The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited: A Comparative Analysis of England, France, and Russia 110704572X, 9781107045729

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1 Ancien Régimes
Geopolitical Dilemmas Unresolved
The Domestic Inadequacies of Divine-Right Monarchy
Three “Prodromal Crises”: 1628-29, 1905, and 1771-74
2 Transitions
Late Winters of Discontent
Foreign/Domestic Interactions and Absolutist State Collapses
The Popular Revolutionary Awakening: Classes and Masses
3 Revolutionary “Honeymoons”?
The Precarious Gains of Reform
Reform, Polarization, and Radicalization
Three “Points of No Return”
4 The “Revolutionizing” of the Revolutions
Chronologies of Radicalization
War and the Radicalization of Politics
Élitists and Non-Élitists: Uneasy Partners (?) in Deepening Revolutions
5 Revolutionary Climacterics
The Foreign and Domestic Dialectics of “Terror”
The Reconsolidation of State Power
Disillusionment on the Extreme Left
6 Thermidor?
The Complexities and Contradictions of Thermidor
Thermidorian Geopolitics: Expansionism and Expediency
Thermidorian “Crises of Legitimacy”
Conclusion
Suggestions for Further Reading
General Revolutionary Theory and Revolutionary Historiography
Ancien Régimes
Transitions: Breakthroughs to Revolution
Revolutionary “Honeymoons?”
The “Revolutionizing” of the Revolutions
Revolutionary Climacterics
Thermidor?
“Revolutions from Below” and “Revolutions from Above”
Index

Citation preview

The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited A Comparative Analysis of England, France, and Russia

This study aims to update a classic of comparative revolutionary analysis, Crane Brinton’s 1938 study The Anatomy of Revolution. It invokes the latest research and theoretical writing in history, political science, and political sociology to compare and contrast, in their successive phases, the English Revolution of 1640–60, the French Revolution of 1789–99, and the Russian Revolution of 1917–29. This book intends to do what no other comparative analysis of revolutionary change has yet adequately done. It not only progresses beyond Marxian socioeconomic “class” analysis and early “revisionist” stresses on short-term, accidental factors involved in revolutionary causation and process; it also finds ways to reconcile “state-centered” structuralist accounts of the three major European revolutions with postmodernist explanations of those upheavals that play up the centrality of human agency, revolutionary discourse, mentalities, ideology, and political culture. Bailey Stone is Professor of European History and International Affairs at the University of Houston. Prior to his time at the University of Houston, he taught at Princeton University, and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and his B.A. from Bowdoin College. Stone is the author of two books on judicial politics in old regime France: The Parlement of Paris, 1774–1789 (1981) and The French Parlements and the Crisis of the Old Regime (1986). He is also the author of two books on the causes and trajectory of the French Revolution: The Genesis of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1994) and Reinterpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2002). His work has been published in many leading journals, including Eighteenth-Century Studies, French Historical Studies, and the Journal of Modern History.

The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited A Comparative Analysis of England, France, and Russia

BAILEY STONE University of Houston

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107045729 © Bailey Stone 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Stone, Bailey, 1946– The anatomy of revolution revisited : a comparative analysis of England, France, and Russia / Bailey Stone. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-04572-9 (hardback) 1. Revolutions – Case studies. 2. Great Britain – History – Puritan Revolution, 1642–1660. 3. France – History – Revolution, 1789–1799. 4. Soviet Union – History – Revolution, 1917–1921. I. Title. jc491.s79 2013 303.6ʹ4–dc23 2013019457 isbn 978-1-107-04572-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

This volume is affectionately dedicated to all scholars, teachers, and students in the field of European revolutionary change

Contents

Preface

page ix

1

Introduction. From Revolutionary Theory to Revolutionary Historiography: England, France, and Russia Ancien R´egimes

2 3

Transitions: Breakthroughs to Revolution Revolutionary “Honeymoons”?

111 186

4 5 6

The “Revolutionizing” of the Revolutions Revolutionary Climacterics Thermidor?

254 318 394

Conclusion. “Revolutions from Below” and “Revolutions from Above”

474

1 45

Suggestions for Further Reading

491

Index

523

vii

Preface

“Comparative historical analysis works best,” Theda Skocpol asserted in 1979 in the Introduction to her landmark study States and Social Revolutions, “when applied to a set of a few cases that share certain basic features. Cases need to be carefully selected and the criteria for grouping them together made explicit.”1 This is excellent advice for any comparativist, especially if he or she is undertaking, as Skocpol did, an analysis of several major sociopolitical revolutions. In my particular case, the reader might well ask, why should I devote so much time to reappraising the causation, trajectories, and implications of (specifically) the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution, the French Revolution of 1789–99, and the Russian Revolution of 1917–29? That these upheavals had previously attracted the attention of an eminent American historian, Crane Brinton, in his pioneering and elegantly written classic The Anatomy of Revolution, is all very well and good, and might be seen as providing in itself a rationale for revisiting the subject – if only to produce a badly needed “update” to Brinton’s analysis.2 Yet are there additional reasons why I, too, should be that concerned to draw comparisons and contrasts between these three particular revolutions – as opposed to any others? In this brief Preface to what will be a fairly long work, I would suggest that there are, in fact, several compelling reasons for my doing so. I could, of course, start off here by noting that I am and have always been a Europeanist – and, at that, a Europeanist with a pronounced weakness for eighteenth-century and revolutionary French history – and that I consequently lack the kind of research competence in (or at least general familiarity with) 1 2

Cited from Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 40. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1938). Brinton brought out “revised” and “expanded” versions of this book in 1952 and 1965.

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areas outside of Europe that many regional specialists, political scientists, and comparative sociologists could legitimately claim. Consequently, because dramatic and violent transformations of states and societies within “Europe” lie somewhat more securely within my scholarly ken than do transformative cataclysms in, say, Eastern or South Asia, Africa, or the Americas, they are that much likelier to elicit from me an analytical commentary that (I can only hope) fair-minded readers will be able to find informed and worth pursuing. Yet other, more substantive considerations have also motivated me in my choice of revolutions to analyze, compare, and contrast. For one thing, as the entire book to come should demonstrate, historians who, like Crane Brinton, have devoted themselves primarily to European revolutionary change have quite rightly developed “stage” or “natural life-cycle” interpretations of what, precisely, transpired in England from 1640 to 1660, in France from 1789 to 1799, and in Russia from 1917 to the late 1920s. They have, that is to say, plotted out a general progression in all three cases from violent overthrows of inefficient, antiquated, and noncompetitive “old regimes” to early, hopeful “honeymoon” seasons of reform in state and society to increasingly radicalized, even “terroristic” systems to convalescent “new regimes” in which public policies seem – more or less – to “work better” than in the past. This is to say that, by concentrating on the process of change as such, Brinton and likeminded analysts have isolated three periods in European history that are not only amenable to comparative analysis but also are strikingly different from everything before or since, at least in English, French, and Russian history. This in turn means that to analyze these three revolutions in such processual terms can allow today’s specialist to distinguish between “revolution” as experienced at length in England during 1640–60 and the much more condensed “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–89; between “revolution” as it unfolded in France during the 1790s and “revolution” as it briefly flared up in 1830, 1848, and 1871; and between “revolution” as it developed in Russia from 1917 to 1929 and the cataclysmic but less “processual” statist developments ensuing under Stalin in the 1930s.3 Again, to hone in on the process of revolution during the years 1640–60, 1789–99, and 1917–29 in England, France, and Russia, respectively, can afford the scholar something of a counterweight to analysis of revolutionary causation and consequences, thereby requiring that he or she confront the actual, flesh-and-blood protagonists in the three revolutions and grapple with issues of personal agency and contingency that are all too easily deemphasized or overlooked altogether in exclusively “structuralist” accounts of these events. 3

This is one reason why I tend – and I explain this in detail in the Introduction and Conclusion – to reject the arguments of Steve Pincus and others minimizing the “revolutionary stature” of the events in England during 1640–60 as compared to those of the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. But for an appetizer, see Steven C. A. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), esp. the extended historiographical discussion on revolutions in Chapter 2.

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Then, again, there is the question of the unique international context of these three revolutions. As readers will come to see in Chapter 1, all three of our upheavals, as defined in the preceding paragraphs, occurred within a fiercely competitive “system” of European (or, in Russia’s case, at least Europeanoriented) states contending for security, survival, and (at times) hegemony – a dynamic, cutthroat system rooted originally in the localized diplomacy of fifteenth-century Italy, but then spilling out into the rest of western and central Europe and, eventually, catching up in its toils all of Eurasia and (by the twentieth century) the entire globe. What this meant most fundamentally was that, in our three successive revolutions, the origins, process, and results of transformative change in both government and society reflected at all times a dialectical relationship between increasingly severe external and internal pressures on governance. In other words, as readers move in our analysis from England to France to Russia, they will find diplomats, administrators, politicians, polemicists, and just “ordinary” people entrapped in ever more sharply defined conflicts between statist objectives and concerns, on the one hand, and humdrum domestic concerns of a social, cultural, and economic nature, on the other. Just as all three of our revolutions reveal in the way they unfolded internally a roughly similar sequence of events, so they all – and they alone – inhabited a world of geopolitics whose “system” of alliances and counter-alliances and imperatives of prestige, security, and hegemonic drives, developing by fits and starts over a span of 450 years or so, and radiating outward from its European epicenter, stamps it as unique in history. Finally, what helps to distinguish the English, French, and Russian Revolutions, as defined previously, from both earlier upheavals of a less politically and socially concentrated nature and later sociopolitical maelstroms in the “extra-European” world is the fact – obvious, perhaps, but significant nonetheless – that they broke out in and (to varying extents) further modernized Great Powers that had been recognized for centuries as sovereign states untrammeled by any kind of “colonialist” dependency on other Powers. They stood, in a sense, halfway between the ever-imperiled, semi-dependent citystates and ducal territories of a not-too-distant, medieval European past and the ancient civilizations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas whose territorial integrity, cultural identity and dignity, and very existence were to be so brutally threatened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the seemingly irresistible forces unleashed across continents and seas by what we retrospectively term the “New Imperialism.” In this sense, too, we appear to have a “family” of revolutions distinct both from what had come before in the way of societal change and from what was destined to come in the future. Of course, writing this Preface is especially pleasurable in that it furnishes me the opportunity to acknowledge some of those individuals without whose personal support, professional counsel, and contributions to the field of

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revolutionary studies I could not have possibly written this extended essay of synthesis. My thanks go first of all to two of my long-standing friends and colleagues, Jack Goldstone and Tom Kaiser. At various critical points over the past ten years, they have encouraged me in my labors on this ambitious project; since early in 2011 they have played an especially indispensable role as careful and judiciously critical readers of my manuscript in its initially completed form. I thank them wholeheartedly for the time they took out of their own busy schedules to assist me in this respect, and can only hope that the arguments I put forth in these pages will in no way cause them to regret the long hours so spent on my behalf! I have also profited from the advice and ideas of a number of other friends/scholars. Several of my current or past confr`eres here at the University of Houston have (I trust) enabled me to avoid some misstatements concerning issues of revolutionary causation, process, and consequences in the cases of seventeenth-century England and early twentieth-century Russia, and enriched my knowledge of these two countries: I refer, specifically, to Cathy Patterson, our Tudor-Stuart specialist, and Rick Thorpe, an expert in the performing arts and culture of late Imperial and early revolutionary Russia. I should also acknowledge at this point two University of Houston Faculty Development Leaves: the first one, awarded for the 2002–03 academic year, gave me the time I needed free of the usual teaching and administrative responsibilities to begin seriously to conceive this study, and the second, awarded for 2009–10, made it possible for me actually to undertake (and largely complete) the writing of what has become my longest manuscript to date. I have also benefited in the usual ways from scholarly exchanges at major conferences I have attended in recent years. In this connection, I would single out for special mention two noteworthy symposia: Into Print: European Cultures of Enlightenment, a meeting held at Princeton University in April 2006 to celebrate the accomplishments of my erstwhile mentor Robert Darnton; and Liberty, Monarchy, and Regicide: The Trial and Execution of Charles I, a symposium sponsored by the Liberty Fund in Cleveland, Ohio, in October 2007. (In the latter connection, I should register special thanks to David Carrithers of the Department of Political Science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, who apparently honored me with the assumption that I had something meaningful to say about the English Revolution and the dramatic run-up to the execution of Charles I!) As many of my readers will happily attest, such exchanges can play a crucial role in stimulating scholars to rethink old issues and thus be in a position to frame conventional questions in novel and ultimately revelatory ways. I am grateful as well to Lewis Bateman, currently Senior Editor of Political Science and History at Cambridge University Press in New York City, and to his editorial associates, for helping me to prepare my manuscript for publication. This will be the third time I have had a book come out with Cambridge; the

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relationship has been a fruitful one, and I can only hope that it will continue in the future. Finally – in connection with this project as with all my earlier works – I owe much to some very special people in the private corridors of my life. As is invariably the case, they know who they are.

Introduction From Revolutionary Theory to Revolutionary Historiography: England, France, and Russia

In the ivied towers of history, political science, and sociology, recent decades have witnessed an explosion of literature on the comparative analysis of sociopolitical revolutions. There can be no doubt that, however broadly or narrowly the term “revolution” be construed, theorists in the field will always acknowledge a lasting debt to Crane Brinton. In 1938, this distinguished student of French history first published The Anatomy of Revolution.1 This pathblazing comparison of the English, American, French, and Russian Revolutions has long served (in this and subsequent editions) as a standard reference work on the subject of revolutionary change, even as historians, political scientists, and political sociologists have inevitably offered new typologies of and explanations for major upheavals in politics and society.2 In light of subsequent scholarship, however, and particularly in the wake of recent earthshaking events in the erstwhile Soviet Union, a follow-up to Brinton’s pioneering analysis would seem to be indicated. Such a study, unlike The Anatomy of Revolution, could focus exclusively on European revolutions as such, thereby leaving developments in eighteenth-century “British” America to authorities in that field. Before speculating on the organization and interpretative thrust of such a study, however, we should first recapitulate what Brinton actually had to say, and then discuss the extensive theoretical literature on the Brintonian schema and on some of the questions it inescapably raises. After doing so, and after summarily relating the successive schools of thought on the English, French, 1 2

Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1938). Brinton brought out “revised” and “expanded” editions of this work in 1952 and 1965. He died in 1968. For a discussion of the scholarship in the field, at least up to the 1990s, refer to Michael S. Kimmel, Revolution: A Sociological Interpretation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

1

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and Russian Revolutions to evolving revolutionary theory, we can then introduce our own (updated) comparative explanation of the causes, process, and results of Brinton’s three classic European upheavals. Crane Brinton, it is true, was only the most celebrated of those numerous scholars who over the years have sought through the use of metaphors or conceptual schemes appropriated from the natural sciences to illuminate the “life cycles” or “natural” sequences of stages of carefully defined subgroups of sociopolitical revolutions.3 Yet, given the unique resonance of his work in the field, it seems proper at this point to concentrate in particular on the Brintonian construct. Borrowing from the imagery and vocabulary of medical pathology, Brinton likened each of the three European revolutions to “a kind of fever” invading and sorely testing a host (political) organism. First, Brinton presented the “causes” of revolution as a cluster of mutually dependent variables (the so-called “prodromal symptoms” of the impending disease). Then, there followed the successive stages of the “disease” or revolution: that is, the onset of the upheaval, which in its earliest phase briefly featured new forces coalescing against the antediluvian and discredited ancien r´egime; a subsequent headlong plunge into deeper “delirium,” with “moderates” being out-maneuvered by “extremists;” a veritable crisis or “reign of Terror and Virtue;” and, finally, a restoration of relative stability (“Thermidor” and beyond) revealing a patient – or, in this case, a postrevolutionary society – in convalescence, sadder, perhaps, but wiser. Much as an individual who is able to survive a pathogenic assault emerges from the trauma temporarily weakened yet in a fundamental sense strengthened, so (affirmed Brinton) the government-and-society undergoing the disruptive experience of revolution emerges from it more “functional,” more of a going concern, than it was previously. This is true despite the postrevolutionary regime’s prolonged susceptibility to “pathological” sequelae, that is, to “a series of lesser revolutions in which the forces present in the initial one are worked out.”4 Such, in brief, is the schema developed by Crane Brinton to anatomize the “natural” life-cycle of revolution as it ran its course in the countries under consideration. It is a way of conceptualizing revolutionary change that has provided stimulating fare for social scientists in the field whether they have confined themselves to examining meticulously defined subgroups of revolutions or aspired to characterize and account for revolutions of all types in all possible temporal and spatial settings. At the same time, however, such theorists, even if intrigued by Brinton’s ideas on the subject, have naturally enough hastened to criticize what they have seen as their problematic aspects.

3

4

Among other works in the genre are Lyford P. Edwards, The Natural History of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927); George S. Pettee, The Process of Revolution (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938); Rex D. Hopper, “The Revolutionary Process,” Social Forces 28 (1950): 270–79; and Jaroslav Krejci, Great Revolutions Compared: The Search for a Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). See Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution, esp. pp. 13–20 and 227–28.

Introduction

3

Most of them have granted a qualified pass to Brinton’s overall schema, at least where England, France, and Russia are concerned. Chalmers Johnson, for instance, long associated with what some call “systems/value consensus” sociology, once said that while there might be “room to argue over Brinton’s descriptions of particular stages and over whether these actually occurred in all . . . of the revolutions he compares,” his formulation in general “remains our richest and most elegantly written elaboration of stage theory.” For Johnson, the chief problem with Brinton was not so much his choice of conceptual metaphor or his postulating of specific, sequential phases of revolution as it was his failure to account convincingly “for the movement from one phase of revolution to another” – in other words, to furnish for the reader “a model of the revolutionary process that encompasses all the aspects of revolution, incorporates both actor-oriented and structural variables, and is sensitive to the contingencies that may arise when all the different variables are combined.” Still, however much Johnson accentuated the need for “a theory . . . that can account for all the major contingencies that arise during an actual revolutionary situation,” he remained persuaded that “the most famous and still the most powerful stage or life-cycle theory is Crane Brinton’s.”5 Brinton’s application of “stage” or “life-cycle” theory to what Johnson in the 1960s had termed the classic “Jacobin” revolutions in Europe has still found some specialist favor in these early years of the twenty-first century. The recently deceased Martin Malia, for example, although complaining at one point that Brinton’s conceptual schema lacked substantive “ideological” content and was extended too easily from France to England and Russia, nonetheless admitted at another point that The Anatomy of Revolution remained “the work closest to being a classic” and allowed that its organizational scenario “is indeed a commonsense description of what goes on during a major European upheaval.” Some of the specific parallels unearthed among these revolutions by Brinton were, said Malia grudgingly, “genuinely illuminating.”6 Even more recently, sociologist Jack Goldstone has averred that “the best-developed theory of revolutionary processes remains the classic ‘natural history’ approach;” Brinton, he concedes, “laid out a process of revolution that has become the standard view of revolutionary sequences.” True, The Anatomy of Revolution provides no explanatory key to the Chinese and other “Third World” revolutions of the twentieth century, and does not, for that matter, even account satisfactorily for all of the complexities encountered in the European revolutions themselves. Nevertheless, Goldstone finds Brinton’s analysis to be “fairly accurate in describing the course of those revolutions;” as such, it still merits the attention of those engaged in this field of studies.7 5 6 7

Chalmers Johnson, Revolutionary Change, 2nd ed. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1982), pp. 182–84, 187. Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Terence Emmons (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006). Jack A. Goldstone, “Rethinking Revolutions: Integrating Origins, Processes, and Outcomes,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29 (2009), pp. 18–32. I thank

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However reassuring the generally positive tenor of such learned commentary over the years, it offers a cautionary note for any historian wishing to follow in Brinton’s footsteps. He or she may hesitate before venturing (in sociologist Michael Kimmel’s words) “to overemphasize the French case as the template for all revolutionary events.”8 Even if the stages sequence theory laid out in The Anatomy of Revolution be retained in one form or another, the historian must not allow revolutionary experiences in seventeenth-century England, eighteenth-century France, and twentieth-century Russia to be subordinated too tightly to the temporal requirements of such a theory. Sociologist Kimmel reminds us in this connection that Lyford P. Edwards, a full-fledged member of the “natural history school of revolution” even before Brinton joined the club, warned early on that “it is the easiest thing imaginable to draw up an arbitrary series of stages and then twist and torture the data to fit this Procrustean bed.”9 It is well to sound Edwards’ cautionary note, and indeed the comparative analysis to follow will do so repeatedly. Yet, it is also only fair to note that Brinton, himself, was at all times sensitive to this issue, and was quick to acknowledge the limits as well as the descriptive and explanatory power of the “uniformities” he traced through the English, French, and Russian Revolutions. To argue (as this study will) that in each of these upheavals there was something of a progression from an early “honeymoon” phase of change to a period of radicalization to a “high” season of “virtue and terror” to a “Thermidorian Reaction” of sorts is not by any means to sacrifice a critical perception of differences among as well as similarities between these tumultuous sequences of events. Yet if something of a consensus has emerged and (however tenuously) held among specialists in revolutionary studies regarding Brintonian “life-cycle” theory as applied to the process or course of revolution in these European settings, there is general scholarly discord when it comes to issues of causation and consequences of revolution. This is especially the case in connection with the former issue. Indeed, as far back as the 1960s, historian Lawrence Stone, expatiating on and essentially agreeing with the strictures of political scientist Harry Eckstein on this subject, was unsparingly critical of Brinton (and assorted others) who had plunged into the perilous explanatory waters of revolutionary causation. Such authors, Stone complained, had produced conflicting laundry lists of hypothetical intellectual, economic, social, and political “causes” of revolutions. “None of these explanations,” he conceded, “are invalid in themselves, but they are often difficult or impossible to reconcile one with another, and are so diverse in their range and variety as to be virtually impossible to fit

8 9

Professor Goldstone for referring me to this article. See also Goldstone’s earlier full-length comparative study, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Kimmel, Revolution, p. 52. Ibid., p. 53.

Introduction

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into an ordered, analytical frame-work.”10 Yet, however “cruelly” Eckstein, Stone and others have exposed the “subjectivity, ambiguity, and partial selfcontradiction” of causal analyses adduced by Brinton and others,11 they have at least underscored the importance of the issue of causation and encouraged other theorists to confront it in their work. The aforementioned Chalmers Johnson, for example, even while eulogizing Brinton as “unique among modern theorists of revolution” for the attention he devoted to ruling classes and to potentially destabilizing divisions in old regime ruling circles, in the same breath found fault with Brinton for his less than “exhaustive” treatment of these and other “prodromal symptoms” of revolution in the cases of Stuart England, Bourbon France, and Romanov Russia. For Johnson, one of the most prominent and prolific “systems/value consensus” or “structural/functionalist” sociologists in the arena of theorized revolutionary change, a vexing question remained in the wake of Brintonian and all other “stages” or “life-cycle” analyses: “Why do some social systems with all these symptoms of dissynchronization still manage to avoid revolution, whereas others succumb?”12 Social scientists of one persuasion or another have repeatedly attempted to deal with this generally perceived shortcoming of Brintonian-style explications of revolutionary causation. Many of them have devised ambitious schemata purporting to apply to sociopolitical upheavals in all (or most) “early modern” and “modern” historical situations. Chalmers Johnson, for instance, argued that revolutions have occurred when what he termed “disequilibrated social systems,” weighed down by accumulating “multiple dysfunctions,” and weakened further by their intransigent and incompetent ruling elites, have been ´ propelled toward fatal breakdowns by “accelerators” of various types – factors such as defeats in war, the appearance of truly revolutionary parties, the emergence of charismatic leaders, and so forth. Johnson proceeded on from this position to develop a typology of six forms of insurrection characterized by their targets to be overthrown, their social composition, their motivating ideology and objectives, and their levels of organization, and covering a vast range of societies in several continents over recent (and, in some cases, not-so-recent) centuries.13 Other theorists over the years have developed explanations of revolutionary causation focusing primarily on the theme of state modernization. Notable 10

11 12 13

Lawrence Stone, “Theories of Revolution,” World Politics 18, no. 2 (1966): 159–76. See also Harry Eckstein, “On the Etiology of Internal War,” History and Theory 4 (1965): 133– 63. Refer also to Perez Zagorin, “Theories of Revolution in Contemporary Historiography,” Political Science Quarterly 88, no. 1 (1973): 23–52. Ibid., p. 8. Johnson, Revolutionary Change, p. 184. Refer in this connection to Johnson, Revolution and the Social System (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Studies, 1964), and to Autopsy on People’s War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

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among them have been S. N. Eisenstadt and Samuel Huntington. Eisenstadt’s most significant work, entitled Revolution and the Transformation of Societies, maintained that revolutions stem from fateful conjunctures of “structural” features involving the inability of social systems, and especially their ruling classes, to accommodate and master the tensions induced by the onset of modernization. In such an explanatory model, the great European revolutions make up only one of many categories of possible sociopolitical cataclysms.14 In his somewhat earlier tome, Samuel Huntington had said very much the same thing, arguing that social and economic changes such as “urbanization, increases in literacy and education, industrialization, mass media expansion,” and so on, undermine traditional sources of political authority and traditional statist institutions and “enormously complicate the problems of creating new bases of political association and new political institutions combining legitimacy and effectiveness.” As a result, “political instability and disorder” arise in such societies; truly revolutionary situations are potentially created as the process of modernization gives rise to a perilous gap between social mobilization and the capacity of traditional political institutions to absorb the increasingly insistent demands of those so mobilized. New expectations and demands are not met; potential challengers to the old regimes are not adequately accommodated; and so revolutions (in this generalized schema) are the result.15 Yet other specialists endeavoring to account for revolutionary change in inclusive theoretical terms have come up with so-called “aggregate social psychological models” that proceed from observations about the personal motivations of leaders and followers in revolutionary movements rather than from commentary on the processes of state modernization and their impact on selected groups in society. During the 1970s, for example, both James Davies and Ted Robert Gurr resorted to the kind of “relative deprivation theory,” with its famous J-curve of frustrated “rising expectations,” that obviously harkened back to Tocquevillian insights into the origins of the French Revolution. Davies applied such a theory to a dizzying variety of disparate historical cases ranging from the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century to the American Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century to the Nazi movement, the Egyptian Nasser “revolution,” and the American civil rights struggle in the twentieth century.16 Ted R. Gurr, appropriating these notions for his own purposes, tried to develop “relative deprivation” (i.e., RD) theory into a model that could be used to predict more or less when, and under what kinds of historical circumstances, revolutionary states of mind could reasonably be expected to trigger outbursts of truly revolutionary behavior.17 At the very least, both scholars managed to 14 15 16 17

Refer to S. N. Eisenstadt, Revolutions and the Transformation of Societies (New York: Free Press, 1978). Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968). See James C. Davies, When Men Revolt and Why (New York: Free Press, 1971). Consult two works by Ted R. Gurr: Why Men Rebel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971); and Rogues, Rebels and Reformers (Beverly Hills, Calif.: SAGE, 1976).

Introduction

7

venture beyond facile concentrations on individual psychological states, and moreover avoided falling into the trap of equating revolutionary initiatives with non-normative, even “pathological” behavior. Yet, as time has passed, an ever-growing number of specialists in the field, dissatisfied with analysts stressing aggregate psychological theories of revolutionary causation as well as with most of their predecessors in revolutionary studies, have (in Michael Kimmel’s words) endeavored to “account for revolutions by reference to longterm structural shifts in the relationships among classes, between classes and the state, and between the state and the international arenas (geopolitical and economic) in which it is institutionally located.”18 The need for what is now usually referred to as a “structuralist” explication of the gestation and onset of revolutions gave rise to work in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s by a host of scholars ranging from Barrington Moore, Jr. to Ellen Kay Trimberger to Randall Collins to Perry Anderson.19 Other theorists have since added their own insights to a field that, even today, remains more than ever (as John Foran has aptly put it) “a collective enterprise, more so than most, given the complexities of the debates and the diversity of the historical material.”20 Still, given our primary preoccupation with European revolutions as such, and with Brintonian-style, comparative “stage-sequence” approaches to those upheavals, it might pay special dividends at this point to reassess one particular “structuralist” whose comparative analysis of France, Russia, and China remains uniquely pertinent for anyone desiring to “update” the Brintonian argument for England, France, and Russia. This political sociologist, whose work has surely affected all aspects of the post-1970s scholarly debate over revolutionary causation, is Theda Skocpol. In her landmark States and Social Revolutions, published in 1979, this onetime student of Barrington Moore, Jr., sharing something of her illustrious mentor’s preoccupation with peasant fortunes and state development in a comparative global context of state-imposed “modernization,” argued for a temporal shift forward from Brinton’s predominantly European-focused England/France/Russia comparison to what we could term a more Eurasianfocused French/Russian/Chinese “comparative historical analysis.”21 In doing

18 19

20

21

Kimmel, Revolution, p. 82. See, for example, Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Ellen Kay Trimberger, Revolutions from Above: Military Bureaucrats and Development in Japan, Turkey, Egypt, and Peru (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1978); Randall Collins, Sociology since Midcentury (New York: Academic Press, 1981); and Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974). John Foran, ed., Theorizing Revolutions (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 7. For a wide-ranging variety of commentaries on “structuralism” in revolutionary analysis, consult the valuable essays in this volume by Foran himself, Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, Jack A. Goldstone, Eric Selbin, and others. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

8

The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited

this, Skocpol, even as she relegated the seventeenth-century “Puritan Revolution” in England to something of a second-class status (likening it, in some respects, to the failed or “incomplete” European revolutions of 1848), took considerable pains to distinguish between Brintonian and other “naturalhistorical” views on revolutionary causation and her own views on the subject. Although she readily noted that “natural historians” such as Lyford Edwards, Crane Brinton, and George Pettee had advanced, “at least implicitly, some theoretical hypotheses about the causes of revolution,” they had not (according to Skocpol) made much of an attempt to validate these “primarily socialpsychological” hypotheses through comparisons of specific historical cases: Instead, the theoretical hypotheses were simply applied to the analysis as a whole, and the historical materials used primarily to illustrate the metaphorical stage sequence. The resulting natural-history analyses were certainly not without value – indeed, they offer many insights into revolutionary processes and can still be read with profit today – but they were very different from a comparative historical analysis. Such an analysis uses comparisons among positive cases, and between positive and negative cases, to identify and validate causes, rather than descriptions, of revolutions.22

Quite forthrightly, then, Skocpol disavowed any particular interest in the unfolding processual stages of her chosen revolutions, opting instead to focus on their causation (and, as it turned out, their consequences in some measure as well). Given the likely implications of Theda Skocpol’s argument for our treatment of (among other issues) the origins of revolutionary change in England, France, and Russia, a succinct synopsis of that argument seems in order. States and Social Revolutions assumes from the start a cardinal distinction between “voluntarist” and “structuralist” exegeses of revolutionary causation. Most “voluntarist” approaches, according to Skocpol, explain causation in broadly similar terms: First, changes in social systems or societies give rise to grievances, social disorientation, or new class or group interests and potentials for collective mobilization. Then there develops a purposive, mass-based movement – coalescing with the aid of ideology and organization – that consciously undertakes to overthrow the existing government and perhaps the entire social order. Finally, the revolutionary movement fights it out with the authorities or dominant class and, if it wins, undertakes to establish its own . . . program.23

In the eyes of the “structuralist,” on the other hand, it is the prerevolutionary state, in its relations with competing states (and, to some extent, with their more advanced economies) as well as with powerful socioeconomic interests at home, that is the critical initiator of revolution. In this latter connection, 22 23

Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, pp. 37–38. Ibid., p. 14.

Introduction

9

Skocpol defines the “state” in Weberian terms that have (predictably) proven to be controversial: The state properly conceived is no mere arena in which socioeconomic struggles are fought out. It is, rather, a set of administrative, policing, and military organizations headed, and more or less well coordinated by, an executive authority. Any state first and fundamentally extracts resources from society and deploys these to create and support coercive and administrative organizations.24

Consequently, the prerevolutionary state for Skocpol is at least potentially “autonomous from (though, of course, conditioned by) socioeconomic interests and structures.” Rather than being a passive instrument of “economicallydominant groups to pursue world market oriented development at home and international economic interests abroad,” the archetypical ancien r´egime state is at bottom “geared to maintain control of home territories and populations and to undertake actual or potential military competition with other states in the international system.”25 Granted this methodically developed differentiation between “voluntarist” and “structuralist” exegeses of revolutionary causation, and her privileging of the latter over the former, Theda Skocpol’s application of what she calls “comparative historical analysis” to France, Russia, and China then follows logically enough. Essentially, she contends, full-fledged “social-revolutionary transformations” of all three countries occurred when – and only when – catastrophic failures in statist foreign and domestic policies dynamically interacted and converged. The inability of Bourbon France, Romanov Russia, and Manchu China to compete militarily (and, secondarily, economically) with Britain, Germany, and Japan, respectively, not only undermined the prestige and security of these ancien r´egime states but also weakened their control over domestic society by compromising the status of “dominant class” feudal/landholding interests visa` -vis increasingly restive peasant elements in the countryside. Loss of coercive control over the agriculturally oriented class structure within these monarchies, reinforcing as it did a failure of diplomatic/military outreach abroad, allowed “societal political crises” in all three cases to blossom uncontrollably and unexpectedly into full-scale sociopolitical revolutions, as the Bourbon, Romanov, and Manchu states lost control over the levers of administrative and physical coercion.26 In all three situations, finally, postrevolutionary states eventually emerged that proved to be markedly more capable than their 24 25 26

Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., pp. 14, 22. For a more succinct statement of this argument, refer to Skocpol, “France, Russia, China: A Structural Analysis of Social Revolutions,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18 (1976): 175–210. Refer also, along these lines, to: Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Theda Skocpol, ed., Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

10

The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited

predecessor-states had been of implementing successful foreign and domestic policies on the bases of administrative/bureaucratic and, to some extent, economic reforms.27 States and Social Revolutions, unsurprisingly, has elicited widespread praise and equally widespread criticism in scholarly quarters.28 For those specifically concerned with updating Brintonian ideas on the English, French, and Russian Revolutions, however, two of Skocpol’s cardinal assumptions, as discussed previously, stand out: (1) that issues of causation and (to some extent) of consequences, rather than issues of process, should rightly claim paramount attention; and (2) that a “structuralist” explanatory perspective, entailing a “state-centered” analysis, works best for many modern “social-revolutionary transformations.” It is telling that some sociologists and political scientists as well as historians of specific revolutions should have found the former assumption troubling. Certainly, we would expect that historians stressing the importance of how revolutions actually unfold (such as, in the case of France, Lynn Hunt) would divine tautological, lockstep characteristics in Skocpol’s explanatory model, which by conflating the causes, process, and results of revolution makes it difficult (so some of them claim) to appraise the contingencies and personalities of revolutions in their own right.29 But of greater moment, perhaps, is the fact that some of Skocpol’s fellow sociologists have seized on the same issue. Chalmers Johnson did so in his revised 1982 edition of Revolutionary Change,30 and so did Michael Kimmel in his 1990 conspectus on sociological interpretations of revolution. “There is,” Kimmel observed, “one striking gap in her approach. . . . although she has a great deal to say about the causes and consequences of revolution (and the correlations between them), she devotes scant space to the process of revolution, to how human beings actually make a revolution.”31 As Kimmel noted, this de-emphasizing of the processual aspects of revolution derives naturally enough from Skocpol’s absolute privileging of structuralism over voluntarism – an interpretative issue to which we will have to return later.32 Most immediately, however, we need to underscore the implications of this criticism of States and Social Revolutions for our decision whether to 27 28

29 30 31 32

Refer again to Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, esp. Chapters 5–7. Michael Kimmel provides one of the most thorough and judicious evaluations of Skocpol’s work in Revolution: A Sociological Interpretation, esp. Chapter 6. But see also the commentaries of Johnson, Revolutionary Change, esp. pp. 174–78; and Noel Parker, Revolutions and History: An Essay in Interpretation (Oxford: Polity Press, 1999), passim. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), esp. pp. 221–24. See Johnson, Revolutionary Change, pp. 174–78. Kimmel, Revolution, p. 185. Still, Skocpol has had her defenders on this issue. See, in particular, the essays by John Foran and Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley in Foran, ed., Theorizing Revolutions, pp. 11–72.

Introduction

11

include the seventeenth-century English Revolution in our analysis of European revolutions. Skocpol herself, to be sure, conceded that “in many ways the dynamics of the English Revolution resembled those of the French,” yet then passed on (after touching on the events of the 1640s and 1650s) to characterize this upheaval as still lacking the full-scale status of modern “revolutionary transformation” later attained in France, Russia, and China.33 Skocpol was likely also thinking in terms of revolutionary causation and consequences rather than in terms of process when she thereby excluded the English Revolution from her cast of transformative characters. By the same token, however, to stress (as many of Skocpol’s critics do) the significance of how revolutionary upheavals actually unfold arguably requires us to “readmit” England to the select company of European states and societies that have undergone truly revolutionary experiences. It is perfectly true that such a “strategic” decision may not square altogether with the reservations voiced by certain “revisionists” in English historiography – reservations about the significance of the midcentury English Revolution that we will have to confront more fully later on. Nonetheless, our analysis essentially endorses historian David Cressy’s defiant conclusion that the English Revolution justifiably remains “widely regarded as a ‘world-historical’ event, notwithstanding the efforts of revisionists to cut it down to size.”34 If Theda Skocpol’s conflation of revolutionary analysis in such a way as to minimize if not altogether “squeeze out” revolutionary process has bothered certain specialists in the field, her emphasis on a “state-centered” structuralist explanation of modern revolutions has met with greater favor. Politicial scientist John Dunn has been unequivocal on this point, at least insofar as twentieth-century upheavals are concerned: What revolutions in fact are is political struggles of great intensity, initiated by political crises within particular historical societies and resolved, insofar as they are resolved, by the creation of a political capacity to confront the historical problems of these societies in ways that their prerevolutionary regimes proved wholly incapable of doing. It follows from this simple identification that revolutions are a profoundly political phenomenon and one which raises in a peculiarly intense form virtually the full range of intellectual problems involved in the understanding of modern politics.35

Such a modern phenomenon, according to John Dunn, terminates by virtue of its intrinsic nature “in the drastic reconstruction of a domestic state power.”36 33 34

35 36

Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, pp. 140–42. David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 6. Thanks go to my colleague Catherine Patterson at the University of Houston for referring me to Cressy’s study. John Dunn, Modern Revolutions: An Introduction to the Analysis of a Political Phenomenon, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. xvi, xviii–xix. Ibid.

12

The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited

One of Dunn’s most distinguished contemporaries, sociologist Charles Tilly, who wrote on this general subject for over four decades, fleshed out this structuralist formulation somewhat by situating states which have undergone revolutions in more explicit international and domestic contexts – and by concentrating on the issue of European revolutions in particular: Whatever else they involve, revolutions obviously include taking of power over states. . . . The point is not merely that the organization of any particular state affects its propensity to revolution. It is also that relations among states affect the locus, likelihood, character and outcome of revolution. . . . Wars generally [have] had a strong influence on the prospects for revolution in Europe. War does not result from the actions of a single state, however aggressive; it results from interactions among states, from alignments in the state system as a whole. . . . To know which states are liable to revolution we must examine not only their domestic politics, but also their locations in the prevailing set of relations among states.37

Yet, lest he be accused of an excessive stress on the structural context of revolution, Tilly also cited three “proximate” causal factors converging in revolution in such a manner as to let a pinch of “voluntarism” in the back door. He referred, first, to “the appearance of contenders, or coalitions of contenders, advancing exclusive competing claims to control of the state, or some segment of it;” then, to a “commitment to those claims by a significant segment of the citizenry;” and, finally, to the “incapacity or unwillingness of rulers to suppress the alternative coalition and/or commitment to its claims.”38 In this way, Tilly strove to “square the circle” of state-oriented structuralism and citizen-oriented voluntarism in his revolutionary theory: if one of his most outspoken admirers is to be believed, “he restores human agency to the equation without sacrificing the primacy of structure, thus achieving an important synthesis.”39 More recently, political scientists and comparativist historians alike have written in a more or less similar vein on the subject of revolution. Thus, political theorist Noel Parker: A revolution will usually involve specifically political change plus the threat of violence, and usually its actual use. Yet crises of legitimacy, political change and political violence all occur in many circumstances without a revolution: individually, therefore, these elements are not defining features of revolution. It is their combination with a more or less successful attempt at a profound structural change which makes events into a revolution.40

More unexpectedly, perhaps, the late Martin Malia, for all his longstanding emphasis on ideology and culture as critical revolutionary variables 37 38 39 40

Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 5–6. Ibid., p. 10. Kimmel, Revolution, p. 216. For an earlier, classic study of revolutionary mobilization by Charles Tilly, see: From Mobilization to Revolution (London: Addison-Wesley, 1978). Noel Parker, Revolutions and History, p. 4.

Introduction

13

comprehensible within a political/constitutional context – and for all his scathing criticism of Skocpolian structuralism – ended up defining revolution (especially in the Western tradition) in a way that may sound suspiciously “structural” after all: Although there are numerous examples in European history of acute social conflicts, . . . none of these led to general revolutions like 1640 or 1789. Such social struggles, therefore, are the necessary but not the sufficient cause of major revolution. For the latter type of event to occur there first must exist the framework of a unitary state to focus all political, social, and other forms of protest in a single set of institutions. And this focus on the transformation of state structures, and the concomitant challenge to existing state legitimacy, is what gives to a general revolution both its explosive character and its political-ideological nature.41

Thus spoke, Martin Malia – despite his countervailing deprecation (at other points) of “structure” and “function” as “ahistorical,” and his celebration of “ideology” and “culture” as more fully “historical.” It would seem, therefore, relatively uncontroversial these days for the theorist of comparative revolutions to speak, in good structuralist fashion, of each major revolution unfolding necessarily within “the framework of a unitary state” that can focus “all political, social, and other forms of protest in a single set of institutions,” and to analyze revolutionary change in terms of “the transformation of state structures” and the “concomitant challenge to state legitimacy.” This, despite the fact that some comparativists who cast their analytical nets beyond Europe continue to express doubts about the universal applicability of any “state-centered” explanatory paradigm. Malia skirted the issue somewhat by writing of the twentieth-century tendency of the revolutionary tradition to “migrate” from more advanced, sophisticated societies to more primitive societies – meaning, presumably, Russia and beyond – and this theme had already figured very prominently in the work of Noel Parker.42 Comparative sociologist Jack Goldstone has dealt with the problem by postulating a distinction between “state-centered” upheavals, amenable to classic structuralist analysis, and the so-called “color revolutions” of recent years occurring in countries ranging from Czechoslovakia to Georgia to Lebanon to Kyrgyzstan. In these latter cases, if Goldstone is to be believed, newly established regimes, rather than running the perilous gauntlet from “Terror” to “Thermidor” and beyond, experience instead “sustained but moderate political competition over policies and government organization” and eventually stabilize themselves as “weak democracies” rather than as “radical authoritarian regimes.”43 41 42 43

Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives, p. 5. Consult again Parker, Revolutions and History, esp. the last three chapters. Refer again to Goldstone, “Rethinking Revolutions,” esp. pp. 18–19 and 31–32. Other works in this comparative genre include Misagh Parsa, States, Ideologies, and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of Iran, Nicaragua, and the Philippines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements,

14

The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited

However this may be, the Europeanist endeavoring to “modernize” Brinton, and confining himself/herself to analysis of English, French, and Russian events, can very likely work with at least a moderate degree of confidence within a structuralist framework as introduced and explicated previously. Yet how, precisely, is the “state” in such a “state-centered” analysis to be conceived? Can we accept unconditionally Theda Skocpol’s neoWeberian definition of the state as “a set of administrative, policing, and military organizations headed, and more or less well coordinated by, an executive authority” that is at least “potentially” autonomous from (if also conditioned by) domestic and international socioeconomic interests? And what of the impact on the state (and possibly even within the state?) of the kinds of cultural and ideological factors that Skocpol so persistently downplays – or ignores altogether – in her work? These are issues that cry out for discussion before we can think of proceeding on to any review of basic tendencies in English, French, and Russian revolutionary historiography. On the first of these points, we need at the very least to acknowledge how scholars wrestling with questions about revolutionary change in Europe (to go for the moment no farther afield) have tried at times to qualify Weberian notions of statism. Incontrovertibly this has been true recently of English historian Michael J. Braddick, who has conceded that there was a prerevolutionary English state “in the sense that there was a network of offices wielding political power derived from a coordinating center by formal means,” and that, hence, “it makes sense to analyse this network as a whole,” but who nonetheless feels constrained to differentiate between this example of the “early modern state” and the more “modern” archetype envisioned by Max Weber: What is usually taken to be a Weberian definition of the state, in terms of centralized, differentiated institutions, is here considered an ideal-type of the modern state – a theoretical construct against which to compare observed social realities. Divergences from this ideal-type can reveal what was not modern about the early modern state, for example that it was only a partially differentiated and weakly coordinated state. . . . it is, none the less, recognizable to us as a kind of state.44

The analyst of the “early modern” state, according to Braddick, should not be confused by uses of the term “centralization.” Patently, “the institutions of a centralized state are not all centrally located. By the same token, the institutions of local government can, in principle at least, be component parts of a centralized state.” State power need not be geographically concentrated in a “modern” sense as long as it is “extensive,” endowed, that is, with a modicum of coordination between central and local institutions of an administrative/coercive

44

1945–1991 (Cambridge University Press, 2001); and John Foran, Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 19–20.

Introduction

15

nature.45 Goldstone, who has also grappled with this question, has displayed even more caution in ascribing Weberian characteristics to states like that of late Tudor/early Stuart England: they may have possessed the “modern” attributes of “centralized national rule-making and rule-enforcing authority,” but they also shared “political space with other actors and authorities.” Indeed, this sociologist has gone so far as to suggest that the “monopoly of legitimate force . . . is a false characterization of early modern states, which existed in tension with semiautonomous sources of legitimate authority at the regional level or among groups subject to religious law.”46 Hence, we see some of the challenges encountered by those intrepid scholars attempting to write about “state building” (or, to employ Braddick’s preferred term, “state formation”) in early modern England – and elsewhere. In the case of France, resisting the tendency to reify the state as an historical “actor” imposing its “will” more or less independently on society has assumed a more explicitly “deconstructionist” tone. This is probably to be expected, given the longstanding influence exerted on French studies by philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz. One specialist on the French Revolution, Suzanne Desan, has been especially forthright on this subject, complaining that “by and large, as revolutionary historians, we have given relatively little thought to the complexities of the state as an analytic category.” Desan has summarized what she manifestly regards as timely revisionism in this area: Scholars across a range of disciplines have theorized the state more flexibly as a site of structured negotiation over power, resources, and relationships, rather than simply as a coercive entity separate from society. Although it is made up of organizations wielding coercive power and of laws meant to structure power relations and social interactions in a uniform way, the state takes shape only in a set of local practices in which power is repeatedly contested, sometimes reinforced and sometimes redistributed. . . . Finally, recent work conceptualizes the state as both a discursive and institutional entity, engaged in a constant struggle to match institutions with constitutional reality.47

Ironically, Desan’s assurance to her readers (in French Historical Studies) that she is “not calling here for “bringing the state back in” as a policy-making entity independent of society” is a fairly clear and (we suspect) somewhat defensive allusion to the title of one of Theda Skocpol’s co-edited anthologies of articles, and thus suggests that the shadow of Skocpolian structuralism continues to lie across even the elegantly sculpted landscape of French cultural studies.48 Whether, as Desan indicates, the state “takes shape only in a set of local practices” might well be contested (and will be later in this Introduction), but 45 46 47 48

Ibid., p. 14. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, p. 5n. Suzanne Desan, “What’s After Political Culture? Recent French Revolutionary Historiography,” French Historical Studies 23 (Winter 2000): 194–95. Refer again to Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In, passim.

16

The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited

her assertion would probably find favor in the realm of Russian revolutionary studies with Steve Smith. This prominent social historian of the Russian Revolution has been struck by the need scholars have to extend their “concept of power beyond that of simple coercion, and by the ways that historical analysis is handicapped by conceptual dichotomies such as voluntary versus coerced, support versus resistance.” Historians of Russia, according to Smith, must “enlarge” their “understanding of power, to understand it as capacity, as something implicated in all social activity.” Such an attitude, understandably, extends for this specialist to applying “some of the techniques of deconstruction” to the political history of the Revolution: utilizing such techniques, for example, historians “might find it fruitful to dismantle the Bolshevik Party as a unified subject.”49 Another practitioner of Russian social history, William G. Rosenberg, has forcefully advocated much the same approach in prefatory remarks to an important anthology on Russian revolutionary topics he has co-edited with fellow specialists Edward Acton and Vladimir Cherniaev.50 Yet however much historians intrigued with the “postmodernist” or “linguistic” turn in their profession might be tempted to interrogate the state as an “analytic category” in connection with the study of revolution, they will have a difficult time getting away altogether from Weberian notions on the subject. After all, Max Weber himself insisted long before the advent of today’s political scientists and sociologists that “revolutionary change always results in the development of larger, more pervasive normative institutions to replace the ones the revolutionaries have toppled.”51 Could anyone having reviewed tendencies in postrevolutionary polities ranging from England and France to Russia and China (to cite no more recent cases) deny the prophetic insight in Weber’s words? Here, it would appear consequently that Noel Parker’s cautionary note is especially welcome: We should hesitate . . . before jumping to conclusions about the priority of a new “post-national” and discursive arena in place of the collective agent embodied in the European revolutionary narrative over more than two centuries. . . . Even a thinker acutely aware of how vulnerable are the nation-state’s claims to spatio-temporal identity acknowledges that states are “exceptionally dense political practices” which have not . . . disappeared.52

For Parker, therefore, the “nation-state as a place of collective autonomy” remains, after all is said and done, the formidable construct it has long been. 49

50

51 52

Steve Smith, “Writing the History of the Russian Revolution after the Fall of Communism,” Martin A. Miller, ed., The Russian Revolution: The Essential Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 275–77. Edward Acton, Vladimir Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914–1921 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 19–20, 23–24. See Kimmel, Revolution, p. 35. Kimmel is paraphrasing here from Weber’s “stunning” essay entitled “Politics as a Vocation,” which appeared in 1918. Parker, Revolutions in History, p. 182.

Introduction

17

For us, as well, concerned with analytically comparing revolutionary England, France, and Russia, the state as a bureaucratic or protobureacratic entity will be taken as a given, as one crucial explanatory element in our updated Brintonian schema. Yet however crucial it may be, it cannot stand alone. We recall at this point Skocpol’s portrayal of the prerevolutionary state as “potentially autonomous from (though, of course, conditioned by) socioeconomic interests and structures.” Before shifting from this theoretical discussion to a reassessment of the latest specific twists and turns in English, French, and Russian revolutionary historiography, we need to say a few words not only about socioeconomic factors influencing the ancien r´egime and revolutionary state, but also about mediating factors between state and society of a psychological, cultural, and ideological nature. Only then will we have in hand a fully developed perspective of “modified structuralism” that can be profitably brought to bear on our three classic European upheavals. On the first point, concerning socioeconomic influences on the state, we may wish to strike a balance (as, for instance, Skocpol has) between the ideas of Immanuel Wallerstein and those of Otto Hintze. Wallerstein over the past four decades has postulated the primary importance of a “capitalist world system” developing since early modern times and profoundly conditioning both the contours of interstate competition and the likelihood for localized outbreaks of revolution, while German historian Hintze, as a disciple of Max Weber, had earlier argued for the centrality of international politics even while accepting a certain role for international capitalism in his ruminations on history.53 Hence, the significance of the effort by a theorist such as Skocpol to position herself somewhere between these two markedly different visions. As Michael Kimmel has summarized her stance: Though Skocpol’s analysis bears a surface resemblance to Wallerstein’s world system model, Skocpol is also departing from Wallerstein’s model in significant ways. Skocpol is not saying that revolutions occur in countries on the periphery or semi-periphery of the world capitalist system. Her position is more complex. Following Hintze, she holds that there are two international systems, a capitalist economic system and a nationstate system, neither of which is wholly reducible to the other. Indeed, she argues that although “uneven economic development always lies in the background, developments within the international state system as such . . . have directly contributed to virtually all outbreaks of revolutionary crises.”54

53

54

See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); The Capitalist World Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); The Politics of the World Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Felix Gilbert, ed., The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Kimmel, Revolution, p. 181. For Skocpol’s trenchant critique of Wallerstein in particular, see: Theda Skocpol, “Wallerstein’s World Capitalist System: A Theoretical and Historical Critique,” American Journal of Sociology 82 (1977): 1075–90.

18

The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited

In effect, Skocpol privileges Weberian/Hintzian analysis over Wallerstein’s construct, suggesting in her overall analysis of France, Russian, and China that, when push came to shove, imperatives of prestige, power, and security more than those of a world market-oriented nature determined the critical decisions of statesmen in these countries. Those commenting on States and Social Revolutions, and on issues of revolutionary causation in general, have naturally struck their own balances on these matters. John Dunn, for example, if adhering basically to a political definition of revolution, also suggested that the “prominence of revolutionary struggles” – at least those in the twentieth century – has resulted as much from economic factors (sharply intensified “economic relations between human populations across the globe” and a “deepening global division of labor and . . . expanding world market in goods and services”) as from political factors such as heightened interstate competition and rapidly evolving intrastate tensions between rulers and the ruled.55 Charles Tilly, on the other hand, played up (as we have already noted) the geopolitical context of revolutionary causation over recent centuries, reminding us, among other things, that wars have generally exercised “a strong influence on the prospects for revolution in Europe,” and that “to know which states are liable to revolution, we must examine not only their domestic politics, but also their locations in the prevailing set of relations among states.”56 There are, in fact, myriad reasons to regard even Skocpol’s mediatory stance between Wallerstein (and Marx?), on the one hand, and Weber/Hintze on the other, as a bit too accommodative of economics. We know, for instance, that a phalanx of “cliometric” and “new economic revisionist” students of old regime France – names such as David Weir, Philip T. Hoffman, George Grantham, John Nye, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, among others, come to mind – have rejected Annaliste and Marxian assumptions about the relative “backwardness” of the French economy in the eighteenth century, thus further throwing into question the economic/developmental aspects of revolutionary causation in the French case. When, in addition, we recall that challenges to old regime England emanated primarily from Continental states that were (if anything) less well developed, economically, than James I’s and Charles I’s realm, and that Romanov – and early Soviet – Russia confronted advanced “capitalism” in friendly and neutral states as well as in potential foes such as Japan and Germany, we cannot help but find Wallersteinian theory even less satisfactory than we did before.57 55 56 57

Dunn, Modern Revolutions, p. xix. Refer again to Tilly, European Revolutions, p. 6. Refer to: David Weir, “Tontines, Public Finance, and Revolution in France and England, 1688–1789,” Journal of Economic History 49 (1989): 95–124; Philip T. Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside, 1450–1815 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); George Grantham, “The French Cliometric Revolution: A Survey of Cliometric Contributions to French Economic History,” European Review of Economic History 1 (1997): 353–405; John Nye, “The Importance of Being Late: French Economic History, Cliometrics,

Introduction

19

But if scholars in the field have differed in their reactions to Skocpol’s handling of international economic forces bearing on revolutionary causation, they have with near-unanimity faulted her for underplaying (indeed, largely ignoring) elements of culture, ideology, and (ultimately) human agency. Tellingly, this has been as true for her fellow sociologists as for historians of a “voluntarist” bent. As early as 1981, Michael Kimmel sounded this note in his review of States and Social Revolutions on the pages of the American Journal of Sociology. “Even if Skocpol is correct about the relationships between structural conditions and revolutionary outcomes,” he wrote, “her analysis is incomplete. She ignores the mediating factors – human consciousness and action – that are always part of the story and sometimes crucial to it.”58 In his 1990 book on sociological interpretations of revolution, Kimmel enlarged on the issue, exploring what he considered to be the pitfalls of a strictly structuralist perspective: Skocpol forgets that human beings, thinking and acting, (however haphazardly), are the mediating link between structural conditions and social outcomes. Structural conditions, moreover, do not dictate absolutely what humans do; they merely place certain limits on human action or define a certain range of possibilities. Within the revolutionary moment, there is more than one potential outcome, the one that actually occurs. . . . Structural conditions may define the possibilities for mass uprisings or the options available for consolidating state power in a revolutionary situation, but they do not fully explain how particular groups act, what options they pursue, or what possibilities they realize.59

However much he might admire Skocpol for enabling us to progress “a long way from nonstructuralist, voluntarist theories of revolution,” and for “rescuing” the autonomy of the state experiencing revolution from the reductionist class analyses of an earlier generation of scholars, Kimmel still saw her approach as lacking “an analysis of people’s motivations to participate in revolution,” or, in other words, as lacking a “social psychology of revolution.” Other specialists, writing in the 1980s and 1990s from their own perspectives on this subject, generally embraced this critique. Chalmers Johnson, advocating “contingency theory” with its emphasis on the unpredictability of multifactoral dynamics in the revolutionary process, rendered a fairly harsh judgment on Theda Skocpol (as well as on other writers such as Samuel P. Huntington and Barrington Moore, Jr.) as part of his effort to formulate a comprehensive theory of revolutionary change that could allow adequately for the role of chance as well as for that of human agency.60 John Dunn, concerned especially with twentieth-century revolutionary change, argued that, by minimizing ideas

58 59 60

and the New Institutional Economics,” French Historical Studies 23 (2000): 423–37; and JeanLaurent Rosenthal, “Credit Markets and Economic Change in Southeastern France, 1630– 1788,” Explorations in Economic History 30 (1993): 129–57. For Kimmel’s review, see American Journal of Sociology 86 (1981): 1153. Kimmel, Revolution, esp. pp. 185–87, for this commentary on Skocpol. Consult Johnson, Revolutionary Change, pp. 174–78.

20

The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited

and human agency to a “quite implausible degree,” Skocpol had underrated the importance of political protagonists and their parties in such situations. “It is not necessary to suppose,” he wrote, “that twentieth-century revolutionaries [have known] what they [were] doing to recognize the dramatic practical contribution of. . . . professional revolutionaries and their modern institutional instrument, the revolutionary party, to the outcomes of modern revolutions.” For that matter, Dunn also distinguished sharply between the causes and outcomes of such upheavals, and emphasized “how much less illuminating the structural perspective is likely to prove” in explaining “the reconstruction of a new and effective regime” than in accounting for the prior “collapse of an 61 And Noel Parker, although as aware as Dunn of the potential ancien regime.” ´ utility of state-centered interpretations of revolution, insisted all the same that “there are many possible formulations of structural forces in history, or in a breakdown, with room for different degrees of agency from various types of agents.” What Parker referred to as “conscious human intentionality” must, therefore, always figure in our understanding of such dramatic and popularly based phenomena as sociopolitical revolutions.62 Yet however broadly accepted this arraignment of an exclusively structuralist rendering of revolution has become among these specialists, they have been no more inclined to “reverse the arrows of causation” when it comes to ideology and intentionality than they have been to “deconstruct” the state as an “analytical entity.” In praising Charles Tilly’s contributions to the debate, for example, Kimmel approvingly cited his ability to develop a “social psychology of revolution” within a structural analysis, as opposed to devising an analysis pivoting on psychological or ideological factors as substitutes for a structural framework.63 Cultural and intellectual historians, on the other hand, have been at times less hesitant about turning structuralism on its head and viewing ideologies and intentions as actually determining, rather than being determined by, structural (i.e., sociopolitical) change. Not astonishingly, this has been an especially indulged tendency in French revolutionary historiography, conditioned as it has been for years by deconstructive and cultural-anthropological methodologies. To be sure, not all historians toiling in these vineyards of inquiry have necessarily harvested such fruit. In her provocative study of “political culture” in revolutionary France, Lynn Hunt, while faulting Theda Skocpol for shunning 61 62

63

Cited in Dunn, Modern Revolutions, pp. xx–xxiii. Parker, Revolutions and History, pp. 56–57, 63, and 139. This issue is discussed further by Eric Selbin: see his article “Revolution in the Real World: Bringing Agency Back In,” in Foran, ed., Theorizing Revolutions, pp. 123–36. Refer to Kimmel’s extended discussion in chapter 7 of Revolution, pp. 188–216, where he thoroughly reviews Tilly’s ideas on the subject, and rejects the primary stress on psychological antecedents to revolution most commonly associated with authors such as Ted Gurr. But see again in this connection Ted R. Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971); and Rogues, Rebels and Reformers (Beverly Hills, Calif: SAGE, 1976).

Introduction

21

analysis of human agency and of democratic republicanism in the process of the Revolution, was nevertheless perfectly willing to associate what she identified as the “breakdown in the Old Regime political culture” with the irrefutable fact that “the French monarchy disintegrated because it could not foot the bill for competition with England.” Whatever the epochal consequences of geopolitical failure for France in the relentlessly competitive world of late eighteenthcentury power politics, here was a definite acknowledgment of structuralist analysis in the work of an historian otherwise known for her political-cultural explication of revolutionary change in France.64 A number of Hunt’s Francophile colleagues, however, have not displayed her discretion on the subject. Perhaps the most arresting cautionary tale in this connection was provided by William H. Sewell, Jr., who in the mid-1980s directly challenged Skocpol herself (both at a professional conference and subsequently on the pages of the Journal of Modern History).65 Sewell contended that structural analysts of revolution cannot simply write off the explanatory value of ideologies merely because some revolutionaries’ “ideological blueprints” do not happen literally to anticipate revolutionary outcomes. He went on to construct an alternative “conceptual framework” by “defining ideology in structural terms and by dereifying class, state and international structures” – that is to say, by reversing, in a sense, the “arrows of causation” running from state-centered forces to dynamics of intellectual change (and, by implication, of human agency). Most provocatively, Sewell postulated that, in the case of the French revolutionaries, ideology was “constitutive of the social order,” and in some respects actually outlasted the sociopolitical hurly-burly of the years from 1789 to 1799.66 In her response, Skocpol accepted this critique in a tactical sense without, however, beating a strategic retreat from her structuralist perspective. “Epochal and transnational intellectual formations,” she admitted, “probably do independently affect the scope of transformations that revolutionary politicians attempt.” But this was as far as she was willing to go, as, in her words, “sociologists and political scientists are not well served by supposing that sets of ideas are ‘constitutive of the social order.’” In the event, Sewell’s own inconsistencies, on display in this scholarly encounter, made Skocpol’s rebuttal that much easier to pull off. For instance, after making much initially of the hypothesis that the “split ideological personality” of the old regime – i.e., its inability to reconcile a traditional societal ethos of “communitarianism” with the Enlightenment’s novel ethos of “individualism” – led to the revolutionary outbreak in 64 65

66

Lynn A. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, esp. pp. 221–24. For this scholarly exchange, see: William H. Sewell, Jr., “Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case,” Journal of Modern History 57 (1985): 57–85; and Theda Skocpol, “Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell,” Ibid., pp. 86–96. For the sake of convenience, I am utilizing here Noel Parker’s discussion of this striking confrontation in Revolutions and History, pp. 139–40. Refer again to Ibid., pp. 139–40.

The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited

22

1789, Sewell was constrained somewhat lamely to concede at a later point that it was, in fact, “impending bankruptcy,” and not the old regime’s postulated “split ideological personality,” that brought the ancien r´egime crashing down in the late 1780s.67 It is highly likely that a more circumspect scholar such as Lynn Hunt would have conceded this last point from the very start, thus preserving herself from the sticky toils of self-contradiction! This should not be taken to mean that other contributors to French revolutionary historiography have not put forth ideas similar to those of William Sewell, or – for that matter – that like tendencies are not to be found in both English and Russian revolutionary scholarship. They most certainly are; and we will have to deal with them in the next, more purely historiographical portion of this Introduction. First of all, however, let us cast a quick glance back over the extensive terrain of sociological theorizing on revolution that we have just traversed. We can then move on to suggest how some of that theorizing has figured in the more overtly historical interpretations brought to bear on England, France, and Russia. When, in 1990, Michael Kimmel published Revolution: A Sociological Interpretation, he posited a general progression in twentieth-century revolutionary theory from what we might call “prestructural” explanations emphasizing (depending on the authors involved) Brintonian-style “natural history” life cycles, “disequilibrated” social systems, or aggregate social-psychological models, to “structural” interpretations playing up the importance of state formation, class, and international relations. The primary if not exclusive tendency in the twenty years or so since his book initially appeared, as discerned in the works of theorists such as Charles Tilly, Noel Parker, John Foran, and Jack Goldstone, has been to confirm, more or less, a structuralist, “state-centered” kind of analysis – at least in the case of the “classic” early modern and modern European revolutions, and among social-scientific commentators. By the same token, however, as we descend from the social-scientific heights of theory to the much earthier realms of English, French, and Russian historiography, we become speedily aware of how contentious, how utterly lacking in consensus, those realms remain today. The pages that immediately follow will point this up in some detail. It would be useful, first of all, to remind ourselves how greatly the political context of Russian scholarship differed in the second half of the twentieth century from that of Western Europe (not to mention, of course, the United States.) Whereas, in these latter areas, a Marxian rendering of revolution stressing dialectical (and inevitable) class struggle did not very long outlast the Second World War, in Russia it remained a state-imposed orthodoxy until very late in the century. Hence, at a time when (in the 1960s and thereafter) theorists of revolution and research-oriented historians in the West were already challenging long-ascendant ideas about revolutionary causation, process, and results 67

Ibid.

Introduction

23

and were struggling to develop new perspectives on the subject, scholars in the former Soviet Union did so only at considerable personal risk. There was, in other words, an incontrovertible and unavoidable “time lag” set between revolutionary scholarship pursued by Westerners and that pursued by their Eastern Bloc colleagues. Concomitantly, of course, there were also, for a long time, restrictions on access to and utilization of historical archives in Russia that impeded the work of inquirers of all nationalities into the events leading up to and following on the 1917 Revolution. Against this background, which is essential at all times to keep in mind, it is still possible to make out, in the historiographies of all three of Crane Brinton’s European revolutions, a very general chronological sequence of interpretative tendencies that have borrowed increasingly from the theorizing on revolution discussed above. In all three cases, the sequence or phases of interpretation might be briefly described as follows: (1) an exegesis still dominated in the years immediately following World War II, in Western historiography, and for some time longer in Russian historiography, by an emphasis on socioeconomic class deriving from a Marxist perspective; (2) a “revisionist” challenge to the socioeconomic orthodoxy deemphasizing long-term causation as such and viewing revolution as originating in a fortuitous convergence of short-term factors and continuing on the basis of unpredictable contingencies; and (3) most recently, a contention between “state-centered” analysis and a “postmodernist” turn celebrating the importance of human agency and the explanatory power of revolutionary discourse and ideology.68 It might be advisable to see first of all how these sequential tendencies have played themselves out in English and French revolutionary historiography, and then to review the somewhat later “twists and turns” in Russian revolutionary historiography. Historians writing in the neo-Marxian tradition naturally saw the revolutionary outbreaks of 1640 in England and 1789 in France as stemming from struggles between economically retrograde or “feudal” aristocracies and economically progressive or “capitalist” gentry and/or urban-bourgeois elements. In both cases, according to the general script, the entrepreneurial-minded elitists, coveting both a greater measure of social recognition and a more influ´ ential role in public affairs, and profiting from the support of humbler folk of city and/or countryside, won out over their aristocratic antagonists and over absolute monarchies insolvent in their finances, inefficient in their bureaucratic procedures, and antiquated in their visions of society. In the English case, this “grand narrative,” which followed on and borrowed from the older Whig (or “High Road”) narrative of progressive constitutional and religious change, was anchored from 1940 on in the works of Christopher Hill, and during 68

For a contemporary overview of the “postmodernist” or “linguistic” turn in historical studies in general, see the articles by Judith Surkis, Gary Wilder, and James W. Cook, and the commentaries by Julia A. Thomas and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, in the latest AHR Forum presented in the American Historical Review 117 (2012): 700–813.

24

The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited

the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s it gave rise to a furious subsidiary debate (a veritable “storm”) over the (supposedly pivotal) revolutionary role of the gentry – a debate engaging the polemical skills of R. H. Tawney, Lawrence Stone, Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, Jack Hexter, Perez Zagorin, and others.69 In the French case, the analogous tendency was grounded for many years in the writings of socialist luminaries ranging from Jean Jaur`es and Albert Mathiez to Georges Lefebvre, and remained sacrosanct in later years in the eyes – and in the ever more embattled polemics – of Albert Soboul and Claude Mazauric.70 Paradoxically, although the “revisionist” challenge to this venerable explication of revolution emanated initially from London, it targeted at that time the French rather than the English paradigm. Historian Alfred Cobban, in his University College inaugural lecture in 1954 entitled provocatively “The Myth of the French Revolution,” and in a later book on the subject, touched off what would eventually become a full-scale assault on the socioeconomic orthodoxy as it applied to the Revolution of 1789.71 Essentially, Cobban turned the Marxian paradigm on its head by stressing the anticapitalist aspects of the Revolution, identifying its protagonists primarily as “the declining class of officiers and the lawyers and other professional men, and not the businessmen of commerce and industry,” and denying to the outbreak of 1789 any significant long-term causation. Even though subsequent research has to a great extent invalidated Cobban’s notion of a “declining class of officiers,” his overall insistence on stripping the Revolution of its grand narrative of class struggle was within a few years powerfully reinforced by historian George V. Taylor’s basic reconceptualization of “capitalism” and of revolutionary causation in eighteenth-century France. Writing in 1967 in the American Historical Review, Taylor declared roundly that France in 1789 had experienced 69

70

71

Reviews of this historiography are, of course, legion. For the very latest reflections on the subject – and for many additional bibliographical references – see John Adamson, “Introduction: High Roads and Blind Alleys – The English Civil War and Its Historiography,” pp. 1–35, in John Adamson, ed., The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–49 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). But refer also to: R. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution, 3rd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); and Keith Thomas, “When the Lid Came Off England,” in The New York Review of Books, May 27, 2004. The fascination with the English gentry in this era also helped to spawn a voluminous literature on the counties and localities. On the extent to which such local studies do (or do not) provide an alternative to histories interpreting revolutionary events from the perspective of London, see esp. Clive Holmes, “Centre and Locality in Civil-War England,” in Adamson, ed., The English Civil War, pp. 153–74. Holmes (much like Adamson, for that matter) concludes that “local issues” in the final analysis “had to be comprehended within a language of national identity and of common law.” Ibid., p. 174. For as competent a review of this literature as any, refer to the initial, historiographical section of William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Refer to Alfred Cobban, “The Myth of the French Revolution,” (London: University College, 1955); and The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).

Introduction

25

“a political revolution with social consequences and not a social revolution with political consequences.” For Taylor, the “breakdown” of 1789 stemmed from a fateful but largely fortuitous conjuncture of short-term factors: state bankruptcy, the “apprehensions of the taxable groups and creditors of the state,” the “hopes and ambitions of the professional classes,” and the “slogans, myths, and images” generated by the struggle against the now-paralyzed crown. Fundamentally, Taylor asserted, the ancien r´egime could not have been eroded and eventually laid low by any confrontation between discrete “feudal aristocratic” and “capitalist bourgeois” classes in eighteenth-century France for the simple reason that the pervasive and evolving complexities of social change in this land precluded the possibility of such a confrontation in the first place.72 While other revisionists soon entered the fray with their own efforts at preserving some notion of social elites instigating revolution in France – most ´ notably, perhaps, Franc¸ois Furet, Denis Richet, and Colin Lucas73 – the cardinal thrust of revisionism, namely, its denial of long-term causation and hence inevitability to the French Revolution, stood for years as a defiant counterpoint to the grand neo-Marxian narrative. For a number of reasons, revisionism in English revolutionary historiography somewhat post-dated French revisionism, but when it eventually did emerge in the course of the 1970s it came on with a rush and a roar. Although “revisionism” in this sense is perhaps most often associated with the prolific scholarship of Conrad Russell, its ranks have included other prominent figures as well: Nicholas Tyacke, John Morrill, and Kevin Sharpe in Britain, and Mark Kishlansky and Paul Christianson in North America, among others. In a lengthy historiographical essay published very recently, John Adamson furnished a tentative profile of this subgroup of specialists on the English Civil War and Revolution: Far from their sharing a single outlook or methodology, the ‘Revisionists’ were united only by a ‘series of negative propositions’: first, their rejection of the ‘grand narratives,’ both the Marxist narrative of social change producing social conflict, and the older Whig narrative of constitutional ‘progress,’ on which it had been superimposed; and secondly, their rejection of the teleology which these older accounts implied. . . .

In a more positive sense, however, most of these “revisionists” also shared “certain interpretative traits” such as a “tendency to stress the general good order and relative stability of English society before 1640; to downplay the role 72 73

George V. Taylor, “Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 72 (1967), esp. pp. 491–92. See, among other revisionist efforts: Denis Richet and Franc¸ois Furet, La R´evolution franc¸aise, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1965); Richet, “Autour des origines ideologiques lointaines de la ´ Revolution franc¸aise: Elites et despotisme,” Annales: E. S. C. 24 (1969): 1–23; and Colin ´ Lucas, “Nobles, Bourgeois, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” Past and Present 60 (1973), esp. pp. 86, 103, and 124–25.

26

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of secular ideological controversy before the Civil War; to imply, therefore, the largely accidental nature of that conflict.”74 The determination in some quarters to deemphasize the significance of the mid-seventeenth-century’s civil conflicts in England has continued down to the present day, often taking the form of a comparison between the events of the 1640s–1650s, on the one hand, and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688– 89, on the other. Although James S. Wheeler pointed to an emergence of fiscal, administrative, and military statism in the mid-century as constituting “the seismic fault line between semi-feudal and modern England,” his fellow specialist in fiscal/administrative/military affairs, Michael J. Braddick, more cautiously spoke of a process of development in these areas extending from midcentury to the 1690s and beyond. The so-called “English Military Revolution,” in other words, may not necessarily have coincided altogether with the political drama of the late 1640s and 1650s, and thus may not have endowed that drama with “revolutionary” significance in the fullest sense of the term.75 Stephen C. A. Pincus has more recently gone even further in locating the really critical revolutionary discontinuities in the English case in the events of 1688–89 rather than in the Interregnum of the mid-seventeenth century.76 Even if we hesitate before accepting this last argument in all of its aspects, and even if we allow (as, indeed, we must) for the incontrovertible differences between prerevolutionary England and prerevolutionary France, and between their respective historiographies, we can see what “revisionism” in the two cases plainly came to have in common: namely, a rejection of Whiggish and/or Marxian “teleology,” with all that it implies, and a stress on (at the very most) short-term causation of sociopolitical change in the two countries. Again, it was assuredly Conrad Russell who set the tone here for England in his many works,77 much as (in the 1950s and 1960s) Cobban and Taylor had done so for France. And, just as the revisionist challenge in French revolutionary historiography anticipated somewhat that launched, by Russell and others, in English

74 75

76

77

Refer again to Adamson, “High Roads and Blind Alleys,” pp. 21–22. See, in this connection: James S. Wheeler, The Making of a World Power: War and the Military Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Stroud, 1999), esp. pp. 197–99; Braddick, “An English Military Revolution?” in Historical Journal 36 (1993): 965–75; and also by Braddick, The Nerves of State: Taxation and National Finance, 1558–1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). See Stephen C. A. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), esp. the extended historiographical discussion on revolutions in chapter 2. Among his many works, see in particular the following: The Origins of the English Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1973); Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1990); and The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Introduction

27

revolutionary historiography, so the potential or actual tensions between “postmodernists” emphasizing “political culture,” ideas, and mentalities on the one hand, and state-oriented “structuralists” on the other, first appeared in a major way in connection with France. This was initially due in some measure to Franc¸ois Furet’s decision, in the 1970s, to move on from his proclaimed (and long-sustained) critique of the Marxist explanatory paradigm in the case of France to a new engagement with issues of political-cultural analysis. In doing so, however, Furet was inadvertently setting the stage both for a postmodernist stress on the French Revolution’s ideological and cultural causes and processes and (as it turned out) for a gradually building structuralist challenge to postmodernist notions on the subject. In a landmark book entitled Penser la R´evolution franc¸aise, which appeared in 1978 (and three years later in English translation), Furet offered an interpretation of the ancien r´egime and Revolution keying on the notion of an absolutist “political culture” common to both periods that insisted on national consensus and demonized (and, in times of revolutionary crisis, guillotined) those deemed to have “deviated” from that national consensus. The exclusivist absolutism, prisons, and lettres de cachet of late Bourbon times, in other words, gave way (implicitly had to give way) to the purges, proscriptions, and executions of the Jacobin Terror.78 Once the Revolution was underway, Furet contended, novel discourses of political legitimacy vied to fill the unforeseen and unprecedented void left in public life by the collapse of the absolute monarchy. From 1789 through the climacteric of the Terror of 1793–94, this increasingly lethal competition of political discourses, all proclaiming fealty to the newly sovereign “people,” drove the Revolution relentlessly leftward. For this brief, unforgettable period, ideology was independent of – and, indeed, constitutive of – sociopolitical reality; only after the overthrow of the Robespierrist dictatorship in Thermidor of Year II (July 1794) would “society” reassume its ordinary role as the primary determinant of sociohistorical evolution. For a decade or so, up to and running beyond the Bicentennial celebrations in 1989, this political-cultural rendition of revolutionary change in France appeared to carry all before it. Specialists including Lynn Hunt, Keith Baker, and Emmet Kennedy contributed enthusiastically to this attempt to give a new cultural/linguistic twist to the meaning of French revolutionary politics.79 78

79

See Franc¸ois Furet, Penser la R´evolution franc¸aise (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). Translated into English by Elborg Forster as Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). An interesting biographical “take” on Furet and his work in this period is provided by Michael Scott Christofferson, “An Antitotalitarian History of the French Revolution: Franc¸ois Furet’s Penser la R´evolution franc¸aise in the Intellectual Politics of the Late 1970s,” French Historical Studies 22 (1999): 557–611. See: Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class, passim., and, more recently, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Keith M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989).

28

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Moreover, the Bicentennial gave rise to a number of scholarly consortia and collaborative editorial projects through which Furet and like-minded colleagues reiterated their call for a cultural exegesis of revolutionary change in France.80 True, not all proponents of the new approach endorsed Furet’s more extreme claims: for example, some of them balked at his contention that the Terror was largely implicit in the ideological “breakthrough” of 1789, and a number of them harbored some residual skepticism regarding what we would term his “voluntarist” postulation of revolutionary ideology as an autonomous and constituting historical force up to late 1794. (In addition, for scholars like Dale K. van Kley, the “political-cultural” dynamic in eighteenth-century France must always be seen as including conflicts over Jansenism and Church/state relations that in the long run imperiled sacral Bourbon absolutism and ultimately adumbrated the Revolution’s Civil Constitution of the Clergy.)81 Still, as a group those historians delving into political-cultural matters shared with Furet the conviction that (as Lynn Hunt put it) the Revolution was quintessentially “the moment in which politics was discovered as an enormously potent activity, as an agent for conscious change, as the mold for character, culture, and social relations.”82 There were those at the time who, unsurprisingly, divined in this interpretation the makings of a new explanatory paradigm for the French Revolution, one not narrowly limited (as so many revisionist accounts had been) to negative pronouncements on the old socioeconomic orthodoxy. And few even today would disagree that Furet and his followers had a compelling and portentous story to tell: a story playing up human agency and ideas, a story of how ordinary Frenchmen – and Frenchwomen – fashioned through rhetoric and ritual and raw human action a new identity for themselves in a world briefly and challengingly turned upside down. Still, even in the midst of the Bicentennial euphoria, and of celebrations of the Furetist schema as being somehow “definitive,” storm clouds of dissent were beginning to gather above the historiographical horizon. Partly, of course, this had to do with the fact that forays into politicalcultural analysis, however stimulating, could not prevent both intrepid Marxists and their “social-revisionist” detractors from insisting that serious questions concerning social elite solidarity or discord in old regime and revo´ lutionary society remained yet unresolved. Indeed, a kind of “rediscovery” of conflictual social dynamics in this period has dogged the footsteps of Furet’s 80

81

82

See, for example: Franc¸ois Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Keith Baker et al., eds., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 4 vols. (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987–94). Van Kley’s latest iteration of this interpretation is given in Thomas E. Kaiser and Dale K. van Kley, eds., From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011) in Chapter 3, “The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 1560–1791.” Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class, p. 236.

Introduction

29

more ballyhooed “rediscovery of politics,” and it has figured prominently in the historical writing of the last few decades.83 Nor have specialists of a “postMarxian” persuasion had the field completely to themselves. As if to dramatize this point, a sympathetic authority on the French peasantry, Peter McPhee, used a special Bicentennial forum in the American Historical Review to remind his readers of Marxist contributions to our scholarly understanding of socioeconomic “class” dynamics and the progress of capitalism in eighteenth-century France.84 Another expert in this area, John Markoff, made a similar point in his massive study of “feudalism,” lords, and the peasantry in revolutionary France.85 Again, David Garrioch and Henry Heller have in recent monographs reminded us of the undiminished centrality of the “bourgeoisie” to many analyses of class dynamics in prerevolutionary and revolutionary France.86 Nonetheless, an explicitly “social-revisionist” contribution to the debate has been made even more recently by Jack Goldstone, this time writing in his capacity as a contributor to an important anthology of articles on the origins of the 1789 revolution co-edited by historians Thomas E. Kaiser and Dale K. van Kley. Goldstone’s social-revisionist twist on the subject has endeavored to show “how specific long-term economic and social trends, properly understood, contributed to financial dilemmas, intra-elite conflicts, and popular mobilization, which were in turn given special meaning as problematic by religious, cultural, and political debates” – thus contributing powerfully to the gestation of a revolutionary situation in late eighteenth-century France.87 Goldstone’s analysis keys on four principal factors: (1) demographic dynamics, including population growth, changes in distribution of population “across cities and the countryside, across age groups, across social and economic and legal divisions, and across regions,” and the implications of such changes for social polarization and conflict; (2) state finances, involving the ability of crown revenue to keep pace with expenditures (especially in peacetime) and the distributional correlation between rising wealth in society and governmental fiscal needs; (3) sociopolitical elitist change, meaning above all changing patterns of intra-elite solidarity and elitist support for state fiscal reform; and (4) plebeian living 83

84 85 86

87

A point discussed in detail by, among others, Jack Censer, in “Social Twists and Linguistic Turns: Revolutionary Historiography a Decade after the Bicentennial,” French Historical Studies 22 (1999): 139–67. But see also on this subject Gwynne Lewis’s lengthy historiographical introduction to the 1999 2nd edition of Cobban’s Social Interpretation of the French Revolution; and Suzanne Desan, “What’s After Political Culture?,” pp. 163–96. Consult Peter McPhee, “The French Revolution, Peasants, and Capitalism,” American Historical Review (1989): 1265–80. See John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). Consult, in this connection, David Garrioch, The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690– 1830 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Henry Heller, The Bourgeois Revolution in France, 1789–1815 (New York: Berghahn, 2006). See Goldstone, “The Social Origins of the French Revolution Revisited,” in Thomas E. Kaiser and Dale K. van Kley, eds., From Deficit to Deluge, pp. 67–103.

