Chapter II: Part 2

We shall, then, hope that whatever uniformities we can detect in the revolutions we are analyzing will turn out to be obvious, to be just what any sensible man already knew about revolutions. We shall be genuinely disappointed if the anatomy of revolutions does not turn out to be a familiar one. It will seem a sufficient gain if these uniformities can be listed, recorded, as uniformities. Those whose appetites demand great discoveries are, then, warned in advance. Here they will find poor fare. Nor is this said in any spirit of mock humility. A literary saw, now almost folk-wisdom, but still pretty literary, is scornful over the mountain which labored and brought forth only a ridiculous mouse. That mountain has perhaps never had due recognition for what is surely a rather remarkable biological feat. Moreover, the mouse was at least alive. Most mountains, when they go in for this sort of thing, produce nothing better than lava, steam, and hot air.

_Chapter_ TWO THE OLD REGIMES

_I. The Diagnosis of Preliminary Signs_

From France, which has long carried out a kind of linguistic Free Trade, comes the phrase “old regime.” Applied to the history of France, it covers roughly the society of the last two-thirds of the eighteenth century, the generation or two preceding the revolution of 1789. We may reasonably extend its use to describe the varied societies out of which our revolutions emerged. Following our conceptual scheme, we shall look in these societies for something like a revolutionary prodrome, for a set of preliminary signs of the coming revolution.

Such a search must not be undertaken without one important caution. Disorder in some sense appears to be endemic in all societies, and certainly in our Western society. The historian turned diagnostician can find evidences of disorders and discontents in almost any society he chooses to study. If a stable, or healthy, society is defined as one in which there are no expressions of discontent with the government or with existing institutions, in which no laws are ever broken, then there are no stable or healthy societies. Not even the totalitarian state, one suspects, can live up to this standard.

Our normal or healthy society, then, will not be one in which there are no criticisms of the government or the ruling class, no gloomy sermons on the moral decay of the times, no Utopian dreams of a better world around the corner, no strikes, no lock-outs, no unemployment, no crime waves, no New Deals. All we can expect of what we may call a healthy society is that there should be no striking excess of this sort of thing, and perhaps also that most people should behave as if they felt that, with all its faults, the society were a going concern. Then we may look about for the kind of signs just described--discontents expressed in words or deeds--and try to estimate their seriousness. We shall, of course, very soon find that we are dealing with a large number of variables, that for given societies studied in their old regimes these variables combine variously and in different proportions, and that in some cases certain variables are apparently absent altogether or nearly so. We are surely unlikely to find in all the cases we study one clear, omnipresent symptom, so that we could say: when you find _x_ or _y_ in a society, you know that a revolution is a month, or a year, or a decade, or any time in the future. On the contrary, symptoms are apt to be many, varied, and by no means neatly combined in a pattern. We shall be lucky if, to borrow another medical term, they form a recognizable syndrome.

_II. Structural Weaknesses, Economic and Political_

As good children of our age, we are bound to start any such study as this with the economic situation. All of us, no matter how little sympathy we may have with organized communism, betray the extent of Marx’s influence in the social studies--and of the influences that influenced Marx--by the naturalness with which we ask the question: “What had economic interests to do with it all?” Now it is incontestable that in all four of the societies we are studying the years preceding the outbreak of revolution witnessed unusually serious economic, or at least financial, difficulties of a special kind. The first two Stuarts were in perpetual conflict with their parliaments over taxes, and the years just before 1640 resounded with complaints about Ship Money, benevolences, tonnage and poundage and other terms now strange to us, but once capable of making a hero of a very rich Buckinghamshire gentleman named John Hampden, who was financially quite able to pay much larger taxes than he did. Americans need not be reminded of the part trouble over taxation played in the years just before the shot fired at Concord defied all the laws of acoustics. “No taxation without representation” may be rejected by all up-to-date historians as in itself an adequate explanation of the beginnings of the American revolution, but the fact remains that it was in the 1770’s a slogan capable of exciting our fathers to action. In 1789 the French Estates-General, the calling of which precipitated the revolution, was made unavoidable by the bad financial state of the government. Official France in 1789 was financially in as unhappy a way as, until our own times, one would have believed it possible for a government to be. In Russia in 1917 financial collapse did not perhaps stand out so prominently because the Czarist regime had achieved an all-round collapse in all fields of governmental activity, from war to village administration. But three years of war had put such a strain on Russian finances that, even with the support of the Allies, high prices and scarcity were by 1917 most obvious factors in the general tension.

Yet in all of these societies, it is the _government_ that is in financial difficulties, not the societies themselves. To put the matter negatively, our revolutions did not occur in societies economically backward, nor in societies undergoing widespread economic misery or depression. You will not find in these societies of the old regime anything like unusually widespread economic want. In a specific instance, of course, the standard against which want or depression is measured must be the standard of living more or less acceptable to a given group at a given time. What satisfied an English peasant in 1640 would be misery and want for an Iowa farmer of 1938. It is possible that certain groups in a society may be in unusual want even though statistically that abstraction “society as a whole” is enjoying an increasing--and almost equally abstract--“national income.” Nevertheless, when national income is rapidly increasing, someone does get the benefit. We must look more carefully at our four societies in this respect.

