Chapter X: Part 10

Thermidor is then not by any means something unique, limited to the French revolution from which it takes its name. We have found in all three of our societies which underwent the full cycle of revolution a similar moral let-down, a similar process of concentration of power in the hands of a “tyrant” or “dictator,” a similar seeping back of exiles, a similar revulsion against the men who had made the Terror, a similar return to old habits in daily life.

Even in the United States, which did not undergo quite the same sort of crisis as the other countries, which did not have a real Reign of Terror and Virtue, the decade of the 1780’s displays in incomplete forms some of the marks of Thermidor. There were a relaxation of war discipline and war tension and a grand renewed scramble for wealth and pleasure. There were much financial speculation and much sheer suffering. Shays’s Rebellion, a most ineffectual gesture, reminds one of the feeble attempts of suffering Frenchmen and Russians to protest against the newly rich of their Thermidors. There was even a moral let-down in this country. “Sober Americans of 1784,” writes Jameson, “lamented the spirit of speculation which war and its attendant disturbances had generated, the restlessness of the young, disrespect for tradition and authority, increase of crime, the frivolity and extravagance of society.” All this sounds very like the original Thermidor in France.

In some sense the phenomenon of reaction and restoration seems almost inevitably a part of the process of revolution. At any rate it seems hard for the most optimistic lover of revolution to deny that we have found such a phenomenon in all of the four societies we have chosen to study. The very, very faithful may still maintain that the great revolution in Russia has proved itself exempt from this reaction, that in Russia the noble aims of revolutionists in Western society have at last achieved an unsullied reality. We ourselves cannot fit the facts of Stalin’s regime to any such interpretation. Yet the fact of Thermidor, even the fact of formal restoration as in 1660 and 1814, does not mean that revolution has changed nothing. We shall in the next chapter attempt to answer the very difficult question: Just what changes did these revolutions effect?

_Chapter_ NINE A SUMMARY OF THE WORK OF REVOLUTIONS

_I. Changes in Institutions and Ideas_

With that tendency to absolutism which common sense shares with some more formal metaphysics, we are likely to think of the kind of revolution we have been studying as a cataclysmic break with the past. The revolution “marks a new era” or “ends forever the abuses of the old regime” or “digs a gulf between the old X and the new.” On the other hand, when disillusioned liberals like Mr. E. D. Martin come to turn against the revolutionary tradition, they conclude as sweepingly that in effect revolutions change nothing of importance--except perhaps for the worse--that revolutions are unpleasant and perhaps avoidable interludes in a nation’s history. Now it should be clear that our present study of the English, American, French and Russian revolutions can hardly permit any such absolute answers to the question: What did these revolutions really change? Some institutions, some laws, even some human habits, they clearly changed in very important ways; other institutions, laws and habits they changed in the long run but slightly, if at all. It may be that what they changed is more--or less--significant for the sociologist than what they did not change. But we cannot begin to decide this last matter until we have got the actual changes straight. We are considering here, of course, those changes which are apparent at the end of the revolutionary fever, those changes which the history books are likely to catalogue as “permanent.” With the changes promised but not achieved by the extremists, as with the many dramatic changes in the lives of the individual actors in the revolution, we are not here directly concerned at the moment.

Politically the revolution ends the worst abuses, the worst inefficiencies of the old regime. It settles for a time at least the kind of internal conflict out of which the “dual sovereignty” arose. The machinery of government works more smoothly after than immediately before the revolution. France is here a typical case. The old overlapping jurisdictions, the confusions and the compromises inherited from the thousand-year struggle between the centripetal forces of the Crown and the centrifugal forces of the feudal nobility, the welter of accumulated precedents, were all replaced by the work of the French revolution. An able bureaucracy operating within neatly subordinated administrative areas, a legal system efficiently codified, an excellent army well staffed and well provided for, enabled Napoleon to do much that his Bourbon predecessors could not possibly have done. Tocqueville long ago pointed out that the French revolution came to complete the work of a long line of French monarchs, to make centralized power in France effective and complete.

Here is one detail among many. In the old France, weights and measures varied from region to region, indeed from town to town. A bushel at Toulouse might be much more than a bushel at neighboring Montauban. Worse yet, the very names of measures might be wholly different words. The coinage was, like the present English coinage, partly duodecimal, and very hard to handle by long division. What the revolution did about all this is familiar to every schoolboy. It substituted the uniform system of weights and measures known as the metric system, a system which has made its way without benefit of revolution through most of the world outside the British Empire and the United States.

This achievement of governmental efficiency is really the most striking uniformity we can note in estimating the political changes effected by our revolutions. With suitable allowances for local differences, for accidents and for the inevitable residue of the unique with which all history and sociology must deal, England, America, and Russia also emerged from their revolutions with more efficient and more centralized governments. The process is less clear in England, partly because it took place before the full maturing of economic and cultural forces tending to promote such forms of efficiency as the metric system or the _Code Napoléon_. But, for all its complexities, the English government after 1660 was much better geared to the needs of the nation of shopkeepers than was the England of 1620, with knights’ fees, ship money, benevolences, Star Chamber, Court of High Commission, and the other appurtenances of the immature Stuart despotism. Parliament after 1660 was more completely master of England than the first two Stuarts had been.

