The extremists put their disciplined skill into the realization of the revolutionary ends. There has been worked out in the last few hundred years an elaborate technique of revolutionary action, of which the Russian Communists were the latest heirs. A good deal has been written about this technique, which is in part simply the technique of any successful pressure group: propaganda, electioneering, lobbying, parading, street-fighting, delegation-making, direct pressure on magistrates, sporadic terrorism of the tar-and-feather or castor-oil variety. Jacobins, Communists, and Sons of Liberty did a notably good job at this sort of thing. But it is rather surprising to note how many of these techniques can be found in England, and especially in London, as early as the seventeenth century. In this respect, as in many others, the English revolution is clearly of a modern type. Here is a bit that might have come from the French revolution: during the debate on the Militia Order, a crowd of apprentices “came into the House of Commons and kept the door open, and their hats on ... and called out as they stood ‘Vote, vote,’ and in this arrogant posture stood until the votes passed.” One suspects that these apprentices did not march in spontaneously. This is the kind of thing that takes organization.
Finally, the extremists follow their leaders with a devotion and a unanimity not to be found among the moderates. Theories of democratic equality, which crop up at the start of all our revolutions, prove no obstacle to the development among the extremists of something very like the “Führer” principle we associate with Fascist movements. Here it is the moderates who live up to their theories, and in the early stages of the revolutions it is not uncommon to find complaints that So-and-so is arrogating to himself powers no good man would want to possess. Mirabeau and Kerensky, to take neat examples, were accused by moderates and extremists alike of aiming at a personal dictatorship. Yet Robespierre and Lenin followed in their footsteps--almost literally--and this time only the cheering could be heard. This magnifying of the principle of leadership runs right through the organization, from the subalterns up to the great national heroes--Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin.
On the whole, this leadership is effective, and especially so at the very top. Now if they are seen as full and rounded human beings, there are unquestionably differences among the men who make up the general staffs of the extremists. The psychologist and the novelist--indeed the historian as well--could not lump them all together. Yet they have in common one aspect which is of great importance to the sociologist; they combine, in varying degrees, very high ideals and a complete contempt for the inhibitions and principles which serve most other men as ideals. They present a strange variant of Plato’s pleasant scheme: they are not philosopher-kings but philosopher-killers. They have the realistic, the practical touch very few of the moderate leaders had, and yet they have also enough of the prophet’s fire to hold followers who expect the New Jerusalem around the next corner. They are practical men unfettered by common sense, Machiavellians in the service of the Beautiful and the Good.
A bit from Lenin will make the point clear. At a secret meeting of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party just before the October revolution, Lenin was urging insurrection on the more tender-minded of his colleagues, who thought that the Bolsheviks ought to respect the will of the majority of Russians, which was clearly against them. “We are inclined to consider the systematic preparation of an uprising as something in the nature of a political sin,” said he. “To wait until the Constituent Assembly, which will clearly not be with us, is senseless.” There is the practical Lenin, unworried by a democratic dogma that stands in his way. After the October revolution he writes in _Pravda_ of “the crisis which has arisen as a result of the lack of correspondence between the elections to the Constituent Assembly and the will of the people and the interests of the toiling and exploited classes.” Here the will of the people is somehow at bottom the will of the minority party of Bolsheviks. We are back again in the midst of democratic dogma. Parallel cases could readily be drawn from Robespierre, Cromwell, and even, one fears, from Jefferson.
Hypocrisy? To those of little imagination or experience of the world, such acts must always seem hypocritical. But, on a less heroic scale, they are far too much a part of normal human action to deserve so opprobrious a label. The Robespierre who, as an enlightened young man, had held capital punishment wrong did not hypocritically send his enemies to the guillotine. He had convinced himself that his enemies were scarcely men at all; they were sinners, corrupt souls, agents of a worse-than-Satan, and their removal from this earth wasn’t really capital punishment in the conventional sense at all. You could still treat ordinary criminals in full accord with the most humanitarian principles of jurisprudence. Most of us make this sort of compromise with ourselves often enough in daily life. But with us comfort, convenience, habit, even common sense, determine the limits of compromise. For the revolutionary extremist such limits are off; in the delirium, in the crisis, there is an extraordinary reversal of the roles played in normal times by the real and the ideal. Here briefly and at last the blind--or the seer--is king; plain earthly seeing, the kind that concerns the oculist, is for once of very little use. The seers have just enough of it to keep their positions of leadership. Cromwell, indeed, had a good deal of what seems an English sense of the contingent, and Lenin was certainly no academic idealist. Robespierre is in some ways the most unadulterated seer of the lot.
Yet all of them, including even Robespierre, were what the world calls men of action. They could and did get things done, were administrators and executives, ran organizations for which tradition and routine had not yet been able to build up much that worked automatically. If they have left behind them a reputation for unusual ruthlessness, this may be in part a reflection of the ill repute terrorism has for most of us. And the ruthlessness, in the proper service of the ideal, went while they were alive into the making of their leadership. Cromwell gained credit among the Saints for his Irish massacres. The guillotine in France was for a few months the “holy guillotine.” Trotsky, early in his famous rallying of the Bolshevik troops in the Civil War, ordered shot the commander, commissar, and one soldier out of ten in a Petrograd workers’ regiment that had fled the enemy, and to the dismay of gentler colleagues showed no hesitation about continuing the policy of discipline through bloodshed. Trotsky became briefly a savior and a hero. We are a long way from Order Number One!
For most men, there is a gap between their deeds and their professions, between what they are and what they would like to be, between what they are and what they think they are. Normally, however, they manage to keep the gap small enough, or turn their attention away from one side of it or the other, so that they are not unduly troubled by it. For the leaders of the extremists in times of revolution the gap looks to an outside observer enormous, bigger than it ever is in normal times. A few men, like Fouché, seem to have been terrorists to save their own skins. But, in general, only a sincere extremist in a revolution can kill men because he loves man, attain peace through violence, and free men by enslaving them. Such contrasts in action would paralyze a conventionally practical leader, but the extremist seems quite undisturbed by it. Where the ordinary man would be troubled by something like a split personality, where his conscience or his sense of reality, or both, would be haunted, the extremist goes boldly ahead. Wide though the gap between the real and the ideal is in the crisis period, he can cross it at his own convenience. He has, for the moment, the best of both worlds. He can manipulate with equal skill the concrete and complex human beings on committees, deputations, bureaus, ministries, all the unsettling problems of administration, and yet use gracefully and convincingly the abstract, indispensable, haunting words which have in revolutions such magic power over large groups of men.
It is this last gift that seems to lie all but wholly beyond the capacity of the most ambitious hypocrite. The great leaders of the Terrors are fitted for their task by a genuine vocation, a vocation which in ordinary times would exclude them from political power. Their belief in the Absolute is not assumed, and is as real as their ability to handle the contingent. And for once the Absolute is practical politics. F. W. Maitland has a passage, suggested by Coleridge, which puts the point neatly: “Coleridge has remarked how, in times of great political excitement, the terms in which political theories are expressed become, not more and more practical, but more and more abstract and impractical. It is in such times that men clothe their theories in universal terms.... The absolute spirit is abroad. Relative or partial good seems a poor ideal. It is not of these, or those men that we speak, of this nation or that age, but of Man.”