the abstractions of the Enlightenment, and from their own leaders
and martyrs. Babeuf, the forerunner of Socialism, became Gracchus
Babeuf. Claude Henri, Comte de St. Simon, kept his Christian names,
but dropped the compromising contact with a saint, and became Claude
Henri Bonhomme. The unfortunate Leroys (Kings) found it well to change
to Laloys (Laws) or something equally patriotic. One faithful Jacobin
had his child republicanly baptized Libre Constitution Leturc. The
French, however, did not stop with persons. Corrupt street names were
changed, the Place Louis XV becoming Place de la Révolution, the rue de
la Couronne becoming rue de la Nation. Place names underwent wholesale
changes that must have added greatly to the wartime disruption of
the mail service. Most of the Saints were dropped, which alone would
cause a lot of trouble. Lyons, having sinned against the revolution
by siding with the Federalists, on being taken by troops of the
Convention was re-christened Commune Affranchie (Freed Town). Le Havre
became Havre-Marat. In the conventional greeting of one’s fellows,
monsieur became citoyen. For a while the word “roi” was under a taboo
as definite as the kind the anthropologist studies, and was actually
cut out of classic authors like Racine. There was an attempt, possibly
serious, possibly journalistic, to change “reine abeille” into “abeille
pondeuse”--“queen bee” into “laying bee.”
In their determination to uproot everything of the contaminated past,
the French revolutionists decided to revolutionize the calendar, to
do away with names like January, which recalled the vicious old Roman
god Janus, or July, which recalled the even more vicious Roman tyrant,
Julius Caesar. So they made twelve new months, and named them, in
melodious French, after the glorious works of Nature--_germinal_,
the month of buds, _fructidor_, the month of ripening, _brumaire_,
the month of mists. Although the French boasted the universality
of their revolutionary aims and principles, they were apparently
undisturbed by the narrow limitation of their new calendar to French
climatic conditions. The calendar is, of course, most inappropriate to
Australia, and even to the American midwest.
The Russians, in addition to their fondness for personal revolutionary
_noms de guerre_, have been particularly addicted to changing place
names, and unlike the French, have hitherto made them stick, insofar
at least as the names were those of good Stalinists. Catherine the
Great, in particular, had put herself on the map as successfully as
did Alexander the Great, but she has vanished altogether from Soviet
Russia. Ekaterinodar has become Krasnodar, Ekaterineburg Sverdlovsk,
and Ekaterinoslav Dnepropetrovsk. The familiar Nizhni Novgorod has only
recently, with a loss of euphony and great associations, become Gorki.
Stalin, for a living man, has done very well for himself. Stalinabad
is perhaps the most exotic of the Stalin towns, but most effectively
symbolic no doubt was the changing of Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad--not the
only place where Stalin has replaced the Czar. From long Socialist
tradition, “comrade” took the place occupied by “citizen” in the
French revolution. Children, too, were given names as suitable to the
day as were Praise God and Libre Constitution to their day. Vladilen,
a telescoping of Vladimir and Lenin, is one of the most shockingly
unconventional to an old Russian.
This renaming is clearly one of the uniformities we can list for all
our revolutions. Even the moderate American revolution indulged in some
renaming. Boston saw King Street and Queen Street give way to names
like Federal and State, thoroughly suited to the new regime; but for
some reason or other the tainted name of Hanover Street survived. The
American name for a certain harmful fly is the Hessian fly, a name
given it in revolutionary days. A kind of cousin of that fly is known
in the South as the Abe Lincoln bug, which is a reminder of the fact
that what we call the Civil War was essentially an abortive revolution.
There is no need to worry much over an explanation of this rage for
renaming. Names are to the savage associated with magic, and we are
constantly reminded in these days of our own nearness to the savage.