Russia is in this respect as in so many still a subject for dispute. Violent opponents of Stalin insist that the new bureaucrats are just as inefficient, pettily tyrannical and stupid as they were said to have been under the Czars. Some of the sentiments involved in statements of this sort would seem to be more or less a constant of Russian life, and to a certain extent of life under any government. Gogol’s admirable comedy, _The Inspector-General_, deals as certainly with uniformities as any scientist could. Yet all in all future historians will probably have to admit that as a piece of political machinery the soviet system worked better than did that of the Czars, that the soviet bureaucracy was on the whole a more capable one than that of the Czars. You may not like the first Five Year Plan, but you must admit that beneath its parade of statistics lies a concrete economic achievement greater than anything the old regime could show for a similar period.

These revolutions were all made in the name of freedom, were all directed against the tyranny of the few and towards the rule of the many. This whole phase of revolutions is peculiarly involved with the existence of certain sentiments in human beings which make it very hard to apply the methods of science to the study of men in society. Yet it would seem that the full importance of such matters as democracy, civil rights, written constitutions, and indeed the whole apparatus of popular government lies rather within that vague and important field the Marxists like to call ideology than in the field of concrete political agencies which we are now studying. Certainly one is struck by the fact that all our revolutions promoted the efficiency of the government rather than the “right” of the individual to a romantic freedom to be himself. Even the traditional apparatus of popular government can be analyzed as an instrument to get things done in a particular situation, however strange such an analysis might seem to conventionally minded contemporaries of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. Bills of Rights, codes, and constitutions were in effect charters of the new ruling classes. Liberty as an ideal was one thing; liberty in politics was another and less exalted matter.

These revolutions all saw much transfer of property by confiscation or forced sale. They saw the fall of one ruling class and its succession by another ruling class recruited in part, at least, from individuals who were before the revolution outside the ruling class. They were accompanied by a definite and concrete demand for the abolition of poverty, for the equal sharing of wealth; the men who guided the Russian revolution continued long after its crisis period to insist that they were economic egalitarians, that Russia would not recognize private property in land and in capital goods. Marxist thought still separates our four revolutions into two different classes: the English, French, and American, all of which it considers to have been in their final results “bourgeois” revolutions, inevitable victories of business and industry over landed aristocracy; and the Russian revolution, in its final phases a true “proletarian” revolution. We may nevertheless be more impressed with the fact that in all four revolutions economic power changed hands, and that a newly amalgamated “ruling class” in the new Russia as in the new France directed the economic as well as the political life of the society.

In more detail, the English revolution took land from the more devoted Cavaliers and ecclesiastical property from the more unyielding Episcopalians and Presbyterians and gave it to typical Puritans, business men and clergymen alike. The church livings came back at the Restoration of 1660 into Anglican hands, but save for the property of a few great lords very close to Charles II, confiscated Royalist lands remained in the possession of their new owners. Most of these owners made their peace with the Stuart government, and thus was laid the foundation for the ruling class under which England won an empire in the next two centuries, a ruling class in which landed wealth and industrial wealth were almost inextricably mixed, and which proved to be a very good ruling class.

The concrete economic changes in France follow a similar pattern. Lands confiscated from clergy and _émigré_ nobles were acquired by revolutionists, and for the most part remained in the possession of the purchasers even after the Restoration of 1814. Much of this land no doubt finally ended up in the possession of small independent peasants, and helped to put the final touches on the establishment of that very French class, universally regarded among writers and politicians as the core of modern France. But much of this transaction also benefited the middle class, and certainly the French ruling class _after_ the revolution represents as striking a mixture of old wealth and new, of land and trade, as did the English.

In Russia the differences are not as great as they ought to be according to Marxist theory. There has been a transfer of economic power from one group to another rather than an equal sharing of economic power, an equal distribution of consumers’ goods, an end of struggle over economic goods or power--but you may put the Marxist formula as you like. The new Russian bureaucracy seems to be a privileged class which enjoys wealth in the form of consumers’ goods without yet possessing it in the forms we conventionally call “property.” At any rate, almost all reporters are agreed that in Russia in 1938 there is nothing like an equal distribution of consumers’ goods. What seems to have taken place is a development of the lines of movement of Russian economic history. Just as the French revolution put the finishing touches on the position of the peasantry, but by no means “gave” them the land suddenly, so the present status of Russian agriculture and industry seems to be a development of slavophile and other elements favoring collective farming over the _kulaks_, and of almost world-wide tendencies favoring large-scale bureaucratically managed industry over small independent competitive concerns. Here as in other countries the revolution certainly does not draw institutions out of a hat--nor out of a book, not even out of so impressive a book as _Das Kapital_.

