_The Heads of Proposals_ and _The Agreement of the People_, radical platforms adopted by the army under Leveller influence, had proposed something very close to what came to be conventional nineteenth-century democracy--equal electoral districts, frequent parliaments, specific limitations on the executive power, even universal manhood suffrage. Cromwell seems never to have been in any sense a doctrinaire rebel, and indeed probably had many of the sentiments about authority and tradition one would expect from a country gentleman. If he suffered at all in mind about the situation, it was probably because the good old parliamentary institutions could not be restored. Certainly the last thing that could be done was to hold an open and free election on any conceivable franchise. The so-called Parliament of Saints which met in 1653 after the dissolution of the Rump was hardly more than a council sent up from trustworthy Independent groups and chosen by caucus methods.
Similarly in France, the victors of June 2nd did not dare go to the people. As a gesture they promulgated the so-called Constitution of 1793, based on universal suffrage, bill of rights, and the rest of the paraphernalia of democracy, but they took good care to go no further than printing it. It was never put into effect.
The Bolsheviks had for months attacked the Provisional government for not calling a constituent assembly. Such an assembly was finally chosen by universal suffrage just before the Bolshevik _coup_. In it the Bolsheviks were in a minority. Lenin dissolved this constituent assembly in January, 1918, with a light heart, but many of his followers, in spite of their Marxist training, were really hurt by such a defiance of democratic sentiments and traditions. Many good Jacobins were also worried by the fact of their new dictatorship.
Theory came to provide a salve to wounded consciences. The theory of revolutionary dictatorship is very nearly identical in all three of our revolutions. Liberty for everyone, liberty full, free, and fair, is of course the ultimate goal. But such liberty at present would mean that men corrupted by the bad old ways would be able to realize their wicked plans, restore the bad old institutions, and frustrate the good men. On reflection, the extremist continues, it is clear that we must distinguish between liberty for those who deserve it, and liberty for those who don’t, which latter is, of course, false liberty, pseudo-liberty, license or anarchy. God had given liberty to the Saints--true liberty, which is obedience to Him--but he clearly did not give liberty to sinners. You repress papists as you would repress devils. To argue that such sinners ought to be left alone would have seemed to seventeenth-century English Puritans as absurd as it would to us to suggest that yellow-fever-bearing mosquitoes be left alone. Robespierre himself phrased it with classic neatness: the revolutionary government, he said, was the despotism of liberty against tyranny. For Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a necessary transitional stage, in which the last vestiges of capitalistic methods and capitalistic mentality are wiped out. Ruthless use of force will be necessary in this period--unfortunately of indeterminate length. Once a capitalist, always a capitalist, apparently. But when men are finally brothers, then the freedom of the classless society will finally begin.
Solaced by the knowledge that they are serving Liberty--in the high, true sense of the word--by a rigorous application of what to the unbeliever seems tyranny, the extremists go ahead to consolidate their power through institutions. Before we attempt a brief, generalized description of these institutions, we may note another uniformity. With the triumph of the extremists as we have defined them, the process of transfer of power from Right to Left ceases. The extremists are not indeed exempt from the difficulty other triumphant groups had faced from the very beginning of the revolutionary process. They develop internal conflicts, tend to split up into groups too hostile among themselves for co-operation. But these groups cannot be neatly ranged from Right to Left; and their dissension is ended quickly and without even the turmoil and confusion of a _coup d’état_. The dissensions have by now become so subtly doctrinal, so remote from the masses of the population, that they can be centered on a few leaders. And they are settled by the banishment or “judicial murder”--as it seems to the defeated partisans--of some of these leaders. What began with large-scale popular uprisings has now come to the dramatic intimacy of a courtroom.
France is here the clearest case. The victorious Montagnards of June 2nd divided into three major factions, that of which Robespierre stands as the head, that of Danton, and that of Hébert. There were, of course, sub-factions, wheels within wheels, and had Marat not been assassinated in the summer of 1793, there might have been still further complications. Robespierre, eventually victorious, rationalized the situation as a conflict between the true revolutionaries on one hand and the Ultra-revolutionaries (Hébert) and the Citra-revolutionaries (Danton) on the other. He was, to himself, the golden and virtuous mean between proletarian vice and bourgeois corruption. The actual situation is almost unbelievably complicated, and only the narrative historian with plenty of space to command can disentangle it. Both Dantonists and Hébertists, “traitors” and “anarchists,” were condemned before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and went to the guillotine in two large and rather miscellaneous batches. For the next few months, the “faction of Robespierre” was in complete control of France.
