Chapter III: Part 3

Finally, when those of them who had positions of political power did use force, they used it sporadically and inefficiently. We shall have more to say about this general problem of the use of force when we come to the first stages of actual revolution. In this connection it will be sufficient that the Russian ruling classes, in spite of their celebrated Asiatic background, were by the late nineteenth century more than half ashamed to use force, and therefore used it badly, so that on the whole those on whom force was inflicted were stimulated rather than repressed. The line in actual practice of government between force and persuasion is a subtle one, not to be drawn by formulas, by “science” or textbooks, but by men skilled in the art of ruling. One of the best signs of the unfitness of the ruling class to rule is the absence of this skill among its members. And this absence is recorded in history in the cumulated minor disturbances and discontents which precede revolution.

Russia remains the classic instance of an inept ruling class, but France is almost as good a case. The salons in which the old regime was torn apart--verbally, of course--were presided over by noblewomen and attended by noblemen. Princes of the blood royal became freemasons, and if they did not quite plot the overthrow of all decency, as witch-hunters like Mrs. Nesta Webster seem to think, at least sought to improve themselves out of their privileges and rank. Perhaps nowhere better than in France is to be seen one of the concomitants of the kind of disintegration of the ruling class we have been discussing. This is the deliberate espousal by members of the ruling class of the cause of discontented or repressed classes--upper-dogs voluntarily turning under-dogs. It is not altogether cynical to hazard the guess that this is sometimes an indication that there is about to be a reversal in the position of the dogs. Lafayette is in some ways a good example of this kind of upper-dog, since he seems to have been an unintelligent and ambitious man, whose course was largely determined by fashion. Lafayette tried to do what his own circle would most admire, and since he could not dance well--and his circle admired good dancing--he went to fight for freedom in America, which was also something his circle admired. But ruling classes cannot profitably fight for freedom--freedom, that is, for the other fellow.

In America this decadence of a ruling class is not a prominent symptom of the coming revolution. Our native ruling class was still young, still in the process of formation, and seen as a class exhibited none of the ineptness we have noted in Russia and France. But of course a large part of our ruling class espoused the American revolution, which is probably one of the reasons why our revolution stopped short of a full-blooded Reign of Terror. As far as the ruling class in England at the time of our revolution is concerned, it was very far from being capable of a resolute course towards America. It managed to hold on in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but only by granting concessions to the middle classes, concessions which its French counterpart refused to grant. Many of these Englishmen were, however, anything but defenders of the established order as regards relations with America. Fox, Burke, the Whigs in general, sided with the Americans even after 1775, and their attitude unquestionably helped give the rebellious Americans heart.

Even in seventeenth-century England this sort of symptom is to be discerned. In the English aristocracy of Jacobean times there is not, of course, exactly the same mixture of weariness, doubt, humanitarian hopes, and irresponsibility we have found in Russia or in France. Yet most of these elements can be found in the group later known as Cavaliers. Picturesque, romantic, appealing though the Cavaliers seem to us now in literature and tradition, it would be hard to maintain that they displayed the solidarity and balance necessary to a ruling class. And the Cavalier legend is not wholly a product of the years after the Great Rebellion. The Cavaliers were romantic even to themselves, and in a harsh world of Puritans and money-making had already begun that search for a golden past so characteristic of the émigrés of later revolutions. Nor are the enlightened or inspired, the Lafayettes or the Tolstoys, altogether lacking in the English ruling classes of the time. Even though you accept the nineteenth-century evaluation of the English as always hard-headed, practical, compromise-loving, you will do well to recall that a Tudor gentleman gave the word “Utopia” to political thought, and that Harrington’s famous Utopia, _Oceana_, is a seventeenth-century product.

Still, what conceals from us the extent to which many able and ambitious English gentlemen had deserted the established order in early Stuart times is that they deserted, not as did Lafayette, to America and the abstract rights of man, but to God and the way of salvation. Puritanism, in one or another of its many forms, proved attractive not merely to humble men, nor even to traders and bankers, but to many of the gentry and the nobility. Do not forget that Cromwell himself was a gentleman. Finally, what we may call the politico-legal opposition to the first two Stuarts--though separation of political and religious for that time is purely a matter of analysis, the two being inextricably mixed in the feelings of contemporaries--this politico-legal opposition was, as far as leadership went, almost wholly recruited from gentry and nobility. Men like Hampden and Essex resemble Washington in that they are essentially conservatives driven to rebellion by the ineptness of their immediate rulers; they are not, like Lafayette, sentimental deserters of their class.

Except perhaps in America, we find the ruling classes in the old regimes markedly divided, markedly unsuited to fulfill the functions of a ruling class. Some have joined the intellectuals and deserted the established order, have indeed often become leaders in the crusade for a new order; others have turned rebels, less because of hope for the future than because of boredom with the present; others have gone soft, or indifferent, or cynical. Many, possibly even most of the rank-and-file of the ruling classes, the English squire, the French and Russian country nobleman, retained the simple faith in themselves and their position which is apparently necessary to a ruling class. But the tone of life in the upper classes was not set by such as these. Fashion had deserted with the intellectuals. The sober virtues, the whole complex series of value-judgments which guards a privileged class from itself and others, all these were out of fashion at Whitehall, at Versailles, at the old court of St. Petersburg. _Esprit de corps_ is a subtle thing, difficult, indeed impossible, to analyze with the methods of the chemist or the statistician. The intricate balance of sentiments and habits which hold men together in any such group as those we have been discussing may be altered by changes apparently insignificant, and extremely difficult to trace. But the fact of the alteration is clear. The very wit, refinement, the cultural graces so evident in what we know of the Cavaliers, the French aristocrats of Versailles and the salons, the Russian upper classes of the ballet, the opera, the novel, are signs of the decadence, not necessarily moral, but certainly political, of a ruling class.

