Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition

In the West 1560-1991

David Parker, David Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134690589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Revolutions presents eight European case studies including the English revolution of 1649, the French Revolution and the recent revolutions within the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (1989-1991) and examines them not only in their specific political, economic and social contexts but also as part of the wider European revolutionary tradition. A chapter on the American Revolution is also included as a revolution which grew out of European expansionism and political culture. Revolutions brings together leading writers on European history, who make a major contribution to the controversial debate on the role of revolution in the development of European history. This is a truly comparative book which includes discussion on each of the following key themes:
* the causes of revolution, including the importance of political, social and economic factors
* the effects of political and philisophical ideas or ideology on the revolution
* the form and process of a revolution, including the importance of violence and popular support
* the outcome of revolution, both short-term and long-term
* the way revolution is viewed in history particularly since the collapse of Communism in Europe.

1 Introduction
Approaches to revolution

David Parker

This book is about the major revolutions which have punctuated the history of Western society from the sixteenth century to recent times. Western society in this context is essentially European society with the significant addition of America, where revolution grew out of European expansion and a European political culture. The establishment and subsequent evolution of the United States is instructive both for the similarities to and divergences from the European experience as well as the way they have been intertwined. Since the collapse of the Communist regimes in 1989–90 pressures on Western Europe to adopt a more American model of social and economic organisation have increased. No doubt it would have been possible to have extended the range of revolutions to others with a European aspect to them; but ‘the West’ as conceived here makes historical sense, as does the view that it was the source of particular revolutionary traditions; such a focus also lends itself to a book which is manageable and coherent.

A similar pragmatism has governed the selection of the revolutions for each of the following chapters. In all but two instances they were chosen simply because they have been commonly regarded as revolutions by a substantial part of historical opinion. The remaining two – the fascist revolutions in Germany and Italy and the demise of the Soviet Union – have not yet perhaps been as fully incorporated into the conventional historiography of European revolutions, but nowadays no serious consideration of this subject could ignore them. Overall the list of revolutions selected is highly disparate. It embraces national revolutions against foreign domination, the upper-class revolution which installed William of Orange as King of England in 1688, the so-called ‘failed’ revolutions of 1848, revolutions of the Left and the Right as well as the ‘top-down’ revolution in Eastern Europe in 1989–91.

Given the varied nature of the revolutions under consideration and the individual interpretations of the writers, there is no uniform pattern to the following chapters. But, with differing degrees of emphasis, they address a number of key themes in order to illustrate and assess the causes, processes and outcomes of revolutionary movements. Placing each revolution in its particular political and social context, the authors discuss the importance of economic developments and conditions, the role of ideas or ideology and the impact of ‘external’ pressures. The process of revolution is examined from a variety of angles with suggestions about what turns a rebellion into a revolution, the relationship between upper and lower orders and some estimation of both short-term and longer term results. Two rather different chapters – one on the revolutionary tradition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a second assessing the reasons for the failure of a left-wing revolution to materialise in Western Europe in the years after 1917 – reflect on longer term developments which shaped and then limited revolutionary aspirations.

Revolutionary ruptures

None of the authors represented here disavows the revolutionary character of the events under consideration. Although Robert Daniels draws attention to the limited amount of violence associated with the demise of the Communist regimes and the non-revolutionary way in which their critics worked through existing institutions, the net effect was the political destruction of the old order and a revolutionary shift in the locus of power. There is a certain parallel here with Bill Speck’s view that although the rejection of James II in 1688 was a largely peaceful affair, conducted by relatively few people, it also involved a revolutionary shift of power – in this case from King to Parliament. His presentation provides cause for thought for those who think that violence is an essential characteristic of revolutions or that they must have a significant popular dimension or result in major transformations of the social structure. Both Marjolein ’t Hart and Colin Bonwick are also firm in their views that the revolts of the Dutch in the 1560s and the North Americans 200 years later cannot be classified as merely national rebellions against foreign domination, although this is how they began. They too were characterised by a profound rupture in the body politic, a transfer of sovereignty and a restructuring of the state apparatus itself. Indeed, these national revolutions generated a more stable and enduring political transformation than that achieved by the Bolsheviks or even by the French revolutionaries who bequeathed to France decades of restless searching for a stable form of government. Most short-lived were the political changes wrought by the extraordinarily rapid collapse of Europe’s principal monarchical regimes in a few weeks in 1848. A rapid conservative reaction left authoritarian regimes more deeply entrenched than before – a fact that has given rise to the somewhat paradoxical concept of a ‘failed revolution’ discussed by John Breuilly.

