Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution now looks at the events surrounding the breakout of revolution, the combination of factors that lead to open defiance and replacement of the old regime.
He begins with Figaro, the barber of Beaumarchais' plays, and his devastating critique of the old regime in Marriage of Figaro. He notes that, "after much vacillation, the censor did not stop Beaumarchais' play."
But in all four revolutions, the old regime, with its vacillations and half-hearted attempts at putting down revolution rather indicate the regime lacked the tyrannous instinct it was reputed to have.
But how did the revolutions begin? With a bang or with a whimper? The revolutionaries preferred the bang theory.
History has tended to mark the battle of Concord as the shot heard round the world, and people marveled at the Fall of the Bastille, but it is not clear just when those revolutions began. But the fall of the Czarist regime following riots in Petrograd in March 1917 seems to be the unquestionable start of revolution.
The English revolution exhibits more of a rolling start, with King Charles dissolving Parliament in 1629 and disastrously summoning it in 1640 when he was going bankrupt. Pretty soon one thing led to another and in 1642 both Parliament and the King were raising armies.
In America there is a good argument that revolution began with the Stamp Act in 1765 which led to "a series of clashes with increasingly well-organized groups of Americans." Or perhaps it began with the Continental Congress in 1774 or the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775 or the glorious Fourth of July in 1776.
In France there was no Parliament to focus resistance, but there was the Parlement of Paris, a kind of aristocratic supreme court, that led to "a dramatic defiance of royal power and the forced exile of the judges." Then the Assembly of Notables in 1787 led to the summoning of the Estates-General in 1789. But the Third Estate decided not to conduct business unless the Estates-General were called the "National Assembly." And then the King yielded.
Was it all planned by committees of malcontents, or a nation rising spontaneously to smite its oppressors? Brinton opts for a bit of both. The Bolshevik narrative is that it was all carefully planned, the other revolution narratives propose a spontaneous uprising.
Clearly, the occasion of revolution arose when "the existing government attempted to raise money from people who refused to pay." Also, it is clear that after the first clash between the old regime and the party of opposition, there ensues a "brief period of joy and hope... the... charming honeymoon of that impossible pair, the Real and the Ideal." Yet was the Bastille a spontaneous response to the dismissal of Necker, or the scheming of freemasons, philosophes, and professional agitators? Brinton proposes a gardening metaphor, that
revolutions do grow from seeds sown by men who want change, but that these men do do a lot of skillful gardening, but that the gardeners are not working against nature but rather in soil and in a climate propitious to their work; and that the final fruits represent a collaboration between men and nature.
What is weird is that in all four revolutions, when it came to the first outbreak of violence, the old regime government was caught flat-footed. Each government totally flubbed its response to the provocation. The authorities responded to the violence, of course,
but in each case with a striking lack of success. Those of the ruling class responsible for such responses in all our societies proved signally unable to make adequate use of force.
In the case of the English revolution, King Charles didn't really have an army to put down the rebellious Parliament. In the case of America, the attempts to put down the rebels actually encouraged them. In the case of the Fall of the Bastille, numerous soldiers actually joined the rioters. In the case of the Russian revolution the soldiers joined the rioters as well, and the railway workers refused to allow the Czar to travel by train.
When the first stages of the revolutions were successful, enlightened people all over the world were delighted. But having won the first battle,
It has now become the government, and is facing a new set of problems. When it actually gets to work on these problems the honeymoon is soon over.
Because there are all kinds of different revolutionists. And, although both supporters and opponents of revolutions tend to imagine revolutionaries as uniquely good or uniquely bad, they are not that different from ordinary people.
Brinton himself wrote a book about The Jacobins in the French Revolution and found that and found that about two-thirds were middle class, a quarter were working class, and less then 10 percent were peasants. Average age of members was about 40, They represented, the abler, more ambitious, and successful."
In the English revolution the revolutionists were often merchants, great lords, and small landowning gentry, like Cromwell himself. They were not riffraff. In the American revolution, it was the merchants that first organizes opposition to the Crown. There were disreputable street fighters, but also respectable yeoman farmers. In Russia almost everyone from liberal noble to businessman to professional to working man and kulak was eager to see the back of the Czar.
The leaders of the French revolution ranged from nobles like the Duc d'Orleans, lawyers, scientists, journalists. In the American revolution over half the signers of the Declaration of Indpendence had college degrees. Sam Adams, scion of a merchant family, went to Harvard. The leaders of the English revolution pretty well all came from the highest ranks of society. The leaders of the Russian revolution also included nobles and professionals. Lenin was the son of a school inspector, and Stalin, of peasant-artisan stock, went to a seminary for a while.
The revolutionists were not uniquely successful men or desperate failures. They came from all walks of life, and displayed a whole range of talents.
In other words,
it makes almost as many kinds of men and women to make a revolution as to make a world...They certainly create a number of empty spaces to fill, and give an opportunity to clever young men who may also be unscrupulous... But they do not re-crate mankind, nor so they eve make use of a completely new and hitherto suppressed set of men and women.
The rank and file are ordinary men and women, and not "riffraff, scoundrels, scum of the earth." The ability of the leaders "is certainly very high." The fact that in the crisis periods of revoluion some very nasty stuff happens, is probably the effect of the emergency on men rather than men creating an extraordinary emergency.
Next: The Rule of the Moderates.
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