France in 1789 was a very striking example of a rich society with an impoverished government. The eighteenth century had begun to collect statistics about itself, and though these would not satisfy a modern economist they enable us to be very certain about the increasing prosperity of eighteenth-century France. Any series of indices--foreign trade, population growth, building, manufactures, agricultural production--will show a general upward trend all through the eighteenth century. Here are a few examples: wastelands all over France were being brought under the plow and in the _élection_ of Melun alone in two years from 1783 to 1785 uncultivated land was reduced from 14,500 to 10,000 arpents; Rouen in 1787 produced annually cotton cloth worth fifty millions of _livres_, having at least doubled its production in a generation; French trade with North Africa (the Barbary Coast) increased from about 1,000,000 _livres_ in 1740 to 6,216,000 _livres_ in 1788; the total French foreign trade had in 1787 increased nearly 100,000,000 _livres_ in the dozen years since the death of Louis XV in 1774.

Even in our imperfect statistics we can distinguish short-term cyclical variations, and it seems clear that in some respects, notably in the wheat harvest, 1788-89 was a bad year. It was, however, by no means a deep trough year like 1932 for this country. If business men in eighteenth-century France had kept charts and made graphs, the lines would have mounted with gratifying consistency through most of the period preceding the French revolution. Now this prosperity was certainly most unevenly shared. The people who got the lion’s share of it seem to have been the merchants, bankers, business men, lawyers, peasants who ran their own farms as businesses; the middle class, as we have come to call it. It was precisely these prosperous people who in the 1780’s were loudest against the government, most reluctant to save it by paying taxes.

In America, of course, with an empty continent available for the distressed, general economic conditions in the eighteenth century show increasing wealth and population, with economic distress a purely relative matter. There can be no talk of starvation, of grinding poverty in the New England of the Stamp Act. Even the minor fluctuations of the business cycle fail to coincide with the revolution, and the early years of the 1770’s were distinctly years of prosperity. There were economic stresses and strains in colonial America, as we shall soon see, but no class ground down with poverty.

Nor is it easy to argue that early Stuart England was less prosperous than late Tudor England had been. There is rather evidence that, especially in the years of personal government which preceded the Long Parliament, England was notably prosperous. Ramsay Muir writes that “England had never known a more steady or more widely diffused prosperity and the burden of taxation was less than in any other country. The coming revolution was certainly not due to economic distress.” Even in the Russia of 1917, apart from the shocking breakdown of the machinery of government under war-strain, the productive capacity of society as a whole was certainly greater than at any other time in Russian history; and to take again the long view, the economic graphs had all been mounting for Russia as a whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the progress in trade and production since the abortive revolution of 1905 had been notable.

Our revolutions, then, clearly were not born in societies economically retrograde; on the contrary, they took place in societies economically progressive. This does not, of course, mean that no groups within these societies cherished grievances mainly economic in character. Two main foci for economic motives of discontent seem to stand out. First, and much the less important, is the actual misery of certain groups in a given society. No doubt in all our societies, even in America, there was a sort of submarginal group of poor people whose release from certain forms of restraint is a very important feature of revolution itself. But in studying the preliminary signs of revolution, these people are not very important. French republican historians have long insisted on the importance of the bad harvest of 1788, the cold winter of 1788-89, and the consequent sufferings of the poor. Bread was relatively dear in that spring when the Estates-General first assembled. There was apparently a tightening up of business conditions in America in 1774-75, but certainly nothing like widespread distress or unemployment. The local sufferings of Boston, considerable under the Port Bill, were really a part of the revolution itself, and not a sign. The winter of 1916-17 was certainly a bad one in Russia, with food rationing in all the cities.

The important thing to note, however, is that French and Russian history are filled with famines, plagues, bad harvests, sometimes local, sometimes national in sweep, many of which were accompanied by sporadic rioting, but in each case only one by revolution. In neither the English nor the American revolution do we find even this degree of localized want or famine. Clearly, then, the economic distress of the under-privileged, though it may well accompany a revolutionary situation, is not one of the symptoms we need dwell upon. This the subtler Marxists themselves recognize, and Trotsky has written: “In reality, the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would always be in revolt.”

Of much greater importance is the existence among a group, or groups, of a feeling that prevailing conditions limit or hinder their economic activity. We are especially aware of this element in our American revolution, and Professor A. M. Schlesinger has shown how the prosperous merchants, their immediate interests damaged by the new imperial policy of the British government, led an agitation against the legislation of 1764 and 1765 and helped stir up a discontent among the less well-to-do which these merchants later found a bit embarrassing. No doubt, too, that many of the firm spots in the very uneven and wavering policy of the British government--the Stamp Act and subsequent disorders, the announced intention of enforcing the Navigation Act, and so on--did have momentary ill effects on business, did throw men out of work. The currency question was of course mismanaged in a day when common sense did not very effectively supplement ignorance of economic processes. The colonies were always lacking in specie, and business enterprise suffered from this lack. Paper money, to which recourse was inevitable, was also an inevitable source of further quarrels between governors and governed.

