For our revolutions, then, we may put this last uniformity very simply: they were successful in their first stages; they became actual revolutions instead of mere discussions, complaints, and riotings, only after revolutionists had beaten, or won over, the armed forces of the government. We cannot attempt to erect uniformities for other revolutions or for revolutions in general. But we may here suggest in very tentative and hypothetical form the generalization that no government has ever fallen before revolutionists until it has lost control over its armed forces or lost the ability to use them effectively; and conversely that no revolutionists have ever succeeded until they have got a predominance of effective armed force on their side.
_V. The Honeymoon_
The first stage of revolution ends in all four of our societies with the victory of the revolutionists after what is rather dramatic than serious bloodshed. The hated old regime has been conquered so easily! The way is open to the regeneration men have been so long talking about, so long hoping for. Even the Russian February revolution, though it broke out in the midst of the misery and shame of defeat at the hands of Germans and Austrians, was cradled in the hope and joy that seems a natural heritage of revolutions. Russians all over the world heard the good news with delight. Liberals were as happy as their ancestors had been in ’76 and ’89. Now Russia was washed clean of the stain of absolutism, could take her place with confidence in the ranks of her sister democracies of the West, join with a new effectiveness in the crusade against the sole remaining forces of darkness, the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs.
The honeymoon stage of revolution is most perfectly developed in France, where the revolution came in peacetime, and at the end of a great intellectual movement called the Enlightenment which had prepared men’s minds for a new and practical miracle. Wordsworth’s lines are familiar:
“France standing on the top of golden hours, And human nature seeming born again.” But poets in a dozen languages set to work to celebrate the regeneration of France and of mankind. And not only poets. Sober business men, professional men, country gentlemen, people who in the twentieth century tend to regard revolution with horror, joined in the rejoicing. Far away in unenlightened Russia noblemen illuminated their houses in honor of the fall of the Bastille. Americans and Englishmen rejoiced that the ancient enemy had come to join the self-governing peoples. Frenchmen themselves were for a brief happy moment almost unanimous. The King had seen the error of his ways, had embraced the paladin Lafayette, had come freely to his good city of Paris to hear the cheers of the heroes of the Bastille.
Yet the honeymoon period even in France was brief, briefer yet in Russia, in England and in America never quite so clear and so definite. In the first stages, and at the critical moment when the test of force comes, the old regime is faced by a solid opposition. The opposition is indeed composed of various groups, is never that myth a “united people.” But it is welded by the necessity of effectively opposing the government into a genuine political unit, into something more than a chance coalition of contradictory elements. Its victory is, if we are willing to take the terms critically and not sentimentally, the victory of the “people” over its “oppressors.” It has shown itself stronger and abler than the old government in this time of crisis. It has now become the government, and is facing a new set of problems. When it actually gets to work on those problems the honeymoon is soon over.
_Chapter_ FOUR TYPES OF REVOLUTIONISTS
_I. The Clichés_
It would clearly be helpful in our inquiry if we could at this point isolate the revolutionist as a type. To pursue our analogy of the fever, may it not be that certain individuals act as “carriers,” and that they can be classified, labeled, described in economic and sociological terms as well as in those of psychology or common sense? This is at any rate a lead which seems worth following.
There are, however, several ways in which such a pursuit might lead us astray. We must beware of regarding revolutionists, and revolutionary leaders in particular, as literally bearing disease germs of revolution. Here as throughout this study, our conceptual scheme must never be allowed to lead us into fantasy. It must be a convenience, not an obsession. We must more than ever avoid using terms of praise or dispraise, which lurk in every corner of this particular field. For the simple word “revolutionist” is likely to call up in the minds of most of us a relatively uncritical personification, the sort of loose change of daily intercourse that serves us well enough to get on with “poet” or “professor” or “Frenchman.”
Even the subtlest thinker, the most delicate and conscientious artist in words, has to come down in daily life to something very close to the clichés that serve the man in the street. You and I, of course, do not picture poets as long-haired, delicate, bohemian and tubercular, nor professors as impractical, absent-minded, kindly and bearded, nor Frenchmen as polite, dapper, wax-mustached, ladies’ men. But we cannot go into Proustian intricacies with ourselves when we use such words, nor can we use them as rigorously as a scientific systematist. We get along with them as best we may, adjusting them roughly to our experience and our sentiments.
Now what “revolutionist” means at this level to various persons and various groups is in itself an important element in a full sociology of revolutions. What all sorts of people feel about revolution is perhaps most easily studied in the clichés which arise out of words like “revolutionist” and “revolutionary,” or their more concrete parallels, “Jacobin,” “Bolshevik,” “red,” and the like. We cannot attempt such a study here, but we must look a bit further into a few of these clichés, if only as a warning and a contrast.
Probably for most Americans in the fourth decade of the twentieth century the word “revolutionist” carries unpleasant overtones. At the level of the Hearst papers or the Macfadden publications, a revolutionist appears as a seedy, wild-eyed, unshaven, loud-mouthed person, given to soapbox oratory and plotting against the government, ready for, and yet afraid of, violence. Even at slightly more sophisticated levels, one suspects many of our countrymen feel much the same about revolutionists, or at any rate are convinced that they are pronouncedly queer people, failures under pre-revolutionary conditions, sufferers from inferiority complexes, envious of their betters, or just downright ornery, “agin the government” on principle and by disposition. Other and more favorable pictures of the revolutionist no doubt arise in other minds. To judge by some of our proletarian writers--not themselves proletarians--the revolutionist is a sturdy, broad-shouldered steelworker, uncorrupted by the falsities the bourgeois call education, but well-versed in Marx and Lenin, strong, kindly, a warrior-spirit with just a redeeming touch of Shelley about him.
Now the social uses of beliefs of this sort are plain enough. In an old bourgeois society like the United States, sentiments hostile to revolutionists are probably important factors in maintaining social stability. Revolutionists were all right in 1776, but not in 1938. Any society that is a going concern must apparently contain large numbers of people who feel this way about revolutionists. Even in Russia, where memories of violent revolution are still fresh, a concerted effort is being made by the government to discredit living, flesh-and-blood revolutionists. Revolution was all right in 1917, but not in 1938. On the other side, it is clear that radicals and extremists who think of revolutionists as fine fellows, as heroes and martyrs, are also aiding in their own social discipline, strengthening themselves for the fray.
The social scientist, however, cannot let the matter rest here. He must attempt an objective classification of revolutionists, as complicated as his data about them makes necessary. We can say with confidence that even a hasty review of the four revolutions with which we are concerned is very far from confirming either set of clichés we have outlined. And notably, since the derogatory set is commoner in this country, such a review by no means confirms the notion that our revolutionists were seedy, loud-mouthed, bomb-throwing failures in the old regimes. If we include, as we must, those who took the first steps in revolution as well as those who ruled in the reign of terror, our type becomes still less simple.
Let us take a random list of names as they come to mind: Hampden, Sir Harry Vane, John Milton, Sam Adams, John Hancock, Washington, Thomas Paine, Lafayette, Marat, Talleyrand, Hébert, Miliukov, Konavalov, Kerensky, Chicherin, Lenin. All are revolutionists; all opposed constituted authority with force of arms. The list includes great nobles, gentlemen, merchants, journalists, a professor of history, a political boss, a ward-heeler. It includes several very rich men and one or two poor men. It includes many who would by conventional Christian standards seem to have been good men; and it includes several who would by such standards seem to have been very wicked men. It includes some who were important people in their pre-revolutionary days, some who were quite unknown, and two, perhaps three, who were apparent failures in life until the revolution gave them a chance to rise. Surely it is no easy task to find a least common denominator for a list like this.