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It is often assumed that serious civil conflict is the consequence of challenges to the status quo undertaken by social and political groups that seek political power and the transformation of the social order. It is also generally held that civil conflict, potentially leading to civil war or revolution, is triggered on the left rather than the right.
There are some historical cases where this can plausibly be argued. The Russian Revolutions of 1917 can be interpreted this way, but it makes more sense to me to interpret them as the consequence of a crisis of the czarist regime following two and a half years of catastrophic war. The February Revolution of 1917 replaced the regime of Nicholas II with a short-lived liberal order that was itself turned out by the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power.
Lenin’s slogan, on which the Bolsheviks seized power, was “peace, bread and land”. The Bolsheviks held out hope for peace and a modicum of well-being to a population that had suffered millions of casualties and had been reduced to abject poverty.
Even if the Russian Revolutions don’t unequivocally illustrate civil conflicts triggered by the left, there have been a number of cases where such conflicts were indisputably begun on the right.
The civil conflict that opened the way for the French Revolution began on the right with the so-called “révolte nobiliaire” in 1787 a revolt of the nobility against the regime of Louis XVI. This revolt by the right opened the way for a transformative social revolution of the left that swept away the actors and institutions that had launched the révolte nobiliare, overturning the monarchy and the entrenched rights of the nobility in the process.
The French case is worth describing in some detail, because it illustrates so vividly how a conflict begun on behalf of a ruling class that fears its power is ebbing can turn in a completely unanticipated direction.
What made the French state vulnerable to the révolte nobiliare (and later the Revolution) was a predicament that people are familiar with today — government debt and the refusal of the rich and the privileged to pay higher taxes. The French state was deeply in debt in the 1780s as a result of a long series of wars they had fought, most recently as the ally of the Patriots during the American Revolutionary War.
The showdown between the privileged and the state began in 1787. The French government was desperately trying to raise taxes to pay its debts and to prevent default. As the ministers of Louis XVI were well aware, default would make future borrowing much more difficult. Government ministers sought to raise new revenues from all elements of French society, including the nobility, through higher customs duties, excise taxes, and the raising of additional sums through state monopolies on salt and tobacco. Most of the new taxes would have flowed from the non-privileged, but that did not stop the members of the nobility from resisting any heavier burdens for themselves through all the institutional means at their disposal.
On the eve of the revolution, French society was formally divided into three estates. The first estate was the clergy, numbering about one hundred thousand members, ranging from wealthy bishops to poor parish priests. The second estate, the nobility, numbered about four hundred thousand members. Among the nobles were those who had inherited their titles, as well as those whose titles were bestowed on them by the monarchy. These were mostly wealthy merchants and lawyers. Technically, there were two orders of nobles, the noblesse d’épée (nobles of the sword) and the noblesse de robe (nobles of the gown, made up of wealthy functionaries, lawyers, and merchants). The third estate was made up of everybody else in France, about twenty-three million people, 96 percent of the population.
Although France was becoming a mor...