The working of economic motives to revolt among possessing classes normally inclined to support existing institutions is especially clear among the aristocrats of tidewater Virginia. Largely dependent on a single crop, tobacco, used to a high standard of living, increasingly indebted to London bankers, many of the planters hoped to recoup their fortunes in the western lands they regarded as clearly belonging to Virginia. George Washington’s own involvements in western land speculations make one of the favorite topics of the debunkers. By the Quebec Act of 1774, however, the British government took the trans-Allegheny lands north of the Ohio from Virginia and other claimant colonies, and incorporated them with Canada. This act gave a grievance to others besides the planter-speculator. The closing of this frontier was also an offense to a class perhaps normally more inclined to revolt--the restless woodsmen and fur traders, and the only slightly less restless small pioneer farmers who had already occupied the Appalachian valleys, and were ready to pour over into the Kentucky and Ohio country. The Quebec Act in itself does not, of course, explain the American revolution; but taken with a long series of other acts, the Stamp Act, the Navigation Act, the Molasses Act, it accounts for the feeling so evident among active and ambitious groups in America that British rule was an unnecessary and incalculable restraint, an obstacle to their full success in life.

In France the years preceding 1789 are marked by a series of measures which antagonized different groups. With striking awkwardness, the government offered with one hand what it withdrew with the other. Tax-reform efforts, never carried through, offended privileged groups without pleasing the unprivileged. Turgot’s attempted introduction of _laissez-faire_ into labor relations offended all the vested interests of the old guilds. The famous tariff reduction treaty with England in 1786 directly affected French textiles for the worse, increased unemployment in Normandy and other regions, and gave the employer class a grievance against the government. So, too, in seventeenth-century England, there is no doubt that the attempt to revive obsolete forms of taxation seemed to London or Bristol merchants a threat to their rising prosperity and importance.

Thus we see that certain economic grievances--usually not in the form of economic distress, but rather a feeling on the part of some of the chief enterprising groups that their opportunities for getting on in this world are unduly limited by political arrangements--would seem to be one of the symptoms of revolution. These feelings must, of course, be raised to an effective social pitch by propaganda, pressure-group action, public meetings, and preferably a few good dramatic riots, like the Boston Tea Party. As we shall see, these grievances, however close they are to the pocketbook, must be made respectable, must touch the soul. What is really but a restraint on a rising and already successful group, or on several such groups, must appear as rank injustice towards everyone in the society. Men may revolt partly or even mainly because they are hindered, or, to use Dr. George Pettee’s expressive word, _cramped_; but to the world--and, save for a very few hypocrites, also to themselves--they must appear _wronged_. Revolutions cannot do without the word “justice.”

All this, however, is rather less than what the Marxists seem to mean when they talk about the revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries as deliberately the work of a class-conscious bourgeoisie. Not having the benefit of the writings of Marx to go by, nor indeed those of the still little known Adam Smith, even eighteenth-century revolutionists and discontented spirits used a very non-economic vocabulary. Of course the Marxist, aided by Freud, can reply neatly that economic motivation drove these bourgeois at an un- or sub-conscious level. The trouble with this, from the point of view of the person brought up in the conventions of professional historical research, is that the subconscious never, or rarely, writes documents or makes speeches. If we confine ourselves to what these bourgeois said and did, we find plenty of evidence that separate groups--the American merchants, for instance--felt specific economic grievances, but no signs that bourgeois, entrepreneurs, business men, were aware that as a class their interests in free economic expansion were blocked by existing “feudal” arrangements. Indeed in France a great many business men were more annoyed by the semi-free trade treaty of 1786 with England than by any other governmental step. Certainly one finds no trace of men in England or America or France saying: “Organized feudalism is preventing the triumph of middle-class capitalism. Let us rise against it.” Nor, as a matter of fact, were there in these countries just before the revolutions any serious economic barriers to prevent the clever lad, even in the lower classes, from making money if he possessed the money-making gifts. Dozens of careers--a Pâris-Duverney, an Edmund Burke, a John Law, a John Hancock--show this. Certainly one cannot deny that class antagonisms existed in these countries; but so far as we can judge, these class antagonisms do not seem to have a clear and simple economic basis. In twentieth-century Russia, of course, these antagonisms were expressed in the language of economics, even though here we shall probably also find that human sentiments as well as human interests are involved.

To sum up so far, if we look at economic life in these societies in the years preceding revolution, we note first, that they have been on the whole prosperous; second, that their governments are chronically short of money--shorter, that is, than most governments usually are; third, that certain groups feel that governmental policies are against their particular economic interests; fourth, that, except in Russia, class economic interests are not openly advanced in propaganda as a motive for attempting to overturn existing political and social arrangements. It is interesting to note here that Professor R. B. Merriman, in a study of six seventeenth-century revolutions in England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Naples, finds that they all had in common a financial origin, all began as protests against taxation.

If now we turn from the stresses and strains of economic life to the actual workings of the machinery of government, we find a much clearer situation. Here, again, we must not posit a normal condition in which this machinery works perfectly. Government here on earth is at best a rough and ready thing, and the governed will always find something to grumble about, from favoritism in distributing low-number automobile license plates to post-office pen points. But there are obviously degrees of governmental inefficiency, and degrees of patience on the part of the governed. In our four societies the governments seem to have been relatively inefficient, and the governed relatively impatient.

