apparent peace
at times during the struggle between the moderates and the extremists.
The pressure of foreign enemies and their _émigré_ allies is not
immediately at its strongest. Yet as the weeks go on the forces that
make for the Terror come into full operation.
We have in this chapter briefly described the rise of the extremists,
and have attempted to analyze the reasons for their victory. We have
taken them to the point where they have disposed of all important
conflicting groups, and have consolidated their position by installing
a centralized system of government. For the next few months, or for a
year or so, the extremists can be as extreme as they like. No one dare
challenge them. We have come to that crisis in the fever of revolution
men commonly call the Reign of Terror. This very important subject must
be treated in a separate chapter.
_Chapter_ SEVEN REIGNS OF TERROR AND VIRTUE
_I. Pervasiveness of the Terror_
“August 8, 1775. Riflemen took a man in New Milford, Connecticut, a
most incorrigible Tory, who called them d--d rebels, etc., and made
him walk before them to Litchfield, which is twenty miles, and carry
one of his own geese all the way in his hand. When they arrived there,
they tarred him, and made him pluck his goose, and then bestowed the
feathers on him, drummed him out of the company, and obliged him to
kneel down and thank them for their lenity.” The Jacobins of Rodez
in southern France drew up a list of “damned dogs of noblemen” and
others unworthy of wearing a mustache, the new symbol of patriotism,
republican virility and orthodoxy. It then ordered its committee of
surveillance to see that any such persons daring to wear a mustache
were seized and shaved, “taking good care to get the job done without
soap, and with the dullest razor available.” Shaving seems in some ways
a ritual performance lifted above the ordinary acts of the toilet, for
on October 3, 1775, the New York Sons of Liberty “in solemn Congress
assembled” took a vote of thanks: “to Mr. Jacob Vredenburgh, barber,
for his firm, spirited, and patriotic conduct in refusing to complete
an operation vulgarly called _shaving_, which he had begun on the
face of Captain John Croser, commander ... of one of his Majesty’s
transports.... It is to be wished that all gentlemen of the razor will
follow this wise, prudent, interesting example.”
The undignified little details are important, for they help bring home
to us the pervasiveness of the Reign of Terror. There is not only the
melodrama of the block, the guillotine and the firing-squad, not only
the heightened struggle for power among the great of the new order,
not only the tension of foreign and civil war, there is also the
tragi-comedy of thousands of little lives invaded by heroic concerns
which are ordinarily not theirs at all. The Terror touches great and
small with the obsessive power of a fashion; it holds men as little of
the common weal ever holds them, unless they are professionally devoted
to the study or practice of politics. During the Terror, politics
becomes as real, as pressing, as unavoidable for John Jones or Jacques
Duval as food and drink, wife or mistress, his job and the weather.
Political indifference, that mainstay of the modern state, becomes
impossible for even the most selfish, the most unworldly.
This participation in the common thing, in the drama of the
revolutionary state, means different things to those we may call
outsiders and those we may call insiders. The opposition is purely
one of convenience. No doubt there are insensible gradations from the
ardent revolutionary extremist--the admirably drawn Evariste Gamelin
of Anatole France’s _The Gods Are Athirst_, for instance--through
the neutral and colorless Center to skulking and repressed
anti-revolutionaries. But in broad lines the division between the many
outside the revolutionary cult and the small active band of orthodox
believers in the new dispensation is worth making. Let us look first
at the Terror as it affects the life of the outsider.
_II. The Terror and the Outsider_
This ordinary outsider is not the actively hostile person, the _émigré_
in fact or, as the French actually put it, the _émigré d’esprit_, the
_émigré_ who has quit spiritually if not in the flesh. He is not the
disgruntled moderate. He is simply the man who makes up the bulk of
modern societies, the man who on the whole accepts what others do in
politics, the man who fairly soon gets on the band-wagon. Especially
in its crisis period, the revolution is awfully hard on this outsider.
It may provide him with a certain number of spectacles in the form of
various celebrations of the new revolutionary cults--processions, trees
of liberty, festivals of reason, and so on. But certainly in the French
revolution there are many indications that the outsiders got very tired
of this, that in the long run they found the old Catholic ceremonials
more to their liking. One wonders whether in the long run the mass
ceremonials which Stalin as well as Hitler and Mussolini seem to manage
so well will not also wear a bit thin. On the other hand, there can be
no doubt that our modern revolutionists are much better stage managers
than their predecessors.
The revolutionary mania for renaming seems also to tend to confuse
and annoy the outsider. The English confined their efforts largely
to the names of persons, where they achieved some remarkable
results. We are all familiar with Praise God Barebone, and
Put-thy-Trust-in-Christ-and-Flee-Fornication Williams is perhaps more
than a legend. The Puritans of course drew chiefly from the Bible and
from evangelical abstractions--Faith, Prudence, Charity, and so on.