None of these revolutions quite substituted a brand-new ruling class for the old one, at least not unless one thinks of a “class” without bothering about the human beings who make up the class, which is a favorite procedure of the Marxists. What happens is that by the end of the convalescent period there is well begun a kind of amalgamation, in which the enterprising, adaptable, or lucky individuals of the old privileged classes are for most practical purposes tied up with those individuals of the old suppressed classes who, probably through the same gifts, were able to rise. This _amalgame_ is especially noticeable in the army and the civil service, but it is almost as conspicuous in business and industry, and higher politics. A detailed study of the social origins of Bonaparte’s officers, or the officers in the present Red Army, or of the men who actually ran the government of England in 1670, France in 1810, Russia in 1938, would certainly confirm this analysis. Moreover, the new men in the post-revolutionary ruling classes have made distinct compromises with the older ones, with that old world from which the crisis period of the revolution is so extreme a revulsion. Your Downings, Fouchés and Kalinins have no longer the fine freedom a Trotsky can enjoy. They are no longer revolutionaries, but rulers, and as such they are in some respects bound to “learn” from their predecessors.

It is in the social arrangements that most intimately and immediately touch the average man that the actual changes effected by our revolutions seem slightest. The grand attempts at reform during the crisis period try to alter John Jones’s relations with his wife, his children, try to give him a new religion, new personal habits. The Thermidoreans abandon most of this attempt, and in the end John Jones stands on certain matters about where he stood when the revolution began. Our study of revolutions should confirm something that sensible men have always known and that exasperated reformers have occasionally come to admit, at least to themselves--that in some very important ways the behavior of men changes with a slowness almost comparable to the kind of change the geologist studies.

We may take as an illustration of the foregoing uniformity the attempts of certain of our revolutionists to alter radically and quickly phases of the law of the family. Le Play has shown that the uniformities of the family are among the stablest and most persistent things in our Western civilization. The ardent Leftist revolutionist in the last few centuries has, therefore, naturally enough, tended to dislike this monogamous Christian family, to him a bulwark of individual selfishness, social snobbery, intellectual stuffiness, snarled up with testamentary red tape, dedicated to the myth of masculine superiority, hardened into rigidity by religious sanctions, a festering center which must be cleaned up before men and women can live as God, Nature, or Science intended them to live. The French revolution saw no widespread attempt to destroy the family, and indeed its generally middle-class course is filled with pious praise of the family virtues. But the humanitarians did put through some far-reaching legislation in this field, such as generous laws of adoption and other measures tending to break down the rigid, almost Roman, family law of the old regime. Notably they attempted to make illegitimate children absolutely equal in every respect with legitimate children. As the law to put this into effect was passed, a glowing orator remarked: “There are no more bastards in France.” We need hardly add that he was mistaken. In a monograph on _French Revolutionary Legislation on Illegitimacy_, the present author has tried to show how even the good bourgeois who passed this law were emotionally too entangled in the traditional family feelings to try to put it into effect. They _said_ that bastards were free and equal to legitimate children; but they could not bring themselves to _act_ as if they really believed or wanted it to be so. On the whole, the traditional family in its French form emerged unscathed from the revolution.

Russia has seen a much more determined attack on the monogamous Christian family, legislation making divorce even easier than in Nevada, legalizing abortion, encouraging collective household arrangements, establishing _crèches_ and kindergartens, bringing children up as far as possible outside the home, and so on. Let there be no misunderstanding. Russian idealists who sought to do all of this were not nasty-minded folk seeking to make life easier for the sensualist. Quite the contrary, they had, as we have tried very hard to show, a strong streak of Puritanism. To this day, a young Russian Communist would be shocked to the fibers of his being at the sight of almost any American newspaper and periodical stand. These idealists thought the bourgeois family corrupting, and agreed with Mr. Shaw that marriage combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. Their legislation was aimed at achieving the ideals behind Christian monogamy though destroying what they regarded as the corrupting family institutions within which it was hedged.

Here again we are not in the position of historians working with good sources, but through the conflicting reports coming to us from Russia of the 1930’s we can make out that the reformers have failed, that the Christian monogamous family has survived the old Bolsheviks in Russia. Recent legislation, as we have seen, has not only hedged legalized abortion so much as to limit it to cases of the strictest medical necessity, but has actually set up premiums for large families. Divorce has been made more difficult. Filial piety and indeed all the conventional bourgeois family virtues are now in high honor in press, movie, stage, and school.

To take a very specific example, homosexuality was, for the old Bolsheviks, an abnormality, possibly open to medical treatment, but not of course a crime. They didn’t like it, but they were too consistent and open-minded to treat it as a crime. Naturally they had no narrow bourgeois disgust for the practice. But in March, 1934, homosexuality was made a crime with a three- to eight-year prison penalty. We cannot refrain from adding that the Webbs explain this with their usual obligingness: “It is understood that this action followed the discovery of centers of demoralization of boys, due to the influence of certain foreigners, who were summarily expelled from soviet territory.” But even with the foreigners expelled, Russia retains the law. The fact is that Russian _sentiments_ on the subject of homosexuality are nearly constant; only Russian _ideas_ on the subject are variable, and in the long run the constant prevails.