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conditions in both city and countryside, and what those conditions implied for polarization among urban/rural groups and for possible popular mobilization against elite society and/or the state itself. Ultimately, Goldstone’s analysis refers back to “underlying demographic and economic trends” in the eighteenth century and suggests how, in combination with “conflicts over religion and shifts in public opinion,” such tendencies could contribute to a conjuncture of forces capable of overturning the ancien r´egime.88 Although this analytical concentration on demographic and associated change and its contribution to state breakdown and revolution has itself been fundamentally challenged, most recently, perhaps, by Steve Pincus,89 the comparativist will still find in Goldstone’s post-Furetist ideas much timely food for thought. Nevertheless, the Furetist argument may have also been challenged in ways transcending the rediscovery (however significant) of conflictual social dynamics in the French ancien r´egime. We recall in this connection Lynn Hunt’s concession that the Bourbon monarchy came apart “because it could not foot the bill for competition with England,” William H. Sewell’s admission that “impending bankruptcy” rather than “ideological conflict at the heart of the ancien r´egime” ushered in the state collapse of 1789, and Suzanne Desan’s rather defensive allusion to “bringing the state back in.” More to the point, perhaps, two distinguished specialists on French military history, Isser Woloch and David Bien, took Franc¸ois Furet himself directly to task for denying so categorically that circumstances – most notably, exogenous geopolitical circumstances – had shaped both old regime and revolution in France.90 It was perfectly natural for both of these scholars to react to Furet’s ideologically driven schema of revolution by stressing the unrelenting pressures of geopolitical circumstances on decision making in late eighteenth-century France, since they had both for many years been sensitized to the importance of such circumstances by their own inquiries into the French armies and military reforms of this era. In a larger sense, however, they (like Hunt, Sewell, Desan, and others writing in the Furetist tradition) were writing against the backdrop of the debate in social-scientific quarters over “state-centered” explanations of revolutionary causation, process, and consequences. 88 89

90

Ibid., pp. 71–73. See Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, pp. 33–35. Pincus here is reacting, not to Goldstone’s most recent article, but rather to his larger study of 1991 from which he derived elements of his current analysis. Yet, Pincus’s own conceptualization of revolution, it must be said, also leaves something to be desired. “Revolutions,” he insists, “are not struggles to overturn traditional states. They occur only after regimes have determined . . . to initiate ambitious modernization programs. Revolutions, then, pit different groups of modernizers against one another” (Ibid., p. 45). For the comparativist, however, this kind of approach to the subject is likely to underestimate the degree to which revolutions do pit “modernizers” against “reactionaries” of one stripe or another. See Woloch’s review article, “On the Latent Illiberalism of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 95 (1990): 1452–70; and the remarks of Woloch and Bien in “Franc¸ois Furet’s Interpretation of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 16 (1990): 777–802.

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31

It was also against this backdrop that I published, in 1994, an essay of synthesis on the genesis of revolution in France. Proceeding from what I called a “modified structuralist approach” to the subject, I offered the following “sequential propositions” to define that approach in more specific terms: The prerevolutionary state (in the French instance, and in many other cases as well) pursues foreign policy goals that respond primarily to the dynamics of the contemporary international state system but also, if secondarily, to domestic pressures. Such a state will collapse when and only when its failure to maintain its wonted credibility in the eyes of its foreign strategic and economic rivals coincides fully with its failure to maintain its traditional credibility in the eyes of its domestic elitist subjects. Only at such a rare juncture does a violent transformation of both state and society become possible. In this theoretical formulation, subjective historical realities – states of mind, social and cultural values, and ideologies – must be considered alongside objectively determinable realities of an administrative, military, and socioeconomic nature.91

I followed this up eight years later with another extended synoptic analysis that essentially applied very similar propositions to the actual process of the Revolution up to the Napoleonic coup in 1799 – albeit in a way that (I certainly hope) dealt more explicitly with the issues of human agency, political culture, and contingency that have rightfully been highlighted by critics of the structuralist approach.92 While it may be premature to see this recent tendency to analyze French revolutionary issues in state-centered, structuralist terms as effectively countering what undoubtedly remains the more fashionable “postmodernist,” politicalcultural tendency in the field, it has been picking up additional steam in recent years, thanks in part to those historians eager to revisit issues on the longneglected terrain of diplomatic history. Here, T. C. W. Blanning led the way in the 1980s-1990s with two monographs on the French Revolutionary wars.93 His studies have been followed up by Jeremy J. Whiteman’s exploration of the interactions between domestic and foreign policy in the early revolutionary era, and – perhaps even more influentially – by a series of painstakingly researched articles on the same general subject by Thomas Kaiser.94 In his own contribution to the Kaiser/van Kley anthology of 2011 referenced earlier, Kaiser, while being at all times careful not to postulate “that foreign policy counted 91 92 93 94

Bailey Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 18. Stone, Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See: T. C. W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London: Longman, 1986); and The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). See Jeremy J. Whiteman, Reform, Revolution and French Global Policy, 1787–1791 (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Press, 2003). Among Kaiser’s articles, the following stand out: “Who’s Afraid of Marie-Antoinette? Diplomacy, Austrophobia and the Queen,” French History 14 (2000): 241–71; and “From the Austrian Committee to the Foreign Plot: Marie-Antoinette, Austrophobia, and the Terror,” French Historical Studies 26 (2003): 579–617.

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more than or even as much as domestic issues” in the unraveling of the ancien r´egime, does avow that it is nonetheless “fair to say that 1789 entailed, among many other things, to be sure, a kind of referendum on the Old Regime’s foreign policy.”95 Kaiser’s conclusion that “foreign issues were closely connected in the contemporary public mind to certain domestic matters, including royal finances and court politics,” helps to reinforce the impression bequeathed to us by a number of other scholars in recent years that French revolutionary issues need to be reinterpreted in state-centered, structuralist terms. In the “parallel universe” of English revolutionary studies, too, “postmodernist” tendencies, however popular in the last few decades, have begun to provoke challenges from “structuralist” quarters. If the initial shift toward political-cultural analysis in French history was spearheaded by Furet’s Penser la R´evolution franc¸aise, in English studies, David Underdown’s Revel, Riot, and Rebellion played a comparable role a few years later.96 As the late Kevin Sharpe admiringly remarked, Underdown’s 1985 monograph was important especially in that it “pointed up the need for a history of politics that would transcend the traditional study of political institutions and their records to interrogate the broader political culture – of region and nation – inscribed in symbols, rituals and customs as well as [in] quarter session records and subsidy rolls.”97 Sharpe himself became a particularly outspoken proponent of “postmodernism” in seventeenth-century British studies, remonstrating that “Historians have not yet faced up to a . . . postmodernist reading of their own discipline: that ‘the past,’ rather than [being] a landscape simply elucidated by evidence, is a representation constructed by the historian from his own cultural vision as well as from the various representations that contemporaries created to discern meaning for themselves.” Sharpe further elaborated on his argument: I want to . . . suggest a new agenda for the political history of early modern England, an agenda that involves not only a broader configuration of the political, but an openness to other critical perspectives on and interdisciplinary approaches to history.98

Sharpe had already moved to explore aspects of this “new agenda” during the 1990s: in a much-discussed biography of Charles I and in coedited anthologies dealing with political-cultural issues in revolutionary times, he had underlined issues of human agency, ideology, and culture that have, in fact, loomed 95 96

97 98

See Thomas E. Kaiser, “From Fiscal Crisis to Revolution: The Court and French Foreign Policy, 1787–1789,” Chapter 4 in Kaiser and Van Kley, eds., From Deficit to Deluge, esp. p. 164. See David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). See also his subsequent work: A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 393. Ibid., pp. 3–4.

Introduction

33

very large subsequently for postmodernists in all three European revolutionary fields.99 Of course, it has always been a truism that, in the case of English revolutionary causation and process, religious as well as secular ideology played a crucial role. Accordingly, it is not at all surprising that the premium placed on religion by Russell and other early revisionists in the 1970s should have been followed up by more painstaking analyses of Puritan, Catholic, and sectarian politics and ideology in the next generation of historians. The many studies of J. C. Davis, Nigel Smith, and John S. Morrill, to go no further, point this up.100 But even more impressive, probably, is the sheer number of monographs, articles, and anthologies that in the last decade or so have expatiated on the issues of linguistic and rhetorical analysis, of politics and republican discourse, that have so characterized the “postmodernist turn” in all European revolutionary studies. For Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky, indeed, the terms “political culture” and “cultural politics” are apparently as interchangeable as they clearly became for Kevin Sharpe.101 This would also seem to be so in the more specific precincts of Interregnum republicanism scrutinized in recent years by Sean Kelsey, Sarah Barber, David Norbrook, and others.102 Then again, there are those like David Zaret who, appropriating the Habermasian conception of the “public sphere” in early modern societies, have used it to trace out the origins of “democratic culture” in late Tudor and early Stuart England.103 Still, in this field as in French revolutionary studies, “postmodernism” has had increasingly to share the limelight not only with a persisting interest in 99

100

101 102

103

See Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Kevin Sharpe, ed., Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); and Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker, eds., Refiguring Revolutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Refer to Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and, by J. C. Davis, these articles: “Fear, Myth, and Furore: Reappraising the Ranters,” Past and Present 129 (1990), pp. 79–103; “Puritanism and Revolution: Themes, Categories, Methods and Conclusions,” Historical Journal 34 (1991): 479–90; “Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution,” Historical Journal 35 (1992): 507–30; and (with others) “Debate: Fear, Myth and Furore,” Past and Present 141 (1993): 155–210. John S. Morrill, too, has recently played up the religious side of the revolutionary experience in England in articles and books far too numerous to itemize here. See Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky, eds., Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). See Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth 1649–1659 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Sarah Barber, Regicide and Republicanism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); and David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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issues of social change but also with structuralist concerns about “state formation” and the nexus between international and domestic affairs. David Cressy, we recall, pointedly referred to the English Revolution as “a ‘world-historical’ event,” and he went on to summarize one important aspect of what we would term the “structuralist” thrust in recent English revolutionary historiography: Recent contributions to the debate have emphasized both its ideological and geographical dimensions. . . . The ‘revolt of the provinces’ has expanded into ‘the wars of the three kingdoms.’ The revolution, if such it was, is now properly seen to be British as well as English, inexplicable without its Scottish and Irish components. Charles I’s problems, like those of Protector Cromwell, are understood in terms of the management of complex international territories with competing religious and constitutional traditions. Some scholars find even this archipelagian approach too narrow, and emphasize instead the European or even global compass.104

It is important here to note that this explanatory tendency had roots extending back to the earliest days of revisionism: Russell, for instance, was stressing Charles I’s unfulfilled needs (and Parliament’s naivete) ´ in matters of English foreign policy as early as 1979, and by 1991 one of his most ambitious monographs was analyzing the downfall of the three “British monarchies” during 1637–42.105 Whatever his strictures against long-term revolutionary causation as conceptualized by a Christopher Hill or a Lawrence Stone, Russell was acutely aware of the greater geographical context of “English” public affairs in the run-up to the tumultuous 1640s and 1650s. More recently, this “big picture” approach has inspired numerous anthologies and general surveys and has even associated the revolutionary ideology so influential in domestic English affairs as late as the 1650s with the formulation of English foreign policy.106 Yet, as Cressy observed – and, for the structuralist, this is crucial – some historians of the “long” seventeenth century have ranged even farther afield, insisting on interpreting revolutionary developments in a European or even global framework. Most germane here, and most challenging, perhaps, to the academic “establishment” has been Jonathan Scott’s situation of “England’s troubles” in the kind of European-wide context conventionally reserved for explanations of the French and Russian Revolutions. “The three rebellions of 1637–42,” Scott has very carefully argued, “do not constitute a British ‘context,’ but a British crisis, involving three kingdoms, united dynastically, 104 105 106

David Cressy, England on Edge, pp. 6–7. Consult again Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–29; and The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). See, for example: Steven Ellis and Sarah Barber, eds., Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725 (London: Longman, 1995); Brendan Bradshaw and John S. Morrill, eds., The British Problem, 1534–1707 (London: Macmillan, 1996); Ronald Hutton, The British Republic 1649–1660, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Austin H. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Stephen C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Introduction

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disunited in other ways. The context for this crisis was European.” Still speaking from this analytical perspective, Scott has contended that “the immediate context for the collapse of Charles I’s monarchy was that broader European upheaval that we call the Thirty Years’ War,” and (furthermore) that “it is not only the case that from 1618 to 1648/9 developments in England, Scotland and Ireland had this European context, but that they were a part of this single European conflict.” Finally, Scott has unabashedly set England’s “long seventeenth century” as a whole within this structuralist framework: Let us remind ourselves now that this was but the first stage of a century-long process through which the principal institutions of English religious and political life were first destroyed, then gradually reconstructed. At every stage of this experience the European context was crucial, and it culminated in a European invasion in 1688–9. Modern British politicians who claim to be defending the state against Europe appear not to understand that the British state was itself a European creation. It was an effect of this intervention, over the years 1689–1714, of which the British kingdoms had been incapable on their own.107

Although Scott’s precise chronology of “state formation” in England has been contested, what really appears to matter here is that his invocation of international affairs, of state construction, and of a contextual link between the two are immediately recognizable to us as foundational elements in a structuralist interpretation of (in this case, the English) revolution.108 Even as Scott was penning these provocative words, several of his associates – most strikingly, James S. Wheeler and Michael J. Braddick – were in their own work confirming his thesis of a causal link between international affairs and revolutionary state formation in seventeenth-century England. As we had occasion to note earlier, Wheeler was especially insistent on associating the “dramatic increase in the amounts of money required to sustain the large naval and military forces which the Westminster governments raised” (and the concomitant innovations in taxation and administration) with the revolutionary events of the 1640s and 1650s. “Beginning in 1643,” he specified, “the Long Parliament’s need to fund its armies and navies forced it to adopt new forms of regular taxation and to create the administrative systems necessary to collect, account for, and disburse the growing state revenue.” It was such developments that Wheeler (as we saw earlier) regarded as constituting “the seismic fault line between semi-feudal and modern England.109 If Braddick was 107 108

109

Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 27–29. It is interesting, if perhaps not essential for our purposes, to note that Geoffrey Parker is currently placing these and other “troubles” of the seventeenth century in an even broader context, one characterized by “global cooling” and resultant demographic stress. See Parker, The Global Crisis: War, Climate, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth-Century World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010). See again James S. Wheeler, The Making of a World Power: War and the Military Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England, esp. pp. 197–98.

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The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited

somewhat more circumspect on this subject, preferring to speak of a process of change extending from the 1640s to 1688–89 and beyond, he certainly agreed with Wheeler that the “discontinuity in revenue totals, army and navy size, and the change in the nature of the armed forces in the 1640s and 1650s seem to have been of great significance.”110 Moreover, Braddick deliberately situated his own work on “state formation” in seventeenth-century England in a larger historiographical context that any structuralist would likely find appealing. “Since the 1970s,” he remarked, “revisionist scholarship has demolished the grand narratives of the seventeenth century without establishing an alternative view. The overall purpose of [my] attempt to bring the state back in is to offer one such narrative in the aftermath of revisionism.” Braddick’s most telling pronouncement then followed: The fiscal-military capacity of the state was transformed in the 1640s, and this was associated with increasingly specialized institutions, legitimated with reference to ideas of necessity and national interest. In the later seventeenth century . . . administrative innovation in relation to the social order was relatively unspectacular. The development of the fiscal-military state, however, was rapid and of long-term consequence.

For this historian, “changes in the form and functioning of the [English] state,” responding especially to geopolitical pressures, “can be considered to have been modernizing in the Weberian sense.”111 We can predict fairly confidently on the basis of assertions such as these that, in English as well as in French revolutionary scholarship, “postmodernist” analysis of one kind or another will for the foreseeable future have to share the stage with a still-developing structuralist perspective. But what of the current state of Russian revolutionary historiography? Here, not unexpectedly, we encounter among specialists a sense of having been “left behind” because of Cold War and other legacies from the past. No one has dealt more forthrightly with this issue than Steve A. Smith, social historian of revolutionary Russia (and, more recently, revolutionary China). In reflections that appeared initially in 1994, Smith decried “the general distrust of theory and explicit conceptualization that is evident among so many historians of Russia,” and also faulted these scholars for “a certain blinkeredness, a tendency to shy away from big questions about ‘what it all meant.’” These observations in turn led Smith to query his Russianist colleagues in more specific terms that will register instantaneously with those of us given over to comparative revolutionary analysis: 110 111

Refer again to Braddick, “An English Military Revolution?” in Historical Journal 36 (1993): 965–75. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, pp. 96–97 and 177–79. Braddick’s latest ruminations on the civil conflicts of the 1640s appear in God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (New York: Penguin Books, 2009).

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How many of us rose to the challenge to conventional ways of thinking about the Russian Revolution that was posed by the work of Theda Skocpol or Perry Anderson?. . . . What parallel is there among historians of Russia to the lively debate on the English Civil War between the exponents of a structural explanation – either couched in terms of constitutional crisis or of class conflict – and the ‘revisionists’ who emphasize short-term causation and a concatenation of mishaps? What is the parallel to the debate sparked by ‘revisionists’ of the French Revolution who insist that the political character of the upheavals of 1789–94 cannot be deduced from social phenomena held to be more basic? . . . Such comparisons are all to our detriment. A cloud of intellectual inertia seems to hang over our field.112

Although Smith allowed thereafter that this was “a harsh generalization to make about a field in which the volume of highly professional studies grows exponentially,” and also conceded that the scholarship on Russia had been “more lively and innovative” in recent years in the United States than among his British peers, his frustration with the overall state of affairs was still palpable. Much of this derived (as we noted earlier) from the fact that, as Smith himself put it, down to the end of the 1980s “the continuance of the Soviet regime and the wider system of superpower rivalry meant that study of the Russian Revolution could never be insulated from the short-term pressures of contemporary politics.”113 At a time when historians of the English and French Revolutions, benefiting from generally open access to libraries and major historical archives in the West, had been able to cast off the shackles of outworn orthodoxies and move on to revisionism and beyond, inquiry into the 1917 cataclysm had still been inhibited by lack of easy access to historical records in Russia and all too often caught up in campaigns of demonization of West by East and East by West. For those compelled to toe the party line in the East, the maelstrom in Russia had perforce remained the “inevitable” result of class confrontation between capitalist bourgeois, on the one hand, and proletarians on the other – a confrontation in which Lenin’s selfless Bolsheviks, the incarnation of revolutionary vanguardism, had unfailingly blazed the way to the world’s first truly “socialist” society. For their ideological opponents in the West, on the other hand, the entire revolutionary experience in Russia had been simplistically reduced to a ghastly sequence of human miscalculations and historical accidents – and, ultimately, to the ability of ruthless, conspiratorial Bolshevik extremists to turn a chaotic situation to their own benefit. Thus, any prospects for a more sophisticated and empathetic understanding of revolutionary events in Russia had long been thwarted in both East and West. In spite of such problems, however – problems that did not afflict historians of the two earlier upheavals – something roughly resembling English- and 112

113

Smith’s entire article first appeared as “Writing the History of the Russian Revolution after the Fall of Communism,” in Europe-Asia Studies 46 (1994): 563–78. These selections are from Martin Miller, ed., The Russian Revolution, pp. 264–65. Ibid., p. 261.

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French-style “revisionism” began to emerge in the Russian field from the late 1960s and early 1970s on, as Cold War tensions receded somewhat and as conditions for research in Russia gradually improved. Another specialist on the Russian Revolution, Edward Acton, has described the torchbearers in this movement, “sometimes collectively characterized in reductionist fashion as ‘revisionists,’” in the following terms: What distinguished them . . . was their willingness to probe, criticize and where necessary repudiate the traditional view; their recognition of the extent to which it was inspired by Cold War hatred of all things ‘left’ – and especially the Soviet system – rather than by historical analysis; and their determination to subject received wisdom about the revolution to searching inquiry, their commitment to social perspectives and quantitative methods already being widely applied in less sensitive fields, and their use of sources hitherto barely tapped. . . . They challenged Soviet and traditional Western accounts alike.114

The result was a barrage of inquiries into such subjects as the prerevolutionary Russian economy, the structure and decision-making process of tsarist and successor political governments, the social composition and organizational strengths and weaknesses of the major revolutionary parties, and, perhaps most arrestingly, the prerevolutionary and revolutionary experiences of workers and artisans, soldiers and peasants.115 Such scholarship (which manifested a lively interest in provincial affairs as well as in developments in urban centers such as Petrograd and Moscow) was widely welcomed in the West, aroused steadily growing interest among Russians themselves in the late 1980s and 1990s, and helped prepare the way for major new syntheses on revolutionary problems authored by Tim McDaniel, Orlando Figes, and Sheila Fitzpatrick, among others.116 It is true that, in the 1990s, in the wake of the collapse of the USSR and of conservative political tendencies associated in the West with the public policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, a kind of post–Cold War rightwing triumphalism reared its head in certain scholarly quarters. Yet, this development, best captured perhaps in the works of long-time Harvard historian 114 115

116

Edward Acton, in Acton, Cherniaev and Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, p. 8. For useful reviews of this turn in scholarship on the Russian Revolution, see: Ronald Grigor Suny, “Revisionism and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics,” Russian Review 53 (1994): 155–82; and Stephen Kotkin, “1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks,” Journal of Modern History 70 (1998): 384–425. Tim McDaniel, Autocracy, Capitalism, and Revolution in Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891– 1924 (New York: Viking Press, 1997); and Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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Richard Pipes,117 has not fundamentally blunted the drive of “revisionists” or (as they are alternatively dubbed) “new social historians” to broaden and diversify their inquiries into the prerevolutionary and revolutionary Russian past. Those inquiries now embrace subjects ranging from domestic labor, crime, hooliganism, homosexuality, and popular entertainment to the concerns of peasant women and of non-Russian ethnic groups, as well as the more familiar topics of research investigated with increasing frequency ever since the late 1960s and 1970s.118 Significantly, however, recent years have also witnessed the emergence of “postmodernism” in some circles and the affirmation of structuralist analysis in other quarters; in this sense, too, trends in Russian historiography have followed, at a certain distance, those in the historiographies of the two earlier revolutions. Here, again, Steve Smith has played a pivotal role, arguing that the “linguistic turn” so prominent in recent historical writing “is but one symptom of the wider cultural transition to post-modernism.” For Smith, “postmodernism” signifies many different things; but “whether one is dealing with poststructuralism, deconstruction or certain styles of feminist analysis, these currents all share a tendency to subvert the grounds on which knowledge claims are secured.” Most certainly, a veritable army of specialists laboring in various “postmodernist” fields of inquiry would have heartily endorsed Smith’s prediction (put forth in 1994) that “over the next 20 years . . . much of the most challenging work will come from historians who are trying to face up to the discursivity of history as a discipline, [and] its subordination to the effects of language and writing.”119 Others, however, have not been so sure. Ronald G. Suny, discussing the “new social history” of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s on the pages of the Russian Review, explicitly cited yet would not embrace unqualifiedly the tendency of William Sewell, Keith Baker, Franc¸ois Furet and other “postmodernists” in French revolutionary studies to celebrate ideology as “constitutive of sociopolitical reality.” At most, he advocated the use of linguistic/cultural analysis in conjunction with other modes of historical inquiry. Politics, economics, social class, discourse, and other factors, Suny maintained, should be regarded as dynamically interrelated one to another: the “arrows of causation” must run in all directions at once.120 Robert V. Daniels, commenting a few years later on a review by Stephen Kotkin of post-Soviet historiography, 117 118

119 120

Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); and, by the same author, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919–1924 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). For some of the very latest examples of this literature, consult the 3rd edition (2008) of Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, esp. pp. 185–91. These works are simply too numerous to cite in these introductory pages. Steve Smith, “Writing the History of the Russian Revolution,” cited in Martin Miller, ed., The Russian Revolution, pp. 267–68. Ronald Suny, “Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917,” pp. 165–82.

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was scathingly critical of what he termed “the now fashionable philosophy that calls itself post-modernism.” For Daniels, the postmodernist “turn” meant, at best, “a skeptical relativism, at worst a free hand to subordinate history to political agendas.” Under its aegis, “no truth is solid and everything depends on the imagination if not the whim of the observer.”121 Then, again, Edward Acton, in his lengthy introductory essay to the enormous anthology of scholarly articles on the Russian Revolution he had co-edited with Vladimir Cherniaev and William G. Rosenberg, descanted on what he reckoned to be postmodernism’s “ambivalent impact on the study of the revolution.” On the one hand, Acton allowed, this new analytic perspective has encouraged historians “to reappraise their own conceptual apparatus, to recognize and bring to light the presuppositions. . . . embedded in the analytical language they themselves employ.” Such specialists, thus forearmed, and “building on the innovative work of the 1970s and 1980s, are now giving deeper consideration . . . to the extent to which cultural formation, ideology, identity and discourse affect the way in which individuals and social groups interpret and respond to objective conditions, processes, and experience.” On the other hand, Acton (much like Daniels) deplored the “extreme skepticism” and “crude relativism” fostered all too often by the new approach to history: such a perspective, he insisted, could subvert any focus on “objective” socioeconomic structures and conditions, make any “grand narratives” of the past impossible, and above all confer on ideas and culture an autonomy and “causal primacy” that, in “real” life, they seldom possess.122 The controversy over this question is not likely to subside any time soon – in the purlieu of Russian studies any more than in those of English and French studies. Emphatically, this has not prevented practitioners of the new linguistic/ cultural “turn” such as Christopher Read, Orlando Figes, Boris Kolonitskii, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Lynn Mally from providing us with fascinating insights into the many articulations between political power, society, and culture in revolutionary times.123 Yet, even in their most iconoclastic moments, such scholars know that they cannot altogether dispense with the explanatory framework of structuralism. For all his insistence on the chilling implications of “cultural 121

122 123

See Daniel’s commentary, “Does the Present Change the Past?,” which follows Stephen Kotkin, “1991 and the Russian Revolution,” in Journal of Modern History 70 (1998): 431–35. Citations are from p. 434. Edward Acton, cited in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 13–16. See, for example: Christopher Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Transition from Tsarism to Communism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); and Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). Countless other examples of this “turn” could be cited here.

Introduction

41

backwardness” for modern Russia, Orlando Figes – as an example in point – conceded that the “First World War was a gigantic test of the modern state, and as the only major European state which had failed to modernize before the war it was a test which tsarist Russia was almost bound to fail.” This assertion logically followed for Figes from his preceding argument that, in the Russian ancien r´egime, “everything depended on the tsarist regime’s willingness to introduce reforms.”124 In defaulting in this fashion to something of a “state-centered” analysis, whatever its visionary postmodernist trappings, Orlando Figes was in reality writing in a securely anchored structuralist tradition. Ever since Theodore H. von Laue had brought out the initial edition of his classic Why Lenin? Why Stalin? in the 1960s, this work, described by its publishers in a later edition as “one of the most popular history books ever written,” had habituated its readers to placing late imperial and revolutionary Russia in the unforgiving context of modern Eurasian geopolitics. For von Laue, the cataclysm of 1917 was in its essence about the “ordeal of building a modern state under highly adverse conditions.” It revolved, that is to say, “around two parallel long-term trends,” one domestic in nature and consisting of the tsarist regime’s relationship with alienated elements in its own society, the other foreign in nature and involving “a drastic process of catching up to the social, economic, and political efficiency of Russia’s more powerful rivals.” In the final analysis, von Laue insisted, this upheaval had been “essentially enforced from without, by the relentless pressures of power politics generated by the universal ambition for political survival and global preeminence.”125 Over the years, von Laue’s reappraisal of the Russian Revolution has admittedly had its detractors, for whom it is heavy-handed, dogmatic, and overly deterministic; yet for all that it has managed to flourish in the standard classroom literature, and (more to the point) found many an echo among the cognoscenti in revolutionary studies. As political theorist John Dunn put it, in anticipation of “political-cultural” historians such as Orlando Figes: It was assuredly not a mere accident that the Tsarist empire was involved in the First World War and it was surely not a mere accident that after three years of unrelenting struggle against the armies of imperial Germany, Russian military, political, economic and social organization should all have been savagely scarred. The Tsarist empire had neither the will nor, in the face of the German threat, the capacity to retire from the strains of international power competition. . . . It was not a viable modern state in the final test of a modern state’s viability.126

And even William G. Rosenberg, for all his clarion calls to fellow Russianists to investigate cultural and ideological processes as vital mediators between 124 125 126

Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 809 and 810. Theodore H. Von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? Why Gorbachev? The Rise and Fall of the Soviet System, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993), p. 2. Dunn, Modern Revolutions, p. 30.

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human experience and structural change in revolutionary times, has conceded that, in the bleak aftermath of the October 1917 coup d’etat, “the task of state ´ reconstruction . . . was regarded as a political imperative for both Bolsheviks and their civil-war antagonists.” This was, in part, because state reconstruction “also constituted in the view of many the only real possibility to stave off total economic collapse.”127 In the Russian situation, therefore, as in the English and French upheavals of earlier centuries, the state was seen by revolutionary actors (and must likewise be seen retrospectively by analysts today whether they endorse structuralism in toto or not) as the vital and indispensable initiator of public policy, both foreign and domestic. At this juncture in our introductory discussion, all that remains for us to do is to say a few words about the organization of the comparative analysis to follow and about two cardinal assumptions undergirding that analysis. In doing so, we will be drawing heavily on the conclusions emerging from the prodigious theoretical literature and archival research on revolutions discussed previously. On the first point, the enduring (if at times qualified) acceptance of Brinton’s prestructuralist stages theory of revolution, at least in the cases of England, France, and Russia, appears to indicate the lines along which our analysis should be organized. Chapter 1 shows how geostrategic decline interacted dangerously with domestic constitutional, social-elitist, and political-cultural ´ weaknesses in the crisis-ridden anciens r´egimes of all three countries. Chapter 2 suggests how the convergence of strategic decline and domestic weaknesses finally induced in all three cases the crumbling of absolutism and thereby opened the way for the revolutionary politicization of elitist and popular soci´ ety. Chapter 3 portrays early revolutionary “honeymoons” in countries characterized (at least temporarily) by massive rejections of the recent, benighted past and by accompanying hopes for the future. Chapter 4 outlines the ensuing process of radicalization in the three revolutions and analyzes that process in terms of both war-related struggles of elitist factions for state power and the ´ outreach of these factions to urban and/or rural interests. Chapter 5 reappraises the most extreme and “advanced” stages in our revolutions by revisiting their “reigns of terror and virtue,” stressing the more lasting gains in statist reconsolidation, and playing up the irony of ruptures between mainstream radicals and their ultra-radical followers. Chapter 6 reassesses the Thermidorian regimes in ´ “late revolutionary” England, France, and Russia by exploring their domestic complexities and contradictions, their foreign policies, and their crises of revolutionary legitimacy. Finally, the Conclusion briefly analyzes the state-initiated “revolutions-from-above” that followed on and secured at least some of the gains of the original “revolutions-from-below” in all three countries, and closes by recapitulating at length the theoretical assumptions underlying our work. 127

William G. Rosenberg, cited in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, p. 27.

Introduction

43

Clearly, in fleshing out our own version of this schema, we will have to guard vigilantly against oversimplification, keeping ever in mind Lyford P. Edwards’s admonition that it is “the easiest thing imaginable to draw up an arbitrary series of stages and then twist and torture the data to fit this Procrustean bed.”128 Another way of stating this is to say that we will have to be on the lookout for, and will honestly acknowledge, differences between as well as uniformities running through our three upheavals. Still, even with this reservation in mind, we can reasonably view such an accentuation of the sequential developmental stages of revolution as paying additional dividends. Specifically, it will allow us (indeed, some would say, compel us) to include seventeenth-century England in the analysis; and it will more or less force us at all times to keep “voluntarist” issues of human agency, culture, and contingency in play. This last observation leads naturally into our second point of conclusion, that concerning the two critical operational premises underlying our work. The first of these premises consists of a candid endorsement of an essentially structuralist approach to developments in England, France, and Russia. Like political/social theorists ranging from John Dunn and Michael Kimmel to Charles Tilly, and comparative historians such as Martin Malia, we cannot help but accept the notion that (as Malia put it) “the framework of a unitary state to focus all political, social, and other forms of protest in a single set of institutions” is the primal prerequisite for a “major revolution” such as that which memorably convulsed each of these three European countries at a defining moment in its history.129 Revolutions, in other words, are in considerable measure about power, and thus about the ways in which politicized individuals, and groups of politicized individuals, compete for it so that they may try to fashion public (state) policy.130 (Revolutions are, of course, also about much else in addition – on which point, see the immediately following paragraph.) Implicit in this primarily structuralist approach is some degree of acceptance of Weberian notions on the nature and functions of modern states – ideas that do, after all, apply to England and France in early modern times as well as to early twentieth-century Russia. At the same time, however – and this is the second of our two key underlying premises – our structuralist approach to what happened in England, France, and Russia must be at all times a modified, carefully nuanced structuralism. 128 129 130

Refer again to Michael S. Kimmel’s citation of Edwards, in Revolution, p. 53. See again Malia, History’s Locomotives, p. 5. In connection with this point, refer to Thomas E. Kaiser’s and Dale K. van Kley’s comment (in From Deficit to Deluge, p. 36) that “the French Revolution is best conceived of as a political event with diverse and other than purely political origins.” Historian Dan Edelstein has even more recently spoken in similar terms, citing “the basic fact that revolutions are first and foremost political affairs. While they also have broad cultural and social ramifications, without this political thrust they would not be revolutions.” Dan Edelstein, “Do We Want a Revolution without Revolution? Reflections on Political Authority,” French Historical Studies 35 (2012): 270.

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Armed with such a perspective, we must see the old regime, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary states in all three cases as responding not only to long-term exogenous imperatives of a primarily geopolitical nature, but also to endogenous pressures reflecting the “objective” needs, aspirations, anxieties, and general cosmologies of “ordinary” people as well as the demands of intra-elite ´ “special interests.” Moreover – and this is absolutely crucial – both exogenous and endogenous forces acting on these states, and helping to determine their ultimate fates, must appear in our analysis as dialectically interrelated and mediated through the agency of political cultures inhering historically in the formation of the societies involved. We may finally have to concede that men and women, taken in general, were not able by themselves to unlock the brittle floodgates of revolution in England, France, and Russia – even though the unprecedented inundations that followed in all three of these countries were ultimately as informed by “ordinary” people’s hopes and anxieties and needs as by the inescapable geostrategic and domestic/political calculations of the policy-makers and politicians who claimed to be ruling on their behalf.

1 Ancien R´egimes

In 1628, one of Charles I’s more perspicacious subjects, William Strode, reflecting on recent tendencies in English public affairs, opined apprehensively that “[Our] liberties have been so invaded, that we are exposed to foreign destruction.”1 On September 7, 1782, French Foreign Minister Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, brooding on his own country’s vulnerabilities, wrote to his eventual successor Armand-Marc, comte de Montmorin, that France’s perdurable adversary England had, “in its constitution and in the establishments which it has permitted her to form, resources which are lacking to us.” Eight weeks later, waxing even more explicit on the subject, Vergennes concluded sadly that England’s “constitution gives her . . . advantages which our monarchical forms do not accord us.”2 Soon after Russia’s humiliation in the Crimean War of the next century, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich sorrowfully acknowledged: “We cannot deceive ourselves any longer. We are both weaker and poorer than the first-class powers, and furthermore poorer not only in material resources but also in mental resources, especially in matters of administration.”3 On one level, what each of these individuals was deploring was his own country’s geostrategic inadequacies and, indeed, its decline in its contemporary competitive international setting. But such observations also exposed on a deeper level an equally crucial reality, namely, the tight interrelatedness in each case of “foreign” and “domestic” issues – a fact that increasingly occupied the minds of thoughtful English, French, and Russian subjects as their floundering countries began to approach what some today would call their appointments with revolution. 1 2 3

Citation from Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 30. Vergennes is cited in Bailey Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution, p. 147. My emphasis. Cited in Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 177.

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Chapter 1 first sketches out the persistent pattern of failure, frustration, and relative decline in the international standing of our three prerevolutionary states. It then argues that, in all three cases, states that were experiencing mounting difficulties in the arena of (primarily if not exclusively) European strategic and security issues were simultaneously proving to be ever less attuned to evolving constitutional, social-elitist, and “political-cultural” realities at home. ´ Chapter 1 suggests finally that, in all three anciens r´egimes, what we can in retrospect identify as “prodromal” or “warning” crises – the Petition of Right controversy of 1628–29 in England, the so-called “Maupeou Revolution” of 1771–74 in France, and the Revolution of 1905 in Russia – prefigured much greater explosions to come. They did so not only by dramatizing how isolated from their own subjects the monarchs and their respective governments in all three cases were becoming in constitutional, social, and political-cultural terms, but also by further aggravating what were already dialectically interrelated state/security and domestic problems, thus accelerating the pace toward full-fledged sociopolitical revolutions. Geopolitical Dilemmas Unresolved If one situates prerevolutionary England, France, and Russia in their temporal/ spatial settings, a certain basic symmetry appears – a symmetry, for sure, not to be unduly stressed or oversimplified, but significant all the same. Diplomatic historians ranging from Ludwig Dehio to Paul Kennedy have long familiarized us with the notion of a fiercely competitive international state system rooted initially in the localized diplomacy of Renaissance Italy, but then spilling out into the rest of west/central Europe and eventually embracing the rest of Eurasia and (by the twentieth century) the entire world.4 In a very real sense, each of the revolutions occurred in one of the three successive phases of this 450year, no-holds-barred struggle for European (and, in growing measure, global) supremacy. The English Revolution erupted very late in the first phase, that which extended from 1500 to 1650, on the northwestern fringes of a European continent long torn by struggle between the late Valois/early Bourbon French and the Austro-Spanish Habsburgs. The French Revolution exploded in and rejuvenated the very country that strove repeatedly to dominate the European heartland from the years after 1648 down to 1815. Finally, the upheaval in Russia broke out on the eastern fringes of Europe at a time when the Germans, recently united and profiting from their central geographical location and from a host of human and material resources, aspired to outdo the exploits of all previous European peoples. It is within these larger contexts that we need to begin to analyze our prerevolutionary regimes, whose geostrategic anxieties 4

See, in this connection: Ludwig Dehio, The Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the European Power Struggle, trans. Charles Fullman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); and Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, esp. Chapters 1–5.

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were only sharpened by nostalgic recollections of what seemed more grandiose earlier days. In the case of England, the early Stuarts – James I and his son Charles I – must in their more fanciful moments have cast envious eyes back to times when late medieval English monarchs lorded it over an “empire” straddling both sides of the Channel, or (more recently) to times when an imperious Tudor monarch such as Henry VIII could (in 1543) endeavor to resuscitate martial English glories in France. By the early decades of the seventeenth century, such exploits (or attempted exploits) had been “ruled out of court” by developments on the international stage (as well, of course, as by developments within England itself, on which more later). The central reality to which all polities in Europe, great and small, had to react after the earliest years of the sixteenth century was the unprecedented conglomeration of titles, powers, territories, and (eventually) overseas colonies in the hands of the Habsburg prince Charles V and his descendants. The Austro-Spanish Habsburgs most immediately menaced Valois France with strategic encirclement; but the ensuing military/diplomatic duel between Madrid and Vienna, on the one hand, and Paris on the other, also posed for the English the dilemma of how (if at all possible) to play the immemorial foe, France, off the newly emerged “superpower” represented by the Habsburgs. What complicated matters further for the English, of course, was the way their strategic vulnerabilities interacted with and were reinforced by their ideological or religious anxieties in a world now polarized between Reformation Protestantism and Counter-Reformation Catholicism. As Jonathan Scott has recently asserted, the newly evangelized English, struggling to survive amidst the strokes and counter-blows of the continental Catholic Powers, devised foreign policy strategies that in some respects looked forward from the Tudors to the Stuarts (and, belike, even beyond): English protestant fear of European popery was above all fear by an encircled enclave of invasion. This had its origins in the middle of the sixteenth century when this perspective persuaded William Cecil in favor of military intervention in Scotland to contain the danger through Scotland from catholic France. Thereafter it remained a powerful force throughout the Elizabethan period, intensifying from the later 1570s in the context of the Dutch protestant struggle against Spain. Cecil’s fear, in 1569, of ‘the invasion of England by the French king . . . ,’ is an authentic expression of ‘the siege mentality of English protestantism’ that was the most important motor of English politics until well into the eighteenth century.5

As Scott remarks, the prolonged Elizabethan succession problem meant that, as the sixteenth century gave way to the seventeenth century, dynastic, religious, and security issues became inextricably intertwined in a fashion that would characterize the Stuart years as well. Simultaneously, the English quest for what 5

Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 57. See also, on these issues, Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis 1558–1569 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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Scott terms “European confessional military security”6 ensured that, in the eyes of statesmen at London, England’s security needs dictated attention to AngloScottish, Anglo-Irish, and Anglo-Dutch relations as much as to diplomatic exchanges with the dueling Catholic giants on the Continent. Elizabethan England’s historic triumph over Mary, Queen of Scots (executed by Elizabeth I for treason in 1587) and over Mary’s powerful Spanish champion Philip II in the Armada year of 1588 may have given London a breathing space for a time, but these stirring developments only deepened English geostrategic fears, and in any case they were soon enough rendered obsolete by the perils of the new century. James I made peace with Spain soon after his accession in 1603; unfortunately for England, however, his foreign policy (and that of his son and successor Charles I) lacked the hard-headed if at times maddeningly dilatory realism of Elizabeth. This was to be particularly unfortunate in that, from 1618 on, the entire calculus of power politics in west-central Europe was to be dominated by the Thirty Years’ War, a conflict that, arising initially out of dynastic, ethnic, and religious quarrels in Bohemia, eventually blossomed into a climactic confrontation between the Austro-Spanish Habsburgs, on the one hand, and the French (now ruled by the Bourbons), on the other. As all students of seventeenth-century England know, James I had a very personal stake in the initial “Bohemian phase” of this prolonged, internecine conflict, because it was the Habsburg-engineered ouster of his son-in-law Frederick of the Palatinate from his too hastily assumed position as king of the insurgent Calvinist Bohemian nobility mustered at Prague that initiated military hostilities in 1619. Within a few years Frederick had been expelled from his hereditary holdings in the Palatinate as well as from Bohemia, and (along with his wife Elizabeth, James’s daughter), had to seek asylum among the Protestant Dutch. James, as one expert on British foreign policy in this era has reminded us, “regarded a confessional war as a disaster to be avoided at all costs. . . . His position as mediator, acceptable to all sides, was the key to his response to the Thirty Years War.”7 James’s reluctance to take up his Tudor predecessor’s gage of war probably stemmed as much from his dislike of the revolutionary implications of Calvinism as from any generalized sentiments of pacifism, and it colored his attitudes toward the insurgent Protestant Dutch and Protestant Huguenots in France as much as toward the insurrectionary Protestant Bohemians, whose aspirations he pointedly refused to endorse. (The most he would do for his son-in-law was to seek, via diplomatic means, his reestablishment in the Palatinate.) But the more important point here is that, as Simon Adams has underscored, James’s stance toward the strategic/religious conflict convulsing Europe signaled something of a break with recent Elizabethan policies: 6 7

Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 57. See Simon Adams, “Spain or the Netherlands? The Dilemmas of Early Stuart Foreign Policy,” in Howard Tomlinson, ed., Before the English Civil War: Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). Citation from pp. 86–88.

Ancien Regimes ´

49

James’s views on the confessional struggle and the subversive aspects of Calvinist politics were little different from those Elizabeth had held, but his dynastic interests and his attitude towards Spain and France marked a distinct break with the past. A central feature of his foreign policy was his intention of marrying his sons to either Habsburg or Bourbon princesses. Elizabethan policy had been based on a deep suspicion of both France and Spain, but James’s policy was marked by a growing respect for Spanish gravitas, already present in the 1590s, and a growing contempt for French unreliability.8

James continued until his death in 1625 to pursue intermittent negotiations with Spain on behalf of his son Charles (and, more indirectly, on behalf of his luckless son-in-law Frederick), and even though the breakdown in those negotiations temporarily threw Charles (and his confidant the Duke of Buckingham) into the hands of the domestic faction clamoring for war with Spain, this was (in Adams’s words) “largely an emotional reaction to the humiliation [Charles] considered he had suffered in Madrid in 1623.”9 Although Charles I “did have a brief period as a Protestant champion during 1624–26,” as Ann Hughes has noted, “he returned to his father’s pro-Spanish policy in the 1630s, hoping to win back the Palatinate for his nephew through Spanish favor.”10 But Charles’s orientation toward Madrid in the 1630s had to do with much more than dynastic concerns. Like his father, he did not share the view of evangelical Protestants in England (or, for that matter, in France, the Netherlands, Bohemia, and elsewhere) that English foreign policy should take the form of an ideological crusade against the threatening forces of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in west-central Europe. And this, in turn, was of major significance insofar as it put the overall thrust of English foreign policy in these dangerous years at odds with sentiments articulated repeatedly in Parliament and in wider circles of informed (and alarmed) Protestant opinion. Whatever Conrad Russell may have written regarding the House of Commons’ hypocrisy when it came actually to funding an aggressive policy against the nefarious and frequently denounced forces of “Papism” in Europe,11 the reality seems much more complex. Jonathan Scott has summed up as aptly as anyone the evolution of scholarly thinking on this point: It is a crucial argument of Russell’s that, contrary to the impression held by earlier historians and by both early Stuart kings, most members of the House of Commons actually opposed war (on financial grounds). . . . Actually, as both primary evidence and recent secondary work make clear, this interpretation is fundamentally unconvincing. The impact made upon English public opinion by the Bohemian crisis and its aftermath was enormous (which is why James, Buckingham and Charles all responded to it, 8 9 10

11

Ibid. Ibid., p. 89. Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Revolution, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 29–30. Charles’s nephew was Charles Louis, eldest son of Frederick V of the Palatinate, who had died (in exile) in 1632. See, in particular, Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, pp. 78–79.

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negatively or positively). This was a conflict that involved fundamental English religious and dynastic interests.12

As Thomas Cogswell has tersely remarked, “nothing focused public attention so closely and so long as the first decade of the Thirty Years War.”13 The problem was not so much that the members of the House of Commons were unwilling to subsidize warfare against the “Jesuitical” Spanish and other threatening myrmidons of the Catholic “anti-Christ” in Europe as that they could not agree with the early Stuart policymakers on the precise character of such warfare. To be sure, the sheer cost of any such campaign was likely to be unprecedented in the English experience. Geoffrey Parker has familiarized us with the concept of a “military revolution” entailing, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a massive increase in the size of what were now permanent standing armies and skyrocketing costs of new military technologies and wars enveloping much of Europe.14 Furthermore, the resultant explosion of military costs in this era was only aggravated by concomitant developments such as the monetary inflation stemming in turn from demographic pressures, inflows of silver from the New World, and intensifying Great Power appetites for material resources. Still, as Simon Adams has pointed out, something even more fundamental was involved. “The inflation of military costs,” he has written, “was a result . . . also of the King of Spain’s possession of vast resources of colonial wealth. The wealth from the Indies enabled him to engage in warfare on a scale which, as the Privy Council in 1602, parliamentarians in 1621 and 1624, the Dutch, Frederick V, and Cardinal Richelieu all realized, would quickly exhaust his enemies. They in turn were forced to look to the economic bases of their military machines and seek either to expand their powers of taxation, create their own colonial or mercantile empires, or contest his control over the Indies.”15 But the implications for England of Spain’s stature as the first of Europe’s modern global or semiglobal empires were political as well as financial. To challenge such a colossus unavoidably meant having to choose between a strategy of direct military confrontation on continental battlefields and a “blue-water” strategy entailing maritime warfare in the Indies and elsewhere. In other words, as Norah Carlin has put it, “there was a difference between the kind of war which Charles and Buckingham wanted, which was an intervention on the European mainland, and the naval war against Spain 12 13

14 15

Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 54. Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 24. For Cogswell’s extended discussion of this issue, see pp. 3–35. See also, for similar interpretations: Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–28 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England, 1603–58 (London: Arnold, 1985); and John Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500– 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Adams, “Spain or the Netherlands? The Dilemmas of Early Stuart Foreign Policy,” pp. 80–81.

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which the Commons wanted. The latter was an unrealistic expectation according to Russell but less so according to others.”16 And insofar as Buckingham and others did intervene in Europe, their military incompetence (at Cadiz and on the Isle de Rhe, ´ for example) as well as their ill-advised willingness in 1627 to take on both France and Spain militarily only heightened suspicions in Parliament (and among politicized English Protestants in general) that the Stuart cause was (at the very least) insufficiently reflective of England’s true geostrategic interests. In looking back on the whole issue of English military involvement in the European conflict of the 1620s, Thomas Cogswell has left us with this sobering assessment: The problems with the war effort of the 1620s therefore do not appear to be those “of a nation reluctantly at war.” The problems instead were those of a people frustrated in their desire for war, and they with some justice blamed Charles for their frustration. For some, the scars of this disappointment ran deep. . . . Hence, pending further research, the blame for the disastrous war effort should be placed in Whitehall, not Westminster.17

Perhaps not all evangelized and articulate English subjects were at this point ready to agree with William Strode (opining in 1628) that they were being “exposed to foreign destruction” by Stuart malfeasance of one kind or another; nonetheless, it does appear in hindsight that the ground was already being laid in England for a potentially dangerous rift between the rulers and many of the ruled on matters of national security and, perhaps, national survival. A similar situation prevailed in prerevolutionary France, where the longreigning but unheroic Bourbon king Louis XV found it as difficult to emulate the grandeur of his ancestors Henry IV and Louis XIV as England’s James I and Charles I had found it difficult to reproduce the charisma of Tudor rulers such as Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. The “Sun King,” in particular, reigning as he had for an unprecedented seventy-two years, had set a standard of stylistic and martial gloire to which neither his great-grandson Louis XV nor the latter’s ill-starred grandson Louis XVI could realistically aspire. Acceding to power in the mid-seventeenth century as the royal beneficiary of a French foreign policy that had recently helped to overthrow the Habsburg supremacy in western Europe, the Roi de Soleil, young, handsome, and arrogant, had developed at his leisure a national tradition meshing diplomatic and economic ambitions of a continental and colonial/mercantile nature. In addition, he had stamped this grandiose tradition with the imprimatur of his personal charisma and the iconography of divine-right kingship. If princelings all over Europe scrambled to emulate the Grand Roi by constructing miniature Versailles and assembling entourages and leading lives styled after his, is it any wonder that subsequent French monarchs (and statesmen laboring on their behalf) found it essential to 16 17

Norah Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 92–93. Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution, pp. 318–19.

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assess their country’s strategic objectives in terms at least as imposing as those bequeathed to them by Louis XIV?18 Of course, it would have been well had Louis XV borne in mind not only the dazzling image of the young Louis XIV dictating war and peace and receiving at court the deferential advances of princes and ambassadors of a hundred lands, but also the more cautionary image of the humbled old monarch of the sanguinary conflict over the Spanish Succession. How many admirers of the Sun King remember or even realize that, weighed down by military reverses as much as by the ailments of old age in the early years of the eighteenth century, this splendid exemplar of divine-right absolutism was apparently quite seriously thinking of appealing to a national representative conclave of some sort (perhaps the long-disused Estates-General) as part of an unheard-of effort to rally popular support for France in its season of humiliating national defeat?19 At some point, this radical gesture was left on the drawing-board; still, it is noteworthy that Louis found it necessary even so to issue two extraordinary appeals for his subjects’ support in the form of public letters, one to the French bishops and the other to the royal provincial governors.20 And even at that, the aging French sovereign would feel himself fortunate, a few years later, to retrieve some tatters of French prestige from the jaws of geopolitical disaster at the peace talks at Utrecht and Rastadt. Yet, this was a cautionary tale that Bourbon monarchs and their advisers would fail to heed in the years after the Sun King’s death in 1715. In the final analysis, they could not resist the legacy of the Louis XIV of an earlier, more resplendent time, the Louis XIV who, building on the policies of his own forebears, and in collaboration with peerless ministers and dauntless men of war, had endeavored to replace the now-exhausted Austro-Spanish Habsburg complex with a European (and overseas) dominion of even greater proportions. True, the incessant wars of the preceding reign had, at least temporarily, exhausted the resourceful French and their still largely rural-peasant economy; more than ever before, time was required to bind up the country’s wounds and regenerate its sources of wealth and power. Moreover, the French (like their rivals the Austrians and the English, for that matter) had a royal succession to secure: Louis XV was but five years old at the time of his predecessor’s death 18

19

20

The literature on Louis XIV is, of course, enormous. For a classic and largely admiring view of his life and reign, refer to John B. Wolf, Louis XIV (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968). A somewhat less hagiographic account of this monarch, which attempts to place him in the larger demographic and socioeconomic context of his times, is that of Pierre Goubert, Louis XIV et Vingt Millions de Franc¸ais (Paris: Fayard, 1966). On this fascinating incident, see Joseph Klaits, Printed Propaganda Under Louis XIV: Absolute Monarchy and Public Opinion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), esp. pp. 211–13. See also, on this general subject, Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965). Klaits, Printed Propaganda, pp. 263 and 267.

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in 1715, and some years would have to pass before the survival of the Bourbon line in France could be regarded as a given. It was, however, only a matter of time before French foreign policy would once again attempt to tread in the beckoning footsteps of the Sun King, to acknowledge, that is, the imposing weight of state tradition and continuity in these matters. As Franc¸ois-Joachim de Pierre, cardinal de Bernis, would later put it: “The object of the politics of this crown has been and always will be to play in Europe the superior role which suits its seniority, its dignity, and its grandeur; to reduce every power which attempts to force itself above her, whether by trying to take away her possessions, or by arrogating to itself an unjust preeminence, or, finally, by seeking to take away . . . her influence and general credit in the affairs [of Europe].”21 Inspired by such a canon, and urged on (so to speak) by the ghosts of his regal ancestors, Louis XV, once grown to manhood, would wage war repeatedly on both land and sea. Unfortunately, however, much as the late English Tudors and early Stuarts had had to deal with the geostrategic challenge of the Habsburgs and (the early Stuarts in particular) with the ever-shifting complications of the Thirty Years’ War, so the eighteenth-century French Bourbons had to confront (but never adequately comprehended) profound changes in the international state system antithetical to French strategic interests. In brief: as Britain, Russia, and Prussia emerged as major players in international affairs, state-mobilized power would “migrate” relentlessly away from gilded Versailles, both toward the northwest (and overseas) and toward eastern Europe. No longer would it be sufficient for the French to overawe the Spanish and the Dutch; patronize or ignore the English; rampage through the Rhineland, northern Italy, and Bavaria; and regard imperial Austria as the permanent enemy to the east. Now the gauntlet would have to be thrown down to strategic (and, in the case of the British, economic) rivals more difficult to vanquish.22 On the one hand, there were the geostrategic and associated economic consequences of two “doses” of revolution in seventeenth-century England. As the French were soon to learn to their cost, England in the eighteenth century would be able to implement a foreign policy drawing massive and historically unprecedented support from its wealthy and articulate elites. Those elites – the ´ ´ profit-oriented agriculturalists of the peerage and gentry as well as the merchants of London and other urban centers – were now securely ensconced in power, in the localities much as at the center. John Brewer has written that if 21 22

Cited in Orville T. Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes: French Diplomacy in the Age of Revolution, 1719–1787 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), p. 213. On eighteenth-century developments, see the following: M. S. Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 1713–1783 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961); Derek McKay and H. M. Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers 1648–1815 (London: Longman, 1983); and Jeremy Black, The Rise of the European Powers 1679–1793 (London: Arnold, 1990). Refer also to the works, cited earlier, by Ludwig Dehio and Paul Kennedy, esp. the chapters dealing with eighteenth-century geopolitics and economics.

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“the conflicts of the seventeenth century finally legitimized the potent combination of monarch and parliament, they also demonstrated the strength of a national system of provincial governance which relied for its implementation on local dignitaries. National centralized institutions were tolerable provided they were neither military nor administrative but judicial in character; they were not only acceptable but desirable if activated by the approval of the ‘natural rulers’ (i.e., landed proprietors) of the nation.”23 Hence, England’s monarchs, however much they may have signified to parliament their determination to retain the initiative in the framing of foreign policy, had no choice but to accommodate in that sphere the economic and cultural interests of the kingdom’s landed elite. This political reality pointed above all to the meshing of foreign and home concerns in British policy. The English landlords, who wished to produce cereals and other crops for domestic and foreign markets and to purchase various colonial and domestically processed goods, patently had much in common with English merchants whose livelihood lay in the local and international exchange of such raw and finished commodities. For both groups there was an imperative need for a diplomatic policy that put the acquisition and/or defense of colonies, trading posts, and commerce alongside dynastic and other “political” considerations. Thus, throughout the eighteenth century, the logic of British politics ensured that the country’s foreign policy became almost as much an instrument of upper- and middle-class economic interests as a projection (in diplomatic terms) of the general “patriotic” desire for British security and prestige in the world’s affairs.24 What all of this meant in the larger context of eighteenth-century international affairs was that, because it was now the French rather than the Spanish who posed the chief strategic threat to the British Isles as well as the principal challenge to British mercantile capitalism, the great wars of this age (at least in the west) were inescapably dominated by the Anglo-French rivalry. And in that rivalry, which made unprecedented fiscal demands of both states, the British could boast over the French two interrelated (and, as it turned out, insuperable) advantages. First, shielded as they were by their insularity from the threat of sudden invasion-by-land that had long haunted their French antagonists, the English could afford to let their military defenses down between wars and, more to the point, focus their wartime efforts on their navy. The British knew all too well that whichever fleet could control the seas could control access to naval stores in the Baltic, to markets for exports, to sources of imports all over the world, and to colonies and trading entrepots. In addition, such control ˆ 23

24

John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 21–22. See also the anthology edited by Lawrence Stone: An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1993). See, on all of this: Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1987).

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of the seas would feed on itself, for it would deny to the losing side in this confrontation the long hours of experience on the high seas, failing which no navy could establish competitive standards of seamanship, gunnery, strategy, and tactics.25 Second, because their geostrategic thinking was not perpetually divided, as that of France was, between contending overseas and continental priorities – because, that is, they did not experience the dilemma inherent in France’s hegemonic “amphibious” foreign policy – the English could (and most happily did) subsidize Louis XV’s continental adversaries from one war to the next, thus contributing powerfully to the strategic diffusion and defeat of military efforts conceived at Versailles.26 But if the rise of postrevolutionary Britain thwarted the French ancien r´egime in one strategic theater, the addition of Russia and Prussia to the international state system just as surely complicated its other expansionist mission. There were intriguing similarities between Romanov Russia and Hohenzollern Prussia in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.27 In both countries the absence of a strong English-style “middle class” of educated and ambitious entrepreneurs and professionals left elite energies, abilities, and sociopo´ litical aspirations pretty much in the hands of relatively uncultured aristocratic landholders. In both countries there were few indigenous forces that could inhibit the development of autocratic government. And in both countries diplomatic/military ambition and insecurity alike drove remarkable autocratic monarchs – most outstandingly, Peter the Great, Frederick William I, and Frederick the Great – to fuse aristocratic energies with the policies of the state. They accomplished this task, in general terms, by integrating many of their nobles as “state servants” into decision-making roles in the military and civilian bureaucracies, and by rewarding these individuals with what often amounted to life-and-death control over the luckless peasants toiling on their estates and fighting in the armies. Whatever these two newly risen powers in the eastern marches of Europe lacked in economic/developmental terms they more 25

26

27

See: James Pritchard, Louis XV’s Navy, 1748–1762: A Study of Organization and Administration (Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), as well as the older study by E. H. Jenkins, A History of the French Navy (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1973). For a still very useful discussion of these strategic issues, see C. B. A. Behrens, The Ancien R´egime (London: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), esp. pp. 138–62. The Georgian kings, of course, were concerned at all times about the fate of their ancestral Hanover in Germany; however, the priorities in English foreign policy were and remained clearer than those of the French. On Russia, see Paul Dukes, The Making of Russian Absolutism 1613–1801, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1990); and Simon Dixon, The Modernisation of Russia, 1676–1825 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On Prussia, the classic but inevitably dated study by Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Autocracy, and Aristocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660–1815 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958) has now been largely superseded by Christopher M. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), esp. the initial section on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Hohenzollern state.

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than compensated for by their integration of existing social-elitist elements into ´ bureaucratic structures of state power. Moreover, they did share one crucial characteristic with the more “entrepreneurial,” commercialized England: they avoided in their foreign policies the French tendency toward a grandiose but in the final analysis overextended hankering after supremacy in both European and overseas/colonial affairs. Given these changing realities in the European state system – changing realities that, we should note in passing, the Sun King himself had never had to face in full measure – it was highly likely if not altogether inevitable that French involvement in the two great mid-century conflicts (the War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–48, and the Seven Years’ War, 1756–63) would inflict searing humiliation upon Louis XIV’s successor. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle formally terminating the war of 1740–48 was not definitive in this regard, but the struggle it concluded had revealed disconcerting French weaknesses. Britain, for instance, had intervened in Italian politics more than ever before, had probed vulnerable points in the Spanish overseas empire, and had jolted Versailles by seizing the great French bastion of Louisbourg, key to control of the St. Lawrence waterway and of much of Canada. British superiority on the seas was not yet as decisive as it would later be, but perceptive observers were not deceived as to which combatant seemed the likelier claimant of laurels in the future. The outcome of the recent passage at arms, affirmed Parisian publicist E. J. F. Barbier, would “teach the ministers to come that it is not enough that we should be almost sure of conquering on land so long as we have not got a navy which can face at sea the maritime powers who, by reason of trade, will always be allied against us.”28 But even on land, where Versailles and Berlin were confederates in an all-out assault on Habsburg Austria, the omens were not auspicious. Prussia’s unscrupulous Frederick II deserted his French ally on more than one occasion as the retention of his precious conquest of Austrian Silesia seemed to dictate, and his adamant refusal to subordinate his personal objectives in the war to the overall strategic conception of the struggle held by Louis XV’s policymakers was one of the factors dooming French efforts to frustration on the Continent. Serendipitous French victories in the Austrian Netherlands may have helped to neutralize British triumphs on the high seas, but they did not efface the impression of contemporaries that Frederick had played Louis XV for a fool. The French may have fared unduly well at Aix-la-Chapelle, but they would not be so fortunate the next time around. The Peace of Paris concluding the Seven Years’ War in 1763 measured a French disaster that, in some respects at least, had been long foreshadowed. The statesmen at Versailles now had to surrender their remaining holdings in Canada, and with them “the vast undeveloped territory of which France had claimed possession to the east of the Mississippi.” They also had to relinquish St. Vincent, Grenada, and Tobago 28

Cited in Rohan Butler, Choiseul: Father and Son (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), p. 750.

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in the West Indies; and “perhaps only the unwillingness of British sugar planters to expose themselves to the competition in the home market of the more fertile French islands prevented the loss of Guadeloupe or Martinique as well.” In India, France retained its trading stations but was otherwise knocked out of competition with London. In West Africa, the French yielded their Senegalese forts to their rivals. In addition, as it these were not sufficient tokens of French decline, Versailles (endeavoring to placate a Spanish ally stymied by its own failures against the British) ceded to Madrid all of its lands and claims in that part of Louisiana west of the Mississippi. The global struggle between the crossChannel opponents, it has been truly said, “had thus changed the political face of much of the world.” This proud initial version of a French overseas empire had been reduced to a few islands, none of which offered scope for territorial expansion; in the meantime, Britain had been elevated by these conflicts “to the position of a world power.”29 But if Britain profited handsomely from the strategic diffusion of the French war effort, Prussia did so even more resoundingly – thus completing the mortification of the geopoliticians at Versailles. On November 5, 1757, FrancoAustrian forces were routed at Rossbach in Saxony by Prussian forces only half their size. The angry frustration infecting elite circles in France as a result ´ of military disasters like that at Rossbach was voiced by the comte de SaintGermain, commander of the French rearguard on November 5, 1757, in a letter to a confidant: No doubt you, like me, were able to predict the Rossbach disaster five months ago. Never has there been such a defective army, and the first cannon-shot determined our rout and humiliation. I am leading a gang of robbers, of murderers fit only for the gallows, who run away at the sound of the first gunshot and who are always ready to mutiny. The King has the worst infantry under the sun, and the worst-disciplined – there is . . . nothing to be done with troops like these.30

And this, in retrospect, from the chastened cardinal de Bernis: A war levied against the king of Prussia, who was undoubtedly the greatest captain of his century, deserved to be carried on by good generals and by a council composed of enlightened and experienced officers. But neither Austria nor France had any general fit to be opposed to Frederick, and the troops were totally undisciplined. Treachery and incompetence were the orders of the day. Generals and nation were completely demoralized.31

Small wonder if, as various memorialists had it at the time, Frederick II frequently mocked his erstwhile Bourbon ally for its military incompetence. If stunning failure on the seas betokened in part problems in the French navy, reverses in continental warfare pointed to serious shortcomings in the French 29 30 31

On all of this, refer to M. S. Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 250 and 267–68. Cited in Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, p. 41. Cited in Roger Soltau, The duc de Choiseul (Oxford: Blackwell, 1908), pp. 16–17.

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army; and more on this later. At this point, it is most relevant to note that Louis XV’s ministers were as alarmed by the relentless growth of Russian influence in eastern Europe as they were disgraced by the drubbing administered to them by Prussian forces at Rossbach. The entire strategic calculus long applied by French geopoliticians to that region – a calculus assuming Austria to be the permanent enemy, counterbalanced by Poland, Sweden, and Turkey – was now threatened by Russian even more than by Prussian designs. This was brought home to Versailles most painfully in connection with Polish affairs, long considered by Louis XV to be a personal proprietary issue. When, in September 1763, the French king, already sufficiently exasperated by diplomatic developments elsewhere, wrote that “everything that may plunge Russia into chaos and make her return to obscurity is favorable to our interests,” he was reacting to the burgeoning influence of St. Petersburg at Warsaw.32 He might also just as well have been predicting what would transpire a few years later, when, in the crisis-ridden twilight of his reign, Russia, abetted by Prussia and (ironically) by France’s “friend” Austria, carried out the first of three late eighteenth-century partitions of hapless Poland. And French influence in the treacherous eastern marches of Europe was further eclipsed as the lengthening Russian shadow fell across the political landscapes of Sweden and Ottoman Turkey.33 At this juncture, the skeptical reader might interject that no one was quite yet observing in this French situation what William Strode had mournfully noted in Stuart England in 1628, namely, that “we are exposed to foreign destruction.” After all, was France not, in the 1760s and early 1770s, still (at least potentially) the strategic keystone of Europe? Perhaps. Yet the comte de Segur no less ´ recalled years later that, in this period, “France lost its influence in Europe; England ruled the seas effortlessly and conquered the Indies unopposed. The powers of the North partitioned Poland. . . . The French monarchy ceased to be a first-rank power.”34 “We must change our ways,” the abbe´ Bernis no less despairingly remarked.35 The sense of urgency here, if ultimately less defensive in nature than that voiced earlier in Charles I’s England, seems nonetheless genuine. What is more, it was also to be matched eventually by an anxious sense of relative national decline in late imperial Russia – a point to which we now turn. To be sure, geographical realities alone ensured that the prerevolutionary Russian experience was bound to be somewhat unique. “The genesis of Russia’s specialness,” Robert G. Wesson has commented, “arose from the fact that Russia grew up in the transition zone between Europe and Asia, the area between 32

33 34 35

Cited in Anderson, “European Diplomatic Relations, 1763–90,” in The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VIII: The American and French Revolutions, 1763–93 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 258–59. All of this is reviewed in Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution, esp. pp. 45–57. Cited in Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, p. 42. Cited in Albert Sorel, Europe and the French Revolution: The Political Traditions of the Old Regime, trans. Alfred Cobban and J. W. Hunt (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), p. 236.

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the Baltic and Black Seas. Occupation of this zone meant that an indefinite space for expansion was opened to the Russians, although they did not cease to be Europeans on the edge of progressive European civilization. . . . Russia has been a mixture of East and West not merely in the trite sense suggested by its straddling Eurasia, but in the sense of mixing Eastern empire with Western state with all the consequent strains and ambiguities.”36 Yet, whatever the special characteristics of a huge ancien r´egime polity bordering on China, Afghanistan, and Persia as well as on “eastern Europe,” the exigencies of geopolitics required that such a polity be measured by standards imported from “progressive European civilization.” In turn, this guaranteed that, like James I and Charles I in the English case, and like Louis XV in France, Russia’s last Romanov tsars – Alexander II, Alexander III, and the ill-omened Nicholas II – were fated to suffer by invidious comparison with earlier, more successful rulers. The long-term decline in the international standing of old regime Russia, comparable in many respects to that of old regime England and France, can be appreciated not only in conventional diplomatic terms but also in macroeconomic terms unique to Russia. The late eighteenth-century and early nineteenthcentury Russian colossus benefited from, first, the eclipse of its traditional east-European rivals Sweden, Poland, and Ottoman Turkey; then the defeat of Napoleonic France; and finally the periodic suppression by Tsar Nicholas I of post-Napoleonic revolutionary movements in central and eastern Europe. All of this, however, was destined to change in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, which, Edward Acton has written, “marked a watershed in Russia’s modern history:” The international pre-eminence the country had enjoyed since defeating Napoleon in 1812 was brought to an abrupt end by the Crimean War (1853–56). She was soundly defeated in her war against Turkey when Britain and France intervened for fear that Russia would establish her sway over Constantinople. The Tsar’s forces were humiliated by land and sea and under the terms of the Treaty of Paris Russia was disarmed on the Black Sea. The defeat brought home in the most devastating fashion just how far the Empire’s development had fallen behind that of her Great Power rivals in the West.37

It was in response to this blow to Russian power and self-esteem, we recall, that Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich sounded his alarm: “We cannot deceive ourselves any longer. We are both weaker and poorer than the firstclass powers, and furthermore poorer not only in material but also in mental resources, especially in matters of administration.”38 England and France, of course, were sufficiently distant from the heartland of European Russia to remain somewhat limited in their ability to intervene in Russia’s internal affairs. This was, perhaps, most obvious in 1863, when 36 37 38

Robert G. Wesson, The Russian Dilemma: A Political and Geopolitical View (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1974), pp. xi–xii. Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), p. 5. Cited in Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 177.

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London and Paris could offer insurrectionaries in Poland little more than vocal support. In the Eastern Crisis of 1876–78, however, Russian victories over the Turks both on the Black Sea and on the Bulgarian and Caucasian fronts were neutralized at least in part because of the threat of possible British naval intervention. (They were also unsustainable for other reasons as well.) It is equally true that the emergence, toward the end of the century, of Japan as a major economic and military power in the Far East, however challenging it might prove for continued Romanov penetration into East Asian affairs, was of less than immediate concern to those Great Russian statesmen, militarists, and Pan-Slavic publicists preoccupied above all with developments in central and eastern Europe. Indeed, it was in central and eastern Europe, in the 1870s and beyond, that developments were most worrying. In a region where, in the late eighteenth century, a resourceful and astute Catherine the Great had been able to play the dueling “Germanic” powers of Prussia and Austria off each other, thereby aggrandizing Russian territory and enhancing Russian prestige, a new potential hegemon arose under the auspices of ruthless Bismarckian realpolitik. Russian specialist Dominic Lieven has analyzed in some depth the nature of the potential threat posed to St. Petersburg by Berlin after 1870: Of the many possible threats to Russian security . . . the German one was the most dangerous, partly because of Germany’s unique military and economic power, but also because the Hohenzollern empire was best placed to invade Russia’s core territories. Military and economic power boosted Germany’s arrogance and her ambitions. At the same time the strains of creating a new nation and of managing the political and psychological consequences of very rapid socio-economic modernization resulted in ever more resounding appeals to German nationalism as a means to unite society and sustain the legitimacy of its ruling elites. In addition, as the German economy boomed, Berlin inevitably acquired interests in regions traditionally seen as lying within the sphere of other powers. In the Russian case, this above all meant the Ottoman empire and Persia.39

And more than economic interests figured here. A visceral appeal to ethnic German sentiments within the borders of the new German Reich could also translate into an appeal to ethnic German minorities in other countries – including, all too plainly, Imperial Russia. This, in turn, could (and did) conjure up the unnerving specter for Romanov leaders of additional political-cultural reasons being invoked at Berlin to rationalize an eventual resumption of the old medieval drang nach Osten, or “drive to the (now Russian-occupied) East” – but this time by all too “modern” German militarists and colonists. Yet, as Lieven and others have pointed out, the potential geopolitical implications of German “irredentism” appeared most clearly in connection with 39

From Dominic Lieven, “Russia, Europe and World War I,” in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, p. 40. Refer also to Lieven’s larger study, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (London: Macmillan, 1983).

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Austrian affairs. The largest German community outside of Hohenzollern Germany by far existed in Habsburg Austria, known after 1867 as the “Dual Monarchy” of Austria-Hungary. Sentiments of ethnic solidarity naturally inclined the German-speaking subjects of the Dual Monarchy toward closer ties with Berlin; moreover, insofar as Hungarians dwelling in Austria-Hungary tended, like their Germanic counterparts, to define themselves racially as nonSlavic subjects in an age of crystallizing ethnic identities, they, too, tended to look toward Bismarck and his successors for leadership in the greater affairs of Europe. This meant, in part, that for both Germanic and Hungarian communities, anti-Slavic consciousness tended inevitably to spill over into international affairs, where Slavic Russia became increasingly feared and hated both in Vienna and in Budapest for its ambitions in the Balkans and its associated sponsorship of south-Slavic ethnic movements. All of these factors played into the formation, in 1879, of the “Dual Alliance” of Germany and Austria-Hungary, an alliance that, automatically, forestalled any attempt that Russian statesmen of the period might have mounted to revive Catherine II’s brilliantly successful strategy of pitting Berlin and Vienna against each other. Granted, Bismarck himself had from the start envisioned the Dual Alliance primarily as a way to isolate a France still smarting from its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, and not as an anti-Russian combination. Yet, however adroitly the Iron Chancellor managed to navigate “between an absolute commitment to Austria-Hungary’s survival and reassurance to St. Petersburg that Germany would never allow any challenge to essential Russian interests, his successors proved less skilful and less careful. Their abandonment in 1890 of the so-called Reinsurance Treaty with Russia led directly to the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894, which remained the central pillar of Russian foreign and military policy down to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917.”40 Although German sensitivity to Russia’s security needs was certainly blunted under Bismarck’s successors, fairly good relations between St. Petersburg, on the one hand, and Berlin/Vienna, on the other, characterized the early years of Nicholas II’s reign. This was due in part to Russia’s chastening recollection of how Austrian hostility had factored into St. Petersburg’s jarring defeat in the Crimean War;41 but it likely owed more to the deepening involvement of Russia in Far Eastern affairs during these years, a commitment that for the time being drew St. Petersburg’s attention away somewhat from the more existential developments in eastern Europe in general and the Balkans in particular. In the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, of course, this situation was fated to change.

40 41

Lieven, “Russia, Europe and World War I,” p. 41. On this issue, see in particular Roderick E. McGrew, “Some Imperatives of Russian Foreign Policy,” in George Stavrou, ed., Russia Under the Last Tsar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), pp. 202–29.

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Furthermore, long before Japan launched its famous “bolt from the blue” assault on Port Arthur in 1904, ministers entrusted with Russian fortunes in the world were uneasily aware that those fortunes were tied ever more closely to economic, cultural, and constitutional developments within the Romanov state. The macroeconomic aspects of relative Russian decline in the nineteenth century must especially concern us in this section of our analysis. Paul Kennedy here has provided the big picture of a Russia “losing ground in an alarming way between 1815 and 1880, at least relative to other powers”: Because of its far bigger population, it had easily possessed the largest total GNP in the early nineteenth century. Two generations later, that was no longer the case. . . . But these figures were even more alarming when the per capita amount of GNP is studied. . . . The figures show that the increase in Russia’s total GNP which occurred during these years was overwhelmingly due to the rise in its population . . . and had little to do with real increases in productivity (especially industrial productivity). Russia’s per capita income, and national product, had always been behind that of western Europe; but it now fell even further behind, from (for example) one-half of Britain’s per capita income in 1830 to one-quarter of that figure sixty years later.42

Such statistics reflect at deeper levels a complex of domestic conditions, economic, demographic, sociocultural, and political in nature, militating ever more against competitive industrialization in late nineteenth-century Russia. Increasingly, the Romanov state found its economic development in the hands of foreign merchants and entrepreneurs, and its role as supplier of raw materials to the West and as importer of Western technology, capital, and finished commodities forcing it into an almost colonial relationship vis-`a-vis western and central European powers. Given these realities, which were in turn dictated largely by extremes of climate, low rates of literacy, weak middle-class formation, primitive railroad systems and communications, and, transcending all else, staggering governmental inefficiency and waste, our conclusion must be as harsh as that of Paul Kennedy: namely, that “the prospects for industrial ‘take-off’ in Russia [were] more difficult than virtually anywhere else in Europe.”43 Lagging modernization in nineteenth-century Russia was bound to be reflected sooner or later in a deteriorating performance on the seas and battlefields of Europe and beyond, and indeed this turned out to be the case for St. Petersburg in the military showdowns of 1853–56 and 1876–78. The Romanovs discovered ruefully now what the early Stuarts and eighteenthcentury French Bourbons had discovered in their own times: that “military revolutions,” with all of their diplomatic implications, do not wait. In this case, the “great powers” vanquished in late nineteenth-century conflicts were usually . . . those that had failed to adapt to the “military revolution” of the mid-nineteenth century, the acquisition of new weapons, the mobilizing and equipping of large armies, 42 43

Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, esp. pp. 170–74, for this discussion. Ibid., pp. 172–74.

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the use of improved communications offered by the railway, the steamship, and the telegraph, and a productive industrial base to sustain the armed forces. In all of these conflicts, grievous blunders were to be committed on the battlefield by the generals and armies of the winning side from time to time – but they were never enough to cancel out the advantages which that belligerent possessed in terms of trained manpower, supply, organization, and economic base.44

The geopolitical implications of all these macroeconomic, political, and military tendencies were most dire for St. Petersburg in its relationship with Berlin. As Imperial Germany (already boasting Europe’s most dangerous army) rapidly increased after 1870 its proportion of global trade, industrial production, and overall GNP, members of the governmental elite in Russia became ever more ´ dependent – whether they wanted to or not – on the capital, industrial expertise, trade, and (up to 1890) the diplomatic good will of Berlin. And this at a time when rabid Pan-Slavs in Russia still resented the way Bismarck’s Berlin Conference had sponsored mortifying last-minute Russian concessions to lowly Ottoman Turkey back in the late 1870s! Small wonder, then, that the tsar’s ministers were shaken when, in 1890, Germany announced that it would allow the Russo-German Reinsurance Treaty of 1887 to lapse. This quite logically drove Russia into the arms of France several years later: “Europe’s two second-ranking powers,” Lieven has correctly noted, “were uniting to ensure that neither of their interests were trampled upon by the continent’s potential hegemon, Germany.”45 Such were, for the Russians, the costs of “falling behind” their potentially most dangerous rival in an increasingly competitive Europe. Hence, also, the tone of urgency sounded by several of Nicholas II’s most far-sighted advisers in the ensuing years. “International competition does not wait,” intoned Finance Minister Sergei Witte in an impassioned memorandum to the emperor in 1900. “If we do not take energetic and decisive measures so that in the course of the next decades our industry will be able to satisfy the needs of Russia and of the Asiatic countries which are – or should be – under our influence, then the rapidly growing foreign industries will break through our tariff barriers and establish themselves in our fatherland and the Asiatic countries mentioned above.”46 “Time does not wait,” echoed one of Witte’s partisans, the economist P. Migulin. “Life goes full steam ahead. Even so, we are behind all the western countries. And by walking slowly one does not go far, our proverb to the contrary notwithstanding. We have to live at a more rapid clip.”47 Neither Witte nor Migulin, of course, could have anticipated that 44 45 46 47

Ibid., p. 191. Lieven, “Russia, Europe and World War I,” p. 41. Cited in Theodore H. Von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? Why Gorbachev?, p. 28. Quoted in Ibid., p. 34. What made things even worse for the Russians was the undeniable fact that they, too, had their maximalist “imperialist” goals in the realm of foreign policy. On this subject, see Dietrich Geyer, Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860–1914 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987); and Von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? Why Gorbachev?, esp. pp. 45–46.

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thirty years later a very tough-minded Georgian named Joseph Stalin would be reflecting in precisely the same fashion on postrevolutionary Russia’s stillimperiled situation. There is for the comparativist something in these pessimistic Russian pronouncements that harkens back to the apprehension voiced by William Strode in 1628 and by the comte de Segur in the twilight of Louis XV’s reign. Drawing ´ very fine lines might enable us to distinguish between the English and Russian situations, on the one hand – situations featuring insecure states on the peripheries of a European state system whose hegemonic powers seriously threatened their international standing and possibly their very existence – and, on the other hand, the French situation, in which a polity long at the heart of that competitive state system might feel that it had to confront no truly existential threat from a land-based, militarized power. Such a distinction, however – which statesmen in those eras were in any case hardly in a position to make – may become less critical for us as well in the light of additional retrospective analysis, analysis dealing with the domestic administrative/constitutional, social-elitist, and political-cultural environments in which these insecure and ´ declining states had to function. The Domestic Inadequacies of Divine-Right Monarchy Unhappily, rulers like James I and Charles I; Louis XV; and Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II had to grapple with deepening statist crises at home even as they struggled to reverse their countries’ deteriorating fortunes abroad. In this section, we attempt to delve into these internal crises by examining three central, interrelated propositions: (1) that these absolutist, divine-right monarchs found their power diminished by administrative-fiscal inefficiencies and potentially delegitimized by constitutional criticism; (2) that their governments (for a variety of reasons) drew less and less support from their traditional social-elitist allies; and (3) perhaps most critically, that these ´ rulers and their articulate subjects increasingly exposed the ambivalence of their interrelated domestic and international concerns through the prisms of religious and/or secular political culture. This might be a handy point in our study at which to break away from any automatically chronological approach; thus, we start in this section with the tsars’ dilemmas, and only then refer back to the two earlier historical situations. “There is no reason to suppose that the tsarist regime was doomed to collapse in the way that Marxist determinists once claimed from their narrow focus on its ‘social contradictions’,” Orlando Figes has recently insisted. “It could have been saved by reform. But there is the rub. For Russia’s last two tsars lacked the will for real reform.”48 Actually, the die had been cast on this issue as far back as the fateful year 1881, when Alexander II, the last even mildly reformist tsar 48

Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 14.

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in old regime Russia, had been assassinated by anarchists. This drastic action sealed the doom of the “Great Reform” era in Russia, initiated (tellingly) in the wake of St. Petersburg’s mortifying defeat in the Crimean War. For the last two tsars, Alexander III and his unfortunate son Nicholas II, reversion to a policy of brutal suppression of even the most moderate stirrings of reform became an alltoo-ingrained characteristic of internal policy. Nicholas II, who ascended the throne on his father’s premature death in 1894, had all of the domestic virtues of the cultured p`ere de famille but tragically none of the political resources of the absolute monarch ruling in acutely testing times. The following portrait of the man captures the inauspicious reality of the situation as effectively as any: Nicholas had many of the personal qualities required to be a good constitutional monarch. . . . But Nicholas had not been born to that role: he was the Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias. Family tradition and pressure from the crown’s traditional allies compelled him not only to reign, but to rule. It would not do for a Romanov to play the role of a ceremonial monarch, leaving the actual business of government to the bureaucracy. Nor would it do to retreat before the demands of the liberals. The Romanov way, in the face of political opposition, was to assert the ‘divine authority’ of the absolute monarch, to trust in the ‘historic bond between the Tsar and the people’, and to rule with force and resolution.49

In all of this, fatefully, Nicholas was seconded by his German-born wife, the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, who (like her earlier counterparts HenriettaMaria of England and Marie-Antoinette of France) urged even less rather than more political conciliation on her husband.50 But even in Russia, the tsar, however all-powerful in theory, however assiduously he might bury himself for hours by the day in the minutiae of administrative routine, could not effectively rule without a modern administrative-fiscal bureaucracy at the center and an administrative apparatus penetrating into the vast depths of the far-flung provinces. And here was the next obstacle to modern governance in late Imperial Russia. In 1888, a high official queried despairingly: “Where is the autocracy? I see no autocracy, I see only administrative anarchy. Each department usurps some of the autocratic power. Ministers . . . make war upon each other or make peace. All that I see; but the autocracy – where is that?”51 Even under a strong-willed autocrat such as Alexander III (1881–94) this was a problem; and, in provincial Russia, the problem was multiplied many times over by the sheer thinness of a bureaucracy charged with extending St. 49 50

51

Ibid., pp. 19–20. See, on the Tsar and Tsarina: R. K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra (New York: Atheneum, 1968); M. D. Steinberg and V. M. Khrustalev, The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995); and Dominic Lieven, Nicholas II: Emperor of All the Russias (London: John Murray, 1993). Cited in Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution 1881–1917 (London: Longman, 1983), pp. 22–23.

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Petersburg’s writ to the innumerable localities. One historian deeply versed in provincial studies has elaborated on this last point: The power of the imperial government effectively stopped at the eighty-nine provincial capitals where the governors had their offices. Below that there was no real state administration to speak of. Neither the uezd or district towns nor the volost or rural townships had any standing government officials. There was only a series of magistrates who would appear from time to time on some specific mission, usually to collect taxes or sort out a local conflict, and then disappear once again. The affairs of peasant Russia, where 85 per cent of the population lived, were entirely unknown to the city bureaucrats. ‘We knew as much about the Tula countryside’ confessed Prince Lvov . . . ‘as we knew about Central Africa.’