Indeed, the near-bankruptcy of a government in a prosperous society might be regarded as good _a priori_ evidence of its inefficiency, at least in the old days when governments undertook few social or “socialized” services. France in 1789 is a striking example of a society the government of which simply no longer works well. For generations French kings and their ministers had fought the particularistic tendencies of the provinces to get out of the control of Paris by devising a whole series of agencies of centralization, which may be said in a sense to run from the _missi dominici_ of Charlemagne to the _intendants_ of Richelieu and Louis XIV. Almost as if they had been Anglo-Saxons, however, they destroyed very little of the old in the process, so that France in 1789 was like an attic stuffed full of all kinds of old furniture--including some fine new chairs that just wouldn’t fit in the living room. We need not go too deeply into the details of the situation, which can perhaps be summed up graphically by saying that in the sense in which you could make a map of the United States showing all our administrative areas--townships, counties, states--you could not possibly make one map of the administrative areas of old France. Even the confusion added to an administrative map of the United States by the various, and relatively new, federal commissions, bureaus, agencies, administrations, does not begin to equal that of France in 1789. You would need at least half a dozen maps to show the criss-cross units of _paroisse_, _seigneurie_, _baillage_, _sénéchaussée_, _généralité_, _gouvernement_, _pays d’état et d’élection_, _les cinq grosses fermes_, _pays de grande et de petite gabelle_--and this is but a beginning.

There is told about Louis XV one of those revealing anecdotes the actual historical truth of which is unimportant, since they reflect contemporary opinion of a concrete condition. Traveling in the provinces, his majesty saw that a town hall or some such building in which he was to be received had a leaky roof. “Ah, if I were only a minister, I’d have that fixed,” he remarked. A government of which such a tale could be told was perhaps despotic, but most certainly inefficient. In general, it would seem the inefficiency is more readily recognized by those who suffer from it than is the despotism.

The incompetence of the English government under the first two Stuarts is much less clear, but one can safely say that the central government was not as well run, especially under James I, as it had been under Elizabeth. What is most striking in the English situation is the total inadequacy to modern government of a tax system based on the modest needs of a feudal central government. For the government of James I was beginning to be a modern government, to undertake certain elementary social services, and to rest on a bureaucracy and an army that had to be paid in cash. The chronic need for money which confronted James I and Charles I was by no means a result of riotous living and courtly extravagance, but was for the most part brought on by expenses no modern government could have avoided. And yet their income was on the whole determined and collected by old-fashioned medieval methods. At any rate it is clear that the Stuarts needed money; but their attempts to fill their coffers were awkward, hand-to-mouth expedients that brought them into sharp quarrels with the only people from whom they could collect money--the gentry and the middle class. Their struggles with Parliament threw the whole machinery of English government out of gear.

In America the failure of the machinery was a double one. First, the central colonial administration in Westminster had been allowed to grow in the hit-or-miss fashion Anglophiles have long regarded as the height of political wisdom. In this crisis, however, muddling through clearly was not enough. The attempted reform in colonial administration after the Seven Years’ War only made matters worse, as did Turgot’s attempted reforms in France, since it was carried out in a series of advances and retreats, cajolings and menaces, blowings-hot and blowings-cold. Second, within most of the colonies the machinery of government had never been properly adjusted to the frontier. The newer western regions of many colonies complained that representation, courts, administrative areas, were rigged in favor of the older seaboard settlements.

The breakdown of Czarist administration is now so much a commonplace that one is tempted to suspect that it has been a bit exaggerated. Looking at the decades preceding 1917--for in all these countries we have been considering the background of the revolutions and not their actual outbreaks--it seems possible to maintain that the government of Russia in peacetime, at least, was perhaps a bit more of a going concern than the other governments we have been studying. From Catherine the Great to Stolypin a great deal of actual improvement can be seen in Russian government. But one thing is clear from the hundred years preceding 1914. Russia could not organize herself for war, and failure in war had, especially in 1905, brought with it a partial collapse of the machinery of internal administration. We must be very careful here to stick to facts and to avoid judgments which have so insinuated themselves into our awareness of Russia that we regard them as facts. It may be that there is some wild oriental element in the Russian soul that makes Russians both incompetent and submissive politically, subject, however, to fits of alcoholic rebellion. This soul is certainly very hard to observe scientifically; and even in literature one may hesitate to label Dostoevski more Russian than Turgenev, who seems far from wild, oriental, drunken or mystic. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that the Russian _governmental_ breakdown, clear in 1917 or even 1916, was by no means clear, say, in 1912.

Finally, one of the most evident uniformities we can record is the effort made in each of our societies to reform the machinery of government. Nothing can be more erroneous than the picture of the old regime as an unregenerate tyranny, sweeping to its end in a climax of despotic indifference to the clamor of its abused subjects. Charles I was working to “modernize” his government, to introduce into England some of the efficient methods of the French. Strafford is in some ways but an unlucky Richelieu. George III and his ministers were trying very hard to pull together the scattered organs of British colonial government. Indeed, it was this attempt at reform, this desire to work out a new colonial “system,” that gave the revolutionary movement in America a start. In both France and Russia, there is a series of attempted reforms, associated with names like Turgot, Malesherbes, Necker, and Stolypin. It is true that these reforms were incomplete, that they were repealed or nullified by sabotage on the part of the privileged. But they are on the record, an essential part of the process that issued in revolution in these countries.