The whole subject of change in the routines of the daily life of John Jones, in the more intimate of his relations with his fellows and his environment, is none too well explored. Here again common sense, with its decisive “human nature doesn’t change,” is much too absolute. But it does appear that our revolutions had but slight permanent effect on the important little things of life for John Jones. What is perhaps loosely called the “Industrial Revolution” had certainly a much greater effect, forced John into a more difficult series of adjustments than did our revolutions. And none of our societies seems to have undergone changes as complete as those undergone by Turkish society since the World War or by Japanese society in the last fifty years. It is tempting to record the apparent paradox that Western society is in some respects more slow to change than Eastern society. But the truth is much more complex than any such paradox. Both the Turks and the Japanese seem to have preserved intact through social and economic change a series of national disciplines. In our Western societies, family, moral and religious disciplines have in a similar way served as a balance to very important social and economic changes, of which the revolutions we have studied are only a part.

Modern Western society has indeed gone through in the last few centuries changes so continuous that, if we adopt the very plausible concept of social equilibrium, we must expect to find certain forces pulling in the opposite direction, in the direction of stability. These forces are not as a rule articulate. They do not seem to interest intellectuals as much as do forces making for change. They are perhaps a bit undignified, and certainly undramatic. Insofar as they do get themselves translated into language, they appear in a variety of logical disguises difficult to penetrate. But they are there, and as we have seen, they set a definite limit to what the reformer or revolutionist can do. Bastardy can hardly stand up against logic or biology; but bastardy exists by virtue neither of logic nor of biology, but by virtue of well-established, slow-changing human sentiments. Men may feel tearfully sorry for poor children stigmatized from birth for something clearly not their fault; but hitherto not even revolution has prevailed against those perhaps ignoble but certainly persistent sentiments behind the “man-made” and “artificial” distinction between children born after a certain rite has been performed and those born without benefit of such a rite. The rite seems fragile, changeable, unimportant--a mere matter of trivial words and gestures. Actually it has proved effective against much grander words and more striking gestures, as well as against whole batteries of logic. For it is, to use Pareto’s terminology, associated with the “persistent aggregates,” patterns of sentiments and behavior very slow to change.

All this amounts to the statement that in our Western society men have continued to hold certain sentiments and to conform to certain set ways of doing things even after they have changed what they say about these sentiments and these acts. Our revolutions seem in many ways to have changed men’s minds more completely than they changed men’s habits. This is by no means to say that they changed nothing at all, that what men think is of no importance. Ideas are not quite magicians in this world, or Robespierre would not have fallen, and Trotsky would today be in Moscow and not in Mexico. But they are not to be dismissed as having no part in the social change. Indeed, what our Marxist friends would call the “ideological” changes effected by our revolutions deserve careful consideration.

One may distinguish two contrasting roles played by these ideas born of revolution. First, our revolutions in the end would seem to have taken the sting out of the radical ideas and slogans of their early days. They achieved the necessary miracle of reconciling aspiring men to the substantial failure of their aspirations. They turned what were originally verbal instruments of revolt, means of moving men to social action against the existing order, into something we shall have to be up-to-date and call the myths, folklore, symbols, stereotypes, rituals, of their respective societies. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” which once was the trumpet call to the storming of heaven on earth, is now in the Third French Republic no more than a bit of national liturgy, a comforting reminder that Frenchmen are the privileged heirs of a heroic past. There are signs that in Russia even so explosive a phrase as “Workers of the world, unite!” can be accommodated to the conservative, restraining necessities of ritual. After all, as too-logical radicals have pointed out, the Bible itself is full of good revolutionary doctrine; what organized Christianity has done with the Bible organized Communism ought to be able to do with a much simpler book like _Das Kapital_.

A second role is a more positive one. Even in their use as ritual, these ideas are not purely passive, mere bits of mumbo-jumbo. We cannot here go into the important and involved question of the role of these myths and symbols in a society. We certainly must avoid the stupid question as to whether such symbols “cause” any kind of social change. Here as almost everywhere in the social sciences the cart-and-horse formula of causation is useless, and indeed misleading. Sufficient for us that in all our societies we find that the memory of the great revolution is enshrined in practices that seem to be an essential part of the national state as a going concern. Insofar as men are today in England, France, America, and Russia heartened by awareness of membership in a nation, guided perhaps, and certainly consoled, by the nobler and more abstract beliefs, made conscious of some kind of security, of a status, by all sorts of ritualistic acts associated with the State or with the Church as a department of the State, fortified by the prospects still held out in the grand words of a Milton, a Jefferson, a Danton, a Lenin--insofar as men are so moved, the revolutions we have studied have given largely to the content of their emotions. In England, in America, in France, the memory of their great overturns has become a factor in the stability of existing society: in Russia, unless all signs fail, a similar state of affairs has just about been reached.

Yet our revolutions have also left behind a tradition of successful revolt. What is to established, contented, conforming, conventional men merely a ritualistic satisfaction, remains for discontented men a spur to activate their discontent. Our modern Western revolutionary tradition is to a certain extent cumulative, and the latest revolutionists in the tradition, the Russians, have carried their awareness of revolutionary history almost to an obsession. Trotsky, for instance, though he naturally never uses the conceptual scheme of the fever as we have employed it, seems constantly to be watching the course of the Russian revolution almost clinically, constantly looking for events to take courses observed before in France, in England, or wherever men have revolted in the name of the many against the few. If Mussolini and Hitler are equally interested in such clinical observations, this is but proof of our modern assumption that there are uniformities in history.