“The crucial weakness of the tsarist system,” so concludes Orlando Figes, “was the under-government of the localities.”52 For lack of a paid, structured, professional bureaucracy at the local level, most administrative tasks were sloughed off onto the shoulders of police constables who, as a group, were minuscule in numbers and grossly undercompensated by “Western” standards. The Great Reforms of the 1860s had attempted to bridge the fearful gap between St. Petersburg and provincial Russia by establishing a network of zemstvos or administrative assemblies at the provincial and country district levels; yet the crushing backwardness of rural Russia – its narrow tax-base, near-universal illiteracy, poverty, and primitive communications – defeated the integrative purposes of this reform.53 The governmental center remained to a dangerous degree out of touch with the provinces, districts, and localities. The quality of Russian administrative governance only deteriorated under Nicholas II. He came to power, Rex Wade has written, “at a time when a rapidly changing world demanded vigorous and imaginative leadership to steer Russia through turbulent times.” But a government defined as “a group of people organized into a unified body of policy makers and executors” did not exist in Russia. “The emperor had to provide coherence and overall direction. This even more capable men such as his father and grandfather found difficult. For Nicholas, mild-mannered, of limited ability, disliking governance and drawn more to the trivia of administration than to major policy issues, it was impossible.”54 All of Alexandra’s exhortations on the subject of governance, as Wade has remarked, only steeled her husband’s fatal determination to resist the implementation of desperately needed administrative reforms. “Government drifted, problems remained unresolved.”55 52 53 54 55

Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 46. On the general issue of the Great Reforms, see Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova, eds., Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–2. Ibid., p. 2.

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It was highly likely, possibly unavoidable, that thoughtful Russians, even those conservative or apolitical altogether by inclination, would draw potentially subversive constitutional conclusions from all of this. Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, highly regarded philosopher and social commentator hailing from the radical intelligentsia, exemplified this tendency with observations penned in 1900: A tsar, who in the present state of governmental and economic life can know of . . . the needs of the people, of the condition of the country and the different branches of state administration only what it is considered impossible to conceal from him; a tsar who learns of the country only what can reach him through a complicated system of bureaucratic filters, is limited in his power more fundamentally than a monarch informed about his country’s needs by its elected representatives.56

Students of early seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century France would doubtless smile at this implicitly constitutional critique – they have, after all, seen similar commentaries penned by English and French notables no more inclined initially to wish ill for their respective sovereigns. Indeed, in none of these three prerevolutionary situations “was the conscientious industry of the sovereign an adequate substitute for what an unfettered public opinion or a genuinely representative body might have told him.” In all three cases under study, autocratic (or “absolute”) monarchy was, therefore, “intrinsically incompatible with the character and needs of a modern state and a modernizing society.”57 To broach the issue of a “modernizing society” in prerevolutionary Russia in this connection is to reintroduce the second of our three cardinal propositions concerning Russia’s domestic ancien r´egime: namely, that the autocratic government enjoyed ever less support from the social elements that really mattered. One of the crucial reasons, for instance, for the late imperial bureaucracy’s declining effectiveness was that (in the words of one widely quoted specialist) “its dependence on the nobility became a source of weakness as the noble estate fell into decline during the later nineteenth century.”58 This assertion reflects in part the research of specialists (such as Roberta Manning) who have postulated a “social disintegration” of Russia’s noble estate, a process that accelerated in the years following peasant emancipation in the 1860s. Involving factors such as a crisis in gentry landownership, destabilizing gentry child-rearing practices, and professionalization in the ranks of both military and civilian officialdom, this disintegrative process gradually produced what Manning has referred to as “several distinct, albeit occasionally overlapping, substrata” in the hitherto more homogeneous nobility. These “substrata” were, first, “the service nobility, an increasingly large group of landless noblemen, consisting mainly 56 57 58

Cited in Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, pp. 22–23. Ibid., p. 23. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 37.

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of persons ennobled through the Table of Ranks in the course of the last two centuries;” second, “a gentry intelligentsia, composed of the most highly educated noblemen who had come to devote themselves to the arts, sciences, and free professions;” and, finally, “the landed gentry, many of whom by the turn of the century were fast becoming a provincial gentry in the true sense of the term, a class of locally-based noblemen, occupied with both agriculture and public affairs in the provinces.”59 The problem from St. Petersburg’s point of view was not only that it found the political loyalty of the first two “substrata” in this heterogeneous nobility to be decreasingly certain as the years passed, but also that it found a host of economic and psychological factors, inducing as they did a decline in the landed gentry’s economic fortunes, weakening this third group as a source of recruitment and support for the bureaucratic state. Some of the gentry’s problems, Abraham Ascher has maintained, were due to global economic trends: the “severe economic crisis in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a worldwide phenomenon that caused a sharp drop in the prices of major crops, hindered the development of large-scale farming in Russia.” On the other hand, Ascher has explained, most members of the landed gentry never really mastered the techniques of scientific farming, failing, for example, to obtain and utilize the latest agricultural machinery. Their failure may have been in part psychological: historically dependent under serfdom on state handouts as well as on services and dues from their peasants, these landed proprietors had never developed the managerial skills or exhibited the hard work, frugality, and entrepreneurial drive and initiative requisite for success in an agricultural market economy.60 The government, eager to preserve its social base in all of the constituent elements of the noble elite – in, that is, the rural gentry as well ´ as in the urban-oriented civilian/military bureaucracy and the intelligentsia – did its best to help stem the economic decline of the rural dvorianstvo. It provided them with half of the arable land in the 1861 Emancipation Decree, a Gentry Land Bank empowered to issue low-interest agricultural loans, special tax privileges, and other fiscal concessions, and, of course, a dominant role in the provincial/district zemstvos. Yet, from the tsarist government’s viewpoint, the last of these concessions turned out to be a double-edged weapon. Furnishing a new, institutionalized power base to the rural gentry in the form of zemstvo representation, and doing so in such troubled economic times, could only aggravate rural/urban tensions within the nobility and encourage rural gentry to challenge urban bureaucratic 59 60

Roberta T. Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 43–44. Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 228–29. See also, on these issues: Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, pp. 88–94; and Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order, esp. pp. 3–64.

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nobles in a constitutionally subversive fashion. As Orlando Figes has succinctly explained this process: It was logical for the tsarist regime to seek to base its power in the provinces on the landed nobility, its closest ally. But this was a dangerous strategy, and the danger grew as time went on. The landed nobility . . . in severe economic decline . . . was turning to the zemstvos to defend its local agrarian interests against the centralizing and industrializing bureaucracy of St Petersburg. In the years leading up to 1905 this resistance was expressed in mainly liberal terms: it was seen as the defense of ‘provincial society,’ a term which was now used for the first time and consciously broadened to include the interests of the peasantry. The liberal zemstvo movement culminated in the political demand for more autonomy for local government, for a national parliament and a constitution.61

Insofar as politicized, economically declining provincial gentry regarded other elements in the Empire’s traditional social elite as rivals for rather than as ´ partners sharing influence in state affairs – and in doing so came to broach a constitutional alternative to autocracy – they were sapping the regime of the tsars. Had Alexander III, Nicholas II, and their ministers attempted to accommodate in some fashion the aspirations of liberals in the zemstvos, and had they been able to assume the political loyalty of the other constituent elements in the noble estate, all conceivably might have been well. But this was not what transpired. In provincial Russia, constitutionalist gentry leanings were met by a reactionary reimposition of autocracy: increasingly, zemstvos (and municipal dumas) were subordinated to the rule of provincial governors and land captains, who in turn obeyed the dictates of the Interior Ministry.62 In urban and military Russia, too, the bonds of mutual cooperation and fidelity between government and elite were fraying. As we see later, some in the noble ´ intelligentsia tended to embrace liberal perspectives embedded in the political culture of the era, and so were increasingly regarded as unreliable by the reactionary advisors to the last two, reactionary tsars of Russia. Insofar as military officialdom was concerned – and this was obviously of particular importance for the critical geopolitical situation of Russia – the omens once again did not seem to favor government/elite cooperation. Over the period extending from ´ the Crimean War to the Russo-Japanese War, noble officers in the army, even as they stubbornly opposed the notion of integrating middle-class subjects into the officer corps, quite readily ascribed their institution’s dismal performance on the battlefield to misguided governmental policies. They pointed (correctly enough) to the fact that sorely needed economic resources were diverted ever more from the War Ministry to the Finance and Interior Ministries, argued that military doctrine and military technology were not keeping up with the times, 61 62

Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 47. But see also, on this point, Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order, esp. pp. 43–44. Norman Stone, Europe Transformed, 1878–1919 (London: Blackwell, 1983), p. 204.

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and criticized the employment of the army to suppress civilian protests in urban and peasant Russia. More fundamental, however, was the deleterious impact on army morale and discipline of the “feudal” conditions that still prevailed in military ranks, especially in matters concerning officer/soldier relations. In the long run, nothing jeopardized the performance of the Russian army more than its replication, internally, of the savage and dehumanizing distinctions that obtained in civilian society between noble or “privilege” Russia and laboring or “peasant” Russia. Tellingly, many in the new generation of military professionals, schooled in recently established Junker military training institutions, not only raised all of these issues in the wake of humiliating Russian reverses in the wars of the era, but also clashed with reactionary army generals and other senior officers over what they insisted was the imperative need to promote meritorious non-nobles to positions in the army command structure.63 In theory, could tsardom, citing chapter and verse from Western kingship, have possibly used “meritorious non-nobles” to counter-balance an overmighty noble estate and thereby more effectively modernized army, state, and society? Rex Wade, among others, has noted that the early phases of the Industrial Revolution in Russia, in combination with economic and social forces at work since Emancipation days if not before, had created “a diverse and growing middle class” of engineers, clerical workers, technicians, economic managers, small entrepreneurs, and others not fully captured by the outmoded “merchant” and “urban dweller” designations. Yet, in the years prior to the Russo-Japanese War, this Russian version of a class of “burzhui” suffered from a weak sense of common social identity and civic purpose. Moreover, hostility to this “bourgeoisie” ran deep in both governmental and gentry-intelligentsia circles; and certainly Alexander III, Nicholas II, and their coterie of secular and religious reactionaries at court were inhibited by their blind adherence to hoary notions of social hierarchy from identifying with and harnessing middle-class values and aspirations to any significant degree.64 But the ever more problematic nature of the Romanov state’s relationship with its most natural ally – that is, the noble estate – remained, and appears most clearly in connection with the emergence and internal contradictions of the “noble” intelligentsia. Although this uniquely Russian group had roots extending back into the late “enlightened” eighteenth century, the term “intelligentsia” entered common parlance only in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.65 Ironically, by the dawning of the twentieth century the intelligentsia

63

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On military issues, see J. Bushnell, Mutiny Amid Repression: Russian Soldiers in the Revolution of 1905–1906 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); and, most recently, John W. Steinberg, All the Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898–1914 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Rex Wade, The Russian Revolution, pp. 7–8. Refer to Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966); and, more recently, Jane Burbank, Intelligentsia

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was composed as much of professional/middle class elements as of noble elements; yet its deepening frustrations – and its bent toward extremist formulations of public issues – mirrored above all else the unhappy isolation of a literate elite caught, so to speak, between an increasingly exclusivist, autocratic ´ state, on the one hand, and the vast, still hopelessly “primitive” and exploited peasant masses, on the other.66 Moreover, deeply isolated – if lettered – nobles shared, along with other elitists, whether consciously or not, “fears of anar´ chy and [of] a massive social upheaval that would sweep away all of Russia’s hard-won cultural achievements and her status as a great power along with the autocracy.”67 Here, we discern through political-cultural lenses the interrelatedness of foreign and home issues in all “privileged” eyes. In the Russian case, however, the proclivity of the intelligentsia toward dogmatic, sweeping conceptions of the linkages between international and domestic issues (as well as of much more) was especially pronounced, and only intensified by autocracy’s isolation from its most idealistic intellectual subjects: The consequence, . . . was that ideas imported from the West (as nearly all ideas in Russia were) tended to become frozen into abstract dogmas once the Russian intelligentsia took them up. Whereas in Europe new ideas were forced to compete against other doctrines and attitudes, with the result that people tended towards healthy skepticism about claims to absolute truth, and a climate of pluralism developed, in Russia there was a cultural void. The censor forbade all political expression, so that when ideas were introduced there they easily assumed the status of holy dogma, a panacea for all the world’s ills, beyond questioning or indeed the need to test them in real life.68

Convinced as they were in their own autocratic, self-absorbed way that their stances on the questions of their times were weighty with implications for all “humanity,” intellectuals in Russia could not help but wrestle with (and be politicized by) the largest questions of the day. Theodore H. von Laue was largely thinking of the intelligentsia when he cited a Russian paradox: “The opposition generally denounced the government’s foreign policy. Yet whether they admitted it or not, all politically conscious elements among the public paid close attention to the role that their country played in world affairs.”69 Those studying the Russian intelligentsia have conventionally divided it, at least in very broad terms subject to much qualification, into “radical” and “conservative” wings, customarily referred to as “Westerners” and “Slavophiles,”

66

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and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). See, on this subject, the many valuable articles in: Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Burbank, “The Intelligentsia,” in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 515–28. Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, pp. 24–25. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 126–27. Von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? Why Gorbachev?, p. 46.

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respectively. The former group, Christopher Read has written, “in the broadest terms . . . wanted to adopt what they saw as basic features of the western European way of life, notably the intellectual values of the Enlightenment and the economic and material advances of the Industrial Revolution. The Slavophiles, on the other hand, wanted to preserve as much of Russia’s specific tradition and culture as possible from the onslaught of imported ideas and practices (among which some of them included the modernising aspirations of tsarism itself), which, they thought, would disturb Russia’s stability and tranquility.” Although Westerners and Slavophiles alike worshipped peasantry and (later) the working classes – generally at a safe distance! – and shared some other attitudes as well, and although by the turn of the century the intelligentsia as a group had become “more extensive” socially and “more mature and complex in its outlook,” the basic divide between Westerners and Slavophiles continued to characterize this crucial element in prerevolutionary Russian society.70 It was to a large extent the political and ideological heirs of these two wings within the movement who in the 1890s and early 1900s were contending for Russia’s “soul,” for Russia’s future, in the mercilessly competitive world of Eurasia (and beyond). On the Westernizing side of the ledger were personalities ranging from the great reformist ministers such as Sergei Witte and their advocates in the government to members (after 1900) of the Western-oriented oppositionist parties like the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) and Marxist Social Democrats – split after 1903 into Mensheviks and Lenin’s Bolsheviks. On the more nativist, Slavophile side of the ledger were those subjects ranging from reactionaries in the government, army, and Russian Orthodox Church to Socialist Revolutionaries and other extremist (and usually peasant-oriented) agitators and ideologues. We will, of course, have much more to say eventually about oppositionist ideologues and politicians in the mass political parties that (even in autocratic Russia) could not help but emerge after the turn of the century. At this point in our analysis, however, we must devote our attention to those in positions of authority in Russia’s sorely tested ancien r´egime who had necessarily to grapple with the dilemma of the Romanov state’s place in the world. We have already had occasion to note how Sergei Witte and his partisans were haunted by the specter of Russia “falling behind” the other Great Powers in the unending scramble for security, power, and prestige in the larger world. In the 1890s, Witte sought to address this challenge by orchestrating what was in effect the world’s first campaign of state-directed “crash” industrialization.71 70

71

See Christopher Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Transition from Tsarism to Communism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 18–21. See also Read, From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution, 1917–1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Theodore H. von Laue, who summarizes this campaign in Why Lenin? Why Stalin? Why Gorbachev?, treats it in depth in Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (New York:

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He was to raise the productivity of Russia’s economy by an extensive program of railroad construction (including the much-postponed Trans-Siberian line). This would result, he argued, in an expansion of Russia’s heavy industries supplying the necessary equipment. The growth of these industries would in turn stimulate the supporting light industries. Through the increased demand and improved transportation, even agriculture would benefit. In the end, the new prosperity would yield more revenue to the government. There still remained the problem of funds for the initial capital investment, but Witte hoped that with the introduction of the gold standard (accomplished in 1897) foreign loans would become cheaper and more plentiful and that, eventually, the boom would feed on its own progress.72

Hence also, of course, the critical importance of that Dual Entente of 1894 linking St. Petersburg with Paris: France would not only serve (it was hoped) to counterbalance Germany diplomatically, but would also provide (along with Belgium) desperately needed capital to undercapitalized Russia. It all sounded so logical (and so urgently requisite) to Witte and his supporters. And those partisans were not insignificant. They could be found scattered throughout the ministries. Dominic Lieven was led by his prosopographical analysis of the 215 men appointed to the State Council, Imperial Russia’s most prestigious political body, between 1894 and 1914, to conclude that the vast majority of this elite, and of the Empire’s other senior officials, diplomats, mil´ itary officers, and judges, were attuned by education, family ties, and practical experience to the kinds of larger concerns motivating Witte and his closest associates. This elite, “still dominated in Nicholas II’s reign by members of old ´ gentry families and permeated by a military ethos,” was “bound to be acutely conscious of its traditions and disinclined to play second fiddle on the world stage.”73 Hence the report of Germany’s ambassador at St. Petersburg, Prince Radolin, in 1895, that “In everything which I hear they proclaim with one voice that it is Russia’s mission to gain in due time the mastery of the world.”74 And hence the comment of the former Minister of the Interior P. N. Durnovo, that “in my eyes all so-called cultural needs retire into second place before the urgent necessities on which depend the very existence of Russia as a great power.”75 Still, however tempted we may be to take this last remark as (in Lieven’s words) “the motto of the regime which governed Imperial Russia,” we have to ´ set beside it this same historian’s concession at another point that “throughout the last six decades of its existence the Imperial regime was faced by the ´ indifference, hostility and in many cases the implacable hatred of part of even

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Columbia University Press, 1963). See also his essay “Problems of Industrialization,” in George Stavrou, ed., Russia Under the Last Tsar, pp. 117–53. von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? Why Gorbachev?, pp. 28–29. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 6–7. Cited in Von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? Why Gorbachev?, p. 46. Quoted in Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War, p. 7.

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ethnically Russian educated society.”76 Several political-cultural factors were at work here and combined to militate against the revival of Russian geopolitical fortunes. One was the profound and potentially disastrous polarization of educated attitudes induced by the ugly historical role of tsarist autocracy. The deep distrust of all state authority; the contempt for that side of politics which is the search for accommodation and compromise; the widespread lack of administrative experience in the population, coupled with a weak and brief tradition of self-government, autonomy, and diversity in public life; the absence of leaders and social institutions sufficiently independent and popular to mediate the conflicts between classes and between state and society . . . all this was in part the legacy of autocracy.77

As we will see later, much the same was, sadly, also true of absolutism’s constitutional legacy in old regime France. In Russia’s case, this was all the more unfortunate in that it meant that most members of the intelligentsia, a group so influential in establishing the tone and defining the content of public discourse, were predisposed against any policy initiatives emanating from St. Petersburg, let alone those authored after 1892 by Witte. And here was the other problem: even the Finance Minister’s warmest scholarly admirer has concluded that what Witte had conceived initially “as a relatively simple and innocuous economic policy. . . . had grown into an ever more unmanageable and complex revolutionary leviathan that respected neither authority nor privilege, neither class interest nor even human dignity.”78 In other words, Witte found that industrializing Russia meant recasting society: placing the embryonic business community ahead of the landed gentry (even as Russian entrepreneurs were constrained to compete with foreign capitalists), dissolving the peasant communes and instilling private initiative into the peasantry even while burdening it with heavier agricultural and monetary taxation, educating the masses, and so on.79 No wonder that many in the dvorianstvo, fearing social insurrection before they could even begin to comprehend Russia’s tightly linked security and economic/developmental needs, raged against Witte and those of his ilk for subverting the very foundations of their world. No wonder that such attitudes also characterized the anti-Western, Slavophile intelligentsia at large and infected the angry reactionary elites surrounding Nicholas II at court. In retro´ spect, the Emperor’s decision to dismiss Witte from the Finance Ministry (in August 1903, on the eve, as it turned out, of the disastrous Russo-Japanese War) was all but a foregone conclusion. 76 77 78

79

Ibid., pp. 15–17. Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, p. 25. von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? Why Gorbachev?, p. 33. Witte’s dilemma is placed in a broader comparative economic/developmental context in Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), esp. pp. 5–30. von Laue, “Problems of Industrialization,” in George Stavrou, ed., Russia Under the Last Tsar, pp. 117–153.

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In summing up (for the moment) our impressions of the domestic ancien r´egime in Russia, we are struck by the extent to which tsardom’s failure to make its foreign and domestic policies mutually reinforcing, a failure with longstanding psychological, social, and institutional roots, acquired even greater resonance in political-cultural terms, in terms (that is) of profound e´ litist ambivalence toward centralized authority, consensual politics, and Western influences of any kind. To view these urgent national policy issues through the lenses of ideology and culture can only sharpen our awareness of how severely ridden with internal contradictions were both prerevolutionary government and prerevolutionary society in Russia, and how perilously each of those entities was alienated from the other. Because this study emphasizes analytical analogies as much as is reasonably possible, it might make sense to “jump over” France for the time being and return to early Stuart England. If late Imperial Russia was caught between the hammer of Hohenzollern Germany and the anvil of Meiji Japan – but most existentially menaced by the two “Teutonic” powers of central Europe – James I and Charles I were just as direly threatened in the early 1600s by the dueling Habsburgs and Bourbons just across the Channel. Before revisiting Louis XV’s France, therefore, we should analyze England’s domestic old regime in terms of the three propositions used earlier for our reappraisal of ancien r´egime Russia. We should find, that is, in the English as in the Russian case, a strategically imperiled state whose domestic power was being sapped by interrelated administrative-fiscal, social-elitist, and political-cultural weaknesses. ´ The first two Stuart kings of England may not have reigned in virtue of quite as many titles as did the late Romanov tsars; yet their internalization of absolutist and divine-right values seems to have been just as complete. James I’s long-winded expositions of divine right absolutism (in and out of Parliament) were legendary; and such was almost equally the case with his son and successor. Charles I informed his closest advisors on one occasion that “the question was of obeying the king, not of counselling.”80 His later announcement that he would recall Parliament only when “our people shall see more clearly into our intents and actions and . . . shall come to a better understanding of us and themselves” was equally revelatory of his convictions on the subject of kingship.81 Michael Young’s conclusion that Charles “wanted” always “to get things under control, arrange them his way,” and thought “purely in terms of descending authority, never ascending authority” conveys the same impression.82 Here was certitude on the subject easily worthy of a Nicholas II! It is also true that after Buckingham’s assassination in 1628, Queen 80 81 82

Cited in Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, p. 82. Quoted in Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, p. 111. Michael B. Young, Charles I (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 81. Much the same characterization of Charles I appears in Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).

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Henrietta-Maria was destined to play (like her subsequent counterparts MarieAntoinette and Alexandra Fedorovna) a problematic role of reaffirming rather than questioning the absolutist/divine right credo of the monarch in question.83 In the English case, then, it was only a matter of time before a royal marriage, once become personally intimate, became by the same token (or so it seems at least in hindsight) a premonition of ultimate political disaster for the crown. Here, again, the most obvious warranty for such disaster consisted in the fact that all the absolutist/divine right philosophy in the world could not translate for Charles into effective governance. True, long before the Scottish Stuarts came to power south of the River Tweed, the Tudors had managed to create something of a unified central administration headed by the Lord Treasurer, with the Privy Council serving both as the main executive body and as a vital link between the executive and the two Houses of Parliament. Yet, in the future, as Lawrence Stone wrote, “anomalies persisted, such as the independent Court of Wards, and old-fashioned officials went on fighting long-drawn-out and often successful inter-departmental battles to the detriment of efficiency.”84 This, too, in spite of the resuscitated Exchequer’s centralization of governmental fiscal authority over the ensuing years.85 But for the early Stuarts as for the late Romanovs, the obstacles to effective governance went far beyond the “turf” battles in the ministries, and included very prominently the growing tenuousness of the link between central and local government. This fault, which plagued the Stuarts long before it came to bedevil the Romanovs, was deeply rooted in the circumstances of sixteenth-century English history – war, inflation, dynastic uncertainties, and Reformation politics – and was, of course, greatly complicated by the survival from the medieval past of that national representative institution for which (prior to 1906) there was nothing like an equivalent in prerevolutionary Russia: namely, Parliament. Its members had parlayed their support for most of the Tudor monarchs’ public policies into a uniquely influential role in the counties, towns, and localities of the kingdom. The Crown was thus in no position to proceed to the next stage in the creation of a strong monarchy, the replacement of the local gentry by paid officials of its own. As a result there was a tacit agreement to divide responsibility, and the main burden of local administration had to be left in the hands of unpaid gentry and urban worthies, whose loyalty and efficiency was dependent on a careful regard being had for their interests, privileges, and prejudices. 83 84 85

On this queen, see the recent biography by Michelle White, Henrietta-Maria and the English Civil Wars (London: Aldershot, 2006). Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, pp. 62–63. The classic study here remains G. R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953); this despite the fact that its emphases, and some of its conclusions, have been increasingly subject to criticism over recent decades. See again the “Suggestions for Further Reading” in John Adamson, ed., The English Civil War, pp. 305–15, for bibliographical references to Elton and his revisionist critics.

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“So far from being progressively weakened,” Lawrence Stone concluded, “local particularism grew step by step with the growth of the central government.”86 Thus, in one respect at least, the challenges of governance were even more complicated for the Stuarts than they would be nearly three centuries later for Alexander III and Nicholas II. In addition to having to contend with ministerial/ bureaucratic infighting at the center, and with the inadequacies of a skeleton bureaucracy in the outlying reaches of the country, the Stuarts had to confront the possibility of a potentially dangerous fusion of central and local oppositional forces in a parliament without which (for largely geopolitical/ financial reasons) they could only with difficulty rule. And this last point was in fact absolutely critical, since (as we have already seen in detail) it was precisely at this time, in an era of “military revolution” and skyrocketing military expenses, that England’s leaders were under mounting popular pressure to respond to the religious and strategic challenges of the Thirty Years’ War. However frequently (and at times justifiably) Conrad Russell has been taken to task in recent years by “post-revisionist” scholars on sundry specific issues, he did well from the 1970s on to refer to warfare repeatedly as the cutting issue for the English in the 1620s. “Every Parliament in the decade,” he pointed out, “was called because of wars or rumors of wars. This is why, during the decade, there were seven sessions of five Parliaments, a frequency of meeting unknown since the reign of Mary Tudor.” Russell also stressed how pitilessly the Stuart state’s security needs exposed the inadequacy of its institutional/fiscal arrangements: In turning to war, Buckingham and Charles were putting pressure on English society and administration at their weakest point: the link between central and local government. . . . The pressure of the war on the counties cannot simply be measured by the central government’s demands for money, though those were vast enough. In 1626, there were military preparations on a scale unknown since Elizabeth. The fact that the failure of the Parliament of that year rendered all these preparations abortive did not absolve the government from demands that they should feed and clothe the sailors and soldiers they had assembled. . . . All this spending at the centre would have to be met by a mixture of Parliamentary subsidies, forced loans, borrowing, and the sale of Crown lands.87

Russell here was leading in to a larger insight: namely, that “the increasing scale and complexity of warfare demanded. . . . considerable changes in the relationship between the State and local communities. In England, those changes had not taken place, and there was a widespread desire that they should not take 86

87

Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, pp. 63–64. This tendency has been exhaustively documented in the local studies inspired in part by the “storm over the gentry” in past decades – studies far too numerous to cite here. Consult again Adamson, ed., The English Civil War, esp. the “Suggestions for Further Reading.” Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, pp. 72–83.

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place.”88 How “widespread” that desire actually was in provincial England (and under what specific military options) remains – as we noted earlier – contested among specialists; what is not debatable is that the strains of war were testing the structures of Stuart governance, and in so doing were exposing (and so sharpening) contradictions within the kingdom’s social elite and political ´ culture as well. On this last point, more later. Sufficient for the moment to note how, for Russell and other authorities on the period, fiscal/administrative issues raised by English involvement in warfare on the Continent all too easily became constitutional in nature. As just one example in point: Conrad Russell noted how “the vexed question of the legal authority for the militia was ideally designed to inflame the constitutional fears which had been growing slowly since 1621.” Insofar as many aspects of raising militia for employment outside England, such as the levying of military taxation in the counties, “had always been without secure legal authority,” and had accordingly been challenged since the 1580s, any attempt in the 1620s “to fight a war with a militia based solely on the [royal] prerogative,” and not legitimized by parliamentary statute, was a “certain recipe for disaster” in the eyes of parliamentary critics of the Stuarts’ alleged encroachments on the unwritten but sacrosanct constitution of the realm.89 Interestingly, the constitutional implications of warfare for early Stuart England loom as large for Russell’s key detractors as they did in recent decades for Russell himself. “Divergent views of the English political system,” Ann Hughes has written, “were coming into conflict in Charles’ reign. . . . Whereas many of the political nation saw regular meetings of parliaments as essential to English stability, the king himself was turning to ‘new counsels’ which stressed the importance of obedience to royal authority, and increasingly resorted to financial exactions not authorized by Parliament. Members of the Commons were not likely to give the king a generous financial settlement when there were serious doubts about his intentions regarding parliaments.”90 Norah Carlin has further broken down the connections among European war, Charles’ administrative/fiscal difficulties, and constitutional questions: War involved constitutional tensions even before the forced loan. The Commons pursued their opposition to continental military intervention by obtaining the right to supervise the spending of the 1624 subsidies, which . . . clearly encroached upon the royal prerogative. They demanded accounts in 1625, and attempted to link the question of further supplies for the war, which still had not started, to reformation in government as well as to action against Catholics at home. They pursued the matter in 1626 so far as to question members of the Council of War about which of them 88 89 90

Ibid. Ibid. Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, pp. 30–31.

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were responsible for advising support for Count Mansfeld’s unsuccessful campaign in Germany, the kind of military adventure they had explicitly tried to rule out in 1624.91

Perhaps (as Carlin speculates) the Whig narrative had it right after all: constitutional conflict in England did not first arise “out of the blue” in the Petition of Right controversy of 1628–29, but rather had antecedents stretching back to James I’s times and the earliest years of Charles I.92 Certainly, Parliament’s perceptions of growing waste and corruption in Charles’ financial administration, and in particular its resentment over Buckingham’s unparalleled monopolization of patronage and storied vindictiveness within that administration from the mid-1620s on, poisoned the political atmosphere and aggravated tensions between Crown and Parliament.93 To administrative/fiscal and constitutional issues (in England prior to 1628– 29, as in Russia prior to 1904–05) were added social-elitist issues. Admit´ tedly, few historians of the English Revolution today reason, as Tawney, Hill, Lawrence Stone, and others once did, in neo-Marxian terms of Stuart absolutism isolated from the uncongenial realities of declining “aristocracy” and rising “gentry” and “bourgeoisie.” At the same time, the current historiographical wisdom on this subject appears also to avoid the more extreme tendencies of revisionists such as Conrad Russell to ignore long-term revolutionary social causation altogether. We can probably register three points here with reasonable if not iron-clad certainty: (1) Most biographers of Charles I would concur that (much like – ironically! – Oliver Cromwell later on) this monarch emphatically endorsed the notion of “the ranks and orders of men,” or, more specifically, of “a nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman” in English society.94 (2) “The numbers of landowners who claimed the status of gentlemen trebled between 1540 and 1640, from about 5,000 to 15,000, and there was an especially marked increase in the number of ‘parish gentry’ owning just one or two manors, leading in some areas to a dramatic increase in the proportion of villages which had a resident squire.” To these ranks of established gentry must be added successful middle-class professionals of one type or another, prosperous farmers, and even some flourishing yeomen, all of whom to one extent or another were able (by economic means) to insinuate themselves into a “gentry” category that was now much more fluid than some modern scholars have retrospectively assumed, and also much closer to (and at critical junctures 91 92

93 94

Norah Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War, p. 93. On this point, see Christopher Thompson, “Court Politics and Parliamentary Conflict in 1625,” in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds., Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642 (London: Longman, 1989). Refer again to Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War, pp. 90–92, on the Duke of Buckingham’s role in further souring relations between king and parliament in the late 1620s. In addition to the sources cited earlier, see Charles Carlton, Charles I, The Personal Monarch, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1995); and Judith Richards, “His ‘nowe majestie’ and the English Monarchy: the Kingship of Charles I Before 1640,” Past and Present 113 (1986): 70–96.

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complicit with) “middling sorts” in the towns and villages of the countryside.95 (3) Finally, we know that both James I and Charles I were driven (especially if not exclusively for geostrategic reasons) toward demanding ever greater fiscal tributes from their subjects, and that in doing so their interests (and the state’s security interests) could not help but conflict with the proprietary and other economic interests of the expanding “gentry” and the more prosperous “middling sorts” in contemporary English society. Insofar as, in such circumstances, James, and even more his successor, were reluctant to accommodate whatever might be the special concerns of a Parliament representing an increasingly broad cross section of “respectable” Englishmen, their governing capabilities in a very challenging, potentially very dangerous western European world were unavoidably diminished. Still, if these updated impressions are anywhere near accurate, the “disconnect” between state and society in prerevolutionary England may have been – at least in constitutional and social terms – less radical than that prevailing in late Imperial Russia. In the former case, after all, there was (at least up to 1629) a national representative body that could endeavor to mediate many divisive issues, and possibly nothing quite as brutally degrading in general society as the distinction between “privilege” or “census” Russia and laboring or “peasant” Russia. On the other hand – and here is where the “special concerns” of Parliament cited above enter the picture – it is arguable that political-cultural issues drove as wide a wedge between rulers and ruled in England as they later did in Russia, and ultimately left the Stuarts as perilously isolated from many of their most articulate subjects as, later, the Romanovs would be. In this connection, it was long customary for English revolutionary historians not content with citing the usual Whiggish litany of constitutional, legal, and domestic/religious issues to see in the “court versus country” theme the most convincing indication of a crown culturally at odds with the “natural” rulers of the English countryside. Perez Zagorin notably developed this theme in the 1960s,96 and Lawrence Stone embroidered on it a few years thereafter. “The ideology of the Country,” he observed in part, “spread by poets and preachers, and stimulated by the news letters about the goings-on at Court . . . defined itself most clearly as the antithesis to this negative reference group.” Revealingly, it was only at the very end of his long catalogue of antithetical moral, aesthetic, and environmental traits then associated with the “Court” on the one hand and the “Country” on the other that Stone finally noted that “the Country was solidly Protestant, even Puritan,” while “the Court was deeply tainted by popish 95

96

Norah Carlin offers these generalizations (and some more statistics) in The Causes of the English Civil War, esp. pp. 116–25. See also, on this subject, C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). See Perez Zagorin, The Court and the Country: The Beginning of the English Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).

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leanings.”97 To be fair to Stone, he had already referenced at several earlier points in his reinterpretative essay the enormous importance, in seventeenthcentury England, of anti-Catholic or anti-“papist” paranoia. What was lacking in the analyses of historians like Zagorin and Stone, concerned as they primarily were with the domestic factors accentuated in the scholarly “storm over the gentry,” was a fully adequate appreciation of the internationalist, security dimensions of the tensions between Protestants and Catholics in early Stuart England. On this point, the recently published commentary of Jonathan Scott is too pertinent not to cite here at considerable length: What one notices first about the seventeenth-century English fear of popery are its range and power: it spanned the century; it crossed all social boundaries; as a solvent of political loyalties it had no rivals. What one should notice next is that it is inexplicable in a purely national context. Within England in the seventeenth century catholics made up a tiny and declining proportion of the population: protestantism was secure, and was becoming more so. It was in Europe that the opposite was the case. Between 1590 and 1690 the geographical reach of protestantism shrank from one-half to one-fifth of the land area of the continent. The seventeenth century in Europe was the century of the victories of the counter-reformation, spearheaded by Spain in the first half of the century and France in the second. It was the century in which protestantism had to fight for its survival.

“This was the context for fear of popery in England,” Scott has concluded – an England, insecure and militarily impotent under the Stuarts for all the reasons we have already inventoried, which nevertheless found itself “thrust into the front line against the European counter-reformation advance.”98 Most crucially from our analytical perspective, however, fears of a popish plot in England indissolubly joined geostrategic and domestic anxieties. Since, as Derek Hirst has written, “anti-catholicism” was “the one genuine religiopolitical conviction of ordinary people in the early seventeenth century,”99 it was all too easy for Charles I’s critics, reacting especially in the late 1620s to the sorry record of Stuart military incompetence in the Thirty Years’ War but also to alarming signs of the king’s “popishly-affected” and arbitrary political attitudes, to assume that they spoke with popular support when they assailed the royal administration in and out of Parliament for both its foreign and its domestic policy choices. Moreover, these critics of the son (Charles I) could not help but have unpleasantly fresh memories of how the father (James I) had, just a few years before, issued highly unpopular “Directions Concerning Preaching” 97 98

99

Lawrence Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, pp. 105–6. Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 29–30. The best full-length study of the subject as it applies to prerevolutionary England is still that of Caroline Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). Quoted in Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 56.

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attempting to tamp down anti-Catholic evangelical outbursts; had suspended penal laws against Catholics; and had persevered in his efforts to marry Charles to a Catholic princess. These policies “had brought political and religious issues together at this time,” placing evangelicals (so they thought) perilously on the defensive – a vulnerability they would continue to feel in the years ahead.100 Once Charles I ascended the throne in 1625 he decided, after some initial hesitation, to throw all of his influence behind eventual Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud’s stress on the Arminian strain in the Anglican Church. The crown’s tendency to designate “ministers” as “priests,” to prefer free will over predestinarian theology, and to emphasize hierarchy, ritual, and liturgical devotions in Sunday services to the detriment of the Puritans’ beloved preaching and lecturing, only made it easier for commentators already dismayed by the weakness of English military efforts in the Thirty Years’ War (and by English support afforded to Richelieu’s anti-Huguenot campaigns within France) to associate the English monarchy with the papal anti-Christ they all so loved to fear and hate.101 All of this made for a highly schizoid political culture in which, by the late 1620s and 1630s, the “court versus country” dichotomy conjoined international and domestic anxieties on both sides of the constitutional divide. “Two rival conspiracy theories were elaborated which . . . were associated with divergent remedies for the kingdom’s ills.”102 Ann Hughes has followed up this cardinal insight with a more detailed description of the contents of these clashing ideological systems: ‘Country’ attitudes included a belief that politics should, at times of danger at least, involve active participation by a broad political nation. There was thus a particular ‘country’ analysis of England’s political problems and a particular country solution. It was intertwined with a conspiracy theory which explained political conflict in terms of an authoritarian popish plot to undermine English laws and liberties as well as true religion, a plot which had alarming support from evil counselors at court. . . . The belief in such a plot was perhaps unsophisticated but it was not irrational. . . . religious developments in Charles’s reign made it all too plausible while court support for the absolutist tendencies in politics added further evidence.

On the other hand, in Hughes’ telling, ‘popular’ reactions to political problems “were seen by Charles and his most favored advisers as a subversive attempt to undermine his God-given authority: ‘popularity,’ not popery, was the great threat to the stability of English (and British) politics. This alternative conspiracy theory also had links to more elaborate political ideas – the 100 101

102

Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War, pp. 62–63. On all of this, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). For a more general overview, see Leo F. Solt, Church and State in Early Modern England 1509–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Hughes, Causes of the English Civil War, p. 81.

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absolutist views discussed earlier – and the two conspiracy theories were mutually reinforcing.”103 Jonathan Scott has endorsed this reading of a dangerously polarized political culture in England during these years, while also accentuating the international security dimensions of these “mutually reinforcing” conspiracy theories: It was the military ineffectuality and humiliation of the 1620s that established the quite disparate analyses by Charles I and his opponents of what was wrong with British government. For Charles his military dishonor resulted from a fundamental problem of religious and political ungovernability which he associated both with Calvinism and with hostility to monarchy. (Since these were the same infections which had apparently sparked the Dutch and Bohemian rebellions it is hardly surprising that he ended up echoing his father’s alliance with Spain.) For his opponents these same humiliations resulted from a government as incompetent as it was popishly affected and arbitrary, and a consequent abandonment of England by God.104

How, in the end, could such diametrically opposed conspiracy theories, with all their interrelated constitutional, social-hierarchical, religious, and geostrategic components, possibly be reconciled? They likely could not be so reconciled, even before the crown/parliament confrontation of 1628–29; and this boded especially ill for Charles I and his religious and secular partisans. Any attempt by the Stuart party to tar its opponents with the brush of “popularity,” of plebeian unruliness threatening the divinely ordained ranks of social hierarchy and divinely prescribed prerogatives of monarchy, was quite likely, in early seventeenth-century England, to be trumped among most English subjects by opposition strategies tarring Charles and his advocates with the fearsome brush of “popery.” After all, “popery” conjured up for most of Charles’ contemporaries such traumata in recent history as the Marian persecutions of the 1550s, the “treason” of Mary Stuart and the Spanish Armada of the 1580s, the Gun powder Plot under James I, and all of the Catholic assassinations and other atrocities that were martyring Protestants on the Continent in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries – not to mention the apparent successes of the Austro-Spanish Habsburgs in rolling back, by the 1620s, one hundred years of Reformation in continental arenas disconcertingly close to England’s imperiled shores. As a burgeoning corpus of research goes to show, the early seventeenth-century tendency, in all ranks of English society, to see priests and other “papists” under every bed, to hate and fear Ireland (and even, to some extent, Scotland) as treacherous avenues for papist infiltration of encircled, evangelical England, cannot easily be overestimated.105 That, after the mid-1620s, Charles I was partnered with 103 104 105

Ibid., pp. 89–90. Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 31–32. See Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot; Robin Clifton, “The Popular Fear of Catholics During the English Revolution,” Past and Present 52 (1971): 23–55; Peter Lake, “Anti-Popery:

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a Catholic wife, cast his lot, ecclesiologically speaking, with a High Anglicanism that to many seemed indistinguishable from papism, and eventually made peace with ultra-Catholic Spain, only added finishing touches to a portrait whose provocative colors affrighted growing numbers of patriotic Englishmen and Englishwomen. When, in the end, the administrative, constitutional, and social-elitist aspects ´ of estrangement between Stuart governance and articulate English society in the early seventeenth century are viewed through the lenses of the schizoid political culture of the times, the Stuarts’ position looks to us quite as tenuous (and perhaps ultimately as untenable?) as that of the Romanovs in late Imperial Russia. As we now turn our attention to eighteenth-century France, we will see Louis XV’s domestic situation being insidiously eroded by a somewhat similar combination of factors. Absolutism in prerevolutionary France, much as in prerevolutionary Russia and England, pivoted on a monarch likening his powers to God’s limitless authority. Here was Louis XV in 1766, haranguing his most prestigious court of law, the Parlement of Paris, on his absolute powers: It is in my person alone that sovereign power resides . . . It is from me alone that my courts of justice derive their existence and their authority. The plenitude of this authority, which they exercise only in my name, remains always with me. I alone possess legislative power without sharing it with, or depending for it on, anyone. . . . The whole system of public order emanates from me.106

Perhaps the crux of the matter, insofar as it concerned administrative/fiscal and (by implication) constitutional issues widening the breach between the Bourbons and articulate French society, was the royal claim to monopolize legislative power. That claim (underscored on many an earlier occasion by Louis XV’s regal great-grandfather in his carefully crafted role as Roi de Soleil) reflected the Bourbons’ fateful decision to rule France through a centralized “protobureaucracy” and avoid consulting the people in the representative body of earlier centuries known as the Estates-General. Centralized, bureaucratized governance in this ancien r´egime did not develop in any more neatly scripted or preordained a fashion than it did in the other countries under review. We know today from a host of studies that the ministers laboring on administrative/fiscal affairs in the wake of the disorders of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in France had to contend with local institutions and attitudes inherited from the past, and had to rely on

106

the Structure of a Prejudice,” in Cust and Hughes, ed., Conflict in Early Stuart England, pp. 72– 106; and of course Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles, esp. Chapter 1, “Taking Contemporary Belief Seriously.” Cited in C. B. A. Behrens, Society, Government and the Enlightenment: The Experiences of Eighteenth-Century France and Prussia (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985), p. 25.

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the cooperation of subjects hailing from all walks of professional life.107 The crown gradually appropriated for its own uses the patron–client relationships that had long bound powerful and dependent nobles together, thus turning patronage in the provinces toward statist purposes. Provincial military governorships, traditionally citadels of noble influence, had to be accommodated within the structures of royal authority. And the government could not possibly have functioned, let alone tightened its grip on this large European kingdom, without the collaboration of clerks in the ministerial bureaux, financiers of various stripes, judges in the legal hierarchy, members of provincial Estates, and officiers in municipalities and villages throughout the land. By the early eighteenth century, the architects of the new French absolutism had the situation fairly well in hand.108 Power at the center (and this now meant Versailles) lay in the hands of the king and varying combinations of ministers, “secretaries of state” directing operative governmental departments, “councilors of state,” and “masters of requests” transacting business and setting policy in the committees that were specific emanations for specifically set purposes of the king’s Council. In these exalted ranks of governance, the chancellor or “keeper of the Seals,” embodiment after the monarch of justice in the realm, was losing something of his customary influence, while the controllergeneral of finances, steward of the moneys that were the sinews of the French state’s war-making capacity, was becoming increasingly indispensable. Decisions hammered out at Versailles were then transmitted to the provinces, and translated into local policy, by the provincial “intendants” and their “subdelegates.” Although it may be true that political initiative and influence in provincial France shifted somewhat back from the crown’s agents to the provincial Estates and other local power-brokers in the course of the century,109 the links between central and local governance in old regime France, when viewed in our study’s comparative terms, appear fairly impressive – probably more impressive than the analogous central/local administrative connections in either of our other anciens r´egimes. Still, there were widening cracks even in this imposing edifice of Bourbon absolutism, and the resultant inadequacies of that absolutism had their 107

108

109

Robert Harding, Anatomy of a Power Elite: The Provincial Governors of Early Modern France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978); William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Richard Bonney, Political Change in France Under Richelieu and Mazarin 1624–1661 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). For overviews of these developments, see Pierre Goubert, L’Ancien R´egime, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Colin, 1969–73); and Michel Antoine, Le Conseil du Roi sous le r`egne de Louis XV (Geneva: Droz, 1970). As is argued by, among others, Maurice Bordes in L’Administration provinciale et municipale en France au XVIIIe si`ecle (Paris: Societ 1972). ´ e´ d’Edition d’Enseignement Superieur, ´

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constitutional implications. “Without a representative body,” David Parker remarked, “French kings had the greatest difficulty in gathering support for their policies throughout the realm. In a sense the administrative apparatus that came slowly into being filled the vacuum which existed. But it was never a complete substitute.”110 In other words, the Estates-General, however consigned to dusty oblivion since the agitated times of Marie de Medicis’s regency ´ at the start of the seventeenth century, never altogether stopped haunting the avatars of Bourbon divine-right absolutism in France. The reasons for this were myriad. For one thing, the authorities’ ability to tax and to promote economic development suffered as a result of their rejection of consultative governance. Lack of representation in fiscal matters meant lack of legitimization of taxes; and the more burdensome such taxes became and the more inquisitorial the government’s means of extracting revenue from all proprietors became, the more likely resistance to such policies was to intensify. By the same token, corporate privileges of every conceivable kind flourished throughout the kingdom in the absence of consultative institutions. And the juridical bodies coddled by the government included guilds and peasant villages which, in some regions at least, seem to have inhibited economic development.111 To do the authorities justice, their patronage of the guilds and of peasant rights responded in part to a frustrating mentality of economic conservatism with which any government in this country, regardless of its ideological persuasion, would have had to deal sooner or later. The fact still remains that the crown, committing itself in the end to a kind of administrative-fiscal absolutism, helped over time to lay the groundwork for a potentially explosive situation in which the French people, struggling to make ends meet in a less than fully commercialized economy, and set upon by vexatious tax agents, would refuse to pay – and/or demand a novel voice in their own government. These developments in turn only made the government more reliant on financiers of various types. Julian Dent pointed in this connection to a “paradox at the heart of the administrative history of the ancien regime,” arguing that ´ the crown was “simultaneously building two mutually hostile systems.” On the one hand, there was the “admirably modern administrative machine . . . created largely in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” and destined in the following century to be “the envy of the civilised world.” Yet, growing up beside it was the

110 111

David Parker, The Making of French Absolutism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 26. See, on these issues, the following: David Bien, “Offices, Corps, and a System of State Credit: The Uses of Privilege Under the Ancien Regime,” in Keith Baker, ed., The Political Culture of ´ the Old Regime (Oxford: Pergamon, 1987), pp. 89–114; Gail Bossenga, “City and State: An Urban Perspective on the Origins of the French Revolution,” in ibid., pp. 115–40; the articles by Gail Bossenga, Liana Vardi, and Cissie Fairchilds in French Historical Studies 15 (Fall 1988), pp. 688ff.; and Hilton Root, Peasants and Kings in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

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“deplorable financial system of the state” – though use here of the word “system,” Dent wrote, “implies a kind of rational organization which was in this instance not readily to be discerned.”112 Indeed, there was no central treasury into which royal revenues flowed and from which moneys could be disbursed to state creditors. There were instead a number of “treasuries,” which were in the hands of the private financiers who had bought the right to administer their funds and who were subject to very few standardized schedules or accounting procedures. The comptables in charge of proceeds from direct taxation were variously styled “payers,” “receivers,” or “treasurers;” their counterparts who purchased and periodically renewed the lease of the indirect taxes were the notorious “Farmers-General.” The financial system was indeed in its chaotic complexities a far cry from the rationalized administrative hierarchy of ministers, councilors of state, and intendants. Moreover, because the financiers (and a plethora of other venal officeholders) were in the final analysis subject to nothing approaching Weberian standards of administrative/bureaucratic oversight, they were able to employ the royal funds they administered to speculate in the government’s own long-term and short-term debt as well as in private ventures on the side, thus making the king’s accounts (and perforce the government’s very credibility) hostage to all the vicissitudes of eighteenth-century economic and financial developments. Again, all of this must be seen in an ultimately constitutional context. “For all its reputed “absolute” qualities,” Gail Bossenga notes, “the monarchy was unable to reach very deeply into society to extract the revenues necessary to support its chronic wars. . . . In an absolute monarchy lacking accountability financial capitalism was grafted onto privileged patrimonial structures.”113 In all these ways, as Bossenga repeatedly (and trenchantly) argues, absolutism in France could not in the long run be competitive with accountable parliamentary governance across the Channel in England. All of these interrelated factors converged to plague Louis XV’s warring government in the 1750s and 1760s. The unparalleled expenses of involvement in the Seven Years’ War drove the king’s agents down ever more desperate paths of fiscal expediency; yet, by a natural dialectic, increasing financial burdens levied on French subjects and institutions elicited from them an increasingly outspoken constitutional commentary – including, ultimately, invocations of the Estates-General. Toward 1750, the marquis d’Argenson “signaled the growing audacity of the criticisms of governmental affairs: the songs, the libels, the 112 113

Julian Dent, Crisis in Finance: Crown, Financiers and Society in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), pp. 234–35. See Gail Bossenga, “Financial Origins of the French Revolution,” in Kaiser and Van Kley, eds., From Deficit to Deluge, esp. pp. 46 and 48. Consult also, among earlier studies: George T. Matthews, The Royal General Farms in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958); Julian Dent, Crisis in Finance; and above all, John F. Bosher, French Finances, 1770–1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

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popular rumors made him fearfully anticipate . . . a call for the Estates General, and even . . . a revolution.” A few years later, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably prophesied likewise: “It could and indeed must happen at some future point that the kingdom will find itself in such distress, that the government will be forced to have recourse to the forgotten practice of summoning the Estates General.”114 But the government likely had more to fear on this score from the parlements, those tribunals of final appeal whose acknowledged right to sanction or criticize royal legislation made them lodestones of constitutional controversy in midcentury and beyond.115 The judges of these courts were expected to confine their observations on royal edicts to protests relayed confidentially to Versailles; but as the parlementaires became ever more deeply embroiled in religious and especially fiscal disputes with the crown in the 1750s and 1760s, “private” remonstrances more and more frequently became published pronunciamentos devoured by an alert and growing reading public. Thus, the Paris Parlement in protests of December 1763 advanced an argument that tended logically toward recourse to some national representative assemblage: “In matters of taxation, Sire, to violate the parlements’ sacred right of consent is to injure . . . the rights of the Nation. . . . [To] levy a tax without consent is to do violence to the constitution of the French government.”116 And what the Parisian magistrates, restrained perhaps by a special working relationship with Versailles, hesitated to spell out, the more vociferous provincial judges did. Here, for instance, were the high jurists at Rouen, in protests of May 1760: “Ever since the Estates [General] have fallen into disuse, private interests have ridden roughshod over the public weal. . . . The essence of a law is that it be accepted. The right of consent is the right of the Nation.”117 And the irate magistrates at Rennes articulated the crucial issue even more forthrightly in August 1764: The investiture of St. Louis, the decisions of the Estates-General at the beginning of the thirteenth century, [and] the ordinances of 1355, 1560, and 1576 make it crystal clear that in the common law of France the consent of the three orders of society in the Assembly of the Estates-General is necessary for the establishment . . . of taxes.118

As historians in successive generations have indicated, this potentially revolutionary invocation of the rights of the “nation” or “fatherland” was becoming common currency among the parlementaires (and members of other high 114

115 116 117 118

Elie Carcassonne, Montesquieu et le probl`eme de la constitution franc¸aise au XVIIIe si`ecle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1927), pp. 380–82 and 373–74. On Mably, see also Keith M. Baker, “A Script for a French Revolution: The Political Consciousness of the Abbe´ Mably,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 14 (1981): 235–63. For a somewhat dated but still very useful overview of this subject, consult Jean Egret, Louis XV et l’opposition parlementaire, 1715–1774 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1970). Carcassonne, Montesquieu, p. 292. Ibid., pp. 292–93. Ibid., p. 294.

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tribunals as well) by the middle of the eighteenth century.119 Hence, for august justices as for essayists in Bourbon France – much as for MPs in the active but affrighted parliaments of early Stuart England and for restive gentry in the zemstvos of late Imperial Russia – fiscal/administrative issues were taking on a constitutional character and threatening thereby to isolate further a state that was also becoming alienated in a social sense from its elitist subjects. ´ In the French case, this “social isolation” of an absolutist, divine-right monarchy derived at least in part (as it also did in the Russian and English cases) from foreign policy commitments. Specifically, the belligerent outreach of the Bourbons (in conjunction, to be sure, with independent socioeconomic forces) considerably altered the nature of the social elite in France and con´ sequently helped to widen the discrepancy between royalty’s vision of society and the actual structure and values of that society. It seems retrospectively clear that if the primordial schema of “prayers,” “fighters,” and “workers” – that is, the old “three Estates” scenario – that traditionally claimed the adherence of French kings had ever even remotely mirrored social realities in this land, it obviously did not do so any longer in the twilight of Louis XV’s long reign. And, again, the supreme irony in all of this undoubtedly was the central role that was played in this process of social change by a state determined in theory to resist such change! How had this situation come about? It has been a commonplace since Voltaire’s day to observe that French absolutism in earlier times had lifted the curse of civil war from the land, thereby facilitating an increase in trade, manufactures, and the arts of peace as well as in governmental activities.120 From this foundational process of statist aggrandizement within France, several consequences had flowed. For one, a burgeoning governmental apparatus, having achieved (at least for the time being) sociopolitical stabilization at home, was now able to proceed on to the prosecution of an increasingly audacious mission abroad, which in turn meant a skyrocketing need for money and for professional Frenchmen to perform the tasks of modern governance. For another, the very encouragement of “trade, manufactures, and the arts of peace” meant that there would be a growing number of moneyed and ambitious bourgeois who could satisfy these statist requirements (and their own social aspirations) by buying their way into the nobility – hence in the long run changing the character of the social elite in France. Finally, the “arts of peace” ´ included, in the eighteenth century, the elaboration and dissemination of an

119

120

The apposite literature on this subject ranges from Roger Bickart, Les Parlements et la notion de souverainet´e nationale au XVIIIe si`ecle (Paris: Alcan, 1932) to David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). A point underscored, for instance, in Behrens, Society, Government and the Enlightenment, esp. pp. 55–56, and throughout Franc¸ois Furet’s revisionist essay Interpreting the French Revolution.

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ideology of “enlightenment” that at the very least promoted utilitarian values congenial to the purposes of policymakers, administrators, and bourgeois who were upwardly mobile. In a nutshell, then, the crown did much to create the preconditions for what we might term “primitive capitalist and intellectual accumulation,” and resolved (for its own, largely strategic purposes) to minister to the needs and sensibilities of those who flourished in such circumstances. Elsewhere, I have analyzed in detail this paradox of long-term social-elitist ´ evolution promoted directly and indirectly by a French crown wedded obdurately to old social-hierarchical values.121 Here, we must confine ourselves to pinpointing several of the most meaningful manifestations of this evolution. First, there was the fact that the financially straitened government felt constrained in mid-century to sell so many letters conferring ennoblement (lettres d’anoblissement) on meritorious (and moneyed) bourgeois in the very terms of modern social meritocracy. Typically, these lettres d’anoblissement (located by historian Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret in dusty judicial registers at Paris) had the king’s government attesting that “commerce has always been regarded as one of the surest and most fecund sources of the power of States,” “assuring the nation that trade is honorable as well as useful,” and lauding “talent,” the “hours passed in studies,” and the “merit that derives from personal qualities.” It is probably also significant, then, that Chaussinand-Nogaret discovered a much higher proportion of these official attestations of nobility going to “useful” middle-class Frenchmen after 1760 than before that date. Nor is it at all astonishing that a royal edict of 1765 should have invited wholesale merchants to purchase certain honorific privileges, such as the right to wear a sword, thus assimilating them, at least outwardly, to the prideful “second estate” of military nobility. Of course, the crown may have drawn even more revenue from the middle-class comptables trafficking in the financial affairs of the bellicose state itself.122 Then, there was the sheer number of offices actually sold in the course of the eighteenth century, and the way this transformed the nature of the social elite ´ by facilitating upward social mobility for bourgeois Frenchmen. How many people were so ennobled over the century? “One estimate is 6,500, another nearer 10,000. Multiplied by five for the families who inherited noble status from their newly ennobled heads, this gives a minimum total of 32,500 or a maximum of 50,000 new nobles during the eighteenth century – a major proportion of the whole [noble] order however it is calculated.” If we note as well that at least 47,000 bourgeois families (meaning more hundreds of thousands of individuals) progressed up the ladder toward noble status through 121 122

Bailey Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution, esp. pp. 85–99 and 183–94. For this research, see Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, “Aux Origines de la Revolution: Noblesse ´ et Bourgeoisie,” Annales: E. S. C. 30 (1975): 265–77; and, by the same author, La Noblesse au XVIIIe si`ecle: De la f´eodalit´e aux lumi`eres (Paris: Hachette, 1968), esp. pp. 268–70. See also Colin Lucas, “Nobles, Bourgeois, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” pp. 97–98.

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purchase of non-ennobling offices during this period, we can begin to sense how important a mechanism officeholding was for bourgeois infiltration (sooner or later) into the iron-spurred ranks of nobility.123 The crown’s vending of lettres d’anoblissement and offices, necessitated above all by the escalating costs of maritime and continental warfare, affected both the composition of elite society in general and specific ranks of that society ´ (especially military and financial) that were of special importance to the survival of absolutism in France. On the first of these two points, social historians have scrupulously researched how officeholders (and associated professionals) made up a strategic mediating element in a heterogeneous elite of “notables” that was ´ emerging from the cocoon of the antediluvian “society of orders” all over the kingdom. From Paris itself to Orleans, from Bayeux to Troyes and Reims, and ´ from Dijon to Bordeaux to Chalons-sur-Marne, we find, in eighteenth-century ˆ France, a situation perhaps best captured by Georges Lefebvre when speaking specifically of Orleans: “this upper class was an oligarchy. It did not form a ´ compact bloc, but its diverse members shared a certain way of life; they all had the same respect for birth and wealth, the same horror of bad marriages, the same arrogance towards men of little property, and the same contempt for the populace. . . . They all met . . . in the literary societies which were, in effect, their clubs. Lastly, they monopolized the urban administration. . . . These then were the “notables” who were to become the ruling class of France from the Consulate on.”124 To be sure, the ultimate question of the relationship between this embryonic governing elite of enlightened “notables” and the conventional ´ noble Estate was (as Marcel Reinhard once put it) “still unresolved. The resolution of this capital question was left to those who wanted to regenerate the kingdom.”125 Still, even in granting this last point, we cannot ignore the accumulating evidence that the orthodox hierarchical values were being insidiously undermined in France. Social change was simultaneously at work within military and financial institutions of critical importance to the French state. Within the army, the Bourbons’ enlistment into officer ranks of out-and-out commoners whose 123

124

125

For all these calculations, refer to William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, pp. 119– 20 and 129–30. On the appreciating prices of these avidly sought offices in the eighteenth century, see Doyle, “The Price of Offices in Pre-Revolutionary France,” Historical Journal 27 (1984): 857, n. 181. Georges Lefebvre, “Urban Society in the Orleanais in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Past ´ and Present 19 (1961): 50–51. On the other cities mentioned here, see Adeline Daumard and Franc¸ois Furet, Structures et relations sociales a` Paris au milieu du XVIIIe si`ecle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961), pp. 80, 87; Olwen H. Hufton, Bayeux in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Lynn A. Hunt, Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial France: Troyes and Reims, 1786–1790 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1978); and Daniel Roche, Le Si`ecle des Lumi`eres en Provence: Acad´emies et acad´emiciens provinc¸iaux, 1680–1789 (Paris: Mouton, 1978). As quoted by Patrice Higonnet in Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles During the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), p. 54.

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wealth often accorded them preference over proud but impecunious sons of the rural gentry, and the spectacular defeats suffered by French forces in the mideighteenth-century wars, worked together to ignite a major debate over exactly how commanding ranks should be composed and what values they should embody.126 Participants in this debate included those championing (anachronistically) the sons of the old provincial “sword” nobility, those advocating a Prussian-style state-service elite strictly defined by criteria of military function ´ and merit, those chanting the praises of “new” noble and bourgeois officers in the commissioned ranks, and those envisioning, a` la Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “citizen” officers from all walks of life sharing a strong emotional bond to the patrie. The utter lack of consensus within the army (and within polite society as a whole) on this fundamental issue – along with the accompanying tensions between officered ranks taken together and the common soldiery – afflicted the army and commensurately weakened the country’s foreign policy in a manner anticipating similar developments in later Romanov Russia. In the ranks of the ever more influential state financiers, too, social change was at work, and inimical to the purposes of the monarchy. For instance, insofar as the Farmers-General, managers of the crown’s indirect taxes, were by late in Louis XV’s reign “usually men not only of wealth but of assured and cultivated manner,” and insofar as their families now “interlaced at every level with the high nobility, the magistracy, and the clans which supplied the state with its chief administrators,” these strategically placed financiers could no longer be deprived of their fortunes (as their less securely ensconced predecessors sometimes had been) in the extrajudicial proceedings of so-called chambres de justice. As they had “arrived” socially, the Farmers-General, like so many other highly placed servants of the belligerent crown, were now firmly rooted in a monde of privilege likely to resist tenaciously all ministerial efforts to rescue royal finances and, hence, absolute monarchy itself by curbing such privilege.127 So, in old regime France much as in old regime Russia and England – if for reasons uniquely French in nature – the crown found itself sponsoring contradictory social-elitist values and at the same time losing touch with evolving ´ social-elitist realities. And, just as in the cases of England and Russia, so in that ´ of France, the connections between ineffectual policies abroad and reformist issues at home were hugely amplified (that is, found a new social resonance) in the political culture of the times. 126

127

See Emile G. Leonard, “La Question sociale dans l’armee ´ ´ franc¸aise au XVIIIe si`ecle,” Annales: E. S. C. 3 (1948), pp. 135–49; and David D. Bien, “La Reaction aristocratique avant 1789: ´ L’Example de l’armee,” Annales: E. S. C. 29 (1974): 23–48, 505–34. ´ On the Farmers-General, see: Matthews, Royal General Farms, pp. 238–41; Yves Durand, Finance et m´ec´enat: Les Fermiers-G´en´eraux au XVIIIe si`ecle (Paris: Hachette, 1976); and Bosher, “Chambres de justice in the French Monarchy,” in J. F. Bosher, ed., French Government and Society 1500–1850: Essays in Memory of Alfred Cobban (London: Athlone, 1973), pp. 19–40.

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This was true, first of all, of what we might call the political culture of reforming officialdom. Just as, in late imperial Russia, Sergei Witte and his associates were perpetually at loggerheads with tsarist reactionaries in and out of government, in France a legion of reformist ministers – Jean Baptiste Machault d’Arnouville, Etienne de Silhouette, and Henri-Leonard-Jean-Baptiste Bertin, ´ among others, – wrestling with the king’s geopolitically induced financial problems, could not help but espouse “enlightened” values insofar as they were trying to rationalize government procedures and curb the tax exemptions and other privileges of regions, groups, and individuals. Their actions were perforce emulated (and their values endorsed) in the provinces by the intendants and their subdelegates.128 Furthermore, Lamoignon de Malesherbes, head censor of the regime, by enabling Denis Diderot to bring out the first edition of his great collaborative “philosophic” work L’Encyclop´edie, and by encouraging the literary efforts of philosophes in general, was providing a megaphone for those insistent on associating French-style patriotism with the cause of domestic reformism. When d’Alembert indignantly refuted Frederick the Great’s charge that the philosophes, as citizens of a cosmopolitan “republic of letters,” lacked patriotism, when Diderot himself promised that the French would eventually overtake their erstwhile English mentors in worldly affairs, and when Voltaire declared that “we shall end by being the equals of our [English] masters,” they showed themselves to be part and parcel of an “official” culture in which France’s international prestige and domestic reformism went hand-in-hand.129 Then there was the political culture in the high tribunals of the land – a political culture that increasingly tied the cause of anti-papal patriotism at Paris to issues of constitutional reform. As Dale van Kley and others have shown, Louis XV and his parlements were frequently at daggers’ points during the 1750s over Jansenist and Gallican questions. Originally little more than a strain of thought emphasizing predestinarian and other austere tendencies within Catholicism, Jansenism in time became a focal point of constitutional controversy in the old regime. The effort by both papacy and crown to suppress the Jansenists, whom they regarded as subversive, revived in some French subjects’ eyes the old bugbear of an ultramontane assault on France’s historic “Gallican liberties.” Aroused Jansenists in the Paris Parlement, inveterate champions of those liberties, were, by the 1750s, calling for a monarchy “controlled by the parlement and ultimately by the nation exercising almost complete control over a democratically constituted and participatory church,” 128

129

See, on this subject: Marcel Marion, Machault d’Arnouville (Paris: Hachette, 1891); Maurice Bordes, “Les Intendants de Louis XV,” Revue Historique 223 (1960): 45–62; and Bordes, ´ “Les Intendants eclair es Revue d’Histoire Economique et Sociale ´ ´ de la fin de l’ancien regime,” ´ 39 (1961): 57–83. Refer in this connection to: Pierre Grosclaude, Malesherbes, t´emoin et interpr`ete de son temps (Paris: Fischbacher, 1961); R. R. Palmer, “The National Idea in France before the Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940): 95–111; and Frances Acomb, Anglophobia in France, 1763–1789 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1950), pp. 67–68.

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while their pro-papal foes were advocating “a veritably absolute monarch in relation to his lay subjects, encountering his equal only in . . . a similarly authoritarian and monarchically structured church.” Given this polarization between two competing ecclesiological and constitutional visions, it was hardly surprising that some Gallican-Jansenist jurists would soon be appealing to the “nation” and even invoking the Estates-General in their ever more jingoistic discourse.130 This schizoid “religio-political” culture, with its internationalist subtext, recalls somewhat the dueling pro-papal and anti-papal “conspiracy theories” in prerevolutionary England, even if it did not, perhaps, play as central a subverting role in Bourbon France as had the analogous phenomenon in Stuart England. Finally, there were the geopolitical/sociopolitical linkages in the anti-English and anti-Austrian sentiments that flourished in eighteenth-century France. Frances Acomb long ago familiarized us with the notion of both conservative and progressive-reformist nationalists under Louis XV cutting their intellectual teeth on a common rejection of much or all that was British. Just as defenders of the political and social status quo in France contrasted their beloved patrie against an allegedly corrupt and declining Albion, Acomb noted, physiocrats and other philosophes frequently combined their advocacy of domestic sociopolitical reform with rhetoric about the supposedly inferior national character and intelligence of the English.131 More recently, scholars such as David Bell and Edmond Dziembowski have taken up and elaborated on some of these points.132 At the same time, however, Thomas E. Kaiser has cogently argued that “Austrophobia,” stimulated in France especially by the dismal performance of Franco-Austrian forces against Prussia in the Seven Years’ War, also pointed in a constitutionally subversive direction by perceiving (and portraying) Louis XV and his partisans as impotent dupes of Vienna in this latest European conflict. To what extent this anticipated the much more lethal Austrophobia of revolutionary France may be debatable; at the very least, however, it does suggest that, in the political culture of anti-Austrian as well as anti-English and anti-papal campaigns in France, the inadequacies of the crown in both international and domestic affairs were being placed on display for all to see.133 This could only further deepen the isolation of a regime already increasingly 130

131 132

133

Dale K. van Kley has now revisited these issues in “The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 1560–1791,” in Kaiser and van Kley, eds., From Deficit to Deluge, esp. pp. 120– 35. But see also his earlier study The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien R´egime, 1750–1770 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), from which the quotations in this paragraph are derived. Refer again to Acomb, Anglophobia in France, esp. pp. 59–68. See again Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France, esp. chapter 3; and Edmond Dziembowski, “Un Nouveau patriotisme franc¸ais, 1750–1770: La France face a` la puissance Anglaise,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 365 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998). Thomas E. Kaiser, “The Austrian Alliance, the Seven Years’ War, and the Emergence of a French ‘National’ Foreign Policy, 1756–1789,” a paper presented at the March 2009 sessions of the Society for French Historical Studies at St. Louis, Missouri. Kaiser resets the context

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alienated from many of its articulate subjects for all of the interrelated reasons detailed earlier. What remains for us to do in this chapter is to indicate how three “warning” or “prodromal” crises in England, Russia, and France greatly intensified the interactions of these systemic geopolitical, administrative/constitutional, social-elitist, and political-cultural challenges to Stuart, Romanov, and Bour´ bon governance, respectively, thereby helping to hasten these anciens r´egimes on to their truly revolutionary days of reckoning. Three “Prodromal Crises”: 1628–29, 1905, and 1771–74 It may not be altogether coincidental (and it is surely quite convenient for our purposes!) that what appear to our “retrospective” eyes as “dress rehearsals” for genuinely revolutionary upheavals in England, France, and Russia occurred in each case from ten to fifteen years before the actual collapse of the government in question. If our comparative analysis up to this point has been anywhere near the mark, it has revealed to us “old regimes” becoming progressively more destabilized by a fairly consistent combination of state/security, constitutional, social-elitist, and political-cultural factors. After very briefly sketching out the ´ chronologies of these premonitory crises, we can suggest how, by bringing together even more explosively the isolating tendencies discussed in depth earlier, these conjunctures of dramatic events in all three cases accelerated the pace toward revolutionary breakdown. Once again, as in the second section of this chapter, we may find it most profitable to consider first the cases of England and Russia, and only then turn to the situation in France. The drama in England that commenced with Parliament’s drawing up of the Petition of Right in early 1628 and ended with the king’s dismissal of his third Parliament after the uproarious session of March 2, 1629 is straightforward enough in its chronology, even if its origins remain hotly debated.134 Simmering anger in the landed classes over what they deemed to be misconceived religious policies, smouldering resentment over Buckingham’s near-monopolization of patronage and access to the king at Whitehall, and Charles’ imposition of a “forced loan” and punishment of those resisting the “loan” through imprisonments, impressments into military service under martial law, and billeting of soldiers on private residents – all these (and other) developments culminated in the histrionics of the 1628–29 parliamentary sessions. The Commons, led

134

for this discussion in “From Fiscal Crisis to Revolution,” in Kaiser and van Kley, eds., From Deficit to Deluge, esp. pp. 141–52. This summary of events relies on Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603–1714 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), pp. 44–45. John Guy, “The Origins of the Petition of Right Reconsidered,” Historical Journal 25 (1982): 289–31 has (for example) found his interpretation of the origins of this controversy challenged by Mark Kishlansky, in “Tyranny Denied: Charles I, Attorney General Heath, and the Five Knights Case,” Historical Journal 42 (1999): 53–83.

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by firebrands like Sir John Eliot and Denzil Holles (and more moderate MPs like Thomas Wentworth) decided to protest the crown’s policies by presenting to Charles, not a formal Parliamentary Bill, but rather a Petition of Right supposedly asking only for confirmation of “old liberties,” not for a concession of innovatory rights. Specifically, the Petition, in its four clauses, anathematized “arbitrary” (i.e., nonparliamentary) taxation, imprisonments without due cause shown, the forced billeting of soldiers and sailors on subjects, and the imposition of martial law overriding (as was at the time the case in many southern and western counties) the authority of Justices of the Peace. Though in fact Charles was expected to accept the Petition with the reply normally used for assent to a private Bill, in practice he regarded it as infringing his “sovereign power” or “prerogative” and he signified his real attitude by continuing (as he had before) to assess customs dues (“tonnage and poundage”) without parliamentary sanction. The upshot was the improbable scene in the Commons’ session of March 2, 1629, during which the Speaker, held down forcibly in his chair, was constrained to witness the House defiantly pass three resolutions qualifying the imposition (or, indeed, payment) of “tonnage and poundage” and the introduction into England of “innovation of religion” as treasonous to “kingdom and commonwealth.” The king forthwith had the ringleaders in this melodrama, Sir John Eliot, Denzil Holles, and Benjamin Valentine, incarcerated, and dissolved the parliament eight days later, thus inaugurating what would be his “Personal Rule” of 1629–40. There are essentially four points to make here, in keeping with the geopolitical, constitutional, social-elitist, and political-cultural elements of our overall ´ analysis of anciens r´egimes. First, it is worthy of note that the 1628–29 crisis occurred not only in the mortifying aftermath of half-hearted and bungling English interventions in the war at that time raging on the Continent (interventions associated with the hated Buckingham), but also on the very eve of the high-water mark of Habsburg military successes in 1629. The fact that, at this very moment, all Protestantism (and thus, by association, English security) seemed to be under dire existential threat seems all the more crucial in light of what we know of the English evangelical psychology of the times. L. J. Reeve has aptly summed up that psychology: With the outbreak of the continental conflict, the threat of Habsburg power invoked comparison in England with the period of the 1580s and 1590s, and it summoned up Elizabethan ways of thinking. . . . in the 1620s, with the direct political application of covenant theology in English puritan circles, England was seen as the chosen nation which could offer leadership to Protestantism in Europe. . . . The Reformed Church in Europe, political Puritanism believed, was engaged in a struggle for survival with the Romish Anti-Christ; and it was incumbent upon England to act decisively in that struggle. By 1629, however, England was clearly failing in her role, and this was held to be a sign of God’s displeasure.135 135

L. J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, pp. 75–77.

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It is in this sense that Russell is inadequate: his carping over “how irritating the domestic preoccupations of the Parliament of 1628 appeared to a King whose mind was fixed on questions of grand strategy,” and his references to the fears of a nation supposedly only “reluctantly” at war and to the “insularity” of the Commons in times of crisis completely fail to capture the larger, international context of the parlementarians’ (in part religiously driven) sense of vulnerability and danger.136 Second, there were the constitutional dimensions of this crisis. Here, Conrad Russell certainly does show himself keenly sensitized to some of the fundamental questions at issue in the impasse that set in between king and legislature. He goes so far as to argue that Charles’s third parliament “was the first of the decade which came to Westminster with the conscious and deliberate aim of vindicating English liberties. . . . It was the Parliament of 1628 which first saw these liberties as collectively threatened by a threat to the ideal which held them all together, the ideal of the rule of law.” Indeed, for Russell, the exigencies of war were driving the English toward the ultimate constitutional question: “the key question now appeared to be what sort of government existed in England.” Was it still to be a regime “in which the King could not make laws or raise taxes without the assent of Parliaments, or was it slowly being driven by the inexorable necessities of war towards some form of arbitrary government?”137 Although subsequent commentators on these matters lack Russell’s conviction that all of these constitutional questions came to a head so suddenly in Charles I’s third Parliament, they do affirm the importance of the questions themselves in the context of 1628–29. Ann Hughes, for instance, recapitulates the constitutional antecedents to and considerations involved in the Petition of Right: Opposition or resistance to royal policies could be justified where they were felt to contravene the ‘ancient constitution,’ especially if they were a threat to property rights which it was the prime function of the common law to protect. Patriotic pride in the law as English was also important in promoting suspicion of royal interference. . . . The forced loan, imprisonments, billeting and other measures taken to prosecute the wars of the 1620s, fostered a widespread fear that the laws were in danger and only parliamentary action could preserve them.138

Logically, then, the Commoners’ “Petition” in 1628 was, for Hughes, “a general declaration of ‘their rights and liberties according to the laws and statutes of this realm,’ which it was hoped would prevent further abuses.” Unhappily, as Hughes observes, the 1628–29 crisis only drove a further constitutional wedge between king and parliament. “Fiery spirits” in the opposition such as Sir John Eliot, dissatisfied with the essentially traditional curbs on monarchical powers 136 137 138

Refer again to Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, pp. 323–416, for his discussion of parliamentary politics during the 1628–29 crisis. Ibid., esp. pp. 342–43. Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, p. 80.

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reiterated in the Petition of Right, went beyond them to launch personal attacks on Charles’ closest allies – Buckingham, Roger Manwaring, and others – censured the excesses of Arminianism, and thereby confirmed the king’s worst fears about his opponents. On the other hand, Hughes points out (agreeing in this with most of Charles’ biographers) that the “‘unwise assumption that his ends justified his means’ meant Charles engaged without scruple in vindictive, shifty or dishonest behavior if he believed it would defeat opponents.” In 1628–29, as later on in the 1640s, “Charles made concessions with an ill-grace and tried to reverse them as soon as possible.”139 Hence, the assassination of Buckingham in August 1628 solved nothing: from 1629 on, more than ever before, it was Charles against his angry (and now unrepresented) subjects. Third, there were undoubtedly social dimensions to the Petition of Right controversy. In his response of 1985 to the critics of his stimulating revisionist essay of 1972 on the Causes of the English Revolution, the late Lawrence Stone allowed that it might have been wise for him to have pushed his “Precipitants” of revolution back from 1629 to 1626. As Stone put it: If this were done, the latter could now include not only the debate over the Petition of Right in 1628, but also the raising of the forced loan of 1626, which led to the arrest of large numbers of respectable and respected squires. The significance of this deeply traumatic event on gentry psychology is down-played by Russell, but in fact it was in 1626, by raising illegal taxes, arresting many important gentry recalcitrants, and patronizing Arminians in the church, that Charles, Buckingham and Laud first gave English politics and religion a violent push to the right, and thus began a wholly new phase of political tension.140

In arguing thus, however, Stone also helped us imagine just how outraged, a few years later, must have been the gentry who were so eager to dispatch illegal property taxes, the billeting of solders, military impressments, and martial law to infamy in their Petition and subsequent remonstrances. Ann Hughes has reminded us that “the passing of the Petition of Right was met with widespread rejoicing and when the policy of billeting soldiers on the population was challenged in Parliament reluctant cooperation in the country gave way to complete obstruction and breakdown.”141 Whatever Russell and other revisionists may say, Charles I, in allowing widely detested favorites like Buckingham (and his own insistence on his absolute royal prerogative) to cut him off from so many influential gentry and “middling sorts” of subjects, was coming to be dangerously out of touch with his contemporary society. Perhaps the most revealing thing about the 1628–29 political crisis, however, from our analytical perspective, was the way it disclosed the inseparability, in English minds, of fundamental domestic and international issues, of constitutional, social, religious, and security matters. Testimonies to the kind of 139 140 141

Ibid. pp. 93, 157, 161. Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, p. 171. Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, p. 161.

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political culture in which these concerns could become so tightly intertwined abound, especially on the parliamentary side. “[Our] liberties have been so invaded,” we have seen William Strode expostulating, “that we are exposed to foreign destruction.” “God has punished us,” declared Sir Edward Coke, “because we have not spoken plainly . . . and until we do so God will not bless us, nor go out with our armies.” “As religion is decayed,” affirmed Francis Rous, “so the honour and strength of this nation [is] decayed.” “Now fall these things,” agreed Sir Robert Phelips, “at a time when our religion is almost extirpate in Christendom.”142 “The key to understanding the Commons’ attitude in 1629,” historian L. J. Reeve has observed, “is the underlying historical framework uniting English and international affairs.” Actually, his observation applies equally to both sides in this increasingly polarized debate: The Parliament developed into a conflict between what were essentially national and international aspirations: between Laudianism and Weston’s economic and diplomatic objectives on the one hand and the priorities of activist Calvinism on the other. This conflict ultimately destined the session to destruction. The collapse of the Parliament represented a victory for the Laudian and anti-war (and thus anti-parliamentary) interests within the court who counselled Charles against accommodation. In opposing these interests, the Calvinist forces in Parliament were just as concerned with the war as with reform of the English Church. . . . The elimination of the enemies of godly religion and war finance at home would allow effective action in the Protestant cause abroad.143

“Each of these perceptions,” Jonathan Scott has accurately concluded, “had a European context and each was anchored in the religious, political and military realities of its time. In his terms Charles could not achieve successful monarchical government, particularly militarily on the European stage, with these parliaments (and therefore this political culture). From the perspective of his opponents . . . parliaments, the laws and their religion were all in real danger, not only in the rest of Europe but at home.”144 Charles I’s third parliament “was to finish disastrously for all who were seeking a settlement that would alter the direction of religious and foreign policy. . . . Hostile elements at court were largely responsible for the outcome.”145 And indeed, during the following decade Charles, inhabiting a mental universe light-years removed from that of his multiplying detractors, only struck out further in directions that had already dangerously isolated him and his government from elitist and middling ranks of English society. He was, at best, conspic´ uously absent from the great battles that turned the tide in the Thirty Years’ War, or at worst seemed suspiciously friendly with forces in the Habsburg and “Papist” camp. At home, he stubbornly backed William Laud (after 1633, Archbishop of Canterbury) in his efforts to push a “High Anglican/Arminian” 142 143 144 145

All of these citations are from Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 111. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, pp. 75–77. Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 112. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, pp. 80–81.

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religious settlement and to muzzle outraged Puritans, gave increasingly free reign to his wife’s Catholic proclivities (and partisans) at court, continued to levy imposts of many kinds lacking parliamentary sanction, and infuriated gentry landowners, common lawyers, and proprietors of society’s middling ranks in countless other ways.146 Insofar as it served to herald all these trends, the 1628–29 imbroglio qualifies for us many times over as the “prodromal crisis” foreshadowing our English case of full-blown revolution. If English specialists are still crossing swords over the origins of the Petition of Right crisis, their Russian counterparts can have no comparable doubts about the most proximate causes of the Revolution of 1905.147 This “dress rehearsal” for the much greater 1917 upheaval unfolded against the backdrop of stunning Russian humiliation in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. That conflict, as noted earlier, had commenced with Japan’s “bolt from the blue” attack on Port Arthur in the Far East in January 1904; Russian forces were heavily defeated by land at Mukden and virtually annihilated by sea in the Tsushima Straits. By the time Sergei Witte’s skillful diplomacy had managed to extricate Russia from the war in August 1905, a broadly based movement of zemstvo liberals, urban professionals, students, workers, peasants, and ethnic minorities was shaking the Romanov state, protesting in the first instance this latest illustration of tsarist state incompetence but also broaching in the process an inflammatory mixture of political, socioeconomic, and ethnic issues. A massacre of demonstrating but peaceable workers at St. Petersburg (“Bloody Sunday” in January 1905) stimulated widespread outrage in society and was followed by workers’ strikes in key metropoles (St. Petersburg, Moscow) and in key industries as well as by elemental, anarchic peasant uprisings in the countryside. The 1905 Revolution achieved its climax in October, when a vast general strike brought government, society, and essential services to a virtual standstill and forced Nicholas II to issue (grudgingly and, ultimately, insincerely) an October Manifesto promising Russia a constitution and a nationally elected parliament (Duma). This momentary concession by the autocracy split the revolutionary front: the more conservative insurgents – “Octobrists,” Cadets, and others – wishing to concentrate on the elections to the upcoming Duma, effectively deserted the workers (mobilized at Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere in “soviets” or workers’ councils) and the rampaging rural peasantry. The regime was able (perhaps just barely) to regain control of the situation from late 1905 through 1906, utilizing police and army units withdrawn from the Far East to crush with storied brutality the remnants of the Revolution 146

147

For what is still the most succinct and readable analysis of these trends during 1629–1639, refer again to Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, esp. pp. 117–35. But see also the updated account in Michael J. Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). This brief chronology is based upon Von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? Why Gorbachev?, pp. 38–41; and Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, pp. 32–35. For an in-depth study of the 1905 Revolution, see Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2 vols. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988 and 1992).