Change a name and you change the thing. It’s all very simple. We are
here, however, interested rather in the effect of all this renaming on
the outsider, and we can be reasonably sure that it affords an example
of the kind of thing that begins to wear on him. The revolution in
names is petty enough. But for John Jones life is an accumulation of
petty matters; and John is not built to support a very complete set of
changes in the trivial details of which his habits are made. Witness
Rip Van Winkle.
There is also, of course, the strain of living under the kind of
government we have in the last chapter described as the government of
the Terror. Even the humblest person, the person most indifferent to
politics, can never tell when the lightning is going to strike him or
his household, when he may be haled into court as a class enemy or a
counter-revolutionary. Detailed study of this constant threat, this
omnipresence of the government, cannot be attempted here. We may,
however, take up briefly two phases which particularly affect the
outsider.
First, as we shall see shortly from the point of view of the insider,
all these revolutions have at their crisis a quality unmistakably
puritanical or ascetic or, to use an overworked word, idealistic.
There is a serious attempt by those in authority to eradicate the
minor vices, as well as what some might feel inclined to call
the major pleasures. With what the Saints in England tried to do
in the seventeenth century most Americans are familiar, if only
from repercussions in New England. But Americans, who have always
exaggerated the French capacity for the pleasures of the senses, are
perhaps not so aware of the fact that in ’93 and ’94 there was an
earnest attempt to clean up Paris, to shut up brothels, gaming houses,
to eliminate actual drunkenness. Virtue was the order of the day.
You couldn’t even be lazy. Some Jacobin would be sure to report you
to the club, with the suggestion that the best place to cure you of
unrepublican laziness was the army. The puritanism of the Bolsheviks
may seem even more paradoxical, but it most certainly existed, and we
shall return shortly to its consideration.
Now there is no doubt that in the better world towards which we
all in some measure aspire, drinking, whoring, gambling, laziness,
boastfulness, and a whole lot of things we all condemn, will simply
not exist. But it seems equally undeniable that here and now on this
earth, and for some generations back, a fairly large number of human
beings have been and are addicted to one or more of these pursuits,
regarding them--not always consciously with the intellect--as necessary
compensations for dullness or other inadequacies in their daily lives.
We must again remind ourselves that we are not dealing with moral
questions, not praising or condemning, but trying to arrange facts in a
useful order. It seems then that the following uniformity is clear: the
extremists’ attempt to enforce a life without the ordinary vices within
a fairly short time puts a strain on the outsider very hard for him, or
her, to bear.
Not only is the outsider denied access to what he probably regards
as legitimate amusement; the new authorities will not even leave him
to himself. Revolutions are very hard indeed on privacy. Gorki once
wrote that “Lenin was a man who prevented people from leading their
accustomed lives as no one before him was able to do.” This is no doubt
a rhetorical exaggeration, but one can see what Gorki is getting at.
And as people have a certain inertia in the direction of leading their
“accustomed lives,” we can perhaps understand better why Stalin rather
than Trotsky has proved to be Lenin’s successor. In the crisis period
the revolution comes to hound John Jones in whatever he does. In a
revolution even the conventional back-biting, gossip and hatreds of
ordinary social life are intensified beyond endurance. The Jacobins,
especially in the provinces, were eager to pick up any bit of gossip
that would show a reform was needed. Citizen W should keep his dog
tied up, citizen X should be made to marry the girl, citizen Y should
be admonished against outbursts of temper, rich citizen Z should be
made to give his consent to the marriage of his daughter to a poor but
honest Jacobin youth in good standing with the club. One expects this
sort of thing from one’s own family and friends, but not, even in the
totalitarian state, from the government. The Germans have a delightful
proverb, which may perhaps give them some solace today: “The soup is
never eaten as hot as it’s cooked.” But certainly in the crisis period
of revolutions there is an effort to force it steaming down the throat
of the ordinary citizen. In the long run, he can’t stand it, and his
cooks learn their lesson and allow it to cool off a bit. But that is in
the period of convalescence from the revolutionary fever.