Nor is it possible, even for those who find the simple forms of the economic interpretation of history inadequate and misleading, to deny that in three of our societies--England, France, and Russia--there are clear signs that the ruling classes were in a very shaky economic position. In each case there had been a notable rise in the standards of living of the nobility and gentry; finer houses, finer clothes, the luxuries brought by the decorative arts, by sculpture, painting, and music all cost a great deal of money, and were not in a purely economic sense good investments. Though the prohibitions against a gentleman’s making money in business were by no means as absolute, even in France, as they sometimes appear in textbooks of history, it is a fact that most gentlemen had neither the gifts nor the training for such money-making. Most of them lived from agricultural rents, which could not be stretched to meet their rising costs, and from pensions, sinecures, and other aids from the government, which were at least as inelastic. Notably for the French and Russian upper classes, it is clear that some of the discontent which undermined their _esprit de corps_ at the outbreak of the revolution had its origin in their economic difficulties.

So much for the upper or ruling classes. The classes immediately beneath them in the social structure display in England, France, and Russia, and to a lesser degree in America, a more than ordinary dislike for their superiors. Here once more we are confronted with the problem of what is normal in class relationships in Western societies. The view that in a normal society there are no class antagonisms is as much to be rejected as the Marxist view that in such societies--at least up to the present--the class struggle has been unceasingly and equally bitter and ferocious. A picture of our Old South, for instance, which sees contented, well-fed slaves, prosperous artisans and traders with no dislike for their gentlemanly patrons, a serene plantation aristocracy nobly patriarchal, is plain nonsense; but so, too, is one which sees only smoldering discontent among the slaves, envy and hatred among poor whites, pride and fear among the planters. Men in Western societies have never been free, equal, and brothers; there has always been political, social, and economic inequality among groups within these societies, groups we commonly call classes. The existence of antagonisms among classes is a fact, however much it may be to the interest of the ruling class to deny it. But the various antagonisms, by no means purely economic, which set class against class are in a normal society subordinated to other concerns, wider or narrower, cut across by other conflicts, subdued by other interests. At any rate they are not concentrated, embittered, strengthened by an almost unanimous support from the intellectuals, as we shall find they were in the old regimes we are studying.

In England, where we have usually been taught to believe that class hatreds were minimized by the good relations between country gentlemen and villagers, by the absorption of younger sons of the nobility in the middle classes, by some English sense of solidarity and decency, the seventeenth century saw a bitter class struggle. The following quotation from Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson is not only a fair specimen of the feelings of a middle-class Puritan towards the nobility; it can stand as a sample of the kind of intense, and always highly moral, atmosphere of such class antagonisms in other pre-revolutionary societies: “The court of the King [James I] was a nursery of lust and intemperance ... the nobility of the land was utterly debased.... The generality of the gentry of the land soon learned the court fashion, and every great house in the country soon became a sty of uncleanness. Then began murder, incest, adultery, drunkenness, swearing, fornication, and all sorts of ribaldry to be countenanced vices because they held such conformity to the court example.” Or, more gently:

“courtesy,
Which oft is sooner found in lowly sheds
With smoky rafters, than in tapst’ry halls
And courts of princes, where it first was nam’d
And yet is most pretended.”

This was not written by an eighteenth-century disciple of Rousseau, but by John Milton.

We need hardly labor the point that both the French and the Russian middle classes hated, and envied, and felt morally superior to their aristocracies, and that their writings are filled with passages indicative of the strength and spread of these sentiments. At fourteen years Manon Phlipon, later as Madame Roland something more than Egeria to the Girondin party, told her mother after a week spent with a lady of the suite of the Dauphiness, “Another few days and I shall detest these people so much that I shan’t be able to control my hatred.” And to her mother’s question as to what harm these aristocrats did her she answered, “It’s just feeling the injustice, thinking every moment about the absurdity of it all.” The higher the French bourgeois rose, the closer he came in his way of life to the aristocracy, the more vividly in some respects he felt the gap which separated him from his neighbor with four quarters of nobility. “It wasn’t the taxes,” wrote Rivarol in his memoirs, “nor the _lettres de cachet_, nor all the other abuses of authority; it wasn’t the vexations of the _intendants_, nor the ruinous delays of justice which most irritated the nation; it was the prejudice of nobility. What proves this is that it was the bourgeois, the men of letters, the financiers, in fine all those who were envious of the nobility, who raised against the nobility the petty bourgeois of the towns and the peasants in the country.”