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in city and countryside. Yet the eventual execution, by field courts martial, of more than a thousand insurgents also underscores the extent to which this prodromal revolutionary crisis had a genuinely mass-mobilizing element – in urban working-class society, to be sure, but even more in rural peasant society – that was noticeably lacking in the “prodromal crises” of old regime England and (as we shall see later) old regime France. Passing beyond chronology to analysis, we can once again break down a “prodromal crisis” into its state/security and domestic components. First, there were the geostrategic elements in the equation, and any consideration of those elements must begin with the dismal performance of the Russian Army. Hans Rogger has usefully summarized for us the findings of the germane military research: Lack of leadership and of tactical arms, poor training and battlefield communications, ignorance of the enemy and contempt for his capabilities, together with the enormous logistical problem of assembling and supplying an army over the single-tracked Trans-Siberian, helped to defeat Russia on land and sea. . . . At the outbreak of war the 125,000 Russian soldiers and border guards stationed in the Far East had at their disposal approximately 175 field pieces and 8 machine-guns. Telephones and telegraphs had to be imported, and many Russian units were without them. There was a shortage of binoculars, telescopes, and range finders. . . . 148

And on and on! Yet, as Rogger points out, all of these problems were but symptomatic of age-old, systemic weaknesses in the tsar’s military forces: bureaucratic inertia, unreasoning opposition to adoption of “foreign” (if urgently required) strategic and tactical innovations, and, perhaps most tellingly of all, a veritable chasm of mutual distrust between officers (men of “privilege Russia”) and the common soldier hailing from “working Russia.” Ultimately, there were for Imperial Russia the bitter diplomatic wages of unaddressed military weaknesses and incompetence. Although they were spared having to pay the indemnity on which Tokyo had first insisted, the Russians had (among other things) to cede any claims to Manchuria; surrender to Japan the southern half of Sakhalin Island, the South Manchurian Railway, and the lease of the Liaotung Peninsula with its valuable ports; and recognize Korea’s strategic dependence on Tokyo. St. Petersburg may in the end have retained possession of northern Manchuria and Mongolia, but this could hardly mitigate Romanov shame over the fact that “white” Russia had failed in what Prince S. N. Trubetskoi called its “mission” to defend Europe against the “yellow danger, the new hordes of Mongols armed by modern . . . technology.”149 148

149

Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, pp. 178–80. On structural weaknesses in the officered ranks of the Imperial Army, see again John W. Steinberg, All the Tsar’s Men, passim. Cited in Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 1: 47. See also, on the larger strategic issues involved in this conflict, Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).

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Inevitably, failure abroad had its constitutional implications at home. Increasingly, subjects who had rallied to the government in the wake of the Japanese attack on Port Arthur – liberal gentry in the zemstvos, city councilors at Moscow led by their mayor V. M. Golitsyn, professionals in the corporate bodies and industrial complexes of the Empire, university professors and students, physicians, and educated middle-class women – found themselves politicized by the shock of defeat in war. “Increasingly,” Abraham Ascher has written, “citizens raised a troublesome question: Who is responsible for this disgrace? The realization that the government bore responsibility for the catastrophe could not but serve as a powerful impetus to all who had argued that the country’s institutions needed to be overhauled.”150 Liberal gentry of the zemstvos (the so-called “zemstvo men”) agitated for the convocation of a national zemstvo congress, and were soon calling for the tsar to summon an actual Constituent Assembly. Professional unions organized themselves into a “Union of Unions” to rally their members behind the liberal cause; a Women’s Union for Equality joined the movement; semiprofessional groups formed affiliated unions; hundreds of zemstvos, city councils, and voluntary bodies chimed in, adding to what was rapidly becoming a national clamor for constitutional renovation; the press, and the literary intelligentsia, joined in as well.151 Tragically, however, they had ultimately to deal with a monarch who, though willing to bend temporarily with the storm, had no intention of fundamentally relinquishing the constitutional ways of autocracy. As the leading expert on the 1905 Revolution has sadly concluded, “intransigence and narrow-mindedness account for the behavior of the Tsar and his most powerful advisers at Court. They could not bear to yield one iota of their prerogatives and they could not grasp the significance of the changes Russia had undergone over the previous few decades, changes that made it impossible to maintain the status quo.”152 The 1905 Revolution also exposed both the ambivalence of the government’s relationship with the traditional social elite and the isolation of that elite within ´ ´ Russian society as a whole. On the one hand, the state’s military campaign against Japan was fatally weakened by the incompetence and anti-reformist stance of most general army officers, many of whom were septuagenarians lacking combat experience since the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78.153 Then, again, the alacrity with which zemstvo gentry liberals called first for a national zemstvo congress and then for a Constituent Assembly, with all its revolutionary potential, reminds us how strained relations had been in preceding decades

150 151 152

153

Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 1: 43. For a colorful description of all of this, refer to Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 173–81. Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 1: 342–43. The tsar’s attitudes during the 1905 Revolution are further investigated in A. Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, pp. 179–80; Steinberg, All the Tsar’s Men, passim.

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between St. Petersburg and this crucial provincial component of the heterogeneous nobility.154 Even within the ranks of noble officialdom at the capital, outrage over the state’s incompetence sparked something of a revolt against Nicholas. The assassination of the widely hated Minister of the Interior, V. K. Plehve, forced the tsar to appoint as his successor someone “enjoying the confidence of society”: in this case, that meant Prince Sviatopolk-Mirsky, who proudly called himself a “zemstvo man” sensitive to the aspirations of provincial gentry as well as of liberal bureaucrats. Mirsky’s unenviable position – “trapped between the demands of the liberals and the stubborn determination of the Tsar to stand firm on the principle of autocracy” – underscored once again the tenuousness of the state–elite relationship.155 On the other hand, ´ paradoxically enough, the tsar (at least in 1905) could count on the liberals’ isolation within Russian society as a whole (and above all their fear of anarchy) to help to splinter the revolutionary coalition of that year. As Ascher has lucidly explained the situation: The groups that propelled the revolution – the liberals, the workers, the peasants, and the national minorities – never coordinated their campaigns against the government. That a simultaneous offensive by all segments of the opposition could have toppled the old regime is suggested by the fact that when only two groups (workers and liberals) cooperated in October, they brought a decisive victory within reach. Then the natural divisions within the opposition, fed by both the growing militancy of the workers and the radical left and the liberals’ fear of anarchy, greatly weakened the movement.156

Once the liberals had pulled out of this never-very-coherent coalition, the government could still count on its ultimate weapon of repression, the battered but still basically intact Russian army. Finally, we need to place the dramatic events of 1905, like the decades preceding them, in a context of Russian political culture. Obviously, the tsar and his fellow reactionaries at court, in the army and Orthodox Church, and in the countryside, saw foreign and domestic questions as of a piece. When the ultraconservative Interior Minister V. K. Plehve preached up the virtues in 1903 of a “small victorious war” in the Far East, he was thinking both of internationalizing the spiritual values of tsarism and of utilizing the upsurge of patriotic sentiment in wartime to stifle domestic discontent over the glaring political and socioeconomic shortcomings of the regime. On the other side, patriotic disgust over governmental corruption, malfeasance, and overall incompetence exposed by the prosecution of the war against Japan related foreign and domestic issues in a very different way, and was aptly given voice by N. I. Astrov, a liberal 154 155

156

See, on this general topic, S. Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia 1900–1905 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973). For a colorful description of “Mirsky,” as his admirers called him, and a discussion of his unavailing campaign to bring about basic constitutional reform in Russia, see Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 170–73. Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 1: 342–45.

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activist in local government: “Impatience, feelings of resentment, indignation – these grew everywhere and became stronger. With each new defeat, with each new retreat . . . indignation grew more intense and there took shape a mood of protest. There was no malicious joy. Oh no! There was a feeling of burning shame and undeserved injury. . . . the country’s institutions needed to be overhauled.”157 Yet, in the end, negotiations between these two diametrically opposed points of view were likely predestined to fall short. And Abraham Ascher certainly is right, at least in part, to attribute this failure to a very basic flaw in this huge empire’s absolutist political culture: “in the Russia of 1905, citizens of all classes lacked political experience, itself a legacy of the longstanding exclusion of the people from the political process.”158 Nicholas II, in the short run at least, could rely on the coercive instruments of repression to keep him in the saddle; but how long could such a situation endure? In the end, the “prodromal crisis” of 1905 in Russia, like that of 1628–29 in England, was important both in that it dramatized to an unparalleled extent the geostrategic, constitutional, social-´elitist, and political-cultural weaknesses of an old regime and in that it set in motion new forces likely to accelerate the drift toward revolution. (As we stressed earlier, it was also much more of a mass-mobilizing phenomenon than the 1628–29 crisis in England, given its exposure of incendiary worker and peasant grievances in Romanov Russia.) Russia’s devastating defeat in the Far East had the effect of refocusing St. Petersburg’s attention on the Balkans and affairs in central Europe, thus contributing mightily to the chain of events leading to war in that region – a conflict that inevitably would mean direct military engagement with powerful Imperial Germany. At home, Sergei Witte’s daunting task of crash industrialization was to be taken up by Peter Stolypin, and that in turn was to stoke the fires of class tension and class hatred in urban and rural Russia, introduce new tensions into the country’s schizoid political culture, and leave the unrepentantly reactionary tsar and his coterie of advisers and hangers-on more fearfully isolated ` than ever. For Russia vis-a-vis the “Germanic” Central Powers as for England ` vis-a-vis threatening Catholic statist forces in west-central Europe, international and domestic issues would be more commingled than ever before, and more fraught than ever before with existential import. In France, finally, the so-called “Maupeou Revolution” of 1771–74 unfolded in the aftermath of humiliating defeat in the Seven Years’ War and against the backdrop of domestic economic recession.159 Louis XV, urged on by recently appointed Finance Minister Abbe´ Joseph Marie Terray and Chancellor R. N. C. Augustin de Maupeou, resolved to break the parlements’ longstanding resistance to higher taxes, taxes judged now to be essential, given the 157 158 159

Ibid., 1: 43. Ibid., 1: 345. For summaries of the following events, see: Bailey Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution, pp. 105–110; and James B. Collins, The Ancien R´egime and the French Revolution (Toronto: Wadsworth, 2002), pp. 20–23.

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government’s straitened circumstances. Hence, Maupeou’s assault during the winter of 1770–71 on the obstreperous parlements, an assault that entailed their neutralization by what those in authority hoped would be more tractable institutions. The chancellor instituted a “supreme court” at Paris composed of councilors of state and a number of more or less complaisant magistrates. Provincial appellate courts arose at Arras, Blois, Chalons, Clermont-Ferrand, ˆ Lyons, and Poitiers. Justice, the government announced grandly, was henceforward to be meted out free of charge to the kingdom’s subjects; venality of judicial office was to be abolished or at least curtailed; and various other reforms were promised to the justiciables of the realm. The parlements continued in existence, but the crown replaced the more refractory personnel with judges from whom it anticipated a greater receptivity to ministerial wishes. Thus, it was hoped, political opposition was to be purged from the hierarchy of tribunals, and the authorities would be unimpeded in the all-important business of securing financial appropriations. Unfortunately from the government’s point of view, however, this drastic initiative touched off a firestorm of protest from a wide range of quarters: from the stricken magistrates and their adherents, of course, but also from many philosophes, other lettered luminaries, and privileged bodies of one sort or another in provincial France. Perhaps more immediately significant, however, was the fact that Maupeou could never count on the unified support of ruling circles at Versailles: rumor had it that even the royal family itself was split over the issue of the chancellor’s political survival by early 1774. Louis XV fell into his final illness and died in May 1774; his grandson and successor Louis XVI, desiring in part to restore the royal popularity long forfeited by his predecessor, very soon overturned Maupeou’s experiment, cashiered the chancellor and his colleague Abbe´ Terray, and in most important respects reestablished the traditional high magistracy in its political as well as administrative and judicial functions. The crisis of 1771–74 in France, like those of 1628–29 in England and 1905 in Russia, helped to dramatize the old regime’s systemic competitive, constitutional, and social weaknesses, and like those other “prodromal” events did so through the revealing lenses of political culture. First, it highlighted France’s decline in competitive international affairs, occurring as it did not only in the wake of defeat in the war of 1756–63 at the hands of England by sea and Frederician Prussia by land, but also against the backdrop of the unrelenting pressure of Catherine the Great’s Russia on those three embattled outposts of French influence in eastern Europe, Poland, Sweden, and Turkey.160 On the eve of Maupeou’s drastic reform of the judiciary, the Abbe´ Bernis wrote despairingly to a colleague: “We must change our ways, and this task, 160

Refer, in this connection, to: M. S. Anderson, “European Diplomatic Relations, 1763–90,” in The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VIII: The American and French Revolutions, 1763– 93 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 258–59; and, among more recent works, to Jonathan Dull, The French Navy and the Seven Years’ War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); and Franz Szabo, The Seven Years’ War in Europe, 1756–1763 (London: Harlow, 2008).

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which would require centuries in another country, might be accomplished in a year in this [country], if there were men capable of it.”161 Indignation at Versailles “overflowed,” Albert Sorel has observed, when in 1772, at the height of the impasse between the French government and its recalcitrant parlements, courtiers there first learned the devastating news about the initial partition of hapless Poland by Prussia, Russia, and Austria and began to comprehend “to what a point of ‘servile dependence’ on the house of Austria the king had reduced France.”162 That this news was bound further to diminish Louis XV’s already besmirched reputation was underscored somberly by the comte de Segur: “The illusions of hope had gained for the King in his youth the title ´ of the well-beloved. Having been defeated, he lost it. People change with their fortunes. They love . . . or hate authority according to the good it does them, and often they bestow without measure their admiration on success and their scorn on failure.”163 Louis XV’s embarrassments at the hands, not only of his foreign adversaries, but also – and especially – of his presumed allies (meaning, above all, Habsburg Austria) thus help powerfully to explain why this monarch in death was the butt of so much elite and popular derision. ´ Persisting French difficulties in the amoral and unforgiving world of international power politics may also have imparted additional urgency to the firestorm of constitutional protest that accompanied Maupeou’s attempt to remodel the judiciary in the early 1770s. Durand Echeverria, who has studied this controversy as methodically as anyone, has contended that the “propaganda war” of 1771 and subsequent years was “probably unequaled in French history until the Revolution.”164 The cashiered judges and their partisans, styling themselves “Patriots,” riposted against the crown with solemn remonstrances and decrees that were in theory confidential petitions to the king but were in reality disseminated in manuscripts and in print to an ever more politicized reading public. These judicial protests were soon to be reinforced “by a flood of less restrained propaganda pieces – placards, engravings, satirical poems, jokes, and – principally – pamphlets ranging in length from a few pages to a hundred and more and varying in nature from the crudest libels to sober and reasoned political essays.” Of course, the government had its supporters too.165 Yet it is significant that, with the notable exception of Voltaire, nearly all the philosophes and most other literati as well sided with the old magistracy 161 162

163 164 165

Cited in Albert Sorel, Europe and the French Revolution, p. 236. Ibid., pp. 289–90. On the extent to which the miscarriage of the Franco-Austria alliance of the 1750s was now driving a wedge between Louis XV and many of his most patriotic subjects, refer again to Kaiser, “The Austrian Alliance, the Seven Years’ War, and the Emergence of a French ‘National’ Foreign Policy, 1756–1798,” pp. 1–10. Cited in Behrens, Society, Government and the Enlightenment, p. 165. Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution: A Study in the History of Libertarianism, France, 1770–1774 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), p. 22. See D. C. Hudson, “In Defense of Reform: French Government Propaganda During the Maupeou Crisis,” in French Historical Studies 8 (1973), pp. 51–76.

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in its confrontation with the government. Moreover, it did not take the Patriots long to progress far beyond the immediate issue of parlementary prerogatives to demand the resurrection of that keystone institution for which the contumacious judges themselves, if pressed to the wall, knew their courts to be only temporary substitutes: that ultimate of ultimates, the historic if long-disused Estates-General. Most dangerously for the authorities, the lead here was taken, not by those outside the structures of power, but by someone clearly speaking from within the “establishment:” namely, the chief of one of the most august courts at Paris, and one-time principal censor of the regime, Lamoignon de ´ Malesherbes. “Originally,” he reminded Louis XV on 17 August 1770, “taxes were established only by the consent of the people accorded in the assemblies of the Estates.” Soon thereafter Malesherbes dared to address the sovereign with these words: “King by divine right you may very well be, but you are also answerable for your power to your voluntarily obedient subjects. . . . There are in France, as in all monarchies, some inviolable rights which belong to the Nation. . . . Therefore, Sire, interrogate the Nation itself, for only the Nation can now be heard by Your Majesty!”166 And this language delivered to a king who, just four or five years before, had harangued the Paris Parlement on the subject of his sacrosanct and “unquestionable” authority! Malesherbes found like-minded Patriots aplenty in the early 1770s, some of whom in their squibs and treatises far exceeded even his radicalism.167 And so the warring Bourbons, at this moment of destiny, continued to be haunted by the apparition of representative governance from the past. Their position was probably also being eroded at this critical juncture by cross currents of stasis and evolution within society’s uppermost ranks. On the one hand, Chancellor Maupeou and his royal master were never able, in their confrontation with the high magistracy, to count on the undivided support of the court nobility. The Princes of the Blood themselves, with the blessings of many aristocratic hangers-on at Versailles, formally protested against the overthrow of the old judiciary, and most of the princes, dukes, and peers boycotted the short-lived “Maupeou Parlement” at Paris. Given the historic tendency of the parlementaires (most of them nobles themselves) to act as paladins of Second Estate privilege, such highly placed opposition to the Maupeou reforms, we may suspect, smacked largely of conservative (or, indeed, “reactionary”) fidelity to the old social-hierarchical principles – principles for which, after all, the divine-right monarch himself supposedly stood.168 On the other hand, there may also have been a certain measure of social “liberalism” in 166 167 168

Citations from Pierre Grosclaude, Malesherbes, t´emoin et interpr`ete de sons temps (Paris: Fischbacher, 1961), pp. 233, 238–39. For many examples of this, see Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution, pp. 85–86. For speculation on this point, see: William O. Doyle, “The Parlements of France and the Breakdown of the Old Regime, 1771–1788,” French Historical Studies 6 (1970): 415–58; and Jean Egret, Louis XV et l’opposition parlementaire, 1715–1774 (Paris: A. Colin, 1970), esp. p. 202.

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the opposition that eventually brought down Maupeou’s ministry. At least one prominent essayist in the opposition, Martin Morizot, in advocating the convocation of a “General Diet of the nation” that would (he argued) be much more broadly representative of “the people” than the old Estates-General, seemed to be anticipating a situation in which constitutional renovation would require social change as well.169 This certainly seems to be the speculation as well of the leading authority on the polemical literature of 1771–74, who has concluded that “Maupeou’s experiment . . . failed not because there was no need for at least some of his proposed reforms, nor because Louis XVI made a stupid, gratuitous mistake in reestablishing the parlements, but because such a constitution was not viable in the face of the determined opposition of the nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie.”170 It appears all too obvious to us in hindsight (if it was not altogether clear at the time) that, sooner or later, “the nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie” were going to insist – even in the teeth of rancorous opposition from social reactionaries – that French society, to be functional in a competitive world, must finally burst out of the outmoded chrysalis of the “society of orders.” Finally, there is the question of how all of these interrelated issues in the “Maupeou Revolution” were perceived, and magnified, through the prism of political culture in late eighteenth-century France. Here, again, as in the cases of prerevolutionary England and prerevolutionary Russia, we have the testimonies of thoughtful observers ruminating on symptoms of national decline in terms persistently associating state/security issues with domestic issues. This, for instance, from former minister of foreign affairs Gerard de Rayneval: ´ “The other nations concluded that France no longer possessed strength or resources. . . . The government at Versailles lost its prestige and its influence over other governments. Instead of being, as formerly, the hub of European policy, it became a passive spectator, whose approval or disapproval counted “Soon after [the 1756 alliance for nothing.”171 Thus, the comte de Segur: ´ with Austria had been concluded] the government no longer possessed any dignity, the finances any order, and the conduct of policy any consistency. France lost its influence in Europe. . . . The French monarchy ceased to be a first-class power.”172 And thus, the Abbe´ Bernis: “The king of Prussia is madly admired, because those who conduct their affairs successfully are always admired. . . . Our policy has been absurd and shameful.” Ten years later, we recall, the same individual would opine anxiously: “We must change our ways.”173 Yet once again, all such testimonies have to be evaluated in the final 169 170 171 172 173

Echeverria, Maupeou Revolution, pp. 85–86. Ibid., pp. 34 and 122. Quoted in Sorel, Europe and the French Revolution, p. 288. Cited in T. C. W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London: Longman, 1986), p. 42. Bernis is cited in Sorel, Europe and the French Revolution, pp. 289–90 and 236.

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analysis within the context of a deeply rooted political culture of absolutist, nonparticipatory governance that militated then, and would militate again in the future, against a harmonious, peaceful resolution of this country’s foreign and internal policy needs. Louis XVI, on his accession in 1774, might curry popular favor by reinstating the old judiciary; but this gesture could in no way compensate for the fact that the Bourbons, by forsaking for nearly two centuries the habits of consultative governance, left their subjects seriously deficient in the skills of negotiating compromises on interrelated foreign and domestic problems. The “prodromal crisis” of 1771–74 in France, like its counterparts in prerevolutionary England and Russia, augured even more serious state/security, constitutional, social-elitist, and political-cultural problems in the years to come, ´ and thus heralded an acceleration of tendencies toward full-scale sociopolitical revolution. Of greatest significance in this connection, perhaps, is the recently cited correspondence of 1770–71 between Louis XV and his Spanish Bourbon cousin Charles III. In that exchange of letters, the aging French sovereign repeatedly cried up the need for the two Bourbon governments to continue with naval rearmament as they looked forward once again to “making war against England,” thereby retrieving the national “honor” compromised in the most recent war.174 Such a resolution, altogether lost in the hubbub of the national debate over the Maupeou reforms, foreshadowed the resumption of an unrealistic French foreign policy under Louis XVI’s minister of foreign affairs, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes – an inordinately ambitious foreign policy that, as we will see very soon, tested the old regime’s domestic political, fiscal/administrative, and social-elitist institutions beyond their point ´ of endurance. In recapitulating our impressions of these three anciens r´egimes, several realities seem to stand out: (1) There was, at all points in the Russian case, a potential for a mobilization of urban working-class and rural peasant masses that far exceeded any such potential in England and France. This seems especially obvious in connection with the “prodromal crises” we have just analyzed: the 1905 Revolution in Russia (at least in hindsight) foreshadowed so arrestingly the “mass-mobilizing” aspects of an eventual upheaval that, once unleashed, would have a “leveling” impact on society not witnessed in either revolutionary England or revolutionary France. (2) At the same time, however, it would appear in retrospect that England and Russia, situated precariously as they were on the peripheries of Great Power bids for European hegemony, may – at least in theory – have had the right to experience anxieties more searing, more existential in nature, than did a France still striving – and perhaps in some quarters still able – to see itself as (in Gerard de Rayneval’s rendering) the ´ “hub of European policy.” For this latter reason, and because of the manifold 174

Cited in Lucien Laugier, Un Minist`ere r´eformateur sous Louis XV: Le Triumvirat (1770–1774) (Paris: La Pensee ´ Universelle, 1975), pp. 360–61.

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implications of foreign policy for all of the interrelated domestic factors in our analysis, it seemed to make some sense, in the second and third sections of this chapter, and as part of our “modified structuralist” approach to this subject, to analyze the English and Russian old regimes in detail before pondering the ancien r´egime as it developed in France. (3) All this having been said, however, we must wonder whether, for the men and women actually having to subsist in those times in England, France, and Russia, the kinds of analytical distinctions so carefully spelled out earlier had any relevance at all. And here, perhaps, is the greatest value of political-cultural analysis. When we look back at those periods through the prisms of people’s religious and secular convictions, hopes, and anxieties, we can reconstruct three historical situations that appeared, in contemporary terms, uniformly urgent – situations, that is, in which converging and intensifying state/security, constitutional, and social concerns were impelling three different states and societies in three different eras, at an ever quickening pace, down paths leading ultimately in all three cases to at least some degree of sociopolitical upheaval. In Chapter 2, we bring our analytical perspective to bear on the actual transitions from old regimes to revolutions in England, France, and Russia.

2 Transitions Breakthroughs to Revolution

Commenting on the crises of 1628–29 and 1640 in Stuart England, John Reeve has enjoined us “to see the Caroline period as a whole and to recognize the links between the two crises: between that which produced the personal rule and that which led, eventually, to civil war. They are causally and inextricably connected. The fears of Charles’s critics were confirmed and deepened during the 1630s and in a real sense it was the climate of the new politics, considerably exacerbated, which created the crisis of the Long Parliament.”1 Reeve’s observation serves as an apt transition from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2, reminding us as it does that, in all three of our anciens r´egimes, “prodromal” or “warning” crises dramatically highlighted systemic policy and structural weaknesses and simultaneously heralded accelerated descents into full-blown revolutions. In the specific terms of our analysis: just as the Petition of Right crisis of 1628–29 foreshadowed Charles I’s all-too-grudging return to consultation of parliament in 1640, so, in the case of France, the “Maupeou Revolution” of 1771–74 looked forward to Louis XVI’s equally unenthusiastic reconvening of the long-dormant Estates-General in 1789, and so, in the case of Russia, the Revolution of 1905 prefigured the much more earthshaking sociopolitical cataclysm of 1917. Chapter 2 analyzes the transition from “old” to the initial stage of “new” in England, France, and Russia along lines that, we can hope, will reflect the overall argument advanced in this study. First, it reappraises what we might call the “late winters” of discontent that, extending from 1629 to 1637 in England, from 1906 to 1914 in Russia, and from 1774 to 1787 in France, were characterized above all by an increasingly dangerous merging of deeply rooted state-security, constitutional, social, and political-cultural weaknesses in countries on the eve of revolution. Chapter 2 then zeroes in squarely on 1

Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, p. 294.

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the crumbling of Romanov, Stuart, and Bourbon absolutism during 1916–17, 1638–40, and 1787–89, respectively, accentuating primarily in this connection the catalytic role of massive, total warfare in the case of Russia, of less massive but still pivotal warfare in the case of England, and of a threatened reversion to a European-wide diplomatic and military conflagration in the case of France. Finally, Chapter 2 takes up the issue of the revolutionary politicization of elitist ´ and, eventually, popular elements in these three societies, emphasizing in the process the importance of “voluntarist” social and cultural analysis within our previously defined framework of structuralist, state-centered analysis of revolutionary change. As if to reaffirm the persisting significance of domestic sociocultural factors in explanations of revolution, this final section of Chapter 2 starts with France, which was actually at peace during 1787–89, and only then move on to a reevaluation of Russian and English developments in what indisputably were, to one degree or another, conditions of wartime emergency. Late Winters of Discontent In reassessing what Lawrence Stone might call the “precipitants” of revolution in England, Russia, and France, we need to challenge certain conventional assumptions: for instance, that Charles I’s intervention in Scotland in 1637, and Russia’s military confrontation with Germany and Austria-Hungary in August 1914, abruptly destabilized previously “stable” situations within England and Russia, and that France’s decision in 1778 to re-engage Britain in colonial/maritime conflict conferred the laurels of geostrategic and economic “success” on Louis XVI’s government. As the following pages explain, such were not, in fact, the realities of these situations. The years running from 1629 to 1637 in Stuart England, and from 1906 to 1914 in Romanov Russia, only witnessed an intensification of trends already working to destabilize those polities – state-security decline and growing domestic isolation of governments as gauged in constitutional, social-elitist, and above all, political´ cultural terms – and essentially bequeathed that unsettling legacy in both cases to the “war years.” As for France, that country’s long-cited achievements in the American War of 1778–83 were largely pyrrhic in nature, as they did little but confirm England’s fundamental superiority on the seas and in many ways widened the breach between Versailles and its elitist and plebeian subjects. ´ In all these ways, then, the periods under review constituted eleventh-hour “winters of discontent” prefacing seemingly auspicious springtimes of renewal in our three cases of full-fledged European revolution. Long before Charles I’s and Archbishop Laud’s disastrous attempt to force their hierarchical, ritualistic version of Anglicanism on the Presbyterian Scots provoked the “Bishops’ Wars” in the late 1630s, thereby throwing the king back on the mercies of a reconvened and wrathful Parliament, England’s strategic situation had been continuing to deteriorate. If the Petition of Right imbroglio of 1628–29 unfolded against the menacing backdrop of waxing

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Habsburg victories in the continental Thirty Years’ War, Charles I’s Personal Rule took hold as first Swedish and then French military intervention started to reverse the geostrategic tide in this sanguinary European conflict. By concluding peace with Spain in the 1630 Treaty of Madrid, and refusing to join, first with Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus, and then with France’s Louis XIII and Richelieu, in a coordinated assault on the Habsburg/papal “anti-Christ” during the 1630s, Charles only played into the hands (and enhanced the anger and anxieties) of subjects already infuriated over his 1629 dismissal of Parliament, his levying of nonparliamentary subsidies, and his “papist” ecclesiological leanings. Obviously, this turn of events equally incensed Charles’s beleaguered sister and brother-in-law, Elizabeth and Frederick V, who viewed the Treaty of Madrid as throwing overboard any last chance they might have had to be reinstated in the Palatine. Yet, as John Reeve has validly noted, the most dangerous repercussions for Charles of his dealings with Spain lay at home, both in London and in the countryside: The immediate casualties were the Palatines. . . . In the longer term the casualty in England was the standing of Charles’s government. The Treaty of Madrid was blasphemy to the puritan gentry. The Grand Remonstrance would [later] describe it as the means “whereby the [elector] Palatine’s cause was deserted and left to chargeable and hopeless treaties, which for the most part were managed by those who might justly be suspected to be no friends to that cause.” It was a fair conclusion. . . .

Meanwhile, there were those in the Privy Council (whether or not of puritan proclivities) who were as alienated by Charles I’s peacemaking with Spain as were the puritan gentry, and who further resented what they saw as a reconfirmation in this Treaty of the Caroline political court’s “provocative monopoly of access” to the king. For them, as for many a gentleman in the counties, the Madrid negotiations of 1630 constituted not only (in Reeve’s phrasing) “the linchpin of a whole diplomatic edifice which served to make England a noncombatant satellite of Spain,”2 but also a symptom of breakdown in domestic decision-making processes that were designed to keep the monarch in touch with his own subjects. Charles appears never to have wavered from a policy that, for so many of his patriotic gentry, Privy Councillors, and others, must have seemed, in the context of the times and in the wake of so much recent history, little less than madness. Despite rebuffs on the Palatine question from both Madrid and Vienna, and despite diplomatic overtures from Richelieu and the Dutch, this Stuart monarch was alleged in 1635 to have remarked that “the Spaniards are my friends on whom I can rely. All the rest is deception and villainy.”3 Even after a further Habsburg rebuff the following year, a diplomatic slight that 2 3

Ibid., pp. 254–56, 290–91. Cited in Adams, “Spain or the Netherlands? The Dilemmas of Early Stuart Foreign Policy,” p. 90.

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moved even Privy Councillors who had earlier endorsed the Anglo-Spanish alliance to propose renewed war with Madrid, Charles still doggedly remained loyal to Philip IV’s government. He was even ready (if discreetly at first) to cultivate warm ties with the papacy, arguing that “as the Pope is a temporal prince, we shall not be unwilling to join with him, as we do with other Roman Catholic princes, in anything that may conduce to the peace of Christendom and of the Church.”4 In all of this, as one authority on English foreign affairs has pointed out, Charles was continuing in his own way his father’s policies – thereby widening the chasm of distrust yawning in England between state and much of articulate society: The Stuart foreign policy was not without its logic and represented one solution to the dilemmas posed by the Thirty Years’ War, but it was a solution that offended many of the most engrained of English political attitudes. James and Charles may have preferred to ally with the leading dynasty of Europe rather than with republicans and Calvinist incendiaries, but too many of their subjects preferred the company of the godly to that of the adherents of antichrist.5

As if to disdain the widening breach between royal geostrategic sentiments and “many of the most engrained of English political attitudes” in the 1630s, Charles banned the circulation of corantoes, primitive newspapers detailing Swedish successes against the Imperial armies, and dismayed his Protestant Councillors by hamstringing Protestant privateering against Spanish shipping in the Caribbean.6 The issue of anti-Spanish naval activities in the Caribbean Basin raises the larger question of the maritime aspects of the Thirty Years’ War and enables us to see how, in this as in so many other ways, Charles I’s policies were alienating his most ardently patriotic subjects. Derek Hirst may well be right to observe that this king “asserted his naval dignity in the most flamboyant fashion, naming his flagship The Sovereign of the Seas,” yet he concedes in the same breath that during this crucial decade Charles gave his fleets “little else to do but force others’ ships to recognize his claims to maritime sovereignty.”7 It is all too easy to see why, in this connection, one of Hirst’s fellow-specialists should impatiently describe Charles as “an authoritarian meddler who could be obsessively concerned with the details of his policies while blithely unaware of the realities of the broader political context.” And Ann Hughes continues: Charles was at peace yet had to create a sense of emergency in order to justify the use of his prerogative powers to impose ship money regularly on England. The fleet was supposed to enforce what Charles believed to be self-evident – that he was sovereign of 4 5 6

7

Ibid. Ibid., p. 101. These matters are discussed in Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England, 1603–58 (London: Arnold, 1985), esp. pp. 175–77. But for a more focused discussion, see Brian Quintrell, “Charles I and His Navy in the 1630s,” in The Seventeenth Century 3 (1988): 159–79. Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England, 1603–58, pp. 175–77.

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the seas around his kingdom; the king busied himself with all aspects of its construction and manning, yet it was irrelevant to the European dramas dominated by France, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands. . . . The ship money navy was most useful as an escort for the Spanish silver fleets.8

As we see later on, this kind of “benevolent” (really, pusillanimous) neutrality in naval matters at a time when preeminence in western and central Europe was up for grabs would (in 1639) leave Charles on the sidelines as Dutch and Spanish forces struggled to control the shipping lanes in “his” Channel! It would be difficult to imagine London stomaching such an incompetent and potentially ruinous foreign policy in Elizabethan days – let alone in subsequent Cromwellian or, for that matter, post-1688 times. From Charles’s point of view, of course, predilections in foreign policy went hand-in-hand with certain basic convictions dictating his domestic policies. And here, if we can believe one of his major biographers, the early 1630s were to prove decisive. When forced to choose between rescuing the Palatine for his brother-in-law (and, later, his nephew), with all that such a statesmanlike policy might signify for cooperation with Parliament at home and with Swedish, Dutch, anti-Imperial French and other military forces abroad, and, on the other hand, a “definitive rejection of Parliament and war,” Charles (perhaps unsurprisingly) chose the latter alternative. The geostrategic/constitutional linkages here were fairly obvious. “It was a positive as well as a negative choice. Charles had a preference for unaccountable kingship under God and for friendship with Spain. These ideas were inextricably linked in his mind. He felt committed to both in principle.”9 It was clear – devastatingly clear – to his fearful (and, after 1629, unrepresented) subjects that Charles shared his father’s distaste for the Dutch not only as commercial rivals but also, crucially, as republican rebels – and that he also found Gustavus Adolphus and even Richelieu’s royal master Louis XIII to be, somehow, deficient in those “divine-right” qualities so exemplified in the monarchs holding sway at Vienna and, especially, Madrid. Hence, for Charles, the Personal Rule (what the Whigs would later anathematize as the “Eleven Years’ Tyranny”) dialectically combined constitutional and state/security considerations. “There is a growing consensus among historians,” Norah Carlin has written, “that beneath the surface calm during the personal rule there was an accumulation of bitterness and suppressed conflict. The suspension of parliaments closed down an important channel of communication between the monarchy and those who ruled the localities, and this caused English society to become ‘politically unstable and distinctly vulnerable to crisis.’”10 Indeed, authors of recent syntheses on revolutionary causation in early Stuart England 8 9 10

Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, p. 156. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, pp. 290–91. Carlin, Causes of the English Civil War, p. 103.

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(most notably, Carlin herself and Ann Hughes) can point to a burgeoning corpus of studies making this general point: even revisionist historians such as Kevin Sharpe, scarcely predisposed to exaggerate the degree of opposition to Charles I during the years without parliaments, have admitted “that, for all the surface calm, resentment had built up in the localities and that a parliament was now expected to redress them.”11 While individuals such as Saye and Hampden directly challenged the levying of nonparliamentary taxation in court (where such appeals in the 1630s invariably failed), and while communities such as Coventry itemized their grievances in official remonstrances, probably of greater danger to the crown in the end were the surreptitious discussions of incendiary public issues among gentry (and even among those of lesser standing) that Charles’s ministers were powerless to suppress: Public opinion did exist in the 1630s. . . . Media which had first appeared in the 1620s, such as manuscript newsletters sent out from London and recopied as they passed from hand to hand, and printed ‘separates’ or one-off publications, continued to circulate in the 1630s, and unpublished political tracts circulated in manuscript. Diaries and letters show gentry and professional men taking an interest in the latest . . . gossip about the kingdom’s affairs, and news also reached literate farmers and artisans. Offering an alternative to official media which stressed harmony and obedience, news often dramatized conflict and tended to present polarized opinions.12

Through the agency of such unofficial media, dramatic events such as the incarceration of the standard-bearers of parliamentary insubordination in March 1629 and the socially degrading punishment of Puritan dissidents such as Henry Burton, John Bastwick, and William Prynne aroused “quite broad layers” of the king’s affrighted subjects. Of course, the sinews of government (even in times of – temporary? – peace) are finance; and it is in this realm where we can retrospectively quantify, at least to some extent, the problems Charles was aggravating for himself by endeavoring to rule without parliament. Charles might do (temporarily) without an army, but, for state-security reasons discussed earlier, he could ill afford to do without a navy. Admittedly, the crown’s “ordinary” accounts were in the black by 1635–36, owing in large part to customs revenue accruing from peacetime trade; yet even with this, and with other kinds of revenue flowing into the royal coffers, Charles found it necessary to extend a levy of ships and money on port towns after 1634 to the entire country. As an annual imposition 11

12

Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 858–60. Others contributing to this literature include Esther Cope, Politics Without Parliaments (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987); Richard Cust, “News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 112 (1986): 60–90; Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds., Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (London: Longman, 1989); and Michael J. Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire, esp. p. 80. Braddick in particular has seen the “local grievances” and national anxieties that had driven Felton to assassinate Buckingham in 1628 as continuing to “accumulate” during the 1630s. Carlin, Causes of the English Civil War, pp. 102–3.

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on inland counties that could not supply their own naval vessels, and as rated and collected by sheriffs without parliamentary sanction, “ship money” was unprecedented, and resultantly aroused unprecedented hatred. The fact that, in the end, the national navy it supported became in itself a potent symbol of English geopolitical irrelevance in these decisive years of the Thirty Years’ War on the Continent meant undoubtedly that, for many of Charles I’s subjects, ship money and other “unconstitutional” taxation became associated with state-security humiliation in ways that he might better have tried to avoid. Moreover, even the collection of such politically counterproductive taxation as ship money could not rescue the king in the late 1630s from the toils of fiscal tribulation. Bills were not being regularly paid in 1636 and 1637, David Thomas informs us. “The crown,” he has written, “was increasingly coming to rely on a small circle of individuals to lend it money. Failure to pay debts on time, disputes with London over Ulster and the Royal Contract estates, and the death or bankruptcy of leading financiers had dramatically reduced the sources from which the crown could borrow money.” By the late 1630s, funds were coming only “from the customs farmers and . . . individuals like Sir William Russell, Laud, and Strafford,” whose survival was tied up with Charles’s survival. These “were not good signs for the long-term future of the government, even without the trouble from the Scots.”13 Limping along, so to speak, by courtesy of the customs farmers, “anticipating” future revenues to an alarming degree, treating creditors in ever more cavalier fashion, and now largely bereft of crown lands as security for future loans, Charles I, Hirst has somberly commented, was allowing himself “little margin for emergencies” that were bound to occur before long.14 Historians are divided as to whether, during these years, Charles’ isolation manifested itself in social-elitist as well as fiscal/constitutional terms. Writ´ ing in the midst of the brouhaha over the gentry, Lawrence Stone held that “Charles and his advisors . . . set out to enforce a social reaction, to put a lid on the social mobility he found so distasteful.” Stone even went so far as to suggest that “taken together, Crown policies and noble behavior” constituted the initial phase of “an aristocratic social reaction which might in time have developed into something comparable to the more self-conscious and comprehensive movement in France . . . before the French Revolution.”15 Leaving aside the fact that revisionists in French scholarship have subsequently downplayed the notion of a r´evolte nobiliaire in prerevolutionary French society, English 13

14 15

David Thomas, “Financial and Administrative Developments,” in Howard Tomlinson, ed., Before the English Civil War, esp. pp. 121–22. For additional insights on all of these interrelated naval, military, fiscal, and constitutional issues, see Kenneth R. Andrews, Ships, Money, and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Simon Healy, “Oh, What a Lovely War? War, Taxation, and Public Opinion in England, 1624–29,” Canadian Journal of History 38 (2003): 436–39. Hirst, Authority and Conflict, p. 175. Lawrence Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, pp. 125–26.

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revisionists such as Russell, Tyacke, and Sharpe have likewise questioned the importance of Charles I’s social policies as a “precipitant” of upheaval in England.16 On the other hand, no one has really questioned this monarch’s love of decorum, social deference, and hierarchy, an inclination that seemingly only hardened during the 1630s and has been seen by Hughes, Carlin, Scott, and others as reflected in everything from Charles’ domestic life at Court to his abrupt termination of his father’s policy of selling titles of nobility to his insistence that only the nobility, as lords lieutenants, should wield authority over musters and training of the militia in the counties. This last policy sparked friction in the localities between peers favored by the crown and the local Justices of the Peace who in so many ways represented a gentry on the rise in demographic, economic, and cultural terms.17 It would be difficult to believe that the gentry who so bitterly resented Charles I’s personal rule for constitutional reasons did not also discern in his policies favoritism for the peerage and obstacles to their own further promotion in a society increasingly needful of their abilities, civic-mindedness, and patriotism. To broach once again the issue of patriotism is to return to the schizoid religious and political culture of the times, and to recall how powerfully the rival conspiracy theories of Charles I, Archbishop Laud, and Catholic courtiers, on the one hand, and of Puritan gentry, lawyers, clergy, and common folk, on the other, interwove foreign and domestic questions and disrupted social harmony in the 1630s. We have already had occasion to note that the king’s potentially disastrous diplomatic machinations during this critical transitional phase of the Thirty Years’ War reflected in part his religious views: fully espousing as he did Laud’s ceremonial/sacerdotal “High Anglicanism,” finding ever more solace in the companionship of his Roman Catholic wife, and tolerating the presence of Jesuits and other provocative Catholics in London, Charles increasingly saw Scottish, Dutch, and Swedish Protestants as linked in unholy alliance with his contumacious English Puritan subjects against what he regarded as his divinely ordained prerogative. Yet, given the deeply engrained anti-popery of so many Englishmen and Englishwomen in this period, such a stance in the end could not have been more damaging to Charles. And it was not merely a matter of the traumatic legacy of the past: the Marian persecutions, Catholic-inspired plots against Elizabeth (especially after 1570), the 1588 Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, Catholic atrocities on the Continent, and so on. These things by themselves would have ensured that many a patriotic subject in early seventeenth-century England would continue to see religious and state/security issues as indissolubly intertwined. Yet beyond this were other factors, such as demographic trends, 16

17

On this point, consult, for example, Kevin Sharpe, Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1990). On all of these issues, treated in a “postrevisionist” fashion, see Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War, esp. pp. 100–01, 116–20.

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that could only heighten Protestant anxieties in England. Scholars from Russell to Hirst to Jonathan Scott have justly emphasized this point. Perhaps Derek Hirst does so most persuasively: Why . . . was anti-Catholicism such a potent force? The answer lay not just in Catholics’ breach of unity and in their adherence to Rome; more particularly, the numbers of English Catholics were growing. The Counter-Reformation was taking effect in England as elsewhere. There were probably between 30,000 and 40,000 recusants . . . in England in 1603; by 1641 there were about 60,000. Although their relative numbers may have been small . . . they compensated by their prominence. Around 10% of the peerage in 1641 was Catholic, and, fatally for Charles, there were unknown numbers of Catholics at court. Worst of all, the number of priests soared from 250 in 1603 to over 700 in the 1630s, with the number of Jesuits, the most feared, quadrupling. The rumors, and reports of gatherings in London and at court, took on an alarming tinge in light of the political advances of Catholicism in the Thirty Years War.18

Although Scott (as we noted earlier) argues for declining numbers of English Catholics by the end of the seventeenth century, like Hirst he sees Europeanwide tendencies in the seventeenth century as running heavily in favor of those adhering spiritually to Rome.19 Other scholars have made their own contributions to our understanding of this fascinating – and, in the circumstances, subverting – phenomenon of antipopery. Russell “psycho-analyzed” the issue somewhat, regarding the very virulence of anti-Catholic sentiment in Stuart England as revealing efforts by Protestants to defend themselves against the self-imposed judgment of “schism, the second worst sin after heresy.”20 For Peter Lake, employing a similar methodology, the “power of anti-popery” was “arguably . . . based on the capacity of the image of popery to express, contain, and, to an extent, control the anxieties and tensions at the very center of the experience and outlook of English Protestants.” English subjects, in other words, needed a psychological anchor of stability in a world seemingly menaced with destabilizing domestic changes of every imaginable kind – not to mention state-security challenges associated all too readily with the Catholic “anti-Christ.”21 But it is perhaps Caroline Hibbard who has most convincingly placed anti-Catholic anxieties in the England of the 1630s in a larger context, combining both psychological and statestrategic considerations: By sowing dissension between one part of the English church and another, or between the king and parliament, or between England and Scotland, the Catholics could divide the king’s subjects and weaken royal authority. This would pave the way for a popish coup d’etat ´ in which a foreign invasion would be supported by a native fifth column. . . . By 18 19 20 21

Hirst, Authority and Conflict, pp. 80–81. Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 29–30. Russell, Causes of the English Civil War, pp. 71–72. Peter Lake, “Anti-Popery: the Structure of a Prejudice,” in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds., Conflict in Early Stuart England (London: Harlow, 1989), pp. 79–80.

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a progression of ideas natural to many Protestants, discord would thus be blamed on those prime agents of the devil, the papacy and the Jesuits. Thus, behind every political crisis, Catholic conspiracy might be suspected, the more so because the Jesuit order was identified with support for theories of resistance and because its followers were widely believed responsible for the assassination of several European monarchs as well as for the Gunpowder Plot.

Hence, by the pivotal year 1637, Hibbard suggests, widespread panic would be set off in English Protestant circles by rumors of a man incarcerated in the Tower just before he could consummate his design to murder the king and then travel overseas to embrace the pope at Rome – even as Charles I (ironically!) was very much in reality soon to be preparing to deal harshly with a prayer-book “rebellion” in Scotland that he associated with an international Protestant conspiracy!22 In summation, the impression we derive from the latest scholarship on the England of 1629–37 sorts very ill with the description of an “unrevolutionary England” Russell conveyed in his 1990 study.23 A much deeper truth is communicated in Derek Hirst’s assertion that “However much the Scottish debacle was the unnecessary product of his own folly, Charles’s finances were not sound enough to give him much safety in the troubled Europe of the 1630s.”24 It is so easy, that is, to find the long-germinating seeds of England’s tumultuous 1640s and 1650s in the international politics, constitutional and fiscal tensions, frustrated gentry aspirations, and schizoid political/religious culture of the preceding decades. And all of these sources of instability seem to have become increasingly fused during the Personal Rule in ways that isolated the crown dangerously from prominent groups and engrained perceptions of public affairs, foreign and domestic, in Charles I’s kingdom. To assume (in the manner of so many excellent historians) that once Charles abandoned parliamentary governance, his continued success relied wholly on peace may be quite true as far as it goes – but how far, given the conditions of the times, could it actually go? Could anyone wielding monarchical power at Whitehall in these perilous times have effectively turned his/her back on the outside world, a world whose most powerful, clashing states inevitably challenged English security both from the Continent and, we must stress, from within the realm’s borders? Here, again, the tendency of early seventeenth-century Englishmen and women to view public affairs through the divisive and fear-inducing lenses of politico-religious culture was absolutely crucial, for, just as it led Charles and his adherents to loathe domestic, “rebellious” Puritans and (at times) to 22

23 24

Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, pp. 15–16. See also, on these issues, Robin Clifton, “The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution,” Past and Present 52 (1971): 23–55. Refer again to Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1990). Hirst, Authority and Conflict, p. 175.

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lump them together with Protestants of Scotland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and other countries, so it led his detractors to loathe “Papists” at Charles’ court and to associate them fearfully with Catholics in Ireland and on the Continent. These ways of thinking must have been instrumental in producing a destabilized society ready, once the hounds of renewed war were unleashed by an insecure and ever duplicitous king, to plunge into uncharted revolutionary (and, yes, counter-revolutionary) waters.25 And what held for the England of 1629–37 held as well for the Russia of 1906–14. Here, again, the latest scholarship portrays a state and society precariously at peace, licking its wounds from unrewarding geostrategic engagements of the recent past, and trying but not fully managing to restabilize itself in statesecurity, constitutional, social, and political-cultural terms before it, too, like England in 1637, found itself once again drawn into the punishing inferno of war. The record of Russian foreign policy in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War makes for reading fully as depressing as that for English foreign policy after 1628–29. True, in August 1907 London and St. Petersburg cobbled together an Entente somewhat less formal than that which had linked Paris and St. Petersburg since 1894; this meant that, as of 1907, the “Triple Alliance” of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy was (in theory at least) “contained” by the newer “Triple Entente” of France, England, and Russia.26 Yet, this in itself, as one of several indications that (on the rebound from its punishing defeats sustained in the Far East) Russia was re-engaging in the affairs of eastern Europe, confronted the tsar’s most thoughtful subjects with the unnerving possibility of a direct confrontation with the formidable Germany of Wilhelm II. And that possibility was likely to materialize sooner rather than later, as the long-expected disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Turkish empires along nationalist-ethnic lines bid fair to involve both Berlin and St. Petersburg in an unseemly scramble for the spoils, as each power sought to advance its interests in this region.27 Admittedly, the Romanovs, in light of their dynastic ties with Germany’s Hohenzollerns and their distaste for the “liberalism” associated with the Western powers, would have preferred a return to Bismarck’s policy of amicable Russo-German relations; unfortunately, however, St. Petersburg’s historic rivalry with Berlin’s ally Vienna in the increasingly volatile Balkans (not to mention Germany’s ever more aggressive desire to exploit the economic

25 26

27

On all of this, refer again to Scott, England’s Troubles, esp. pp. 20–39 and 43–65. A succinct discussion of this era’s diplomacy is provided in Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 416–20; but see also Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War, esp. pp. 36–37, 65–66, and 109–11. But see also in this connection Ronald P. Bobroff, Roads to Glory: Late Imperial Russia and the Turkish Straits (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2006), who convincingly argues that Nicholas II’s government worked to keep Turkey neutral in 1914 and only fixed upon acquiring the Straits after World War I had already commenced.

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resources of Russia itself!) made such a pacific reorientation of policy less and less likely. This, then, was the essential diplomatic background to the further reverses suffered by Russia in the years between 1905 and 1914. The First Balkan Crisis of 1908–09 was touched off by secret and very technical negotiations between Austrian Foreign Minister Alois von Aehrenthal and his Russian counterpart Alexander Izvolski, talks that reached a climax in September 1908.28 Austria wanted in essence to bridle the Serbian nationalism that was threatening to break up the “Dual Monarchy” by annexing the Turkish provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina that Vienna had been occupying militarily ever since the 1878 Congress of Berlin; Russia wanted Austrian support for eventual international recognition of St. Petersburg’s naval access to the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits (and hence to the Mediterranean). Izvolski had expected these issues to be referred to an international conference; however, on October 6, 1908, Aehrenthal had formal Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina unilaterally proclaimed even while Izvolski (to his discomfort) was encountering opposition from his English and French allies to the notion of Russian naval access to the Mediterranean. Executing what one diplomatic specialist has called “a ruthless stroke of power politics in the Bismarckian tradition,” Germany intervened at St. Petersburg on March 22, 1909, menacingly demanding not only that Russia accept the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina but also that it pressure Serbia to do likewise. Resolved to avoid war at all costs, Nicholas II’s government lost no time in capitulating to Germany’s demands. “The major lesson” Russia’s rulers learned from this contretemps, Dominic Lieven has written, was that “if similar humiliation were to be avoided in the future both the Russian armed forces and the Empire’s links with London and Paris would have to be strengthened.”29 This may be true; yet realization of these facts could not spare the old Russia yet another diplomatic embarrassment in the Balkans. In the course of the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 which constitute, in the retrospective run-up to World War I, the “Second Balkan Crisis,” Serbia’s insistence on following up victories over Turkey by claiming a port on the Albanian coast of the Adriatic Sea provoked a demand from Vienna (backed up once again by Berlin) that the Serbs withdraw from their advanced positions and that a formal state of Albania be created precisely to block Serbian access to the sea. Once again, the “Germanic” powers had, at least indirectly, threatened St. Petersburg with war; once again, Nicholas II and his ministers backed down. Responding reluctantly to an impassioned appeal by his Prime Minister, V. N. Kokovtzov, that “we were not ready for war and our adversaries knew it well,” the tsar in late November 1912 canceled 28

29

For a lucid discussion of this affair, see L. C. F. Turner, Origins of the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), pp. 6–9; this work supersedes the older treatments of Albertini, Fay, Helmreich, and others. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War, pp. 36–37.

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plans for a “partial” military mobilization whose implementation might well have led to Austrian and, eventually, German military intervention against his country.30 Although these tense years witnessed a rising tide of frustration, exasperation, and alarm in all of the capitals of Europe, contemporaries were especially struck by what seemed to be the widening disparity between Russia’s huge size (and strategic aspirations) and its repeated failures in the Continent’s unforgivingly competitive power politics. In hindsight, we can see clearly the economic, military, and other weaknesses of Russia that were so pitilessly exposed in the diplomacy of those years. We know, for instance, that on the eve of 1914 Russia remained fearfully underindustrialized in Great Power terms, fearfully dependent on imports of capital, machinery, and technological know-how from the West, fearfully reliant as well on exports of an agricultural sector that was itself underdeveloped and very poorly integrated with other sectors of the domestic Russian economy, and far behind other countries as well in its infrastructure of transportation and communication and its mobilization of capital for productive national purposes. In striving to capture all of this for the general reader, Paul Kennedy has focused most forcefully, perhaps, on the issue of Russia’s relative underindustrialization: The assessment of Russian strength is worse when it comes to comparative output. Although Russia was the fourth-largest industrial power before 1914, it was a long way behind the United States, Britain, and Germany. In the indices of its steel production, energy consumption, share of world manufacturing production, and total industrial potential, it was eclipsed by Britain and Germany; and when these figures are related to population size and calculated on a per capita basis, the gap was truly enormous. In 1913 Russia’s per capita level of industrialization was less than one-quarter of Germany’s and less than one-sixth of Britain’s.31

Although, as we shall see later on, economic historians such as Lewis Siegelbaum and Norman Stone have been very careful not to posit too close a causal link between economic underdevelopment as such and Russia’s actual state collapse in 1916–17, we know how acutely aware Imperial statesmen such as Sergei Witte, P A. Stolypin, and V. N. Kokovtzov were of Russian economic unpreparedness for war in the bleak aftermath of the Russo-Japanese debacle.32 30

31 32

For a remarkable account of these dramatic developments, and in particular of Kokovtzov’s last-minute intervention to prevent a catastrophic confrontation with the Triple Alliance in late 1912, see again Turner, Origins of the First World War, esp. Chapter 2. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 232–41, for this highly critical assessment of Russia’s relative degree of national economic development during the prewar years. We also know, thanks to the work of David M. McDonald, how inconsistently Nicholas II supported these and other members of his Council of Ministers during these years in their formulation of Russian foreign policy. See David M. McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900–1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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Of course, their gloomy assessments reflected among other things their appreciation of the implications of socioeconomic and technological backwardness for the state of the armed forces. Russian military specialists such as John W. Steinberg and Bruce W. Menning would likely find much to agree with in Paul Kennedy’s description of the problems plaguing the tsar’s army during the 1905–14 period: Thanks to the crude and overheavy concentration upon armaments rather than the broader, more subtle areas of national strength (e.g., general levels of education, technological expertise, bureaucratic efficiency), Russia was frightfully backward at the personnel level. As late as 1913, its literacy rate was only 30%. . . . And while it was all very well to vote vast sums of money for new recruits, would they be of much use if the army possessed too few trained NCOs? The experts in the Russian general staff, looking with “feelings of inferiority and envy” at Germany’s strength in that respect, thought not. They were also aware (as were some foreign observers) of the desperate shortage of good officers.33

Tellingly, Dominic Lieven has found that, in the Russian navy as well, “unpreparedness in 1914 turned out to be more a question of personnel than of materiel.” He, too, cited the desperate lack of long-service non-commissioned ´ officers (NCOs) who, “belonging socially to the lower deck and professionally to the service and its officers,” could have helped to bridge the widening chasm between officers hailing from “privilege Russia” and conscripts drawn from “working Russia.” Fatefully, many of the weaknesses besetting both army and navy in late Imperial Russia “were the products either of history or of the existing level of Russian social development and could not be eradicated overnight by administrative means.”34 That in the final analysis the Russian state’s armed forces have to be evaluated in a societal context recalls us to the task of evaluating constitutional, social, and cultural weaknesses as well as strategic decline in late prerevolutionary Russia. If Charles I’s Personal Rule abruptly reversed the historic trend toward “more frequent parliaments” in the case of England, Nicholas II’s establishment of a Duma did not precisely push Russian constitutional developments in the opposite direction. Sheila Fitzpatrick has aptly summed up the ambiguous constitutional situation that prevailed after 1905: In the Fundamental Laws of 1906 – the closest Russia came to a constitution – Nicholas made known his belief that Russia was still an autocracy. True, the autocrat now consulted with an elected parliament, and political parties had been legalized. But the Duma had limited powers; Ministers remained responsible solely to the autocrat; and, after the first two Dumas proved insubordinate and were arbitrarily dissolved, a new 33

34

Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 232–41. For more on the leadership failings in the late Imperial Russian Army, see Bruce W. Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); and Steinberg, All the Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, passim. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War, pp. 109–11.

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electoral system was introduced that virtually disenfranchised some social groups and heavily overrepresented the landed nobility.35

In theory, the practices and culture of “enlightened” Great Russian bureaucratic reformism lived on – for a few years – in the person of Witte’s successor P. A. Stolypin. Yet, as Stolypin’s most recent biographer has pointed out, this last great Imperial reformer’s ministry was marred from the start by a disjunction between “liberal” goals and authoritarian methods of governance. Stolypin favored the creation of a Duma, yet did little to enable political leaders and parties to gain useful experience in the arts of responsible government. He encouraged education at all levels, yet inflamed the universities by persecuting student activists. He promoted the rule of law, yet violated it when to do so suited his purposes – most notoriously, perhaps, in connection with the field courts-martial of 1906. He often spoke in the parlance of political compromise, yet, Abraham Ascher has concluded, he lacked the attributes of “a leader with flexibility, who could persuade associates and even opponents to accept policies they did not find congenial, and who knew how to compromise.”36 Still, given the unyielding resistance to constitutional and other forms of change on the Right, could even a less willful, less authoritarian chairman of the Council of Ministers have made much of a difference in prewar Russia? It is highly unlikely. Numerous recent studies make it perfectly clear that Nicholas II, still styled “Supreme Autocrat” under the Fundamental Laws of 1906, regarded his personal rights of unfettered rule (as opposed to those of the tsarist administration) as divinely ordained and, as such, unalterable.37 For him (and, of course, for his wife Alexandra) the Duma was little more than a nuisance, an inconvenient sop to “liberal” opinion, a “talking-shop” for feckless, irrelevant politicians. It may have functioned at the very most as a novel public forum for the ventilation of grievances against the regime, as a school for training in parliamentary procedure for a motley congeries of Conservatives, Octobrists, Kadets, and socialists of one variety or another, even as (in Orlando Figes’s rendering) “a rhetorical battering ram against the fortress of autocracy.”38 Yet, for the time being, the fortress held out against its critics – much as divine-right absolutism held out in the England of the 1630s against the plaints of outraged gentry, common lawyers, and Puritan divines. 35

36 37

38

Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 35. For other comments underscoring the political impotence of the 3rd and 4th Dumas, see Thomas Riha, “Constitutional Developments in Russia,” in George Stavrou, ed., Russia Under the Last Tsar, pp. 87–116. Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 396–99. See, for example: G. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907–14 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); and A. Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 218.

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Of course, even in his days of greatest social isolation, Charles I could always rely on a minority of religious and secular figures recruited from socialelitist ranks to support his Personal Rule. Likewise, in the aftermath of the ´ Russo-Japanese War, Nicholas II could count on some Orthodox ecclesiastics, courtiers, and rural gentry to advocate maintenance of the status quo in his empire. Complicating the situation for Nicholas, however, were the envenomed relations between the rural gentry and his most important minister, P. A. Stolypin. Two parallel historiographical controversies still swirl here: one involves the measure of success Stolypin actually attained in his attempts to bring about peasant agrarian reforms, and the other involves the characterization of the prewar Russian gentry as languishing in the throes of economic decline. Concerning the former point, Ascher concedes that “an unqualified judgment on the effectiveness of Stolypin’s agrarian reforms is difficult to make.” On the one hand, the minister’s most ardent champions claim that, given the unfortunate resort to massive warfare in 1914, it is unfair to fault Stolypin (and his successors after his assassination in 1911) for failing to realize fully his campaign to transform at least a minority of “strong” and “industrious” peasants into private, profiteering landholders, thereby unleashing an agricultural revolution in the provinces. On the other hand, the most recent student of Stolypin’s career is realistic in assessing the success of the Stolypin Reforms: An examination of the reform process indicates that it was very slow to begin with and had become markedly slower well before 1914. The number of applications for secession [i.e., of individual peasants from their communes] reached its high point early in 1909 and declined sharply thereafter. . . . By 1914, only about 20% of the peasants had obtained ownership of their land, while 14% of the land had been withdrawn from communal tenure. Strip consolidation developed at an even slower pace. By late 1916, 10.7% of the peasant households in European Russia worked land that was enclosed.

Stolypin rightly insisted that his reforms were designed to benefit peasants with average-sized holdings as well as rich muzhiki; still, as Ascher has subsequently noted, “the process of privatization and consolidation would have taken many years to reach even a majority of the peasants. . . . the obstacles impeding implementation were immense.”39 The prime minister similarly found his path blocked when it came to institutionalizing administrative reforms, most notably by including peasants and other social groups in the rural zemstvos and by broadening social access to civil tribunals throughout Russia.40 39

40

Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, pp. 162–64. For detailed scholarly assessments of these reforms, see: D. Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905–1920 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983); Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class, esp pp. 20, 58, 221–25. On this subject, see Neil Weissman, Reform in Tsarist Russia: The State Bureaucracy and Local Government, 1900–1909 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1981).

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Perhaps the most formidable obstacle to Stolypin’s success in this area (other than the lack of enthusiastic imperial support at Court) was to be found in the countryside, where “a large number of nobles who were politically active after 1905 behaved as though they were making a last stand to protect their status and privileges.”41 The extent to which the rural gentry in prewar Russia were (or were not) able to reverse their declining agricultural fortunes by utilizing entrepreneurial techniques of estate management has occasioned a sharp scholarly debate paralleling that over the efficacy of the Stolypin Reforms: Roberta Manning, as we saw earlier, has stressed gentry failure in this regard, while Seymour Becker has advanced a more optimistic view of gentry agricultural accomplishments.42 Yet neither of these scholars would question Ascher’s subsequent assertion that “the agrarian unrest in the fall and winter of 1905, the most extensive and destructive disturbance in Russia since the eighteenth century, stunned and alarmed the nobles, prompting many of them to turn sharply to the right.”43 This fateful turn to the right manifested itself both in provincial and in metropolitan terms. In the provinces, the most conservative gentry reasserted their control over the zemstvos and all other local administrative institutions; at St. Petersburg, gentry spokesmen, coordinating their efforts with reactionary courtiers, condemned in unprecedentedly violent language Stolypin’s administrative and rural reforms, warning all who would listen that the chair of the Council of Ministers and his partisans were subverting the social and political structures of the empire. Unfortunately for Stolypin, Nicholas II was one of those who listened all too readily to the prime minister’s multiplying critics, and so exhibited next to no emotion when Stolypin was gunned down in Kiev on September 1, 1911.44 The fact that, even today, we are not sure whether this violent deed emanated from the extreme Left or the extreme Right may in one sense be irrelevant: plainly, the indomitable but authoritarian prime minister was hated by both political extremes in a bitterly polarized society. Yet there was a related kind of polarization also at work in prewar Russia: that between the heavy hand of autocratic/bureaucratic government and the ever-simmering violence, in urban and especially rural Russia, of the masses. And between the extremes of government-sponsored violence, on the one hand, and anarchic peasant/worker violence, on the other, no kind of Western-style bourgeoisie (with its associated, “Habermasian” civil society) could possibly develop. This is, at least, 41 42

43 44

Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, p. 422 (n. 48). See, on this debate: Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia, pp. 370–71; and Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985), esp. Chapters 2, 3, and 4. Also valuable in this connection are the essays in Leopold Haimson, ed., The Politics of Rural Russia, 1905–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979). Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, pp. 229–30. For a vivid account of the assassination, see Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 229–30. Stolypin died four days later, on September 5.

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the conclusion of specialists such as Edith Clowes, Samuel Kassow, and James West, whose anthology of articles points up this significant weakness in prewar elitist Russian society. True, there were signs of a “new public culture” in late ´ Imperial Russia, evidenced in the rise of voluntary associations; the gradual development of respect for property rights; the expansion of secondary and higher education; and the emergence of new professions, of artistic patronage, and of a “multilayered press,” with all such developments being mediated after 1906 in the public rhetoric of the Duma. Still, no middle-class identity became securely established in prewar Russia as had already occurred in the more advanced Western countries; and, so, just as reformists such as Stolypin could in the end find no substantial support in tsarist/Court/gentry circles, they likewise could not rely on very many influential partisans in a Western-style bourgeoisie.45 All of the weaknesses outlined earlier – state-security, constitutional, and social-elitist – were perceived by contemporaries, and magnified in their ´ impact, through the prism or prisms of clashing political-cultural assumptions – assumptions that heightened the already dangerous isolation of the tsar and his closest ideological brethren. If prerevolutionary England was above all destabilized by diametrically opposed “conspiracy theories” conjoining religious and secular, domestic and international considerations, Russia after 1905 was primarily destabilized in political-cultural terms by polarized assumptions about governance that, also, had their implications for Russian geopolitics. No one has explained the tragic oscillation in Russia between the extremes of willful autocracy on the one hand and spontaneous anarchy on the other more eloquently than has Theodore Von Laue: The clash between popular spontaneity and government leadership pervaded all facets of Russian life. . . . A strict and often stupid censorship prevented free discussion of almost any political issue. Yet had there been free speech, it is safe to say, the government would have been drowned in a flood of protest, some of it utterly irresponsible. In order to protect itself from uninformed criticism, the government had long evolved an armory of repressive weapons, which in turn had driven all determined opposition underground. The revolutionaries were hunted down by the secret police and punished, when apprehended, by imprisonment, exile, forced labor in Siberia, and, in rare cases, even death. . . . The continuous petty war aroused fierce passions on both sides and gradually ate away what was left of the good nature of Russian society carried over from a simpler age.46

“Many government officials,” Samuel Kassow has written in much the same vein, “insisted that the state must hold the fist in reserve. Even moderate liberal 45

46

See the essays in Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). Citations here are from pp. 367–68 and 370–71. Von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? Why Gorbachev?, pp. 22–23.

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demands that stopped short of political democracy . . . threatened this vital ultimate weapon – the state’s ability to use brute force as the only alternative to national disintegration and chaos.” The “public sphere” and “civil society” so reverently invoked today in Habermasian analytical discourse were strangled from the start in modern Russia, a country “where fear of violence – from either the state or the masses – lurked in the wings.”47 Could the transcendent and increasingly urgent question of Russia’s role in the world have possibly bridged the fearful gap between an all-powerful state and an atomized, violence-prone society in the case of prerevolutionary Russia? Many advantageously dwelling in “privilege Russia” thought so in the heady early days of World War I, when the tsar’s desperate gamble of war against Austria-Hungary and Germany seemed to be paying off in terms of a national unity embracing all or at least many of the Russian Empire’s myriad and contending social and ethnic groups. But, tragically, this unity was not to endure. “The mass of the people had yet to be touched by the war,” Orlando Figes has all too accurately observed, “and the millions of peasants and workers who departed for the Front felt little of the middle-class patriotism that had done so much to raise the Tsar’s hopes. . . . according to foreign observers the expression on most of the soldiers’ faces was somber and resigned. It was their terrible experience of war that would ignite the revolution.”48 PanSlavism may have been a powerful racial/cultural force among the privileged and the powerful in Nicholas II’s Russia, finding moorings not only in the government but also in most of the organized political parties represented in the prewar Duma and in most of the urban enclaves of the empire; but it failed to penetrate very deeply or lastingly into the fathomless depths of urban/proletarian and especially rural/peasant Russia. Hence, the Russia that plunged into total war in 1914 brandishing the banner of Pan-Slavism against the “Teutonic” Central Powers was, as it had always been, a polity polarized culturally as well as institutionally between statist and anarchist extremes, and between the ultraprivileged few and the historically exploited masses, a polity significantly more lacking than early Stuart England (it must also be said) in the arduously developed habits of peaceful constitutional consultation and political compromise. These, then, were the “winters of discontent” in two prerevolutionary situations where precarious peace was destined to dissolve in the unpredictable furies of war. But what of France, whose “winter of discontent” was, on the contrary, to be characterized by a recurrence to warfare followed up by tenuous peace? We shall find that, notwithstanding this variation in the sequence of events, France represents in retrospect a basically similar situation, a situation in which state-security, constitutional, social, and political-cultural weaknesses increasingly converged in a manner dangerous to the youthful Louis 47 48

Clowes, Kassow, and West, eds., Between Tsar and People, pp. 368 and 370–71. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 252.

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XVI and to those endeavoring to serve him after his accession to power in 1774. If late prerevolutionary France differed from both England and Russia in passing from war to peace rather than from peace to war during its “winter of discontent,” it stood out as well for its quasi-hegemonic geopolitical aspirations. “A king of France,” the young duc de Berri had written seven years before he became Louis XVI, “if he is always just, will always be the first and most powerful sovereign of Europe and can easily become arbiter of the Continent.” That he also dismissed the English as “swelled up with pride, jealous, [and] presumptuous,” and Frederick II’s Prussians as ever coveting other people’s territories, suggested that he, like his long-reigning predecessor Louis XV, had formed his foreign policy assumptions in the inescapable shadow of the Sun King, and was sensitive to the humiliations recently suffered by his realm in global affairs.49 The young king’s foreign minister, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, must have been proceeding from these assumptions as well. As he would later lament in a message to Louis XVI reflecting back on the diplomatic situation they had inherited together in 1774: “The deplorable Peace of 1763, the partition of Poland, and many other equally unhappy causes had profoundly undermined the consideration due the crown of France, which in earlier days, had been the object of terror and jealousy. . . . I confess, Sire, [that] all the arrogance and insults against which my heart revolted made me . . . search for the means to change a situation so little compatible with the elevation of your soul and the grandeur of your power.”50 As befitted the foreign minister of a country long accustomed to viewing itself as the “hub” or “arbiter” of European affairs, Vergennes not only hotly resented the crushing defeat inflicted on French colonial/mercantile interests by the English in the Seven Years’ War but brooded as well over the pressure being unrelentingly applied by Catherine the Great’s Russia to those traditional redoubts of Gallic influence to the east, Poland, Sweden, and Ottoman Turkey. As Jonathan R. Dull and others have lucidly shown, Vergennes reacted to this conundrum eventually by proposing a two-stage relationship with the British. First, Versailles would work to humble the “modern Carthage” by abetting the North American colonists in what looked very much like becoming a full-scale revolt against London; then, somehow, a chastened Britain was to be enlisted in a grand campaign to counterbalance the greedy, unscrupulous geopoliticians at Berlin, St. Petersburg, and (ironically, France’s “ally”) Vienna. In carrying out the first mission, Vergennes, his sovereign, and all their fellow-countrymen 49

50

Cited in Pierrette Girault de Coursac, L’Education d’un roi. Louis XVI (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 152, 168, 171–72. On Louis XVI’s attitudes on these issues, see also Robert R. Crout, “In Search of a ‘Just and Lasting Peace’: The Treaty of 1783, Louis XVI, Vergennes, and the Regeneration of the Realm,” International History Review 5 (1983), pp. 364–98; and John Hardman, Louis XVI (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). Cited in Orville T. Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes: French Diplomacy in the Age of Revolution, 1719–1787 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), p. 217.

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could fully indulge their prejudices against and revenge themselves on the aloof English; in discharging the second mission, they might just be able to restore that delicate equilibrium of European strategic forces best calculated to maximize French state-security and international diplomatic influence.51 Vergennes’s grand design certainly testified to the continuing global reach of French strategic ambitions; yet it rested on a host of debatable suppositions.52 The “enlightened” finance minister, A. R. J. Turgot, courageously criticized some of those assumptions in counciliar debates of April 1775, citing (among other things) the precariousness of royal finances and arguing that this problem, and not the unfolding conflict in North America, should be engaging minds at Versailles. He also tried to chip away at the assumption that Britain really needed to maintain its administrative hold on the North American colonies, going so far as to suggest that British retention of those colonies would so exhaust London’s resources as to work to the strategic advantage of the French! As we know so well today, events would in the end validate Turgot’s prophecy.53 At the time, however, Vergennes’s arguments prevailed. The king’s first minister, the comte de Maurepas (an erstwhile naval minister), and Sartine, current head of the naval department, joined Vergennes in taking up the cudgels for war. In addition, Dull has written, a “conjunction of the desires of unemployed military officers, Anglophobes, intellectuals, and expansionist businessmen reinforced the gradual acceptance of war by the king.”54 The upshot was the treaty of friendship officially concluded between France and the youthful American republic on February 6, 1778. Even so, Vergennes had to argue Louis XVI out of eleventh-hour misgivings about resuming the nearly century-old Franco-English struggle on the seas, and had also to overcome the opposition of the changeable Maurepas, War Secretary A. M. L. de Montbarey, and Turgot’s successor Jacques Necker. Still, the war was (for a change!) well prepared from a diplomatic point of view. Spain eventually rallied to Vergennes, as Charles III desired Gibraltar, Florida, and Minorca and resented British incursions into his overseas empire more than he feared associating his crown with subversive anticolonialist rebellion in North America. The Dutch, too, nursing 51

52 53 54

This strategic design is most impressively laid out in Jonathan R. Dull, The French Navy and American Independence: A Study of Arms and Diplomacy, 1774–1787 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), esp. pp. 8–15. But see also Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, pp. 211–21. Those suppositions are summarized most conveniently in Bailey Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution, pp. 113–14. Turgot’s very incisive (if unavailing) arguments are summarized in Dull, The French Navy, pp. 45–47. Ibid., pp. 48–49. See also, on Vergennes’ policies, Jean-Franc¸ois Labourdette, “Vergennes ou la tentation du ‘ministeriat’,” Revue Historique 557 (1986): 89–90; and Munro Price, Preserving ´ the Monarchy: the Comte de Vergennes, 1774–1787 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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their own grievances against London, in time joined the French and Spanish in their assault upon the English. Most telling, however, was the fact that Vergennes succeeded where all his predecessors had failed: he was able to keep the war in the overseas theater from spilling over into the continental arena. The British found themselves, this time and this time only, isolated. Indeed, Catherine II, not having on this occasion to reckon with French involvement in European affairs, seconded Versailles’ efforts by forming a league of “neutral” states against the British lords of the seas.55 Vergennes’s machinations, thus, were crowned with success – or so it seemed. He got the war he desired, and, undeniably, forced London by 1783 to relinquish its North American colonies. Yet the 1780s were to expose the many flaws in the foundations of the foreign minister’s imposing geostrategic edifice.56 For one thing, the British and French made peace in 1783 on terms that hardly revealed any decisive shift in the power balance between the two feuding countries. The great naval victory scored by Rodney and Hood over Admiral de Grasse in the (Caribbean) Battle of the Saints in April 1782 had already dissipated any British gloom left over from the loss at Yorktown the previous autumn, and underscored London’s undiminished superiority on the seas. The American War cost Britian little more than Tobago in the West Indies, Senegal in Africa, and various fishing rights in the waters off Newfoundland. Neither in Canada nor (more critically, perhaps) in India could Versailles score a reversal of the embarrassing verdict of the Seven Years’ War.57 Again, whatever economic revisionists – Philip T. Hoffman, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, George Grantham, John Nye, et al. – may say regarding the buoyancy of the French economy in general, the British after 1783 seem to have out-traded the French in most areas of the world. In North America, where the Americans, once liberated, happily resumed commercial ties with the former Mother Country, average annual British exports were already back to 90 percent of the 1769–74 figures, and would soon be forging ahead to unheard-of levels. As the Americans also provided an ideal market for the kinds of goods (cotton and wool textiles and also ironware of everyday use) most easily mass-produced by Britain’s emerging, steam-driven technologies, this represented yet another feather in London’s economic cap, and one that was, arguably, less in evidence in France.58 The British made similar gains at France’s expense in the 55

56 57

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For a discussion illuminatingly placing the American War of 1778–83 in the larger context of the “Second Hundred Years’ War” which repeatedly pitted Britain against France from 1689 to 1815, see C. B. A. Behrens, The Ancien R´egime (London: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), pp. 138–62. This is all succinctly recapitulated in Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution, pp. 119–29. For the details of the Peace of 1783, see Franklin A. Ford, Europe 1780–1830 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), pp. 63, 66–67. For Britain’s Spanish and Dutch adversaries, the results were even more meager. On the North American connection, see: Dull, French Navy, 340–41; Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton,

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Mediterranean, in the Baltic, on the slave-trading African West Coast, and in the potentially unlimited markets of India and the Far East.59 Small wonder if, over the years 1782–88, British merchant shipping world-wide more than doubled in absolute terms – a development that must have happened at the expense of the French (among other trading powers).60 Moreover – and most disappointing from Vergennes’ point of view – George III’s government showed no inclination to join that of Louis XVI in any campaign to counterbalance the predatory autocratic states of eastern Europe. This became starkly evident even as representatives from the two cross-Channel rivals labored over the articles of the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty of 1786. The French ambassador to London, Adhemar de Grignan, and his charge´ ´ d’affaires, Barthel concluded ruefully that “the English are irreconcilable ´ emy, ´ enemies. Rivalry, competition, jealousy, national hatred, spirit of vengeance, all are opposed to a rapprochement with this nation.”61 On the other side, Prime Minister Pitt confided to a colleague (not unnaturally, given recent events) that “though in the commercial business I think there are reasons for believing the French may be sincere, I cannot listen without suspicion to their professions of political friendship.”62 Such an observation, had she been privy to it, would have been music to the ears of Russia’s redoubtable empress, who profited from French and English preoccupation with divisive matters in the West to make hay in Europe’s Eastern marches. Having dramatically illustrated St. Petersburg’s growing influence in European affairs by bringing together Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, Portugal, the United Provinces, and Russia itself in a league of “neutral” states during the American war, Catherine proceeded to reinforce that

59

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N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956), pp. 130–32; H. J. Habbakuk, “Population, Commerce, and Economic Ideas,” in The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol VIII: The American and French Revolutions, 1763–93 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 40–45; and David S. Landes, “Technological Change and Development in Western Europe, 1750–1914,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe., Vol. VI: The Industrial Revolution and After (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 353–69. See, for example: Frank Fox, “Negotiating with the Russians: Ambassador Segur’s Mission ´ to St. Petersbourg, 1784–1789,” French Historical Studies 7 (1971), pp. 52 and 62; Franc¸ois Crouzet, “Angleterre et France au XVIIIe si`ecle: Essai d’analyse comparee ´ de deux croissances economiques,” Annales: E. S. C. 21 (1966): 263–64; and Habbakuk, “Population, Commerce ´ and Economic Ideas,” pp. 40–45. For this trend in the 1780s, see Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 120, and Dull, French Navy, pp. 340–44. The one bright spot in this generally bleak picture for the French was the West Indies, where the islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Dominique produced about half of the western world’s sugar and coffee in the 1780s and secured much needed foreign exchange for Versailles. See Jean Tarrade, Le Commerce colonial a` la fin de l’ancien r´egime (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972); Robert Stein, The French Sugar Business (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); and, most recently, Jeremy D. Popkin, “Saint-Dominique, Slavery, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” in Kaiser and Van Kley, eds., From Deficit to Deluge, esp. p. 221. Cited in Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, pp. 434–35. Cited in Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, p. 46.

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impression by serving as co-guarantor of the Treaty of Teschen ending a brief Austro-Prussian conflict over the Bavarian Succession. The French complained, revealingly, that this mediating role left Russia, for the first time, rather than Versailles, as the dominant foreign influence in the politics of Germany.63 Yet even more worrying to Vergennes and his associates were Catherine’s waxing ambitions in the Balkans. Although her brazen proposal to Louis XVI’s brother-in-law Joseph II of Austria in the early 1780s that St. Petersburg and Vienna partition the Turkish Balkans bore no fruit before 1787–88, the Russian tsarina went ahead on her own to invade (and soon annex) the Crimean Peninsula, and she soon conquered much of Georgia in the western Caucasus as well.64 Vergennes must have died (in February 1787) a very disillusioned man. His grandiose two-stage strategy projecting, first, renewed colonial/maritime conflict with England and, then, a Franco-English intervention in the hazardous affairs of eastern Europe, had largely served to highlight French strategic decline in both the overseas and continental theaters. At the same time, that geostrategic decline was interacting with constitutional, social-elitist, and political-cultural ´ tendencies at home to deepen the isolation of the Bourbon state that the foreign minister so faithfully served until his death. In matters constitutional, Louis XVI early on absorbed a credo resembling that for which Charles I had died in 1649 and for which Nicholas II would perish a century and a half later. At thirteen or fourteen, the future French monarch was being urged by his preceptor, the duc de La Vauguyon, to “know the whole extent both of your authority and of the obedience due to you from your subjects.” Louis would compliantly write that “there was no person more proper than himself . . . to manage his State, God having destined him, and no other, to that function.”65 We know today that some of those who were closest to this ill-fated sovereign attempted at times, in their own ways, to sound a salutary caution on this issue. As early as April 1775, Malesherbes, at that time still first president of the Paris Cour des Aides, insisted on identifying for Louis XVI key institutional and cultural safeguards against “despotism,” and voiced the hope that the king might “listen to the Nation itself assembled, or at least . . . permit assemblies in each province.”66 (Appointed to a ministerial post soon thereafter, Malesherbes would drop any advocacy of the Estates-General but would continue to favor the concept of representative provincial assemblies.) It is also significant that both Vergennes, principal architect of the new 63 64

65 66

See, on this question, Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 191–92; and also Dull, French Navy, pp. 125–26. The Austrian attitude towards these dramatic developments is carefully explored in Karl A. Roider, Jr., Austria’s Eastern Question 1700–1790 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), passim. For Vergennes’s anguished reaction, see Dull, French Navy, p. 298. Girault de Coursac, L’Education d’un roi, pp. 121 and 176. Cited in Robert D. Harris, Necker: Reform Statesman of the Ancien R´egime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 74–76.