Shut out from his ordinary pleasures and vices, constrained to fight
for, or at least to cheer long, loud, and conspicuously for the
revolutionary state in its struggle with foreign and civil foes,
exposed to privation and suffering from scarcity attendant on war
and the inevitable inefficiencies of the new government, urged to
the “height of revolutionary circumstances” on every hand, in press,
theater, pulpit, rostrum, mass demonstration, above all inescapably
caught in the common and very exhausting nervous excitement which
marks the crisis period, John Jones sooner or later finds these
strains insupportable, and gets ready to welcome anyone who can throw
the extremists out. Perhaps no one of these strains would be in
itself unbearable, though it does seem likely that there is a kind of
saturation point in large-scale, obsessive political propaganda after
which such propaganda actually backfires. We may hope to learn more in
this respect from contemporary German and Russian experience. At any
rate, the converging series of pressures outlined above seems clearly
to have put too great a strain on the outsider in our revolutions.
_III. The Terror and the Insider: The Religious Parallel_
To the insider, to the true believer, the revolution appears as a very
different thing in this crisis period, though one may guess that for
some of the less ardent insiders much of what has been said about the
outsiders begins, after a while, to hold true also. The revolution
begins to take too much out of him, and he begins to have his
hesitations and his doubts, to be bored with the endless ceremonies,
deputations, committees, tribunals, militia work, and the other chores
necessary to achieve the reign of virtue on earth. He, too, becomes
an outsider. But the true faithful stay to the end, to the block, the
guillotine, the firing-squad, or exile.
Now to this insider it would seem that the service of the revolution
supplies many of the satisfactions commonly supplied by what we call
religion. This analogy with religion has been frequently made. It has
been applied, not only to the English revolution where its fitness
is undisputed, but also to the French and Russian revolutions. Since
both Jacobins and Bolsheviks were violently hostile to Christianity
and boasted themselves atheists or at least deists, this analogy has
given a great deal of offense both to Christians and to their enemies.
For the Marxist in particular the assertion that his behavior has
similarities with the behavior of men under the acknowledged influence
of religion is like a red rag to a bull. Nor is the Marxist wholly
unjustified in his anger, for the glib phrase, “Oh, the Communists
are just another fanatical sect,” is frequently thrown out by shallow
conservatives as at once a reproach and a dismissal. Actually, to
judge from past experience, it would seem that large numbers of men
can be brought to do certain very important things of the kind the
Communists want to have done only under the influence of what we call
religion; that is, some pattern of more or less similar sentiments,
moral aspirations, and ritualistic practices. Marxism as a religion
has already got a great deal done; Marxism as a “scientific theory”
alone would hardly have got beyond the covers of _Das Kapital_ and the
learned journals.
But the dispute sketched above is endless, and we are not rash enough
to suppose we can settle it. Those who use the term “religion” in
this connection seem to us to be trying to describe a phenomenon of
the world of sense-experience, one that needs to be integrated with
other phenomena of revolutions. It is certainly true, however, that
this use apparently arouses in many persons emotions unfavorable
to the continued objective study of the subject. Anyone who could
suggest a neutral term as effectively pointing to the same phenomena
as does the term “religion” would be performing a great service for
sociology. No such term at present existing, we shall have to continue
to use the word “religion.” We must insist that this word does not
refer necessarily and exclusively to a formally theistic cult like
Christianity; and above all, that it does not necessarily imply belief
in the “supernatural.” We take it that in the present analysis the
important thing about a religious belief is that under its influence
men work very hard and excitedly in common to achieve here or somewhere
an ideal, a pattern of life not at the moment universally--or even
largely--achieved. Religion attempts to close in favor of the best of
human hopes the gap between what men are and what men would like to be;
at least in its young and active phase, it will not for a moment admit
that such a gap can long exist.
