Scripting Revolution

A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions

Keith Michael Baker, Dan Edelstein, Keith Michael Baker, Dan Edelstein

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804796194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The "Arab Spring" was heralded and publicly embraced by foreign leaders of many countries that define themselves by their own historic revolutions. The contributors to this volume examine the legitimacy of these comparisons by exploring whether or not all modern revolutions follow a pattern or script. Traditionally, historians have studied revolutions as distinct and separate events. Drawing on close familiarity with many different cultures, languages, and historical transitions, this anthology presents the first cohesive historical approach to the comparative study of revolutions.

This volume argues that the American and French Revolutions provided the genesis of the revolutionary "script" that was rewritten by Marx, which was revised by Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, which was revised again by Mao and the Chinese Communist Revolution. Later revolutions in Cuba and Iran improvised further. This script is once again on display in the capitals of the Middle East and North Africa, and it will serve as the model for future revolutionary movements.

PART I

Genealogies of Revolution

Did the English Have a Script for Revolution in the Seventeenth Century?

TIM HARRIS

The seventeenth-century English joked about themselves being a rebellious people. “The King of Spain,” ran a common adage, was “said to be Rex Hominum, the king of men, his subjects being generally well affected towards him: the King of France, Rex Asinorum, the king of asses, whose subjects are forced to bear whatsoever taxes he is pleased to lay on their backs: the King of England, Rex Diablorum, the king of Devills, by reason of their many rebellions.”¹ The historiographer royal James Howell, writing in 1661 just after the restoration of the monarchy, asserted how England “hath bin fruitfull for Rebellions,” there having “hapned near upon a hundred” since the Norman Conquest in 1066.² Yet despite such self-awareness, and despite the fact that the English had two revolutions over the course of the seventeenth century, it has traditionally been thought that the English did not possess the modern concept of revolution in this time period. The first historian to write of “the English Revolution” was François Guizot in his Histoire de la révolution d’Angleterre of 1826, the preface of which contained an extended comparison between affairs in England and the French Revolution.³ In the seventeenth century, the word “revolution”—so we have been told—possessed a “mainly non-political meaning,” and was used predominantly in an astronomical sense, as in the revolution of the planets; if it was ever applied to politics, it carried a conservative meaning, as bringing “the situation back to what it had been before—to complete the historical cycle”: in short, a return to the status quo ante. Hence, contemporaries called the restoration of monarchy in 1660 a revolution, but referred to what we now call the English Revolution as “the Great Rebellion.” The Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, on the other hand, was indeed styled a revolution at the time, but this was supposedly “because so much of it was not in the modern sense revolutionary,” but rather an attempt to restore the old system.⁴

Such a view has proven remarkably resilient. It is, however, seriously misleading. Christopher Hill demonstrated more than a quarter of a century ago that the word “revolution” underwent a transformation in meaning over the course of the seventeenth century as a result of the profound political changes of the 1640s (though he did also note earlier usages of revolution not implying circularity), and concluded that the term had certainly acquired its modern political meaning well before 1688.⁵ David Cressy has likewise seen a key shift in meaning occurring in the mid-seventeenth century, suggesting that “under the pressure of events” the word “acquired new political and constitutional shadings” and came to be employed “metaphorically to signify a sudden and dramatic change, or significant and abrupt turnover in the politics and religion of the state.”⁶ Yet even this might put the emergence of these allegedly “new” shades of meaning too late. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first known use of “revolution” to mean the “overthrow of an established government or social order by those previously subject to it” and the “forcible substitution of a new form of government” to 1521, in a letter written by Thomas More to Cardinal Wolsey. In fact the letter is from 1526, although the five-year time difference is hardly significant; as the context makes clear, More presumed that Wolsey would have no trouble grasping his meaning, and thus he could not have been using the word in a novel way. Writing with regard to the internal conflict in Scotland during the minority of James V and the battle among rival Scottish factions for control of the young king’s body (the letter was written in the aftermath of the slaying of the Earl of Lennox at the Battle of Linlithgow on 4 September 1526), More reported how Henry VIII was pleased that the heads of the regency council, the Earls of Angus and Arran, seemed to be prospering “against theire enemyes,” but nevertheless remained concerned that the Chancellor, the Archbishop of Saint Andrews James Beaton, was using “all his possible power to procure [the Earls’] destruction, and to rere broilerie, warre and revolution in the Realme to the no little perell of the yong King.”⁷ The OED also notes a usage from 1569, in an English translation of a French work by Pierre Boaistuau (d. 1566), in which in reference to the turbulent history of Naples and the frequent overthrow of its kings by war it is observed: “of al the kingdoms of the earth, only this state of Naples hath exceeded in revolution, mutation, persecution and losse of blood.”⁸ One certainly should not attempt to make inferences about typical usage from two isolated examples; moreover, the OED also cites numerous usages from this time of the term “revolution” in a cyclical sense. Nevertheless, what we can say is that already in the sixteenth century there was available the concept of a revolution that involved the forcible overthrow of a reigning monarch by violence and bloodshed and the erection of a new regime, and that English readers would have recognized—and have been familiar with—the meaning of this term when used in this manner.