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king’s ambitious foreign policy, and Jacques Necker, the Swiss-born financier charged after 1776 with the thankless task of finding the funds to defray the exorbitant costs of that policy, acknowledged the pertinence to Bourbon France of the constitutional issue. We have already had occasion to quote Vergennes on the issue, as he ruminated uneasily on the “advantages” conferred on England by its unique parliamentary arrangements. As for Necker – in his famed treatise of 1784 on the administration of finances – he paid explicit tribute to the constitutional wellsprings of fiscal stability (and, therefore, of war-making capabilities) at London: The strong bond between citizens and the state, the influence of the nation on the government, the guarantee of civil liberty to the individual, the patriotic support which the people always give to their government in times of crisis, all contribute to making the English constitution unique in the world.67

And soon, Necker would be establishing, on a trial basis, consultative assemblies in certain provinces of the realm as part of an effort to establish new constitutional ties, however tentative, between the government at Versailles and at least some of its more elitist subjects.68 How anticipatory this seems (in ´ hindsight) of the zemstvos later to be established for strikingly similar reasons in tsarist Russia! Moreover, other powerful institutions in old regime France, although profiting handsomely from their privileged sociopolitical status, tempted fate at times by raising fundamental constitutional issues in the aftermath of the “Maupeou Revolution.” Playing a starring role here was the Paris Parlement. In 1774, on the morrow of its reinstatement, the Parlement heard one of its illustrious peers, the duc de La Rochefoucauld, conjure up the nation’s “imprescriptible rights” and call for the revival of “those national assemblages [i.e., the Estates-General] without which all is irregular and illegal.”69 In sparring with the crown over the coming years, the judges in the kingdom’s most influential court would still exhibit traces of the radical Jansenist ecclesiology that traditionally held the king to be only the “mandatory” of the secularized “nation,” and would seek out in this area the constitutional advice of retired President Durey de Meini`eres, who as early as 1775 confidently augured the rebirth of the nation’s “sovereignty” in the Estates-General.70 But perhaps the crown should have 67 68 69 70

Ibid., p. 121. On the provincial assemblies, see Pierre Renouvin, Les Assembl´ees provinciales de 1787: Origines, d´eveloppements, r´esultats (Paris: A. Picard, 1921); and Harris, Necker, pp. 98, 182–84. Cited in Carcassonne, Montesquieu et le probl`eme de la constitution franc¸aise, pp. 466–67. See, on these issues: Dale Van Kley, “The Jansenist Constitutional Legacy in the French Prerevolution, 1750–1789,” Historical Reflections/R´eflexions Historiques 13 (1986): 393–453; Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 125–64; and Keith M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 34–36, 75.

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been most exercised about the willingness of the Parlement, a presumed pillar of the status quo in ordinary times, to carry its opposition to Neckerite tax reforms to the point of invoking the inflammatory constitutional principle of “no taxation without representation,” a principle that the magistrates, like all educated French subjects, knew perfectly well to be guiding the anti-British insurgents in America.71 Such a potentially subversive discourse could attain a national resonance all the more easily in that, for decades, invocations of the rights of the “nation” or “fatherland” had been resounding as well in provincial parlementary chambers.72 Hence, no more than Charles I or Nicholas II could Louis XVI emerge scotfree from a constitutional situation deemed ever more unsatisfactory by his articulate subjects. And, here again, absolutism meant, among other things, a state whose guiding social philosophy was lagging behind evolving socialelitist realities. Perhaps we might more analytically say that, just as in England ´ Charles I’s Personal Rule had the effect of masking potential divisions within his peerage/gentry over some concrete issues, and just as in Russia the post-1905 Imperial Duma could not reconcile the differing perspectives of bureaucratic reformists, rural gentry, and enterprising bourgeois, so in France absolutism in its twilight years failed to come to grips with an intensifying tug-of-war between “enlightened” notables, on the one hand, and ultraprivileged, antireformist corps (corporate bodies), on the other. To be sure, Louis XVI knew exactly where he stood on such matters. He seems to have held to the very end a credo of social inequality imbibed early on from his preceptor, who had intoned: “Uphold all the orders of the State and each of them in particular in its rights, properties, honors, distinctions, and privileges. . . . Alter nothing . . . except after the most profound reflection and most scrupulous examination.”73 Yet no more than Charles I or Nicholas II could Louis XVI control clashing tendencies of social evolution – especially when those tendencies derived as tenaciously as they did in the French case from the forces inherent in the Bourbon state’s internationalist policies. Incessantly needing money as it did, the French state after 1774 continued to sell lettres d’anoblissement and certain sinecures to affluent members of the Third Estate who, as progressive arrivistes in a new urban society of “notables,” could never be altogether reconciled with the old schema, dear to the crown, of “prayers,” “fighters,” and “workers.” (We earlier saw these “notables” flourishing in such communities as Orleans, Bayeux, Troyes and Rheims, Bor´ deaux, Dijon, Chalons-sur-Marne, and, of course, Paris itself – just as we ˆ saw how lettres d’anoblissement sold by the necessitous crown to meritorious 71 72 73

Bailey Stone, The Parlement of Paris, 1774–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 81–82. Roger Bickart, Les Parlements et la notion de souverainet´e nationale au XVIII si`ecle (Paris: Alcan, 1932); and David Bell, The Cult of the Nation, esp. pp. 50–77. Girault de Coursac, L’Education d’un roi, p. 121.

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Frenchmen celebrated the kinds of civic and even egalitarian values never dreamt of in the king’s philosophy.) At the same time, however, the self-same crown, by actually restricting the sale of other offices after 1774 because of the financial cost of their accompanying tax exemptions, only increased bourgeois demand for them and thus enhanced their value. This in turn gave a new lease of life to a horde of special interests – financiers, high and low judges, and so on – determined to hold onto their ever more valuable offices and hence to obstruct ministerial efforts to reform the government and its most basic administrative procedures.74 Hence, the irony of a situation accentuating dialectically related statesecurity needs and social-elitist evolution in the period between Maupeou’s ´ downfall and the onset in 1787 of “pre-revolution.” If the overall trend in France was toward a more “modern” society of notables, in the short term the sinister hydra of parasitical privil`ege threatened still to suffocate the monarchy. As publicist Rabaut Saint-Etienne so pungently put it: Every time one creates a corporate body with privileges one creates a public enemy because a special interest is nothing else than this. . . . Imagine a country where there are a great many corporate bodies. The result is that . . . one hears talk of nothing but rights, concessions, immunities, special agreements, privileges, prerogatives. . . . A minister who wants to disentangle the wires does not know where to begin because as he touches them he makes the interest cry out to which they are attached.75

This was indeed the situation in the waning years of France’s ancien r´egime. But this is only to say that the government, still mesmerized by its own inherited vision of international greatness, and still allowing itself to become dangerously isolated from its most affluent and articulate subjects in constitutional terms, was also promoting irreconcilable tendencies in social evolution and so helping to generate the social origins of its own revolutionary demise. Finally, in late prerevolutionary France as in prewar Russia and England, state-security, constitutional, and social-elitist weaknesses were powerfully ´ amplified through the prisms of political culture, thus further discrediting and isolating the monarch and those serving him. And here, again, it was the explicit fusing of geopolitical and domestic issues that proved especially dangerous. One recent student of French nationalism in this period has insisted that “vilification of national enemies and assertions of France’s superiority had very narrow applications under the old regime – far narrower than in 74

75

On the crown’s mixed approach toward the vending of lettres d’anoblissement, sinecures, and functional posts, see: William Doyle, “The Price of Offices in Pre-Revolutionary France,” Historical Journal 27 (1984): 831–60; David D. Bien, “Manufacturing Nobles: The Chancelleries in France to 1789,” Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 445–86; and Gail Bossenga, The Politics of Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Quoted in Behrens, Ancien R´egime, p. 179.

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the Revolution or the nineteenth century.”76 This is true only up to a point: even an author of a study stressing signs of “Anglomania” in late eighteenthcentury France has had to stress the prevalence of Anglophobic attitudes in the late 1770s among the people.77 More to our point, what Frances Acomb suggestively called the “Anglophobe doctrine of the sovereignty of the nation” gradually fused Anglophobic nationalism in France with demands for meaningful constitutional change before but also after London and Versailles locked horns in America. There are myriad indications of this. Lettered luminaries such as Mirabeau, Dupont de Nemours, A. J. J. Cerutti, and Lafayette lashed ´ out at “perfidious Albion” during these years: they censured the administrative practices of the British East India Company, belabored the British for their treatment of the Irish, excoriated London for impeding French merchants’ access to colonies in the West Indies, and deplored the immolation of the Dutch Patriot cause on the bloodstained altars of British ambition. It was they, too, who, increasingly, brought together in their correspondence, essays, and other writings “the two ideals of the political and martial glory of France and the freedom of the citizen.”78 Yet celebrities such as Mirabeau, Dupont de Nemours, and Lafayette were only exemplifying a much broader tendency in elitist circles to draw certain con´ clusions both from idealism in America and from French frustration over dealings with the British – conclusions, that is, that could be turned against sociopolitical arrangements at home. “Liberals and intellectuals,” Durand Echeverria has observed, . . . identified the American struggle against British oppression with their own battle against autocracy. The word libert´e was a constant refrain in every panegyric of America, and to a great extent the American example was used as an excuse to express ideas which otherwise could not have been voiced. . . . The American War was for the ancien r´egime a sort of Pandora’s Box out of which poured a cloud of books and articles advocating equality, republicanism, liberty, and constitutionalism, and attacking both the aristocratic principle and monarchical absolutism.79

The writings of Franklin, Paine, and Dickinson; the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation; the various state constitutions and bills of rights; and the resolutions and acts of the American Congress were widely disseminated in France, and could be – and were – exploited to associate French national pride with the great causes of constitutional and social reform. And unsurprisingly, the most immediately urgent reform issue at hand – systemic financial reform – was directly (and heatedly) tied to war and French 76 77 78 79

David Bell, The Cult of the Nation, p. 44. See also Edmond Dziembowski, Un Nouveau patriotisme franc¸ais, passim., for some corroboration on this point. Josephine Grieder, Anglomania in France, 1740–1789 (Geneva: Droz, 1985), pp. 19–20. Frances Acomb, Anglophobia in France, pp. 113–21. Echeverria, Mirage in the West, p. 42.

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patriotism a few years after the American War by the reflective essayist and politician Antoine Marie Joseph de Servan: The war we have recently suffered, that abyss of so much money, the greatest cause of our financial disorder and of the evils with which France is now assailed . . . in short, gentlemen of the Third Estate, who wanted that war, who asked for it? You yourselves, who, in your homes, in your public places, in your cafes, ´ and even in your taverns, saw in imagination the whole English navy swallowed up, and drank in long draughts . . . the pleasure of vengeance.80

While Thomas Kaiser is undoubtedly right to assert that this latest AngloFrench conflict did not produce a “conspicuous clash of interests or loyalties” between the “nation” and a king who often himself vented anti-English sentiments, the larger point is that France’s frustrating passage-at-arms with London sensitized influential subjects of Louis XVI to the imperative need for constitutional, administrative, and social reforms that would eventually help to doom that monarch’s closed world of absolutism and privil`ege.81 What made things even worse for Louis XVI was the fact that the concurrent decline of French influence in eastern Europe, although stemming most fundamentally from Russia’s waxing strength, was frequently ascribed by commentators at Paris and Versailles to the troubled 1756 alliance with Habsburg Austria – a critique furnishing the crown’s detractors with yet another handy stick with which to beat Louis XVI and his increasingly unpopular (and Austrian) queen.82 Austrophobia, too, if temporarily on the back-burner during the late 1770s and early 1780s, carried its own implications for state-security, constitutional, and social reform in a no-longer-preeminent France. In concluding this initial part of Chapter 2, we note again the value of cultural analysis. To try to view state-security, constitutional, and social issues through the apprehensive eyes (and religio-political cosmologies) of the subjects of Charles I, Nicholas II, and Louis XVI – as well as from the perspectives of these embattled monarchs themselves – is to be able to sense intuitively why these prerevolutionary English, Russian, and French rulers were becoming so perilously isolated from their own subjects as well as stymied by strategic tendencies abroad. In the case of England, Charles chose the “wrong” comprehensive “conspiracy theory,” thus alienating many of his most articulate, ambitious, and patriotic compatriots. In the cases of Russia and France, countries lacking traditions of consultative governance, and thus polarized between absolutist and “popular” perspectives on foreign and domestic affairs, 80 81 82

Cited in Acomb, Anglophobia in France, p. 86. Refer again to Kaiser, “The Austrian Alliance, the Seven Years’ War, and the Emergence of a French ‘National’ Foreign Policy, 1756–1789,” esp. pp. 2–3. On this point, see: Murphy, The Diplomatic Retreat of France and Public Opinion on the Eve of the French Revolution, 1783–1789 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998); and Kaiser, “Who’s Afraid of Marie-Antoinette? Diplomacy, Austrophobia and the Queen,” French History 14 (2000): 241–71.

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Nicholas II and Louis XVI identified to the very end with the former perspective, thus forfeiting the loyalty of their most aspiring and patriotic countrymen. All three of these leaders, therefore, would be hard-pressed to weather the ultimate political storms that they brought down upon their own heads. Foreign/Domestic Interactions and Absolutist State Collapses The essential chronologies of state collapse in England, France, and Russia are for the most part uncomplicated enough, and have been outlined elsewhere. In the case of England, Charles I’s attempt to impose the Anglican Book of Common Prayer on Presbyterian Scotland in 1637 led to a national uprising there the following year, which during 1639–40 (in the so-called “Bishops’ Wars”) the English were unable to quell. The king’s financial difficulties eventually forced him back to parliaments. The abortive “Short Parliament” of April 1640 was followed by the convening, that November, of what history knows as the “Long Parliament,” fated to endure (with interruptions) for almost twenty years; and the English Revolution was underway. In the case of France, governmental insolvency forced Louis XVI to appeal, first (in 1787) to an extraordinary Assembly of Notables, and eventually (in 1788–89) to the Estates-General to rescue his government from bankruptcy and all that it implied. Stalemate in the latter body over a variety of issues brought about popular intervention in this heretofore largely elitist quarrel: the upshot was the July Days (seizure of ´ the Parisian Bastille) and then the October Days, which secured the early Revolution by removing both royal family and legislature from Versailles to the capital. In the case of Russia, everything happened with breakneck speed: food riots at St. Petersburg (patriotically renamed “Petrograd” in wartime) triggered in February 1917 a week of spreading proletarian unrest, at the end of which memorable week Nicholas II’s abdication, first on his own behalf and then on that of his only son Alexei, suddenly left Russia a republic. Such are the bare bones of chronology. Our challenge, of course, is to place these breathtaking events within an analytical framework that can in turn refer back to the larger argument adduced so far in this book. Our general thesis will be that, in all three cases, the collapse of absolutism and outbreak of full-scale revolution resulted from the dialectical interplay between international and domestic pressures on governments already seriously (perhaps fatally) weakened by similarly interacting pressures in preceding decades. In the cases of Russia and England, revolution broke out against the backdrop of direct Russian and English involvement in war; in the case of France, revolution resulted from a largely war-induced state bankruptcy in a European crisis threatening a renewal of continental warfare. The attendant politicization and mobilization of elitist subjects and, in time, of plebeian masses in all three ´ countries engage our attention in the final section of this chapter. Manifestly, no country on the eve of revolution was more enveloped in massive warfare than tsarist Russia. Yet historians have come to treat specific causal

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connections here with a great deal of caution. On the one hand, they note that Nicholas II’s armies were quickly routed by those of Wilhelm II at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in late 1914; that by the end of 1915 Russia had lost all of Poland and parts of Belorussia, Ukraine, and the Baltic region; and that by the end of 1916, “Russia had lost about 5,700,000 men, 3,600,000 of them dead or seriously wounded, the rest prisoners of war.”83 At the same time, they acknowledge that the Russian forces throughout this period did very well generally against those of Austria-Hungary and Turkey; moreover, they point to the brilliant (if only momentary) successes scored by Russian General Alexei Brusilov against Austrian troops in the mid-summer of 1916, successes that very much worried leading German generals (Ludendorff, Hindenburg) until they were able, through a variety of ways, to stabilize the Eastern Front.84 All such considerations have led most specialists to focus in particular on the late 1916–early 1917 period as that when linkages between Russia’s woes at the front and political problems behind the lines became truly critical, and the overall situation for the Romanov state untenable. In analyzing those linkages, we concentrate on four principal factors: (1) the Russian economy; (2) the constitutional/political situation; (3) the state of the army; and (4) political-cultural issues. Norman Stone is doubtless correct to argue that the “economic chaos” of wartime Russia is too “frequently ascribed quite simply to backwardness.” He maintains, provocatively, that “in any case . . . the economic chaos came more from a contest between old and new in the Russian economy. There was a crisis, not of decline and relapse into subsistence, but rather of growth.”85 This may be useful as an initial generalization, but other historians still stress the more conventional story of an economy whose productivity in certain key sectors was lagging by 1916. Thus, Hans Rogger: Whether [Russian industry] could have continued to meet the demands of the military as well as other essential requirements is far from certain. Output in such important sectors as iron ore and coal, pig iron and steel, began to drop in 1916, before the catastrophic declines of . . . 1917. Scarcities of fuel and raw material were aggravated by the disruption of foreign trade and domestic transport, the latter caused by the disrepair of rolling stock and the loss of key railways in enemy-occupied territory. Labour productivity declined with the employment of unskilled hands, including large numbers of women. Not until 1915, when it was too late for many of them, were workers in critical occupations exempted from conscription. 83 84

85

Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 17–19. Robert D. Warth, The Allies and the Russian Revolution: From the Fall of the Monarchy to the Peace of Brest-Litovsk (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954), pp. 10–11; Norman Stone, The Eastern Front 1914–1917 (London: Scribner, 1975), pp. 265–70; and W. Bruce Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914–1918 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), pp. 251–52. Stone, The Eastern Front, pp. 284–85.

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Industry’s admittedly “impressive” record in supplying Russia’s armies up to 1916 was achieved in part, Rogger goes on to say, by “neglecting needs which turned out to be as imperative as those of the military.”86 On this point, Theodore H. Von Laue is even more explicit: Although after the initial defeats the government and the nongovernmental agencies created by the “public” succeeded in superficially solving the munitions crisis by 1916, they did so only by starving the metal industries of transport and raw materials. . . . the Russian economy could not support both war production and the railroads, steels mills, factories, and mines that made war production possible (not to mention the continuing needs of the civilian sector of the economy, particularly of agriculture).

Whether Russia’s “industrial collapse” was, as Von Laue contends, “inevitable and fully foreseen by the end of 1916” may be debatable – here a prominent “modernization theorist” is obviously speaking – but few would deny that the war severely tested the Russian economy’s ability to serve needs simultaneously at the front and behind the lines.87 In other areas, too, the Russian economy exhibited weaknesses that, in a comparative European context, were noteworthy. Norman Stone himself concedes that wartime inflation – hardly unique to the tsar’s realm – did in Russia go “far beyond the experience of any other country.” The huge increase in money supply, dictated by the government’s imperative and ever-growing spending needs, combined with economic-structural conditions peculiar to Russia to make inflation especially deadly here. “The decline of the ruble on foreign exchanges, the rise in basic costs such as transport, shortages that could be exploited by profiteers, the need for firms to obtain relatively scarce skilled labor by offering higher and higher wages, monopolies’ tendency to go for quick profits in an era of uncertainty, all made for inflation’s being more marked in Russia than in other countries.”88 Yet, as Stone (and all experts in this field) realize, problems such as runaway inflation, overtaxed railroad networks (another factor cited in all such accounts), strategic isolation from markets and sources of wealth and industrial commodities in the West, and so on – all these weaknesses ultimately had an effect most directly lethal to the regime in the undersupplied food markets of urban Russia. Here, W. Bruce ´ Lincoln is perhaps most forceful: To state the hard and simple truth, there was more than enough grain to feed everyone in Russia in 1916, but Russia’s peasants simply refused to sell their grain at the low prices fixed by the government while the cost of rapidly disappearing consumer goods soared. They ate more themselves, fed more to their livestock, distilled grain into illegal 86 87 88

Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernization and Revolution, pp. 258–59. Theodore Von Laue, “Problems of Industrialization,” in G. Stavrou, ed., Russia Under the Last Tsar, pp. 146–47. Stone, The Eastern Front, p. 288.

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vodka, or stored it away in hopes that food prices would rise and consumer goods prices would fall enough for them to sell their reserves at a greater advantage. In the meantime, Russia’s urban masses faced hunger, perhaps even starvation.89

In other words, the failure satisfactorily to integrate urban and rural sectors of the economy in Russia – a fundamental weakness that would also bring down Kerensky’s moderate-socialist successor regime in the Revolution, and ´ even drive Stalin’s successor-regime to near-distraction by 1928–29 – this fail´ ure, more than any other single issue, perhaps, spelled doom for the Imperial government by early 1917. That the ministers in place so hopelessly botched efforts to reduce the widening “scissors” between fixed agricultural and soaring industrial prices in Russia may have been inevitable at the time; yet it points nonetheless to the second of our four key analytical factors – namely, the staggering incompetence of Nicholas II’s government in this season of supreme national testing. For Mark Steinberg, the essential tragedy of Nicholas’s rule “perhaps lay less in the absence of ideas or in the often-described clash between the political needs of his time and his personal preoccupation with family and personal pleasure than in the conflict between his convictions and values, on the one hand, and the need for reasoned change, on the other.” By the same token, Steinberg suggests, Alexandra’s contribution to this tragedy lay most of all “in her encouragement of Nicholas’s anachronistic political convictions.”90 Those “anachronistic convictions,” reinforced by the tsarina’s hatred of any ministers even mildly critical of her husband’s policies, had (along with Alexandra’s widely publicized anxiety over her son’s hemophilia) allowed for Grigorii Rasputin’s scandalous elevation to influence in state affairs; now, at a time of paramount danger for Russia, those convictions played out in terms of a fatal instability in the highest echelons of power. Orlando Figes has written that in the final seventeen months of the old regime, Russia had four Prime Ministers, five Ministers of the Interior, three Foreign Ministers, three War Ministers, three Ministers of Transport and four Ministers of Agriculture. This ‘ministerial leapfrog,’ as it came to be known, not only removed competent men from power, but also disorganized the work of government since no one remained long enough in office to master their responsibilities. Bureaucratic anarchy developed with competing chains of authority: some ministers would defer to the Tsarina or Rasputin, while others remained loyal to the Tsar, or at least to what they thought the Tsar was, although when it came to the crunch he never seemed to know what he stood for and in any case never really dared to oppose his wife.91 89 90 91

Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon, pp. 296–97. Mark D. Steinberg, The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 5. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 278. See also, on the ‘ministerial leapfrog,’ the recollections of British observer Bernard Pares, in The Fall of the Russian Monarchy (New York: Vintage Books, 1961).

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The dismissal of War Minister A. A. Polivanov the year before had been bad enough, robbing Russia as it did of the person most responsible for the revival of the empire’s military fortunes after the debacle of 1915; now, the prolonged presence in office of Prime Minister Boris Sturmer ensured utter failure in ¨ the government’s effort to deal with an urban food crisis that most directly threatened the political status quo.92 To be fair, ending or at least mitigating the urban food crisis – that is, by reducing the widening “scissors” between grain and consumer goods prices – “might well have proved beyond the skill of even a talented ‘dictator,’” Lincoln has conceded; “but there is no doubt that it called for far greater ability than Sturmer possessed. Utterly at sea, he quickly ¨ made the crisis worse by establishing several impotent government agencies that worked directly at cross purposes with ones that were already in place.” No one would cooperate with the Prime Minister because, simply, “no one trusted him.”93 Moreover, in the early weeks of 1917, and as if to spite the countless critics of the recently assassinated Rasputin, Nicholas II “replaced every minister who had a shred of talent or independence with men whose cause Aleksandra had pleaded” in recent days. In doing so, he (and his wife) “recklessly destroyed the last pillars of their political support.”94 The Russian government, doomed perhaps in the most immediate sense by its own incompetence and corruption, was condemned as well in the broader monde of “privilege Russia,” imperfectly represented as it was in the fourth and final Imperial Duma and in various patriotic organizations that had sprung up during the war. Paul Miliukov and the other moderates in the “Progressive Bloc” who led the Duma in late 1916, Prince Lvov’s Union of Zemstvos and sister organization the Union of Towns, business leaders in the War Industries Committees of the principal metropoles – all of these resolutely unrevolutionary liberals and civic-minded groups wanted desperately to help the tsarist regime in its war-induced season of agony; yet they were systematically thrust aside by a government that had every rational reason to welcome their support.95 Again, it was the “anachronistic” philosophy of the tsar and tsarina that was at the heart of the problem: Alexandra’s instincts, like Nicholas’s, conveyed a specific political message (which Rasputin assured them was God’s wisdom): constitutional reform was unnecessary and dangerous. . . . During the war Alexandra voiced her “hatred” for members of Nicholas’s government who were not absolutely loyal – especially those on “the left,” by whom she meant not the revolutionaries of the socialist parties (she seems to have barely noticed them before 1918) but the liberals in the Duma and in influential civic 92 93 94 95

For vivid testimony to this effect, see Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon, pp. 296–97. Ibid., p. 297. Ibid., p. 309–310. On Prince Lvov, see Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 270–73. On the War Industries Committees, refer to Lewis H. Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914–1917 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). On the Fourth Duma, refer again to Riha, “Constitutional Developments in Russia,” esp. pp. 111–12.

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organizations like the Union of Zemstvos and even the Union of the Nobility (whom she judged to be “vile, utterly revolutionary”). Toward the end of 1916 she advised “war” against the Duma and urged Nicholas to shut down the legislature, treat all opposition as “high treason,” and send the Duma leaders . . . “to Siberia.”96

Given this attitude, and the government’s deepening isolation from elitist (let ´ alone laboring) society, political moderates such as Lvov and Miliukov found themselves helpless to affect the course of events. “Trapped between tsarism and revolution,” Raymond Pearson has observed, “the dilemma of the Russian moderates became a predicament admitting no constructive solution. By early 1917 the moderates were dwarfed by the looming confrontation between tsarism and revolution.”97 In what was perhaps a crowning indication of his contempt for those liberal politicians who had been endeavoring for so long to navigate between the opposite extremes of embattled Romanov autocracy and threatening popular upheaval, Nicholas finally abdicated in response to his generals rather than acknowledge any significant constitutional role for even his most conservative civilian subjects.98 The role played by the defense and military establishment in the abdication drama at Pskov in February 1917 naturally draws our attention to the third of our four key analytical factors, namely, the state of the Russian Army in late 1916 and early 1917. Here, the critical issues seem not to have been so much a lack of munitions, weapons, and other war materiel, nor failures in ´ distributions of medicine, clothes, and other nonmilitary necessities, but rather questions of changing personnel, deteriorating morale, and the larger political context in which the soldiers on the front lines had to operate. All of these considerations figure to one extent or another in Allan K. Wildman’s seminal analysis of the new military recruits, both non-officers and officers, at this crucial juncture: The replacements were the hastily assembled and badly trained peasant youths and over-forty ratniki who bitterly resented being torn away from their families and plots. The new officers recruited from previously deferred students and middle class, clergy, and peasantry for the most part identified with the Allied cause, but they were also susceptible to political ideas and negatively disposed toward the tsarist government; a fair number had been involved in student revolutionary and political organizations, and many more were at least conversant with the politics of the Duma and progressive circles. Thus a very unreliable element, from the government’s point of view, was being brought into contact with soldiers in the trenches. 96 97

98

Steinberg, The Fall of the Romanovs, pp. 35–37. Raymond Pearson, The Russian Moderates and the Crisis of Tsarism, 1914–1917 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977), pp. 178–79. On Paul Miliukov’s dilemma in all of this, see also: Thomas Riha, A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1969); and William G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974). A point made by, among others, Steinberg, The Fall of the Romanovs, p. 61.

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Clearly, for this leading specialist on the subject, the really “dangerous new element was the interaction of the mood of the front with the deteriorating political situation in the rear. . . . The replacements infected the front-line troops with their laxer discipline and civilian concerns, while the latter soon communicated their battle traumas and utter despair to replacements. This amalgam was a deadly combination, seriously undermining the Army’s fighting capacity and vastly increasing the danger in the eventuality of a political crisis.”99 While Wildman therefore regards both spreading indiscipline at the front and “politicization” emanating from the rear as threatening the integrity and battlereadiness of the Russian Army, most noticeably when they reinforced each other, he concedes that, in the final analysis, “the chief impetus to revolution was to come from the metropolis.”100 In this, Wildman has been seconded by military scholar David R. Jones, who furthermore notes that, to a degree unique among the major combatant-states in the war, Imperial Russia’s will to fight was sapped by domestic political developments: By December 1916 there was ample evidence of low morale on both the home and war fronts. This was not, of course, an exclusively Russian phenomenon, but it was particularly dangerous in the tsar’s empire thanks to the ongoing political struggle between ruler and Duma. Although both were steadfast behind the Allied cause, influential elements of the Duma were determined to undermine the military’s loyalty to the existing regime in their efforts to gain major political concessions. Indeed, some were prepared for a coup d’´etat if necessary. If by December 1916 these patriots had made some converts among senior regular officers, they undoubtedly had a much larger following among the wartime newcomers – and it was these who now mixed with the rapidly trained and often dispirited conscripts.101

Jones would no doubt endorse Wildman’s earlier conclusion that “once internal politics became a major preoccupation of the officers, it inevitably found an echo in the trenches.”102 The Imperial Army, it is very important to stress, did not actually disintegrate as an institution in the critical early weeks of 1917 – but retrospective analysis (as well as the subsequent events of February/March at Petrograd) suggest that, by now, its efficacy, not only as a weapon of war against the Central Powers, but also as an instrument of internal counterrevolutionary repression, may have passed the point of no return. Nicholas II, that is, was soon to learn a lesson that his earlier counterparts Charles I and Louis XVI had been similarly forced to learn: namely, that a ruler largely isolated 99 100 101

102

Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March–April 1917) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 105–15. Ibid., pp. 119–20. David R. Jones, “Imperial Russia’s Forces at War,” in Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness I: The First World War (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1988), pp. 284– 85. Also consult, once again, John W. Steinberg, All the Tsar’s Men, passim., for discussion of the alacrity with which some of the “Young Turks” in the officer corps deserted the tsar’s cause in February 1917. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, p. 105.

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from his own contemporaries even in times of national military/diplomatic crisis could no longer depend on brute physical force to beat down what was now becoming, willy-nilly, a consciously revolutionary opposition. The fact that, in the Russian case, the “opposition” had come by early 1917 to embrace virtually all elements in privileged as well as popular, civilian as well as military society, is best analyzed and most arrestingly perceived in political-cultural terms. In this connection, the association of rumored “dark forces” at Court and in general society with Imperial Germany and its victorious armies was especially fatal to Nicholas and his family and, therefore, to the dynasty and old regime as a whole. Indeed, as Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii have emphasized, this was a development with roots extending back to the military disasters of 1915. “Such was the mood of despondency following the defeats of 1915,” these historians have observed, “that most people naturally assumed there were German spies in the High Command. During that autumn Moscow cabbies claimed that everyone knew the generals were traitors and that, without them, Russian troops would have been in Berlin long ago.”103 Such rumors had persisted throughout 1916, despite the temporary stabilization of forces achieved on the Eastern Front due to the reforms of Polivanov and the battlefield heroics of generals like Brusilov; and with the deepening of the economic crisis behind the lines, and the progressive deterioration of morale among the active soldiery, Russia’s wartime Germanophobia came to know no bounds. Specific historical circumstances facilitated this development, and would have done so even if the tsar, tsarina, and Court elements had not by now been tarred with the brush of sexual scandal associated with Rasputin.104 “Many Russian noble families and officers had German names, mostly dating from the eighteenth-century annexation of the Baltic region,” Rex Wade has explained; and, given their natural prominence in military, courtier, and bureaucratic circles in the early twentieth-century tsarist empire, such families and individuals could all too easily be held responsible for Russia’s humiliation at the hands of dark, conspiratorial German (or pro-German) “forces.”105 That, unfortunately, the empress herself (like her earlier counterparts in England and France!) was also branded with the nationality of one of her adopted country’s “natural” adversaries only made the situation that much worse for the beleaguered authorities. Symptomatic of the government’s deteriorating position was the fact that even those politicians outside the corridors of power who had as much reason as 103 104

105

Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). See, on this point, R. K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra (New York: Atheneum, 1967), pp. 152, 299, 346–37; and George Katkov, Russia, 1917: The February Revolution (London: Longman, 1967), pp. 157–60. Wade, The Russian Revolution, p. 22.

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Nicholas and Alexandra themselves to dread the possibility of revolution in the streets were by late 1916 driven by their exasperation with current affairs to fan the flames of Germanophobia, at least indirectly, in the most public of forums, thereby further undermining the regime’s legitimacy. Thus, Paul Miliukov, principal spokesman of the intensely patriotic Kadet party, declaimed bitterly against the government in a celebrated speech in the Duma on November 1, 1916, insisting that if the Germans had indeed wanted to foment trouble and disorder in Russia, “they could not do better than to act as the Russian Government has acted.” After reviewing the ministers’ follies and the “dark rumors of treachery and treason” wildly making the rounds in the country, he posed the stunning question: “What is it? Stupidity or treason?” This speech, Wade has commented, “electrified” opinion throughout the empire, helped to set various genuine conspiracies on foot – one of which would soon result in Rasputin’s murder – and further cut the ground out from under the tsar and his close, pathetic coterie of “decision-makers.”106 Perhaps most significant to us, however, from our vantage-point as students of revolution, is how the cultural phenomenon of Germanophobia – in a time of national humiliation administered by German arms – could perform the revolutionary function of momentarily unifying all social, professional, economic, and ethnic elements in society against the existing r´egime, thereby going far toward hurling the intransigent and isolated Romanov couple from power. Again, the analysis of Figes and Kolonitskii is particularly on the mark: If the February Revolution was able to unite so many diverse (and even hostile) forces, that was largely due to its . . . self-definition in opposition to a common enemy. That enemy was defined extremely vaguely – as the ‘dark forces’ – Even the Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, in a letter to the tsar in November 1916, complained of ‘the constant intrusion of dark forces into everything.’ Fear of the ‘dark forces’ (Black Hundred, Monarchist, Rasputinite and German) temporarily united diverse political groups (constitutional monarchists and republicans, liberals and socialists) behind February as a national revolution. During the February Days people in the crowd in Petrograd told foreign correspondents that what they wanted, and were fighting for, was victory over Germany: ‘Now we have beaten the Germans here, we will beat them in the field’. . . . 107

Hence, the deadliness of references to Alexandra as the “German Woman,” and of contemporary discourse linking the Imperial family, the bungling ministers, Rasputin’s faction at Court, and others with unnamed (but presumably omnipresent) German “spies.” Hence, as well, the danger posed for the government by ordinary soldiers at the front who, Wildman tells us, were becoming ever more “convinced of the ‘German stranglehold,’ the treason of government 106 107

Ibid. Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, pp. 158–64. Figes enlarges upon these issues in A People’s Tragedy, pp. 284–85.

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figures, and the German sympathies of the tsarina,” and were ever more likely to ask: “What’s the use of fighting if the Germans have already taken over?”108 Thus did the Romanovs’ unsuccessful engagement in the brutally competitive power politics of early twentieth-century Europe come home to haunt and eventually destroy them. For a brief period in early 1917, all those political factions, economic classes, and socio-ethnic groupings that were destined so soon to struggle viciously among themselves over the succession to power and the direction of public affairs in modern Russia could agree on the absolute necessity of pushing Nicholas, Alexandra, and their corrupt and incompetent advisers off the stage of history. Such is the conclusion that seems to derive from the foregoing economic, constitutional, military, and political-cultural analysis. A roughly similar kind of analysis – organized, that is, around fiscal, constitutional, military, and political-cultural issues – can enable us to comprehend how, in the case of England, warfare pursued on an assuredly much less prolonged and massive basis could still function just as effectively as a primary catalyst for revolution. Charles I, unlike Nicholas II, would survive the official denouement of absolutism, but in circumstances that, by conjoining destabi´ lizing international and domestic pressures on English governance, augured ill for his fortunes over the long haul. Admittedly, the Anglo-Scottish military confrontations of 1639 and 1640, known retrospectively as the “Bishops’ Wars,” hardly rank in most respects with Imperial Russia’s gigantic struggle against the Central Powers during 1914–17. Indeed, the first of these “wars” (in June 1639) saw a small English force briefly invading southern Scotland, and then retreating on contact with the Covenanters’ army; soon thereafter, a “Pacification of Berwick” temporarily ended hostilities. The following summer, however, genuine disaster attended Charles’ efforts, as the Scots defeated him at Newburn in Northumberland, occupied Newcastle, and demanded direct negotiations with a newly summoned English Parliament.109 However brief and small-scale such a military engagement may seem in historical-comparative terms, it no less sounded the death knell of absolutism in seventeenth-century England. In no connection is this more abundantly clear than in that of crown finances. According to the late Kevin Sharpe, Charles apparently felt at the start of 1639 that the existing surplus in his treasury, when reinforced by customary county militia contributions and revived feudal obligations exacted from the nobility, would see him through the anticipated confrontation with Edinburgh, and (a crucial consideration) enable him to avoid a recurrence to Parliament.110 Yet most English revolutionary specialists 108 109 110

Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, pp. 114–15. For as good a summary of these events as any, refer to Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War, pp. 15–18. Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 794.

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today would probably still agree with G. E. Aylmer’s prior commentary on this point: Charles I was able to keep going without recourse to parliament as long as he kept out of war. Broadly speaking, he managed this by a combination of several illegal or at least dubious and unpopular revivals and innovations, a small measure of economy in the spending departments, and some limited improvements in the ordinary and legal revenues. Despite Professor Dietz’s argument, that the ‘Bishops’ Wars’ of 1639 and 1640 . . . were in fact financed without parliament’s help, it remains true that the King’s means were quite inadequate for such a crisis and that these ‘Wars’ did make the calling of parliament a financial necessity.

This was the case, in part, due to “grave weaknesses in the administrative system” that impeded the logistics of Charles’s military preparations in 1639 and 1640; it was due as well, Aylmer tells us, to the fact that royal revenues were “anticipated” in such a fashion as to make it impossible for the Crown to balance its budgets. The Crown, after all, could not as of yet be sustained through the workings of a “fully-fledged credit system, such as began to come into existence [only] during the 1690s.”111 Aylmer concedes that there had been substantial rearmament from 1635 to 1639, but this had been based on the separate (and, of course, widely hated) resource of ship money, and “had affected only the Navy.”112 This, in turn, is telling in geopolitical as well as in constitutional terms, for it suggests how hopelessly deficient Stuart finances were in the larger sense of a foreign policy that had always to reckon with the ultimate possibility of warfare waged on land (as, for instance, in Scotland) as well as on the seas. Yet even regarding naval matters alone, Conrad Russell saw serious problems in the offing: Ship Money highlighted two serious and related issues. One was the breakdown of the principle of government by consent. . . . The other was a growing gap between the maximum weight of taxation the King’s subjects were likely to consent to and the minimum sum on which a King could preserve solvency and national security. The case for arguing that the King needed to be able to put out a fleet capable of matching the French or the Dutch was one which those who had reproved him for unpreparedness in 1626 could not easily answer. . . . The critics of Ship Money were as likely as anyone else to reproach Charles for neglecting the defense of the kingdom, and Charles was entitled to ask them, as he did after the Short Parliament, in what form they were likely to give their consent. The answer seems to have been none. . . . 113 111

112 113

G. E. Aylmer, The King’s Servants: the Civil Service of Charles I, 1625–1642 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 420–21. For corroboration of this point, see Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War, pp. 163–64. Regarding Aylmer’s citation of Dietz: see Frederick C. Dietz, English Public Finance, 1558–1641 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964). Alymer, The King’s Servants, p. 420. Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, p. 7. On the many implications of Ship Money in the late 1630s, refer again to Andrews, Ships, Money, and Politics, passim; Quintrell, “Charles I and His Navy in the 1630s,” pp. 159–79; and to Andrew Thrush’s article on Ship Money in

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Or at least “none” that the king would have been likely to find constitutionally acceptable. Yet, Russell was surely correct to assert that, even when it came to naval warfare alone, and even “assuming compliant and well-satisfied Parliaments,” any English ruler would have found regular peace-time subsidies to be hopelessly inadequate. That, on the contrary, there were no “compliant and well-satisfied Parliaments” on which the king could rely in the late 1630s only reminds us how utterly inseparable, in the final analysis, were military, fiscal, and constitutional questions at this time – and this, even in the theater of less costly “local” land campaigns such as those undertaken against the Scots. Mark Fissel, who has studied the Bishops’ Wars as carefully, perhaps, as any scholar, has accentuated this unavoidable association of issues: In deciding upon war in 1638 and 1640, the King heeded only those voices which promised victory. He trusted few unreservedly. . . . Not even the proponents of ‘thorough,’ Laud and Strafford, served as the innermost royal counsel. . . . Few in his circle suggested that perhaps he was not governing so well, or that he was alienating important constituencies within the realm. This was a ruler who eschewed the ruled. He made few progresses in the shires, thwarted the gentry’s petitioning by secluding himself, and trimmed the aspirations of the nobility by making the court a closed community and promoting the episcopate. He seems to have taken for granted the allegiance of his subjects, save for a favoured few, and showed little interest in the complications or imperfections of applied government. . . . Charles had succeeded in isolating himself from the political nation, but at his peril.114

That, by now, Charles’ closest confidants included his wife Henrietta Maria, who appears from the start to have assured her husband in “hard-line” fashion of victory over the “rebels” from the North, can only recall for us the later, painfully similar role of Alexandra Fedorovna.115 It is doubtless true, as Fissel has observed, that when the expenses of war finally forced Charles to summon a Parliament in early 1640, “he did so for supply only. Discussion of policy or redress of grievances were not even to be considered. The opinions and reactions of the ruled were irrelevant.”116 Yet, clearly, such an attitude was unrealistic, and destined for rejection. In fact, although constitutional theory articulated in the abortive convocation of April 1640 was not as advanced as it would be in the more genuinely revolutionary assembly of November 1640 – for most MPs in April, Russell has noted, “a Parliament” was still “an instrument for limiting the power of government,

114 115

116

Mark Charles Fissel, ed., War and Government in Britain, 1598–1650 (New York: Manchester University Press, 1991). Mark Charles Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s Campaigns against Scotland, 1638–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 292–93. On the queen’s disastrous political role at this juncture, and on the equally disastrous role of her French and Catholic mother, Marie de Medicis, see Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict: ´ England, 1603–58, pp. 185–87. Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars, p. 293.

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not for exercising it” – there nevertheless was, among some of John Pym’s colleagues, “an inkling of something different.” Pym himself, in addressing the assembly on April 17, advanced ideas which “certainly amounted to a full-scale alternative programme” for governing, and at least one of his associates “was already developing a theory of mixed monarchy which put supreme power into the hands of the King, Lords, and Commons together.”117 Palpably, the king had not summoned MPs for the first time since the late 1620s to hear this kind of language, and he soon dismissed the “Short” Parliament. Yet, sooner or later, financial need born out of military engagements would force this unhappy sovereign back to a reckoning with his subjects that was bound to have truly revolutionary implications. The key to this situation – as surely it would be for Nicholas II in early 1917 – was the utter isolation of the monarch by 1639–40. This became starkly evident when, in order if at all possible to avoid renewed recourse to Parliament, Charles sought lastminute funds from the City of London; and it became equally plain, we might almost say quantifiable, in the critical elections for both the Short and the Long Parliaments in 1640. On the first point, Valerie Pearl has stressed the significance of the Bishops’ Wars as a turning point toward something virtually unheard-of in the politics of the all-important English capital – that is, its determination to resist the urgent wartime financial requests of an utterly discredited king: It can be argued that the crisis of 1639–40 was precipitated by the crown’s great blunder in bringing about the unpopular and financially crippling Scottish war. Had this crisis not occurred, the compliancy of the municipal government and financial circles with the crown from 1631 to 1638 suggests that money might still have been raised from London, while the oligarchic constitution of the City government might well have considerably delayed the time when popular feeling against royal policy would become effective.

As it was, the king’s desperate recourse to London for aid in raising soldiers and money only resulted in refusals dictated by the lack of security for loans from the City. How, after all, could loans safely be made to the king, given Crown finances that lacked credit-worthiness in the absence of representative government? This exchange between Crown and City elders helped to shift influence from the patrician Aldermen to the somewhat more popular Common Council, emboldened the Puritan opposition in the City, and (as we know today) looked forward to truly revolutionary political developments in late 1641 in the king’s incomparably wealthy, populous, and strategically situated capital.118 117 118

Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 121–23. Valerie L. Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics, 1625–43 (London: Oxford, 1961), pp. 91–105. Yet see also Robert Ashton, The City and the Court, 1603–43 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) for warnings against viewing the Crown and London as too closely allied politically during the 1630s. In general terms, however, he endorses Pearl’s interpretation.

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But it was the parliamentary elections of 1640 that most graphically revealed the isolation of Charles and his few remaining allies in courtier/peerage circles. Lawrence Stone has pointed this out with special reference to elections to the Short Parliament: Royalist peers nominated 78 men as candidates, only 49 of whom were elected (19 of those elected were not clear royalists). By way of contrast, all 24 candidates nominated by opposition peers were returned. The humiliation of the Court itself was even greater. Judging from past experience, the various conciliar agencies of the Crown should have been able to influence 78 elections, but they judged it prudent to interfere in only 47. Including efforts made elsewhere, the Court agencies nominated 66 candidates, all but 14 of whom were defeated. A more crushing demonstration of the collapse of royal authority before an aroused electorate could hardly be imagined.

As for the Long Parliament, only 11 percent of its members were to consist of “courtiers, officials and hangers-on,” representing, so Stone assures us, “a smaller proportion than in any previous Parliament of which we have record.” When this historic latter assembly convened in November 1640, Stone could easily enough conclude, “Charles found himself almost alone.”119 Charles I’s constitutional isolation in 1640 (like that of Nicholas II in early 1917) was only made more dangerous by the fact that, like his later Russian counterpart, he could assuredly not count on a mobilized army to effect some sort of military coup de force. However much consternation there may have been on this score among Londoners in early 1640, some of whom saw Charles’s troops as designed for possible action against themselves rather than against Scottish occupation forces in northern counties, those who have studied the English forces most assiduously have found them inferior to their Scottish adversaries in ways that recall for us unflattering comparisons between Russian and German troops in World War I. Take, for example, the question of personnel. “With the exception of Sir Jacob Astley,” Fissel has observed, “the officers of the First Bishops’ War were inexpert and uninspiring. In contrast, the Covenanters selected what appear to have been able commanders.” While Charles chose his officers “by court connection,” the “kirk and committees of Scotland systematically sought out professionalism.” If anything, the situation for the English was even worse in 1640, given the “extraordinary turnover in officer corps personnel” and the lack of junior officers; the latter problem, it seems, plagued the English much as a crippling lack of NCOs would plague the Russians in 1916–17. Charles’ failure to call out the cream of the local militia to fill rank-and-file positions meant, Mark Fissel insists, that “the royal army would largely approximate to the riff-raff of an overseas expedition, with 119

Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, pp. 135–36. A revisionist study that places such computations in a broader societal context is that of Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

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similar results.”120 Inadequate financing, administrative inefficiency, and bottlenecks in the procurement of supplies of all sorts only aggravated the king’s personnel problems in both 1639 and 1640.121 How very different, seemingly, was the caliber of personnel north of the River Tweed! An impressive number of Scots had served militarily on the Continent during the 1630s, and many of the most proficient among them returned home in the Bishops’ Wars to fight against a monarch inattentive to Scottish demands on a wide array of fronts. Hence, Jonathan Scott has argued, the marked superiority of the military forces opposed to those of Charles I: The Scots covenanting army acquired a backbone of professionals experienced from Dutch and Swedish service. All the artillery officers, gunners and engineers were veterans of the Thirty Years War. Accordingly the supremacy of this army over the English (where inexperience was a major problem at every level) was not simply numerical. Arguably the covenanting movement was second at this time only to the Swedish crown in possessing an experienced national standing army sustained by a central government. In this respect it anticipated the English New Model Army by six years.122

Whether Strafford, if given full rein, could have defeated the Scots in 1639 remains a tantalizing question for some historians. In any case, by the following year his indisposition (along with that of Charles’ other major commander, Northumberland) joined with other, perhaps more fundamental problems – a worsening financial situation, the bitter aftermath of a failed “Short” Parliament, and so on – to render the Stuart monarch’s military – and, by extension, political – situation untenable. With the Scots now occupying Newcastle, and seconding fully-aroused Englishmen in demanding a royal summons to a new parliament at London, the overall situation in Stuart England had been transformed. Yet the depths of that “transformation” – in this case as in that of prerevolutionary Russia – can be appreciated most convincingly in political-cultural terms. If it was Germanophobia that especially isolated and delegitimized Nicholas II and his German wife in wartime Russia, it was the conspiratorial mentality of those who for historical reasons feared and hated continental and Irish Catholicism that ruinously isolated Charles I and his unabashedly Catholic wife in wartime England. Turning his back at this time on Richelieu’s anti-Habsburg (and potentially pro-English) faction in France, spurning the Protestant Dutch and the Protestant Danes, conceding unparalleled influence to Henrietta Maria and to several of her Jesuit and Spanish supporters at Court, 120 121 122

Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars, pp. 287–89. A point also stressed by Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 134–35. Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 140–41. See also Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars, pp. 79–80; and Allan MacInness, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 191–92.

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scheming for Spanish, Irish-Catholic, and even papal (!) support in his struggle with the defiant Presbyterian Scots, and permitting passage of Spanish troops across southern England while refusing to challenge Madrid’s navy in “his” Channel – in all these ways, Charles played perfectly into the hands of those of his affrighted subjects who saw in him the ultimate nightmare of an English monarch given over to “popish conspiracy” and, perhaps, to treasonous preparations for a Catholic invasion of (or “fifth-column” insurrection within) their country.123 Of course, it is only fair to note that now, as before, Charles I continued to believe (and was continually being encouraged at Court to believe) in the other version of this Janus-faced conspiracy theory. “From an early point,” Caroline Hibbard has written, “the king was persuaded that French intrigue was an element in the Scottish turmoil, and he persisted in this belief despite the absence of any information to support it.” Along with the French, in this conspiratorial version of current events, presumably came others in the usual pantheon of those plotting against the king’s divinely derived prerogatives. Papal agent George Con, who was apparently very close to Henrietta Maria and consequently wielded a great deal of influence at Whitehall in the critical late 1630s, presented the Scottish uprising “as but one incident in the international Calvinist conspiracy, subversive to both temporal and spiritual authority.” He lost no opportunity to place the Scottish crisis in an international context, “harping on the possibility of foreign intervention in Scotland, something that already worried Charles I.” Con assailed the Protestant Dutch and Swedes, and busily “fed the king’s fears that France was fishing in muddy waters and awaiting an opportunity, should the king become engaged in the north, to swoop down upon the unprotected southern coast of England.” Perhaps most significant, however, were Con’s efforts – and those of others at Court – to associate the “treachery” of the Scottish Covenanters with that of their “supposed wellwishers, the English puritans.”124 In this way, Charles was encouraged at all times to view the “insubordination” of his English subjects (and most vocal among them, the Puritans) and the rebelliousness of the Presbyterian Covenanters as mutually reinforcing threats to his sacrosanct role as God’s anointed sovereign in the British Isles. Unsurprisingly, the defiant Scots, endeavoring to raise support for their cause in 1639–40 among their Protestant co-religionists in England, were every bit as insistent on linking events in the two British kingdoms together and placing them in an international context – a context mirroring in many respects the other, pro-“papist” context in this schizoid religio-political culture. As Hibbard has elaborated: 123

124

On all of these issues, see in particular: Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, pp. 83–89, 91, 147–49, and 150–52; and Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 136–42, for the period of the Bishops’ Wars in particular. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, pp. 94–95.

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In their publications, they depicted the dispute as a central episode in the holy war between Catholicism and the reformed religion. Over the several years before the meeting of the Long Parliament in November 1640, this propaganda persuaded a widening segment of the English public that the policies of the 1630s, especially those from 1637 to 1640, reflected the workings of a Catholic conspiracy that aimed at the conquest and reCatholicization of the British Isles. The theme of crusading antipopery in the Scottish response to the new prayer book is sometimes dismissed as either paranoid or transparently hypocritical. But if one considers [George] Con’s attitude toward the crisis, his attempts to influence the king’s Scottish policy, and the way Charles I actually responded to the situation, the Covenanters’ suspicions about Catholic influences on royal policy look more reasonable.125

Of course, Puritans in England had as many historically based reasons as did Presbyterians in Scotland to fear “Catholic influences on royal policy.” They could (and did) refer back to the Marian persecutions, the Armada, and the Gunpowder Plot as well as to more recent Catholic machinations on the Continent. And if such recollections were not enough, they learned during the Bishops’ Wars of Charles I’s negotiations to bring over a Catholic army from Ireland and Spanish troops from Flanders to overwhelm his Protestant foes in Scotland – and, perhaps, in England itself?126 Small wonder, then, if apprehensive Protestants in the two kingdoms came to conflate the “popish” threats to their religion and way of life on both sides of the River Tweed. (Of course, for Archbishop Laud, the king’s closest ecclesiastical confidant, there was also a conflation of fears: “the Tumults in Scotland hath now brought that Kingdom into danger. No question, but there is a great Concurrence between them, and the Puritan Party in England.”127 ) In any case, the king’s policies had led to a war in which, Jonathan Scott has argued, “the beliefs of many English and Scots troops were closer to each other than either to their king.”128 If he is right, a similarity between Presbyterian and Puritan attitudes among the British soldiery in the Bishops’ Wars was coming to reflect that in British society at large – a development of potentially immense danger to Charles I and the regime he was attempting to uphold. In light of all of this, it was only logical that, during 1640, the “Short Parliament” should give way before very long to the “Long Parliament,” and that, by the time the latter body convened in early November, the ancien r´egime should be teetering on the brink of collapse. “Even the king’s councilors wondered,” Derek Hirst has marveled. “As Charles drove on in his bid to crush the Scots without . . . changing his policies, Lord Admiral Northumberland confided helplessly, ‘We are as great strangers to all proceedings as if we lived at Constantinople.’ The private papers of royal advisers and other officials who 125 126 127 128

Ibid., p. 90. Other international aspects of the Anglo-Scottish struggles of 1639–40 are discussed by Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King, pp. 136–37. Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 79–80. Cited in Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 139–40. Ibid., p. 139.

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should have been (but were not) in a position to warn the king of his catastrophic isolation in society “show increasing signs of demoralization and a sense of isolation.”129 It may have been the sheer availability of parliament as an historically based institution to mediate outstanding public issues, both foreign and domestic, that (as much as any other factor) at least allowed Charles I (unlike the more autocratic and brutal Nicholas II) to maintain a tenuous hold on his crown when the first stages of genuine revolution convulsed England. In any case, it must appear to us today that at least some degree of “revolution” had without much doubt become the order of the day when, on November 3, 1640, Charles began to be forced into a reckoning with representatives of his apprehensive and very angry subjects gathered at Westminster in London. At first glance, the circumstances attending the collapse of old regimes in Russia and England would seem markedly different from those attending the demise of the old regime in France: after all, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate altogether, and Charles I was forced back upon the harsh “mercies” of parliament, in wartime, with hostile troops in partial occupation of their realms, whereas France was at peace during 1787–89. Yet, at a deeper level of analysis, the French situation in 1787–89 seems hardly less daunting for Louis XVI’s state than those of 1916–17 and 1639–40 were for the Romanov and Stuart states, respectively. It is arguable that France remained “at peace” in 1787 only because it had not the military means to challenge Prussian troops drubbing its “Patriot” allies in the United Provinces, or to lift a finger in defense of its traditional friends in Sweden, Poland, and Turkey, who were ever more at the mercy of Russia’s Catherine the Great. By late 1788 even France’s presumed “ally” Habsburg Austria would be profiting from Versailles’ geostrategic impotence by joining Catherine II in an all-out assault on Ottoman Turkey – thus ensuring that yet another widely demonized queen (in this case, Austrian-born Marie-Antoinette) would be entangled in the origins of her adopted country’s revolution.130 It would seem useful, therefore, to base our analysis of the collapse of absolutism and onset of revolution in France on the same explanatory factors cited in connection with Russia and England: that is, economics and state finance, constitutional developments, the state of the army, and the cultural context of politics. Once again, the transcendent significance of the dialectic between foreign and domestic affairs will constantly loom here in the background. The interrelatedness of foreign and domestic policy appears immediately as we broach the issue of finances, as the debt that helped to sink Louis XVI’s 129 130

Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England, 1603–58, pp. 186–87. France’s role in the European power politics of 1787–89 is conveniently summarized in Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution, Chapters 3 and 5. On Marie-Antoinette’s role in the geopolitics of the late ancien r´egime, see in particular Thomas E. Kaiser, “Who’s Afraid of Marie-Antoinette? Diplomacy, Austrophobia and the Queen,” French History 14 (2000), pp. 241–71; and “From Fiscal Crisis to Revolution,” in Kaiser and Van Kley, eds., From Deficit to Deluge, passim.

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government had largely been incurred in the most recent war with the English, and because a staggering 75 percent of state expenditure projected in the budget of April 1788 (the first and last budget of the old regime) was directly or indirectly related to military matters!131 Well before the publication of the budget of April 1788, however, the king’s finances had become seriously imperiled. During the American War, Finance Minister Jacques Necker had kept those finances afloat by curtailing pensions to those in favor at Court, by streamlining the administration of finances in the king’s various treasuries, by squeezing as much revenue as possible out of vingti`eme (i.e., 5 percent) taxation of landowners (including nobles), and above all; by assuring the crown’s creditors that they would always receive, on an annual basis, the interest specified by statute for the loans they had made to the state.132 Necker, however, had been dismissed by the king in 1781, and none of his successors had maintained his strict regimen of fiscal management. This was most arrestingly the case after 1783: Charles Alexandre de Calonne, the new Controller-General of Finances, abandoned so many of Necker’s critical administrative reforms that by late 1786 and early 1787 he was finding it increasingly difficult to guarantee the annual payment of interest to Louis XVI’s creditors. Because there were in France (just as in the England of the late 1630s) no constitutional means to ensure a trustworthy management of royal finances, Louis XVI’s government (like that of Charles I in 1639–40) found itself increasingly and perilously dependent on “anticipations,” that is, the short-term credit notes issued to it by various public and private financiers in anticipation of future tax revenue. Ominously, this short-term credit had by early 1787 ballooned to a staggering 255 million livres. This was, as Robert D. Harris has noted, “the most onerous of all types of government loans, the one that Necker tried most to keep limited.”133 The danger (fully appreciated by Necker during his ministry of 1776–81, but not clearly perceived even now by Calonne) was that if such “anticipations” became compromised in a severe economic recession, they could (in combination with other factors) bring down a monarchical government still lacking constitutional (i.e., parliamentary) legitimacy in the eyes of its all-important bond-holders.

131

132

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On this latter point, see (among other historians) Fred Braesch, Finances et monnaie ´ eric ´ r´evolutionnaires: recherches, e´ tudes et documents (Nancy: Roumegoux, 1934); and Pierre Goubert, L’Ancien R´egime, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Colin, 1969–73), II: 137–39. On Necker’s fiscal policies, see: John Bosher, French Finances, 1770–1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Robert D. Harris, Necker: Reform Statesman of the Ancien R´egime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); and Jean Egret, Necker: Ministre de Louis XVI, 1776–1790 (Paris: H. Champion, 1975). Harris, Necker and the Revolution of 1789 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986), esp. pp. 80–81. See also, on all of this, Eugene Nelson White, “Was There a Solution to the Ancien Regime’s Financial Dilemma?” Journal of Economic History 49 (1989): 545–68. ´

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And this is precisely what came to pass in 1787–88. Many of the accountants and bankers on whose short-term advances of capital the crown had increasingly come to live day by day were using both public (that is, bond-holders’) and private funds to speculate as never before on the Paris stock exchange; and they themselves were, in a number of cases, on the verge of or in actual bankruptcy at this time. A “severe general crisis” in financial circles was apparently shaking public confidence in the fiscal system.134 This general crisis, in turn, may have owed some of its severity to a larger economic recession of the post-1778 period which has long been assumed by C. E. Labrousse and those following in his wake. They have contended that adversity for wine producers and textile workers in this alleged “inter-cyclical recession” drove them to resist the demands of royal tax collectors. That in turn, by jeopardizing the credit of financiers who relied in part on continuing income from diverse forms of indirect taxes, may have accelerated the trend toward bankruptcies in their circles and hence toward the insolvency of a government reliant in turn (through anticipations) on these financiers.135 Whatever the validity of Labroussian ideas about an “intercyclical” recession during this period – and they have been seriously questioned recently by a growing number of specialists – it does still appear likely that the French economy was encountering difficulties on the eve of the Revolution. Again, we know that other factors were also working against Calonne’s increasingly desperate efforts to stave off bankruptcy: for instance, the growing numbers of creditors in the 1780s ultrasensitive to all vicissitudes in royal credit, evolving attitudes in “public opinion” on state/financial issues, and growing uncertainties regarding inflows of capital from English, Dutch, Swiss, and other foreign money markets. Gail Bossenga has most recently recapped the research in this area by citing four specific factors militating against any royal recurrence (in the late 1780s) to the old fiscal “escape strategy” of declaring state bankruptcy: (1) the partial internationalization of French long-term debt; (2) changing attitudes of finance ministers and of other royal officials toward the expensive maintenance of so much short-term credit; (3) tendencies in the pivotal Paris Parlement toward endorsement of a reconvened Estates-General for the purpose not only of 134

135

Bosher, French Finances, pp. 189–90. On this crisis, see also George V. Taylor, “The Paris Bourse on the Eve of the Revolution, 1781–1789,” American Historical Review 67 (1962): 951–77; and Harris, Necker and the Revolution of 1789, pp. 80–81. The classic account of an “inter-cyclical economic crisis” during the late 1770s and 1780s is that of Ernst Labrousse, La Crise de Economie franc¸aise a` la fin de l’Ancien R´egime et au D´ebut de la R´evolution (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942). It has been conceptually challenged in recent years: see, for example, Rondo Cameron and Charles Freedman, “French Economic Growth: A Radical Revision,” Social Science History 7 (1983): 3–30; David Weir, “Tontines, Public Finance, and Revolution in France and England, 1688–1789,” Journal of Economic History 49 (1989): 95–124; and Philip T. Hoffman and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “New Work in French Economic History,” French Historical Studies 23 (2000): 439–53.

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sanctioning taxes but also of guaranteeing government loans; and (4) changing cultural attitudes (in French society) regarding what some fiscal experts have termed the “sanctity of the national debt.”136 All of these factors would plague Calonne and his eventual successor in the Finance Ministry in 1787–88, Etienne-Charles Lomenie de Brienne. In the ´ meantime, however, Calonne found (as those counseling Charles I had discovered during the Bishops’ Wars) that, sooner or later, financial and state-security crises in absolute monarchies blossomed into constitutional crises. In a fateful memorandum submitted to Louis XVI in August 1786, the Controller-General of Finances recommended that an Assembly of Notables be summoned to consider a battery of fiscal/administrative reforms required to ward off government bankruptcy.137 However, Calonne, in pursuing this course, almost immediately became caught up in an uncontrollable dialectic of ministerial initiative and public response. Unsurprisingly, the Notables, once assembled early in 1787, demanded to see the government’s fiscal records before they would even consider endorsing proposed reforms, many of which in any case seemed likely only to refill the coffers of absolutism without conceding any compensating rights to the king’s loyal subjects. The Notables may have been seen by the shortsighted Calonne as “loyal councilors,” Vivian Gruder has observed, “but they fast became prosecuting attorneys and soon assumed the guise of quasi-representatives of the nation, trying to make their consultative assembly into a virtual legislature.”138 When put to the ultimate test, that of deciding whether or not to ratify the government’s legislation, the Notables, as Gruder has explained, could only continue to stake out an ever more radical position: When refusing to grant final approval, especially to tax measures, they denied having political power, contending they were appointed, not elected, mere private persons, not deputies. Instead they believed that other institutions, other instruments of the nation already established or to be called into existence, should have the task of consenting to laws. They turned the Crown’s constraints on their functions, which they often criticized and tried to break, into an argument for conferring the larger role to which they aspired on another . . . more effective body.

And although the members of this assemblage might offer various institutional alternatives to their convocation, it was predictable that some among their 136

137 138

On all of these issues, see White, “Was There a Solution?” p. 566; Weir, “Tontines, Public Finance, and Revolution,” passim; James C. Riley, “Dutch Investment in France, 1781–1787,” in the Journal of Economic History 33 (1973): 733–57; and Gail Bossenga, “Financial Origins of the French Revolution,” in Kaiser and Van Kley, eds., From Deficit to Deluge, Chapter 1. On this memorandum and the reforms it advocated, consult Jean Egret, The French Prerevolution, 1787–1788, trans. Wesley D. Camp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Vivian Gruder, “Paths to Political Consciousness: The Assembly of Notables of 1787 and the ‘Pre-Revolution’ in France, French Historical Studies 13 (1984): 348. The entire essay (along with several other articles) has been reproduced in slightly revised form in Gruder, The Notables and the Nation: The Political Schooling of the French, 1787–1788 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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number should have urged on the authorities “an estates-general, which they looked upon as the fullest embodiment of the nation’s will, in the past as in the future.”139 Indeed, Leblanc de Castillon, a distinguished judge from Provence, had proclaimed early on in the Notables’ deliberations that the Estates-General would ultimately have to sanction any new taxes; and no one less than Lafayette was to issue a clarion call for the resurrection of this historic organ of national consultation on the eve of the Assembly’s dissolution. It was clear that the Bourbon state, smarting at the time from its diplomatic/military impotence in a time of threatening continental warfare both in the West and in the East, could not – any more than Charles I’s warring and beleaguered state in 1639–40 – lay to rest the ghosts of venerable constitutional precedent. That the dialogue between the government and the Notables engendered such a radical constitutional discourse owed much to the concurrent politicization of the educated public. The abbe´ Andre´ Morellet spoke to this point in a revealing letter to Britain’s Lord Shelburne: A slight fever has gripped the country. As soon as the public has seen the Notables seriously occupied with its interests, opinion has given them a power which they would not have had by the manner in which they were convened. The Nation has, so to speak, recognized them as its true representatives, although they were assembled with quite a different intention, and by reason of the confidence acquired they have become like the deputies of our old States General.140

The Notables, no doubt painfully aware that hawkers in the streets of the capital were selling dolls to the raucous refrain of “Notables for sale!” and cognizant as well of popular cartoons portraying them as guileless geese about to be devoured by the authorities, desired at all costs to avoid playing a role of subservience to the government. Hence the blunt warning of the prince de Beauvau to his fellow Notables that if their assemblage served “only to levy taxes,” it would be hopelessly “compromised in the eyes of the nation;” and hence the final agreement of all the standing committees in the Assembly that, in the decisive matter of consent to taxation, they could not possibly fill the shoes of either the parlements or that ultimate of ultimates, the Estates-General.141 It is true that the king, operating from an ever-eroding position, tried to mollify the Notables by handing over to them the fiscal accounts they had been demanding, firing Calonne, and replacing him with one of their own, the Archbishop of Toulouse, Lomenie de Brienne. But the Notables remained ´ defiant. The next step, then, for the government, still trying to avoid recourse to the Estates-General (did it conceivably have the English revolutionary precedent 139 140

141

Gruder, “Paths to Political Consciousness,” pp. 349–50. Cited in Harris, Necker and the Revolution of 1789, p. 134. Refer also to the discussion of the public’s political awakening at this time in Elie Carcassonne, Montesquieu et le probl`eme de la Constitution franc¸aise au XVIIIe si`ecle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1927), esp. pp. 554–57. Harris, Necker and the Revolution of 1789, p. 134; Egret, French Prerevolution, p. 34.

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of November 1640 in mind?) was to force its edicts – above all those aimed at augmenting sorely needed revenue – through the Paris Parlement. Yet the results, again, were predictable. The judges of the Parlement, loath to appear any more amenable to ministerial wishes than had the Notables, hesitated not a whit to invoke the “constitution” of the realm on the day they received from the crown its legislation extending the stamp tax. “A similar type of tax had served as pretext for the insurrection of the English colonies against the mother country,” reminisced one observer. “Orators of the Paris Parlement were proud to have to reiterate the arguments of the American publicists.”142 The Parlement rejected the stamp tax, and insisted, as had the Notables, on access to the government’s fiscal accounts and projections. By 25 July, the tribunal was formally calling for the reconvening of the Estates-General, and two days later its printed protests making that portentous demand were selling openly on the streets of Paris. Further attempts by Brienne to negotiate with the magistrates only elicited further, insistent calls for the Estates-General. Eventually, the rebellious judges were banished to Troyes. Yet it was becoming more obvious by the day that Louis XVI’s harried ministers could no longer hope (had they in fact ever been able to expect) to put the constitutional genie back in its bottle. By August 1787, Jean Egret tells us, “everyone was calling for the Estates General, and some daring journalists were already speculating about its potential composition . . . and about the task it would have to accomplish.”143 Attempts by the government to carry out a coup de force against the Paris Parlement and other institutional opponents of its edicts in May 1788 only provoked widespread outrage in society. Even the abbe´ Morellet, though one of Brienne’s most loyal collaborators, informed the Finance Minister flatly: “We need some bar to the repetition of abuses: we need the Estates General or the equivalent. That is what people everywhere are saying.”144 In such circumstances of almost complete isolation – isolation inescapably recalling to us that of Charles I in 1640, and foreshadowing that of Nicholas II at the start of 1917 – Louis XVI had no choice but to retreat. By 5 July 1788, his government in conciliar decree was inviting “all Frenchmen, through provincial Estates or assemblies, to make known their opinions on the appropriate rules to be followed” in the summoning of the Estates-General. On August 8, a royal edict informed the nation that the Estates-General would convene on 142 143

144

Ibid., p. 94. Ibid., p. 103. On the steadily growing pamphlet literature speculating on constitutional issues during 1787–88, see Ralph W. Greenlaw, “Pamphlet Literature in France During the Period of the Aristocratic Revolt (1787–1788),” Journal of Modern History 29 (1957): 353; and Kenneth Margerison, “History, Representative Institutions, and Political Rights in the French Pre-Revolution (1787–1789),” French Historical Studies 15 (1987): 68–98. Egret, French Prerevolution, p. 108. See also Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution, pp. 177–181, for an in-depth discussion of the “ideological onslaught on absolutism” in myriad publications at this time.

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May 1, 1789, and on August 16, yet another decree, in effect announcing the state’s “temporary” bankruptcy, also promised the crown’s creditors that the upcoming national convocation would permanently secure their investments. Not long after having thus associated fiscal and constitutional issues indissolubly in the eyes of the nation, Lomenie de Brienne gave way to a renascent ´ Jacques Necker. Absolutism in France was, in effect, signing its own death warrant.145 The French government’s inability to carry out a coup de force against the constitutional opposition in 1788 – or to stem the tide of popular revolution the following summer – also reflected in part the state of the French army. Here, with the third of our four analytical factors, we discover yet another element common to the three revolutionary situations. True, the French forces were not shattered by defeat in the late 1780s, as those levied by Charles I had been in 1640, and as those fighting for tsarist Russia would be by 1917. Still, Louis XVI’s troops were no better prepared to repress domestic dissent of any kind than were those of the besieged Stuart and Romanov sovereigns. In a season of “peace” imposed by a looming national bankruptcy, Louis XVI convened a special council of war to promulgate badly needed reforms in the military. Samuel F. Scott has summarized some of the most important of those reforms: Besides a number of tactical and organizational reforms, e.g. the decision to use columns for movement and lines for combat and the reorganization of chasseur units, the council improved conditions of military service. A new pay-scale was established which raised the pay for all grades, but most of all for the officers. . . . Officers and N.C.O.s were forbidden to inflict any punishment except those authorized by regulations; they were likewise prohibited from mistreating their men. . . . Punishment by blows with a sabre flat was, however, maintained. Each regiment was required to establish a school for candidates to the N.C.O. ranks which would teach the men to read, write, and count.146

All of these (and other) reforms patently helped to lay the foundations for the spectacular performance of French arms in the ensuing revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. In 1788–89, however, such measures, albeit urgently needed from a technical point of view, tended to exacerbate deeply rooted tensions and jealousies within the officer hierarchy, pitting established court aristocrats, provincial squires, newly created nobles, and ambitious, affluent commoners against each other. “Witnesses all agree,” Jean Egret observed, “on the profound malaise produced in the army by the drastic treatment applied to it. . . . It is easy to imagine, if difficult to measure, the disarray and exasperation produced among officers, especially older ones, by a reform that threw everything into question.”147 145 146 147

Egret, French Prerevolution, pp. 183–85. Samuel F. Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 27–33. Egret, French Prerevolution, pp. 47–54. Scott provides a detailed corroboration of Egret on this point: consult Response of the Royal Army, esp. pp. 27–33.

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Clearly, any deterioration of morale among officers could have implications for the army’s efficacy as an instrument of social control – and hence, in the circumstances of 1788–89, of counterrevolution. “What ultimately incapacitated the army and led directly to the collapse of both royal and noble authority,” Scott has written, “was the breakdown of the discipline exercised by officers over their men. This failure arose primarily from the conditions of military life, particularly the relationship between soldiers and officers.”148 On more than one occasion during 1788 and the spring and summer of 1789, officers hesitated to order their troops into action against rioters, or the troops themselves proved reluctant to march against their countrymen; such failures on the part of the army in a number of areas marked by unrest reflected in some measure the lack of empathy between noble officers (who were, again, often feuding among themselves over reform-induced questions of protocol and procedure) and soldiers of humble social provenance. When, in addition, we factor into the equation how officers and ordinary soldiers alike wore themselves out policing the countryside in a time of subsistence crisis, and were frequently underpaid and hungry themselves, it becomes even easier to understand the diminishing reliability of the army as an instrument of social repression in 1788–89. Finally, there was, in the case of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette and the French government, as in our other cases of incipient revolution, a politicalcultural context in which financial, constitutional, military, and other “objective” problems took on an enhanced significance. By fusing in the eyes of the state’s multiplying critics foreign issues of geostrategic impotence and domestic issues of “despotism,” Austrophobia and (indirectly) Anglophobia did for France what Germanophobia did for Russia, and what anti-Catholic paranoia did for England. And here, again, the role of the queen was important. There is a growing consensus, constructed by scholars such as John Hardman, Munro Price, and Thomas E. Kaiser, that Marie-Antoinette’s political influence at Versailles, however questionable in the early years of her husband’s reign, had become something to reckon with by the late 1780s.149 That the queen was Austrian, and sister to Austrian ruler Joseph II, helped to ensure the fusion of foreign and domestic issues in the jaundiced eyes of political observers in France on the eve of its revolution. 148

149

Ibid., pp. 27–33. Other military specialists have endorsed this assertion. See, for example, Jean-Paul Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution: From Citizen-Soldiers to Instrument of Power, trans. Robert R. Palmer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 22–29. See John Hardman, Louis XVI (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993); Munro Price, Preserving the Monarchy: The comte de Vergennes, 1774–1787 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); J. Hardman and M. Price, eds., “Louis XVI and the comte de Vergennes: correspondence, 1774–1787,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Thomas E. Kaiser, “Who’s Afraid of Marie-Antoinette? Diplomacy, Austrophobia and the Queen,” French History 14 (2000): 241–71.

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Persistent conspiratorial rumors concerning the queen’s supposed machinations on behalf of both “despotic” power at home and the expansionist schemes of brother Joseph II abroad (obviously at France’s expense) had already figured prominently in the notorious Diamond Necklace Affair of the mid-1780s. As Kaiser has remarked, this unsavory scandal “was undoubtedly crucial in the history of Marie-Antoinette’s defamation, for it confirmed and publicized long-standing allegations in connection with the queen’s abuse of power – involving greed, amorous indiscretions, and cruel vengeance – while it cast her as a player in complex schemes to weaken the monarchy for her own benefit and, in one version, Austria’s as well.”150 Subsequent developments, both at Versailles and in eastern Europe, hardened these damning impressions among the queen’s multitudinous detractors. At Court, her widely bruited role in the appointment of Lomenie de Brienne as successor to Calonne and her advo´ cacy of a hard line against the Paris Parlement and other law-courts protesting the government’s eleventh-hour reforms helped to earn for her the unenviable sobriquet of “madame Deficit.” In European affairs, the queen’s reported ´ efforts to divert French funds desperately needed at home to her Imperial brother’s military campaign against Turkey demonstrated (so Kaiser has maintained) “that Marie-Antoinette was undermining the entire thrust of French foreign policy, which as regards the defense of Turkey enjoyed great public support.” By 1787–88, thus, it would appear that, through the agency of Louis XVI’s wife, “‘despotism’ at home had now been fused representationally with ‘despotism’ abroad.” All of this seems therefore to validate Kaiser’s more general conclusion that “if we are to understand how a fiscal crisis turned into a revolution” in France, “we must factor in the “static” around the queen, in particular the very real, semi-transparent Austrian efforts to co-opt French policy made possible by her temporary spike in influence on the eve of the Revolution.”151 Moreover, French Anglophobia – if only indirectly – worked much as French Austrophobia did during the 1787–88 “pre-revolution” to conjoin domestic and foreign questions in the eyes of the French government’s detractors. We know, for instance, that in 1787 the Dutch imbroglio (in the course of which France’s “Patriot” proteg ´ es ´ were driven from power by London’s Prussian ally) drove a wedge into the King’s very Council itself. The War Minister, Segur, ´ seconded by Naval Minister Castries, called for the mobilization of twenty-five battalions under the command of Lieutenant General Rochambeau for a possible action in defense of the Dutch Patriots; but Finance Minister Lomenie de ´ Brienne, obsessed by the state’s accumulating fiscal woes, vetoed the project. 150 151

Ibid., p. 262. On the “Affair” itself, see Frances Mossiker, The Queen’s Necklace (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961). The quotations here are drawn from: Kaiser, “Who’s Afraid of Marie-Antoinette?” pp. 263– 64; and “From Fiscal Crisis to Revolution: The Court and French Foreign Policy, 1787–1789,” in Kaiser and Van Kley, eds., From Deficit to Deluge, p. 141.

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Both Segur and Castries were soon to resign in disgust; and, responding angrily ´ to this abject French retreat before what was, he well knew, a coalition of Prussia and the eternal English adversary, the duc de Montmorency-Luxembourg observed: Abandoning the Patriots served to demonstrate the inexperience, the weakness, and the incompetence of the first minister [i.e., Brienne] and the foreign minister [i.e. Montmorin, Vergennes’s successor], prompting scorn for alliances with France and disgust with her conduct; she was the plaything of the will of others.152

Yet when, scarcely eight months later, the government, attempting to break the parlementary opposition to fiscal edicts aimed at (among other things) strengthening the financial sinews of French foreign policy, promulgated its so-called May Edicts, it ran into a wall of virtually universal opposition. From celebrated literati such as Lafayette, Barnave, Target, Condorcet, Bergasse, and Mirabeau to the clergy convened in its quinquennial convocation of 1788 to noblemen assembled in Brittany and Bearn to the representatives of the three ´ orders in Provence and Dauphine´ to judges in courts high and low throughout the land – educated Frenchmen everywhere joined in a condemnation of what they pilloried as the rampant “ministerial despotism” of Lomenie de ´ Brienne and his infamous cronies.153 Louis XVI, as isolated (with his Habsburg queen) in domestic affairs as he was humiliated in geopolitical affairs by “allies” such as Habsburg Austria and by out-and-out antagonists such as Prussia and England, had in the final analysis to beat a retreat hauntingly redolent of that endured by Charles I in 1640. Divinely ordained absolutism, that is, had (at least provisionally) to cede the stage to the uncertainties of representative governance. What had been 1640 for England became 1789 for France – with the significant difference that, unlike Parliament in the English case, the Estates-General in the French case had not (at least in recent times) been allowed to play a mediating role in the disposition of national and local affairs. That, in all three of these cases of transition from prerevolutionary to early revolutionary times, the monarchs, queens, and governments involved had been rejected in their traditional roles by many of the governed naturally invites a closer examination of how, precisely, those subjects (whether of elitist or of ´ humble status) became politicized by their rulers’ dilemmas and, how, then, they mobilized in an increasingly independent fashion to play their own roles in the political “space” so suddenly and so unpredictably opened up for them.

152

153

Cited in Egret, French Prerevolution, p. 41. See ibid., pp. 40–42, for a succinct discussion of the Dutch crisis. See also, on this subject, Murphy, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, p. 461. See Egret, French Prerevolution, pp. 145–69 for a thorough discussion of the May Edicts of 1788 and the national controversy to which they gave rise.

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The Popular Revolutionary Awakening: Classes and Masses Here, let us begin (for a change!) with France, which was at peace in the late 1780s, and only then proceed on to the wartime Russia of 1916–17 and the wartime England of 1639–40. To do so will allow us somewhat to separate out issues of social history from the state-security analysis we have felt constrained so far to emphasize in so many connections, and this (we can hope) will permit us to draw somewhat closer to the perceptions of current affairs held by “ordinary” folk in three countries entering the initial stages of full-blown political revolution. In the case of France, the willingness of, first, the Assembly of Notables and, then, the Paris Parlement to defy ministerial (and, ultimately, royal) wishes on matters of taxation almost immediately unleashed a debate within “respectable” ranks of society over constitutional and social questions. It was relatively easy for most clerical, noble, and wealthy bourgeois polemicists to condemn the government on strictly constitutional grounds: “ministerial despotism,” after all, could readily be discerned behind all official efforts to enhance state revenue by raising taxes. The lead was taken here by the press, newly liberated by the authorities from July 1788 on, and by a number of “clubs” such as the so-called “Society of Thirty.” Some of the members of this last-named “society,” courtiers of the old aristocracy, became strident critics of “despotism” because they had lost out in the competition for government posts and patronage to families of the rural squirearchy; others, whether hailing from the military noblesse, the judiciary, or even the bourgeoisie, acted out of genuine idealism.154 In any case, from such “clubs,” from the press, and from the outpouring of pamphlet literature associated with them, emerged the challenge of the “National” or “Patriot” party to the constitutional status quo in late 1788.155 Speaking as constitutionalists, some in this Party looked hopefully to institutionalized Estates-General and revived provincial Estates to deliver the kingdom from the yoke of “despotism.” Others spoke of adopting something like the English constitution. The most radical among them, however – most notably, the abbe´ Emmanuel Joseph Siey` ´ es – vested the nation’s sovereignty squarely and without appeal in a hypothetical (and, in most versions, unicameral) legislature.156 But to raise the constitutional question was ineluctably to broach social issues as well – and thus furnish grounds for profound polarization within these still largely elitist circles of commentators on current affairs. On the one ´ 154 155 156

On the Society of Thirty, see Daniel L. Wick, A Conspiracy of Well-Intentioned Men: The Society of Thirty and the French Revolution (New York: Garland, 1987). Much of this propaganda – especially that emanating from the newly liberated press – is reviewed in Gruder, The Notables and the Nation, esp. Chapters 4 through 10. Egret, French Prerevolution, p. 194. On Siey` ´ es in particular, see William Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abb´e Siey`es and “What Is the Third Estate?” (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).