How far the lower classes or the proletariat really were stirred against their betters in these societies is not wholly clear, save perhaps in Russia. In England there can be little doubt that the more prosperous artisan classes in the big cities, and in regions like East Anglia the peasantry, were won over to Puritanism; and this meant hostility to the Anglican upper classes. Mixed inextricably with the religious fervor and phrases of the pamphlet literature is a great deal of social hatred, which later came out fully as the revolution moved towards its radical extreme. The French peasantry in many, perhaps most regions, showed by acts in 1789 that they hated their absentee landlords, or the institutions of land tenure, but conclusive evidence that this hatred was much stronger and more universal than it had been for several hundred years has not yet been produced. We cannot be sure whether they hated individuals or a status. Certainly the old notion, evident even in the work of Taine, that the French peasantry were in 1789 smarting under a sharpened double oppression from government and from _seigneurs_, is at least a revolutionary myth rather than an historical fact. A great deal of work remains to be done in the objective study of the actual sentiments of suppressed or oppressed classes at the bottom of the social scale.

The Russian proletariat, at least in the cities, had certainly been exposed to several generations of Marxist propaganda, and had acquired, so far as its elite goes, a sense of mission against nobles and middle class alike. As the first manifesto of the Social Democratic party, issued in 1898 before the split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, put it: “The farther one goes to the East of Europe the weaker, baser and more cowardly becomes the bourgeoisie and the larger cultural and political tasks fall to the lot of the proletariat. On its strong shoulders the Russian working class must bear and will bear the cause of conquering political liberty. This is necessary, but only as the first step toward the achievement of the great historic mission of the proletariat: the creation of a social order in which there will be no place for the exploitation of man by man. The Russian proletariat will cast off from itself the yoke of the autocracy in order with all the greater energy to continue the struggle with capitalism and with the bourgeoisie until the final victory of socialism.” Just how the Russian peasants felt towards classes above them is a difficult problem. We may assume a good deal of variety, as also in eighteenth-century France, depending on local conditions, the character of the landlord, the prosperity of the peasants themselves. There is some indication that by the twentieth century one can risk the generalization: the more prosperous the peasants, the more discontented. But here, as throughout the range of our study, trustworthy materials of one kind are scarce: neither historians nor sociologists have paid sufficient systematic attention to the _sentiments_ towards other groups which seem to prevail in a given social group or class.

We have noted the ineptness of the ruling classes, and the existence among the middle and parts of the lower of more than normally strong sentiments hostile to the ruling classes. It remains to consider how far these class lines were rigid, how far, in particular the “career open to talents,” existed in these societies. One might well argue _a priori_ that in Western societies any approach to a rigid caste-system which would bar the possibility of rise to the able but low-born, any stoppage of what Pareto calls the _circulation of the elites_, would be a very important preliminary symptom of revolution. Able men do seem to get born in the humblest ranks, and an accumulation of able and discontented men would provide splendid natural leaders for groups restive and ready for revolt. Yet this test of the career open to talents is one of the hardest to apply to our societies. The normal standard for a Western society is here very difficult indeed to sketch, even as roughly as we have done for our other variables.

One might start with a characteristic American assumption, and say that in this country at least we have full freedom of opportunity. Very well, let us take at random some self-made contemporaries--Babe Ruth, Henry Ford, Rudy Vallée, Sinclair Lewis. It would be comforting to be able to say confidently that in the societies of the old regimes these able men would have been kept down by hard-and-fast caste lines, condemned to obscurity or to revolt. Unfortunately, it would not be true. We must not, indeed, be indecently sure about such hypothetical matters. The professional athlete as such could probably not have attained in any other society than our own the wealth Mr. Ruth has nor as much honor--public attention, if you prefer--save perhaps in the Rome of the gladiators. Yet in early feudal society sheer physical strength might have won him knighthood, and even in later societies noble patronage might have carried him far. Mr. Ford may be taken as the entrepreneur-inventor, and though one doubts whether any other society than our own would have made him a national hero, it is likely that in eighteenth-century France or in twentieth-century Russia he could have secured substantial financial success. Mr. Vallée is the man who amuses, and Western society has usually rewarded adequately, and sometimes highly, those who could amuse it. Perhaps aristocracies have never quite concealed their contempt and democracies have made no attempt to conceal their admiration for those who amused them. Yet actors, musicians, jesters and their like seem not, in spite of the example of Figaro, to have been greatly irked by their social status in the past. Certainly the French eighteenth century was kind enough to them, even economically. As for Mr. Lewis, he would presumably have been in his element among the _philosophes_, and with proper national and racial adjustments, among the Gorkys and the Chekhovs. He would have made proportionately quite as much money, and have been even more honored.

We are dealing with very subtle variables of human sentiments. At all times and in all societies, probably, some men feel that they have abilities which are denied free play by existing social, political, and economic restrictions. Some men always feel balked, cramped, kept-down, and some of them really are. Probably in societies on the eve of revolution there are very large numbers of such men. Yet it is very difficult to put one’s finger on those kinds of activity, those fields of distinction, where this restraint is most felt. Here as elsewhere the given situation is always a complex of restraints, no one or two or three of which would, without additional elements of disturbance, be anything but a quite normal social fact. Moreover, there are other elements besides restraint. Men conditioned to loyalty may put up with great hardships. Fact and feeling seem to vary independently. Thus in Western society there has always been--say in comparison with Hindu caste-society--a very high degree of the “career open to talents.” The circulation of the elites has always gone on. We can here but glance at our societies and see whether there were any special limitations to that circulation in the years prior to the revolution.