Yet, as he shows, the 1848 upheavals, despite their brevity, exemplify the way in which the weakening of the old order created space for competing centres of power and brought new actors on to the revolutionary stage for the first time. This process was writ large in those countries where newly empowered representative institutions – the English Parliament in the 1640s, the new French Legislative assembly in 1792, the Russian Duma in 1905 and again in 1917 – were then confronted by rival power bases in the form of the New Model Army, the Paris Commune, and workers’ councils (Soviets) respectively. These examples are only the most obvious of those which can be found in the following chapters to illustrate the way in which power exercised by crumbling regimes was dispersed and gathered up by a multiplicity of rival institutions or movements.

The resulting instability may help to explain why revolutions could end up by restoring order through the creation of state structures, which although very different from the old ones, might be just as repressive. However, as will be seen, this was far from an invariable outcome. A number of revolutions produced less authoritarian, less centralised and more representative regimes even if democracy remained a distant prospect. What defines a revolution as such is not the precise form of state which emerges from the battle for power but the rupturing and restructuring of the state and the purposes for which it is used. Put in such terms this may seem to be a very obvious statement. However, it is worth making given the frequently encountered assumption that revolutions are really about bringing power to the people and that those which simply replaced one band of robbers by another, to borrow Babeuf ’s colourful phrase, had either failed or were not revolutions at all (see pp.). Once this issue is grasped it becomes possible to describe Nazism, which as Roger Griffin stresses consciously aimed at the creation of a totalitarian state, as revolutionary.

Revolutions and the idea of progress

These reflections bring us to a deeper problem embedded in the historiography of revolutions: the notion that revolutions have been essentially progressive and liberating. Two major, if partially conflicting, schools of thought have been largely responsible for this. One may be broadly described as liberal and the other as Marxist, although these are umbrella labels and inadequately convey the variety of interpretations which have sheltered under each.

The former has some of its roots in Whig convictions that 1688 was one of the major landmarks in the recovery of lost liberties, a view later incorporated into supremely complacent accounts of the rise of freedom and democracy in England. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, despite the doubts of many intellectuals, a sort of French Whiggism also emerged in which the revolution was seen as carrying through the process begun by absolute monarchy of replacing feudal privilege by a rational and meritocratic system. The assumption that the early modern revolutions were essentially about the rise of liberalism and democracy lends itself even more readily to the American experience. In 1959 the American historian R.R. Palmer published the first volume of his Age of Democratic Revolution, a synthesis binding together the English, American and French revolutions within the perspective suggested by his chosen title. A few years later Hannah Arendt (a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who had settled in America in 1941) challenged Palmer’s interpretation in a brilliant and provocative study in which she argued that the French Revolution had been tragically side-tracked by the ‘attempt to liberate mankind from poverty by political means’. However, Arendt acknowledged that it was ‘precisely’ in the attempt to recover ancient liberties that the French and American revolutions ‘had their most conspicuous similarities’.¹

Arendt also remarked that in the eighteenth century, defence of freedom was synonymous with defence of property, a view articulated by John Locke with great clarity in the 1680s. It is an assumption, one might add, which still pervades much liberal thought today even though traditional Whig history has been under sustained attack for several decades. Indeed the notion that the natural end-point of the revolutionary process is a liberal capitalist democracy has been given encouragement by the collapse of the Communist regimes, a view most famously, if not most convincingly, propounded by Francis Fukuyama.² Robert Daniels offers a more measured analysis of the uncertainties of the post-revolutionary situation in Russia; he nonetheless suggests that what occurred in 1989 was a return to more moderate revolutionary principles, the culmination of a long revolutionary process for which he finds analogies in both France (1830) and England (1688).

Marxist historians have long been critical of the Whiggish tendency to gut revolutions of their social content by detaching high politics and constitutional issues from questions of class and economics. For Marx, the English and French revolutions were not just political revolutions but social and economic ones which brought the bourgeoisie to power. As Dick Geary points out, Marx concluded that freedom would not come without a further transformation of economic and social relationships. Nonetheless, Whig and Marxist history are in some ways closer than is often imagined. Marx did not doubt that in global terms the bourgeois revolutions constituted progress. The principle of equality before the law and parliamentary rule espoused by the new ruling class might not bring universal emancipation but they nonetheless represented an advance over a system based on feudal privilege. More importantly, the revolutions achieved the final liberation of capitalism from the constraints of feudalism and made possible a colossal increase in productive capacity which if used aright could benefit all.