_III. The Desertion of the Intellectuals_

So far we have fixed our attention on the machinery of economic and political life, and have tried to distinguish signs of any approaching breakdown. Let us now turn to the state of mind--or better, feeling--of various groups within these societies. First we may ask the question, does the disorganization of the government find a counterpart in the organization of its opponents? We shall have later to deal with what are nowadays well known as “pressure groups,” men and women organized in societies with special aims, societies which bring all sorts of pressure--from propaganda and lobbying to terrorism--to the attaining of their aims. Such societies in one form or another are apparently a constituent part of all modern states and the mere fact of their existence cannot be taken as a symptom of revolution, or we should have to regard the A.S.P.C.A. or anti-billboard associations as signs of a coming second American revolution. There seems to be no simple and sole test to determine when and under what conditions the existence of pressure groups may be taken as a symptom of approaching political instability. The pre-revolutionary decades in our four societies do show, however, an intensity of action on the part of pressure groups, an action more and more directed as time goes on towards the radical alteration of existing government. Certain groups, indeed, begin to go beyond lobbying and propaganda, begin to plan and organize direct action, or at least a supplanting of the government in some dramatic way.

In America the merchant’s committees organized to resist measures for imperial control did a great deal of quite modern pressure-group work, from straight propaganda to stirring up popular demonstrations and to intercolonial co-operation through resolutions, conferences, and so on. They form the prelude to those efficient revolutionary cells, the correspondence committees Sam Adams handled so well in the 1770’s. Similar organizations are to be found lower down the social scale, where they edge over into boisterous tavern parties. In many of the colonies, the legislatures could be used for pressure-group work against the imperial government in a way not possible in the other societies we are studying. The New England town meeting provided a ready-made framework for this kind of agitation.

In France, the work of Cochin has shown how what he calls the _sociétés de pensée_, informal groups gathered together to discuss the great work of the Enlightenment, gradually turned to political agitation and finally helped steer elections to the Estates-General of 1789. Though the official school of historians in the Third Republic has always distrusted such notions, it is difficult for an outsider not to feel that Cochin has put his finger on the essential form of group action which turned mere talk and speculation into revolutionary political work. Freemasonry, even French Republican historians admit, had a place in the preparation of the revolution. Masonic activity in eighteenth-century France was clearly no dark plot, but it certainly was far from being purely social, recreational, or educational. Almost all the ambitious nobles and bankers, almost all the intellectuals, were freemasons. Even at the time, clerical conservatives were shocked at what they considered the subversive aspects of freemasonry.

In Russia, societies of all degrees of hostility to things as they were had long flourished. Nihilists, anarchists, socialists of all stripes, liberals, westernizers, and anti-westernizers, expressed themselves in various ways from bomb-throwing to voting at Duma elections. One gathers from a consideration of the last years of the Czarist regime that the diversity and cross-purposes of its opponents did much to keep that regime in the saddle. Certainly the Russian revolution had plenty of advance publicity, and the role of pressure groups in its preparation is singularly clear.

England here is a less clear case. Nevertheless there are definite indications of systematic opposition of merchants and some of the gentry to measures like Ship Money, and the parliamentary majorities which were rolled up against Charles after the period of personal government were the product of embryo pressure groups, as a glance at the very prolific pamphlet literature of the time will show. Moreover, the English revolution was the last of the great social overturns within the active domination of specifically Christian ideas. In a sense, the pressure groups most obvious in seventeenth-century England are simply the Puritan churches, and especially the churches called Independent. Their very existence was as much a menace to Charles as was that of the Bolshevik party to Nicholas.

It must be noted that some of these pressure groups, the American merchant’s committees, the French _sociétés de pensée_ and freemasons, for instance, would not in the heyday of their action have admitted they were working for a revolution, certainly not for a violent revolution. What perhaps separates them from pressure groups like the A.S.P.C.A. or anti-billboard associations--which we can surely agree are not to be taken as symptomatic of revolution--is their basic aim at a radical change in important political processes. Thus the American merchants were really aiming to reverse the whole new imperial policy of Westminster; the French who prepared the elections to the Third Estate were aiming at a new “constitution” for France. On the other hand, some of the Russian organizations were from the very start violently revolutionary; but these were not the important elements in the Russian situation from 1905 to 1917, any more than the antinomians or anarchistic religious sects were in England before 1639.

There were, then, pressure groups with purposes more or less revolutionary in all these societies. Their activity is seen against a background of political and moral discussion which in these societies seems particularly intense. We come now to a symptom of revolution well brought out in Mr. Lyford P. Edwards’s _Natural History of Revolution_, and there described as the “transfer of the allegiance of the intellectuals.” Although the word “desertion” has perhaps unfortunate moral overtones, the shorter phrase “desertion of the intellectuals” is so much more convenient that we propose to use it, rather than the longer one, in this study.