In eighteenth-century France, the way to wealth and fame was open practically unrestricted to business men, adventurers, adventuresses, actors, artists, writers--to Pâris-Duverney, to Cagliostro, to Mme. Du Barry, to Talma, to Watteau, to Voltaire. The way to political power was much harder, though the Abbé Dubois, an apothecary’s son, could attain its highest peak. On the whole, substantial political power, the power of making programs and policies, was open to the courtier talents even more than to noble birth; administrative power was almost entirely in the hands of the _noblesse de robe_, an hereditary, conscientious, and not incapable bureaucracy. Social position, the highest honors, we are frequently told, went only to those who could show four quarters of nobility. Certainly a privileged nobility did exist, and was disliked in the abstract by many a bourgeois who had no concrete experience of it. Twentieth-century Russia is in many ways a close parallel in these respects. A privileged nobility topped the social system, and closed the very highest social honor to plebeian talent. This class was disliked and bitterly disliked by those who saw it from the outside; and no doubt many of its individual members were insufferably haughty, overbearing, dissolute, vain, empty-headed, and the rest, just as if they had come from the pages of _A Tale of Two Cities_. Yet the way to fame and fortune was far from closed in pre-revolutionary Russia, with new industries rising, with an active theatrical, ballet, and musical life, with university and administrative positions open to ambitious and able young men even from the villages. Rasputin you may perhaps regard as an unhealthy example of the career open to talents, but you can hardly deny that the Siberian monk reached the top.

One clue to this problem of the circulation of the elite may lie in a stoppage of that circulation in a particular and very delicate spot, such as the professions, and especially the “intellectual” professions; that is, among people especially liable to the feeling of frustration, of being excluded from good things. One is struck in studying French society in the years just preceding the revolution with a kind of jam in the stream of bright young men descending on Paris to write and talk their way to fortune. Mercier in his _Tableau de Paris_ tells how every sunny day young men may be seen on the quays, washing and drying their only shirts, ruffled and lacy symbol of high social status. There are also in Russia signs of pressure in competition in the ranks of what we should call “white-collar men,” intellectuals, bureaucrats, clerks, and the like. We know that a similar stoppage in the society of the Weimar Republic had a great deal to do with the Nazi revolution of 1933. This symptom is, like most others that indicate strong social tensions, nearly lacking in eighteenth-century America, and extremely difficult to trace, partly for lack of proper historical materials, in the English revolution. Naturally enough, a stoppage in the circulation of the elite into journalism, literature, and such professions is likely to be rapidly reflected in the desertion of the intellectuals.

Finally, social antagonisms seem to be at their strongest when a class has attained to wealth, but is, or feels itself, shut out from the highest social distinction, and from positions of evident and open political power. This, broadly speaking, does describe the situation of the Calvinist gentry and merchants in seventeenth-century England, the colonial aristocracy and merchants of America, at least in relation to the British ruling class, the French bourgeois of the eighteenth and the Russian bourgeois of the nineteenth centuries. Individuals in each society might rise from ranks even lower than the middle class, and surmount all these barriers. Even as a class, the bourgeoisie in all four societies really had a determining voice in major political decisions even before the revolutions. But the countries were “run” by other, and privileged, beings, and from the highest social distinctions the bourgeoisie as a class were hopelessly excluded. Moreover, this exclusion was symbolized, manifested continuously in all but the most remote rural districts. Long before Marx, long before Harrington’s _Oceana_, practical men knew that political power and social distinction are the handmaids of economic power. Where wealth cannot buy everything--everything of this world, at any rate--you have a fairly reliable preliminary sign of revolution.

_V. Summary_

In summing up, the most striking thing we must note is that all of these preliminary signs--government deficits, complaints over taxation, governmental favoring of one set of economic interests over another, administrative entanglements and confusions, desertion of the intellectuals, loss of self-confidence among many members of the ruling class, conversion of many members of that class to the belief that their privileges are unjust or harmful to society, the intensification of social antagonisms, the stoppage at certain points (usually in the professions, the arts, perhaps the white-collar jobs generally) of the career open to talents, the separation of economic power from political power and social distinction--some, if not most of these signs may be found in almost any modern society at any time. With the wisdom of hindsight, we can now say that in four, or at least in three, of our societies these--and no doubt other signs we have omitted to consider--existed in some unusual combination and intensities before revolution ensued. But clearly we must infer from what we have just done that in its earlier stages diagnosis of revolution is extremely difficult, and certainly cannot be reduced to a neat formula, a recipe, a set of rules. This is also true of the diagnosis of human illnesses. The best diagnosticians, we are told on good authority, could not possibly analyze out and put into formal logical sequence all the steps they take in the clinical diagnosis of disease.

We are not, however, left altogether helpless before some mystic gift for short-term prophecy in the successful diagnostician. His methods are not those of magic, but rather the gift for making what is, until familiarity has made it easy, the difficult and rarely explicit synthesis of past experience and present observation into a successful generalization--or hunch if you prefer. And we can in this instance hazard something further as to signs of revolution in our four societies. In all of them, and especially in France and in Russia, there is as the actual outbreak of revolution approaches increasing talk about revolution, increasing consciousness of social tension, increasing “cramp” and irritation. Prophets of evil there always are, and we need not lay much stress on any specific prediction of a given revolution, such as the Marquis d’Argenson made forty years before the French revolution. But when such fears--or hopes--become something like common property, when they are, to use a very aged metaphor to which the invention of the radio has given an ironic twist, in the air, then it is fairly safe to take this general sentiment as a pretty conclusive sign of revolution. Even then, however, we have a sign difficult to use. For people never seem to expect revolution for themselves, but only for their children. The actual revolution is always a surprise. This is true even for Russia, where the revolution had long been in the air.

