All this by no means amounts to asserting the paradox that there are no real differences between revolutions and ordinary times. On the contrary, especially in their crisis periods, revolutions are like nothing else on earth. But you cannot altogether explain the differences between societies in revolution and societies in equilibrium by suggesting that a whole new crew operates during a revolution; by saying, if you dislike a particular revolution and all its works, that the scoundrels and the bums put it over on the good souls; or if you happen to like and approve a particular revolution, that the heroes and sages turned out the corrupt old gang. It just isn’t as simple as all that. Since on the whole the evidence would seem to show that revolutionists are more or less a cross-section of common humanity, an explanation for the undoubted fact that during certain phases of a revolution they behave in a way we should not expect such people to behave, must be sought in changes worked on them by the conditions they live under, by their revolutionary environment.
_Chapter_ FIVE THE RULE OF THE MODERATES
_I. The Problem of the Moderates_
In the summer of 1792 Lafayette, with some of his officers, left the French Army and passed over to the Austrian lines. He was promptly put in prison by the Austrians, to whom he was a dangerous firebrand of revolution. Lafayette was, however, a good deal more fortunate than many of his fellow-heroes of 1789 who elected to stay in France, and who were guillotined as dangerous reactionaries and counter-revolutionists. Fedor Linde, a moderate Socialist who in April, 1917, moved the Finnish Regiment to a mutinous demonstration against the pro-Ally and still more moderate Miliukov, was later sent to the front as a government commissar under Kerensky and there was lynched by mutinous soldiers who refused to obey his commands. In 1647 Denzil Holles, of whom we took note briefly back in 1629, as he was helping to hold down the Speaker in his chair, was with ten other Presbyterian members excluded from Parliament for “endeavoring to overthrow the rights and liberties of the subjects.” He did indeed return briefly to his seat again in 1648, but was soon forced to flee to France to save his life. A famous phrase from the French revolution puts the thing neatly: “The revolution, like Saturn, devours its children.”
The honeymoon was in these revolutions short; very soon after the old regime had fallen there began to be evident signs that the victors were not as unanimous about what was to be done to remake the country as had appeared in the first triumphant speeches and ceremonies. Those who had directly taken over the mechanism of government were in all four of our societies men of the kind usually called moderates. They represented the richer, better known and higher placed of the old opposition to the government, and it is only to be expected that they should take over from that government. Indeed, as we have seen, their assumption of responsibility is almost a spontaneous act. So strong is this feeling that the moderates should take over power that it prevailed even in Russia in February, 1917. It looks to us now as though a Socialist coalition of some kind--Social-Revolutionary and Menshevik groups, with possibly even Bolshevik adhesions--might just as well have assumed power right away in that month. The Kadets and other bourgeois groups clearly had few strong roots in the country. And yet Lvov and his well-meaning moderates had little difficulty in assuming at least nominal control.
The moderates, once in power, turned out to have less homogeneity and party discipline than they seemed to have when they were in opposition. They were faced with the difficult task of reforming existing institutions, or making a new constitution, and taking care at the same time of the ordinary work of governing. They were also confronted very soon with armed enemies, and found themselves engaged in a foreign or civil war, or in both together. They found against them an increasingly strong and intransigeant group of radicals and extremists who insisted that the moderates were trying to stop the revolution, that they had betrayed it, that they were as bad as the rulers of the old regime--indeed, much worse, since they were traitors as well as fools and scoundrels. After a period, brief in Russia, longer in France and England, there came a show of force between moderates and extremists, a show of force in many ways quite like that earlier one between the old government and the revolutionists, and the moderates were beaten. They fled into exile, they were put into prison ultimately to face the scaffold, guillotine, or firing-squad, or if they were lucky or obscure enough, they dropped out of sight and were forgotten. The extremists in their turn took power.
This process was not quite the same in the American revolution, where on the whole it may be said that extremists like the Independents, the Jacobins, and the Bolsheviks, did not attain undivided rule. Nevertheless, as we shall see, in America rather earlier in the revolutionary process a struggle between moderates and radicals had been fought out, and had ended with victory for the radicals. The fruit of that victory was the Declaration of Independence. We may say then that in all our revolutions there is a tendency for power to go from Right to Center to Left, from the conservatives of the old regime to the moderates to the radicals or extremists. As power moves along this line, it gets more and more concentrated, more and more narrows its base in the country and among the people, since at each important crisis the defeated group has to drop out of politics. To put it in another way: after each crisis the victors tend to split into a more conservative wing holding power and a more radical one in opposition. Up to a certain stage, each crisis sees the radical opposition triumphant. The details of this process vary naturally from revolution to revolution. Its stages are not identical in length or in their time-sequence. In America power never got as far Left as it did in the other countries.
Nevertheless this struggle between moderates and extremists is a stage in our revolutions as definite as those we have studied in previous chapters, and by its very existence provides us with a useful if somewhat simple uniformity. Before we attempt to make refinements in this observation, before we try to discern uniformities in the conduct of moderates and extremists, we must review briefly the course of events during the rule of the moderates.
_II. Events During the Rule of the Moderates_
With the outbreak of the Civil War in the summer of 1642, Royalists and Parliamentarians stood opposed in arms. By the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644, and certainly by that of Naseby in 1645, the Royalist cause had become, in a military sense, hopeless. But almost from the first clear break with Charles, the Parliamentarians had won their revolution. The Royalists did but play more effectively the role played in America by the Tories, in France by the Royalists and clericals in the provinces, the _émigrés_ abroad, in Russia by the numerous White Armies which opposed the Bolsheviks until 1921. We are not here so much interested in the Royalists as in the Parliamentarians. Within these latter there is from 1642 on an increasingly evident division between groups which we may call roughly moderates and extremists.
The division is not at first a simple one between two parties. At the extreme right of the Parliamentarians were a few moderate Episcopalians just touched with puritan notions, and usually also constitutional monarchists. Many of this group were on the whole indifferent to religious questions, felt that church matters would settle themselves decently if the political difficulties could be adjusted. Between these men and the moderate Royalists, who somewhat reluctantly chose to stand with their king, there was actually very little difference. Next came the great moderate party, Presbyterian in religion, puritan in ethics, monarchist at heart, but monarchist in what was to become the Whig tradition of the monarch who reigns but does not govern. The left wing of the Presbyterians, early disillusioned with the idea of monarchy by their hatred for Charles, merged easily with the main group of the extremists. These in the English revolution are called the Independents, extreme Calvinists who insisted upon the independence of each separate congregation. Their notions of church government were substantially those well known in this country as Congregationalism. With them for most political purposes were other groups that subsequently made up the English nonconformists or dissenters--notably the Baptists. The New Model Army, through which these radicals made themselves an effective force in the revolution, contained individuals espousing almost every conceivable kind of evangelical religious belief, and a good many varieties of economic and social beliefs. But the group did work as a group, and its core was certainly Independent. To the left were other groups, Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchy men, whom we shall consider in a later chapter.