We must, however, be clear as to what we are talking about before we attempt to use the desertion of the intellectuals as a symptom. Intellectuals we may define without undue worry over preciseness as the writers, teachers, and preachers. Further subdivision into the small group of leaders who initiate, or at least stand prominently in the public eye, and the larger group who grind over material they get from the leaders, is not of major importance here. What is important, and somewhat puzzling, is the general position of the intellectuals in our Western society since the Middle Ages. Clearly we must not posit agreement among its intellectuals before we decide that a given society is reasonably stable. Even in the thirteenth century, in which so many of our contemporary thinkers find an enviable unanimity as to fundamentals of belief, the amount of bickering among the intellectuals was in reality very considerable. There were rebels and prophets aplenty throughout the Middle Ages. In modern times we expect the intellectuals to disagree. Moreover, for a number of reasons, writers, teachers, and preachers are to a large degree committed by their function to take a critical attitude towards the daily routine of human affairs. Lacking experience of action under the burden of responsibility, they do not learn how little _new_ action is usually possible or effective. An intellectual as satisfied with the world as with himself would simply not be an intellectual.

Here, as so often in the social sciences, and indeed in the natural sciences, we are dealing with a question where quantitative and qualitative differences shade most confusingly one into the other. Quantitatively, we may say that in a society markedly unstable there seem to be absolutely more intellectuals, at any rate comparatively more intellectuals, bitterly attacking existing institutions and desirous of a considerable alteration in society, business, and government. Purely metaphorically, we may compare intellectuals of this sort to the white corpuscles, guardians of the bloodstream; but there can be an excess of white corpuscles, and when this happens you have a diseased condition.

Qualitatively, we may discern a difference of attitude, partly, no doubt, produced by the numbers and unity of these intellectuals in attack, but partly produced by a subtler reality. Victorian England, for instance, was a society in equilibrium, an equilibrium now in retrospect a bit unstable, but still an equilibrium. Here Carlyle upbraided a generation addicted to Morison’s Pills instead of to heroes, Mill worried uncomfortably over the tyranny of the majority, Matthew Arnold found England short of sweetness and light, Newman sought at Rome an antidote for the poison of English liberalism, Morris urged his countrymen to break up machines and return to the comforts of the Middle Ages, and even Tennyson was worried over his failure to attain to anything more useful than a high, vague, and philosophical discontent. Many, though by no means all, Victorian intellectuals were in disagreement among themselves, united apparently in nothing but a profound dislike for their environment. If, however, you look at them carefully you will find a curious agreement that not too much is to be done right away to remedy matters. It is not, as we are told so often of the scholastic intellectuals of the Middle Ages, that these Victorians were in agreement on fundamental metaphysical and theological assumptions. They weren’t in any such agreement. It is rather that they were in agreement about the less dignified but in some ways more important routines and habits of daily life, and they did not expect the government to change such matters.

The difference between the intellectual atmosphere of a group like the Victorians, writers who cannot be said as a whole to have deserted, and a group which has deserted, will be clear in a moment if we look at that famous group in eighteenth-century France which stood at the center of the great Enlightenment. One has first the impression of immense numbers of intellectuals, great and small, all studying matters political and sociological, all convinced that the world, and especially France, needs making over from the tiniest and more insignificant details to the most general moral and legal principles. Any of the textbooks will give you the roll--Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Raynal, d’Holbach, Volney, Helvétius, d’Alembert, Condorcet, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Beaumarchais--rebels all, men leveling their wit against Church and State or seeking in Nature a perfection that ought to be in France. You will hardly find active literary conservatives like Sam Johnson or Sir Walter Scott, nor even literary neutrals, men pursuing in letters a beauty or an understanding quite outside politics.

Literature in late eighteenth-century France is overwhelmingly sociological. If you look in the yellowing remains of French eighteenth-century journalism, if you try to reconstruct the chatter of salons and clubs, you will find the same chorus of complaints and criticisms of existing institutions, the same search for Nature’s simple plan of perfection in politics. There is both a bitterness and a completeness in this chorus of complaint that you will not find in Victorian complaints. Statistically, one might establish the fact that there were proportionately more intellectuals “against the government” in eighteenth-century France than in nineteenth-century England. But the difference goes beyond statistics, and into what we have called the qualitative difference. The French have a tone, at once more bitter and more hopeful, quite different from the Victorians. That this is not altogether a national difference will be clear to anyone reading the pamphlet literature of the age of Milton. Then the English intellectuals had deserted, as they had not under Victoria.

Russia, too, is a clear example of this desertion of the intellectuals. There is certainly much more than political propaganda in the series of novelists who have made Russian literature a part of the education of us all. But there is unmistakably political and social criticism of Czarist Russia even in the work of the most Olympian of them, Turgenev. And the impression one gets from even a cursory view of Russian intellectual life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is unmistakable; to write, teach, or preach in those days meant being against the government. There are exceptions, and degrees of opposition, but the above statement would probably be accepted even by present-day Russian exiles.

America is not so neat an instance. In Boston, for instance, in the 1760’s and 70’s, a good many of the kind of people we are discussing--intellectuals will have to do--were as firmly as such people are now against so un-Bostonian an activity as sedition. It is clear that Harvard was by no means unanimous against the Crown, let alone in favor of the democratic machinations of her distinguished alumnus, Sam Adams. But if the literary and journalistic output in the colonies between 1750 and 1775--and even if we include the sermons--could be statistically assigned as either for or against the actual policies of the imperial government, there seems little doubt as to the very considerable balance against these policies. The Enlightenment, especially through Locke and Montesquieu, had come to the American colonies. The natural and inalienable rights of man were in this country, as in Europe, concepts introduced by intellectuals.