The victorious Independents in England in 1649 found themselves facing an astonishing variety of sects which had been carried along to triumph in the general good work for the cause of complete toleration of all Dissenters. We shall in a moment have a word to say about the doctrinal aspect of these groups. Meantime we may note that not only did Cromwell continue to keep down papists, prelatists, and Presbyterians, but he and his officers saw to it that Fifth Monarchy Men, Diggers, Levellers, Millenarians, Quakers, and the rest were not allowed to try out their wilder schemes in practice. The Diggers could dig no more in this earth. The old tactics of “no enemy to the Left,” which had held ever since the beginning of the revolution, were now definitely abandoned. As Professor Trevelyan has written, “All revolutionists, the moment they undertake the actual responsibilities, become in some sort conservatives. Robespierre guillotined the Anarchists. The first administrative act of the [English] Regicides was to silence the Levellers.” There are, then, if you like, those more extreme than the group we have called the extremists. But such men are of the lunatic fringe. They are the impractical people erroneously thought by some conservatives to be typical revolutionists. They definitely do not attain power.
The Russian situation is still somewhat obscured in respect to the opposition to official Bolshevism after October, 1917, and this obscurity seems in some ways thicker than ever today. Nevertheless it is clear that even while Lenin was alive, and especially in the year or so after the October revolution, there were a good many stresses and strains within the Bolshevik party, and that Lenin and his followers suppressed opposing groups even when they claimed to be more “revolutionary” than the Leninists. Thanks to the excellent discipline of the Bolshevik party and to the particularly pressing nature of the war against the Whites and the Allies, these quarrels were not as public as they had been in England and in France. The recent Moscow trials seem to belong to a different phase of revolution, or rather, are internal difficulties of a specific state that has gone through the cycle of revolution. In spite of certain superficial analogies, they do not seem to be a part of the uniformity we are here discussing.
These little opposition factions are inextricably woven in with various eccentric groups which are not completely stilled until the height of the Terror--if even then. They represent, as we have seen, the lunatic fringes common to any complex civilization, and they are especially active and vocal in the early stages of our revolutions, and during the struggle between moderates and extremists. They are less important in the actual course of these revolutions than conservative historians, and conservatives generally, like to make out. But they are interesting variations in the main body of revolutionary orthodoxy, and they illuminate in many ways the general history of heresy and heretics.
“Never did the human mind attain such a magnificent height of self-assertiveness as in England about the year 1650,” wrote Lytton Strachey. And certainly what we now think of as almost a racially founded British love for the middle-of-the-road is not very evident in these years. Strachey ironically lists the possibility of becoming a Behmenist, a Bidellian, a Coppinist, a Salmonist, a Dipper, a Traskite, a Tyronist, a Philadelphian, Christadelphian, or Seventh Day Baptist, omitting the subject he was actually writing about, Ludovic Muggleton, founder of the still-existing Muggletonians. The terms mean almost as little to us today as do those with which John Goodwin is referred to in the third volume of _Gangraena_: “a monotonous sectary, a compound of Socinianism, Arminianism, Libertinism, Antinomianism, Independency, Popery and Skepticism.” This is a marvelous compound of contradictions, as though a man today were called a mixture of Communism, Hitlerism, Fascism, Republicanism and Prohibitionism. As Mr. Gooch has said, the English revolution presents some of the most remarkable communistic speculations in history. As early as 1647 John Hare published a pamphlet, _Plain English to our Wilful Bearers of Normanism_, in which he attacked the institution of private property without being very clear about what might take its place. Chamberlen, in his _Poor Man’s Advocate_, urged the nationalization of all Crown and Church possessions, the resumption of all common lands that had been enclosed. This land was to be called the national stock, and was to be administered for the benefit of the poor.