To discern the element of religion in the behavior of the ardent
extremist is not to deny the existence of economic motives. Indeed, at
this stage some of the most acute phases of the struggle among classes
are to be noticed, and form one of the uniformities we can clearly
consider established. Whatever the place of economic class struggles
in the days just before the revolution--and in our four revolutions it
takes varied forms by no means adequately summed up in phrases such
as “feudal nobility,” “middle class,” and “proletariat”--once the
revolution gets going these class struggles have at least one phase
common in all four societies. The property of many, if not most, of
those openly and stubbornly identified with the beaten parties is
confiscated for the benefit of the successful parties, identified
as “the people.” Furthermore, as the different moderate groups are
defeated their property, too, is commonly confiscated in the same way.
In the English revolution the Royalists lost a large part of their
property, mostly in land; and though lay Presbyterians were not
as a rule subjected to confiscation of property unless they were
actively on the wrong side in politics, there was a great deal of
easing Presbyterians and other unacceptable ecclesiastics out of
their livings. Laurence Washington, a clergyman, the father of the
John of Virginia, and a direct ancestor of George, was “plundered”
as the phrase went in 1643, cause he was said to have said that the
parliamentary army had more papists in it than there were around the
King. That is to say, he was deprived of his living. We need hardly be
reminded that Loyalist property was confiscated during the American
revolution. Indeed the late J. F. Jameson concludes that in a quiet
way--quiet at least for revolutions--the American revolution effected
in its whole course a very sensible democratization, or spreading
into smaller units, of ownership of property in this country. Both in
France and in Russia the revolutions saw the confiscation primarily
of land, but even in France to some extent also of capital, and their
redistribution. We need not go into detail here on these agrarian
problems. Sufficient to state that many of those who came to the top
in the crisis period, both leaders and followers, had good reason to
hope that by staying on top their economic status would be consistently
better than it had been. This is true regardless of what theories and
ideals, laissez-faire or Socialism, were appealed to as guiding the new
distribution.
But though we must recognize the economic motive, as we recognize the
drive to centralization to repel attacks from within and without, our
picture is incomplete until we consider those elements unavoidably
called religious. Partly because the economic and political elements
are in their conventional sense familiar to most people nowadays,
partly because these religious elements appear to be among the
most important variables in the situation, we are here emphasizing
them. They seem to be among the most important variables because
their presence in an acute form gives a different and much more
pervasive tone to the political and economic elements of struggle,
which frequently occur by themselves in very similar form and even
somewhat similar intensity in situations we do not commonly label
revolutionary. It is also true that in the growth of Wesleyan Methodism
in eighteenth-century England, for instance, in times not to be called
revolutionary, one finds actively religious behavior among large
numbers of people, behavior in many ways like that we are going to
analyze in our revolutionary insider. But Wesleyanism was politically
conservative on the whole, and not directed at a given social and
political system. The whole point, indeed, of the three revolutions
we are about to analyze is that religious enthusiasms, organization,
ritual and ideas appear inextricably bound up with economic and
political aims.
The insiders in all three of our complete revolutions, and indeed
to a certain extent in the fourth, the American revolution, seem to
have wished to put into life here on earth some of the order, the
discipline, the contempt for the easy vices, which the Calvinist sought
to put there. Indeed our first revolution, the English, is commonly
labeled the Calvinist or Puritan revolution. Here we may expect a
protest from the Communists, an indignant assertion that Marx put such
Christian weaknesses as a desire to subdue the flesh well behind him,
that his followers are all for an abundance of food and drink, and
the other good things of this world for everybody. We shall return to
that question in a moment. In the meantime we can begin to see some
lurking ascetic tendency in Communism if we reflect on how indignant
good Communists would be over the slogan “wine, women, and song for
everybody.”
That the Puritans were in some sense puritanical we can take in stride
as a reasonable assumption. Indeed, at present it is probably more
useful to try to show that the historical Puritans both in old and
new England were not quite the complete killjoys the school of H. L.