How, then, did the English use the term “revolution” in the seventeenth century, during their century of revolution? Clearly, the word possessed an array of closely related though ultimately discrete meanings, and we find it being used in a variety of ways. The problem facing the modern reader is that when the sense of a word transforms over time, the new meaning emerges gradually out of what was already implied in the old, as the word comes to be applied to new or altering circumstances; there is thus the risk that we can read our modern assumptions back into a word and see modern overtones when such overtones might not yet have been apparent to contemporaries. There was something about the imagery of revolving around that made it ultimately possible for revolution to come to designate the sort of radical rupture that we now associate with the term. When considering seventeenth-century usage, therefore, one must exercise extreme caution; it is often possible to detect alternative resonances that the term “revolution” might conceivably have held for contemporaries without being sure precisely how contemporaries would have understood the term in any given context. What we can say with confidence is that when the seventeenth-century English invoked the term “revolution” in a political context they invariably did not mean a return to the status quo ante. Most typically, they used the word to designate a sudden and dramatic change, or “a turning quite round,” to cite the definition Elisha Coles provided in his English-Latin dictionary of 1677, rather than “a turning round to the first point” (as in “the revolution of heaven”).⁹ This sudden and dramatic change might simply involve a change in personnel: we find the word “revolution,” for example, being used to describe what a later age might have thought of as a ministerial coup. But it could be a more fundamental alteration, such as a change in the political system itself. Often the term “revolution” was employed to refer to what we would think of as a “regime change.” Such a regime change might not necessarily have radical implications or involve what we would think of as being “revolutionary upheavals,” but it could do. Did the seventeenth-century English, then, have a script for revolution? If revolution meant in essence regime change, then the question “How to effect a revolution?” essentially translated into “How did one bring about a change of regime?” and this was something to which the seventeenth-century English certainly did give much thought. Since the monarchy in seventeenth-century England was deemed to be absolute and irresistible, the crucial question in the first instance became how could one resist an absolute regime. The question of what to replace that regime with once it had been effectively resisted came up later.

. . .

The word “revolution” and its plural “revolutions” were employed frequently in a political context in seventeenth-century England. One of its usages certainly was in the literal sense of things turning or revolving around, though without necessarily implying turning full cycle. Sir John Davies, in his history of Ireland written in 1612, observed how the conquest of Ireland was made “by slow steps and degrees, and by several attempts” across the ages, and that “there were sundry revolutions, as well of the English fortunes, as of the Irish”—“revolution” here carrying perhaps the sense of reversal (as well as overturning) but not quite putting things back to where they had started.¹⁰ When the Warwickshire-based doctor and translator Philemon Holland delivered a speech before James I at Coventry in 1617, he observed how this once-flourishing city, “by sublunary changes, and fatall revolutions,” had “falln to decay”; Holland brought this up precisely because he hoped that James might do something to reverse these “fatall revolutions” and help return Coventry to its status quo ante.¹¹

It is true that contemporaries did sometimes refer to the restoration of monarchy in 1660 as a revolution. The royalist astrologer George Wharton styled it “this happy, and (by many, almost) unexpected Revolution of Government; viz. of turning from Anarchy, to the most natural of all Governments, MONARCHY.”¹² The Anglo-Irish Protestant Richard Cox, in his history of Ireland written in the aftermath of the Jacobite war of 1689–91, observed how the Irish Catholics, although they welcomed the return of monarchy, nevertheless “sat still” during the spring of 1660 “and contributed nothing to this great Revolution.”¹³ Yet if 1660 was a revolution, it was because it involved a change or turnover in government; the fact that this particular change marked a restoration of the old system of government was incidental. The contemporary Scottish lawyer Sir George Mackenzie could call both the Restoration of 1660 and the far-reaching ministerial changes of 1663 in Scotland a “revolution.”¹⁴ Even Thomas Hobbes’s oft-quoted ascription of the Restoration as a revolution in his Behemoth (written c. 1668, though not published until 1679)—“I have seen in this revolution,” Hobbes wrote, “a circular motion, of the Sovereigne Power through two Usurpers Father and Son, from the late King to this his son”—makes it clear that he thought of a revolution as being a regime change and that other revolutions (besides “this” one) might not entail such a circular motion.¹⁵ One individual, writing in his commonplace book in the late 1690s, described as a “Revolution” both “the Return of Charles the Second” and “the coming of the Prince of Aurenge now King William the 3d,” yet this commonplacer made it clear that the term referred to “all Changes or Alterations of Government.”¹⁶