England may seem at first sight an exception to the desertion of the intellectuals. Lovelace, Suckling, even Donne seem hardly preoccupied with sociology. Yet at a second glance it is quite clear that English literature under the first two Stuarts is far from being the chorus of loyal praise it was in the days of Queen Bess. A glance into Professor Grierson’s _Cross Currents in English Literature in the Seventeenth Century_ will show how much that literature was a dissolvent of the merry England of the Renaissance. Even more important is the fact that in those days there were no real newspapers, and the pamphlet took their place. Now the pamphlet literature of the early seventeenth century in England, quantitatively enormous, even by modern standards, is almost wholly preoccupied with religion or politics--better, religion _and_ politics--about as good an example of the desertion of the intellectuals as could be found. Indeed, as Professor Gooch has written, in the reign of James I “proclamation followed proclamation against the sale of ‘Seditious and Puritan books’ and there was ‘much talk of libels and dangerous writings.’”

To what do these intellectuals desert? To another and better world than that of the corrupt and inefficient old regimes. From a thousand pens and voices there are built up in the years before the revolution actually breaks out what one must now fashionably call the foundations of the revolutionary myth--or folklore, or symbols, or ideology. Some such better world of the ideal is contrasted with this immediate and imperfect world in all the ethical and religious systems under which Western men have lived, and notably in Christianity. It is not quite accurate to assert that for medieval Christianity the other, ideal world is safely put off to heaven. Yet it is clear that with the Reformation and the Renaissance men began to think more earnestly about bringing part of heaven, at any rate, to this earth. What differentiates this ideal world of the revolutionaries from the better world as conceived by more pedestrian persons is a flaming sense of the immediacy of the ideal, a feeling that there is something in all men better than their present fate, a conviction that what is, not only ought not, but need not, be.

We shall later meet these revolutionary ideals in their fully developed forms. Here we need only notice that in the writings and preachings of the English Puritans--and to a lesser extent the constitutional lawyers--in those of the eighteenth-century _philosophes_, in those of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Marxists, the evil, and indeed illegitimate existing regime is very effectively contrasted with the good, and indeed inevitable, rule of right to come. In England, America, and in France, the essential principle to which men appealed against present conditions was Nature, with its clear and simple laws. Ship Money in England, Stamp Act in America, patents of nobility in France, were all contrary to the law of Nature. Even in England and America, where there was also much appeal to rights to be found in Magna Charta or the common law, the final appeal was always to a law of Nature “engraved in the hearts of men.” As the Puritan Henry Parker wrote in England, the common courts were “furnished only with rules of particular justice, which rules being too narrow for so capacious a subject [the relation of Crown to People] we must refer to those that the original laws of Nature hold out to us.” By the eighteenth century this kind of language had become almost universal among intellectuals. That Nature always counseled what the intellectuals in revolt wanted is an observation we must in these days feel bound to make. It seems likely, however, that for most of those who appealed to her Nature was as definite and explicit as God had once been, and as dialectical materialism was to be.

For the Russian writers and agitators of the Czarist regime, Nature did not play so prominent a part. Not that Nature is lacking in the pages of Tolstoy and his fellows, and the contrast between “artificial” society and “natural” instincts was not disdained even in Socialist propaganda. But the official ideology of most of the Russian radicals was Marxism, and Marxism finds that the existence of capitalists, the rule of the bourgeoisie, is altogether natural. Only, its destruction by the proletariat is also natural, and this destruction is determined by forces quite beyond capitalistic control. The inevitable march of economic forces would then for the Marxists accomplish what the English Puritan expected from God and the French _philosophe_ from Nature and Reason. The essential thing all these pre-revolutionary agitators have in common, the essential ingredient, intellectually at least, in the revolutionary myth, is this abstract, all-powerful force, this perfect ally.

One special point is here worth our attention for a moment. Not only does God, Nature, or dialectical materialism make the victory of the present under-dog certain. The present upper-dog can be shown--perhaps for propaganda purposes _must_ be shown--to have acquired his preponderance by an accident, or a particularly dirty trick, while God or Nature was temporarily off duty. Thus in the English revolution the royalists and indeed the gentry as a whole were labeled “Normans,” descendants of a group of foreign invaders with no right to English soil. John Lilburne, the Leveller, goes so far as to assert that the whole common law was a badge of slavery imposed upon the free people of England by the Norman Conquest. American hatred of absentee British government hardly needed such artificial fanning. The French were told by no less a person than Siéyès that all their trouble came from the usurpations of the Franks over a thousand years ago. French nobleman in 1789 were descendants of barbarous Germans, while French commoners were descendants of civilized Gauls and Romans. Revolution was but restoring the conditions of 450 A.D. Marxism explained the exploiting class without recourse to such pseudo-historical notions. And yet there is plenty of reference in Russian revolutionary agitation to the usurpation of land by the nobles, to their Varangian, or Tartar, or Western, or at any rate foreign origins.