It must, however, be really in the air, and not simply in the mouths of professional seers or timid conservatives. It must, above all, go beyond the intellectuals. For, valuable as the desertion of the intellectuals is as a sign if found with others, as part of a syndrome, in itself alone this desertion proves nothing. After all, one of the great functions of the intellectuals in Western society has always been to shake ordinary mortals out of their unthinking optimism, and Cassandra has perhaps as much claim as Plato to be founder of a great academic tradition. But Cassandra’s successors have not quite achieved her unhappy infallibility.

_Chapter_ THREE FIRST STAGES OF REVOLUTION

_I. The Eternal Figaro_

There is in the _Marriage of Figaro_ of Beaumarchais, first performed at Paris in 1784, a famous soliloquy by Figaro in which much of what we have laboriously analyzed in the previous chapter is dramatically focused in a few pages. Figaro himself is the able young man unjustly kept down by the pressure of a social system built on privilege. As the scene opens he is waiting in the darkness to surprise in an assignation his bride and his master, the Count Almaviva. His first reflections on feminine inconstancy pass over very rapidly into a violent attack on his noble master. “Because you are a great lord, you think you are a great genius! ... nobility, fortune, rank, appointments; all this makes a man so proud! But what have you done to deserve so many good things? You took the trouble to get born!” Then he looks back on the struggles that have filled his life--his obscure birth, his education in chemistry, pharmacy, surgery, all barely sufficing, because of his lack of high birth, to give him the privilege of practicing veterinary medicine; his venture in playwrighting, and his inevitable clash with the censor; his turn to writing on state finance, and the resulting prison term; another essay in literature, this time in journalism, and another suppression; rejection as candidate for a government job, since unfortunately he was fitted for the post; a turn as gambler, when his noble patrons took most of his profits; and his final return to his old trade as barber-surgeon.

Scattered throughout the soliloquy are a train of epigrams which delighted fashionable audiences in the old regime, and were taken up throughout the country. Indeed, families would come up to Paris chiefly to see the _Marriage of Figaro_, and hear French wit at its best directed against a wicked government. Here are a few of Beaumarchais’ most famous jibes: “Not being able to degrade the human spirit, they get revenge by mistreating it.” “Only little men fear little writings.” “For the job an accountant was necessary; a dancer got it.” “To get on in this world, _savoir faire_ is worth more than _savoir_.” And, of course, that bitter jibe at the Count’s attainments--“qu’avez-vous fait pour tant de biens? _vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître._” Here in this one speech are so many indications of the coming revolution that, with the wisdom of after-the-fact that comes so naturally to the historian, we can say the revolution is already almost full-blown in Figaro. Including, of course, the fact that, after a long vacillation, the censor _did not stop_ Beaumarchais’ play.

The years just preceding the actual outbreak of revolution witness a crescendo of protests against the tyranny of the government, a hail of pamphlets, plays, addresses, an outburst of activity on the part of interested pressure groups. Facing all this, the government certainly does not live up to the reputation its opponents seek to make for it. Its tyrannous attempts at suppressing the rebellious opposition may perhaps fail because that opposition is too strong, resourceful, and virtuous; or its attempts may fail because they are carried out half-heartedly and inefficiently by governmental agents more than half won over to the opposition. The fact remains that they do fail.

Even the period of the personal rule of Charles I which preceded the English revolution was not altogether as quiet and successful as it seemed on the surface to be. Many Puritan divines escaped Laud’s attempt to drive them from the Established Church, and the others found plenty of independent pulpits and printing presses. Strafford might write in 1638 that “the People are in great quietness and, if I be not much mistaken, well-satisfied if not delighted with his Majesty’s gracious government and protection”; but he was much mistaken. At the very least these eleven years of personal government were but the calm before the storm.

In our other three societies we do not even find this deceptive calm, but a steady growth of revolutionary agitation. In America hardly a colony escaped some form of rioting in the period between the Stamp Act and Lexington, and all of them saw a steady growth of agitation through merchants’ committees, correspondence committees, Sons of Liberty, and similar groups. The French government in the 1780’s drew nearer and nearer to bankruptcy, and with each expedient to avoid bankruptcy brought nearer the calling of the Estates-General and the signal for revolution. As for Russia, it was a society strikingly conscious of the possibilities of revolution. Upper-class Russians had for more than a generation been turning their uneasiness into the smooth coin of conversation: “sitting upon a volcano,” “after us the deluge,” “the storm is rising.” In 1905 and 1906, under pressure of defeat by the Japanese, a kind of dress rehearsal of the great revolution took place. The patriotic enthusiasms of 1914 for a while stilled conspicuous preparation for revolution, but military defeat in 1915 and 1916 brought back conditions that grew daily more and more like those of 1905.