Marxists, of course, have never accepted John Locke’s view that defence of liberty and property are not only synonymous but ought to be the prime function of government. But they have had no difficulty in accepting Locke as a historical source whose thought was an embodiment of bourgeois ideology. Defence of property rights was central to the early modern revolutions. On that much liberals and Marxists could agree, even if for the latter the historical process would not end with the establishment of capitalist regimes. These in turn would be overthrown by the proletariat which capitalism had brought into being. The poor would inherit the earth, classes would be abolished and the state apparatus, liberal or otherwise, which was required to maintain class rule, would wither away.

The collapse of Soviet style communism, even if it had long degenerated, as Robert Daniels suggests, into a ‘post-revolutionary, imperialist dictatorship’ (see p.), has taken socialism off the political agenda. In retrospect it is clear that the anticipated progress of revolutionary socialism in Europe had long been problematic. As Christopher Wrigley explains in his discussion of the interwar period, Lenin’s expectation that other European powers would follow Russia in revolution failed to materialise. Reaction, counterrevolution and fascism prevailed.

Of course it does not follow from any of this that those who believe revolutions have been the result of class struggle are necessarily mistaken.
However, well before the events of 1989 threw many left-wing intellectuals into a state of shock, the notion of bourgeois revolution had been subjected to sustained criticism by conservative and revisionist historians. It is now generally accepted, even by those who continue to think that the Dutch, English and French revolutions did advance the progress of capitalism, that this was more a result of these upheavals than a cause. The difficulty of identifying a consciously revolutionary capitalist class prior to these revolutions, despite the evident progress of ideas of economic liberalism by the mid-eighteenth century, has proved difficult. Moreover, as the contributions to this volume show, if the bourgeoisie played a part in precipitating the early modern revolutions so did nobles, gentry, artisans and peasants. If the bourgeoisie emerged as the principal beneficiaries it was the revolutions that made the bourgeoisie and not the other way round. Moreover, in the English case this argument is only sustainable if the gentry and aristocracy who remained politically dominant in the eighteenth century are considered as bourgeois by virtue of the fact that they were no longer feudal but capitalist landowners who invested in other capitalist enterprises. This problem impinges on complex and sometimes pugnacious historical debates about the nature of English society in the eighteenth century.

The contributors to this volume, it will be seen, vary in their approach to these issues. What remains inescapable is that the early modern revolutions occurred in the context of increasingly commercialised economies – indeed in the most advanced European countries – leaving historians with a problem of working out what the relationship was between these two phenomena – if any.

Revolution and modernisation

A possible response to the problem, entertained more seriously by some revisionist historians than the contributors to this volume, is to minimise the significance of social and economic change by stressing the impact of ‘external’ forces and events. Thus 1688 may be treated as an episode in European dynastic politics brought about by William of Orange and the Revolution of 1917 as a consequence of the First World War without which it is sometimes suggested Russia might well have developed into a liberal capitalist democracy. Of course it would be foolish to deny the way in which ‘external’ pressures contributed to creating revolutionary situations. In the case of the Dutch and American rebellions which were precipitated by the fiscal demands of imperial rulers, they are self-evident. Both France and Russia were embroiled in what proved to be disastrous foreign policies which sapped the prestige and resources of their respective rulers. Yet there were strong inducements for the Dutch and American rebels to retain the advantages brought by imperial protection and leadership. The unexpected transformation of these rebellions into national revolutions is only explicable, as our contributors show, through a careful analysis of the distinctive social and political structures of both countries and the tensions in their midst.

In the French and Russian cases the crucial question which arises is why formerly powerful monarchies no longer had the resolve or the means to carry out the reforms required if they were to sustain their position as great powers. Gwynne Lewis and Maureen Perrie draw attention to the structural weaknesses of the French and Russian states which both made necessary and impeded political and/or economic ‘modernisation’. This is a concept to which they return on several occasions. Its value is that it makes possible an analysis of ‘external’ pressures which does not merely simply counterpose them to social explanations. Modernisation in fact only makes full sense, as Skocpol has insisted, when employed to compare one regime with another.³ The problem facing the French regime in the eighteenth century was...