Fire in the Minds of Men

Origins of the Revolutionary Faith

James Billington, James H Billington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351519816
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: History

This book traces the origins of a faith--perhaps the faith of the century. Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed and intense than were Christians or Muslims of an earlier era. What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from forcible overthrow of traditional authority. This inherently implausible idea energized Europe in the nineteenth century, and became the most pronounced ideological export of the West to the rest of the world in the twentieth century. Billington is interested in revolutionaries--the innovative creators of a new tradition. His historical frame extends from the waning of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century to the beginnings of the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth century.

The theater was Europe of the industrial era; the main stage was the journalistic offices within great cities such as Paris, Berlin, London, and St. Petersburg. Billington claims with considerable evidence that revolutionary ideologies were shaped as much by the occultism and proto-romanticism of Germany as the critical rationalism of the French Enlightenment. The conversion of social theory to political practice was essentially the work of three Russian revolutions: in 1905, March 1917, and November 1917.

Events in the outer rim of the European world brought discussions about revolution out of the school rooms and press rooms of Paris and Berlin into the halls of power.</p><p>Despite his hard realism about the adverse practical consequences of revolutionary dogma, Billington appreciates the identity of its best sponsors, people who preached social justice transcending traditional national, ethnic, and gender boundaries. When this book originally appeared The New Republic hailed it as "remarkable, learned and lively," while The New Yorker noted that Billington "pays great attention to the lives and emotions of individuals and this makes his book absorbing." It is an invaluable work of history and contribution to our understanding of political life.

Introduction

THIS BOOK seeks to trace the origins of a faith—perhaps the faith of our time. Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed and intense than were the Christians or Muslims of an earlier era. What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from the forcible overthrow of traditional authority. This inherently implausible idea gave dynamism to Europe in the nineteenth century, and has become the most successful ideological export of the West to the world in the twentieth.

This is a story not of revolutions, but of revolutionaries: the innovative creators of a new tradition. The historical frame is the century and a quarter that extends from the waning of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century to the beginnings of the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth. The theater was Europe of the industrial era; the main stage, journalistic offices within great European cities. The dia-logue of imaginative symbols and theoretical disputes produced much of the language of modern politics.

At center stage stood the characteristic, nineteenth-century European revolutionary: a thinker lifted up by ideas, not a worker or peasant bent down by toil. He was part of a small elite whose story must be told "from above," much as it may displease those who believe that history in general (and revolutionary history in particular) is basically made by socio-economic pressures "from below." This "elite" focus does not imply indifference to the mass, human suffering which underlay the era of this narrative. It reflects only the special need to concentrate here on the spiritual thirst of those who think rather than on the material hunger of those who work. For it was passionate intellectuals who created and developed the revolutionary faith. This work seeks to explore concretely the tradition of revolutionaries, not to explain abstractly the process of revolution. My approach has been inductive rather than deductive, explorative rather than definitive: an attempt to open up rather than "cover" the subject.

My general conclusions can be stated simply at the outset—and, for the sake of argument, more bluntly than they may appear in the text that follows.

The revolutionary faith was shaped not so much by the critical rationalism of the French Enlightenment (as is generally believed) as by the occultism and proto-romanticism of Germany. This faith was incubated in France during the revolutionary era within a small subculture of literary intellectuals who were immersed in journalism, fascinated by secret societies, and subsequently infatuated with "ideologies" as a secular surrogate for religious belief.

The professional revolutionaries who first appeared during the French Revolution sought, above all, radical simplicity. Their deepest conflicts revolved around the simple words of their key slogan; liberty, equality, fraternity. Liberty had been the battle cry of earlier revolutions (in sixteenth-century Holland, seventeenth-century England, eighteenth-century America) which produced complex political structures to limit tyranny (separating powers, constituting rights, legitimizing federation). The French Revolution also initially invoked similar ideas, but the new and more collectivist ideals of fraternity and equality soon arose to rival the older concept of liberty. The words nationalism and communism were first invented in the 1790s to define the simpler, more sublime, seemingly less selfish ideals of fraternity and equality, respectively. The basic struggle that subsequently emerged among committed revolutionaries was between advocates of national revolution for a new type of fraternity and those of social revolution for a new type of equality.