Again this tradition of revolt is an imponderable, but it seems to have gone into the making of the Western democracies, and to be one of the elements that is in its full form lacking in the development of Italy and Germany, where democratic revolutions have been abortive or at best unimpressive. To state the existence of this revolutionary tradition is not necessarily to make a judgment of value. We bring it forth as an observable fact, one not to be effectively denied by partisans of any stripe. Its exact influence in the complex equilibrium of our present societies we cannot here attempt to determine. Notably, we find great difficulties in estimating how far it has taken root in Russia. Possibly the Communism of Stalin is but “fascism of the Left.” But the whole temper of the Western democracies is influenced, surely, by the fact that they were born of one kind of revolution, with one kind of “ideal”--that is still best summarized as “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”

_II. Some Tentative Uniformities_

When all necessary concessions are made to those who insist that events in history are unique, it remains true that the four revolutions we have studied do display some striking uniformities. Our conceptual scheme of the fever can be worked out so as to bring these uniformities clearly to mind. We shall find it worth while, in attempting to summarize the work of these revolutions, to recapitulate briefly the main points of comparison on which our uniformities are based.

We must be very tentative about the prodromal symptoms of revolution. Even retrospectively, diagnosis of the four societies we studied was very difficult, and there is little ground for belief that anyone today has enough knowledge and skill to apply formal methods of diagnosis to a contemporary society and say, in this case revolution will or will not occur shortly. But some uniformities do emerge from a study of the old regimes in England, America, France, and Russia.

First, these were all societies on the whole on the upgrade economically before the revolution came, and the revolutionary movements seem to originate in the discontents of not unprosperous people who feel restraint, cramp, annoyance, rather than downright crushing oppression. Certainly these revolutions are not started by down-and-outers, by starving, miserable people. These revolutionists are not worms turning, not children of despair. These revolutions are born of hope, and their philosophies are formally optimistic.

Second, we find in our pre-revolutionary society definite and indeed very bitter class antagonisms, though these antagonisms seem rather more complicated than the cruder Marxists will allow. It is not a case of feudal nobility against bourgeoisie in 1640, 1776, and 1789, or of bourgeoisie against proletariat in 1917. The strongest feelings seem generated in the bosoms of men--and women--who have made money, or at least who have enough to live on, and who contemplate bitterly the imperfections of a socially privileged aristocracy. Revolutions seem more likely when social classes are fairly close together than when they are far apart. “Untouchables” very rarely revolt against a God-given aristocracy, and Haiti gives one of the few examples of successful slave revolutions. But rich merchants whose daughters can marry aristocrats are likely to feel that God is at least as interested in merchants as in aristocrats. It is difficult to say why the bitterness of feeling between classes almost equal socially seems so much stronger in some societies than others--why, for instance, a Marie Antoinette should be so much more hated than a Barbara Hutton; but at any rate the existence of such bitterness can be observed in our pre-revolutionary societies, which is, clinically speaking, enough for the moment.

Third, there is what we have called the desertion of the intellectuals. This is in some respects the most reliable of the symptoms we are likely to meet. Here again we need not try to explain all the hows and whys, need not try to tie up the desertion of the intellectuals with a grand and complete sociology of revolutions. We need state simply that it can be observed in all four of our societies.

Fourth, the governmental machinery is clearly inefficient, partly through neglect, through a failure to make changes in old institutions, partly because new conditions--in the societies we have studied, pretty specifically conditions attendant on economic expansion and the growth of new monied classes, new ways of transportation, new business methods--these new conditions laid an intolerable strain on governmental machinery adapted to simpler, more primitive, conditions.

Fifth, the old ruling class--or rather, many individuals of the old ruling class--come to distrust themselves, or lose faith in the traditions and habits of their class, grow intellectual, humanitarian, or go over to the attacking groups. Perhaps a larger number of them than usual lead lives we shall have to call immoral, dissolute, though one cannot be as sure about this as a symptom as about the loss of habits and traditions effective among a ruling class. At any rate, the ruling class becomes politically inept.

The dramatic events that start things moving, that bring on the fever of revolution, are in three of our four revolutions intimately connected with the financial administration of the state. In the fourth, Russia, the breakdown of administration under the burdens of an unsuccessful war is only in part financial. But in all our societies the inefficiency and inadequacy of the governmental structure of the society come out clearly in the very first stages of the revolution. There is a time--the first few weeks or months--when it looks as if a determined use of force on the part of the government might prevent the mounting excitement from culminating in an overthrow of the government. These governments attempted such a use of force in all four instances, and in all four their attempt was a failure. This failure indeed proved a turning point during the first stages, and set up the revolutionists in power.