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side, Mirabeau declared: “War on privileges and privileged, that is my motto;” Target exhorted: “Provinces, cities, courts, companies, Orders – oppose the King with your privileges, but strike them [down] before France assembled;” and Cerutti ridiculed those privil´egi´es who claimed that “the people are con´ spiring on all sides against the nobility, the clergy, and the magistracy.” It does not seem that, at this (relatively early) point, Patriots such as the foregoing were consciously advocating the abolition of the old schema of “orders,” either within the Estates-General or within French society as a whole. But they assuredly were conjuring up a France in which social rank would reflect merit rather than genealogy; and double representation for Third Estate delegates and voting on all issues “by head” rather than “by order” in the impending assembly of the nation were in their minds initial prerequisites toward that end.157 Critically, support for modernization of the Estate-General’s composition and procedures – and, in general terms, for the idea of meritocracy – was also welling up from the grass roots all over France. At Rouen in Normandy, for instance, bourgeois in huge numbers signed a petition to the king invoking the need for deliberation and voting in common in the Estates. In Provence, nineteen towns and villages and nine parishes drafted petitions demanding a doubling of the Third Estate contingent. By 30 December, one nouvelliste, “generally well informed,” could claim that “the number of demands from Provinces, Cities, Communities, and Corporations” across France “for the doubling of the Third Estate is immense, and some put it at more than 800 without reckoning those arriving here daily from all quarters.”158 It is perhaps needless to add that many of these manifestos called as well for voting “by head” in the Estates and, more generally, for “careers open to talent” in this reawakening kingdom. Moreover, as Greenlaw, Margerison, Furet, Gruder, and others would remind us, a polemical literature drawing very specifically on French historical precedents was now inundating the realm with the same demands.159 Not surprisingly, such a swelling national chorus for social as well as constitutional change provoked an irate response from those still committed to the inequality and privilege of the ancien r´egime. On September 25, 1788, the Paris Parlement spearheaded this reaction by insisting that the Estates-General be patterned after the last convocation of this body, that of 1614–15. This would, presumably, ensure a national deliberative body in which equal contingents representing the three estates, and voting on all issues “by order” rather than “by head,” would effectively throttle all meaningful reform – above all, 157 158 159

These citations are from Egret, French Prerevolution, pp. 195–96. Ibid., esp. pp. 206–43. See Greenlaw, “Pamphlet Literature in France,” p. 353; Margerison, “History, Representative Institutions, and Political Rights,” pp. 95–98; Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, pp. 33–36; and Gruder, The Notables and the Nation, esp. Chapters 8 and 11.

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social reform.160 A similar message emanated from November 6 to December 12 from the second Assembly of Notables, convened by the reinstated Finance Minister Jacques Necker to advise him on the constitution and procedures of the Estates. The Notables evidenced little enthusiasm for doubling the Third Estate, and even more overwhelmingly rejected the key notion of suffrage by head. They would concede to the “Patriots” fiscal equality and nothing else. What was more, they went on the offensive against their progressive foes: the crusty and reactionary prince de Conti inveighed against “scandalous writings spreading disorder and dissension throughout the realm,” and in the Assembly’s final days the Princes of the Blood presented a manifesto to Louis XVI restating the Notables’ rejection of all changes other than those strictly financial in nature.161 As 1788 became 1789, deepening divisions within elitist ranks of French ´ society over the prospects for genuine social change approached civil strife in some of the provinces. “The nobility of Lower Poitou,” Georges Lefebvre has written, “came together spontaneously to protest.” The parlementaires of Besanc¸on in Franche-Comte´ drew up impassioned remonstrances, while their fellow-reactionaries in the Estates of the province, “assembling under the ancient forms, did likewise.” In Provence, the Third Estate was so alienated by clerical/noble intransigence that it refused altogether to send delegates to the Provenc¸al Estates. In Brittany, Lefebvre informs us, “the class conflict degenerated into civil war. . . . Bands of men recruited by the nobles, on January 26, 1789, came into conflict with the law students.” The latter combatants “won the battle and besieged their opponents in the hall of the Breton Estates.” The young men of Nantes took up arms upon hearing this news, and marched off to reinforce Brittany’s Patriotic heroes at Rennes. Dramatic events such as these moved leading Patriots at Paris to vilify their conservative foes with new torrents of rhetoric: Sieyes, in his renowned essay “What Is the Third ´ Estate?”, poured cold scorn upon the “parasitical” aristocracy, while Mirabeau (excluded by old regime snobbism from the Provenc¸al Estates) took to the printed page to lionize Marius, “less great for having vanquished the Cimbrians than for having exterminated the order of nobility in Rome.”162 Equally revealing in this connection was the divergence between noble and bourgeois opinions on social issues expressed in the cahiers de dol´eances (writs of grievance) prepared throughout France concomitantly with voting for delegates to the Estates General. Even “revisionists” such as Roger Chartier and Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, however eager to unearth in the cahiers evidence of 160

161 162

For somewhat differing interpretations of this controversial decree, see Stone, French Parlements, pp. 102–3; and Dale Van Kley, “The Estates General as Ecumenical Council: The Constitutionalism of Corporate Consensus and the Parlement’s Ruling of September 25, 1788,” Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 1–52. See Egret, French Prerevolution, pp. 199–202 on the subject of the second Assembly of Notables. On all of this, consult Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, pp. 60–62.

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a fusion of nobles and bourgeois on the threshold of the Revolution, have had to allow a real difference between noble and Third Estate cahiers on questions with social ramifications for the kingdom. Chartier discovered a general insistence on the part of commoners for the vote by head in the Estates-General, whereas, by contrast, he found only a small proportion of the nobles’ cahiers pronouncing unambiguously for such an arrangement.163 Even more significantly, his colleague Chaussinand-Nogaret admitted forthrightly that only a “radical fringe” of noble cahiers accepted “the access of all, without distinction of birth and status, to public and military employments, [and] the suppression of distinctions and formalities humiliating for the Third Estate.”164 Yet again, both Chartier and Chaussinand-Nogaret necessarily acknowledged a substantial divergence between noble and bourgeois grievance lists on the subject of seigneurial dues and justice. The electors’ writs of grievance, however impressively testifying to a consensus among French notables on a variety of constitutional and administrative issues, thus witnessed also to the continuing potential divisiveness of social privilege in the elitist politics of the realm.165 ´ It can hardly surprise us, then, that soon after its first ceremonial sessions at Versailles in May 1789 the Estates General, summoned above all to rescue the finances of belligerent Bourbon absolutism, should have soon been paralyzed over bedrock issues regarding the future organization of French society.166 And it was at this juncture that the kingdom’s humbler folk – artisans, shopkeepers, urban laborers, and peasants – intervened decisively in the confrontation between conservative and progressive elitists to the advantage of the latter. That ´ they could do so at all testifies in part, of course, to the entirely unanticipated administrative/military vacuum that developed in this traditional e´ tat polic´e as a result of its bankruptcy-induced paralysis; but it also reflected other factors, such as the depressed state of the economy, incitements to political activism pouring forth from the country’s feuding notables, and unique circumstances obtaining in the numerous communities of the realm. However some economic revisionists may still question longstanding Labroussian postulations of an “inter-cyclical crisis” in the French economy in the waning decades of the ancien r´egime, evidence does point to a disastrous harvest in 1788, one of the worst of the late eighteenth century. This not 163 164 165 166

Roger Chartier, “Cultures, Lumi`eres, Doleances: Les Cahiers de 1789,” Revue d’Histoire ´ Moderne et Contemporaine 28 (1981), esp. pp. 90–91. Chaussinand-Nogaret, Noblesse au XVIIIe si`ecle, p. 190. See on this point the corroborative interpretation of Michael P. Fitzsimmons, “Privilege and the Polity in France, 1786–1791,” American Historical Review 92 (1987), esp. pp. 279–80. There is still no better resum e´ of this story, after all these years, than Georges Lefebvre’s ´ Coming of the French Revolution. But see also, particularly in connection with the July Days of 1789, Jacques Godechot, The Taking of the Bastille, July 14th 1789, trans. Jean Stewart (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1970). On the stalemate within the assembly leading up to the July Days: Harris, Necker and the Revolution of 1789, pp. 486–89, 509–10, and 519–20; and Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, esp. pp. 252–305.

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only wiped out or severely reduced the subsistence margin of many peasants; it also wreaked havoc on textiles and other industries whose products could no longer be purchased by townspeople and rural folk constrained to spend meager funds on ever more expensive food. This development led in turn to widespread unemployment in the industrial sector, so that by late 1788 and through most of 1789, the difficulties in agriculture and industry were mutually reinforcing. Furthermore, the bitterly cold winter of 1788–89 and subsequent spring floods worsened the economic crisis by impeding the milling of grain and the transport within France of fuels, foodstuffs, and other essential commodities.167 It is not surprising, then, that by 1789 people should have been caught up (even more than they usually were) in the toils of dire need. The price of bread at Paris, on the rise ever since the preceding August, passed 14 sous for the four-pound loaf by the spring of 1789 and was absorbing as much as 88 percent of the average worker’s salary at times. In provincial France, the towns and peasant communities, traumatized by the fear of famine, fought to preserve local stores of grain; riots erupted in market places, and millers and bakers were assaulted; and grain was often seized on the roads. The most serious disturbances prior to the events of the summer occurred in March and April in Flanders, Provence, Franche Comte, ´ Dauphine, ´ Languedoc, and Guienne. At Versailles, Necker, bedeviled by the subsistence crisis as well as by the sociopolitical impasse, had to spend hard currency (desperately needed elsewhere) to import grain, subsidize merchants in Paris and other communities, establish charitable workshops for the unemployed and starving in the capital, and pay troops overseeing the transport of grain through the countryside. Government and people alike were adversely affected by the economic hard times.168 These economic troubles alone would have provided ample incentive for the laboring folk of urban and rural France to intervene in the sociopolitical wrangles of their betters. Yet other influences were also inclining them in that direction. For example, as George Rude´ has shown with particular clarity, contesting elements within the “dominant classes” at Paris took to appealing to the populace during the prerevolutionary crisis with printed and verbal attacks against each other and with antiministerial invocations of liberty and social justice. The artisans and shopkeepers whom history would soon know as the sans-culottes developed early on the habit of championing one faction against another, one institution (such as the Paris Parlement) against another (such as the government itself), and so by 1789 were already psychologically prepared to burst into the arena of national politics.169 167 168 169

For a concise description of all of this, consult Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, pp. 159–67. On Necker’s handling of these difficulties in his second ministry, see Harris, Necker and the Revolution of 1789, esp. pp. 273–74, 544–59. See George Rude, ´ The Crowd in the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959); and Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Viking, 1973).

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Ultimately, however, we must turn to a comparative sociological analysis to explain why, during this memorable summer, urban insurrections utilizing the brawn of such individuals succeeded at Paris and elsewhere – but not necessarily everywhere else in France. Four factors, Lynn Hunt contends, were particularly influential in determining the extent of change in a given municipality: its socioeconomic structure, the recent political behavior of its ruling elite, the ´ impact on it of the economic crisis, and the closeness of its ties with other towns.170 Of these four variables, the first was the most important; still, all four of them “worked together to limit the political options available in each town.” Revolutionary change was least likely “in administrative towns, whose ruling elites had either opposed the monarchy or opened their ranks in 1787– 88, in which prices did not continue to climb (the south) and which were not in close contact with revolutionary centers.” At the other extreme, revolution, if especially likely to erupt “in manufacturing, military, and naval construction towns,” was also probable (more generally) in towns “where ruling elites had refused to open their ranks, especially during meetings to elect deputies to the Estates General; where prices rose steeply in 1789 (the north); and where the local leaders of the revolution had close contacts with other revolutionary centers.” Because of its unique status, Paris did not in all respects fulfill the criteria for revolutionary upheaval adduced on these pages. Still, it is easy to see why the capital, with its politicized judges, officiers, and men of letters, its intransigent munipical elite, its economic difficulties, and its exposure to the frightening ´ rumors (and eventual reality) of counterrevolutionary measures coordinated at nearby Versailles, should have exploded in July and October.171 It is, moreover, easy to comprehend why so many other communities across France, which did more or less satisfy these revolutionary desiderata, should also have revolted. And the muscle-power in most of these uprisings was furnished by grocers, other small shopkeepers, craftsmen, journeymen, and unskilled toilers, some of whom had participated in the spring in the “consciousness-raising” tasks of drafting cahiers de dol´eances and electing delegates to the Estates-General, and all of whom, presumably, harbored throughout 1789 fears of starvation, aristocratic plots, and foreign invasion.172 With the kingdom’s populous capital lost to its king, then, and with other cities and towns, like Paris, setting up revolutionary committees, forming citizen militias, and obeying only such orders from the triumphant National Assembly as sorted with their own local political and economic concerns, state 170 171 172

Lynn Hunt, “Committees and Communes: Local Politics and National Revolution in 1789,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18 (1976), esp. pp. 327–29. On the July and October Days at Paris, see again Lefebvre, Coming of the French Revolution, passim.; and Godechot, The Taking of the Bastille, passim. On the elections to the Estates-General, refer to the papers by Franc¸ois Furet and Ran Halevi ´ in Baker, ed., The Political Culture of the Old Regime. On the beliefs of the Parisian townspeople in 1789, see Lefebvre, Coming of the French Revolution, Chapter 6.

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power effectively shifted from monarch, ministers, and provincial intendants to Assembly and even, to some extent, from Assembly to local municipalities. But that historic transferral of power only engaged the majority of the king’s subjects with the coming of the peasant upheaval in the summer. There seems to be broad agreement among comparative sociologists such as Theda Skocpol and experts on the French peasantry such as Hilton Root, P. M. Jones, and John Markoff that rural folk, too, were psychologically prepared for an active role in the drama of 1789 – and this, in part, because of the historic role of the monarchy itself! Root, for instance, has (typically) argued that “the rise of the bureaucratic state” and resultant “absorption of the village into the bureaucratic structure” of that Bourbon state gave the peasant community “a new self-image” and the confidence to challenge its lord as it had never challenged him before. Brandishing this new confidence rather than responding to any novel demands advanced by the local seigneur, the rural village tapped the burgeoning talents of the legal profession to launch a “devastating” critique not only of specific seigneurial rights but also of “the historical and moral foundations of seigneurial authority” itself.173 Whether the primary emphasis in this structuralist rendering of rural history in the late ancien r´egime falls on the paternalistic role of the Bourbon state or on the autonomy or semiautonomy of the peasant communities, their psychological readiness for an active role in the politics of 1789 seems in retrospect as evident as does that of the craftsmen, shopkeepers, and workers at Paris and elsewhere. This is all the more the case in that the peasants were, like their urban counterparts, involved in the drafting of cahiers de dol´eances and electoral procedures in the spring of 1789, and subject to the same “objective” economic pressures, anxieties, and phobias stemming from the consequences of the terrible harvest of the preceding year.174 Only with the summer did peasant agitation deriving from all of these influences become truly nationwide in scope, culminating in the “Great Fear” of late July and early August.175 At this time, rural cultivators, obsessed by fears that “brigands” in the pay of foreigners and/or French aristocrats would cut 173

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Hilton Root, “En Bourgogne: L’etat ´ et la communaute´ rurale, 1661–1789,” Annales: E. S. C. 37 (1982): 288–303; and “Challenging the Seigneurie: Community and Contention on the Eve of the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 57 (1985): 652–81. See also, along these lines: Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, pp. 118–21; P. M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); John Markoff, “Peasant Grievances and Peasant Insurrection: France in 1789,” Journal of Modern History 62 (1990): 445–76; and Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism, esp. Chapters 2 to 5. Markoff’s massive, quantitative research in this area is especially impressive, and unlikely ever to be effectively challenged. On the electoral procedures as they affected the peasant communities, see Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, p. 123. On the impact upon these communities of the economic crisis, see Jones, Peasantry in the French Revolution, esp. pp. 60–62; and Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism, Chapters 2–5. The authoritative work on this fascinating subject is still Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, trans. Joan White (New York: Pantheon, 1973).

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down the crops ripening in their fields and mutilate or slaughter their livestock, banded together for defensive purposes and then passed on to an assault on the manorial archives (and, occasionally, the manors) of their lords. Clearly, the uprising in the countryside, as a national development, was made possible by, and then reacted back on, the municipal revolution. The authorities (as we noted earlier) had been unwilling or unable to employ the distracted and demoralized royal army against the revolutionaries at Paris; the intendants were deserting or had been chased from their provincial posts; what military coercive power still existed was passing in all areas into the hands of civic “bourgeois” militias; and peasant soldiers, allowed to return home to assist in harvesting the crops, were spreading there the news of revolt and unrest in cities and towns across the kingdom. To be sure, the Patriots in the National Assembly may have detected in the rural upheaval in the summer of 1789 a potential threat to property rights in the countryside; yet, even assuming the military efficacy of royal army or local militias, the Revolution’s protagonists were not at this time prepared by deploying such forces to “play into the hands of autocratic reaction. This was a chance that most were unprepared to take. Only in a few localities did urban forces act against the peasants.”176 In addition, with unrest in town and countryside persisting through August and September primarily because of the continuation of the economic crisis, the more radical Patriots in the Assembly and their adherents at Paris and in the provinces remained under popular pressure (had they needed it) to defend the Revolution as it had progressed up to this point. Here, then, was yet another calculation behind the Parisian insurrection of early October that forced the removal of the sovereign, and that of his legislature, from Versailles to the capital of a nation now fully in the throes of sociopolitical revolution. The transition to revolution in Russia, occurring at it did under the pressures of seemingly endless warfare, economic chaos, and massive social dislocation, was much more abrupt and brutal than it was in France. “Privilege Russia,” rather than indulging in a prolonged “French-style” debate over the limits of acceptable social change, was by late 1916 united in its disgust over the tsarist state’s incompetence, corruption, and rumored sexual and “German” scandal – yet united also in its dread over the possibilities of upheaval from below. But even “liberals” such as Paul Miliukov and Prince Lvov “betrayed an inability [Hans Rogger has written] to recognize or admit how wide was the gulf in late 1916 between the mass of ordinary Russians and respectable society – all those who would soon be categorized as the bourgeoisie.” Laborers of city and countryside and soldiers in the ranks “were no longer interested in victory, if they ever had been, and more and more often they blamed society, represented in the Duma and the voluntary organizations, as much as the tsar

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Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, p. 124.

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and his officials, for prolonging their hardships.”177 True, Miliukov, Lvov, and other moderates of “privilege Russia” were, at least nominally, to preside over the early “honeymoon” phase of revolution in this land; but they were soon to be swept from their positions of leadership by the enraged masses of workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants. Hence we can dispense fairly quickly with an analysis of elite attitudes in this period and focus primarily on the ´ perceptions of those in the sullen domain of “laboring” or (as it would soon be termed) “Soviet” Russia. (Here, given the suddenness and sheer rapidity of the transition to full-scale revolution, the primary emphasis must be on urban/military rather than rural Russia; in-depth analysis of peasant attitudes in Russia’s vast hinterland will follow in subsequent chapters dealing with the dynamics of radicalization, terror, and “Thermidor” during 1917 and beyond.) Reactionary and liberal elitists might (and eventually did) hatch conspira´ cies against Rasputin and even the Imperial couple itself; but the dilemma of moderate, Western-oriented politicians such as Miliukov went far deeper, and could not be resolved merely by such ploys. As Figes has remarked: The liberals’ paralysis was determined, above all, by their fear of sparking violence on the streets. They were caught between the devil of autocracy and the deep red sea of a social revolution that would undoubtedly drown them too. Miliukov was afraid that if the Duma went into open conflict with the regime and encouraged a popular revolt, as some on the left of his party advocated, it would lead to an ‘orgy of the mob’. . . . Rather than risk this, the liberals played a waiting game: if they could hold out until an Allied victory, new channels of reform would open up.178

Beyond demonstrating, once again, the close, almost dialectical nexus between domestic and international developments, such a strategy was obviously predicated on the continued willingness of Russia’s bleeding peasant-soldiers to “hold the line” against the Central Powers, and so will eventually require from us a careful analysis of army attitudes both at and behind the front. Even as the battered Russian army was striving to maintain its essential integrity in the face of incredible military hardships, however, the sheer intransigence of the regime was sapping the influence of those within liberal-elitist ´ ´ circles who distractedly resisted all talk of collaboration with the Petrograd masses. By November–December 1916, the Duma’s Progressive Bloc was itself becoming splintered by arguments for and against endorsing the desperate expedient of popular revolution. If the Duma was to avoid becoming obsolete and ineffective, it would have to move closer to the mood of the streets and add its own voice to the revolutionary movement. That was the view of the left Kadets, of Kerensky’s Trudoviks, and of a growing number 177 178

Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, pp. 265–66. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 276. Miliukov’s dilemma draws greater attention in Thomas Riha, A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics, passim; and Melissa K. Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, passim.

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of public figures, including Prince Lvov, who told a meeting of the Progressive Bloc that Russia’s only hope of salvation lay in a revolution. ‘Abandon all further attempts at constructive collaboration with the present government,’ he wrote in December; ‘they are all doomed to failure and are only an impediment to our aim. Do not indulge in illusion; turn away from ghosts. There is no longer a government we can recognize.’179

Somewhat earlier, we recall, Miliukov had queried repeatedly of the state’s policy: “What is it? Stupidity or treason?” Although he was later to assert that his intention on this occasion had been to “buy time” for some sort of last-minute rapprochement with the tsar and his ministers, in fact (so Miliukov ruefully admitted) his address had become “a storm-signal for the revolution.”180 The anguished arguments within the comfortable monde of “privilege Russia” for and against joint action with the workers reflected their massive presence in Petrograd and Moscow – and, by late 1916 and early 1917, their rapid radicalization. Here, again, the dialectic between foreign and domestic affairs stands out as we review the composition, distribution, and radicalization of these urban cadres of what would soon be the February Revolution in Russia. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has documented the operation of this dialectic as it affected the Petrograd metalworkers, the shock troops of the strike movement destined to bring the regime down in February 1917: It should be noted that at the background of the revival of the workers’ movement during the war, there was a tremendous expansion of Russian industry, particularly of those sectors connected with war production. This expansion created an acute labor shortage, especially of skilled metalworkers, and it was these metalworkers who participated most actively in the strike movement. They enjoyed relative security – in a labor market where they were in great demand they could present their demands more forcefully than their comrades in other industries that did not share the prosperity created by the war boom. Shortly after the beginning of the war, the government discontinued the practice of drafting skilled workers into the army, and those who had already been drafted gradually came back to the factories.

Narrowing his focus even further, Hasegawa hypothesizes that “the major impetus of the radicalization of the Petrograd workers” emanated from those “highly skilled, confident, young metalworkers” in the Vyborg District of the capital “whose economic benefits were much better than those in other sectors in industry but not as good as [those of] the older, skilled workers in the large government plants.”181 The Great War influenced this “raw material” of revolution in many other ways as well. It enhanced the overall concentration of Russian workers at 179 180 181

Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 285–86. See also George Katkov, Russia 1917: The Kornilov Affair: Kerensky and the Break-up of the Russian Army (London: Longman, 1980), p. 218. Cited in Pearson, Russian Moderates, pp. 117–18. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), pp. 73–76.

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Petrograd. It greatly increased the number of large plants, and hence the concentration of easily mobilized workers in those plants, all geared toward war production and nearly all government-owned. It facilitated the geographical concentration of proletarians in the industrial sections of the capital: “The heavy concentration of workers in the working-class district, segregated from other parts of the city, facilitated the consciousness of solidarity as well as of distinctiveness of their class from the other segments of society.” Moreover, as the war dragged on, it tended to draw into Petrograd new social elements such as “peasants, women, and children.” They, and educated, articulate, urbanborn youths frustrated by their lack of upward mobility in society, may have constituted a significant “reserve army” on which the leaders of the February Revolution could eventually draw. Peasants, for instance, having gained little or nothing from the social changes in their villages resulting from Stolypin’s agrarian reforms, and having then drifted into urban centers, . . . may not have been far from comprehending the language of class warfare in the cities. High cost of living, food shortages, crowded housing, long working hours – these new urban miseries must have made them embittered and resentful. They may not have been directly involved in the strike movement, but it is possible to argue that they constituted a reserve army of the more militant, politically conscious workers.

Women and youths, it appears, exasperated increasingly by the growing economic crisis in late 1916 and early 1917, commonly attacked food stores in a spontaneous, violent fashion, thereby injecting into the organized strike movement an element of explosive, direct action (buntarstvo) foreshadowing the revolutionary days of February. Such initiatives were endorsed and encouraged most notably by the Bolsheviks and other socialist groups most implacably set on genuine revolution.182 What most endangered the regime, from this quarter, was the fusing of political and economic grievances, and the gradual shift from a mood of “opposition” to a genuinely revolutionary willingness to bring the entire rotten, incompetent edifice of government down. As late as September 1916, the tsarist secret police (Okhrana) noted that, while “complaints against the administration and harsh merciless condemnations of government policy were heard,” still, “the mood of the broad masses is ‘oppositional’ and not ‘revolutionary.’” Before very long, however, the deepening of the economic crisis in metropoles such as Petrograd and Moscow lent a new note of urgency to Okhrana reports: In the opinion of the spokesmen of the labor group of the central War Industries Committee, the industrial proletariat of the capital is on the verge of despair and it believes that the smallest outbreak due to any pretext will lead to uncontrollable riots 182

Ibid., pp. 81–84. See also Hasegawa, “The Bolsheviks and the Formation of the Petrograd Soviet in the February Revolution,” Soviet Studies 29 (1977): 86–197. On the food-riots during the war years, see Barbara Alpern Engel, “Not By Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia During World War I,” Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 696–721.

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with thousands and ten of thousands of victims. Indeed, the stage for such outbreaks is already more than set. Groups of responsible workers find it difficult to prevent the masses from bursting into demonstrations growing out of the lack of necessities and the rise in the cost of living.183

All of this, furthermore, was occurring in a larger political context in which the last remaining traces of patriotic, pro-government sentiment in both privileged and plebeian milieux were disappearing. Brusilov’s offensive had been blunted by German High Command initiatives; the southern, Rumanian front had become a bleeding strategic liability for Stavka (Supreme Military Headquarters); and, in Raymond Pearson’s words, the military emergency only “increased the need for efficient organization of the home front and rendered the problems of the civil government all the more acute.”184 For the woebegone regime of Nicholas and Alexandra, the final d´enouement came less than two months into the new year. There were, certainly, premonitions of the decisive events to come in the streets of the capital. A call for a strike on 9 January to commemorate Bloody Sunday of 1905 brought out 140,000 workers, about 40 percent of Petrograd’s proletariat; another strike on February 14, called by the “Worker’s Group” of the War Industries Committee to mark the reopening of the Duma, brought out at least 84,000 workers. Yet by now, the strike movement was assuming a life of its own. On Thursday, February 23, 1917 (International Women’s Day), “there began,” Hans Rogger has stated, “the unplanned and unforeseen transformation of uncoordinated strike action into a revolutionary rising.” What distinguished February 23 from preceding days was the “determination of the strikers to take their grievances beyond the workplace to the centre of the capital. Their purpose was to enlist its citizens in demonstrations that demanded on this and more insistently on subsequent days not only bread or even peace but the overthrow of the monarchy and of autocracy.” Rogger continues: As the strikes and marches gained momentum, they were aided by agitators and organizers of all socialist factions making the round of the factories – from members of the Workers’ Groups who were still at liberty to a thousand or more militant anti-war Mensheviks, SRs, and some 3,000 Bolsheviks. The demonstrators’ biggest accretion of strength, however, came from the women of Petrograd and the soldiers of its garrison. The former, exasperated by hours of mostly futile waiting in bread lines, took to smashing bakeries and food shops; the latter followed them into open defiance of authority from which there was no turning back.185

Similar events would soon take place in Moscow, historic capital of the Russian Empire and now second city to Petrograd – but only during February 28 – 183 184 185

Pearson, Russian Moderates, p. 107. Ibid., p. 108. Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, pp. 265–67.

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March 2, once news of the collapse of tsarist authority at the capital had arrived from the northwest.186 Rogger’s verdict on the February Revolution at Petrograd is assuredly that of all Russian experts on the subject: namely, that “the soldiers’ revolt was decisive in converting the workers’ and women’s angry protests into revolution.”187 On past occasions, the tsar’s repressive forces – the Okhrana, the regular police, and (when necessary) the army – had always been sufficient to put down such protests. On this occasion, however, the tsar’s ultimate weapon – the Petrograd garrison – would fail him: by February 27–28, it would be coalescing with the angry women in the markets and with metalworkers and other proletarians to oppose the tsar’s gendarmes, and, thus, ensure a transition from food riots and workers’ strikes to full-scale revolution. As Wildman’s careful analysis has revealed, specific elements disproportionately represented in the garrison were especially predisposed by now to abandon the regime. These included “recuperating evacuees,” who, radicalized by their experience at the front, “were hostile to discipline and contemptuous of officers as a class.” Also included were “the over-forties, who had left households behind them in the charge of women and old folks,” and were “agitated by a pervasive fear that their holdings would be easy prey to the village kulaks and miroeds . . . as well as to speculators and venal food supply officials.” Then there were workers from Petrograd who had lost their exempt service status due to participation in strikes. All such elements, Wildman has noted, were “greatly embittered over the war, disgusted with the government, and violently antipathetic toward the police, who in their view should have long since been sent to the front in their stead.” Such elements more than counterbalanced the occasional progovernment training units organized by a few energetic officers from soldiers transferred recently from the front, soldiers not yet contaminated altogether by the revolutionary mood and slogans of the women and workers of Petrograd.188 Could the troops of the Petrograd garrison (and other forces, including those at nearby Kronstadt) have been moved to rally, all other causes failing, to Nicholas and Alexandra? To this notion, Wildman responds unequivocally: The Rasputin scandal and the rumors of German influence on the tsarina had effectively eroded the last remaining barriers that had hitherto exempted the person of the tsar from the rage directed toward the ministers, the generals, the police, the war, and the shortage of bread. Occasionally the tsar was defended as a well-intentioned but weak person, but the tsarina, who was known to dominate her husband, had indelibly become “that German woman.” Proof of the erosion of the prestige of the crown came when 186

187 188

On the revolutionary agitation at Moscow, see Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), esp. pp. 94–100; and Diane Koenker and William G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), passim. Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, p. 267. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March–April 1917), pp. 136–37, 156–58.

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appeals to the soldiers to observe the oath of loyalty to the tsar were almost totally ignored in the February days.189

That, in the February Days of 1917, Nicholas II could commit the fatuous blunder of ordering General Sergei Khabalov, Chief of the Petrograd Military District, to use military force to “put down the disorders by tomorrow” only underscored the tsar’s total isolation from reality – meaning, above all, from the perceptions of the alienated masses of laboring and suffering Russians for whom the tsar’s war had become the ultimate nightmare foisted upon them by their age-old oppressors in the foreign universe of “privilege” or “census” Russia.190 Small wonder, then, that after some initial hesitation the troops of the garrison at Petrograd, goaded beyond endurance, swept the hated gendarmes of the old regime aside and assured the transformation of enraged women’s food-riots and workers’ strikes into revolution. In the case of England, war undertaken against Scotland in 1639–40 may have been dwarfed in its sheer demographic dimensions and duration by tsarist Russia’s struggle against the Central Powers; still, it was comparable to the later conflict in at least three respects. First, it exposed a certain ambivalence within elitist circles on several of the most explosive public issues of the day; ´ second, it heightened the ideological fears and paranoia of “ordinary” subjects both at the capital and in the counties; and, third, it unleashed a dynamic of violence and iconoclasm within army ranks that set a potentially destabilizing example of revolutionary initiative for the general populace. On the first point, we know that English peers and gentry every bit as obsessed as were the Stuarts themselves by issues of social deference and subordination were, by now, almost equally worried about Charles I’s inclinations toward absolutism and seemingly “Papist” predilections. As early as 1639, peers who were summoned to attend the king at York in advance of the first Bishops’ War were markedly unenthusiastic about the prospect of military action against the Scots, and some explicitly demanded a royal recourse to Parliament.191 The following summer, some peers and gentry actually contacted the Scots clandestinely, hoping apparently for a reconciliation between the two sides that would preserve the “commonwealth” from a shedding of blood bound to harm both Charles and his Scottish subjects.192 More than simply an ideological “meeting of minds” between co-religionists of Scotland and England, yet considerably less than a dark “conspiracy” of peers and gentry aimed against the king’s legitimate prerogatives, these and similar contacts reflected elitist alarm over extremist tendencies descried at Whitehall rather ´ 189 190 191 192

Ibid., p. 156. For further discussion of this point, refer again to David R. Jones, “Imperial Russia’s Forces at War,” pp. 249–328. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 312. Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 84–85. Peter Donald, “New Light on the Anglo-Scottish Contacts of 1640,” Historical Research 62 (1989): 227–29.

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than any genuinely “pro-Scottish” orientation. Such, in any case, is the impression that is gathered from a meticulous analysis of the situation in at least one county, that of Yorkshire.193 Norah Carlin’s overall verdict on the subject seems, in the circumstances, fair enough: Behind the opposition to Charles in England lay a growth of national political awareness, and the king’s leading opponents were trying to use both the Scottish invasion and the heightened political consciousness to advance a programme of religious and constitutional reform in England. The Scottish invasion of 1640 was in a sense the first stage of civil war in England, though the next two years were spent mostly in trying to prevent its going any further.194

To condemn those English social elitists willing temporarily to make common ´ cause with the Scots in the summer of 1640 as dishonorable and treasonable, as Russell does, is to miss the crucial point.195 Like the French Patriots apprehensively scanning the provincial countryside during the “Great Fear” of 1789, and the timorous Russian liberals in the Fourth Duma’s Progressive Bloc in 1916–17, peers and gentry in Stuart England in 1639–40 doubtless felt trapped, all too often, between the “devil” of an isolated and intransigent monarch and the “deep red sea” of tumultuous and potentially insubordinate commoners. Much would have to transpire over the next two years to induce a sizeable number of Charles I’s upper-class subjects to jettison or at least repress these feelings of ambivalence. Although the actual numbers of those ordinary Englishmen and Englishwomen involved in the sociopolitical commotions of 1639 and, even more, 1640, may be dwarfed by those of subjects implicated in the rioting and urban/rural heavals of early revolutionary France and Russia, they seemed, in the English context, formidable and (to many) intimidating enough. As early as Whitsun (late spring) 1639, John Lilburne – soon to be known as the leading Leveller agitator in revolutionary England – aroused mobs of unemployed cloth-workers and others adversely affected by the economic hard times of the late 1630s in the streets of London; the result, ultimately, was a “considerable demonstration” targeting, at least nominally, the widely execrated Archbishop Laud. The failure of the Short Parliament, so Valerie Pearl has written, “brought popular feeling to fever pitch” by the following April and May: In May 1640, placards suddenly appeared throughout the City urging the apprentices to rise and free the land from the rule of Bishops. At a great public meeting on St. George’s Field, Southwark, the City apprentices, and the glovers and tanners of Bermondsey and Southwark on holiday for the May Day celebrations, joined up with the sailors and dockhands, now idle through lack of trade, to hunt, as they put it, ‘Laud, the 193

194 195

See, on the situation in Yorkshire in 1640, David Scott, “‘Hannibal at our gates:’ Loyalists and fifth-columnists during the Bishops’ Wars – the case of Yorkshire,” Historical Research 70 (1997): 269–93. Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War, p. 21. Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchy, pp. 149–53.

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fox’. . . . On the night of May 14th, the prisons were broken open by the apprentices, and the whole City was aroused by the night watch to take up arms and preserve their lives and property. . . . The rioters also planned to attack the house of the Earl of Arundel, the recent commander of the army against the Scots, because, it was said, he had mounted guns in his gardens on the north bank of the Thames and turned them in the direction of the apprentices’ assembly place on St. George’s Field.196

The Privy Council, not trusting City magistrates and militia, intervened repeatedly in the situation that tense spring and summer, ordering in troops from the trained bands of surrounding counties, arresting alleged ringleaders of these movements, and searching the houses and seizing the papers of other suspected militant leaders. The agitation in the capital subsided somewhat over the summer, only to revive with the convening of the new Parliament in the fall. The religious element in this turbulence at London was a thread tying many of these demonstrations and mob actions together. As early as May 1640, just after the king’s dismissal of the Short Parliament, Robin Clifton tells us, rioters were targeting, among others, “the Catholic Queen, her priests, the Papal Agent and sundry recusant gentry and peers.”197 “The agitation in the capital was anti-Catholic as well as anti-government,” Caroline Hibbard concurs. Placards appeared all over London in the wake of the Short Parliament urging mass meetings “to preserve liberty and true religion;” one ambassador from the Continent “lumped together the objects of popular ire (Strafford, Laud, Rossetti, the Capuchins, and Catholics in general) as though their connections were obvious;” citizens from London presented a general petition against Catholics to the king; the French and Catholic queen was maligned, along with her equally French and Catholic mother (Marie de Medicis); and, after a ´ momentary lull in this turmoil over the summer months, Catholic homes in the capital were ransacked for arms during October, and wild rumors circulated against the queen, the queen mother, and all reputedly Catholic ministers.198 Panics broke out as well in the counties, especially in 1640, generalizing in many parts of the kingdom a sense of insecurity and anxiety – much as the mysterious “Great Fear” would in the France of 1789. The failure of the Short Parliament in April 1640, coming as it did in the wake of Charles’s initial abortive foray against the Scots, helped to propagate rumors weighted with the usual anti-Catholic prejudice, rumors chronicled by (among others) Robin Clifton: Just out of the capital in Chislehurst, Kent, after a body of men estimated at 30 to 40 in number was reported entering a Catholic’s house, two searches had to be made before the J. P.’s were satisfied that “the rumor and noise in the county were great, and the fear of the people greater without cause.” Equally “causeless” was a series of panics which 196 197 198

Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, pp. 107–10. Robin Clifton, “The Popular Fear of Catholics During the English Revolution,” Past and Present 52 (1971): 25–27. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, pp. 150–51, 166–67.

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convulsed Colchester a few days later during the Whitsun holiday period. . . . Rumors spread in Oxford that recusants were meeting for purposes unknown at a city inn, [and] more anxiety was reported from the North Downs of Kent. . . .

And all this, while word was passing in London (and no doubt elsewhere) of the king’s assumed intention to “use an Irish army to restore order in both of his unsettled kingdoms!”199 Later in the summer, dark rumors about “popish plots” circulated at York and at Lichfield and in Berkshire, and on the eve of the convening of the Long Parliament in November, similar stories spread panic at Rye and Norwich.200 Finally, Charles’ efforts to raise troops and money to fight the Scots, and the actual northward march of troops, first in 1639 and then the following year, served potently to reinforce anti-Catholic anxieties and to generate violence among troops and populace in many areas. “The war became an issue in itself,” Esther Cope has perceptively remarked. “It sharpened and was sharpened by the pain of other grievances. Fewer people paid their shipmoney assessments in 1639. . . . Opposition to the purpose of the war also prompted resistance.” Broadsides and placards proclaimed that levies being raised to finance the war “were financing Popery which, after it had been set up in Scotland, would be established in England.” As early as the spring of 1639, antiwar resistance erupted in areas ranging from Essex and Hertford to Newcastle, where local citizens would in 1640 sympathize with their Scottish occupiers. Yet, as Cope has also observed, “from the perspective of the more widespread and serious trouble associated with soldiers in 1640 the insolencies and disorders of soldiers in the spring of 1639 seemed mild.”201 Indeed. Charles I’s need for officers on whom, for ideological and other reasons, he felt he could rely in the 1640 campaign almost automatically translated into a disproportionate representation of Catholics in commanding ranks. And, as scholars like Clifton and Fissel have shown, this would have disastrous consequences for the English mobilization against the Scots. Far more discouraging to the government than anti-“Papist” rumors circulating in London, Clifton has written, . . . were the disturbances which shook the morale of army officers as more units marched north against the Scots. The news which led to rioting in London caused mutiny and murder among troops commanded by Catholics. Two officers were beaten to death in Berkshire and Gloucestershire (and their killers sheltered by the local population), a third in Herefordshire was only saved by some local trained bands, and the Catholic son of a Secretary of State wrote to his father of his soldiers’ resolution to murder all their popish officers. From Berkshire, Wiltshire and Northamptonshire, 199 200 201

Clifton, “The Popular Fear of Catholics,” p. 25. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, p. 150; and Clifton, “The Popular Fear of Catholics,” pp. 25–27. Esther Cope, Politics Without Parliaments (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), pp. 173–74, 175–77, 193.

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desertions and mutinies were reported; pressed soldiers led anti-Catholic rioting in Newbury and Cirencester; and news of further military disorders came from Essex and Hertfordshire.202

Examples multiplied of the army “creating its own mayhem,” with soldiers tearing down altar rails and defacing images in churches, leveling hedges and fences around recently enclosed lands, rioting for arrears in pay, and – perhaps most significantly – encouraging local people through whose villages they tramped to engage in similar behavior. Clearly, Charles’ adherence to the hardline advice of Strafford and Laud – that is, to pursue war against the Scots – unleashed a dialectic of violence, social insubordination, religious iconoclasm, and economic “leveling” in both military and civilian sectors of the population, and looked forward to the socioeconomic and religious tumults of the revolutionary years to come. Moreover, warring against Presbyterian Scotland ensured that, for many Englishmen and Englishwomen, especially those of an ardently Puritan persuasion, the stereotypical vision of the Stuart cause as, somehow, wedded in unholy and unnatural alliance with Catholic forces besieging their country from within and without took on frightening new lineaments of reality.203 In developing this comparative analysis of the collapse of the old and the advent of the new in England, France, and Russia, we have attempted to strike something of a balance between the “structuralist” requirements of a “statecentered” approach and “voluntarist” concerns about political culture and the roles of “ordinary” subjects/citizens in the initial stages of our three revolutions. It would have been tempting, in this connection, to include even more issues in our argument. To take just one example: why not extend our “structuralist” and “voluntarist” analysis of France in this critically transitional period to the debate over slavery in the overseas colonies? Jeremy Popkin rightly insists that, in fact, “debates about colonial rights and slavery were an integral part of the events leading to the Revolution, particularly during the period of the ‘pre-revolution’ in 1787–89.” The first “ideologically defined revolutionary club,” he reminds us, traced its creation to this debate; and a wide variety of interest groups energized by colonial issues contributed much more signally than most historians have been willing to admit to the “feverish maneuvering” so palpably behind the convening of the Estates-General and its conversion into the National Assembly.204 A “modified structuralist” approach to the 202

203

204

Clifton, “The Popular Fear of Catholics,” pp. 25–27. See also Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars, pp. 264–86, for much more detail on acts of anti-Catholic violence and on the overall deterioration of discipline and morale in Charles I’s army in 1640. David Cressy sees a continuity in all of these manifestations of revolution stretching from as early as spring 1640 through 1642 – and, presumably, beyond. See Cressy, “Revolutionary England, 1640–1642,” Past and Present 181 (2003): 35–71; and England on Edge, esp. p. 352. Refer again to Popkin, “Saint-Domingue, Slavery, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” in Kaiser and Van Kley, eds., From Deficit to Deluge, esp. p. 221.

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1789 Revolution, in other words, could (had we only the time and space!) be so easily extended from a consideration of French peasants to a reappraisal of slaves and associated issues in the French colonies. As things stand, however, we must move on, striving to maintain our delicate “balancing act” between structuralism and voluntarism in the chapters that follow. This will start with our attempt, in Chapter 3, to explore the hopes and ultimate disappointments characterizing the early, “honeymoon” days of acknowledged, full-scale revolution in these three countries. How relatively easy it was to be (as we will discover) for individuals and groups of every imaginable description, all along the political spectrum in these situations, to agree on what it was that they detested most about their countries’ benighted anciens r´egimes – and yet, by the same token, how fragile would be the concerns binding them together in even the earliest days of their new, revolutionary existence!

3 Revolutionary “Honeymoons”?

In the early stages of the English Revolution, Lawrence Stone tells us, “even so cautious a man as Sir Edward Hyde, the future royalist leader,” spoke rapturously of “a dawning of a fair and lasting day of happiness to this kingdom,” while as late as the summer of 1642 a Yorkshire gentleman could still share with an M.P. his “hearty desires for a thorough reformation both of Church and Commonwealth,” and his view of Parliament as being “able if need require to build a new world.”1 A century and a half later, the Duke of Dorset, British ambassador to France, wrote to inform his home government that the recent popular seizure of the Bastille heralded a relatively bloodless revolution that would curb the powers of the French king and inaugurate a new regime of ´ social equality; and one of his countrymen, also alluding to this earth-shaking event, wrote to his wife that he had been witness “to the most extraordinary revolution that perhaps ever took place in human society.”2 Finally, in the case of the February 1917 revolution in Russia, we have the same (initial) sense of euphoria. “A miracle has happened,” marveled poet Alexander Blok, “and we may expect more miracles.” From Prince Georgii Lvov, destined to be the first prime minister in revolutionary Russia, came this: “I believe in the vitality and the wisdom of our great people, as expressed in the national uprising that overthrew the old regime. . . . I believe in the great heart of the Russian people, filled as it is with love for their neighbours, and am convinced that it is the foundation of our freedom, justice, and truth.”3 It is readily understandable that, in his Anatomy of Revolution, Crane Brinton should have identified something of a “honeymoon” phase in each of his revolutions – even if, unhappily, he also had to admit that once the fragile 1 2 3

Cited in Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, pp. 251, 252 Cited in Jacques Godechot, The Taking of the Bastille, pp. 261–62. Quotations from Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 351–53.

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coalition of forces overturning each of his anciens r´egimes actually buckled down to work on “a new set of problems” unavoidable under the circumstances, then “the honeymoon [was] soon over.”4 Indeed, this was the case in all three of our societies – even if, granted, the hopeful sense of new beginnings lasted longer in France (almost two years) and in England (about a year or so) than in war-ravaged, economically devastated Russia (scarcely two months!) The pages that follow analyze the initial, at least guardedly optimistic phases of full-blown revolution in England, France, and Russia by essaying three tasks. First, working as much as possible in comparative fashion, they outline and assess the long-term significance of ameliorative public policies in the France of 1789–91, the Russia of February–April 1917, and the England of November 1640 to January 1642. Second, they explore the dynamics of sociopolitical polarization and radicalization which, almost from the very start, worked to jeopardize the early, moderate revolutionaries’ reformist endeavors in all three countries. Finally, they focus on three revealing and irreversible “points of no return” in these three upheavals – that is to say, traumatic developments pointing definitively away from conciliatory, consensus politics and toward the more violent and divisive politics of radicalization. These transitional developments, specifically, were: in the English case, Charles I’s abortive entry into Parliament in January 1642 and subsequent departure from London; in the French case, Louis XVI’s ill-fated attempt to flee his realm (the so-called “flight to Varennes”) in June 1791; and, in the Russian case, Foreign Minister Paul Miliukov’s precipitation of the “April Crisis” in 1917 over diplomatic issues related to World War I. As always, we expect to find something less than perfect uniformities in our three revolutions; still, we may reasonably anticipate gaining from all of them a sense of early achievements imperiled and of early hopes proven premature. The Precarious Gains of Reform Perhaps we should start here with France, and then turn our attention to Russia and, finally, to England. Sheltered temporarily from the pressures of European politics, and profiting from the domestic isolation of Louis XVI and his closest adherents, the men of France’s National (Constituent) Assembly achieved an unexampled barrage of political, administrative, ecclesiastical, and socioeconomic reforms during 1789–91. During the scant two months allotted to them in Russia in early 1917, Paul Miliukov and his mostly Kadet colleagues rushed through (or, in some cases, were forced to accept) a comparable but less carefully premeditated program of ameliorative measures. In the first year or so of England’s Long Parliament, on the other hand, John Pym and his wrathful yet visionary associates accomplished somewhat less in the way of 4

For Brinton’s discussion of the extent (and limitations) of “honeymoons” early in the English, French, and Russian Revolutions, refer to The Anatomy of Revolution, pp. 90–91.

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reform than was achieved in either France or Russia, although the changes they did manage to muscle through would prove at least temporarily or, in several cases, lastingly significant for many of their countrymen. The eminent British historian J. M. Thompson was sufficiently struck by the accomplishments of the Constituent Assembly to praise “the legislative action of deputies drawn from the whole hierarchy of the middle classes, who for a while forgot their class interests and enmities in a genuine zeal for national regeneration.”5 We can endorse this positive assessment in general, provided only that we interpret the term “national regeneration” to include, vitally, the reconstitution of state power and “national” solidarity in France’s perdurably competitive West-Eurasian setting. In this connection, we can briefly discuss seven specific and pivotal areas of legislation: the restructuring of administrative authority, the establishment of electoral procedures, fiscal/bureaucratic reform, ecclesiastical changes, the curtailment of seigneurialism, the dissolution of corporate entities in general, and the overhaul of the armed forces. Restructuring administrative authority in revolutionary France entailed the replacement of the old patchwork of conflicting jurisdictions with a simple and rational system of 83 departments, subdivisions called districts and cantons, and (at the local level) approximately 44,000 communes (or parishes). In discussing this truly fundamental innovation, which in essence has survived down to the present day, George Rude´ contended that “not only absolute monarchy but the whole old system of centralized government was dismantled; and France, at this stage of the Revolution, became virtually a federation of. . . . departments and municipalities, enjoying a wide measure of local autonomy.”6 Rude’s ´ judgment is, substantially, valid: after all, the drawing of local administrative boundaries was entrusted to the deputies from the regions concerned; the departments were to derive their names from “natural” features such as mountains, rivers, and seas; and the new administrative units were henceforward to be staffed not by royal appointees but by committees of citizens elected from below. To this extent, 1789–91 in France (as we will see, much like February–April 1917 in Russia) represented an unprecedented interlude of decentralization between more typical periods of pronounced centralization of governance. Yet, even so, the situation was not quite that simple: it masked an underlying insistence on preserving the integrity of the “regenerated” France. Centralizing and decentralizing tendencies, admittedly, existed side by side in the new administrative structures of the state; still, the stress lay on the former rather than the latter. For example, the towns in this new polity, however emancipated from the “despotic” tutelage of the erstwhile intendants, found themselves securely anchored in a hierarchy of authority that clearly linked towns, 5 6

James M. Thompson, The French Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1943), pp. 226–27. George Rude, ´ Revolutionary Europe, 1783–1815 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), p. 111.

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districts, and departments with the national government. Again, the Assemblymen, however determined to protect the eighty-three new departments from any revival of “ministerial despotism,” also saw those departments as instrumental in neutralizing provincial opposition to national policies and in curbing the independence of the towns. Yet again, the new administrators at all levels, answerable henceforth to the electorate, would presumably shun the benighted old ways of despotism; still, the systematizing and standardizing of administrative structures, and the rationalization and bureaucratization of procedures, could not help but expand the domain and prerogatives of government. All in all, it was the officialdom and procedures of departments, districts, and municipalities, rather than spontaneous popular mobilizations, that were destined in 1790–91 to fill the void left by the collapse or abolition of the old institutions. This fact was underscored further by the competition of towns all over France for the new law-courts that the Constituent Assembly early on established in place of the old, parlement-dominated hierarchy of tribunals. Townspeople struggling to adjust to new realities during the revolutionary era believed more than ever, therefore, that their communal fortunes depended on institutions and procedures established by the central government. “The egalitarian rhetoric and civic consciousness of Republican political culture,” Ted Margadant has argued, “remained consistent with an institutional hierarchy that redistributed resources from the government in Paris to local communities.”7 In the creative tension between governmental centralization and decentralization in revolutionary France – even in this “honeymoon” stage of affairs, with its characteristic rejection of the old “ministerial despotism” – the former very much held its own against the latter. Electoral procedures in the new France, while they might mitigate somewhat these persistent administrative-centralizing tendencies, worked simultaneously to reinforce a very deeply rooted “public consciousness” easily manipulated by French statesmen in times of national crisis. The revolutionaries by and large seemed extremely reluctant to tolerate in this area anything resembling formal party differences and formalized competition for votes. Given a prevalent political culture accentuating communal, collective, and public values, divisiveness in politics could be stigmatized as an assault on the supposed “general will” of society.8 This apparent adherence of all or most politicians to a vision of politics in which factional machinations were condemned a priori as subverting the voters’ ability to ascertain their common interests may have made it easier

7

8

Ted W. Margadant, Urban Rivalries in the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 445. See also, on this subject, Lynn Hunt, “Committees and Communes: Local Politics and National Revolution in 1789,” esp. pp. 321–46. On these issues, see: Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy, 1789–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Patrice Guennifey, Le nombre et la raison: La R´evolution franc¸aise et les e´ lections (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1993).

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for the French (at least in the central regions of the country) to accept extremely centralized governance – namely, the Terror – in 1793–94.9 The very ways in which the new electoral regime adopted in the 1790s broke through old privileged and corporate barriers and brought citizens together may have fortified this predisposition. Procedural guidelines adopted by the Constituent Assembly facilitated the emergence of a body politic new to the French experience: they drew citizens together in the spring of 1790 by neighborhood or “arrondissement” rather than by trade, profession, or corps – this, for the purpose of choosing electors for the assemblies of the departments. Of course, excluding some Frenchmen (let alone all Frenchwomen!) from voting at all may, ironically, have also played a role in fostering a certain solidarity among those “active” citizens formally enfranchised at this time. Acting in part on the counsel of Abbe´ Siey`es and like-minded deputies, the legislature decreed that only those men aged twenty-five and over, “domiciled” for at least one year, not engaged in domestic service, and paying a direct tax equivalent to three days of unskilled labor, could vote in the primary assemblies. Among these electors, only those whose direct annual taxation was worth ten days of unskilled labor could vote at the secondary stage for citizens fully qualified (through payment of a “silver mark” or 52 livres in yearly taxation) to serve at various levels in the new administrative system. Precisely how inclusive (or exclusive) these provisions were intended to be or indeed turned out to be is, from our viewpoint, of less than paramount importance. They demonstrably did bring many hitherto unpoliticized males into politics and in so doing created a reservoir of citizens on whom the government could draw in time of national emergency. One specialist has suggested that “some 3 million citizens were at least occasionally involved in voting” in revolutionary France, and has speculated that perhaps as many as 500,000 citizens attended electoral assemblies regularly; another historian, of perhaps more sanguine disposition, has accepted the old estimate of roughly 50 percent of men older than twenty-five participating at some point in the electoral process during 1790–91, and has recited additional reasons for stressing the inclusivity of the provisions regarding “actives.”10 From our perspective, the salient point here is that the electoral procedures developed by the Assemblymen in these early days of the Revolution were (like so many of their other reforms) a doubleedged weapon. They were surely devised in part as a bridle on officeholders in the new France, as a surety that the “despotism” of benighted times of old could never return. At the same time, however, by helping to break down old 9

10

See, in this connection, the relevant articles by Franc¸ois Furet – and others – in Franc¸ois Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution; and Guennifey, Le nombre et la raison, passim. See, for these hypotheses, Crook, Elections in the French Revolution, p. 192; and Michael P. Fitzsimmons, The Remaking of France: The National Assembly, the Constitution of 1791 and the Reorganization of the French Polity, 1789–1791 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 187–91.

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barriers of corporate organization and privilege while simultaneously permitting the survival of established practices of collective and communal political culture, and by mobilizing unheard-of numbers of Frenchmen on public (and at times crisis-laden) occasions, these procedures contributed in the course of the 1790s to the reconsolidation of state power. On the other hand, no ambivalence attended financial-bureaucratic reforms in this period: they seemed to cut in one direction only, toward an enlargement of the public domain, and, hence, of state authority. The whole point of fiscal reform in the 1790s, John Bosher has explained, was to remove all budgetary and related matters from the purview of private individuals – the much-maligned “capitalists” (bankers, traitants, venal officers) – and place them under the watchful eye of the “nation.” Those who dared to speak up for the old system were ignored from the start. “The parliamentary forces imbued with the new principles of nationalism,” Bosher has written, were “provincial representatives brought into the Assembly in the elections of 1789. They were only too anxious . . . to exert the crushing weight of their numbers to thwart the ambitions of Parisian financial interests, whether of bankers or financiers.”11 Accordingly, the Assemblymen, all the more to consolidate the “honest” portion of the royal debt – that is, those payments owed to bond-holders – moved to liquidate the king’s obligations to “capitalists” such as venal bureaucrats. They issued notes, the famous assignats, to facilitate the transfer of nationalized properties (clerical and crown estates and buildings) to venal officers, thus abolishing the offices (and extinguishing the associated national debt) in question. Needless to add, the Assembly insisted on keeping the sale of biens nationaux under public control, and the assignats themselves, for better or for worse, were to be securely tied to the nation’s fortunes. Of course, liquidating that part of the crown’s debt owing to the financiers of the past was only the prelude to the principal task at hand: creation of a modern bureaucracy to safeguard the nation’s finances. Inspired by the vision of a state functioning with mechanical efficiency, the men of the Constituent Assembly hoped to marshal the forces of organization to banish all forms of malversation in office. In France, they decreed, the myriad separate treasuries in the hands of free-wheeling, profiteering tax farmers and accountants would have to go. In their place, a consolidated, bureaucratic Treasury would emerge whose salaried officials would operate in a rational, prescribed fashion. Palpably, these were fundamental changes that could not occur overnight; they were part of the ongoing process of revolution in France. At least until 1792 – a pivotal year marked by the reversion to war – the “new” fiscal system retained many if not all of its traditional characteristics. It managed to preserve something of its erstwhile autonomy within the state apparatus; it still lacked precise operational rules and a precise definition of its place within 11

John Bosher, French Finances, 1770–1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 309–10.

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French constitutional arrangements; its ministries remained somewhat uncoordinated and only partially modernized; and its functionaries, veterans and neophytes alike, held on to some of the prejudices and habits of old regime officialdom. Nonetheless, it is clear by the same token that state employees were no longer aristocratic hangers-on from Court. They were servants of the state, subordinate to state policymakers and expected to defend the national interest. They worked within a system purged of its ruinous venality and subject increasingly to legislative oversight, a system already taking the initial steps toward a major rationalization of routines.12 It is hard to resist Bosher’s further conclusion that the new financial bureaucracy, “with its flexible hierarchy of command, its division of labor, its central records, its double-entry bookkeeping systems, and its mechanical efficiency” would eventually be “capable of mobilizing the . . . resources of the nation to a degree . . . necessary for 20 years of war against nearly the whole of Europe.”13 This is, in other words, one of those areas of reform in which the geostrategic implications of the French Revolution’s consolidation of state power are – in retrospect, at least – most obvious. In the realm of ecclesiastical reform, the needs of the revivified state had to contend somewhat more vigorously with those of individual citizens – although even here, one suspects, the Assemblymen were primarily guided by “national” and statist considerations. Indisputably, the deputies hoped, by deciding (tentatively) as early as October 1789 to nationalize and sell off the French Catholic Church’s valuable properties, to generate public support for their controversial policies by transferring many of those properties to bourgeois and enterprising peasants who had long coveted them. Moreover, the concurrent abolition of venal offices, by releasing so much liquid capital, undoubtedly facilitated such a popular transference of wealth. In addition, the Constituent Assembly must have had the interests of individual propri´etaires in mind when, as part of its initial ecclesiastical reforms, it abolished unpopular tithes, the payments of annates to Rome, and pluralism in office, and suppressed or consolidated the contemplative orders of “regular” clergy. On the other hand, the Assembly’s seizure of church properties even more arrestingly pointed up the revolutionaries’ sense of the supremacy of the “nation” – and, prospectively, of statist needs. If the crown in olden times had turned to its own (usually warlike) uses the incomes from church benefices, the Assembly was now basically doing the same thing, if on a larger scale. Furthermore, discussion of the issue enabled secular-minded legislators such as Le Chapelier and Robespierre to stress the imperative need to expropriate the clergy so that they could no longer portray the Gallican Church as an eternally separate order in France; in the revolutionary “nation,” that is to say, no 12 13

On all of this, see Clive H. Church, Revolution and Red Tape: The French Ministerial Bureaucracy 1770–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), esp. pp. 64–68. Bosher, French Finances, p. 313.

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privileged corps, not even the historically sanctified Catholic Church, should be in a position to challenge and possibly even frustrate the “national” will.14 The central importance of this national (and, by implication, statist) theme emerges even more strikingly in connection with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, decreed by the Assembly in July 1790. Although most humble parish priests might have good reason to applaud the abolition of chapters and benefices “without cure of souls,” the assimilation of dioceses and parishes into the new framework of departments and communes, and the drastic reduction of the scandalous inequities between episcopal and priestly incomes, the most principled among them might (and indeed did) see the Civil Constitution as imposing ecclesiastical changes without prior consultation of the Church in France and, ultimately, of the First Shepherd at Rome. And this was, as John McManners has stated, the truly “insuperable obstacle” to ecclesiastical acceptance of this reform. Many a learned canonist rejected the state’s claim that it could redraw diocesan borders without consultation of spiritual authorities, contested just as stoutly the state’s right to arrogate to itself the investiture of bishops, and appealed on these and associated issues to the final arbiter of such matters, the Pope at Rome.15 Yet there could be no doubt as to how most legislators, as laymen, would frame the question. “When the sovereign believes a reform is necessary,” thundered one of their number, Treilhard, “no one can oppose it.”16 As Dale Van Kley has recently reminded us in an article summarizing the scholarly wisdom on the topic, the revolutionaries were heirs of the kings and of the antipapal Gallican traditions of the old regime, and were mindful as well of efforts by “enlightened despots” such as Joseph II of Austria and Catherine II of Russia to remodel ecclesiastical institutions and curb church prerogatives within their dominions.17 Thus, they were not about to be deterred from asserting national-statist control over the Church Universal. Moreover, by the spring and early summer of 1790, the Assemblymen were receiving encouragement to adhere to this hard line from radical Parisian journalists for whom any defense of churchly rights had become little more than a rationalization of “counterrevolution.”18 Small wonder, therefore, that the Assembly defiantly burned its bridges behind it on this potentially explosive issue, ratifying the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in July and insisting four months later that 14 15

16 17 18

John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), pp. 28–29. McManners, The French Revolution, pp. 38–41. See also, on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, Andre´ Latreille, L’Eglise Catholique et la R´evolution franc¸aise, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1946–50), esp. 1: 99–116. Cited in McManners, The French Revolution, p. 42. Refer again to Van Kley, “The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 1560–1791,” in Kaiser and Van Kley, eds., From Deficit to Deluge, esp. pp. 135–38. See, on this subject, Jack R. Censer, Prelude to Power: The Parisian Radical Press, 1789–1791 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), esp. pp. 98–99.

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all clergy take an oath of allegiance to the new religious order. As subsequent research has revealed, charting the local fortunes of this oath allows us to distinguish between “citizen priests” amenable to the Revolution’s assertion of secular-statist authority and “Tridentine priests” wedded still to the older vision of a hierarchy of ecclesiastical institutions in France rejecting the secular state’s supremacist claims. Whether the model of the “citizen priest” willing to swear the oath or that of the “Tridentine priest” refusing it prevailed in a given region might well decide if clerical (and, often, secular) inhabitants would accord their allegiance to local patriots and the revolutionary government at Paris or to local bishops and distant Rome. It appears that, in the region centering on the Parisian Basin, much as in a very broad sweep of provinces cutting diagonally across the core of the country from the border of the Netherlands to the mouth of the Gironde River, the government could count on general acceptance of the oath.19 Here, then, was at least one indicator of a geographical context in which the Constituent Assembly’s assertion of “national sovereignty” (and reassertion of statist supremacy) would resonate powerfully. In its efforts to revolutionize or at least substantially modify the seigneurial regime in France, much as in its ecclesiastical policies, the Assembly exposed a tension between the needs of “liberated” individual citizens and those of the rejuvenated French state that was often, if not invariably, resolved in favor of the latter. There is no doubt that the government’s decision to limit the rights of all seigneurs answered in part to powerful social pressures in post-absolutist France. Most citizens with any capital to spare (and, we recall, many of them were conveniently receiving capital in return for their old venal offices) desired to invest it in land, and the peasants ached to be relieved of their seigneurial dues and associated obligations. Yet, the Constituent Assemblymen, as they came to inherit the burden of ruling France, had to have more than these considerations in mind. John Markoff has in this connection cited the political as well as the social calculations behind the deputies’ decision to sanction the redemption (in cash or in kind) of all seigneurial dues and services supposedly grounded in past “legitimate” transfers of property. The legislators, many of whom were landed seigneurs themselves, may have viewed indemnification as a reasonable social compromise both for restive peasants wishing to have done with seigneurialism altogether and for lords insisting on the retention of all their property rights. But they were also uneasily aware that to go beyond indemnification – that is, to abolish all seigneurial prerogatives outright – could adversely affect state finances. The unconditional abolition of such prerogatives would not only eliminate that admittedly minor but heretofore assured state revenue that the king himself received as lord of royal domains; it would 19

Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Conflict in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), esp. pp. 290–98.

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also diminish the market value of crown and other seigneurial estates whose prospective purchasers could now look forward no longer to acquiring (and profiting from) seigneurial rights. All too clearly, declining proceeds from such purchases would translate into a diminished financial windfall for a French state more fiscally straitened than ever.20 Hence, the Assembly’s adoption of the principle of indemnification for the heaviest of the old seigneurial dues was dictated as much by statist requirements as by bourgeois, peasant, and other social interests. Peter M. Jones has vividly illustrated this harsh reality by recalling its paradoxical implications for “liberated” Frenchmen of humble status toiling in the countryside. Peasants who until 1789 had paid “a wide range of monetary and harvest dues” to ecclesiastical landlords in their capacity as seigneurs and were now unable to meet the terms of redemption would be “henceforth expected to pay to the government” everything they had formerly remitted to their clerical lords. Some “liberation!” Only the onset of a war crisis in the summer of 1792 would cut off this source of income to the state, along with all other remittances to Paris deriving from the by now completely discredited seigneurial regime.21 In general, the actual terms of rachat (redemption) offered by the Assembly disclosed tensions between citizens and the state that, as in other areas of public policy, somewhat favored the state. True, a number of the deputies – Thouret, Delley d’Agier, and the duc de la Rochefoucauld among them – cried up the need to seize this opportunity to spread the ownership of land as widely as possible by selling ecclesiastical estates in small lots for low prices and on deferred terms. Tellingly, however, they were countered by others who asserted unabashedly that the whole object of the sale was to rescue state finances from the bankruptcy of the old regime; and this implied getting the highest prices possible and enforcing prompt payments. The initial decree on the subject, that of May 14, 1790, provided a “compromise” that unashamedly subordinated the interests of small landowners to those of the state (and, indirectly, to those of wealthier proprietors). Although only 12 percent of the purchase price was due immediately, with the remainder (at 5 percent interest) payable over twelve years, lands were obtainable only in large blocks, and sales were to be by auction (which would drive prices up) and confined to the administrative centers of districts, to which few peasants would have the time to travel.22 In a sense, the purchasers of these properties, whatever their social provenance, had the last laugh, as in subsequent years the government found itself receiving payments sharply reduced in value by runaway inflation. Still, Finance Minister 20

21 22

This calculus of conflicting interests is particularly well discussed by John Markoff, “Violence, Emancipation, and Democracy: The Countryside and the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): esp. pp. 365–66. See Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution, pp. 109–10. For these terms of purchase of the biens nationaux, see Norman Hampson, A Social History of the French Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), pp. 124–26.

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Necker’s sobering projection in 1790 of a state deficit rising to at least 294 million livres had given the legislators an urgent financial cue, and larger political (and, ultimately, geopolitical) considerations would continue in ensuing years to lie behind the brisk transactions in biens nationaux.23 Larger political (or, in the terms of our analysis, statist) considerations also profoundly informed the Constituent Assembly’s decision in 1791 (embodied in the celebrated “Le Chapelier Law”) to dissolve all corporate bodies in the realm. Historians addressing this contentious issue have as a rule stressed the social motivations behind, and consequences of, the Le Chapelier legislation. And it is incontrovertible that, even if the law’s formal prohibitions and penalties were supposed to apply equally to employers and employees, in practice they fell almost exclusively on workers. It is hard to see how, over the next century or so, this could not have been the case: abolition of guilds and other producers’ associations and the prohibitions aimed against unions and other workers’ groups, by deregulating in effect the marketplace of capital and labor, could only hand urban laborers over to the not-so-tender mercies of entrepreneurs. But the really germane point to make here from our analytical perspective is that, as the most recent research on this question indicates, the chief motive behind the Le Chapelier Law was constitutional (or political) rather than social or socioeconomic. Passage of this law was, in fact, yet another way to trumpet the revolutionary credo that “corporations” as such could not be reconciled with the foundational principles of the new, regenerated French state. No intermediary body could be allowed to exist between the individual, liberated citizen and the “nation” – and the nation was henceforth to be the sole guardian of civic rights and the sole venue for the exercise of the general will.24 This, we recall, had also been the revolutionary gospel in whose light that venerable “intermediary body” the Gallican Church had stood condemned the preceding summer – along with a host of judicial and administrative corps with long histories in the French past. This primarily political reading of the Le Chapelier decree is supported by the fact that the Constitution of 1791 in its final draft began by explicitly anathematizing “the institutions that have injured liberty and the equality of rights.” Accordingly, corporate bodies were dispatched to infamy along with nobility, peerage, hereditary distinctions, all orders of chivalry, venality of office, religious vows, and the privileges of provinces and cities. “Loyalties to provinces, estates, orders, communities, corporations, all were to vanish before the interests of individual citizens and the supreme loyalty of every citizen to 23

24

It is also true, as Hampson has noted, that many deputies were frankly “skeptical of the economic wisdom of splitting large holdings into a number of smaller plots.” Ibid., pp. 124–26. See also, on these issues, Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution, pp. 154–55. The crucial work on this subject is: William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), esp. pp. 90–91.

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the nation.”25 Here, then, was yet another instance of a reform enacted by the Constituent Assembly that, while catering in part to real and substantial socioeconomic interests, also served larger issues of the revolutionary polity. Moreover, France’s renewed involvement in international affairs was fated before long to subordinate the “interests of individual citizens” to their “supreme loyalty . . . to the nation.” For many French citizens, that paramount fidelity to the nation was soon to be demonstrated through service – whether voluntary or coerced – in the armed forces of the rejuvenated and ever more militarized state. Once again, we can perceive here the tension between statist sensitivity to the aspirations and needs of individual Frenchmen and a revolutionary raison d’´etat overriding, when necessary, the concerns and objections of king, aristocrats, and commoners alike. Certainly, it would be unfair to posit here a blanket indifference among France’s new rulers to the needs of those willing (or forced) to serve under the colors. The Assembly, rejecting Dubois-Crance’s ´ call for universal conscription, abolished the generally despised militia and replaced it with fully 100,000 “auxiliaries” to be recruited by voluntary enlistment. Those so enlisting would earn 3 sous a day in time of peace; in the event of war they would be incorporated into existing units of the army. The Assembly also made some efforts to ameliorate the living conditions of common soldiers, codify their legal status as active citizens, guarantee their rights in criminal proceedings, and provide pensions for their widows should they die in active service.26 Still, what Samuel Scott has called “the single greatest problem in the Royal Army, the alienation between soldiers and officers,” continued as in the twilight of the ancien r´egime to fester.27 Indeed, incidents pitting officers against their men occurred with a new frequency during the summer of 1790, and even more serious mutinies were to break out the following spring. The revolutionaries showed little sympathy for the common soldiery in such circumstances; yet their paramount statist concerns hardly stopped at matters of military discipline. For one thing, the deputies’ sensitivity to seemingly permanent international pressures drove them to contest and eventually deny the crown’s traditional role in military affairs. “Whether peace would ever be established in Europe was doubtful,” Jean-Paul Bertaud has realistically written. “For all their yearning for universal peace, many bourgeois were well aware that war was not about to disappear from the continent. . . . An army would therefore be necessary in future years. To prevent its becoming an instrument of despotism, it must become national.”28 This meant, among other things, that although Louis XVI remained in theory chief of the army, working 25 26 27 28

Ibid., pp. 88–89 and 90–91. Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, pp. 44–49. Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution, p. 82. Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, p. 40.

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through a War Ministry, the Constituent Assembly “by a decree of February 28, 1790 . . . reserved to itself the possibility of encroaching on the executive domain. It provided that, at each session of the legislature, the Assembly should determine the funds needed to maintain the army and assure its pay.”29 Alan Forrest has noted that the Assembly “dramatically” increased its influence over the military in other ways as well, for instance by establishing a special legislative military committee “that could provide the deputies with expert advice,” and by deputizing some of its own members to the various armies to ascertain the “political loyalty” of the generals and to take up “more routine questions of supply, morale, and general readiness for war.”30 In matters of recruitment and promotion within the ranks, too, the revolutionaries revealed the predominance of political over social concerns. For example, decrees of March 7 and 9, 1791; altered the terms of military enlistment. Joining the army was no longer to involve “a contract between one man and another; it became a contract between the individual and the State, represented by the municipalities and the directories of the departments.” The reconsolidated state insisted that enlistment be for eight years, that the recruit be between 18 and 40 years old, and that he display “good moral character and physical aptitude.” In addition, foreigners were excluded by these criteria so as to solidify the Frenchness of the fighting units.31 At the same time, when it came to promotional matters, the revolutionaries quite consciously subordinated social (that is, “new” noble and “bourgeois”) ambitions to immediate pragmatic and professional concerns. “Although they might have serious reservations about the aristocratic profile of the officer corps,” Forrest has concluded, “few in the Assembly saw any alternative to a gradual transfer of authority. Army officers did, above all, need to possess expertise, and the possibility of an army without a clear structure of authority was attractive to no one.” In effect, those revolutionaries who sought in the first place to inculcate professionalism in the soldiery so as to create an army capable of waging full-scale aggressive war as well as handling defensive operations won out (at least for the time being) over those who stressed civic individualism and viewed the army in ideological terms as helping to fashion the “new man.”32 In the navy as well, the reforms in this period betrayed the priority of the revolutionaries’ statist and pragmatic/professional concerns. Here, as well, royal and ministerial control gave way at a fairly early point to legislative oversight, and retention of the highly experienced, largely aristocratic officer corps took precedence over any aggressive efforts to open the commanding 29 30

31 32

Ibid., pp. 44–45. Alan Forrest, The Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), pp. 42–45. See also Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution, passim., and Bertaud, The Army of the French Revoution, esp. pp. 40–50, on these matters. Ibid., pp. 44–46. Forrest, The Soldiers of the French Revolution, pp. 42–45.

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ranks to “new” men. As a consequence, although the navy was able now to recruit merchant officers directly from the merchant marine via the rank of enseigne, and although such enseignes constituted a reserve of officers in times of war, there was emphatically no purge of the aristocratic Grand Corps at this point in the Revolution. The navy, specialists have concurred, emerged in 1791 substantially unchanged by the reformist statutes of the Constituent Assembly.33 The foregoing analysis of seven especially pivotal kinds of reform undertaken by the Constituent Assembly may confirm J. M. Thompson’s observation that the French revolutionaries of 1789–91 were indeed capable of favoring the cause of “national regeneration” over their sundry “class interests and enmities.” In the somewhat different terms of our analysis, the Assemblymen, if willing in many connections to open up political and professional careers and make new proprietary rights available to ambitious (male) citizens, were even more consistently determined to sweep away all corporate interests intervening between the individual citizen and the state, and to supply that modernized, revived state with updated institutions through which it could turn the individual citizen’s wealth and energies to statist or “national” purposes. Yet, in our larger comparative context, the French legislative, reformist “honeymoon” appears somewhat unique. There was certainly an initial feeling of euphoria, of “liberation,” and of limitless possibilities in the Russian and English cases of revolution as well – yet, as we will now see, in neither case were those inheriting the initiative in public affairs from the discredited old regime able to achieve anything quite like the battery of reforms implemented in early revolutionary France. Let us concentrate first on the extent and limitations of a reformist “honeymoon” in Russia, and then review the same issue in the case of early revolutionary England. In France, the Constituent Assembly had been able to pass an impressive array of reforms (some of which were more or less permanent, others of which were to be carried further or radically altered in subsequent phases of the revolutionary-Napoleonic era) because, during much of 1789–91, its legitimacy was not seriously challenged either from the discredited Right or from the watchful Left – and because the country at this critical moment was at peace with the rest of Europe. In Russia, on the other hand, a situation of “dual power” (dvoevlastie) meant that, from the very start, formal state power was vested in the so-called Provisional Government, while real coercive power resided increasingly in the huge, unruly Petrograd Soviet of soldiers, sailors, and workers. (These rival institutions, ironically, occupied opposite wings of the Tauride Palace in the capital!) “The Provisional Government,” 33

See, on this subject: Norman Hampson, “The ‘Comite´ de Marine’ of the Constituent Assembly,” The Historical Journal 2 (1959): 148; and, more recently, William S. Cormack, Revolution and Political Conflict in the French Navy, 1789–1794 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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Sheila Fitzpatrick has written, “had no electoral mandate, deriving its authority from the now defunct Duma, the consent of the Army High Command, and informal agreements with public organizations such as the Zemstvo League and the War Industries Committee.”34 It inherited the old tsarist bureaucracy and other institutions of the old regime, both in metropolitan Russia and in the provinces, but its Kadet and other ministers – Prince Georgii Lvov, Paul Miliukov, Vladimir Lvov, Andrei Shingarev, Alexander Konovalov, Alexander Manuilov, Nicholas Nekrasov, and M. I. Tereshchenko, for instance – had no supportive legislature to work with. It did possess a liaison with the Petrograd Soviet in the person of its sole socialist member, Justice Minister Alexander Kerensky; he, it was hoped, would counterbalance the conservative, Octobrist War Minister Alexander Guchkov, and would try to mediate the tensions between the “bourgeois” leadership of the Provisional Government and the predominantly Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary leadership of the Soviet. In such a situation, the ameliorative measures promulgated by Prince Lvov’s and Foreign Minister Miliukov’s “ruling” clique during Russia’s brief “honeymoon” period of February–April 1917 had perforce to be either universally popular and therefore noncontroversial reforms, entailing what Melissa Stockdale has called “the repeal of odious laws and the proclamation of promised rights,”35 or “class-oriented” reforms implemented under growing pressure from the working masses of “Soviet Russia.” War Minister Guchkov remarked on the Provisional Government’s political isolation, likely inevitable in such circumstances: The Provisional Government does not possess any real power; and its directives are carried out only to the extent that it is permitted by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which enjoys all the essential elements of real power, since the troops, the railroads, the post and telegraph are all in its hands. One can say flatly that the Provisional Government exists only so long as it is permitted by the Soviet.36

As for the Soviet, its socialist leaders, if “moderate” in comparison to Bolsheviks and other ideologues on the Far Left, were nonetheless determined to mount a careful watch over all “bourgeois” machinations of the Provisional Government and to speak up incessantly for working class interests until the “bourgeois” phase of the revolution should have been succeeded by triumphal socialism. As Nikolai Sukhanov, one of the Soviet’s most perspicacious SRturned-Menshevik leaders, put it: The Soviet democracy had to entrust the power to the propertied elements, its class enemy, without whose participation it could not now master the technique of administration in the desperate conditions of disintegration, nor deal with the forces of Tsarism 34 35 36

Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 46. Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, p. 249. Cited in Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 1: 260.

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and the bourgeoisie, united against it. But the condition of this transfer had to ensure the democracy of a complete victory over the class enemy in the near future.37

So much for the Petrograd Soviet’s pledged cooperation with the Provisional Government! But N. N. Sukhanov’s candid reference to the “desperate conditions of disintegration” in Russia reminds us forcefully that, at this time, all Russians, whether of bourgeois or non-bourgeois status, whether non-Marxist or Marxist, were staring into the abyss of threatened socioeconomic as well as political anarchy in a time of total, unsuccessful, and seemingly unending and unendable war. But the isolation of the Provisional Government in wartime – and the monstrous challenge it faced in its ameliorative efforts – went even further than this. Specialists in provincial aspects of the Russian Revolution see the dvoevlastie, the “dual power” cited by all textbooks describing the familiar developments at Petrograd, as only the tip of the iceberg: they refer to what Orlando Figes has called the “deeper problem of the proliferation of a ‘multitude of local powers’ (mnogovlastie).” And even the most militant, most millenarian Marxists in the Petrograd Soviet knew how little control even they could wield over this tendency toward disintegration in the provinces. As Figes has somberly put it: There was a breakdown of all central power: local towns and regions declared their ‘independence’ from the capital; villages declared themselves ‘autonomous republics’; nationalities and ethnic groups seized control of territory and declared themselves to be ‘independent states’. The social revolution was to be found in this decentralization of power: local communities defended their interests and asserted their autonomy through the election of ad hoc committees (public executive committees, municipal committees, revolutionary committees, committees of public organizations, village committees and Soviets) which paid scant regard to the orders of the centre and which passed their own ‘laws’ to legitimize the local reconstruction of social relations.38

Something like this, we recall, had happened in the French countryside in the summer of 1789 as royal intendants one-by-one abandoned their posts and as rumors about “brigands” and aristocratic plots ran wild; but the Constituent Assembly had never had to deal with anything quite this extreme or elemental – especially in a time of total war. This, in any case, was the context in which the struggling yet hopeful Kadets and other moderate figures in the Provisional Government, just released like their fellow Russians from the iron but decaying tyranny of tsardom, endeavored to remake their vast country during February–April 1917. They, too – much like the French Revolutionary leaders whom they idolized – wanted 37 38

Cited in Nikolai N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917, trans. Joel Carmichael (2 vols.; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 1: 104–5. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 359. See also, on developments at this time in the provinces, Donald J. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986); and Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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to achieve some sort of balance between new rights and opportunities conceded to “liberated” citizens and new sources of legitimacy and operational efficiency vested in the regenerated (but now safely “revolutionary”) Russian state. Unfortunately for them, however, the political currents of society were, in these early months of 1917, all running overwhelmingly against authority and authority figures. More than even the 1789 upheaval, “the revolution of 1917 should really be conceived of as a general crisis of authority.” In its essence, it rejected, not just the state, the bloody tsarist regime, “but . . . all ´ figures of authority: judges, policemen, Civil Servants, army and navy officers, priests, teachers, employers, foremen, landowners, village elders, patriarchal fathers and husbands.”39 Not unexpectedly, this first Provisional Government, presided over by Prince Lvov, a malleable individual imbued with a Slavophilic faith in popular “wisdom” and hostility toward bureaucracy, swam along with the current. In its earliest weeks, it hastened to transform Russia into “the freest country in the world.” “Freedoms of assembly, press and speech were granted. Legal restrictions of religion, class and race were removed. There was a general amnesty. Universal adult suffrage was introduced. The police were made accountable to local government. The courts and the penal system were overhauled. Capital punishment was abolished. Democratic organs of local self-government were established. . . . The laws followed upon each other in such rapid succession that it was hard for Russia’s new citizens to keep up with them.”40 Even female suffrage was possible in this brave new world of Russian politics: bowing to pressure from feminist and socialist women’s groups, Rochelle Ruthchild informs us, the Provisional Government conceded full female suffrage on July 20, 1917.41 As Melissa Stockdale has pointed out, this explosion of democracy extended to foreign affairs as well. The government published a manifesto on Finland repealing all laws that had heretofore transgressed against the Finnish constitution, including statutes that Miliukov had bitterly opposed in the Third Duma; Finnish cultural autonomy (if not yet outright political independence) was sanctioned. The issue of Poland was obviously more problematic, given Poland’s current occupation by Imperial German forces. Still, on March 16, the government, at the behest of its foreign minister, published an appeal to all Poles promising the eventual creation of an independent Polish state “comprising all lands in which the Polish people constitute the majority of the population,” to be joined with Russia in what was nebulously termed a “free military alliance.”42 39 40 41

42

Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 359. Ibid., p. 358. See Rochelle G. Ruthchild, Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905–1917 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010) for a full discussion of the women’s suffrage debates that led to this dramatic breakthrough in the summer of 1917. Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, pp. 249–50.