The French national example and republican ideal dominated the revolutionary imagination throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Exiled Francophile intellectuals from Poland and Italy largely fashioned the dominant concept of revolutionary nationalism—inventing most modern ideas on guerrilla violence and wars of national liberation, expressing their essentially emotional ideal best in mythic histories, vernacular poetry, and operatic melodrama.

Rival social revolutionaries began to challenge the romantic nationalists after the revolutions of 1830; and this socialist tradition increasingly predominated after the forming of the First International in 1864 and the movement of the revolutionary cause from French to German and Russian leadership. Social revolutionaries expressed their essentially rationalistic ideal best in prose pamphlets and prosaic organizations, Their hidden model was the impersonal and dynamic machine of factory industry rather than the personalized but static lodge of the Masonic aristocracy.

No less fateful than the schism between national and social revolutionaries was the conflict among social revolutionaries that began in the 1840s between Marx and Proudhon. The former's focus on destroying the capitalist economic system clashed with the latter's war on the centralized, bureaucratic state. This conflict continued between the heirs of Marx (principally in Germany and Russia) and of Proudhon (among Latin and Slavic anarchists, populists, and syndicalists).

The word intelligentsia and the thirst for ideology migrated east from Poland to Russia (and from a national to a social revolutionary cause) through the Russian student radicals of the 1860s, who developed a new ascetic type of terrorism. Lenin drew both on this Russian tradition of violence and on German concepts of organization to create the Bolshevism that eventually brought the revolutionary tradition out of the wilderness and into power.

The revolutionary faith developed in nineteenth-century Europe only within those societies that had not previously (1) legitimized ideological dissent by breaking with medieval forms of religious authority, and (2) modified monarchical power by accepting some form of organized political opposition. In northern Europe and North America, where these conditions were met by Protestant and parliamentary traditions, the revolutionary faith attracted almost no indigenous adherents. Thus, the revolutionary tradition can be seen as a form of political-ideological opposition that arose first against authoritarian Catholicism (in France, Italy, and Poland) and then against other religiously based autocracies (in Lutheran Prussia, Orthodox Russia). The most dedicated and professional social revolutionaries—from Maréchal through Blanqui, Marx, and Bakunin to Lenin—came from such societies and tended to become that rarest of all forms of true believer: a militant atheist. They and other pioneering revolutionaries were largely middle-class, male intellectuals with relatively few familial attachments. Revolutionary movements tended to become more internationalist and visionary whenever women played a leading role; more parochial and pragmatic whenever workers were in command.

Before attempting to chronicle the drama, the dogmas, and the disputes of this new, secular religion-in-the-making, it is important to linger on the mystery and the majesty of faith itself.

The heart of revolutionary faith, like any faith, is fire: ordinary material transformed into extraordinary form, quantities of warmth suddenly changing the quality of substance. If we do not know what fire is, we know what it does. It burns. It destroys life; but it also supports it as a source of heat, light, and—above all—fascination. Man, who works with fire as homo faber, also seems foredoomed in his freedom to play with it as homo ludens.

Our particular chapter in history unfolds at a time of physical transformation in Europe that was almost as momentous as the first discovery of fire must have been in the mists of antiquity. The industrial revolution was permitting men to leash fire to machines—and to unleash fire power on each other—with a force undreamed of in earlier ages. In the midst of those fires appeared the more elusive flame that Dostoevsky described in the most searching work of fiction ever written about the revolutionary movement: The Possessed.