Yet one is impressed in all four instances more with the ineptitude of the governments’ use of force than with the skill of their opponents’ use of force. We are here speaking of the situation wholly from a military and police point of view. It may be that the majority of the people are discontented, loathe the existing government, wish it overthrown. Nobody knows. They don’t take plebiscites _before_ revolutions. In the actual clash--even Bastille Day, Concord, or the February Days in Petrograd--only a minority of the people is actively engaged. But the government hold over its own troops is poor, its troops fight half-heartedly or desert, its commanders are stupid, its enemies acquire a nucleus of the deserting troops or of a previous militia, and the old gives place to the new. Yet, such is the conservative and routine-loving nature of the bulk of human beings, so strong are habits of obedience in most of them, that it is almost safe to say that no government is likely to be overthrown until it loses the ability to make adequate use of its military and police powers. That loss of ability may show itself in the actual desertion of soldiers and police to the revolutionists, or in the stupidity with which the government manages its soldiers and police, or in both ways.

The events we have grouped under the name of first stages do not of course unroll themselves in exactly the same order in time, nor with exactly the same content, in all four of our revolutions. But we have listed the major elements--and they fall into a pattern of uniformities--financial breakdown, organization of the discontented to remedy this breakdown (or threatened breakdown), revolutionary demands on the part of these organized discontented, demands which if granted would mean the virtual abdication of those governing, attempted use of force by the government, its failure, and the attainment of power by the revolutionists. These revolutionists have hitherto been acting as an organized and nearly unanimous group, but with the attainment of power it is clear that they are not united. The group which dominates these first stages we call the moderates. They are not always in a numerical majority in this stage--indeed it is pretty clear that if you limit the moderates to the Kadets they were not in a majority in Russia in February, 1917. But they seem the natural heirs of the old government, and they have their chance. In three of our revolutions they are sooner or later driven from office to death or exile. Certainly there is to be seen in England, France and Russia a process in which a series of crises--some involving violence, street-fighting and the like--deposes one set of men and puts in power another and more radical set. In these revolutions power passes by violent or at least extra-legal methods from Right to Left, until at the crisis period the extreme radicals, the complete revolutionists, are in power. There are, as a matter of fact, usually a few even wilder and more lunatic fringes of the triumphant extremists--but these are not numerous or strong and are usually suppressed or otherwise made harmless by the dominant radicals. It is therefore approximately true to say that power passes on from Right to Left until it reaches the extreme Left.

The rule of the extremists we have called the crisis period. This period was not reached in the American revolution, though in the treatment of Loyalists, in the pressure to support the army, in some of the phases of social life, you can discern in America many of the phenomena of the Terror as it is seen in our three other societies. We cannot here attempt to go into the complicated question as to why the American revolution stopped short of a true crisis period, why the moderates were never ousted in this country. We must repeat that we are simply trying to establish certain uniformities of description, and are not attempting a complete sociology of revolutions.

The extremists are helped to power no doubt by the existence of a powerful pressure towards centralized strong government, something which in general the moderates are not capable of providing, while the extremists, with their discipline, their contempt for half-measures, their willingness to make firm decisions, their freedom from libertarian qualms, are quite able and willing to centralize. Especially in France and Russia, where powerful foreign enemies threatened the very existence of the nation, the machinery of government during the crisis period was in part constructed to serve as a government of national defense. Yet though modern wars, as we know in this country, demand a centralization of authority, war alone does not seem to account for all that happened in the crisis period in those countries.

What does happen may be a bit oversimply summarized as follows: emergency centralization of power in an administration, usually a council or commission, and more or less dominated by a “strong man”--Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin; government without any effective protection for the normal civil rights of the individual--or if this sounds unrealistic, let us say the normal private life of the individual; setting up of extraordinary courts and a special revolutionary police to carry out the decrees of the government and to suppress all dissenting individuals or groups; all this machinery ultimately built up from a relatively small group--Independents, Jacobins, Bolsheviks--which has a monopoly on all governmental action. Finally, governmental action becomes a much greater part of all human action than in these societies in their normal condition: this apparatus of government is set to work indifferently on the mountains and molehills of human life--it is used to pry into and poke about corners normally reserved for priest or physician, or friend, and it is used to regulate, control, plan, the production and distribution of economic wealth on a national scale.

This pervasiveness of the Reign of Terror in the crisis period is partly explicable in terms of the pressure of war necessities and of economic struggles as well as of other variables: but it must probably also be explained as in part the manifestation of an effort to achieve intensely religious ends here on earth. The little band of violent revolutionists who form the nucleus of all action during the Terror behave as men have been observed to behave before when under the influence of active religious faith. Independents, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, all sought to make all human activity here on earth conform to an ideal pattern, which, like all such patterns, seems deeply rooted in their sentiments. A striking uniformity in all these patterns is their asceticism, or if you prefer, their condemnation of what we may call the minor as well as the major vices. Essentially, however, these patterns are a good deal alike, and all resemble closely what we may call conventional Christian ethics. Independents, Jacobins, and Bolsheviks, at least during the crisis period, really make an effort to enforce behavior in literal conformity with these codes or patterns. Such an effort means stern repression of much that many men have been used to regarding as normal; it means a kind of universal tension in which the ordinary individual can never feel protected by the humble routines to which he has been formed: it means that the intricate network of interactions among individuals--a network which is still to the few men devoted to its intelligent study almost a complete mystery--this network is temporarily all torn apart. John Jones, the man in the street, the ordinary man, is left floundering.

