It is, however, more important for us to see whether there are not in these four revolutions uniformities which can be grouped together, related to the whole course of the movements, given a place in our conceptual scheme of the fever. What evidence have we here that we are dealing with a process which has definite and common stages? Do these first steps in revolution take place under conditions sociologically similar even if dramatically dissimilar?
One uniformity is crystal-clear. In all four of our societies, the existing government attempted to collect monies from people who refused to pay. All four of our revolutions started among people who objected to certain taxes, who organized to protest them, and who finally reached the point of agitating for the elimination and replacement of the existing government. This does not necessarily mean that those who resisted taxation foresaw or wished a radical revolution. It does mean that the transition from talking about necessary great changes--for in all our societies, as we have seen, something was in the air--to concrete action, was made under the stimulus of an unpopular form of taxation.
A second uniformity is quite as clear, though the consequences that derive from it are much more obscure. The events in this stage, these first steps in revolution, do most certainly bring out of the confused discontents of the old regime two parties into clear opposition, and indeed into preliminary violence. These parties we may call briefly the party of the old regime and the party of the revolution. Moreover, by the end of this period of the first stages, the party of the revolution has won. The muddy waters of doubt and debate are momentarily cleared. The revolution, hardly begun, seems over. In England after the Long Parliament had disposed of Strafford and wrung concessions from the King, in America after Concord, and that greatest of moral victories, Bunker Hill, in France after the fall of the Bastille, in Russia after the abdication, there is a brief period of joy and hope, the illusory but charming honeymoon of that impossible pair, the Real and the Ideal.
That our four revolutions ran through some such early stage as this, in which the opposition between old and new crystallized dramatically, and the new won a striking victory, is too evident for the most old-fashioned narrative historian to deny. Over the reasons why this stage developed as it did, however, there is still a running dispute among writers who concern themselves with such matters--historians, political theorists, sociologists, essayists. The heart of the dispute is a matter which must be got straight before anything like a sociology of revolutions is possible. Briefly, one set of disputants maintains that these glorious first steps in revolution are taken almost spontaneously by a united nation rising in its might and virtue to check its oppressors; another maintains that these first steps are the fruition of a series of interlocking plots initiated by small but determined groups of malcontents. By and large the first view is that taken by persons favorable to a given revolution, the second by persons hostile to it, or at least loyal to the memory of the old regime. There are, however, all sorts of variations on the theme, and different commentators have differently balanced these elements of spontaneity and planning.
This opposition is clearest, and in some ways quite adequately typical for our purpose, in the historiography of the French revolution. Augustin Cochin used to describe this opposition as that between the _thèse des circonstances_ and the _thèse du complot_, the explanation by circumstances and the explanation by plot. Those who on the whole regarded the revolution as a good thing maintained that the people of France, and especially the people of Paris, were goaded into revolt by the oppression of king and court, that the circumstances of their social, political, and economic life in 1789 are in themselves adequate explanation of what happened. Given such circumstances, and men and women of French blood, and you have revolution as naturally, as _automatically_, in a sense, as you have an explosion when a spark strikes gunpowder.
This figure may be applied to specific steps in the revolutionary process. The Bastille riots, for instance, were not planned in any sense. Paris heard of the dismissal of Necker, noted that the King was concentrating troops around Paris, and in a million forgotten conversations spread the fear that the King and his party were about to dismiss the revolutionary National Assembly and rule by armed force. Paris therefore rose in its might, and with a sure instinct seized on the Bastille as a symbol of the hated old regime, and destroyed it. The sovereign people were self-guided in all this, moved if you like by a natural force, by a hatred of injustice, and were led by hundreds of small men, by noncommissioned officers of the revolution, but not by any general staff, not by any small group who had deliberately planned an aggression.
The opposite theory maintains that the whole revolutionary movement in France was the work of a scheming and unprincipled minority, freemasons, _philosophes_, professional agitators. These people in the second half of the eighteenth century got control of the press and the platform, and persistently indoctrinated the literate part of France with a hatred for established institutions, and especially for the Church. As the government found itself in increasingly bad financial straits, these plotters wormed their way into its councils, and finally secured the promise of an Estates-General. By clever electioneering in a populace not used to representative assemblies, they filled the Third Estate with members of their sect, and succeeded in penetrating even the ranks of the First and Second Estates. They had been used to working together, and thanks to years of discussion of political reform, they knew what they wanted. The more determined and initiated of these plotters could therefore control the actions of the large and shapeless National Assembly, though they were a minority of its twelve hundred members.
Bastille Day seems very different to the writers of this school. Louis was concentrating troops to protect, not to dissolve, the National Assembly, to protect it from the minority of wild radicals who were abusing its machinery. Fearing defeat, these radicals stirred up Paris in a hundred ways: they sent orators to street corners and cafés; they distributed radical news-sheets and pamphlets; they sent agents to spread discontent among the royal troops, and especially among the French Guard; they even subsidized prostitutes to get at the soldiers more effectively. Everything was planned ahead for a more propitious moment, and when the dismissal of Necker afforded that moment, the signal was given and Paris rose. But not spontaneously. Somewhere a general staff--Mirabeau was on it, and most of the popular figures in the National Assembly--was working, carefully sowing the seeds of rebellion.
With the appropriate changes, this sort of opposition can be made out in all our revolutions. To the Stuart partisans--and they still find their way into print--the Great Rebellion was an unhappily successful conspiracy of gloomy money-grubbing Calvinists against the Merrie England of tradition. More commonly, since the Whigs gave the tone to modern England, the Parliamentarians are seen as liberty-loving children of Magna Charta, who rose quite naturally and spontaneously against unbearable Stuart tyranny. American Loyalists always maintained that the best of the country was with them, that the Whigs had won by superior organization and chicanery. Most of us, of course, were brought up to regard George III as a personal tyrant, a hirer of Hessians, a man who wished to grind the Americans into unmanly submission. The American revolution was to us the spontaneous reply of injured freemen to British insolence.
Finally, some Russian _émigrés_ still seem to believe that a minority of unscrupulous Bolsheviks somehow engineered both the February and the October revolutions. Marxism attaches no shame to revolution, and admits the importance of planning and leadership in revolutionary movements. Therefore, though official Communist explanations by no means soft-pedal Czarist guilt and oppression, though they insist that the people of Russia in February, 1917, wholeheartedly and nearly unanimously rose against the Czar, still they admit, and indeed glory in, the role of leaders consciously planning a revolution. At least, this was the explanation accepted in orthodox Marxist circles, and it is classically stated in the first volume of Trotsky’s _History of the Russian Revolution_. There are signs in Stalinite Russia of a reversion to something analogous to an American schoolbook explanation of our own revolution; Czarist tyranny and the spontaneous popular uprising are emphasized, the tactics of a revolutionary minority minimized.