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.