_II. The Events of the First Stages_

The Russian revolution began more dramatically and definitely with a single event--street riots in Petrograd in 1917--than did any of our other revolutions. Yet even in Russia it took four or five days for the revolutionists themselves to realize that the confused milling around of Petrograd crowds might bring about the fall of the Romanovs. History and patriotic ritual have singled out dramatic episodes--the battles at Lexington and Concord, the fall of the Bastille--as beginning revolutions. But though contemporaries were aware of the dramatic quality of such events, they were not always sure that they had turned revolutionary agitation into revolution. The first steps in revolution are by no means always dear to the revolutionists themselves, and the transition from agitation to action is rarely a sudden and definite thing.

Charles I came to the throne in 1624, and almost immediately found himself engaged with the House of Commons in a struggle chiefly over taxes. Out of the conflict there emerged the Petition of Right of 1628, in which the Commons forced the King’s consent to a statement of definite limitations on the royal power: Charles promised not to raise forced loans, not to quarter soldiers on unwilling householders, not to permit officers to exercise martial law in time of peace, not to send anyone to prison without showing cause why he had done so. Emboldened by this success, the Commons under the leadership of the emotional Sir John Eliot went on to refuse to grant the King the usual form of customs’ revenue--tonnage and poundage--and to insist in an aggressive and indeed revolutionary way on their privileges. At a final debate on March 2, 1629, two men, Denzil Holles and Valentine, held down the Speaker in his chair by force while Eliot proposed a ringing declaration on the illegality of paying tonnage and poundage without a grant from Parliament. Conservatives pushed forward to free the Speaker. There followed a riotous debate fully worthy of the standards set later by the National Assembly in France, but somehow or other in the confusion Eliot’s resolutions were put through before the royal order dissolving the Parliament could be carried out. The parliamentarians had made a grand gesture of protest. From that day, no Parliament met in England for eleven years. Eliot, jailed for rioting, maintained that the King had no power over a member of the House of Commons. He died a most effective martyr in 1632.

In the years of personal rule Charles, aided by his two great supporters, Strafford and Laud, did his best to organize the government of England in accordance with notions of efficient centralization and expert rule which were the chief political heritage of the Renaissance. He did a job in some ways surprisingly good. But he may, as nineteenth-century liberal historians fondly believed, have been going against the basic grain of the English character and the basic mold of English institutions; he was most certainly going bankrupt. A clash with the Scotch Presbyterians probably merely hastened the inevitable. Charles called a Parliament in the spring of 1640, but dissolved it after less than a month. A Scotch army now invaded England, and Charles had to buy it off. To get money he had to call another Parliament. The Short Parliament was, therefore, but a breaking of the ground for the Long Parliament, which met on November 3, 1640, was dissolved on April 20, 1653, and was brought briefly to life again in 1659, just before the restoration of the Stuarts. The life of this extraordinary assembly thus spans almost completely the twenty years of the English revolution.

The Long Parliament got to work at once, for on November 11, 1640, a week after it first met, Pym moved the impeachment of Strafford for high treason. The impeachment, held up by the more conservative House of Lords, was turned early in 1641 into a bill of attainder. Impeachment involved at least the forms of judicial action, whereas attainder was a simple legislative act. The Lords were willing enough to abandon Strafford, if not to try him, and on May 12th he fell under the executioner’s ax. Less than eight years later that ax was to reach his royal master.

Actual outbreak of armed hostilities between Charles and the Parliament was not to come for another year. Parliament voted by a majority of eleven the Grand Remonstrance, a long summing-up of all the grievances accumulated against the King in the seventeen years of his reign. Charles replied to this vote of want of confidence by attempting to arrest six members of Parliament, Lord Kimbolton in the Lords, Pym, Hampden, Haselrig, Holles, and Strode in the Commons, who had compromised themselves by entering into technically treasonous negotiations with the invading Scotch army. Charles rashly came down to the House of Commons himself with armed men and attempted to seize the members. He was met with something of the kind of passive resistance the French Third Estate displayed at the royal session of June 17, 1789, when Louis XVI ordered them to give up attempting to form a National Assembly. The threatened members fled to the City of London, and Charles was again checkmated. The Commons were now so aggressively successful that they decided to take over the military by naming officers in the militia and train-bands. Charles, in turn, began to build up his own army, and set up his standard at Nottingham in August, 1642. The Civil War had begun.

Where in this long and closely knit series of events you wish to say the English revolution fairly began is partly a subjective matter. Somewhere between the calling of the Long Parliament in 1640, and the outbreak of the war two years later, the first critical steps in the revolution were undertaken. Perhaps the execution of Strafford is a good dramatic date, or Charles’s futile attempt to seize the five members in the Commons. At any rate, by the summer of 1642 the English revolution had taken on unmistakable form.

Events in America moved hardly more rapidly. In a sense, you can maintain that the American revolution really began in 1765 with the Stamp Act; or at any rate that the agitation which culminated in the repeal of that Act was a kind of rehearsal for the great movement of the seventies. The imperial government was determined to do something about the American colonists, and Townshend’s mild duties on tea, glass, lead and a few other articles imported into America were accompanied by an attempt to collect them in an efficient modern way. Under Townshend’s act His Majesty’s customs houses in America were equipped with a hopeful and willing bureaucracy. The result was a series of clashes with increasingly well-organized groups of Americans. Tarring and feathering of informers, stealing sequestered goods from under the noses of customs officers, jeering at British troops, led up to the more dramatic incidents enshrined in the textbooks: the seizure of the _Gaspee_ at Providence, the Boston Massacre of 1770, the Boston Tea Party, the burning of the _Peggy Stewart_ at Annapolis.