We are almost at the point of being carried away into the belief that our conceptual scheme is something more than a mere convenience, that it does somehow describe “reality.” At the crisis, the collective patient does seem helpless, thrashing his way through a delirium. But we must try to avoid the emotional, metaphorical appeal, and concentrate on making clear what seems to be the really important point here. Most of us are familiar with the favorite old Tory metaphor: the violent revolutionist tears down the noble edifice society lives in, or burns it down, and then fails to build up another, and poor human beings are left naked to the skies. That is not a good metaphor, save perhaps for purposes of Tory propaganda. Even at the height of a revolutionary crisis period, more of the old building is left standing than is destroyed. But the whole metaphor of the building is bad. We may take instead an analogy from the human nervous system, or think of an immensely complicated gridwork of electrical communications. Society then appears as a kind of a network of interactions among individuals, interactions for the most part fixed by habit, hardened and perhaps adorned as ritual, dignified into meaning and beauty by elaborately interwoven strands of interaction we know as law, theology, metaphysics, and similar noble beliefs. Now sometimes many of these interwoven strands of noble beliefs can be cut out, and others inserted. During the crisis period of our revolutions some such process seems to have taken place; but the whole network itself seems so far never to have been altered suddenly and radically, and even the noble beliefs tend to fit into the network in the same places. If you kill off _all_ the people who live within the network, you don’t so much change the network of course as destroy it. And in spite of our prophets of doom, this type of destruction is rare in human history. Certainly in none of our revolutions was there even a very close approach to it.

What did happen, under the pressure of class struggle, war, religious idealism, and a lot more, was that the hidden and obscure courses which many of the interactions in the network follow were suddenly exposed, and passage along them made difficult in the unusual publicity and, so to speak, self-consciousness. The courses of other interactions were blocked, and the interactions went on with the greatest of difficulties by all sorts of detours. The courses of still other interactions were confused, short-circuited, paired off in strange ways. Finally, the pretensions of the fanatical leaders of the revolution involved the attempted creation of a vast number of new interactions. Now though for the most part these new interactions affected chiefly those strands we have called the noble beliefs--law, theology, metaphysics, mythology, folklore, high-power abstractions in general--still some of them did penetrate at an experimental level into the obscurer and less dignified part of the network of interactions among human beings and put a further strain on it. Surely it is no wonder that under these conditions men and women in the crisis period should behave as they would not normally behave, that in the crisis period nothing should seem as it used to seem, that, indeed, a famous passage from Thucydides, written two thousand years before our revolutions, should seem like a clinical report:

“When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed
carried the revolutionary spirit further and further, and determined
to outdo the report of all who had preceded them by the ingenuity of
the enterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of
words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by
them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal
courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the
disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing.
Frantic energy was the true quality of a man. A conspirator who
wanted to be safe was a recreant in disguise. The lover of violence
was always trusted, and his opponent suspected. He who succeeded
in a plot was deemed knowing, but a still greater master in craft
was he who detected one. On the other hand, he who plotted from the
first to have nothing to do with plots was a breaker up of parties
and a poltroon who was afraid of the enemy. In a word, he who could
outstrip another in a bad action was applauded, and so was he who
encouraged to evil one who had no idea of it.... The tie of party was
stronger than the tie of blood, because a partisan was more ready to
dare without asking why.”

With this we may put a quotation from a much humbler source, an obscure Siberian co-operative leader protesting against Red and White Terror alike. Mr. Chamberlin quotes:

“And we ask and appeal to society, to the contending political
groups and parties: When will our much-suffering Russia outlive the
nightmare that is throttling it, when will deaths by violence cease?
Doesn’t horror seize you at the sight of the uninterrupted flow of
human blood? Doesn’t horror seize you at the consciousness that the
deepest, most elementary bases of the existence of human society are
perishing: the feeling of humanity, the consciousness of the value
of life, of human personality, the feeling and consciousness of the
necessity of legal order in the state?... Hear our cry and despair:
we return to prehistoric times of the existence of the human race; we
are on the verge of the death of civilization and culture; we destroy
the great cause of human progress, for which many generations of our
worthier ancestors labored.”

Certainly, however, none of our revolutions quite ended in the death of civilization and culture. The network was stronger than the forces trying to destroy or alter it, and in all of our societies the crisis period was followed by a convalescence, by a return to most of the simpler and more fundamental courses taken by interactions in the old network. More especially, the religious lust for perfection, the crusade for the Republic of Virtue, died out, save among a tiny minority whose actions could not longer take place directly in politics. An active, proselyting, intolerant, ascetic, chiliastic faith became fairly rapidly an inactive, indifferent, worldly, ritualistic faith.