He depicted a stagnant (tranquil?) provincial town that was suddenly inspired (infected?) by new ideas. Shortly after a turbulent literary evening, a mysterious fire broke out; and a local official shouted out into the nocturnal confusion: "The fire is in the minds of men, not in the roofs of buildings." Dostoevsky was writing under the impact of two great fires that disturbed him deeply and heralded the transfer of revolutionary leadership from France to Russia. These fires had broken out in imperial St. Petersburg in the spring of 1861 (where the emancipation of the serfs seemed to have inflamed rather than calmed passions), and in imperial Paris ten years later (where the flaming defeat of the Paris Commune ended forever the era of romantic illusions).

The flame of faith had begun its migrations a century earlier, when some European aristocrats transferred their lighted candles from Christian altars to Masonic lodges. The flame of occult alchemists, which had promised to turn dross into gold, reappeared at the center of new "circles" seeking to recreate a golden age: Bavarian Illuminists conspiring against the Jesuits, French Philadelphians against Napoleon, Italian charcoal burners against the Hapsburgs.

When the most important anti-Napoleonic conspiracy was ridiculed for attempting "to use as a lever something which is only a match," its leader replied that

With a match one has no need of a lever; one does not lift up the world, one burns it.^l

The leader in spreading the conspiracy to Italy soon noted that "the Italian flame" had spread "the fire of freedom to the most frozen land of Petersburg." ² There the first Russian revolution occurred in December 1825. Its slogan, "From the spark comes the flame!" was originated by the first man to predict an egalitarian social revolution in the eighteenth century (Sylvain Maréchal) and revived by the first man to realize such a revolution in the twentieth (Lenin, who used it as the epigram for his journal, The Spark).

A recurrent mythic model for revolutionaries—early romantics, the young Marx, the Russians of Lenin's time—was Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods for the use of mankind. The Promethean faith of revolutionaries resembled in many respects the general modern belief that science would lead men out of darkness into light. But there was also the more pointed, millennial assumption that, on the new day that was dawning, the sun would never set. Early during the French upheaval was born a "solar myth of the revolution," suggesting that the sun was rising on a new era in which darkness would vanish forever. This image became implanted "at a level of consciousness that simultaneously interpreted something real and produced a new reality." ³

The new reality they sought was radically secular and stridently sim-ple. The ideal was not the balanced complexity of the new American federation, but the occult simplicity of its great seal: an all-seeing eye atop a pyramid over the words Novus Ordo Seclorum. In search of primal, natural truths, revolutionaries looked back to pre-Christian antiquity—adopting pagan names like "Anaxagoras" Chaumette and "Anacharsis" Cloots, idealizing above all the semimythic Pythagoras as the model intellect-turned-revolutionary and the Pythagorean belief in prime numbers, geometric forms, and the higher harmonies of music. Many of the same Strasbourg musicians who first played La Marseillaise in 1792 had introduced Mozart's Magic Flute to French audiences in the same city only a few months earlier; and Mozart's illuminist message seemed to explain the fuller meaning of the jour de gloire that Rouget de Lisle's anthem had proclaimed:

The rays of the sun have vanquished the night,
The powers of darkness have yielded to light.⁴

The rising sun brought heat as well as light, for the fire was generally lit not at high noon on a tabula rasa by some philosopher-king, but rather by some unknown guest arriving at midnight amidst the excesses of Don Giovanni's banquet. "Communism," the label Lenin finally adopted, was invented not by the great Rousseau, but by a Rousseau du ruisseau (Rousseau of the gutter): the indulgent fetishist and nocturnal street-walker in prerevolutionary Paris, Restif de la Bretonne. Thus the revolutionary label that now controls the destiny of more than one billion people in the contemporary world sprang from the erotic imagination of an eccentric writer. Like other key words of the revolutionary tradition it first appeared as the rough ideograph of a language in the making: a road sign pointing to the future.

This study attempts to identify some of these signs along the path from Restif to Lenin. It follows sparks across national borders, carried by small groups and idiosyncratic individuals who created an incendiary legacy of ideas. We will say relatively little about either the familiar, forma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• NOTES
• INDEX