Finally, a great deal of energy has been expended on the question as to whether this revolutionary ideology “causes” revolutionary action, or whether it is merely a sort of superfluous decoration with which the revolutionists cover their real acts and real motives. Most of this discussion is in the highest degree futile, since it is based on a crude notion of causation altogether untenable in fruitful scientific work beyond a very simple level. There is no more point disputing whether Rousseau made the French revolution or the French revolution made Rousseau than in disputing whether egg or chicken came first. We note that in our pre-revolutionary societies the kind of discontents, the specific difficulties about economic, social and political conditions that hard-boiled moderns focus on are invariably accompanied by a very great deal of writing and talking about ideals, about a better world, about some very abstract forces tending to bring about that better world. It is, indeed, the _expression_ of ideas, rather than particular ideas--which may vary enormously in different revolutions--that makes the uniformity. We find that ideas are always a part of the pre-revolutionary situation, and we are quite content to let it go at that. No ideas, no revolution. This does not mean that ideas _cause_ revolutions. It merely means that they form part of the mutually dependent variables we are studying.

_IV. Classes and Class Antagonisms_

Certain groups in our four societies of the old regimes nourished feelings of dislike, mixed or unmixed with contempt, for other groups. If we avoid the narrow economic connotations of the term, we may call these groups classes; if we realize the struggle was not simply one between two contending classes, feudal vs. bourgeois or bourgeois vs. proletariat, we may even speak of class struggles. This type of struggle in one form or another seems as endemic as many other kinds of violence in the stablest of Western societies. Here again we must not postulate for the normal society with which we contrast our pre-revolutionary societies, a lying down together of the lion and the lamb. But even so, it will soon appear that these class hatreds are stepped up, exacerbated in a noticeable degree in the old regimes. Class distinctions are seen, not as barriers the clever, brave, or ambitious can cross, but as unnatural and unjust privileges, established by wicked men against the express intention of Almighty God, Nature, or Science. These class struggles are by no means simple duels; there are groups within groups, currents within currents. We must try and analyze some of these currents.

In the first place, what may be called the ruling class seems in all four of our societies to be divided and inept. By ruling class we understand, it may be too generously, the people who run things, the people in the public eye--the politicians, the important civil servants, the bankers, the men of affairs, the great landowning nobles, the officers, the priesthood, perhaps even some of the intellectuals. Formal nobility of the blood has in the Western world usually been a much too narrow test of membership in a ruling class. Even in early modern times, the ruling class was something like what we have outlined above, the minority of men and women who seemed to lead dramatic lives, about whom the more exciting scandals arose, who set the fashion, who had wealth, position, or at least reputation, who, in short, ruled. Indeed, in a socially stable society it seems likely that the great masses of poor and middling folk, as also the obscure and unsuccessful people who by birth and training might seem to be in the ruling class, really accept the leadership of those at the top of the social pyramid, and dream rather of _joining_ them than of _dislodging_ them.

Now the ruling classes in our societies seem, and not simply _a posteriori_ because they were in fact overthrown, to have been unsuccessful in fulfilling their functions. It is unlikely that short of Sparta or Prussia the simpler military virtues alone are enough for a ruling class. Such a class ought not, however, to shrink from the use of force to maintain itself, and it ought not to value wit and originality in its own members too highly. Wit, at any rate, it can usually hire adequately enough from other sources. A mixture of the military virtues, of respect for established ways of thinking and behaving, and of willingness to compromise, is probably an adequate rough approximation of the qualities of a successful ruling class--qualities clearly possessed by the Romans of Punic War times, and the English of the eighteenth century, though the latter failed in relations with America.

When numerous and influential members of such a class begin to believe that they hold power unjustly, or that all men are brothers, equal in the eyes of eternal justice, or that the beliefs they were brought up on are silly, or that “after us the deluge,” they are not likely to resist successfully any serious attacks on their social, economic and political position. The subject of the decadence of a ruling class, and the relation of this decadence to revolution, is a fascinating and, like so much of sociology, a relatively unexplored subject. We can here do no more than suggest that this decadence is not necessarily a “moral” decadence if by “moral” you mean what a good evangelical Christian means by that word. Successful ruling classes have not infrequently been quite addicted to cruel sports, drinking, gambling, adultery, and other similar pursuits which we should no doubt all agree to condemn. It is a reasonable assertion that the virtuous Lafayette was a much clearer sign of the unfitness of the French aristocracy to rule than were Pompadour or even Du Barry.

The Russians here provide us with a _locus classicus_. To judge from what appears of them in print, Russian aristocrats for decades before 1917 had been in the habit of bemoaning the futility of life, the backwardness of Russia, the Slavic sorrows of their condition. No doubt this is an exaggeration. But clearly many of the Russian ruling classes had an uneasy feeling that their privileges would not last. Many of them, like Tolstoy, went over to the other side. Others turned liberal, and began that process of granting concessions here and withdrawing them there that we have already noticed in France. Even in court circles, it was quite the fashion by 1916 to ridicule the Czar and his intimates. As Protopopov, a hated Czarist minister, writes: “Even the very highest classes became _frondeurs_ before the revolution; in the grand salons and clubs the policy of the government received harsh and unfriendly criticism. The relations which had been formed in the Czar’s family were analyzed and talked over. Little anecdotes were passed about the head of the state. Verses were composed. Many grand dukes openly attended these meetings.... A sense of the danger of this sport did not awaken until the last moment.”