The equilibrium has been restored and the revolution is over. But this does not mean that nothing has been changed. Some new and useful tracks or courses in the network of interactions that makes society have been established, some old and inconvenient ones--you may call them unjust if you like--have been eliminated. There is something heartless in saying that it took the French revolution to produce the metric system and to destroy _lods et ventes_ and similar feudal inconveniences, or the Russian revolution to bring Russia to use the modern calendar and to eliminate a few useless letters in the Russian alphabet. These tangible and useful results look rather petty as measured by the brotherhood of man and the achievement of justice on this earth. The blood of the martyrs seems hardly necessary to establish decimal coinage.

Yet those who feel that revolution is heroic need not despair. The revolutionary tradition is an heroic one, and the noble beliefs which seem necessary to all societies are in our Western democracies in part a product of the revolutions we have been studying. Our revolutions made tremendous and valuable additions to those strands in the network of human interactions which can be isolated as law, theology, metaphysics and, in the abstract sense, ethics. Had these revolutions never occurred, you and I might still beat our wives or cheat at cards or avoid walking under ladders, but we might not be able to rejoice in our possession of certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or in the comforting assurance that one more push will bring the classless society.

When one compares the whole course of these revolutions, certain tentative uniformities suggest themselves. If the Russian revolution at the end of our series is compared with the English at its beginning, there seems to be a development of conscious revolutionary technique. This is of course especially clear since Marx made the history of revolutionary movements of the past a necessary preparation for revolutionists of the present. Lenin and his collaborators had a training in the technique of insurrection which Independents and Jacobins lacked. Robespierre seems almost a political innocent when his revolutionary training is compared with that of any good Bolshevik leader. Sam Adams, it must be admitted, seems a good deal less innocent. All in all, it is probable that this difference in the explicitness of self-conscious preparation for revolution, this growth of a copious literature of revolution, this increasing familiarity of revolutionary ideas, is not one of the very important uniformities we have to record. It is a conspicuous uniformity, but not an important one. Revolutions are still not a form of logical action. The Bolsheviks do not seem to have guided their actions by the “scientific” study of revolutions to an appreciably greater degree than the Independents or the Jacobins. They simply adapted an old technique to the days of the telegraph and railroad trains.

This last suggests another conspicuous but not very important tendency in our four revolutions. They took place in societies increasingly influenced by the “Industrial Revolution,” increasingly subject to those changes in scale which our modern conquests of time and space have brought to societies. Thus the Russian revolution directly affected more people and more square miles of territory than any previous revolution; its sequence of events compresses into a few months what in England in the seventeenth century had taken years to achieve; in its use of the printing press, telegraph, radio, airplanes and the rest it seems, as compared with our other revolutions, definitely a streamlined affair. But again we may well doubt whether such changes of scale are in themselves really important factors. Men’s desires are the same, whether they ride towards their achievement in airplanes or on horseback. Revolutions may be bigger nowadays, but surely not better. The loudspeaker does not change the words.

Finally, at the risk of being tedious, we must come back to some of the problems of methods in the social sciences which were suggested in our first chapter. We must admit that the theorems, the uniformities, which we have been able to put forward in terms of our conceptual scheme, are vague. They cannot be stated in quantitative terms, cannot be used for purposes of prediction or control. But at the very outset we warned the reader not to expect too much. Even such vague theorems as that of the desertion of the intellectuals, that of the role of force in the first stages of revolution, that of the part played by “religious” enthusiasm in the period of crisis, that of the pursuit of pleasure during Thermidor, are, one hopes, not without value for the study of men in society. In themselves they amount to little, but they suggest certain possibilities in further work.

In the first place, by their very inadequacies they point to the necessity for a more rigorous treatment of the problems involved, challenging those who find them incomplete and unsatisfactory to do a better job. In the second place, they will serve the purpose of all first approximations in scientific work--they will suggest further study of the facts, especially in those fields where the attempt to make first approximations has uncovered an insufficient supply of the necessary facts. Notably here the facts for a study of class antagonisms are woefully inadequate. So, too, are the facts for a study of the circulation of the elite in pre-revolutionary societies. But there are a hundred such holes, some of which can surely be filled. Our first approximations will then lead the way to another’s second approximations. No scientist should ask more.

_III. A Paradox of Revolution_

Wider uniformities will, to judge by the past of science, some day emerge from more complete studies of the sociology of revolutions. Here we dare not hazard much that we have not already brought out in the course of our analysis of four specific revolutions. After all, these are but four revolutions of what seems to be the same type, revolutions in what may be not too uncritically called the democratic tradition. So precious a word is “revolution” to many in that tradition, and especially to Marxists, that they indignantly refuse to apply it to such movements as the relatively bloodless but certainly violent and illegal assumption of power by Mussolini or Hitler. These movements, we are told, were not revolutions because they did not take power from one class and give it to another. Obviously with a word in some ways as imprecise as “revolution” you can play all sorts of tricks like this. But for the scientific study of social change it seems wise to apply the word revolution to the overthrow of an established and legal parliamentary government by Fascists. If this is so, then our four revolutions are but one kind of revolution, and we must not attempt to make them bear the strain of generalizations meant to apply to all revolutions.