The closing of the port of Boston, the dispatch of Gage and his troops to Massachusetts, the Quebec Act itself, were all really measures taken by the imperial government against colonies already in revolt. You may, if you are interested in such matters, discuss at length the question as to just when the American revolution is to be considered as formally beginning. You may go as late as the first Continental Congress in 1774, or the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, or even the most famous Fourth of July in 1776. But the complex group-struggles out of which revolutions actually grow only later turn into formal sources for patriotic ritual. The first steps in the American revolution were many and spread over something like a decade. Only an absolutist mind could insist that out of this long process a given detail be isolated as the beginning of the American revolution.

The French revolution of 1789 may be said to have been incubating for several decades. Overt and definite resistance to the royal government, as in the parliaments of Charles I and in the American colonial assemblies, is not to be found in France, which was wholly without such representative bodies. The nearest thing to such a body was the _parlement de Paris_, a kind of supreme court composed of judges who were nobles and held their positions by heredity. It was precisely this _parlement_, followed by the provincial _parlements_, that began in the 1780’s an open quarrel with the Crown, which culminated in a dramatic defiance of royal power and the forced exile of the judges. Popular opinion, at least in Paris, was overwhelmingly with the judges, and privileged nobles though they were, they became heroes and martyrs for a day.

Meanwhile, approaching bankruptcy had forced the King to call in 1787 an Assembly of Notables, a kind of hastily gathered special commission of prominent nobles, from whom Louis XVI in good eighteenth-century style no doubt expected enlightenment. This he certainly obtained, for the Assembly contained many upper-class intellectuals, like Lafayette, who were convinced that France must cease to be a “despotism,” must endow itself with an up-to-date constitution of the kind the new states of the American union were making fashionable. The Assembly of Notables was accordingly very divided and doubtful about ways of filling the empty treasury, but clear that further consultation with the nation was necessary. The Crown finally yielded, brought back into the government the Swiss commoner, Necker, who had a reputation as a financial wizard, and summoned a meeting of the Estates-General for the spring of 1789.

This Estates-General had last met in 1614, and there was some uncertainty as to how one went about electing it. The antiquarians came to the rescue, however, and three hundred representatives of the First Estate, or clergy, three hundred of the Second, or nobility, and six hundred of the Third, or commons, were chosen, practically in time for the first meeting. The double representation of the Third Estate had no precedent in 1614 or earlier. It was, in fact, a revolutionary step, a concession wrung from the King, an admission that in some way or another the Third Estate was more important than the others. In the old constitution, however, final decisions were made by the orders as units; that is, if the Clergy and the Nobles as separate houses agreed on a policy, they could carry it, two to one, even against the dissenting Third Estate. When the Estates met in May, 1789, the great question was whether to follow the old constitution and vote by orders, or to vote in one great assembly of twelve hundred members in which the doubled Third Estate, plus the “liberals” among the other two orders, would have a clear majority. Louis had characteristically permitted this problem to remain vague and unsettled, and only after the Third Estate had insisted on one great assembly did he royally insist on three separate ones.

The issue out of which the French revolution formally grew was this simple one of vote by orders or vote by individuals in one assembly. The Third Estate stood pat, and refused to transact any business until the other orders joined it in what was to be called--and the name was a sound piece of propaganda for the revolutionists--the National Assembly. There are certain dramatic moments in a two-months’ struggle which was essentially parliamentary and lacking in the more physical kinds of violence. Shut out by a royal blunder from their usual meeting place, the Third Estate on June 20, 1789, met hastily in a large indoor tennis court, and swore not to disperse until they had endowed France with a constitution.

Thanks partly to David’s famous painting, which is more symbolic than realistic, this episode is now second only to the taking of the Bastille in the patriotic ritual of the present Third French Republic. Actually more important was the glowering defiance of the Third Estate when in a plenary royal session of June 23rd the King called on all the prestige and pageantry of the Crown to enforce voting by separate orders. At this session the Third Estate remained behind after the King’s withdrawal, and Mirabeau is said to have made his famous reply to a request from the King’s Grand Master of Ceremonies that they in turn withdraw: “We are assembled here by the will of the nation, and we will not leave except by force.” Shortly afterwards the King yielded, though probably not to Mirabeau’s rhetoric. By the beginning of July the National Assembly had been duly constituted, and was ready to put the Enlightenment, so long in France a matter of theory, into practice. The first steps in the French revolution had been taken.

Those who insist that you must have violence before you can label revolution as begun will date the great French revolution from July 14, 1789, when a Paris mob, aided by soldiers who had gone over to the popular side, took the gloomy fortress-prison of the Bastille on the eastern edge of the city. Bastille Day is the French republican Fourth of July, a great holy day in one of the best organized of our contemporary nationalist religions. As such it has been surrounded by legends, endowed with a martyrology, safely withdrawn from the unedifying touch of history. To an outsider, the taking of the Bastille seems an involved and confusing process, at least as much the result of the weakness of the royal governor, De Launay, as of the strength of the besiegers. What is important for us is that Paris was in the hands of a mob for three days, and that this mob was clearly shouting against the King, shouting for the National Assembly. After the rioting had died down, the National Assembly--or rather, the revolutionary majority in the Assembly--could proceed in the useful assurance that the people were on its side, could feel that it had _carte blanche_ to neglect royal protests as it went about its task of remaking France.