The congratulatory addresses delivered to Charles II from up and down the country in May 1660 frequently invoked the notion of revolution (or rather, the plural revolutions), but principally to refer to developments prior to the actual Restoration itself. For instance, when a group of twenty Puritan ministers from London and Westminster rejoiced how God had, “after many great revolutions, and wonderfull providences,” brought His Majesty to “so peaceable possession of [his] imperial throne,” they were clearly alluding to the numerous regime changes and upheavals that had happened since the execution of Charles I in January 1649, though they perhaps also saw the Restoration itself the last of these revolutions.¹⁷ Likewise, the inhabitants of Totnes in Devon announced how they rejoiced at “the eminent appearing of the hand of God for your Majestie in such late miraculous revolutions by overturning and overturning and overturning even untill he hadd as itt were with his owne Finger chalk’d out a pathe for your Majestie’s happy restauration to your Father’s throne”—the triple emphasis on “overturning” leaves us in no doubt about the essential meaning of the term for the framers of this address, albeit the Restoration itself was the outcome of this process of overturning.¹⁸ The inhabitants of Lyme Regis, Dorset, by contrast, saw the revolutions and the Restoration as distinct: their address stated how they admired and adored “That Stupendious Providence of Almighty God,” whereby after “all these Illegal Changes and Revolutions of Government, by which we have been hurried to and fro, since the Foundations were overthrowne,” they were “now at last mercifully reduced to An Hopefull Condition of Ease and Settlement, By the miraculous Restitution” of Charles “to the Possession and Exercise of [His] Royall Rights and Government.”¹⁹

To think of the upheavals in the three kingdoms in the 1640s and 1650s as being revolutions was therefore already common by the time of the Restoration.²⁰ Charles II invoked this vocabulary himself. In his Declaration of Breda, issued in April 1660 on the eve of his return, he made reference to “the continued Distractions of so many Years, and so many and great Revolutions,” and he used this language again in letters subsequently written to the House of Commons, the Lord Mayor of London, and General George Monck (the military leader who was in effect the architect of the Restoration).²¹ Historiographer royal Howell likewise did so in his Twelve Several Treatises, of the Late Revolutions in These Three Kingdoms; revealingly, this work was also published under the variant title Divers Historicall Discourses of the late Popular Insurrections in Great Britain, and Ireland. Similarly, John Paterson (the future bishop of Edinburgh and archbishop of Glasgow), preaching a thanksgiving sermon in Scotland for the restoration of monarchy in 1660, condemned the types of arguments that had been used to justify the usurpation of royal authority “in these late Troubles and Revolutions.”²²

Interesting insight into the multiple resonances of the term “revolution,” as well as the potential for unintended slippage, can be gleaned from the reflections of Nicholas French, the Catholic Bishop of Ferns, on the Irish Rebellion of 1641 in a tract published in 1675. French’s objective was to clear the majority of the Catholic population of Ireland from the charge of rebellion. Some evil men, he alleged, had misled Charles I by informing him “that the Catholics of Ireland without discrimination had entered into a Rebellion,” when “only some discontented men began a Revolution in the North [Ulster].” In fact, French affirmed, the Catholics of the other three provinces, as well as those of Ulster who did not join this “first rysing in the North”—note this revolution is seen as being the same as a “rising” of “discontented men”—“lived in soe happy a state and soe opulent and rich, that they would never abett a Revolution for gaining other men’s estates.” Indeed, French continued, “all those . . . and theire Fathers before them” had remained “faithfull to the Crowne,” as was shown “in the warrs of Desmon[d], Tyron[e], and other smaller Revolutions” (an allusion to rebellions in Ireland under Elizabeth in the later sixteenth century). By “Revolution for gaining other men’s estates” French presumably meant an uprising or a war intended to achieve this objective. There is possibly an implication of a revolution in estate ownership, in the sense of a sudden and dramatic forcible change or even “a turning round to the first point,” since in the North the rebels wanted to undo the Protestant Plantation of Ulster and seize back lands they had lost following the Flight of the Earls in 1607; but was French hinting at that, could other people have seen that as an implication even if French did not intend to imply it, did the word subconsciously seem to him suitable to use in this context because of these various resonances even if he was not consciously aware of this when he first inked the word on the page, or are we reading too much into this because of our own knowledge of the issues at stake in the Irish rebellion, as well as our awareness of how the term “revolution” in modern times has come to be associated with a radical redistribution of land ownership? Having used language that seems to associat...