Mencken would make them out to have been. As for the Jacobins, their
legislation and above all their somewhat informal administration in
1793-94 had striking analogies with the kind of things the English
Puritans tried to put over. The Jacobins were in principle against
gambling, drunkenness, sexual irregularities of all sorts, ostentatious
display of poverty, idleness, thieving, and of course in general all
sorts of crimes. In practice they felt at liberty to enforce abstention
from these vices and to insist with force on the carrying out of
positive acts of virtue--such as selling goods always at the legal
fixed maximum price, even if a little bootlegging seemed quite safe,
attending celebrations in honor of the Supreme Being on _décadi_,
expressing in public the opinion that William Pitt was a corrupt
villain, and the English nation a lot of pathetic slaves. Such a system
of action they sought to enforce by making each man his own detective,
God’s own private spy, much as was said to have been done in Calvin’s
own Geneva.
Those who chiefly did the prying were the members of the local clubs,
urged on by the local leaders, just as with the Puritans it was the
parish clergy, aided by the active elders of the church, who saw to
it that the sheep were properly shepherded. The most undignified
matters, apparently the most insignificant also, might under these
conditions set a parish or a community on end. The first dissension
in the English Separatist Church at Amsterdam, we are told, arose not
over any point of doctrine or ritual, but over the lace on Mrs. Francis
Johnson’s sleeve. One could find dozens of parallels for this in the
behavior of the Jacobins. There was the lively debate in a little club
in Normandy over the question whether citizen doctor X wasn’t making
his professional calls on aristocrats too long, his calls on patriots
too short. And the great row at Bourgoin when the secretary announced
that he wasn’t going to wear the red Liberty cap because it didn’t
become him. This shocking display of vanity overcoming patriotism
unleashed the full fury of the virtuous Republicans of Bourgoin, and
the secretary was lucky to escape with his life.
The other-worldliness of the Russian revolutionists affords a problem
more apparent than important, or even real. It is quite true that
“philosophically” modern Communism is based on materialism, that it
denies the immortality of the soul and indeed the existence of a soul,
that it insists men must be happy here on earth, enjoying the good
things of this earth. But surely it is most important if you wish to
understand the problems of men in society to find out what men do, how
they behave, as well as what they say on paper or in the pulpit that
they are doing, or want to do, or ought to do. It is also quite true
that Communists, fellow-travelers, as the Communists like to call their
sentimental followers among the intellectuals, and the brethren of the
Left in general in this country tend to be extremely indignant when
their behavior is analyzed as we propose to analyze it. Here, as so
often, indignation is not refutation.
That the Bolshevik leaders were almost all ascetics is perhaps a
commonplace. Lenin was notably austere and contemptuous of ordinary
comfort, and at the height of his power his apartments in the Kremlin
were of barrack-like simplicity. Some of Lenin’s sayings sound like
the bourgeois Calvinists as analyzed by Max Weber, or even by Mr.
R. H. Tawney: “Carry out an accurate and honest account of money,
manage economically, don’t loaf, don’t steal, maintain the strictest
discipline in labor.” Indeed, the general tone among the high command
of Bolshevism was in those early years that of a consecrated and
almost monastic group. In a Russia where men were starving or freezing
it was for one thing pretty impolitic for leaders to look too sleek
and well-fed. But just as the pressure of the war is not a complete
explanation for the Terror, so neither necessity nor policy explains
the asceticism of the Bolsheviks. They felt, as the Puritans had felt,
that the ordinary vices and weaknesses of human beings are disgusting,
that the good life cannot be led until they are eliminated. Early the
Bolsheviks prohibited the national drink, vodka, and almost all the
early soviets took steps against prostitution, gambling, night life,
and so on. Theoretically the Bolsheviks thought women should be free,
for instance, free from the shocking limitations bourgeois laws had put
upon them; hence the notable freedom allowed in Russia as to marriage,
divorce, abortion, and other phases of family and sex relationships.
But the Bolsheviks did not intend by this that women were to be free to
behave as they were sure they secretly behaved--or wanted to behave--in
dissolute old bourgeois society. On the contrary, they expected their
women to behave as they would behave in the classless society--and
though vague, that is a pretty strict canon.