The revolution in Russia got under way with great speed. As we have seen in a previous chapter, there were plenty of precedents for a Russian uprising, and several generations of Russians had been discussing the inevitable coming of the storm. The first steps which led up to the February revolution of 1917, however, took even advanced leaders like Kerensky somewhat by surprise. Socialist parties the world over had been used to celebrating March 8th as Women’s Day. On that day--February 23rd of the old Russian calendar, whence the name, February revolution, by which it has gone down in history--crowds of women workers from the factory districts poured into the streets calling for bread. Each day thereafter crowds increased. Orators of the radical group harangued at street corners. Soldiers from the large Petrograd wartime garrison mingled with the crowds, seemed indeed to sympathize with them. Even the Cossacks were not hostile to the people, or at any rate, seemed to lack stomach for fighting.

Meanwhile the authorities were consulting, and as piecemeal measures failed to work, they decided on March 11th to repress the troubles in accordance with a fine neat plan already drawn up on paper for just such emergency. But the plan didn’t work. The soldiers of the garrison, anxious not to be sent to the front, began to waver. On March 12th the first of the mutinies broke out, and one after another the famous regiments of the Imperial Army poured out of the barracks, but to join, not to shoot on, the crowds. Obscure leaders, sergeants, factory foremen and the like arose and directed their little groups at strategic points. Out of all the confusion and madness which makes the detailed record of events in this week the despair of the historian, one clear fact came out. There was no imperial government left in the capital, no formal government at all. Gradually there emerged the nucleus of the Soviet government to come, organized through trade unions, Socialist groups, and other working-class sources. The Czar and his advisers, too bewildered and incompetent to control the movement, did prevent the legal Duma from taking control. Instead, moderates of all sorts got together to form the nucleus of the provisional government to come. In such a chaotic condition, indeed, it would seem that the action of the moderates is a uniformity of revolutions. Their sentiments and training impel them to try and put a stop to disorder, to salvage what they can of established routines.

Socialists and liberals alike were agreed that the Czar must abdicate. Nicholas himself had started from Headquarters for his palace at Tsarskoe Selo near Petrograd, but was held up at Pskov by the increasing disorders. Here, on March 15th, he decided to abdicate in favor of his brother, the Grand Duke Michael. What centralized power there was in Russia seems to have been in the hands of a committee of the Duma, and this committee waited on Michael in person. Kerensky, who was on the committee, seems at this juncture to have been as neurotically dramatic as usual; at Michael’s refusal to accept the Crown he went into a transport of delight. Russia was to be a republic. Michael’s own decision to refuse seems to have been dictated by personal cowardice. One of the nice problems of history in the conditional centers around the question of what would have happened had this Romanov been a man of courage, decision, and ability. No one can say, but the question reminds us that even in its most sociological moments, history cannot neglect the drama of personality and chance.

With Michael’s abdication on March 16, 1917, the Russian revolution had clearly begun. There were repercussions in the provinces, and in some remote spots the fall of the Romanovs was not realized for weeks. But the work of those eight days had destroyed a centralized bureaucratic government at its most vital point--its head and nerve-center. Much in Russia was unchanged by the February revolution, but politically a week had done what it had taken years to do in England and France. The Romanovs had gone much more rapidly than the Stuarts and the Bourbons.

_III. Spontaneity or Planning?_

Even from the foregoing sketch of the first steps in four revolutions, it should be clear that to the narrative historian the differences in the four are striking. The English revolution was begun in one of the oldest, best established of representative bodies; the American revolution began chiefly in New England, among people used to town meetings and colonial legislatures; the French revolution developed out of the meetings of a legislative body with no immediate precedents, staffed by men unused to parliamentary life; the Russian revolution started in street riots in the capital city, and went on without benefit of any parliamentary body, since even the old Duma met only through an emergency committee. There are differences of personality, differences of time and place. Charles raising his standard in hope at Nottingham in 1642 seems worlds apart from the abject Nicholas, buffeted about the northern plains in a railroad train at the mercy of striking workers and troops in revolt, drearily abdicating in the provincial gloom of Pskov. There may even be racial differences. The orderly and almost chivalrous Civil War of the English seems at first sight something quite unlike the madness of July 14th, or the tragicomic spectacle of metropolitan Petrograd in the hands of a mob without even a good slogan.

Yet this last should give us pause. At the informal level of mere dramatic or narrative likenesses, these early stages of revolution have similarities as striking as their differences. Speaker Lenthall defying Charles come to seize the five members, Mirabeau thundering his challenge to the bewildered Grand Master of Ceremonies at the royal session of June 23rd, Patrick Henry warning a king of the unfortunate fate of certain other rulers--these seem to be speaking the same language, assuming the same effective postures. The English House of Commons in the pandemonium of its final session in 1629 seems much like the French National Assembly during its frequent heated moments, and not worlds apart from certain important sessions of the Petrograd soviet.