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One critical political reform directly invoking the prior experience of the French Revolution was not enacted by Lvov, Miliukov, and their high-minded colleagues: namely, the expeditious convening of a Constituent Assembly. Everyone might acknowledge the urgent need for its convocation, but this initial post-tsarist government (like its Coalition successors during 1917) became so bogged down in detailed legal and procedural preparations for such an assemblage that it never actually got around to convening it. For this, as Rex Wade has commented, the moderate revolutionaries, from the “honeymoon” period of February–April on, would pay a constantly appreciating political price: The emphasis on the importance of the Constituent Assembly and the government’s provisional nature had enormous consequences. Organizing the elections took longer than expected and they took place only in November, after the Provisional Government had been overthrown. Meanwhile the Provisional Government tended to delay action on major problems on the grounds that only the Constituent Assembly had the moral and legal authority to deal with them. This view was ethically commendable, but not entirely practical given the problems and the revolutionary conditions facing them. It became both a reason for not acting and a ready justification for failure to do so caused by other factors such as disagreement within the government or between it and the Soviet.43

Moreover, the Bolsheviks, taking advantage of Kadet (and then moderate socialist) procrastination on this symbolically potent issue, used it to plant seeds of doubt in people’s minds about the seriousness of all reform intentions professed by their political foes, thus legitimizing their own partisan propaganda; and this, predictably enough, helped pave the way for the Leninist seizure of power in the fall. In the meantime, Kadets in the key ministries of agriculture, trade and industry, education, and transport had to deal immediately with problems whose urgency far surpassed that of similar challenges tackled in 1789–91 by France’s legislature-dominated government. As Minister of Agriculture, for example, Andrei Shingarev had to confront what William Rosenberg has called “the almost insurmountable problems of “legally” regulating rural production, providing for adequate distribution of food products, and containing peasant discontent.”44 In early March, Shingarev moved quickly on a number of fronts. He directed the railroad authorities to accord top priority to shipments of foodstuffs, attempted to ascertain the location of grain supplies, ordered military commanders to limit their unrestricted requisitioning of foodstuffs, and collaborated with local urban committees to plan the introduction of rationing in several metropoles. With the implied backing of the food commission of the Petrograd Soviet, Shingarev announced on March 10 that the government 43 44

Wade, The Russian Revolution, pp. 53–54. See also, on this crucial issue, Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, 1: 145; and Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, pp. 146–47. On what follows, see ibid., pp. 78–80.

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“would introduce a national grain monopoly, requiring the compulsory transfers of all marketable grain to the state at fixed 1916 rates.” Later in the month, the Minister of Agriculture took additional initiatives that seemed to augur change in rural as well as urban areas: these included the establishment of rural food committees and of a network of so-called “land committees” designed to gather facts on the ground regarding land distribution. Yet it soon became all too clear that, for Shingarev as for his Kadet colleagues, locating adequate food supplies for hungry citizens in this new, embattled republic took precedence over land redistribution and all other fundamental agrarian reforms. This was unavoidable, Shingarev candidly explained in late March: the transfer of lands would not increase productivity in 1917, and, in any case, such operations were vastly complicated by the state treasury’s lack of funds wherewith to compensate landlords, by the fact that so many peasants were still in uniform at the front and so unavailable for allocation of redistributed lands, and by other practical considerations. Not that surprisingly, the Ministry of Agriculture was soon being taken to task by the Petrograd Soviet (and, in April, by the First All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies) for functioning in reality as a rallying ground for unregenerate “bourgeois” reactionaries. The Minister of Trade and Industry, Alexander Konovalov, and the Minister of Transport, Nicholas Nekrasov, had to deal more directly with urbanproletarian issues. Their record of success was uneven, to say the least.45 Konovalov, described by one specialist as “a somewhat weak-willed progressive Moscow industrialist,” attempted initially to mitigate urban Russia’s pressing economic problems by arguing for good working relations between management committees, representing industrialists and factory managers, and factory committees, representing working-class interests. He responded to the Petrograd Soviet’s demand for a strong state regulatory regime defending worker interests by invoking vague sentiments of national patriotism and sacrifice in the face of German occupation of western territories; in reality, much like Shingarev in the realm of agriculatural/rural policy, Konovalov was putting issues of industrial relations and labor reform on a back burner. By the end of March, the Minister of Trade and Industry was being denounced as a “bourgeois tool” in Soviet and working quarters. On the other hand, the new Minister of Transport, the “Left” Kadet Nekrasov, aroused genuine enthusiasm in Soviet and proletarian ranks: he found factory shops and workers’ committees a congenial environment in which to discuss pressing economic issues with Petrograd and Moscow workers. In the specific realm of transport, Nekrasov began soon after his appointment to outline a comprehensive plan to turn most powers of supervision and control over to the railroad workers themselves. His conviction that “democratizing the entire railroad structure” represented the “primary means 45

Ibid., pp. 80–83; see also Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon, esp. pp. 373–79, on worker’s economic issues and the workers’ growing hostility towards the Kadet Provisional Government during March–April 1917.

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for renewing Russian transport” betokened a certain favoritism for workers over supervisors in labor disputes and other matters; such an orientation was obviously calculated to appeal to proletarian interests, but left most of Nekrasov’s Kadet colleagues in the government and in the Petrograd Kadet Party leadership unenthused, not to mention antagonizing industrialists and transportation supervisors.46 But the workers of Petrograd and Moscow, whose agitation had played such a cardinal role in toppling the tsarist regime, and whose economic situation continued to deteriorate in March–April 1917 in the face of soaring inflation, desperate food shortages, exploding housing costs, epidemics of small pox, scarlet fever, and typhus, and other tribulations, were not to be fobbed off by vague government promises of a brighter future. They forced the Kadet leaders, and the “bourgeois” industrialists with whom they were all too palpably allied, into significant workplace concessions during this “honeymoon” phase of the Revolution.47 They demanded better working conditions, a role in the management of their factories, higher pay, social security, but “most of all they sought relief from the grinding routine of long hours of heavy labor.” The Provincial Government conceded – in principle – the need for the eight-hour day, but leading politicians and factory owners were able in most cases, by playing on the patriotism still inspiriting workers in these early revolutionary days, to persuade them to continue laboring longer hours. (Nonetheless, Lincoln tells us, the opposition to overtime spread quickly from Petrograd to Moscow, and then to Ivano, Nizhnii–Novgorod, Kiev, Kazan, Kharkov, Rostov-on-the-Don, Ekaterinburg, and Perm before the end of March, and into the mines and foundries of the Donbas, the Urals, and elsewhere by the middle of April.)48 The Petrograd workers also demanded higher wages, and by late March and early April had secured a minimum daily wage of five rubles for men, and four for women. (Skilled workers, especially in the war-related industries, earned more than twice that amount.) Again, the wages movement spread all across Russia: in some areas, much to the dismay of industrialists and managers, wage increases of 100 percent were fairly common. In addition, the workers were able to put teeth into their demands by forming factory committees during March and April whose mobilized, collective strength far outmatched that of their industrialist foes. Despite the Provisional Government’s efforts to limit their numbers, more than 300,000 Petrograd laborers formed nearly 400 committees in the capital, and many more sprouted up in other urban centers. The committees, 46

47

48

For more on Nekrasov and transportation issues in this period, see: William G. Rosenberg, “The Democratization of Russia’s Railroads in 1917,” American Historical Review 86 (1981): 93–108. See, in addition to the general discussion of W. Bruce Lincoln in Passage Through Armageddon as indicated earlier, Rosenberg and Koenker, “The Limits of Formal Protest: Workers’ Activism and Social Polarization in Petrograd and Moscow, March to November, 1917,” American Historical Review 92 (1987): 296–326. Lincoln, Passage through Armageddon, pp. 375–77.

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greatly preferred by the workers to the less effective trade unions, delved into all sorts of matters, ranging from the arbitration of labor disputes to organization of food supplies to the age-old struggle in Russia against drunkenness. Finally, the workers, having already begun increasingly to justify their unionizing activities in national-patriotic terms, citing their workplace contributions to the grand effort of defense against the Central Powers, plunged as well into the work of forming detachments of revolutionary workers’ militias. By the middle of March 1917, the ranks of Red Guards formations held 20,000 men or more, “all armed and sworn to defend the revolution as each saw fit.”49 Again, there was little the government could do to stymie the workers’ will in this matter: especially in these early months of the revolution, militant workers massed in Red Guards units assumed the task of restoring order in various urban centers and furnished their co-workers the means to impose their will on hated managers, supervisors, engineers, technicians, and foremen in a number of factories, mills, and mines. The reluctance of the Kadet-dominated government to “overplay the hand” of revolution also manifested itself in policy areas not directly related to workers’ and peasants’ issues or to the eternal tug-of-war between urban consumers and rural producers. Alexander Manuilov, the new Minister of Education, was expected to use his appointment to overhaul the entire network of primary and secondary schools in Russia so as to facilitate free access to those institutions by urban and rural proletarians, to decentralize the system of curriculum control, to implement construction projects, and to authorize greater public participation in local school affairs. Yet here, too, as in so many other purlieus of Kadet-instituted “reform,” bright early expectations were eclipsed by dampening realities. Manuilov was for the most part satisfied to establish investigatory commissions, leaving to them the responsibility, in a hazy future, of suggesting the specifics of basic educational reforms. Like many of his colleagues, he tended to leave tsarist supervisory personnel at their posts. He notably failed to replace those instructors on university faculties holding chairs previously vacated by victims of political persecution, and he seemed generally to be serving tradition, rather than advancing the regenerative cause of revolution. Predictably, Manuilov, too, increasingly aroused opposition on the Left.50 Finally, in the critical area of military reform (very important, as we have seen, for the French revolutionaries) the very conservative, Octobrist Minister of War, Alexander Guchkov, never had much of a chance to make his mark. On March 1, 1917, even before the formal establishment of the Provisional Government, the notorious Order No. 1, promulgated in the name of the 49 50

Ibid., pp. 377–79. See also, on this issue, the valuable work by Rex Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1984). On educational issues in February–April 1917, see Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, pp. 82–83.

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Petrograd Soviet, called for “democratization” of the army by such means as the election of soldiers’ committees, the curtailment of officers’ disciplinary powers, and, most critically, the participation of the Soviet in all policy matters affecting the armed forces in general. This measure, with its blatant overtones of class war, not only nullified from the start the Provisional Government’s control over military matters, and thus over institutionalized coercive force in the country, but also effectively undermined discipline and cohesion within the army. On this capital point, Allan K. Wildman has observed: . . . the command authority of the Army was a direct casualty of the February Revolution itself, of the massive groundswell of popular feeling that shattered the autocratic framework. . . . it did not simply erode over time. The point scarcely needs demonstrating for the Petrograd garrison and the Baltic ports, where the soldiers’ (and sailors’) revolt was the most conspicuous mover of events. . . . At the front there was no overt “mutiny” on the same massive order, yet the uninterrupted chain of events, from the first tidings of the abdication to the formalization of soldiers’ committees, was just as complete a revolution in authority, leaving the command in a position of sufferance and voluntary recognition at best and sweeping away most of the coercive powers that had formerly ensured obedience to orders.51

Henceforward, even soldiers at the front who had to confront the enemy across the wire, and who had been less thoroughly exposed to revolutionary propaganda than their comrades in the rear, soon “institutionalized their emancipation from officer tutelage through their committees.” Fatefully, the army, divided internally between officers still loyal to the Provisional Government and soldiers of the line following only the directives of the Petrograd Soviet, came increasingly to mirror Russian society at large, with its yawning and destabilizing chasm between “privilege Russia” and “Soviet Russia.” In attempting, under the pressures of war and threatening economic collapse, to carry out a program of reforms that could rival those put in place by the French revolutionaries whom they so admired, the Kadet ministers in these early days of the Russian Revolution inevitably fell short. They had, one specialist has concluded, “three closely related goals:” namely, “the end of mass unrest and the restoration of order in Petrograd; support from the army and the avoidance at all costs of civil war; and the implementation of those reforms that were capable of resolving Russia’s general administrative and economic crisis.”52 Yet, in a society sick to death of seemingly endless war, and beginning already to be responsive to calls for “class” politics, the Kadets, led as always by Miliukov, could not relinquish the tsarist regime’s traditional geostrategic goals (more on this later), and continued adamantly to view themselves as, somehow, distinct from and “above” class interests. At their seventh Party Congress, convened over three days at Petrograd in late March, the Kadets reaffirmed this 51 52

Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 1: 374–75. The drafting of Order No. 1 in the Petrograd Soviet is vividly recounted in Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1: 113. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, pp. 52–53.

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elevated sense of self-identification. “Miliukov,” Thomas Riha has asserted, “remained the party’s great conciliator, the man whom all Kadets could continue to call their leader.” After paying lip service to the republican mood of the moment, the history-professor-now-turned-foreign-minister gave renewed voice to his conviction that “the Kadet party remained Russia’s only non-class party, the only guarantor of class peace and national progress.”53 Yet only a truly representative Constituent Assembly, called expeditiously, might have had the ghost of a chance to establish a locus of legitimacy for Russia’s fragile, almost accidental democracy, and thus bridge the chasm widening between this country’s minuscule elite and its worker and peasant masses. And here, ´ in a nutshell, was the rub as far as the Kadets were concerned: they “favored the postponement of the elections,” as Orlando Figes has wryly observed, “no doubt because they knew they would lose them.”54 As we discover later on in this chapter, this was a conundrum for which Miliukov and his cosmopolitan but elitist associates had no adequate answer. ´ If, however, at this point, we exercise our privilege as comparativists to leap back in time from the Russian and French Revolutions to the English “honeymoon” of 1640–42, we will see that vexatious conundrums abounded as well for the reformist or revolutionary protagonists of those years – much as they subsequently have for historians endeavoring to interpret key events in the England of the early 1640s. Concerning the latter point, scholars from Hill and Stone to (more recently) David Cressy and Alan Cromartie have argued for a degree of “revolutionary” intent and action in 1640–42 that, if accepted, makes that period comparable to 1789–91 in France, and to February–April 1917 in Russia. If, at one point, Lawrence Stone conceded that it was “perfectly true that the country gentry and nobility assembled in Westminster in 1640 were reformers, not revolutionaries,” soon thereafter he pointed to “the language of revolution in the modern sense, and the language of ‘cultural revolution’ at that,” by which, he insisted, the parliamentarians of 1640 were continually being bombarded – and which, as he demonstrated, some of them indulged in themselves. “It is a little hard to understand those historians,” Stone concluded, “who would deny the word revolution to what happened in mid-seventeenthcentury England.”55 Much more recently, David Cressy allowed that what he constantly referred to as the “English Revolution” involved “no class war, no struggle of one social sector against another. . . . no objective repositioning or revolutionary rearrangement of social and economic resources, no permanent or purposive reconstruction of the social order.” Even so, at another point, he insisted that “an earthquake of cosmic proportions rocked English society 53

54 55

Riha, A Russian European: Paul Miliukov, pp. 306–10. See also, on this point, Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, passim; and Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, pp. 242–43. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 361. Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, pp. 51–53.

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between the spring of 1640 and the summer of 1642;”and he explicitly rejected the tendency of some of his fellow specialists to portray this upheaval as resulting from rather than actually preceding the country’s civil war. “Much of England’s world turned upside down before the hostilities, between 1640 and 1642,” Cressy insisted.56 As Norah Carlin has recently pointed out in her trenchant overview of the pertinent historiography, “revisionists” such as Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and John Adamson have attempted at various times to reduce the “revolutionary” aspects of the parliamentary politics of 1640– 42 to little more than a baronial revolt modeled on late medieval precedents, and have presented John Pym as something less than a purposeful, “modern” revolutionary leader; yet, as she has remarked, such a rendering of these events (and of John Pym) creates its own interpretative distortions and difficulties.57 Our assumption here will be that, whether or not they started out in November 1640 as “reformers” or as “revolutionaries,” leading opposition parliamentarians such as John Pym, John Hampden, Denzil Holles, and William Strode had perforce become revolutionaries by the end of the “honeymoon” period, and that consequently we can and indeed should compare their specific efforts as reformists in this early phase of the English Revolution to those, already detailed, of France’s National Assemblymen of 1789–91 and Russia’s mostly Kadet ministers of February–April 1917. We can do so fully aware that, in some respects, the “honeymoon phase” of revolution in England bore certain resemblances to the analogous periods in France and/or Russia, whereas in other respects these early, hopeful days of revolution in England were really quite unique, reflecting seventeenth-century England’s unique circumstances. We can, with tolerable accuracy, discuss the ameliorative measures passed in the first fourteen months of the Long Parliament under five headings: (1) the assault on Charles I’s ministers; (2) constitutional reforms securing Parliament’s role in public affairs; (3) financial measures; (4) judicial reforms; and (5) initial ecclesiastical changes.58 It was perfectly obvious that, once reconvened, the wrathful parliamentarians, still adhering to tradition by distinguishing between the “prince” and his “evil advisors,” were going to waste no time proceeding against the ministers whom they held responsible for the “despotic” acts and malversation of the Personal Rule. Several of Charles’ ministers – most notably, John Finch, 56

57 58

Cressy, England on Edge, pp. 376, 424, and 8–9. This perspective also finds some support in Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War, pp. 25–26, for a balanced evaluation of these historiographical issues. One of the most lucid, succinct discussions of these measures is now, unfortunately, out of print: G. E. Aylmer, A Short History of Seventeenth-Century England: 1603–1689 (New York: Mentor Books, 1963), pp. 115–18. But they are also reviewed, in somewhat greater analytical depth, in Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War, pp. 24–35.

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who as chief legal counselor to the king had harassed the judges over ship money in 1635 and 1637, and Secretary of State Francis Windebank, damningly accused of indulgence toward Catholics – avoided punishment by fleeing abroad. The king’s two chief architects of “Thorough,” the Earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud, were not so fortunate. Strafford, having been swiftly impeached and incarcerated in November 1640 with the tacit support of the Lords, was eventually executed on May 12, 1641, on an act of “Attainder,” that is, on the basis of a legislative rather than judicial procedure. At the core of the Commons’ hatred of Strafford apparently was the conviction that, as an erstwhile parliamentarian himself and now “turncoat” in government service, he had urged “extreme” courses of action on Charles following his dissolution of the Short Parliament, and (as Pym phrased it) had advocated turning the legal, constitutional monarchy in England into “the civil tyranny of an arbitrary, unlimited, confused government.”59 Laud, “elderly and demoralized,” as Aylmer has described him,60 was not arrested until March 1641; he would eventually be tried in 1644 for his advocacy of a “High Anglicanism,” which, to his critics, had smacked of “papism,” and for his persecution of dissident Puritans, and executed early in the following year. The parliamentarians were almost as quick to pass two key constitutional measures that were intended to secure in perpetuity their institution’s role in English governance. In February 1641, the Triennial Act stipulated that there would be a parliament at least once every three years, and spelled out a procedure for having it summoned and elected, if necessary, without the king’s approval. In May of the same year, an additional Act was passed prohibiting the adjournment (for more than a few days) or the dissolution of any parliament in session against its own consent. At the time, the reasons for this measure were financial as well as political: as Anthony Fletcher has written, the bill had been drawn up to place loans from the City of London required for payment of the rival armies in the North on a legal footing and to reassure all prospective creditors of the Crown that their advances of capital would be made henceforward on a safe legal (i.e., parliamentary) basis.61 The king’s assent to this latter Act on May 18, 1641, contributed, Fletcher tells us, to a general renewal of confidence in the financial community, lacking which, indeed, government in England could hardly have proceeded on a secure basis. But the constitutional implications of this legislation were also obvious: Charles (at least in theory) could not now rid himself of parliament by invoking the historic royal prerogative of dissolution. 59

60 61

On these charges against Strafford, see also Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, p. 126; and J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 192. Aylmer, A Short History of Seventeenth-Century England, p. 116. Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), pp. 28, 30, and 39–40.

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The matter of finances, of course, requires further discussion. The Parliament struck down the “arbitrary” taxation and other fiscal abuses of the Personal Rule. Ship Money was outlawed by statute (and some of the judges who had upheld Charles’ unlimited right to levy it during the 1630s were manhandled). Pym and his colleagues also passed Acts against the misuse of Forest Fines, against Compositions for Knighthood, and against monopolies, and purged monopolists from the Commons. Customs duties of one kind or another were suspended altogether; more significantly, perhaps, the Tonnage and Poundage traditionally voted to the monarch for the duration of his (or her) reign was “voted for a few months only and then renewed for a few more, thus underlining as well as actually increasing the King’s financial dependence on Parliament.”62 Anthony Fletcher has argued persuasively that Pym, in collusion with John Hampden in the Commons and with his patron the Earl of Bedford in the Lords, wanted in the autumn of 1640 to “settle” the king’s finances on the basis of a compromise involving opposition M.P.s’ permanent control of “certain vital offices” and, therefore, of the machinery of government.63 Though some historians have seriously questioned this account of Pym’s activities,64 or regarded them as at best premature for political reasons, there is at least no question that the Long Parliament in a general sense was determined to tolerate no repetition of the financial abuses of the Personal Rule. By May and June 1641, the Parliament began also to take seriously in hand the need to abolish the “prerogative courts” (Star Chamber, High Commission, etc.) used by the ancien r´egime to punish political and religious dissidents, and to right the wrongs done to some of the victims of those courts. By May 4, the Commons had reviewed the cases of Burton, Prynne, Bastwick, and John Lilburne, and pardoned all of them. In the event, Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, the most notorious of the prerogative courts, were dispatched to infamy; so, in effect, were the Councils in the North and in the Marches of Wales. Limits were (at least for the time being) placed as well on the judicial powers of the Privy Council itself – from which the bishops were in time to be expelled. These measures, G. E. Aylmer has written, “destroyed the very institutions of Tudor conciliar government. . . . Not only did they ensure that the regime without parliament could not be repeated but also that the ´ whole machinery of autocratic monarchy could not be revived without a statutory or military counter-revolution.”65 (Intriguingly, the destruction of prerogative court procedure also had, as a side effect, the drastic attenuation of the government’s powers of censorship.) 62 63 64

65

Aylmer, A Short History of Seventeenth-Century England, p. 117. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, pp. 6–7. As, for example, John S. Morrill, “The Unwearibleness of Mr. Pym: Influence and Eloquence in the Long Parliament,” in Amussen and Kishlansky, eds., Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, pp. 19–54. Aylmer, A Short History of Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 117–18. For additional details on this judicial reform, refer to Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, p. 30.

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Finally, there was the question of ecclesiastical reform – an issue that, we have seen, was very energetically taken in hand by the Constituent Assemblymen in the early phase of France’s revolution. For all their hatred of Laud, “High” Anglicanism, and rumored “papist” conspiracies, however, the M.P.s in this first phase of England’s revolution proved to be deeply divided on religious matters. True, they abolished the widely despised Court of High Commission, and, in addition, overturned Laud’s Canons of 1640 – but, as has often been noted, on constitutional as much as on theological grounds. (The Canons, preaching up a Laudian version of Anglicanism, had been approved in Clerical Convocation after the dissolution of the Short Parliament, suggesting that Parliament did not wield substantial powers in churchly affairs, and Pym and his colleagues were eager to nullify this interpretation.) Although the M.P.s were subjected to outside pressures on religious issues in the form of demands, from London and some of the counties, for “root and branch” reform of the Episcopalian establishment – demands reinforced, diplomatically, by the Presbyterian Scots in the North – it was not until September 1641 that the Commons would even go so far as to issue nebulous and tentative orders against “recent innovations in religious ceremonies and furnishings.” Even at that, the Lords by now were shifting over to a more conservative stance on questions of liturgy and ceremony, and showed it in some of their own mandates.66 If Gerald Aylmer could argue, nearly fifty years ago, that “the Long Parliament’s positive achievements in its first session” were, in fact, “very striking,” he had also to concede soon thereafter that the “broad basis of agreement which had made these great achievements possible was not maintained.”67 Although, from our comparativist perspective, we could scarcely regard the ameliorative legislation of 1640–41 as attaining the comprehensive institutional reach of that of early revolutionary France, or as directly affecting the social masses as did certain decrees in early revolutionary Russia, we can certainly agree with Aylmer’s latter assertion: namely, that any early revolutionary consensus on public issues did not endure. If opposition figures such as John Pym, John Hampden, and Denzil Holles started out as reformers, desiring to reestablish a traditional balance between King, Lords, and Commons, but wound up as genuine revolutionaries by the end of 1641, making ever more radical demands of Charles I, this points to a dynamic of polarization/radicalization that operated insidiously to undermine England’s early revolutionary “honeymoon” and to augur rough times ahead. The same dynamic, it turns out, developed in the early phases of the French and Russian Revolutions as well, and as such must also engage our attention in the next section of this chapter. 66

67

On these issues, see: John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 69–90; Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, pp. 91–107 and 111–24; and Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 231–34 and 168–70. Aylmer, A Short History of Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 116 and 118.

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Reform, Polarization, and Radicalization In subjecting the “dynamic of polarization/radicalization” in the initial phases of our three revolutions to comparative analysis, it might make sense to start with England and France, whose early revolutionary politics pointed toward brewing and likely unavoidable confrontations between monarchs and legislatures, and then deal with the Russian situation, whose politics in this same stage of revolution pointed toward a differently structured yet in some respects analogous confrontation between “bourgeois” and socialist politicians at Petrograd. Careful consideration of the dynamic forces eroding consensual “honeymoons” in all three revolutionary situations will require that we return to our central theme of a critical nexus between international and domestic affairs, comprehended and amplified in political-cultural terms. In the case of England, the breakdown of parliamentary consensus during 1640–42 that eventually allowed Charles I, so utterly isolated at the start of this period, to win back a considerable following, has to be reappraised within the sort of foreign/domestic and political-cultural context suggested in the preceding text. We need, in this connection, to start by reminding ourselves that Pym and his adherents in the Commons, in striving to reach some sort of stable accommodation with the king, had very much in the back of their minds the potential linkages between the sanguinary war still raging on the Continent, the presence of Scottish and English armies in the northern counties that had, somehow, to be paid off, and their fears, never far from the surface of events, of presumed “popish plots” against English security. The interconnectedness of all these issues in parliamentary minds manifested itself from the very start in the way Pym and others went after their primary bˆete noire, Strafford. Here, Conrad Russell’s commentary is very instructive: The belief that there was more known against Strafford than came out in the trial does not rest on conjecture. We know, for example, that he had proposed to have the nucleus of a standing army in England. . . . Strafford’s plan to call in Spanish help to fight the Second Bishop’s War was not merely widely known about the court, and therefore to many of his judges: his letter to [chief Spanish minister] Olivares of 18 July 1640 was in the hands of Pym. . . . Strafford’s speeches at the Great Council of Peers, demanding the renewal of war against the Scots, had been heard by the majority of his judges.

“If we can discover so much now,” Russell continues, “it seems probable that . . . Strafford had committed other indiscretions.”68 It is equally suggestive of parliamentary attitudes that, just a week before Strafford went to the scaffold, the Commons declared that anyone who brought foreign forces into the kingdom without the consent of both Commons and Lords was a “publick enemy to the King and kingdom.” Moreover, both Houses of Parliament, reacting both to Strafford’s “indiscretions,” with their potential international 68

Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, p. 285.

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implications, and to rumors (the so-called “Army Plots”) that Charles I was willing to turn bands of ruffianly mercenaries and/or the remnants of his Northern Army against his political enemies, began, in the wake of Strafford’s execution, to take England’s security and military interests into their own legislative hands. The Commons, for instance, . . . directed their members to take a survey of ammunition in their counties, and to report whether Deputy-Lieutenants and Lords-Lieutenants were ‘persons well affected to the religion, and to the publick peace.’ The Lords were less hesitant: when some of those suspected of being Army Plotters fled, the Lords stopped the ports and issued a Proclamation to apprehend them entirely on their own authority . . . they sent Mandeville and others to gather forces to defend Portsmouth, where the Queen was still expected to take refuge, and directed the Lord Admiral to put ships into the hands of ‘persons of trust.’ They agreed with the Commons’ request for the trained bands of Yorkshire to be ‘put into a safe hand.’69

As Russell comments, by acting more or less as “the ultimate repository of supreme authority” in the land, the Lords were demonstrating, whether they truly desired to or not, that Army Plot rumors were accustoming lawabiding subjects to believe that, in times of crisis, “they could take control of armed force out of the King’s hands for essentially defensive and law-abiding purposes.”70 From our comparativist perspective, it is even more fascinating to learn that on May 11 – on the eve, that is, of Strafford’s execution – the apprehensive Lords arrogated to themselves the prerogative of opening all letters from foreign parts. Here, again, is eloquent testimony to prominent Englishmen’s internationalist/domestic concerns – but, additionally, a premonition of the very same issue being debated by Robespierre and other nervous Constituent Assemblymen in France in the tense summer of 1789!71 Moreover, just as the French revolutionaries became increasingly xenophobic in 1789 in the face of rumors about Spaniards, Sardinians, Austrians (and, yes, English mercenaries!) violating French territory, so John Pym and his peers in the tense summer of 1641 reacted xenophobically against the prospect of continental participants in the Thirty Years’ War, increasingly desperate for new sources of manpower, seeking out fresh troops in England, and meddling generally in English affairs. As Caroline Hibbard has written: Prospects that England would play a truly active role in the European arena receded as the English became increasingly preoccupied at home. The continental powers were more and more viewed, not as potential allies, but as potential threats to English liberty and religion. As the persecution of priests got seriously under way in the summer of 1641, all the Catholic ambassadors became implicated as “harborers of priests.” Leaders 69 70 71

Ibid., pp. 298–99. Ibid. The debate over the propriety of opening private mail that took place in the Constituent Assembly during the last week of July 1789 is taken up in Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, p. 121.

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of parliament continued to differentiate in the summer of 1641 between the friendly governments of France and Venice on the one hand and the other Catholic powers on the other, but the mob did not. . . . no Catholic, domestic or foreign, was entirely immune from attack.72

There may have been, in Hibbard’s words, a “final burst of enthusiasm for the prince Palatine’s cause as an issue that might unite king, English, and Scots in the summer of 1641,” but in the end even this venerable cause c´el`ebre, with its origins extending back to the reign of James I, could not distract the English from prosecution of their own, ever more bitterly divisive affairs. Despite Norah Carlin’s cautionary comment that the “fascination of many historians with John Pym” remains “problematic,”73 none of the “revisionists” (Russell included) have managed altogether to dispel the impression of Pym’s central importance in the parliamentary politics of 1640–42 so laboriously established by Anthony Fletcher’s scholarship. Fletcher himself, perhaps conceding on this point something to the research and insights of Russell, has concurred that, during the opening months of the Long Parliament, Pym’s “settlement” strategy – that is, his hope of “settling” a permanent income on the crown in return for the replacement of “evil” counselors by trusted men enjoying parliamentary confidence – “ran counter to all the conservative notions of members imbued with the country tradition.” Parliamentary “backbenchers,” in other words, “responsive to the grievances of their local communities, irresponsible when it came to national contingencies,” and consequently less interested than Pym and like-minded M.P.s in matters of national finances and international “religious” politics, failed for some time to react positively to Pym’s moves in the direction of national leadership.74 Yet, on June 23, 1641, if we can accept Fletcher’s version of events, John Pym, taking advantage of the king’s continued political isolation and of worrisome rumors concerning Charles’ projected trip to the North, “set out a new programme for settlement, arguing that its completion was imperative before the king could safely leave the capital.” Admittedly, there were elements in this program broached by Pym in the Commons bound to be offensive to the king and his close adherents, such as the disarming of leading “papists” and the swift removal of “all bad counselors”: Yet his underlying aims had not changed: the king should be given an adequate revenue and evil counselors should be replaced by trusted men whom parliament respected. Taken overall the speech was positive and optimistic. Pym was eloquent about the possibilities once the immediate problems were solved. The parliament that was sitting, 72 73

74

Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, pp. 197–98. Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War, p. 26. Indeed, this “fascination” with Pym extends back to Jack Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941). But see again on this issue John S. Morrill, “The Unwearibleness of Mr. Pym,” pp. 19–54, for a strong dose of revisionism. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, pp. 35–36.

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he declared, could “lay a foundation for such a greatness of the kingdom, both in power at home and in reputation abroad, as never of His Majesty’s ancestors enjoyed.”75

“Power at home and . . . reputation abroad” – again, as always, we see here that pivotal nexus assumed automatically between affairs at home and affairs in the greater, outside world. And it seems that, this time, Pym succeeded brilliantly in gaining the support of many of his colleagues in the Commons and even (for the time being) in the Lords. “Ten Propositions” drafted in close committee and adopted by the Commons on June 24 embodied most of the proposals enunciated the preceding day; and, two days later, with the establishment of a joint committee of both Houses to ensure implementation of the Ten Propositions, “the assertion of Pym’s leadership was complete.” “This was,” Fletcher has gone so far as to maintain, “perhaps Pym’s most triumphant hour.”76 And it was, at least for the remainder of this session of Parliament, an enduring triumph. “For the whole of the first session of the Long Parliament,” Kevin Sharpe affirmed, “the papist scare dominated the agenda and coalesced the Commons. More than anything else it was the solvent that eroded trust in the king.”77 Its deadly efficacy as such a “solvent,” according to Sharpe, derived from the basic fact that it was nurtured by all the interacting European and domestic realities to which Pym and all other politicians of the day had to respond: the continental war, with its diplomatic intrigues pursued at London and its endless statist hankerings after English, Scottish, and even Irish troops; the propaganda of the Scots, who, even after they were paid off and accordingly withdrew from England’s northern counties, continued to cry up the danger posed to both England and Scotland by “popish” conspiracy; popular petitions flooding in from the counties upbraiding the M.P.s for their “leniency” toward subversive “papists” in the country; the paranoia of individual M.P.s; and, of course, most important of all, the incessant rumors (many of them seemingly well-founded) of attempts by the king and queen to solicit foreign intervention (French, Danish, Spanish, Dutch, even Imperial and Papal) on their behalf.78 This last point is crucial, for it suggests that, however gracious a front he might assume in discussions with members of Parliament, Charles never really forgave Pym and the other leading oppositionists for Strafford’s execution and Laud’s incarceration. The death of the Earl of Bedford on May 9, 1641, robbed both sides of a valuable intermediary; it seems that, henceforth, the king increasingly relied on advice tendered by Henrietta-Maria 75 76 77 78

Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., pp. 43–44. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I, pp. 938–39. On the intrigues of Charles I and Henrietta-Maria during the spring and summer of 1641, prior to Charles’ trip to Scotland, see Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, pp. 188–96; and Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, passim.

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(who, like Marie-Antoinette and Alexandra Fedorovna in similar circumstances, counseled intrigue and defiance rather than compromise), the Marquis of Hamilton, and the duke of Lennox.79 As early as June 1641, Charles may well have been involved in plans to use his northern army against Pym and his associates, once Scottish neutrality had been assured (the so-called “Second Army Plot”). Rumors concerning this alleged conspiracy unsurprisingly aroused considerable alarm at Westminster. When Charles journeyed to Edinburgh in August, he may still have been thinking of using the remnants of his northern army to move against the politicians in London; while in Scotland, he was almost certainly implicated in a plot to capture and possibly kill several prominent peers (the so-called “Incident”).80 When, in October, Pym relayed details of the “Incident” to his colleagues in the Commons, distrust of the king naturally only intensified. All of this makes us wonder why, before the end of 1641, a monarch who just months before had been virtually isolated politically was able to gather a party of moderates around him and (doubtless) begin in his heart of hearts to dream of contesting, militarily if necessary, his adversaries’ recent victories. Lawrence Stone has highlighted this “slow drift of the moderates away from Parliament and back to the King” by contrasting the vote (in May 1641) to attaint Strafford to the vote (in November of the same year) to pass the celebrated Grand Remonstrance, a laundry list of parliamentary grievances against the Crown’s mismanagement of affairs during the Personal Rule. The motion to attaint Strafford had passed overwhelmingly, by 204 to 59; the Grand Remonstrance “squeaked through” by a margin of only 159 to 148.81 Why, we must ask, this transformation of “moderate reformers” or “reluctant revolutionaries” into “born again” Stuart loyalists? Three developments in particular should probably be mentioned here by way of explanation. First, the means adopted by Pym and his partisans to control the direction of affairs in the Commons, and to try to assure themselves of substantial support in the Lords, inevitably rubbed increasing numbers of M.P.s the wrong way, and helped to generate an ingrained opposition to Pym’s interpretations of affairs. Gossip, rumor-mongering, and conspiratorial thinking, in other words, could cut two ways in the schizoid political culture of the day. Here, Fletcher’s analysis is revealing: Pym had certainly become vulnerable to the misunderstanding of those who did not accept the case for his policies and disliked the means he adopted. The myth of a small clique engaged in a conspiracy to overthrow monarchical authority was born during the spring and summer of 1641. A miasma of gossip and rumor already threatened the reputation of the parliamentary leaders. Their audacity provoked dislike. . . . Tales of their ambition were exchanged. 79 80 81

Ibid., p. 44. On these matters, see: ibid., p. 53; and Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 322–28. Lawrence Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, pp. 140–41.

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Pym and his friends, increasingly, were regarded by those not won over by their anti-papist fears and by their alarmist suspicions of Charles I’s every move “as a clique who expected unquestioning devotion,” as politicians who were “merciless to their opponents,” as utterly dominated by narrow, partisan considerations.82 By the time John Pym and Company forced the Grand Remonstrance through their House, Kevin Sharpe observed, “some were beginning to doubt the existence of the papist conspiracy and even accuse Pym and others of manipulating it for their own ends.”83 Indeed, long before November 1641, more than one parliamentarian was finding the leadership’s retailing of the specifics of every alleged “army plot” and “papist conspiracy” to be somewhat wearing, and more than a little suggestive of conspiratorial (and, belike, manipulative) theorizing gone wild. Second, there were the frightening social implications of debate, within and outside parliamentary walls, over the as yet unresolved but pivotal issues of ecclesiology. Whereas a substantial majority of those in the Commons and Lords could long concur in rejecting Laud’s almost hieratic, excessively ceremonial version of Anglicanism, they could agree in 1640–42 on little else regarding church reform. By late 1641, Fletcher has with some justice contended, “the national debate about the Church” was “crucial to the process by which the political nation was becoming divided, the process that brought the emergence of two parties at Westminster and made civil war a possibility.” If, on the one hand, those pushing for “root and branch” reform of the Anglican Church painted their opponents simplistically as “ready to let in popery and condone immorality,” on the other side the Episcopalians, “clinging to the Church as the rock of order, were terrified by their own supposition that all radicals were at least potential separatists.”84 We must also remember that, behind this debate on both sides lay the recollection of how, during the very recent Bishops’ Wars, the king’s undisciplined troops had on their northward marches taken advantage of their numbers to rampage through villages, smash stained glass windows and pull down altar rails in local churches, and in several cases harass or even murder their own commanding officers.85 Their examples of lawlessness had proven contagious in a society that was, at one and the same time, traumatized by conspiratorial rumors and anxieties over religious differences and poorly equipped, institutionally speaking, to repress the outbursts of popular violence that often accompanied or resulted from the dissemination of those rumors and anxieties. (There was, in addition, widespread anti-enclosure rioting in the English fenlands.) In light of all of this, and of the popular petitioning that seemed increasingly to jeopardize law and order in London, one 82 83 84 85

Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, pp. 87–89. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I, p. 939. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, p. 124. On all of these incidents involving violence in the royal armies of the Bishops’ Wars, consult once again Fissell, The Bishops’ Wars, passim.

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can all the more readily endorse David Cressy’s observation relating to the widespread disturbances of 1640–41: “The threat of the vulgar rising above themselves . . . helped to mobilize many of the gentry who ultimately sided with the King. The fear of social leveling, as much as the fear of religious fragmentation, boosted support for the royalist cause and constructed the King as the anchor of stability.”86 Charles I owed some of his most fervent support in the civil war to come, we suspect, to those former critics of Laud’s High Anglicanism for whom “the fear of religious fragmentation” and “the fear of social leveling” had by late 1641 and early 1642 become indissolubly conjoined. Third, and most critical, perhaps, were the constitutional implications of the Irish Rebellion of late 1641. This sanguinary uprising of Anglo-Catholic landlords and peasants against more recent English Protestant settlers (and against Strafford’s iron administrative hand, just recently removed) could not have come at a worse time in that, as Lawrence Stone once put it, “the plain need to crush it made necessary the resurrection of central power in its most extreme and dangerous form, an army.”87 But how was that army to be raised, and (most critically of all) who was to control it? On the one hand, the news of the Irish Rebellion, which reached London on Sunday, October 31, and was reported to parliament the following day, appeared, in Caroline Hibbard’s words, “to substantiate all that the opposition had said about popish plotting.” The rebels boldly claimed royal authorization of their actions, insisted that they were in arms “not against the king but against his enemies,” and boasted that Henrietta-Maria had herself urged them to rise up in defense of their faith. In addition, Hibbard states, the information relayed to the parliament accentuated for it the international–domestic linkages of this latest crisis: The queen and all those thought to be her allies came under immediate scrutiny. Spain was suspected of playing a leading role, for the leaders of the rising had been in Spanish employ and were reputed to have boasted that they expected Spanish help. . . . This antiSpanish animus owed something to tradition, something to known and suspected Irish appeals to Spain, and doubtless something to the French ambassador. . . . The leaders of parliament . . . feared direct papal intervention [as well] through the sending of troops from the continent to Ireland.

“The king’s involvement with the rebels,” this specialist flatly adds, “can no longer reasonably be questioned.”88 And even worse news was to come, in the form of subsequent communications to Westminster. One individual, for instance, reported later in November having heard the Irish “conspirators” say that “they had good friends in England, the bishops and some privy councilors, 86

87 88

Cressy, England on Edge, p. 376. Refer, as well, to David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985) for a salutary reminder of how intimately related, in this period, were issues of religious heterodoxy of any kind and elitist control of the masses. ´ Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, p. 138. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, pp. 213–14.

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and that nothing was done at the Council table in England but it was presently known in Ireland, in Rome and in Spain.” Then, on November 30, came Sir John Temple’s devastating communication from Dublin to the effect that the rebels had begun “to grow so confident of their prevailing in Ireland as they did begin to advise of the invading of England.” Fletcher has concluded from all of this that “there were probably few informed Londoners who had any confidence during the last two months of 1641 that the rebellion could be contained across the Irish Sea. Many spoke of the intention to invade as a fact.”89 Small wonder, then, that John Pym, in conference with the Lords prior to passage of the Grand Remonstrance, remarked fearfully that “there hath been one common counsel at Rome and in Spain, to reduce us to popery,” and went on to argue that, if “good counsel” prevailed “at home,” then “we shall be the better prepared to preserve peace and union,” and be “fit for any noble design abroad.”90 The upshot of the Irish crisis was to facilitate passage of the Remonstrance in the Commons, but at the same time to reinforce dynamics of polarization already powerfully at work at Westminster for all the previously analyzed reasons. If, for Pym and his allies, already dreading the possibility of royal retribution for their “murder” of Strafford in May, the lesson drawn from the Irish crisis was parliament’s need both to insist on control of any army raised to crush that rebellion and to control key ministries in the government, for increasing numbers of moderates the lesson drawn from the grim news filtering out of Dublin was just the opposite: that Charles I could not rightfully be coerced into ceding such critical military and policymaking powers. The closeness of the vote over the Grand Remonstrance in the Commons (159 to 148) reveals how much support the oppositionist M.P.s had lost and how much support the king’s party had gained by now over this and (as we have seen) other issues.91 Perhaps, at this point, it would be helpful to ponder the ruminations of two scholars especially qualified to assess the political situation obtaining in England in late 1641. On the one hand, Anthony Fletcher had no doubt that “the most important outcome of the politics” of the months leading up to the Irish Rebellion and Grand Remonstrance was . . . that Charles closed his mind to negotiation and so did Pym. The defensiveness which lurks in every clause of the Grand Remonstrance had become a habit of mind among the parliamentary leadership, as the threat of popery and conspiracy became an ever more absorbing obsession. The less they trusted the king the more they wanted the future guaranteed. A strategy of pressure and persuasion had failed. Confrontation was established. It is at least arguable that an insoluble political crisis was bound to follow.92 89 90 91

92

Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, pp. 136–37. Cited in Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, pp. 214–15. The setting of religious issues in the Remonstrance in both a domestic and an international context has been stressed in Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 94–96 and 146–47. See also a similar emphasis in John Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, p. 26. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, pp. 89–90.

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At the same time, Conrad Russell, whose emphases frequently differed from those of Fletcher, argued that one of “two very deep seventeenth-century political assumptions” in England was that “whenever the body politic was divided to the point of danger, the king was thought to have a special responsibility for making the concessions necessary to restore unity. . . . because more was expected of kings than of ordinary mortals, the king suffered for it in a way that his opponents never did.”93 These well-informed reflections on the politics of 1640–41 can serve to anticipate our discussion, farther on, of the fateful initiative that Charles I was about to take in early January 1642 – an initiative, unhappily, that did not involve in its wake “the concessions necessary to restore unity.” If, at first glance, the institutional aspects of the “honeymoon period” in the French Revolution seem tellingly similar to those of the early 1640s in England – namely, an increasingly radical legislature whittling away the powers of an isolated, discredited king and his outnumbered clerical and noble partisans – there certainly were differences between the early stages of these two upheavals. In the case of France, for instance, there was nothing quite as dramatic, as brutally irrevocable, as the execution of one leading ex-minister (Strafford) and the incarceration of another (Laud). Thus, no line was yet drawn in ministerial blood between Louis XVI and the Constituent Assembly. For this there is a fairly ready explanation: whereas, for Pym and his fellow M.P.s, the first order of business was to punish those whose policy of “Thorough” had rudely interrupted the historic presence of parliamentary governance in England, the revolutionaries in France knew well that the Estates-General, from which their own Assembly had emerged in the “July Days” of 1789, could vaunt no comparable recent constitutional role. Nor, for that matter, was there from beginning to end in the Constituent Assembly any one figure quite as dominant as “King Pym.” Still, as we shall see, the underlying similarities between the two situations were, after all is said and done, undeniable and crucial. A dynamic of polarization/radicalization gradually took hold in the Constituent Assembly in 1789–91 much as it had in Parliament in 1640–41; and, in the French case, too, this dynamic, interweaving as it did foreign and domestic affairs, responded in part to lurid rumors of conspiratorial counterrevolution and to the revolutionaries’ uneasy suspicions that their king and queen, too, were not in the final analysis to be trusted. Recent meticulous scholarship enables us to follow the general evolution of factional politics and thus to speak of a gradual leftist tendency in France’s legislature during 1789–91.94 This was helped along initially by the fact that 93 94

Russell, Unrevolutionary England, pp. 301–2. See, in particular: Timothy Tackett, “Nobles and Third Estate in the Revolutionary Dynamic of the National Assembly, 1789–1790,” American Historical Review 94 (1989): 271–301; Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); Norman Hampson, The Constituent Assembly and the Failure of Consensus, 1789–1791 (New

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leadership on the Right in the Assembly shifted soon after the king’s defeat in the October Days from responsible “Monarchists” such as Jean-Joseph Mounier and Pierre-Victor Malouet to intransigent paladins of the ancien r´egime like the Abbe´ Maury, Cazal`es, and ex-parlementaire Jean-Jacques Duval 95 d’Epremesnil. More fundamental, however, was the emergence late in 1789 ´ of the Jacobin Club and its rapid development as a tightly organized political faction. Some of the Jacobins had formerly been members of the radical Breton Club of 1788–89, whereas others had not; what they had in common was a determination to respond to all parliamentary machinations on the Right and thus to seize the direction of revolutionary affairs. “Organization” and “mobilization” were to be the key words in the Jacobin lexicon. In addition to staging public meetings in the Dominican convent on the Right Bank from which their society derived its name, the Jacobins invested a “central committee” with the primary responsibility of setting the club’s agenda and devising an efficient machinery for disciplining members’ voting in the legislature. Yet, the Jacobins went even beyond this – and sowed many seeds of their future success – by acting to mobilize public opinion in favor of their policies. They did this in part by creating a “correspondence committee” to link the Parisian “mother club” with affiliated societies in the provinces.96 It is true that the Jacobins’ rise to power in the National Assembly was hardly a smooth, continuous process. The first half of 1790 witnessed a split in Jacobin or “Patriot” ranks between those like Barnave and the Lameth brothers, Jerome ´ Petion and Maximilien Robespierre, united at that point in championing the ´ popular promises of the Revolution and querying the king’s intentions, and those like Lafayette, Siey`es and Talleyrand, Thouret and Demeunier, and even ´ onetime radical Le Chapelier, who were ever more concerned about “law and order” issues and consequently favored a closer working relationship with Louis XVI. Most of those in the latter group eventually came together in a rival, “centrist” association, the “Club” or “Society” of 1789, and though some of them for a time maintained a foot in both camps, divisive issues arising during 1790 led most of them finally to sever connections with the Jacobins. As the first year of revolution officially drew to a close with commemorative celebrations at Paris and in the provinces, “a majority of the deputies seemed ready to follow the Society of 1789.”97 In the end, however, those on the Left who were most steadfastly suspicious of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette and most faithful to the concrete promises of the Revolution to its plebeian supporters inherited power: that is, inherited

95 96 97

York: Blackwell, 1988); and Harriet B. Applewhite, Political Alignment in the French National Assembly, 1789–1791 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993). Tackett, “Nobles and Third Estate,” pp. 289–93. Ibid., pp. 293–95. The emergence of the “centrist” group of deputies during 1790 is especially well covered by Tackett in Becoming a Revolutionary, pp. 277–88.

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for the duration of this Assembly the roles of policymaking and reacting to foreign and domestic developments. With the advent of autumn, Timothy Tackett tells us, “a revitalized Jacobin contingent would take definitive control of the elections of Assembly officers, both the presidents and secretaries.”98 Endlessly active in the Assembly’s crucial committee work and eloquent in plenary deliberations of the legislature, the deputies most radicalized by the iniquitous old regime – and by maneuvering on the Far Right to resurrect something of it – finally came into their own by late 1790 and 1791. What factors lay behind the Jacobins’ success in this early stage of the revolution? To a large extent, they preserved and constantly enhanced their influence in the Constituent Assembly much as John Pym and his allies had consolidated their political clout in the Parliament – that is, by viewing bedrock issues (and persuading many of their legislative peers to regard such issues) through the political-cultural lenses handed down from the past. For instance, the tendency, very much inherited from the ancien r´egime, to think in conspiratorial terms was powerfully reinforced during 1789–91 by the constant swirl of Austrophobic rumors surrounding the deputies, rumors concerning supposed efforts by Vienna to sap the legitimacy of the revolutionary government and the supposed formation of a so-called “Austrian Committee” or “Cabal” involving MarieAntoinette at the Tuileries Palace, and by reports to the Assembly (correct, as it turned out) that Austria insisted (on the basis of a 1769 agreement) on its right to send troops across a corner of northeastern French soil and on to the Austrian Netherlands.99 The heavy hand of the past also evidenced itself in the absence of mutual trust among the Assemblymen and in an unwillingness on the part of many of them to accept the basic legitimacy of a political opposition on controversial issues. Clearly, the judicial procedures of the old regime and the long period without a national deliberative assembly to mediate contentious issues had worked against the development of any precedents for sanctioning adversarial debate or legitimizing opposition, and against the creation of new values and habits that might have helped to usher in a consensual brand of politics.100 Finally, there were the traditional French statesmen’s obsessions with the geopolitical implications of domestic policies, and with the financial 98 99

100

Ibid., p. 312. On these issues, see: Kaiser, “Who’s Afraid of Marie-Antoinette?,” pp. 266–67; Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, p. 76; and Hampson, Prelude to Terror, p. 138. While Timothy Tackett, in “Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French Elites and the Origins of the Terror, 1789–1792,” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 691–713, has minimized the significance of elitist conspiracy-mindedness prior to Varennes, he is very ´ forcefully challenged in this view by Peter R. Campbell, Thomas E. Kaiser, and Marisa Linton, eds., Conspiracy in the French Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). See their articles in this anthology. On this lack of consensual politics handed down from the absolutist past in France, refer once again to Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, passim.; and Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, passim.

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costs of such policies. All of these aspects of what we might call France’s “political mentality” worked toward polarization within the Constituent Assembly in 1790–91 – and, in time, favored the ascendancy of the advanced “Patriot” or “Jacobin” faction. Take, for instance, the debate over the remodeling of the Gallican Church in 1790. What gave this controversy explosive import in the end was its ability to generate popular support in much of the kingdom for a counterrevolutionary movement that might otherwise have been limited to disgruntled squires nursing their wounded pride over the curtailment of seigneurialism and (in June 1790) the official abolition of noble status. In the Assembly at Paris, in the meantime, the fact that many of the deputies, recoiling from the technical complexities of budgetary matters involved in the state’s ongoing financial crisis, chose to ascribe the state’s penury simplistically to a counterrevolutionary “plot” to foment chaos in the countryside over religious matters, only magnified in their eyes the importance of ecclesiastical reform.101 This in turn made it all the easier for the Jacobins and a substantial number of delegates unaffiliated with any specific faction to evaluate the broader ecclesiological questions raised by the proposed Civil Constitution of the Clergy against the “conspiratorial” backdrop of clerical attempts to foil all of the Assembly’s ameliorative reforms. The upshot was the legislature’s defiant enactment of the final version of the Civil Constitution on July 12, 1790. To identify the principal winners and losers emerging from these churchrelated controversies is to follow the gradual but inexorable shift of influence from Right to Left in the Assembly. On the one hand, the assault on the Gallican Church undeniably tended to unite delegates of all “Patriot” persuasions. From the very beginning, prominent Jacobins were closely associated with the anticlerical cause. In the closing weeks of 1789, the “push for the complete seizure of church property was spearheaded by a ‘phalanx’ of radicals, mobilized by the nascent Jacobin group.” Later, in the climactic debates of June–July 1790, when “a small group of patriot cures ´ and lay specialists in theology and canon law” constituting a sort of “Jansenist contingent” waxed eloquent on behalf of the Civil Constitution, they did so with the assent of Patriots both inside and outside Jacobin circles.102 On the other hand, the enactment of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy “marked a harsh turn of events for the conservative clergy and especially for the bishops. . . . From July 1790 through the end of the year the bishops’ participation in Assembly debates dropped to less than one-fourth its previous level.”103 But this was crucial to the revolutionary process precisely because the defeat and demoralization of conservatives in the erstwhile First Estate and resultant clerical alienation from (and eventual resistance to) sociopolitical change in the country only re-energized the Patriots on 101 102 103

Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, p. 265. Ibid., pp. 261, 290–91. Ibid., pp. 291–92.

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the Left – particularly the most stalwart and militant Jacobin partisans of the new France. If the reorganization of the Gallican Church was driven at least to some extent by the strategically induced crisis of state finances, and played to the ultimate benefit of the Jacobins, the great Assembly debate of May 1790 over the constitutional powers of war and peace treated even more directly with issues of European high politics – and it, too, would serve in the end to profit those on the Left. “For many observers,” one of the Assembly’s most recent historians writes, “the debate was one of the most important of the entire first year of the Revolution.”104 Indeed, the question of how, exactly, the deputies should apportion those most awesome of powers, the powers of war and peace, between the king and the legislature became, in time, something of a domestic and foreign cause c´el`ebre. Discussion of the issue was touched off by the terse announcement, from Foreign Minister Montmorin, that Louis XVI had taken precautionary naval measures in reaction to an Anglo-Spanish imbroglio over Nootka Sound, situated on the west coast of Vancouver Island.105 Predictably, deputies on the extreme Right – Cazal`es, the abbe´ Maury, Montlosier, Virieu, etc. – demanded that the monarch be conceded a veritable monopoly of powers pertaining to warmaking and peacemaking, and warned that anything less would intolerably diminish both king and country. Just as predictably, the most assertive Jacobins – Petion, Robespierre, Barnave, Gaultier de Biauzat – ´ spoke up for a preponderant legislative role in such matters. The latter faction did not secure precisely what it demanded on this occasion: a “centrist” call for a compromise solution nebulously positing a shared executive-legislative control over war and peace easily carried the day in the Assembly. Yet the fact that the deputies actually took advantage of the situation to double the number of French warships initially mobilized by the king – and later augmented that number by 50 percent yet again – suggests that Jacobin calls for the Assembly to wrest a more active role in this crucial domain of policymaking from the king (as much as their precious time permitted) acquired a real resonance among the legislators.106 That it did so may also indicate to us that, for growing numbers of Assemblymen, and not solely for Robespierre and his closest associates, cooperation with a monarch whom fewer and fewer deputies really trusted was seen as a dubious proposition at best. And this, of course, brings us directly to the existential question that tormented the French revolutionaries from the earliest days of their revolution, 104

105

106

Ibid., p. 283. See also, on these deliberations, Hampson, Prelude to Terror, pp. 130–34; and Barry M. Rothaus, The Emergence of Legislative Control over Foreign Policy in the Constituent Assembly, 1789–91, Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1968. On the particulars of this diplomatic incident, see H. V. Evans, “The Nootka Sound Controversy in Anglo-French Diplomacy – 1790,” Journal of Modern History 46 (1974): esp. pp. 638–39. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars, pp. 48–49.

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much as it had tormented Pym and his confr`eres from 1640 on: were the king – and his queen – fundamentally to be trusted to embrace their toilsome efforts at reform? And in hindsight, the answer, regretfully, has to be, in the French case as in the English case: not to any meaningful degree. As early as 1789, Louis XVI responded to the decrees forced through the Constituent Assembly on the tumultuous night of August 4, decrees that curbed seigneurial and particularist privileges in the kingdom, by writing angrily to the Archbishop of Arles: “I will never consent to the spoliation of my clergy or of my nobility. I will not sanction decrees by which they are despoiled.”107 Moreover, he anathematized all the concessions wrung from him over that summer in a statement sent surreptitiously both to his Spanish cousin, Charles IV, and to his Imperial brother-in-law Joesph II soon after the October Days had compelled the royal family’s removal from Versailles to Paris. “I owe it to myself, to my children, to my family and to my entire dynasty,” the statement read in part, “not to . . . let the royal dignity, confirmed in my dynasty by the passage of centuries, become debased in my hands.” Louis recorded his “solemn protest against all the acts contrary to my royal authority extracted from me by force since 15 July of this year” – thus for the people’s seizure of the Bastille! – while at the same time reaffirming – somewhat lamely – his “determination to fulfill the promises” that he had made at the notorious and divisive s´eance royale of the National Assembly on June 23.108 Most of the revolutionaries (needless to add) had found those “promises” inadequate from the start. In addition, the king’s general credit in the eyes of his most politically attuned subjects was by 1789 at least somewhat compromised (as was that of Charles I by 1640) by the antics, real or rumored, of his wife. One of the side effects of Austrian intervention in French diplomacy in the late 1780s, as Thomas Kaiser has convincingly demonstrated, was further to blacken the already marred reputation of Marie-Antoinette. The abbe´ Soulavie, a memorialist who frequently summed up public rumors swirling around major figures at Court, suggested that the queen, as a result of her continual intriguing on behalf of her native Austria, had “subjugated Louis XVI and reduced France to the point of calling to the court the ambassador of the house of Austria to direct the general affairs of France.” It was “no longer Louis who chose his ministers or dismissed them,” Soulavie rambled on. “The ambassador of Joseph II determined their fall, promised them a cardinal’s hat and a future return to the ministry . . . The opinion that the queen had resolved upon the destruction of France for the benefit of Austria soon prevailed in the kingdom. The queen alone was said to be capable of emptying the treasury.”109 As ridiculously distorted as all 107 108 109

Cited in Lefebvre, Coming of the French Revolution, p. 185. This clandestine and revelatory manifesto is cited in Egret, Necker, p. 372, and Hardman, Louis XVI, p. 174. Soulavie is cited in Kaiser, “Meddling Abroad: Austrian Intervention in French Politics and the Construction of the ‘Austrian Committee,’ 1787–1790,” a paper presented at the

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such rumors might have been, they help explain to us why, in the earliest days of the Revolution, the construction in some subjects’ minds of a clandestine “Austrian Committee” dedicated resolutely to the debasement or even outright destruction of France was already underway – and why, consequently, the king’s reputation as a passive instrument for his Austrian wife’s ambitions could be so damaging. It was against the backdrop of rumor-mongering such as this that, on February 4, 1790, Louis XVI appeared before the Constituent Assembly, ostensibly to invoke national unity in the face of peasant insurrections in southwestern France. Yet, revealingly, he also took advantage of the situation to argue for a reinforcement of “executive authority” and for the preservation of religion, property, and the titles of the “honored race” of the nobility. True, both the king and Marie-Antoinette, who accompanied him to the Assembly on this occasion, were sufficiently astute to pay a certain hommage to the principles of constitutionalism that were emerging from the deputies’ work; nonetheless, disquieting rumors had the queen regarding the royal address to the assemblage on February 4 as affording an opportunity (presumably to her and/or unnamed fellow intriguers) to foment discord among the Patriots.110 When, five months later, Louis XVI presided in the Champ de Mars on the Left Bank over what had originally been intended as a festive commemoration of the events of July 14, 1789, he must have been gratified to see the event take on a “fundamentally conservative” aspect, “rallying the country toward the consolidation of the Revolution under a strengthened constitutional monarchy.” Indeed, some orators on the Left, manifesting the conspiratorial-mindedness so characteristic of the revolutionary mentality, fearfully divined behind preparations for this Fˆete de la F´ed´eration a nefarious military plot to stifle any further work of revolution.111 Such suspicions may, once again, have overshot the mark; yet retrospective inquiry does little to justify the countervailing optimism of those “centrist” deputies in the Assembly who should have been the king’s natural allies, and who accordingly were so eager – pathetically eager – to detect in his every gesture toward that body a sign of royal acquiescence in the reforms that they and their peers were laboring to enact. And indeed, developments involving Louis XVI were soon to validate the nagging doubts voiced all along on the Left about his fidelity to France’s revolutionary course. In the early months of 1791, the dialectic of distrust between the monarch and his legislature – and the dynamics of radicalization within that legislature – acquired even sharper edges. The Assembly, viewing matters as always through the prisms of conspiracy, national security needs, and the overarching nexus between domestic and foreign affairs, began to take concrete steps on its

110 111

54th Annual Meeting (in April 2008) of the Society for French Historical Studies. Citation is from p. 10. On this incident, see Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, pp. 274–77. Ibid., pp. 296–301.

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own initiative to ensure the safety of a kingdom whose king seemed increasingly unreliable. As early as January, the deputies “on the recommendation of Alexandre de Lameth . . . initiated a program of active recruitment” for the army and voted the creation of a volunteer force of 100,000 “auxiliaries” to be drawn from all departments. (Lameth even envisaged as a putative third line of national defense “a reserve of 250,000 to 300,000 National Guard volunteers, prepared to march to the frontiers at a moment’s notice.”) Five months later, the Assembly “finalized regulations for the 100,000-man auxiliary force,” and then, in the subsequent emergency attending Varennes (and in tardy vindication of Lameth) “took an even more radical step, decreeing . . . the immediate formation of a 300,000–400,000-man volunteer force.” To energize the new recruits, the legislature permitted them to elect their own officers, waived the usual height and age requirements, promised daily wages in proportion to rank, and eventually directed the departments imperatively to provide the soldiers with all needed equipment.112 That the deputies drove ahead with these measures was doubtless facilitated by a shifting of the political forces within the Assembly favoring the Jacobins and others on the Left. Ever since the start of 1791, those legislators on the Far Right had been steadily abandoning the Assembly altogether, in effect giving up on parliamentary debate and simultaneously raising the specter of civil war and foreign intervention. In response to such a drastic course of action, centrist politicians had only been able to suggest lamely that Louis XVI’s government be allowed to take back some of its former authority so as to seek to “stabilize” affairs. To the Jacobins on the Left, naturally, such talk smacked of stark lunacy. With good reason, they accused delegates in the Center of being ready to jeopardize all that had been gained so far in the Revolution in the feckless hope of collaborating with a king who had yet to demonstrate persuasively his acceptance of anything the Assembly had done.113 In any case, the Jacobins and their fellow travelers had come increasingly to dominate the key offices and committee assignments in the Assembly since late in the preceding year; and now, with legislative reactions to the king’s (and queen’s) rumored counterrevolutionary maneuvers very much the order of the day, Robespierre and his colleagues were very much in a position to drive politics in an ever more radical direction. In retrospect, their determination to do so appears all the more logical in light of what we now know about hardening attitudes at the Tuileries. The dramatic refusal of a Parisian crowd to allow the royal carriage to leave on 112

113

On all of this, see: Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The First Years (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 194, 196–98; Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, pp. 49–57; and Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution, p. 106. Hampson, Prelude to Terror, pp. 162–64, succinctly recapitulates these arguments and counterarguments.

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April 18, 1791, for the annual Easter trip to Saint-Cloud seems to have spurred Marie-Antoinette to redouble efforts already under way to secure foreign help for an exit from the kingdom that she (and, increasingly, her husband) were coming to regard as essential.114 In the meantime, royal appearances had to be maintained. Popular concern in the capital over the possibility of foreign intervention apparently lay behind the tense incident involving the royal family at the Tuileries on April 18; then, just a few days later, Louis XVI was forced to involve the Constituent Assembly in an effort to defuse what was rapidly becoming a full-blown war scare in many parts of the realm. Having received “several requests to clarify the situation,” the king finally responded by having his Minister of Foreign Affairs reassure the Assembly at its evening session of April 23 that he would unhesitatingly endorse what he vaguely termed an “auspicious constitution.” Similar sentiments were to be relayed through all diplomatic channels to the proper authorities in all foreign countries.115 For the French, the ultimate d´enouement – that is to say, the fully publicized revelation of the king’s and queen’s true feelings about the Revolution – was to be reserved for the hot, dusty, and hectic days of late June and beyond. If, in France, the early, “honeymoon” days of revolution can be retrospectively viewed as having lasted for the better part of two years, and if, in England, the analogous period endured for about fourteen months, the Russian revolutionary “honeymoon” was swept away (as Trotsky might say, “into the dust bin of history”) in little more than ten weeks. Why the striking temporal discrepancy here? Two principal reasons come immediately to mind. First, the total and irredeemable collapse of monarchy in Russia in February 1917 completely transformed the political dynamics of the situation: the total concentration of power in autocratic tsardom gave way to both dvoevlastie – a highly fluid, unstable division between formal state power in the Provisional Government and increasingly real, coercive power in the Petrograd Soviet – and what Orlando Figes has called mnogovlastie, the draining away of real state power to proliferating centers of power and legitimacy at the local level.116 Second, the situation in Russia, to a far greater extent than those in the two earlier revolutions, was dominated from start to finish by the apparently insoluble dilemma and myriad domestic complications of total war. In this case, the “dynamic of polarization/radicalization” is to be seen primarily as undermining the brief, Miliukov-dominated phase of the Provisional Government in favor of both the Petrograd Soviet and local foci of political and military power – with all of this to be interpreted by us today (as it was magnified at the time) through the prisms of Russian political culture inherited from the tsarist past. 114 115 116

For some of the latest insights on all of this, refer again to Hardman, Louis XVI, esp. chapters 13 and 14. On this incident, see Fitzsimmons, The Remaking of France, pp. 111–12. On this discussion of dvoevlastie and mnogovlastie in revolutionary Russia, refer again to Figes, A People’s Tragedy, esp. pp. 359–60.

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Rex Wade has stressed how the sudden collapse of tsarism in Russia in early 1917 produced a “complex realignment” of political forces, a realignment that reshaped political parties into what he has termed “multi-party blocs.” There were, he has written, three aspects of this process: First, the revolution completely altered the political spectrum. It swept away the old right wing of Russian politics as represented by the monarchist and truly conservative political parties. The liberal parties, previously on the left, became the “new conservatives” of the revolutionary era and made up most of the right wing of the new political spectrum, leaving the socialist parties alone on the left wing of the new political system. Second, at the same time both the new left . . . and the new right . . . split into subfactions, with centrist and more extreme wings. Third, a broad centrist coalition emerged composed of the “center-left” of more moderate socialists and the “center-right” from the nonsocialists.117

This “broad centrist coalition” of moderate socialists and non-socialists, Wade has affirmed, dominated Russian politics not only through the early “honeymoon” weeks but all the way down to September and October. Moreover, he has been at pains to point out, this realignment of politics took place “in the major provincial cities” as well; it was, in other words, a national phenomenon to some extent, and not merely to be comprehended, in the hackneyed textbook terms, as a duel between the Provisional Government and the Soviet at Petrograd. What did all this mean, first, in terms of specific institutional developments at the capital of the new Russian republic? It meant, above all, that the “dynamic of polarization/radicalization” that has habitually been portrayed as playing itself out in the tension between the “bourgeois” Provincial Government and the socialist Soviet during most of 1917 was also operating from the start within each of these institutions. This was particularly ironic in the case of the Kadet-dominated Provisional Government, because, according to all contemporary testimony, it was Miliukov who, speaking for the Duma “Temporary Committee” on the evening of March 1 in its negotiations on the nature and mandate of the new government with representatives of the Soviet’s Executive Committee, began to play “a key role in determining the composition of the government.”118 According to Sukhanov, who apparently functioned as principal spokesman for the Soviet at these critical negotiations, Miliukov “spoke for the entire Duma committee; everyone considered this a matter of course. It was clear that Miliukov here was not only a leader, but the boss.”119 If this was true, it apparently manifested itself over ensuing days in the selection of some at least of the ministers of the new government – most notably, the new 117 118 119

Wade, Russian Revolution, pp. 53–54. Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, pp. 242–43. See also Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 334–35. Cited in Stockdale, Paul Miliukov, pp. 242–43. But see also, on these negotiations, Hasegawa, February Revolution, pp. 410–16; and Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, pp. 116–25.

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prime minister, Prince Georgii Lvov; Octobrist leader Alexander Guchkov as Minister of Army and Navy; Centrist Vladimir Lvov as Procurator of the Holy Synod; and Miliukov’s close friend Andrei Shingarev for the Agriculture Ministry. Miliukov, himself, was unchallenged as the more or less self-appointed Foreign Minister of the new government. Other ministerial appointments, however, reflected not so much Miliukov’s influence as a developing consensus among members of the Duma’s “Temporary Committee” on the need for cooptation of moderate figures likely to be acceptable to the Soviet.120 Notable among these ministerial choices were Alexander Kerensky, Nikolai Nekrasov, and M. I. Tereshchenko. Kerensky, vice chair of the new Petrograd Soviet, became Justice Minister, and was the sole (very moderate) socialist in the Government during the March–April period. Nekrasov, appointed as we have seen to the Transport Ministry, was “somewhat surprising . . . not so much by virtue of his qualifications – an engineer by profession, he was a highly capable man and knowledgeable about railroads – as for personal reasons.” A left-wing Kadet, he had broken acrimoniously with Miliukov back in 1915, and remained one of his principal detractors. Finally, Tereshchenko, an affluent young entrepreneur from Kiev in the Ukraine, was appointed to the Finance Ministry. Stockdale has depicted Kerensky, Nekrasov, and Tereshchenko as having logically formed a “triumvirate” within the cabinet not above intriguing against Miliukov; on the other hand, Wade has written more broadly of the emergence, early on, of a group of “political leaders of a generally liberal but also somewhat romantically populist outlook for whom party labels were less important than a set of shared, if vague, attitudes.” This faction, by Wade’s reckoning, included, in addition to Nekrasov, Kerensky, and Tereshchenko, Prince Lvov and Alexander Konovalov: Within the political realignment underway they represented a loosely defined centerright bloc which quickly came to dominate the government. These men reflected an outlook that had emerged in liberal political circles just before and during the war which stressed the importance of creating connections with the more moderate socialists and through them with the broad masses of workers and peasants.121

Palpably, there was a potential from early March on for policy clashes between these ministers, linked as they were indirectly (or, in the case of Kerensky, directly) with the Soviet, and people like Miliukov, Guchkov, and most Kadets, who were increasingly vocal advocates of the old Great Russian nationalism, reified “interests of state” as being somehow “above” all class, ethnic, or other sectional interests, desired to postpone fundamental socioeconomic reforms until after the war, and resisted sharing authority with a “class-based” organization like the Petrograd Soviet. 120 121

See Stockdale, Paul Miliukov, pp. 242–43, and Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 335–37, on the make-up of the new Provisional Government. Wade, Russian Revolution, pp. 57–61.

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If, however, growing divisions within the Provisional Government were especially significant in an immediate sense, given the executive, policymaking functions supposedly entrusted to it, over the long haul divisions within the Soviet, representing (however imperfectly) as it did the worker–soldier–peasant masses, were probably of greater moment. Initially, the Petrograd Soviet’s vision of its role was relatively passive, inhibited, perhaps, by its adherence to Marxist doctrine. The Petrograd Soviet (and all local soviets, too) might be convenient vehicles for organizing and mobilizing the masses, preparing them for some future “socialist” revolution; in the meantime, nonetheless, “Soviet democracy” would best serve the future by mounting careful watch over the present. The Petrograd Soviet in particular would support the government tentatively, and guard against the betrayals that “bourgeois” politicians must be tempted by their selfish “class” outlook to commit against the revolution, all the while reflecting the long-term interests of “Soviet Russia.” This doctrinal, passive view of the Soviet role, however, was re-energized, was given a greater militancy and coherence by returning waves of political exiles later in March and April. Of cardinal significance was the return to Petrograd of the “Tsereteli group,” so designated by its allegiance to the ideas of Irakli Tsereteli. One specialist has described Tsereteli in especially vivid terms: Irakli Tsereteli, a practical, realistic, clear-thinking Georgian aristocrat “with a pale and elongated face like a painting by El Greco,” one contemporary remembered, set out to transform the [Soviet] Executive Committee’s vague statements of principle into concrete articulations of policy that could rival Miliukov’s precisely formulated statements. Friend and foe alike thought him “a man of high moral standards,” and Miliukov later spoke warmly of him as “a natural-born peacemaker who became a remarkable expert on inter-party relations.” Even Trotsky, whose ascerbic characterizations of men and events during 1917 left few unscathed, called him “a distinguished orator” known for his “desire to pursue a consistent policy.”122

Immediately on their return from ten years’ exile in Siberia, Tsereteli and his adherents, joining forces with Soviet leaders such as Chkheidze and Skobelev, and shouldering aside slightly more militant figures such as Sukhanov and Stecklov, brought most SRs and Mensheviks together in sponsoring a somewhat more concrete socialist agenda. That agenda, which reigned supreme in the Petrograd Soviet until the late summer and early fall, included a “Revolutionary Defensist” prescription for Russian foreign policy that will require elaboration later on, a new insistence on the necessity for land redistribution and for comprehensive industrial reform after the war (or on convocation of the Constituent Assembly), a vigorous advocacy of electoral democracy, a constant fear of counterrevolution (deemed much more likely to emanate from the Right than from the Left), and a willingness to collaborate, although 122

Lincoln, Passage through Armageddon, pp. 359–60. On Tsereteli, see: W. H. Roobol, Tsereteli, A Democrat in the Russian Revolution: A Political Biography, trans. Philip Hyams and Lynne Richards (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976).

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ever more suspiciously, with the “bourgeois” ministers occupying the opposite wing of the Tauride Palace.123 Tsereteli’s restatement of the moderate socialist position, most arrestingly on the war, but also on domestic issues, was also adopted at the local level by soviets and other workers’ and peasants’ organizations. At the same time, the Tsereteli group was always subject to criticism on its left flank – not only by militant stalwarts like Sukhanov and Steklov, present at the creation of the Petrograd Soviet, but also by even more extreme socialists like V. I. Lenin. Promptly on his return from exile at the start of April, Lenin issued his notorious “April Theses,” which called (among other things) for terminating support for the Provisional Government, repudiating the overly “soft” Mensheviks, arming the workers, establishing Soviet power immediately, and withdrawing unconditionally from the war.124 In thus calling (at least in the abstract) for an expedited worker/peasant revolution, thereby overturning the conventional Marxist schema of bourgeois revolution preparing the way for socialist upheaval, Lenin shocked most of his colleagues, incurring, indeed, a great deal of ridicule among those in and out of the Soviet who portrayed him as the quintessential exile long out of touch with “objective” Russian realities. Although, in ensuing weeks, Lenin somewhat toned down the asperity of his observations, Tsereteli and his intimates (somewhat like Miliukov and his closest associates, for that matter) had henceforth to be concerned about the possibility of desertion within his ranks toward the Left. In this regard, as in virtually every other political respect, everything would depend on Russian fortunes in the all-devouring war. All the while, of course, the ministers who had inherited the state power of the defunct ancien r´egime had to deal, not only with the situation of “dual power” or dvoevlastie in the capital, but also with mnogovlastie, the dissemination of power to and proliferation of power at the local level. And this was true both in civilian and in military sectors of society. From the very start, both in their talks with representatives of the Soviet leading to the creation of the Provisional Government and in their actual administrative policies once in power, individuals such as Miliukov and Prince Lvov showed an inadequate appreciation of the importance of bureaucratically structured authority – especially in a fluid period of national emergency. Whether this stemmed from the ambivalence toward state authority so typical of the Russian intelligentsia, or from Prime Minister Lvov’s specific experience with and faith in local self-government, or from Miliukov’s relief that Sukhanov and other Soviet spokesmen had for the moment deferred demands concerning land reform and other domestic issues – or, most likely, from all of these factors taken together – we know that, throughout Russia as much as at Petrograd itself, the 123 124

All of this is summed up concisely in Wade, Russian Revolution, pp. 71–72. On the April Theses and Lenin’s ballyhooed return from exile, see: Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, pp. 274–75; and Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 384–98.

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government from the start lacked institutions through which it could enforce its will. As Wade has written, the Provisional Government’s problems in governing were accentuated by the fact that although it acquired the central bureaucracy reasonably intact, it had little means of enforcing its decisions beyond verbal exhortation. In both Petrograd and the provinces the old police force was gone, replaced by a weak and decentralized “militia” system under the control – often nominal – of city governments. The garrison soldiers were unreliable enforcers of government decrees, even if such a use of their strength were desirable. . . . In the provinces, commissars appointed by the Provisional Government. . . . exercised less real power than either the reformed local city governments, the local soviet or, in some places, new nationalist-based organizations.

On the local level, mnogovlastie ran wild: “in addition to the Soviets thousands of new organizations – political parties, trade unions and professional associations, nationality-based organizations, community organizations, educational and cultural clubs . . . further undermined, rather than bolstered, the central government’s authority.”125 Moreover, if, as Wade has observed, soldiers garrisoned at the capital and elsewhere had to be regarded by Miliukov and his colleagues as “unreliable enforcers of government decrees,” much the same characterization could easily have applied to troops at the front. Although Wildman’s research led him to conclude that “the command’s new course of action – unquestioned loyalty to the Provisional Government and acquiescence in the system of dual power in the capital and soldiers’ committees at the front” – did succeed, at least for the time being, in producing “a new equilibrium and calming of tensions,” this was not a situation fated necessarily to endure. If, initially, newly elected soldiers’ representatives were inclined to accept their commanding officers’ criticisms of revolutionary excesses at the rear, the basic division running horizontally through Russian civil society between “elitist” or “privilege” Russia and Soviet ´ or “working” Russia continued to separate officers in the army from the rankand-file soldiery; and this only underscored the precarious nature of soldier loyalty to the new regime. In political-cultural terms, this meant, Wildman has maintained, that “apart from the revolution in power and authority” registered formally at Petrograd and elsewhere, “an even more profound revolution in consciousness had taken place in the minds of the soldier-peasant masses,” as a result of which de facto truces and fraternization across the trenches were quite conceivable, whereas any return to a “normal” military order (let alone resumption of the war effort on any consequential scale) was emphatically not seriously to be entertained.126 125

126

Wade, Russian Revolution, pp. 53–57. See also Stockdale, Paul Miliukov, pp. 244–46, who stresses Miliukov’s relief that, in their 1 March negotiations with members of the Duma “Temporary Committee,” the Soviet’s representatives had not insisted on “stipulations concerning the conduct of the war, agrarian reform, and the right of national self-determination.” Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, I: 376–79.

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Consideration of evolving realities within the Russian army brings us quite naturally back to the imperative question of the war. Here, most markedly, was where Miliukov, in his capacity as Foreign Minister, wished to preserve a basic continuity with the immediate, tsarist past. Both he and his Kadet Party, as Wade and others have shown, had become ever more nationalistic before and during the war, and by 1917 “fully accepted the expansionist policy of the fallen tsarist regime.” The erstwhile history professor, now in power, “strongly favored retaining two basic features of that policy: Russia’s continuation of the war on the side of Britain and France and her annexation of Constantinople and the Straits as a reward for her war efforts.”127 At a press conference on March 9, the newly minted Foreign Minister asserted that “in diplomacy, such a sharp revolution as in internal affairs is of course impossible.” If, at the same time, he agreed that the toppling of the old regime had brought Russia – now, like its Western allies, a “democracy” – into a closer collaboration with them, this only led Miliukov to reject anew any thought of relinquishing agreements made with those allies during the war, agreements promising for Russia annexation of the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmora, and the Dardanelles, along with Constantinople and its environs. Furthermore, as an institutional safeguard for continuity in Russian diplomatic policy, Miliukov insisted on keeping all of his ministry’s personnel (and that of the foreign service in general) at their posts. “I knew that among those serving under me,” he ironically recalled later, “there were people who did not share my views about current questions of foreign policy, but I relied upon their conscientiousness as professionals.”128 In fact, the Foreign Minister might as well have extended his retrospective observation to several of his fellow ministers (especially, on the Left, the “triumvirate” of Kerensky, Nekrasov, and Tereshchenko), for his adamant insistence on retaining important aspects of the old regime’s expansionist foreign policy, it seems, created serious dissension within the cabinet. In the long run, however, it was the incessant and ever-deepening opposition to Miliukov on geopolitical questions within the more radical Petrograd Soviet that was to prove particularly fateful for this initial experiment in post-tsarist governance in Russia. At first, as Rex Wade has remarked, . . . the Soviet leaders . . . found themselves split into the same two broad camps that had divided European socialism since the beginning of the war. In one camp were the “Defensists,” who placed heavy emphasis on the need to defend the country and called for military victory over the foreign enemy. In the other were the antiwar socialists, variously known as “Internationalists,” “Zimmerwaldists,” and “Defeatists,” who, for the most part, wanted the earliest possible end to the war and laid great emphasis on concerted international socialist action to achieve that goal. . . . But whatever their 127 128

For this discussion of Miliukov’s position on the war, see: Wade, The Russian Search for Peace, February–October 1917 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), esp. pp. 9–13. Cited in Lincoln, Passage through Armageddon, p. 356.

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differences, virtually all the socialists were united in their opposition to Miliukov’s policy of unrelenting war to total victory.129

What eventually brought most of the Soviet’s leadership together on issues related to the war was the return, from Siberian exile, of Irakli Tsereteli, whom Wade has described as “probably the most important figure in the ruling circles from his return in March until July or August.” On the initiative of the Tsereteli group, the Petrograd Soviet adopted what became known as “Revolutionary Defensism,” a stance that combined an acknowledgment of Russia’s need to maintain its current defensive posture against the Central Powers with an insistence on agitating, in concert if possible with socialist forces in other countries, for a speedy end to the war “without indemnities or annexations.” Such a position, as Wade has written, “provided just the combination of national defense and Internationalism needed to construct the broad center position that most Russian socialists could and did accept.”130 Miliukov’s influence in the government was further challenged, and ultimately eroded, by the return from exile, not so much of Lenin, whose blanket condemnation of both the Provisional Government and Tsereteli’s moderate leadership in the Soviet placed him temporarily outside the pale, but of Victor Chernov, titular head of the Russian SRs. Immediately on his return to Russia in early April, Chernov adopted a position close to that of Tsereteli’s “Revolutionary Defensism,” but with a more militantly antiwar emphasis, and (more to the point, perhaps) with a willingness to take Miliukov on directly. His assaults on and personal ridicule of the Foreign Minister apparently made a deep impression on the Soviet’s Executive Committee, and was one of the political factors that ultimately made Miliukov’s presence in the cabinet (and neo-Imperial, annexationist foreign policy) untenable. Miliukov and his closest Kadet adherents may have derived some momentary satisfaction from resolutions of support adopted by the Seventh Kadet Party Congress toward the end of March, but those resolutions were ultimately eclipsed by the endorsement, two weeks later, of a “Revolutionary Defensist” definition of the appropriate Russian stance on the war by the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets.131 By the early weeks of April, it seems at least in hindsight, the political omens were pointing with increasing clarity toward a crisis both within the Provisional Government and in the increasingly tense relationship between that Government and the Petrograd Soviet. The result of this “first major crisis of the Provisional Government,” Wade has put it, would be “the disintegration of the cabinet, and a new triumph for Tsereteli and the Siberian Zimmerwaldists.”132 129 130 131

132

Wade, The Russian Search for Peace, pp. 14–15. Ibid., pp. 17–19. On the former event, see Riha, A Russian European, pp. 306–10. On the latter event, consult Robert D. Warth, The Allies and the Russian Revolution: From the Fall of the Monarchy to the Peace of Brest-Litovsk (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954), p. 50. Wade, The Russian Search for Peace, p. 25.

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It only remains for us to add, at this point, that this crisis was in part engendered by the political-cultural perspectives of the various protagonists in these early days of the 1917 revolution: for instance, their abiding ambivalence toward the prospect of a revived, bureaucratic state, their rejection of (or identification with) the collectivist values of workers and peasants, and above all, their persisting fear of elitist, class-based, counterrevolutionary conspiracy. ´ In each of our three revolutions, then, an initial consensus on the iniquity of the ancien r´egime just overthrown, and accompanying, euphoric predictions of regeneration to come, were undone by a dynamic of polarization/radicalization – gradually, in the cases of England and France, and much more swiftly in the case of Russia. What remains to be seen in this chapter is how, in these three upheavals, three pivotal individuals – an English monarch, a French monarch, and a Russian Foreign Minister who was a kind of unhappy “standin” for a Russian monarch – took actions that irreversibly ended revolutionary “honeymoons” and helped to unleash dangerous processes of revolutionary radicalization. Three “Points of No Return” “One can justifiably conclude,” Allan K. Wildman has written, “that the formation of the Coalition Government (May 5) signified the end of one major phase of the [Russian] Revolution and the beginning of another.”133 Actually, the transition cited here by Wildman was precipitated by Paul Miliukov’s provocative diplomatic note to the Allies in April (the so-called “April crisis”), a provocation that drove Miliukov from power and led in early May to cooptation of key members of the Petrograd Soviet into the Government. In the earlier revolutions, it was ill-advised initiatives of Charles I and Louis XVI that, by confirming the worst suspicions and fears of their critics, destroyed any lingering chances of political reconciliation and thus helped launch their countries on uncharted waters of radicalization. Let us commence, again, with England and France, and then return to the situation in Russia. Charles I’s commonly cited initiative was his abortive attempt, in early January 1642, to arrest five M.P.s (forever known henceforth as the “Five Members”) and one peer on charges of high treason; their timely withdrawal into a City of London now predisposed in favor of the parliamentary cause may well have saved their necks.134 A disillusioned Charles and his family soon left London; the king was not to see his capital again until he was remanded there as a prisoner following his defeat in the Civil War. In February–March 1642, first, the Commons, and then, somewhat more hesitantly, the Lords passed (without royal approval) the Militia Ordinance, designed to place the 133 134

Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, I: 373. Again, for a terse summary of the essential chronology of events here, see Aylmer, A Short History of Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 120–23.

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militia, the home defense forces, under the control of Westminster. (The king’s countering promulgation of “Commissions of Array” to raise the militia in his defense further polarized the situation without really boosting his cause.) It was indeed on the concrete issue of control of the militia, left by the break-up of the army as the sole military force within the kingdom, that the civil war actually began.135 Desultory negotiations between the two sides (and an active war of oratory and pamphlets) dragged on over the summer; but by August the king, burning his boats behind him, had raised the standard of civil conflict at Nottingham. The king’s disastrous foray (along with a supporting force of royalist desperadoes) into a traumatized House of Commons on January 4, 1642 did not, obviously, occur in a political vacuum. It was, for example, foreshadowed by other, minor provocations on his part after his return the year before from the North: we could cite in this connection his attempt to place the Tower of London on December 29 in the ruffianly hands of Colonel Thomas Lunsford, an action sparking a huge demonstration by thousands of fearful Londoners (who also profited from the occasion to demand the removal of bishops from the Lords); and his ostentatious decision to feast royal officers who had drawn swords against some of the demonstrators on December 29. We should also recall the parliamentarians’ own provocative statements in late 1641 – most notably, that “Grand Remonstrance” which, in November, had “squeaked through” the Commons by the less-than-overwhelming margin of 159 to 148. Far more basic, however, as political antecedents to the king’s strategic blunder of January 4, 1642 were developments across the Irish Sea – the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland at the start of November 1641 – and a development closer to home – the political “revolution” in London on December 21. Taken together, these events set the critical context for what was to come by demonstrating how likely both royalists and parliamentarians were to evaluate all personalities, parties, and policies against the backdrop of widely bruited conspiracies and dialectically related British and local affairs. The terror struck into Protestant subjects’ hearts by the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland manifested itself both at London and in the counties, that is, throughout the kingdom. At Westminster, Fletcher has observed, “all eyes remained fixed on Ireland, now so evidently the mainspring of the whole Catholic plot. There was no relief from the tale of anarchy and destitution until news reached London in March of the earl of Ormonde’s relief of Drogheda.”136 Meanwhile, the county petitions inundating Westminster give a riveting sense of the same conspiratorial-mindedness in provincial England: A sense of political crisis, the petitions suggest, only enveloped the provinces in the last months of 1641. The essence of it was fear and alarm about a malignant party, which was thwarting parliament’s work and had brought reformation to a halt. . . .

135 136

Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, p. 2, n. 1. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, p. 248.

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Papists were seen as the core of the malignant party and fear of popery was the most prominent theme running through the petitions. The Irish rebellion was accounted the prelude to the papists’ wider designs. It brought to the surface a deep loathing for Catholicism felt by a generation educated in the Foxeian tradition and imbued with a sense of popery as a debasement of Christianity, a system of idolatry and error.137

The “provincial terror” relating to Irish developments had a legion of sources: the “atrocity propaganda” circulating widely outside of the capital, the panicky reports spread by many Protestant refugees from Ireland tramping England’s roads by January 1642, and fears of full-scale “papist” invasion of the western coastal regions of the kingdom. Equally significant were the assumed domestic implications of this alleged conspiracy of foreigners. “Petitioners living away from the west coasts,” Fletcher has remarked, “pursued a more subtle line of argument about the significance of the rebellion for the nation’s troubles. For them the crux of the matter was the effect of rebel successes on native papist morale. The expectation that English papists would seek to emulate their Irish coreligionists was widespread.” That the local panic-mongers also alleged links between Irish and domestic “papists” and Arminian bishops, local vicars and curates, evil-minded monopolists, and unnamed wicked advisers to the king further substantiated in some people’s minds the nexus between Irish and internal threats to their security.138 The same anxieties boiling up over Ireland, “papist” plots, and the projected internal ramifications of “anti-Christ” abroad also helped to foment upheaval within London itself in late 1641 and early 1642. Both royalist and parliamentary puritan opinion was “unanimous,” Valerie Pearl has maintained, in attributing the transformation of London into a power base for Pym and his partisans to the annual Common Council elections held on December 21, elections that “excluded the old leadership of Common Council, in favor of men of active parliamentary puritan sympathies.” This was momentous in that it helped alter the power balance within the City between the Mayor and Aldermen, on the one hand, and the Common Council, on the other, in favor of the latter. Especially noteworthy here – from our comparativist perspective – was the radicalized Common Council’s election, on January 4 (the very day of the king’s disastrous foray into the Commons) of an unprecedented Committee of [Public] Safety. Students of the more celebrated, Robespierrist Committee of Public Safety of 1793–94, flexing its muscles in the crucible of revolutionary France, will be unsurprised by Pearl’s description of this Committee of Safety’s subsequent political role: The power and significance of this Committee in the early months of 1642 has never been commented on by historians. Yet, not only was the composition of the Committee . . . radically different from that of previous committees, but it was given very great authority. In the first few months after its election, it drew up practically every petition 137 138

Ibid., pp. 200–06. Ibid., pp. 208, 214–15. See also, on all of this, Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, pp. 221–23.

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of the municipality, and all important business was referred to it. . . . On January 8th, it was given special authority to confer with the House of Commons, on behalf of the City, on matters concerning the defence of the kingdom.

This Committee of Safety or “Militia” took over the Trained Bands of London, impeached officials (including the sitting Mayor), challenged the Aldermanic Veto on all issues, and became, in general, “the driving force behind the arming of the City and the petitions to Parliament.”139 In connection with the last of these points, the Committee and its many Puritan, anti-papist adherents within the City helped mightily to mobilize genuinely popular support for Pym’s policies through petitioning and sponsoring of demonstrations, tactics apparently supported by “a great number of substantial citizens, shopkeepers and traders as well as seamen and artisans and labourers from the City poor and the suburbs.”140 The London revolutionaries, as obsessed by stories of “papist” conspiracies as were Pym and like-minded parliamentarians, agitated as well for “root-and-branch” ecclesiastical reforms, for the expulsion of all Jesuits from England, and above all for a crushing military response to the rebellion in Ireland. On the other side, Charles I at this time was every bit as inclined to view personalities and issues through the lenses of conspiracy and the foreign/domestic nexus. Long convinced that “a small group of MPs were deliberately conspiring against him,” the king prepared in December 1641 to charge the Five Members (and one peer) with high treason. The seven articles of accusation alleged, among other things, that Pym and his closest cronies had conspired to invite the Scots to invade England, “to subvert the rights and the very being of parliaments,” and to foment seditious “tumults” against both king and parliament. Although the immediate pretext for Charles’ entry into the Commons may well have been provided for him by rumors that the M.P.s were “plotting” to impeach the queen, the situation, more broadly conceived, is perhaps better summarized by Fletcher: “Charles had charged the five members because he believed that a settled conspiracy by a small clique to bend him to parliament’s will had reached fruition.” The king would soon be leaving his capital, motivated by a “fixed conviction” that, abetted by the “traitors” at Westminster, London was irrevocably committed to a rebellion against his legitimate authority.141 He would soon be sending Henrietta-Maria on to foreign parts to raise money; on April 8, 1642, in the meantime, Charles I would signal his own intention to recruit in person a force in Ireland through whose agency to put down “rebellion” in England. 139 140 141

Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, esp. Chapter 4. Ibid., pp. 235–36. See also, on the popular agitation in London on Pym’s behalf, Keith Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997). Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, pp. 179, 189–90. Caroline Hibbard (Charles I and the Popish Plot, p. 221) suggests that Charles may also have suspected at this time parliamentary designs to seize the young Prince of Wales.

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Such news, of course, only added corroboratory details at Westminster to a frightening and apparently ever more persuasive scenario of royalist-inspired foreign invasion. Some of the vivid colors of that canvas have been painted in by Anthony Fletcher: The invasion fears began with stories of great preparations in France during January. In March 60 French men-of-war were reported to be hovering between Brittany and Devon and there was news of men and horses ready for transportation in Normandy. Then Pym’s circle became more concerned about Danish activity. . . . New rumors about Danish plans cropped up week by week during April and May. Finally, on June 9, Pym announced that 20 Spanish ships were feared to be sailing for Hull. What terrified him was the prospect of a joint invasion from Denmark and France or Spain at a moment of gross internal weakness. He had no reliable means for sifting false rumors from fact.142

Tellingly, the preamble to the Militia Ordinance (passed on March 5 in the Commons) embroidered on such themes, speaking alarmingly of “a most dangerous and desperate design on the House of Commons, which we have just cause to believe to be an effect of the bloody counsels of papists and other ill-affected persons, who have already raised a rebellion in the kingdom of Ireland, and . . . will proceed not only to stir up the like rebellion and insurrections in this kingdom of England, but also to back them with forces from abroad.” The declaration of both Houses finalized in the Lords several days later ended by alluding to the “manifold advertisements” from overseas that the king “had some great design in hand for the altering of religion, and breaking the neck of your parliament.”143 We should also recall in this connection that Pym and his fearful brethren never lost sight of the reports (often emanating from the Continent and readily translated into English) retailing the horrible atrocities being perpetrated in the Thirty Years’ War – and never lost an opportunity to liken those atrocities to those reportedly being committed by “papist” extremists against English settlers in Ireland.144 It is important at this juncture to keep two points uppermost in mind. First, Norah Carlin has very usefully reminded us that “although both sides were threatening violence” in the early and middle stretches of 1642, “both were, understandably, reluctant to bear responsibility for the horrors of a civil war, and the fact that they did so in the end has to be attributed to their having exhausted the alternatives.”145 Pym was almost as appalled by the specter of popular violence in the streets of London in late 1641 and early 1642 as he was by the prospect of a military invasion of his weakly defended country by iniquitous “papist” forces; while Charles I, for his part, must have been at least marginally aware of the loathing with which most members of his kingdom’s social elite regarded the possibility of an unchecked military confrontation ´ 142 143 144 145

Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, pp. 233–34. Citations from Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, p. 224. On this point, see Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 150–52. Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War, p. 35.

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between royalist and parliamentarian forces. At the same time, however – and this is the second salient point – the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that what Fletcher has called “two competing myths” (with all their attendant conspiratorial and stereotyping baggage) by now had protagonists on both sides so firmly in their grip that peace-saving compromise, in time to avert actual bloodshed, was rapidly becoming impossible: Already the distortions of fear and hatred overlay much of the positive idealism that would carry men into one camp or the other. Already . . . there was a willingness to characterize the conflict in the harsh terms of a struggle between papists and Puritans. This absurdly simplified it, yet it pointed accurately to the dramatization and rhetoric, the delusions and misunderstanding, that make the origins of the civil war so complex a story.146

In the terms of our overall analytical and metaphorical framework, the revolutionary “honeymoon” was breaking down in England, foundering above all on the jagged rocks of competing ideological and geopolitical myths, of conspiratorial fears, and of mutual and unconquerable hatred and distrust. In the case of France, the ill-advised royal initiative corresponding, more or less, to Charles I’s dramatic entry into the Commons on January 4, 1642, was the royal family’s “flight to Varennes” on the night of June 20–21, 1791.147 As all the world knows, the royal family’s attempt to flee a kingdom that had become steadily less congenial to them in recent months was thwarted by the watchfulness of local citizens at Varennes (and at several other communities) in far northeastern France; Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and family were in the next few days transported back to a capital grown ominously silent and suspicious. Louis would be “temporarily” suspended from his regal duties by a Constituent Assembly still engaged in completing its work on what was soon to be known as the “Constitution of 1791.” After a period of agonizing (and increasingly polarizing) discussion in the Assembly about how to deal with this would-be fugitive monarch, Louis XVI was finally reinstated on the precarious understanding that he would definitively endorse the constitutional document soon to emerge from the representatives’ labors. Yet his “endorsement” of the completed Constitution in September rang rather hollow in light of the proclamation he had left behind him at the Tuileries on June 20, excoriating his “rebellious” subjects and condemning their subversive works of innovation. The newly elected Legislative Assembly would have to deal as best it could with this ticklish situation starting in October 1791. When every allowance has been made for the uniqueness of each of these royal initiatives, their comparative aspects remain striking and suggestive. Whether we examine the psychological and geopolitical (or “politicalcultural”) antecedents to the flight to Varennes, the way the Constituent 146 147

Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, pp. 189–90. The story has been most recently – and thoroughly – retold by Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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Assembly in an unanticipated and unprecedented moment of national emergency “took charge” of domestic and especially foreign affairs, or the reactions, both at Paris and in the provinces, to the king’s attempted abandonment of his compatriots and their work of reform, we find the parallels with England’s tense situation of late 1641 and early 1642 impossible to overlook. Take, for instance, the “competing conspiratorial myths” (to paraphrase Anthony Fletcher) that were coming, by 1790–91, to dominate both royal and legislative perspectives at revolutionary Paris. Both Louis and MarieAntoinette, Timothy Tackett has written, “had now come to believe that a small group of Parisian radicals, the Jacobins, had seized control of the state and that the great mass of the population outside the capital fully backed the king and only awaited the opportunity to show him their love and obedience.”148 How readily this reminds us of Charles I’s and Henrietta-Maria’s invidious contrast of John Pym and his plotting cronies to their presumably loyal subjects in the English counties! At the same time, the Constituent Assemblymen, too (much like Pym and his parliamentary partisans) and many of their compatriots as well were increasingly viewing events in conspiratorial fashion: Lower class and middle class . . . were . . . unsettled by continuing rumors of counterrevolutionary plots. Fears had been aroused by the blustering pronouncements of emigrant nobles, threatening to invade from across the Rhine, and by the very real and well-publicized conspiracies hatched during the first two years of the Revolution. Such tensions were exacerbated by the large numbers of aristocrats living in the city, many of them with their own reactionary clubs and publishing clubs, closely attached to the conservative minority in the Assembly itself. The creation of a Monarchy Club at the end of 1790, with a membership drawn largely from the nobility and clergy, seemed tangible evidence of a conspiracy to reinstate all the abuses of the Old Regime.149

Moreover, much as the agitation for (or opposition to) “root and branch” reform of Anglicanism in 1641–42 fed the flames of conspiracy theory in revolutionary England, so the “refractory” clergy’s opposition in revolutionary France to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy heightened the Assemblymen’s fears of rightist conspirators lurking insidiously in their midst. Interestingly enough, too, wild stories concerning foreign or aristocratic plots to “kidnap” Louis XVI – the kind of rumor that had infuriated Charles I at a later juncture in his own country’s upheaval – were also circulating in Paris as early as January 1791, and further nurtured legislative and popular fears of both conspiracy and foreign invasion.150 Then, there was the associated matter of defending the country (whether Pym’s England or the Jacobins’ France) against the possibility of military intervention from without. We have already raised this point in an earlier 148 149

150

Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 95. See also, on the issue of conspiratorial-mindedness in the early phases of the Revolution, Tackett, “Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution,” pp. 691–713; and Campbell, Kaiser, and Linton, eds., Conspiracy in the French Revolution, esp. the Introduction. On this point, see Tackett, When the King Took Flight, p. 97.

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connection, but should reiterate it here. As early as January 1791, the deputies were already sufficiently worried by invasion rumors to vote the creation of a volunteer force of 100,000 “auxiliaries” to be drawn from all the departments, and resolved as well to expedite the recruitment of new troops for the conventional royal army. At that point, they regarded Alexandre de Lameth’s call for “a reserve of 250,000 to 300,000 National Guard volunteers, prepared to march to the frontiers at a moment’s notice,” and formed as a sort of “third line” of national defense, as premature. Yet, in mid-summer, dealing with the repercussions of the Varennes crisis, the deputies revisited the subject, and decreed the “immediate formation” of an even larger volunteer force than that proposed by Lameth six months before.151 We have already seen how critically divisive an issue for contending English leaders in 1641–42 had been the questions of controlling the county militias and raising additional troops for the pacification of Ireland – and, possibly, for other military purposes as well. Perhaps most remarkable, however, were the ways in which, in both of these revolutionary situations, the precipitous actions of a discredited monarch only exposed the readiness of politicians in the capital to govern their country, if necessary, in the absence of that monarch – and elicited expressions of support for those politicians from the counties (or provinces). If, in the case of England, the Parliament and radicalized Londoners stepped into the breach created by Charles I’s absence, and were inundated by petitions from across the kingdom, in the case of France the Assemblymen readied themselves in the wake of Varennes for national defense on a much larger, continental scale, and were robustly seconded in this by provincial leaders and Jacobin activists. On June 21, 1791, just hours after having been apprised of Louis XVI’s flight from Paris, the deputies, Tackett has observed, “took steps to keep the government functioning”: Never in its history had France been without a king or a king’s regent, and now, in these difficult circumstances, the Assembly was forced to improvise. . . . the deputies ended the requirement of a royal “sanction” for the ratification of decrees . . . the deputies opted to work through the existing ministers . . . [who would] work directly with the appropriate committees in coordinating policy. Other decrees enabled the finance minister to continue paying the nation’s bills without the monarch’s signature, and instructed foreign ambassadors to deal directly with the Assembly through the minister of foreign affairs.

“At present,” Charles de Lameth informed his colleagues that very day in a telling commentary, “we are compelled to assume both legislative and executive powers.” He went on: “In periods of crisis, one cannot subject oneself rigorously to the forms of the law, as one would necessarily do in a period 151

See, again, on these issues: Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The First Years, pp. 194, 196–98; Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, pp. 49–57; and Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution, p. 106.

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of calm . . . It is better to commit a momentary injustice than to see the loss of the state itself.”152 Such a statement, Tackett has been quick to note, with its unqualified acceptance of “government by expediency,” almost unavoidably prefigures for us today the Terror of 1793–94. Significantly, too, the deputies, alive to the possible international implications of the king’s departure, ordered the principal army commanders then in Paris to appear before them, to swear their fidelity to the constitution, the laws, and the Assembly (but not, by implication, to Louis XVI), and to work with the ministers and corresponding Assembly committees to formulate contingency plans for the defense of France.153 Paradoxically, by leaving London in early 1642, Charles I had only proven that he was not indispensable to the conduct of public affairs; by fleeing Paris in June 1791, Louis XVI in effect drove home to all thoughtful individuals the same, potentially revolutionary lesson. Moreover, as they learned of the crisis in the capital, leaders in exposed coastal and frontier zones of the kingdom prepared for possibilities of foreign invasion. The most recent historian of the “flight to Varennes” has detailed some of their defensive actions: The city of Strasbourg took the initiative in stationing guardsmen up and down the Rhine. Longwy, on the northern frontier near Luxembourg, urged all border communities to arm themselves and prepare for war. In Provence a protective cordon was set up along the neighboring Italian states, and in Perpignan detachments were directed to guard both the passes of the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean coast near Spain. Similar steps were taken along the Atlantic coast. Bordeaux and Dieppe temporarily closed their ports. . . . Rouen established observation posts on the English Channel from Le Havre to the departmental border at Le Treport. A semaphore chain was prepared along the ´ south Breton coast to relay word quickly of suspicious sightings.154

In the days to come, rumors of actual invasion would set off waves of terror in various provincial regions resembling those of the Great Fear two years earlier; and, once again, in community after community, linkages were spontaneously assumed between foreign and domestic conspiracies, between soldiers purportedly entering the country from foreign parts and insidious, internal adversaries spinning their wicked plots against the Revolution’s good works. Moreover, provincial Jacobins and other Patriots, acting in official and unofficial capacities, reinforced municipal efforts to defend specific localities. For example, rumors that an English naval force was poised to descend on Brittany touched off scenes of panic in the Jacobin Societies of the west and southwest. Bordeaux’s Jacobins railed hysterically against the reported buildup of English arms, while those at Ste. Foy drafted a call to the English people to overthrow their detestable Prime Minister Pitt. Clubs all over the kingdom responded to news of the royal family’s flight by convening emergency sessions. 152 153 154

Tackett, When the King Took Flight, pp. 124–29. Ibid., pp. 128–29. Ibid., pp. 158–60.

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Permanent committees in some communities sat through the nights, and as the crisis heated up, huge crowds began to assemble at the halls reserved for the Jacobins just after dawn. The clubs were so overwhelmed by numbers that many of them were forced to convene in public squares. Dark rumors of invasion by Spanish, British, Imperial, and emigr e´ forces placed a premium on ´ civil defense. Couriers were dispatched to nearby towns to obtain the latest information. Deputations rushed off to the local authorities “to demand the mobilization of the National Guards, the placement of beacon fires on the heights, the seizure of the papers of emigr es, ´ ´ and the surveillance of suspects.” Clubs in a number of regions – notably on France’s threatened frontiers – transformed themselves overnight into recruitment bureaus, took newly formed companies of “volunteers” under their wing, and demanded that all officers in the armies be subjected to rigorous “patriotic” oversight. Needless to add, the provincial Jacobin societies corresponded ceaselessly among themselves and deluged the Parisian mother club and the Constituent Assembly with messages of encouragement.155 The crisis in the summer of 1791 touched off by the king’s flight from Paris, by dispelling any lingering illusions about the king’s and queen’s acceptance of the Revolution, put paid as well to the optimistic, consensual “honeymoon” atmosphere of 1789. This was especially obvious in the capital. However much historians may differ, for instance, about the strength of conspiratorial sentiment in the Constituent Assembly in the run-up to this crisis, few of them would disagree with Tackett’s conclusion that “the king’s flight . . . enormously reinforced the arguments of all those who held to a conspiratorial view of the world.” Retrospective investigation of the affair divulged the outlines of a “comprehensive plot . . . involving numerous participants in Paris, in the army, and among the emigr es ´ ´ in Germany” not to mention “a pattern of boldfaced deceit on the part of Louis himself.” New waves of emigration of nobles and of some “refractory” priests naturally intensified the distrust with which those nobles and clerics remaining in France were regarded by all true patriots; and the poison of paranoid fear and mutual distrust gradually seeped into the legislature itself.156 Alas, the ground was already being laid, in psychological terms, for the incarnadined excesses of the Terror to come. Further poisoning the atmosphere at Paris were developments in the hitherto largely united Jacobin Club and at the Champ de Mars. The compromise cobbled together in July between king and Assembly, conditionally reinstalling Louis XVI, helped precipitate a split within Jacobin ranks: the conservative majority of Jacobins withdrew to form their own (“Feuillant”) association, leaving the most inveterately radical Jacobins – Robespierre, Petion, and ´ others – behind. Meanwhile, the sponsorship by the ultra-radical Cordelier Club of a petition implicitly calling for a republic provoked a “massacre” of 155 156

See, on all of this, Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs, esp. pp. 194, 196–98, 241, and 269. Tackett, When the King Took Flight, pp. 204–06, 222–23.

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Parisians by National Guards on the Champ de Mars (July 17). A new line had been drawn – in blood – between Lafayette, Bailly, the “Feuillants,” and other notables still desirous of preserving the crown, on the one hand, and the more radical revolutionaries, on the other.157 In the long run, however, just as the crisis of 1641–42 fortified the resolve of Pym and his partisans to prosecute their cause against Charles I, so that of the summer of 1791 steeled the determination of Parisian Jacobin militants such as Robespierre and Petion to champion the popular cause and play up ´ the perfidy of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. And in this strategy they (and, crucially, their provincial counterparts) were well positioned in future crises to act as spokesmen for a truly national response to threats from abroad and to lead a mobilization of citizens in defense of the Revolution. The social origins of those composing this faction, at Paris and in the provinces, drives the point home. Whereas scholars have found the most outspoken centrists in the Constituent Assembly to have been, disproportionately, rich entrepreneurs, Parisian aristocrats of illustrious lineage, and former old regime bureaucrats, and whereas they have found activists on the Right to have derived especially from old, traditional noble and clerical families of rural France, they have ascertained that Jacobin militants were overwhelmingly of the former Third Estate. Most of the Jacobin representatives seem originally to have been practitioners of the law or officiers of various stripes in the small towns of provincial France. They were, as a rule, much less affluent than the celebrated nobles, bankers, and merchants of the Club of 1789, and in fact many were among the humbler members of the Third Estate. We can append to these findings a natural counterpoint: that Jacobin clubs in provincial communities drew their membership from much the same professional strata of middle-class society.158 This last observation is important, because in the crises that lay ahead the Jacobins would have to be active nationally, and not just at the capital. And here the most relevant fact is that the social elements most faithfully represented among the Parisian and provincial Jacobins were – in a more general sense – assuming the direction of civic affairs all over France. Whether urban entrepreneurs, professionals versed in the law, or other “bourgeois,” they were now “the men best prepared by their style of life, reading habits, professional skills, economic positions, in short, by their sociopolitical organization, to take power.”159 157

158

159

For updated insights on the Champ de Mars affair, see: David Andress, Massacre at the Champ de Mars: Popular Dissent and Political Culture in the French Revolution (Suffolk, UK and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2000). On all these point, see: Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, pp. 285–87; Applewhite, Political Alignment in the French National Assembly, esp. pp. 193–201; and Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The Middle Years (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 34–35. See Lynn Hunt, “Committees and Communes: Local Politics and National Revolution in 1789,” pp. 336–42.

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If the most striking difference between the crisis of 1642 in England and that of the summer of 1791 in France concerned the roles of the two monarchs – one rallying his men in the counties for civil war against the “traitors” of his own capital, the other fetched back, helpless, to his capital – then what are we to make of the collapse of the impromptu “honeymoon” in revolutionary Russia? In this case, the autocrat of the ancien r´egime was by the spring of 1917 already long gone, politically speaking. Yet, the individual who in Russia’s upheaval arguably precipitated the demise of the “honeymoon” – Foreign Minister Paul Miliukov – had striven desperately if unavailingly to save the monarchy in February, and in his special preserve of foreign policy still maintained several of the defining traditions of the old regime. And in fact it was in this latter connection that Miliukov took an initiative that, in retrospect, appears to the comparativist as meaningfully analogous to Charles I’s desperate gambit of January 4, 1642 and Louis XVI’s equally desperate move on the night of June 20–21, 1791. In Miliukov’s case, the fateful initiative was a “covering note” sent by the foreign minister on April 18, 1917, to the Allies, designed to interpret the Provisional Government’s March 27 restatement of Russian foreign policy objectives in a way that would preserve Miliukov’s stress on traditional Russian geostrategic interests and at the same time reassure the Western governments of Petrograd’s continued adherence to the Alliance. Because it was this soon-to-be notorious diplomatic note that precipitated the “April Crisis” in the course of which the first, Miliukov-dominated Provisional Government disintegrated, we need briefly to recapitulate the chronology of events in April–May 1917 and then, in analytic fashion, note the revealing similarities between this crisis and those in the two earlier revolutions.160 The return of Irakli Tsereteli to Petrograd on March 20 stimulated a full-scale review of the war issue in the Soviet. Led by Tsereteli and militants like Sukhanov, the Soviet eventually (and successfully) pressured the ministers to issue a new statement of foreign policy principles to the Russian people. “It was,” Rex Wade has observed, “a compromise document, with some passages stressing the Soviet theme of renunciation of annexations and indemnities while other sections stressed defense and treaty obligations, Miliukov’s theme.” Yet, not satisfied with what was a significant victory for the Soviet in the realm of domestic politics, Tsereteli and his colleagues decided to use the forum of the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, convened initially on March 29 in the capital, to push further on the peace issue. They insisted that the government “must go beyond renouncing its own annexationist ambitions and must enter into negotiations with the Allied governments to get them to join in drawing up a general Allied declaration of war aims renouncing all annexations.” The Soviet leadership also demanded that the government send its restatement 160

For a brief resum e´ of events in the April Crisis, refer to Wade, Russian Revolution, pp. 80–86; ´ Fitzpatrick, Russian Revolution, pp. 48–49; and Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, p. 106.

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of policy (dated March 27) to the Allies as a formal diplomatic note. Additional pressure to this end was brought to bear on the ministers by the return to Petrograd of other prominent socialist emigr es, ´ ´ most notably Victor Chernov, one of Miliukov’s most outspoken detractors. The government reluctantly acceded to this demand; however, the Foreign Minister, hoping to ensure that the Allies would interpret the March 27 declaration in a manner reconfirming both Russia’s fidelity to the Alliance and the legitimacy of its strategic interests, had the declaration accompanied by a covering note to those purposes. Predictably and provocatively, Miliukov’s note (dated April 18) ignored all talk of renunciation of annexations, spoke of “guarantees” and “sanctions,” and insisted on the prosecution of the struggle against the Central Powers to a “decisive victory.”161 Publication of the foreign minister’s note led to clashes in the streets between huge anti-Miliukov and somewhat smaller pro-Miliukov demonstrations and raised for leaders on both sides of the Petrograd dvoevlastie the dread specter of civil war. The upshot was a political compromise co-opting leading socialists into the government on May 5 but excluding the two principal conservative figures, Miliukov and War Minister Guchkov. Thus was born, out of the chaos and frenzied political maneuvering of the April Crisis, the first of three “moderate” Coalition Governments that tried to direct public affairs in Russia prior to the Bolshevik coup of October 1917. Thus for the basic facts of chronology. When we probe beneath the specific personalities and contretemps and clashes of rival interests in the April Crisis in revolutionary Russia, we discern, as we did in analyzing the analogous crises in revolutionary England and France, certain elements symptomatic of a “honeymoon” period on the verge of demise: efforts to preserve effective governance in a time of unraveling public order; the eternal nexus between foreign and domestic affairs; and competing conspiratorial myths through which each side in a rapidly polarizing situation demonized the other. The formation of a new, “coalition” government, announced on May 5, 1917, was spurred by the realization, in both liberal and socialist quarters, that the violent street demonstrations of recent days must not be allowed to return, and that the country, still enmeshed in a gigantic foreign war on its western front, must not be allowed to drift into civil war. For these reasons, Prince Lvov and other responsible leaders were determined to achieve greater popular credibility for the government, and for this a major reshuffling of ministers was necessary. The results have been summarized by Rex Wade: Five additional socialists, including Tsereteli, Skobelev and Chernov, joined Kerensky in the government. Ten non-socialists, including four Kadets, completed the government. Lvov remained head of the government. Miliukov and Guchkov, the two men originally expected to be the dominant figures of the Provisional Government and who had been especially critical of the Soviet’s role in politics, exited. Kerensky took over the Ministry of War and Tereshchenko assumed the sensitive post of foreign minister. The difficult 161

Citations of these documents are from Wade, Russian Revolution, pp. 84–86.

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task of dealing with the expectations of industrial workers and peasants fell to two Soviet leaders, Skobelev (Menshevik) as minister of labor and Chernov (SR) as minister of agriculture. Tsereteli, who joined the government reluctantly, took the minor position of posts and telegraphs so as to be able to devote his energies to political affairs of the Soviet.162

In many respects, Tsereteli became the key figure in the coalition; Prime Minister Lvov also retained the services of two of Miliukov’s habitual “leftist” critics, Nekrasov and Konovalov.163 Whether the formation of the First Coalition Government could have arrested the decline of Russian reliability and prestige in the eyes of the Western powers at this point is debatable. Miliukov in his earlier days as foreign minister had already had occasion to protest to London, Paris, and Rome their failure to invite Russian diplomats to attend conferences held at Folkestone and at St. Jean de Maurienne to discuss questions affecting Asia Minor, and in early April prominent Western figures such as French ambassador-designate Albert Thomas and British ambassador George Buchanon were quite openly snubbing the Russian foreign minister at Petrograd.164 The West was, it appears, writing off the Miliukov-dominated Provisional Government even in advance of the April Crisis; yet, realistically speaking, the Allies could hardly have expected, in the days following the exit of Miliukov and Guchkov from their respective ministries, unqualified support from a Coalition Government now drawing its sense of direction from figures on the moderate Left such as Tsereteli and Chernov. The abject failure of Kerensky’s so-called “June Offensive” would only confirm the Allies’ growing doubts about the steadfastness of their huge but ailing Eurasian confederate.165 What is incontrovertible is the extent to which Miliukov and his partisans, on the one hand, and the foreign minister’s growing host of critics, on the other, viewed issues at this time in conspiratorial, simplistic terms that by now should be very familiar to us. By April 21, William Rosenberg has noted, street demonstrations in Petrograd seemed to betoken “more a polarization of attitudes on the war than a consensus behind the socialists.” On the Right, for example, this: For Miliukov and the Kadets, who read with great interest in April the resolutions of dozens of congresses and conferences supporting “War to Complete Victory,” the Petrograd demonstrations . . . raised the whole question of the capital’s relation to the 162 163

164 165

Ibid., pp. 85–86. See Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 382–84. Refer also, for more detailed information on Tsereteli’s role in all of this, to Roobol, Tsereteli – A Democrat in the Russian Revolution, pp. 123–24. See Riha, A Russian European, pp. 314–18; and Wade, The Russian Search for Peace, pp. 35–37. For doubts expressed within the Russian military establishment itself regarding the likelihood of Russian perseverance in the war, see Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 378–80.

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rest of Russia, and the liberals’ “obligation” to defend “national interests” against the onslaught of a relatively small group of Petrograd rebels. Just one day before the Kadet foreign minister dispatched his Note of April 18, a large group of war-wounded in Petrograd had mounted the noisiest public attack yet on Lenin and the internationalists, calling the Bolsheviks “German agents,” and demanding war to complete victory.166

Thousands of Kadet supporters on the streets of the capital on April 21 waved, along with their party’s trademark green pennants, signs reading “Victory for the Free Democracies!” and “Down with German Militarism!” In addition, Miliukov in his memoirs would later castigate his leftist fellow minister Nekrasov for having spread conspiratorial rumors about machinations on the Right; Progressive Bloc leader Shulgin accused the Soviet of dark “treachery;” and his associate Rodichev demanded an all-out struggle against what he called “German slogans” on the Far Left.167 Conspiratorial-mindedness flourished in these circumstances on the Left as well. On April 29, as an example in point, the Soviet received a frantic delegation of officers from the Petrograd military staff warning of possible military plotting against the Left by Guchkov, General Lavr Kornilov, and even some Kadets. Rumors of military, counterrevolutionary plots filled the air – although, at least at this relatively early point in the Revolution, they failed to materialize.168 Moreover, tendencies toward conspiratorial thinking on the Left were only reinforced by Marxian “class” analysis. Thus, Lenin had, while still in exile, written to a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee in Stockholm “that the agents of Anglo-French imperialist capital and the Russian imperialist Miliukov (and Co.) are capable of all, of deception, of betrayal, of all, of all, to prevent the return of the internationalists to Russia.” Maksim Gorky, demanding Miliukov’s resignation in the midst of the April Crisis, would declare that “A champion of the interests of international capital has no place in the ranks of the government of democratic Russia.” And Sukhanov in the run-up to the April crisis had calmly but curtly informed the foreign minister: “You did not succeed in turning the new Russia into a plutocratic England or France by consolidating the political dictatorship of capital here. . . . It has become apparent that you do not, and cannot, possess any real force against the democracy.”169 The accusations and counter-accusations that destroyed the early sense of optimism, of consensus and bright new beginnings in the English Revolution had largely (if not exclusively) been grounded in competing conspiratorial myths involving religion, and the foreign and domestic implications of religious commitment. In the hopeful early days of the French Revolution, the competing conspiratorial myths had been somewhat more secular in content, 166 167 168 169

Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, pp. 106–8. Ibid., pp. 112–13. Ibid., p. 113. Citations are from Riha, A Russian European, pp. 327–28.

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despite the continuing importance of ecclesiological controversy over Gallican Catholicism; and secularism was, arguably, even more important in the earliest weeks of the Russian Revolution. Orlando Figes has explained, in concrete socioeconomic as well as political terms, how the formation of the First Coalition Government in April–May 1917, rather than consolidating a “democratic center” of left-leaning Kadets and “right-leaning” or “moderate” socialists, did precisely the opposite, opening the way for a political and social polarization that in the end could only benefit either ultra-rightist or (in Russian conditions, more likely) ultra-leftist interests: On the one hand, most of the provincial rank and file of the Kadets moved with their party leader Miliukov, who had resigned on 4 May, into right-wing opposition against the coalition government. Increasingly they abandoned their liberal self-image as a party of the nation as a whole and began to portray themselves as a party for the defense of bourgeois class interests, property rights, law and order and the Russian Empire. Within the Soviet camp, on the other hand, there was a steady drift towards the Left as the mass of the workers and the peasants became increasingly disillusioned with the failure of the socialists to use their position in the government to speed up the process of social reform or to bring about a democratic peace.

In the end, as Figes correctly comments, the moderate SRs and Mensheviks, rather than tackling forthrightly the monstrous issue of the war, so that they could then deal with “Soviet Russia’s” burning concerns regarding land and workplace reform, became caught up in what very much seemed to their acolytes to be little more than a sterile, even traitorous defense of a discredited “bourgeois” state.170 “The war – ever-present, ever-bitter, draining the substance of enemy and ally alike – barred the way.”171 This observation by W. Bruce Lincoln sums up how absolutely critical was the issue of war in the foreign/domestic nexus of public affairs – unprecedentedly so in this revolution, thereby differentiating it somewhat from the two earlier upheavals. Historian Robert D. Warth has expressed the same point this way: In brief, the Russian soldier and the Russian people were heartily sick of the war. Any attempt to make them go on with it was doomed to failure and merely reacted to the further discredit of those who advocated such a policy. That Lenin and the Bolsheviks had the political sagacity to grasp the obvious and to campaign for peace is more a reflection on the sterility of bourgeois leadership than a credit to the mystic properties of Marxist dogma in the service of professional revolutionaries.172

To make this point, of course, is to anticipate a central element in the analysis of radicalization in the Russian Revolution yet to come, as well as to reflect back on our analysis in this chapter. 170 171 172

Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 384. Lincoln, Passage through Armageddon, p. 355. Warth, The Allies and the Russian Revolution, p. 50.

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Indeed, war of one kind or another – foreign or civil, or something of both – will loom ever larger as we make the transition in Chapter 4 – for all three of our revolutions – from the by now irredeemably discredited days of “honeymoon” illusions to the increasingly unpredictable and perilous days of radicalization that, tragically, lay just ahead. It is to that dramatic and in many ways instructive story, to what one notorious French politician of the 1790s called, appropriately enough, the “revolutionizing of the revolution,” that we must now direct our attention. Doing so, we will soon find the “dynamics of sociopolitical polarization and radicalization” that had already been so consequential in troubling and eventually breaking up the “honeymoons” in our revolutions to be taking on ever more explosive dimensions. This will be true in large part because these self-same dynamics were destined to engage, to an extent unimaginable before, the interests and hopes and anxieties of “ordinary” people of city and countryside as well as the domestic and international calculations of those in the corridors of power and in the sunlit pastures of comfortable, elitist society. ´

4 The “Revolutionizing” of the Revolutions

The stages of radicalization in our three revolutions that were (at least in part) touched off by the abortive initiatives of two kings and a foreign minister proved even more unequal in their duration than were the “honeymoon” periods to which they succeeded. If, in the case of England, we view the phase of radicalization as extending from the initiation of serious civil war hostilities in the late summer of 1642 to the execution of Charles I and the abolition of both monarchy and House of Lords in January 1649, we are envisaging a period of nearly six and a half years. If, in the case of France, we see the analogous phase as extending, roughly speaking, from the “Varennes crisis” of June–September 1791 to the Jacobin seizure of state power after the journ´ees of May 31–June 2, 1793, we have in mind a period of about two years. And if, finally, in the case of revolutionary Russia, we conceive the stage of radicalization as extending from, say, the formation of the First Coalition Government on May 5, 1917, to the Bolshevik seizure of state power in late October, we are defining a period of less than six months. From six and a half years (England) to two years (France) to less than six months (Russia) – to what does such a pronounced acceleration of the pace of radicalization, of revolutionary change, seem to point? It seems to suggest (much as did our previous analysis of “honeymoon” stages of revolution) that, as we progress from mid-seventeenth-century England to late eighteenth-century France to early twentieth-century Russia, we are dealing with dramatic sociopolitical change occurring under ever greater geopolitical and sociopolitical pressures on governance – with, that is to say, an ever tighter nexus between external and internal developments driving on the process of revolution in the three countries under review. The following pages will place this evolution of affairs under our analytic microscope, and try to evaluate its overall import for the study of European revolutions, in three steps. First, they briefly recapitulate the chronology of events – relatively prolonged, as we have just noted, for England, much less so 254

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for France, and especially for Russia – which, in all three situations, take us from the dissipation of any lingering “honeymoon” illusions to the seizure of power by political extremists prepared at all costs to salvage the revolutionary cause. Second, they analyze the critical dialectic in all three upheavals between war (civil or foreign or both) and the struggles of elitist political factions for state ´ power. And third, they interrogate the extent to which those public figures contending for power in these challenging circumstances were willing – for preexisting ideological reasons, for reasons of political expediency, or perhaps for a combination of both – to accommodate and even (in some respects) to champion aggressively the aspirations of their societies’ urban and/or rural masses. Chronologies of Radicalization The progression in England from what is frequently known as the “first revolution” of 1640–42 to the more decisive revolution of January 1649 was punctuated, technically, by two civil wars rather than by just one – both of them occurring against the somber backdrop of the climactic decade of the Thirty Years’ War on the Continent. In the case of France, the “revolutionizing of the revolution” involved the return of this traditionally belligerent country to the ways of foreign war – war that gradually cast off its originally defensive trappings to become an offensive leviathan catching up all of French society in its toils. The deepening of revolution in Russia during the summer and early autumn of 1917, to complete this synopsis of chronologies, was every bit as much driven by the domestic repercussions of Russian involvement in the “World War” as had been the earlier, more consensual stage of this upheaval. After roaming over much of northern England following on his hasty departure from London in early 1642 (and after being refused admittance to Hull by Sir John Hotham in April), Charles I formally raised his standard of military defiance at Nottingham in August.1 Enough of the peerage and gentry (joined by continental figures such as the king’s dashing nephew Prince Rupert of the Palatine) flocked to Charles I’s side to enable him to make a genuine fight of it against Westminster. In the meantime, the Earl of Essex was appointed commander of the parliamentary forces. The initial significant engagement of the “first” civil war (1642–46) was essentially a draw – at Edgehill (October 23, 1642). The king advanced on his capital soon thereafter, but the opposition of the trained bands at Turnham Green (November 1642) forced his withdrawal to Oxford. In 1643, royalist forces attempted to coordinate a campaign against London from the north, the southwest, and Oxford; this campaign, however, was defeated by the combined resistance of Plymouth, Hull, Gloucester, and 1

This brief account of the 1642–49 period in revolutionary England is based on Aylmer, A Short History of Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 130–48; and Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714, pp. 94–97.

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London’s trained bands intervening in relief of Gloucester. Newbury soon thereafter was the site of another military draw between royalist and parliamentary forces. Parliamentary frustration with military developments eventually led in 1644–45 to a decisively successful turn of events for the strategists at Westminster. John Pym achieved what was destined to be his last diplomatic triumph for the parliamentary side when, in September 1643, he induced his colleagues to sign the Solemn League and Covenant engaging the Scots to intervene militarily against the king. (Pym died soon thereafter; a Scottish army crossed the border in January 1644.) The new alliance seemingly bore fruit when, in July 1644, the combined armies of Scotland, Yorkshire (Sir Thomas Fairfax), and the Eastern Association (led by the Earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell) defeated the royalists at Marston Moor; unfortunately for Westminster, however, the lack of a united military command eventuated in a failure by the parliamentary forces to follow up their victory. Indeed, the ignominious surrender of Essex’s army at Lostwithiel in the southwest in September, and the indecisive outcome at the Second Battle of Newbury (on October 25) reinforced the arguments of those in London calling for the elimination of “half-hearted” officers and for a united command. The upshot, eventually, was the revolutionary creation of the New Model Army, with Fairfax (and Cromwell) in charge, and a Self-Denying Ordinance (April 1645) depriving all peers and MPs (with the judicious exception of indispensable figures like Cromwell!) of their commissions; the almost immediate result was the definitive rout of Charles I’s army at Naseby on June 14, 1645. Oxford surrendered formally a year later (in June 1646) after the king had given himself up, not to the Puritan/parliamentarian forces, but rather to the Presbyterian Scots. Indeed, for the next two years or so, from the summer of 1646 to the end of 1648, Charles I played a truly tortuous game of playing (as best he could) one feuding faction off another. On January 30, 1647, he was transferred by the Scots into parliamentary hands; five months later, he was forcibly remanded by Cornet George Joyce into the custody of the victorious Army; and then, on November 11, 1647, the king escaped from Army custody, fled to the Isle of Wight, and negotiated from there with the Scottish commissioners at London an agreement that would soon bring yet another Scottish army into England, this time on the royalist side! Yet, long before this, serious disagreements had broken out within parliamentary and army ranks, and between civilian and military leaders, over a variety of issues. When, in the months following the end of the “first” civil war, the “Presbyterian” or conservative majority at Westminster proposed disbanding the New Model Army, with its wages unpaid, offering the rank-and-file the thankless option of “volunteering” for service in Ireland, this provoked the opposition not only of the “Independent” or radical minority of M.P.s but also of the mutinous soldiery. The Army, unified momentarily by its “General Council” representing officers and the rank-and-file, refused to disband before obtaining redress of its grievances, and in short order

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went on (in August 1647) to occupy London and purge eleven Presbyterian members of Parliament. Unity in the Army, however, gave way speedily to disunity: in October, two rival constitutional schemes – the “Heads of the Proposals” backed by most of the generals, and a more democratic “Agreement of the People” representing the views of civilian radicals (the so-called “Levellers”) and military radicals (the “Agitators”) were debated at Putney Church. Although deadlock ensued, with Cromwell ordering the Agitators back to their regiments (November 15), unity was restored in military ranks by the disconcerting news of the king’s escape to the Isle of Wight and by the implied threat of a renewal of civil war. The negotiations between an unrepentant Charles I and the Scottish commissioners at London led to the third Scottish invasion of northern England since the late 1630s. This invasion, in July 1648, highlighted what historians usually call the “second” civil war; this conflict, however, unlike its predecessor, was swiftly resolved, and resulted in the final, drastic undoing of the king. Cromwell, who had already crushed a “Presbyterian”/royalist uprising in South Wales, easily defeated the Scots at Preston in August; Fairfax disposed of a royalist force at Colchester; and soon the “second” civil war was over. The generals, however, in light of Charles’ parleys not only with the Scots but also, subsequently, with “Presbyterian” conservatives in Parliament, resolved to have done altogether with this “man of blood.” After having revived their alliance with the Levellers and with democratic elements among the Army’s rank-and-file, the generals occupied London a second time (December 1648), had Colonel Thomas Pride purge one hundred “unreliable” M.P.s (“Pride’s Purge”), and then put the king on trial for his life before the “rump” of the Commons. Charles I was executed on January 30, 1649, as a traitor to his people; and both monarchy and the Lords were institutionally abolished. Thus did revolution in England, at the end of this complex sequence of events, embark on its republican and (perhaps?) most advanced phase. At this point, the comparativist immediately notes that “self-denying ordinances” figured prominently in the radicalization of both the English and French Revolutions. As we have already seen, the Self-Denying Ordinance of April 1645 deprived (most) peers and M.P.s of their commissions in the as yet underperforming army loyal to Westminster; in France, a very similar measure (proposed in the Constituent Assembly, ironically enough, by Maximilien Robespierre) ensured a complete turnover of personnel when the newly elected Legislative Assembly first convened at Paris on October 1, 1791.2 The new legislature’s turbulent one-year history was dominated by a struggle between “Feuillant” moderates, who hoped to preserve the monarchy, maintain peaceable foreign relations, and rein in domestic sociopolitical change, and the “Brissotin” allies of Jacques-Pierre Brissot, who dreamed of overturning the 2

This succinct account of events during the period from mid-1791 to mid-1793 in revolutionary France is drawn largely from Bailey Stone, Reinterpreting the French Revolution, pp. 159–61.

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moderates’ initial ascendancy in the government by manipulating controversial foreign and domestic issues. In November, the Brissotin deputies secured passage of draconian decrees against emigr es ´ ´ and clergy rejecting the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy; the king’s decision to veto these (and subsequent) punitive measures further undermined his already sufficiently tenuous political position. At the same time, Brissot and his cronies took up the cudgels for war against Austria (and, possibly, other states) both in the Assembly and at the Paris Jacobin Club, where Robespierre incisively (but, in the end, unavailingly) resisted the Brissotin stampede toward war. As 1791 ended and 1792 began, other forces also contributed to a deterioration in Franco-Austrian relations: the counterrevolutionary scheming of the Court and its diplomatic agents abroad, Lafayette’s entirely separate if quixotic desire to use the prospect of war to impose a political compromise on both Left and Right, and the longanticipated decision by policymakers at Vienna to try to reverse the Revolution by intervening militarily against France. In March, a Brissotin ministry was forced on the king; on April 20, 1792, France declared war on the Habsburg monarchy. Soon, the French would be at war with the Prussians as well. The war powerfully contributed to the toppling of the monarchy in France. On June 20, Louis XVI’s recent dismissal of his Brissotin ministers and vetoes of measures pursuing “refractory” clergy and setting up an impromptu military camp at Paris provoked an ugly antiroyalist demonstration at the Tuileries Palace. In July, with Austrian and Prussian forces already established on French soil in the northeast, the country was declared to be en danger, and Paris soon learned of a proclamation (the “Brunswick Manifesto”) in which Berlin’s generalissimo, the duke of Brunswick, threatened dire consequences should Parisians not submit instantly and unconditionally to Louis XVI’s authority. By early August, forty-seven of the capital’s forty-eight sections were calling for the deposition of the king; a “revolutionary committee” (similar in some respects to the “Militia” or “Safety” Committee of January 1642 in London) usurped the “legal” Parisian municipality; and on August 10, forces storming the Tuileries overthrew the French sovereign and reinstated the Brissotin ministry that had been dismissed by Louis two months before. Over the next month, qualifying male voters nervously aware of intervening events such as Lafayette’s desertion to the Austrians, Prussia’s victories at Longwy and Verdun, and a sickening massacre of prisoners at Paris (in early September) still managed to elect delegates to a National Convention. At its very first public session (September 21, 1792), the Convention voted unanimously to abolish the monarchy. Louis XVI was put on trial by year’s end, and, much like Charles I before him, was executed as a traitor to his people (January 21, 1793). The international situation at the outset of the Convention’s existence appeared favorable to France: the Prussians were stopped at Valmy on September 20, 1792, and the defeat of Austrian forces at Jemappes (November 6) opened the way for a French advance into Belgium. On November 19 and December 15, Convention decrees offered aid to all peoples desiring

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to “recover” their freedom and (in a more concrete vein) laid out ground rules for French control over and conduct in conquered (or “liberated”) lands. The newly born French Republic soon annexed Savoy and Monaco, and its troops streamed into the German Rhineland. It was in these (momentarily) propitious circumstances that Brissot’s faction of Jacobin deputies (the so-called “Girondists”), profiting from their association with the war, decided to do battle with the Jacobin deputies most closely associated with Robespierre (soon to be dubbed the “Montagnards” or “Mountain” in the Convention). Unfortunately for Brissot and his adherents, the resulting struggle for power unfolded in the first half of 1793 against a backdrop of newly worsening conditions both abroad and at home. On February 1, France declared war on the English and the Dutch; a declaration of war against Madrid followed on March 7. General Charles Franc¸ois Dumouriez, a Girondist proteg ´ e, ´ lost the battle of Neerwinden on March 18 and on April 6 defected to the Austrians. The French had to retreat from the Netherlands and were increasingly besieged on other fronts, too. Meanwhile, runaway inflation and growing food scarcities were sapping popular support for the government at home, and antigovernment revolt flared in the Vendee ´ region of western France and (under the aegis of “Federalism”) elsewhere as well. The authorities began to implement emergency measures – the creation of a Revolutionary Tribunal and Committee of Public Safety at Paris and of “surveillance committees” in the communes, imposition of price controls on grain, and so on – but this was not enough to avert a showdown between dueling Girondist and Montagnard politicians in the Convention. Finally, the massive Parisian insurrection of May 31–June 2 led to the arrest of Brissot and a number of his “Girondist” allies and to a purging of all government committees save for the Committee of Public Safety. It would now fall to the “Robespierrist” Jacobins (Montagnards) to manage, at Paris and nationally, what was daily becoming a more perilous situation for the French. With Valenciennes being lost to the Austrians on July 28, 1793, and Toulon, on the Mediterranean coast, going over to the British on August 27, and with a new surge of popular rage challenging the government’s very existence at Paris in early September, a policy of officially sponsored “Terror” would soon be in the works. By the time of the Russian Revolution, comparativists can affirm, the general concept of radicalization of revolution was already becoming an established subject for academic analysis. No one less than Paul Miliukov, writing as an emigr e´ in Paris on the tenth anniversary of his own country’s upheaval, ´ remarked ironically that “he who has studied the history of the great revolutions of the past will know how to distinguish the generic traits common to all revolutions. . . . One of the common phenomena of these revolutions is the successive passage of power from the hands of the moderate factions to those of others, with more extreme ideas.”3 In the case of Russia, with which the 3

Miliukov is cited in Riha, A Russian European, p. 327.

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onetime Kadet Foreign Minister was all too familiar, we can talk, essentially, of the “passage of power” during the period from May to October 1917 through the hands of three consecutive Coalition Governments into those of that year’s ultimate political victors, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, Trotsky, et al. The First Coalition Government, as we saw in an earlier connection, was formed on May 5, 1917, in the wake of the “April Crisis” precipitated by Miliukov’s provocative “covering note” to the Allies.4 Miliukov and War Minister Guchkov having tendered their resignations, the remaining members of the cabinet, led by Prime Minister Lvov, threatened to follow suit unless they could coopt into their ranks leading socialists from the rival Petrograd Soviet. On May 5, six socialists led by Tsereteli decided reluctantly to assume responsibilities in the government. Chernov, as we have seen, accepted the portfolio of Agriculture; Skobelev became Minister of Labor; M. A. Tereshchenko, a nonparty liberal, succeeded Miliukov in the Foreign Ministry; and Tsereteli was entrusted with relatively minor ministerial duties so that he could continue to devote most of his time to political affairs in the Soviet. Meanwhile, Alexander Kerensky moved from the Justice Ministry to the War Ministry. Given that Tsereteli had brought into the government his newly formulated doctrine of “revolutionary defensism,” it was clear to most astute observers that this cabinet, mired like its immediate predecessor in the muck of total war, was going to be dogged by a daunting array of international as well as domestic problems. And this, in fact, proved to be the case. On the one hand, while Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries vainly endeavored, working through the Petrograd Soviet, to rally antiwar sentiments in all countries, and while Foreign Minister Tereshchenko attempted just as unavailingly to bring the Western Powers closer to the Soviet’s redefinition of Allied war aims, Kerensky’s ministry set preparations on foot for a new Russian military offensive against Germany and Austria-Hungary. The so-called “June Offensive,” launched with much fanfare on June 18, collapsed in the first week of July. It was disastrous in every possible sense: there were about 200,000 Russian casualties; morale in the Russian army sank to a new low; the Germans mounted a potent counterattack that was to continue into the fall; and with growing estrangement at Petrograd between civilian and military leaders, the government’s diplomatic credit was sapped further. Meanwhile, affairs behind the lines continued to deteriorate: the food and fuel crises in the major cities were exacerbated; peasant unrest deepened, especially in regions where landlords’ holdings were conspicuous; ethnic minorities from the Baltic to the Black Sea agitated ever more noisily for secession from Russia; and the Bolsheviks, if not yet in control of most congresses, committees, and soviets, maintained their withering critique of all moderate socialists’ compromises with “bourgeois imperialists.” 4

This chronology of events in the May–October 1917 period in Russia draws primarily from Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution, pp. 5–27; and Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, pp. 40–67.

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The early days of July brought matters to a head for the First Coalition Government. The Kadet ministers withdrew from the cabinet on July 2; during the so-called “July Days” (July 3–5), massive crowds prominently featuring Petrograd Bolsheviks, workers, garrison soldiers, and Kronstadt sailors converged on the Tauride Palace in the capital and demanded that the socialists of the Soviet’s Executive Committee break with their liberal colleagues and form a purely socialist, Soviet-based regime. The socialists resisted plebeian demands that they “seize power,” but went on the offensive in their own way, using loyal troops to restore order in Petrograd, publicly denouncing Lenin as a German stooge, driving him into exile in nearby Finland, and incarcerating other leftists (including Trotsky, who was by now moving into Bolshevik ranks). After prolonged negotiations, a Second Coalition Government was somehow cobbled together on July 25: Prince Lvov’s leadership role was transferred to Kerensky, and a combination of socialists and liberals (including, still, Tsereteli, Chernov, and Tereshchenko) consented to serve in it. Yet, if Lenin’s faction at Petrograd had been temporarily discredited by the July Days and their aftermath, Kerensky’s premiership in the Second (and, later, the Third) Coalitions never really managed to establish itself securely. From this time on, increasing polarization in the capital manifested itself in a rash of rumors concerning the possibilities of a coup, from either the extreme Right or extreme Left – rumors all the more energized by the constant and growing military pressure from the Germans to the west and northwest. (In August, Berlin’s forces would seize Riga on Latvia’s Baltic coast.) In late August, a coup from the Right was in fact attempted by troops supposedly loyal to General Lavr Kornilov, recently appointed Commander-in-Chief by Kerensky. The coup failed, both because of the unreliability of Kornilov’s forces and because of the concerted efforts of Bolshevik enthusiasts, moderate socialists, garrison troops, Kronstadt sailors, and workers’ militia (Red Guard) detachments to defend the capital. Kornilov was arrested; General Alexsandr Krymov, his assistant in the attempted coup, committed suicide. In the end, however, the Bolsheviks were to reap more credit than did Kerensky from the defeat of the Kornilov movement, which was therefore certainly one of the major turning points in the process of radicalization stretching from May to October 1917 in Russia. Kerensky, although badly weakened by the Kornilov affair, was somehow able to stitch together yet one more “Coalition Government.” Yet, significantly, this government, which took shape on September 27, no longer included either Tsereteli or Chernov. Furthermore, it emerged in a situation where, externally, the German Army continued to advance toward the capital, and, internally, the Bolsheviks were already coming into their own. Long in the ascendancy in many district, factory, and trade-union soviets, Lenin’s party had gained majority control in the all-important Petrograd Soviet by August 31 and in Moscow’s soviet five days later. Although moderate socialists still controlled the Central Executive Committee elected back in June at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, they were pressured now to call a Second All-Russian Congress;

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eventually, it was called, for October 25. Meanwhile, the Petrograd Soviet had voted for the establishment of a Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) to coordinate defense of the capital both against the advancing Germans and against any internal coup mounted from the Right; and, since the Bolsheviks dominated the MRC, they were able to employ it as their primary institutional vehicle for overthrowing the Third Coalition (Provisional) Government in late October. Lenin, still in hiding in Finland, was calling for that seizure of state power as early as September 14; although many of his party colleagues at first saw his demand as premature and potentially dangerous, the Bolshevik Central Committee (with Lenin now, it seems, back in Petrograd) resolved tentatively on October 10 to make an armed insurrection in the capital “the order of the day.” This decision was confirmed at an enlarged, stormy meeting of Bolsheviks six days later. On October 20–21, the Soviet’s Military Revolutionary Committee asserted control over the military garrison in the capital; and on October 24– 25, even as the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets was convening, forces loyal to Lenin seized control of strategic points in Petrograd, including the Winter Palace, where most of the ministers, now passively waiting on events, were arrested. Within twenty-four hours, Lenin and his victorious comrades, overriding the objections of what was now an internally-divided and isolated moderate socialist minority at the Congress of Soviets, had persuaded the effective radical majority at this Congress to declare the Provisional Government defunct and to sanction the formation of a new, all-Bolshevik executive, the “Council of People’s Commissars” (Sovnarkom). Radical revolution had thereby triumphed at Russia’s besieged capital – if not yet anywhere else in this vast country. Hence, the chronology of events in our three revolutions. Behind this chronological pattern, we have already noted, lay significant differences in the cases of the three countries concerned. For example, that England’s revolution “radicalized” at a relatively gradual pace reflects in part the circumstances of a civil war fought out in an insular context removed somewhat (if by no means altogether) from the pressures of Great Power continental geopolitics. That radicalization in Russia, at the other extreme, progressed so rapidly (even more rapidly than had radicalization in France) is likely attributable, in large measure, to the destabilizing urgency of issues generated there in the crucible of “total” and seemingly endless war. Other points of difference may also strike us: the fact, for instance, that, in the English case, a military institution – the New Model Army – became increasingly the main agent of radicalization, whereas in France and Russia, civilian institutions – the Legislative Assembly, the National Convention, and the Petrograd Soviet – became the central catalysts for radicalization. Still, behind these differences (and, at the same time, reflecting them in myriad ways) we perceive certain fundamental realities common to the three revolutions – realities of dynamic relationships between war and politics, and between the politics of war, on the one hand, and the

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politics of social advocacy, on the other. We proceed to examine these dynamic relationships in the remaining two sections of this chapter. War and the Radicalization of Politics Miliukov’s rueful observation of 1927 regarding the “successive passage of power” in major revolutions “from the hands of the moderate factions to those of others, with more extreme ideas” invites us immediately to deal, as we have dealt before, with the issue of war and its profound implications for domestic politics in countries such as England, France, and Russia. Moreover, treating these three revolutionary situations in correct chronological order will be especially useful in enabling us to demonstrate, right off the mark, that civil conflict (as contextually redefined just above) could be every bit as telling in this connection as international warfare. The two “civil wars” in the England of the 1640s, that is to say, whatever their domestic social repercussions, were in the end as potent as the European-wide conflicts of the French and Russian revolutionary eras in determining the destinies of the chief protagonists and factions caught up in politically transformative situations. This is emphatically not to say, however, that, in commencing with the case of revolutionary England, we can afford to ignore the international context of civil warfare. For one thing, Charles I’s conduct from 1642 on makes that impossible. As Caroline Hibbard has observed: . . . the king continued to seek the support of the Catholic Irish and other suspect groups after the beginning of the war, for he was unable to rally sufficient numbers of loyal English Protestants to his ranks. In September 1643 he signed articles of cessation with the Irish rebels and began to bring to England soldiers (both Protestant and Catholic) who had been fighting in Ireland. Modern historians agree with contemporaries . . . that no other single act of the king had such a harmful effect on his fortunes. In the spring of 1643 he had again supported Antrim’s project, a revival of the old scheme of 1638, to invade western Scotland from Ulster. The plan would finally be put into action in 1644–45 when Antrim’s forces joined Montrose’s highlanders; until their defeat at Philliphaugh in late 1645, this largely Catholic force would present a serious threat to parliament’s control of Scotland.5

Given that, in the minds of so many Protestant English, the recent Irish rebellion, so terrifying in its sanguinary details, had been viewed “as part of a European design against Protestantism, and the Irish . . . thought to be planning an invasion of England,” it is easy to see why the king’s unrelenting efforts in a context of full-blown civil war to solicit Irish support so damaged his cause, and so magnified the impact of the parliament’s antiroyalist propaganda. 5

Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, p. 225. On the implications of all this for the Presbyterian Scots, leagued as of late 1643 with Pym’s forces, see, most recently, Allan I. Macinnes, “The Scottish Moment, 1638–45,” in Adamson, ed., The English Civil War, pp. 125–52.

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And, as Hibbard emphasizes, the king never let up. He was just as willing, in the later stages of the “first” civil war, to use Catholic Welsh as to use Catholic Irish forces – not to mention those of the papacy and other continental polities involved in this climactic stage of the Thirty Years’ War – to neutralize the successes of his domestic Protestant opponents: The scheme devised in 1644–45 for Irish aid to the king centered on a force of 10,000 that Herbert of Raglan was to land in north Wales under his own command, while another 10,000 landed in south Wales under Sir Henry Gage. A third force of 6,000 from the continent, including some Scottish and Irish mercenaries, would land on the east coast of England, where it would be assisted by the prince of Orange and supported by the pope and Catholic princes. The religious concessions demanded by the papal agents frustrated this grandiose scheme, and what might have come of it we shall never know. But it wonderfully illustrates the character and continuity of the king’s planning.6

Indeed, it does. Is it any wonder, then, that – looking ahead briefly to the events of 1648–49 – we should find Oliver Cromwell sworn (it seems) at last to the cause of regicide by news of the king’s refusal even at that late date to veto the mobilization of yet another royalist invasion force in Ireland?7 Hence, the contemporary tendency to see the military showdown on English soil in geopolitical as well as in ideological terms as part of a wider, Europeanwide struggle was only reinforced by Charles’ own conduct. Yet that tendency was there from the start. Ian Roy has pointed out that, for the English, apprehensive observers of the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War for many years prior to their own civil conflict, the assumption that comparable atrocities were likely to accompany warfare in their own land came all too easily. In 1642, this specialist has written, “newsbooks and sermons vied with each other to paint the blackest picture possible of the evils in store for England, once it seemed that, at last, the nation was to be swallowed up in the general European conflagration.”8 Moreover, as Roy (and others) have commented, once the war actually began, Pym’s propagandists had a field day portraying the king’s nephew and ardent supporter, Prince Rupert, as the archetype of the evil-minded, bloody marauder so often encountered on continental battlefields. “Many towns and villages he plundered,” an indignant parliamentary historian would later reminisce, “executing some, and hanging servants at their 6 7

8

Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, pp. 225–26. On this point, see John Adamson, “The Frightened Junto: Perceptions of Ireland and the Last Attempts at Settlement with Charles I,” in Jason Peacey, ed., The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). See also, in this connection, Ian Gentles, “The Politics of Fairfax’s Army, 1645–9,” in Adamson, ed., The English Civil War, pp. 198, 200. Ian Roy, “England turned Germany? The Aftermath of the Civil War in its European Context,” in Peter Gaunt, ed., The English Civil War: The Essential Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 249–50. On the scaremongering pamphlet literature on the Thirty Years’ War, see also Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 150–52.

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master’s doors for not discovering their masters.”9 In 1645, the New Model Army’s commander, Fairfax, voicing widespread sentiments so helpful to the parliamentary side and so damaging to the royalists, would write to Prince Rupert himself: “Let all England judge . . . whether the burning its towns, ruining its cities, and destroying its people be a good requital from a person of your family, which has had the prayers, tears, purses and blood of its parliament and people.”10 Still, the extent to which conditions in the English Civil War actually replicated wartime conditions on the Continent has been hotly debated among historians. There surely were linkages between the English civil conflicts of the 1640s and the larger European struggle waged by the continental Great Powers since 1618. Drawing on the research of Charles Carlton and others, Ian Roy has observed: The British wars could not be, and in the end were not, isolated from the continental struggle. If the King kept aloof from the wars of Europe before the Civil War, many of his subjects did not. . . . Perhaps as many as 20,000 of the subjects of Charles I had gone abroad to serve one or other of the warring powers, and on the outbreak of the wars in the British Isles . . . hundreds of volunteers flocked home again. After 1638 there was a constant, if not large-scale, two-way traffic in arms and men between all regions of the British conflict and the continent.11

As the civil war of 1642–46 progressed, Roy would have us believe, the burgeoning presence of career solders, of “soldiers of fortune” and hardened mercenaries, reproduced – especially, it would seem, in peripheral areas of England – “some of the conditions familiar to observers of the Thirty Years War.”12 “Portraits of the civil war as a conflict which largely passed by the bulk of the population,” Peter Gaunt has concurred, “are now given little credence.” Citing from a phalanx of recent scholars laboring on this issue, Gaunt has concluded starkly: “In addition to up to 85,000 direct military fatalities in England, perhaps an additional 100,000 perished through the increased prevalence of disease in wartime, producing an overall death-toll in the civil war, viewed as a proportion of the national population, slightly higher than that suffered in the First World War and much higher than that in the Second.” Rather than being a “civilized, almost genteel affair,” the civil war was, for Gaunt, “bloody, brutal, and, at times, truly barbaric.”13 Other scholars, however, have not been so sure. In a series of pertinent articles, Barbara Donagan 9 10 11

12 13

Cited in ibid., p. 162. See also, on Prince Rupert, Ronald Hutton, The Royalist War Effort 1642–1646 (London: Longman, 1982), esp. pp. 120–42. Cited in Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 152. Roy, “England Turned Germany?,” pp. 252–53. Refer in this connection to Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the English Civil Wars, 1638–1651 (London: Routledge, 1992). Roy, “England Turned Germany?,” pp. 252–53. Peter Gaunt, ed., The English Civil War, pp. 164–65.

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concluded that in areas other than the Anglo-Irish theater, the conduct of war was not that atrocious.14 For his part, Michael Braddick has argued that, in general, “England did not endure the horrors of the Thirty Years War and ‘turn Germany;’” on the other hand, he has conceded that it “was sometimes touch and go. . . . England . . . saw plenty of horrors, and restraint was not always secure.”15 But perhaps even more detrimental to the king’s cause was his apparent willingness to employ English Catholics in his war effort because of their disproportionate enthusiasm for his cause. It is, for instance, striking that, in 1642, Charles should have written to the sympathetic earl of Newcastle: “This rebellion is grown to that height that I must not look of what opinion men are who at this time are willing and able to serve me. Therefore I do not only permit but command you to make use of all my loving subjects’ services, without examining their consciences – more than their loyalty to us – as you shall find most to conduce to the upholding of my just legal power.”16 “Without examining their consciences” – how amazingly anticipatory such language is of what Cromwell would, for his part, soon be saying on the subject of recruitment of (in his case, Protestant) combatants! With the king’s issuing of such directives, Fletcher has justifiably enough concluded, “the papist conspiracy had at last become, in some sense, a self-fulfilling prophecy.”17 Taking a longer view, Hibbard not surprisingly concurs in this conclusion: Even within the ranks of the English army, the charge that the king headed a popish force had considerable justification. . . . Clarendon, among many others, saw this as very harmful to the king’s cause. An analysis of royalist activity among the northern Catholic aristocracy indicates that the king’s forces included a significant proportion of Catholics and that they were sufficiently prominent in status to provide some substance to the charge of a “popish army.” Thus, the character of the king’s forces after the outbreak of hostilities kept alive the popish-plot explanations of the conflict. This aspect of parliamentary propaganda was neither trivial nor ad hoc. It was part of a long-gestated pattern of explanation that reflected a sustained pattern of royal policy.18

14

15 16 17 18

See, by Donagan, the following: “Codes and Conduct in the English Civil War,” Past and Present 118 (1988), esp. pp. 65–71 and 93–94; “The Casualties of War: Treatment of the Dead and Wounded in the English Civil War,” in Gentles, Morrill and Worden, eds., Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 114–32; and “The Web of Honour: Soldiers, Christians, and Gentlemen in the English Civil War,” Historical Journal 44 (2001): 363–89. Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire, pp. 395–96. Cited in Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, pp. 332–33. Ibid., p. 333. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, pp. 225–26. See also, on the appeal of “popery” charges against Charles I to the commonalty as well as to the parliamentary elites, Robin ´ Clifton, “The Popular Fear of Catholics During the English Revolution,” Past and Present 52 (1971), pp. 23–55; and Hutton, The Royalist War Effort, p. 4.

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Even Keith Lindley, although inclined on the basis of a sampling of English counties to discount “tales of popish armies forming around the royal standard” as “mere propaganda,” allowed that there was a certain correlation in upper gentry society between Catholicism and support for the royalist side in the war. “If the counties studied are regarded as a good sample of the entire country,” he concluded, “then Catholicism is not all that much less a characteristic, or major element, of the royalist party, than puritanism is of the parliamentarian party.”19 It would seem, then, given everything we already know about the schizoid and polarizing tendencies in the English political culture of this era, that Charles I, in striving to defeat his parliamentary opponents through whatever combination he could most advantageously employ of battlefield victories and backroom negotiations and intrigues, was in “real-world” terms assiduously digging his own political grave.20 In the final analysis, Anthony Fletcher has acutely observed, “Charles’s cause lacked ideological momentum. Indeed many were probably left wondering who they were expected to fight against. The tale that there was a parliamentary design against the kingdom was simply not as persuasive as the contrary story that the nation’s enemies were papists and their malignant friends at court.”21 This is how it eventually ended, of course, with the king and his allies out-fought and out-maneuvered; yet a review of the specific twists and turns of political in-fighting among Charles I’s enemies helps to explain why the process of actually defeating him took (at least in our comparative-revolutionary terms) so long. Certainly, if traditional accounts of political developments in the parliament of the 1640s retain any credibility, John Pym’s ascendancy among his peers was fairly securely established until his death in late 1643. Under his direction, Parliament in 1642 launched an unprecedented campaign of propaganda as it attempted to seize the “high road” in its great quarrel with the sovereign: When the king made war on it, parliament declared on 20 May, there was ‘a breach of the trust reposed in him by his people, contrary to his oath, and tending to the dissolution of this government.’ There was no flinching from the logical course of this argument. Though the king possessed a trust from his people, parliament was given a superior trust. For parliament was a council to provide for necessities, prevent imminent dangers, and preserve the public peace and safety of the kingdom.22

Pym and his adherents, however reluctant to pursue radical courses, found that their profound (and, as it turned out, well justified) distrust of Charles 19 20

21 22

Keith J. Lindley, “The Part Played by the Catholics,” in Brian Manning, ed., Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), p. 175. For some very recent reflections on royalist political maneuvering during the civil war period, see David Scott, “Rethinking Royalist Politics, 1642–9,” in Adamson, ed., The English Civil War, pp. 36–60. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, p. 334. Ibid., pp. 336–38.

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I “finally left them no choice but to claim sovereignty for parliament.” Acting on this assumption, they established (on June 6) a new committee for the defense of the kingdom. Its members included Pym, Hampden, Holles, Henry Marten, and Nathaniel Fiennes. Beyond this, Pym’s group cultivated ties with the Puritan/parliamentary forces in London and in nearby counties such as Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, and Surrey. London was, for obvious reasons, especially crucial in this connection. Once the parliamentarians knew that they would have to raise an army against the king, turning their “Militia Ordinance” to actual account, they increasingly drew on the support of London’s Court of Common Council. They also followed the capital’s example by creating (on July 4) a Committee of Safety – this one, of course, staffed by activist M.P.s: It quickly became the main organ of military policy. It drafted the decision to appoint a general and raise an army; it put forward the names of the chief officers. . . . It employed its own messengers and quickly established its own intelligence system. It made arrangements for the buying and delivery of war materials. It kept in close touch with Essex.23

Pym’s final master-stroke, all Civil War historians seem to agree, was the signing, late in 1643, of the Solemn League and Covenant bringing the Scots into the conflict. This maneuver was followed up in February 1644, shortly after Pym’s death, by the creation, at Westminster, of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, tasked with coordinating the parliamentarian-Scottish war effort against the royalists. Whether the M.P.s during 1642–44 were divided, in tripartite fashion, into a “middle group” led by Pym until his death and then, for some time thereafter, by a worthy successor in the person of Oliver St. John, and two flanking groups, the “war party” and the “peace party,” has been increasingly open to question in the most recent historiography.24 What is certain is that, the longer the war went on, the more strongly polarizing tendencies took hold, most notably in the Commons, between those in the so-called “war party” and those in the “peace party.” Indeed, those tendencies manifested themselves as early as 1643–44 with the reintroduction into England of Scottish Presbyterian forces. Even those specialists still assuming the viability of the old, “tripartite” vision of parliamentary factionalism in 1642–44, such as Lawrence Kaplan and Robert Ashton, have acknowledged this point. As Kaplan has allowed: Ironically, the Scottish alliance, which Pym had brought into being, served to weaken the tenability of a middle position by creating the necessity for total victory in the war. 23 24

Ibid., p. 342. For the traditional position on this issue, see: Hexter, The Reign of King Pym, passim.; and Valerie Pearl, “Oliver St. John and the “Middle Group” in the Long Parliament: August 1643– May 1644,” English Historical Review 81 (1966): 490–519. For the latest scholarly challenge to the existence of such a group, see David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

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For any inclination of the Scots toward a middle way mattered less than the fact that their presence at the conference table made such a course more difficult to achieve. Purely Scottish interests would have to be thrashed out and settled . . . . and this could delight only the militants.25

Ashton, arguing along similar lines, has underscored how vehemently most “peace-party” M.P.s disliked the Scottish alliance, regarding it as likely further to antagonize a monarch whom they were yet hoping, somehow, to placate, and likely as well to prompt new commitments of foreign troops to the royalist side in the conflict. Then, again, the well-known Scottish advocacy of Presbyterianism – a version of Protestantism that Edinburgh was all too eager to impose on its neighbor to the South – posed additional complications for Anglicans and Puritans alike.26 Indeed, with the formation of the New Model Army in 1645 and its decisive rout of the royalist forces during 1645–46 came a complete reversal of orientations toward the Scots in the Commons, a reversal reflecting the shifting of political influences within that body. On the one hand, the more thoroughly the king seemed by now to have been vanquished by a revolutionary military force boasting its “Independent” (or, as we might say, “Congregationalist”) ecclesiology and professional military meritocracy, the more fearfully did relatively conservative M.P.s like Denzil Holles, Philip Stapleton, and others view what they saw as the social and religious “subversion” likely to follow from an absolute humiliation of Charles I.27 They were buttressed in this evolving position by a gradual weakening of radical “Puritan and parliamentary” forces in the City of London: from October 1643 on, Pearl has written, the “moderates” in the all-important capital “slowly consolidated their strength” to the point where “the defeat of the radicals left the way clear for the alliance between political Presbyterians and Royalists in the City which almost succeeded in bringing back the king in the spring of 1647.”28 Hence, relatively conservative or “peace party” M.P.s, increasingly dominant in Parliament during the 1646– 48 period, can be usefully designated as “Presbyterians” in political as well as religious terms because they shared, with Presbyterians in the City of London and with Presbyterians from the Scottish North, a fear of radical consequences that could follow from a divine-right monarch’s thrashing at the hands of 25 26 27

28

Lawrence Kaplan, Politics and Religion during the English Revolution: The Scots and the Long Parliament, 1643–1645 (New York: New York University Press, 1976), pp. 6–7. Robert Ashton, The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1978), esp. pp. 202–3. On the implications for all of this of the New Model Army’s striking victories, see both Mark Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), and Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Scotland and Ireland 1645–1653 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). On the debate between these two historians concerning the chronology of radicalization within the army, see the final section of this chapter. Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, pp. 273–75.

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Cromwell’s meritocratic and Independent (or even, in some cases, religiously heterodox) military forces.29 On the other hand, radical “win-the-war-at-all-cost” types in the Parliament (known in scholarly parlance as “Independents”), who had originally applauded Pym in late 1643 for bringing the Scots into the fray – at a time when militarily insecure Puritans at Westminster could still remember, gratefully, the way the Presbyterian Scots had defied Charles I, Laud, and Strafford during the “Bishops’ Wars” of 1638–40 – tended by 1645 (and beyond) to look on the Scots with less favor. They saw them as Presbyterian proselytizers intent on imposing their own ecclesiastical system on England, as demanding English payment for their military services under the terms of the Solemn League and Covenant, as increasingly in league with London “Presbyterian” conservatives, and, even, in a worst-case scenario, as deal-makers with a still widely distrusted monarch who, during the second half of 1646, was actually in Scottish custody. As Mark Kishlansky has rightly noted, despite the New Model Army’s stunning victories over its “Cavalier” foes, “Charles’ flight to the Scots outweighed the submission of his garrisons and clouded both the military and political situation.”30 And it was, in the end, for the “Independent” minority in the parliament and their Independent confederates in the Army in revolutionary England (as, later, it would be for the most radical Jacobins in revolutionary France) the bottomless duplicity and endless intransigence of the king that would prove to be the ultimate trump card. “A dictated peace following the unconditional surrender of the King: such was the policy of the war party,” David Underdown has realistically observed. This would permit not only the total elimination of monarchical power, perhaps even of monarchy itself . . . , but also a total reconstruction of the government, including that of the Church (though there was no agreement on what would replace episcopacy). In order to achieve this, the revolutionary minority would wage war by the most ruthlessly effective measures, getting rid of the half-hearted aristocrats . . . If this meant promoting and encouraging the radical Puritans of the lower class, arming and organizing them, and stirring them up with the millenarian preaching of the Army preachers, and if this led to the spread of dangerous, subversive opinions, this was a price that they were willing to pay.31

Yet there might have been no coalescence between army radicals and parliamentarian radicals at all in the aftermath of Naseby if only Charles I had been psychologically capable of accepting his defeat. But, as we know today, he was 29

30 31

On the evolution of politics within Parliament during the 1645–48 period, refer again to Ashton, The English Civil War, esp. pp. 194–249; and David Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), esp. pp. 58–72. Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army, pp. 182–83. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 60–61.

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not – and this makes the radical Independents’ “Presbyterian” adversaries (as portrayed by Underdown) look especially na¨ıve and forlorn: The peace party wanted settlement with the King on almost any terms. . . . Essentially the peace party’s position rested on a willingness to trust the King, a belief that the measures of 1641 could be sustained without inflicting on him a total military defeat, and without the additional safeguards demanded by more tough-minded members. Through all the shocks to their faith provided by repeated disclosures of Charles I’s duplicity . . . , they clung to this touching belief in the King’s integrity.32

The “Presbyterian” opponents of further radicalization in the English Revolution could not, palpably, see themselves as comparativists must inevitably regard them today: as forerunners of the “Feuillants” of the French upheaval and of the desperate, Miliukovite monarchists of 1916 and 1917 in late Romanov and early revolutionary Russia. This, then, was the political backdrop to the Army’s limited purge of “Presbyterians” from parliament and initial occupation of a backsliding London in August 1647 – as well as to the much more decisive parliamentary purge and military occupation of the capital 16 months later. It is, we must concur with Robert Ashton, “difficult to turn from 1647 to 1648 without experiencing some sense of dej` ´ a vu, for in many ways events followed a strikingly similar pattern, though with an even fiercer intensity:” Once again the prelude to firm antimonarchical action was the quelling of counterrevolution, though on a far more serious scale than in 1647. Once again this was succeeded by a round of fruitless negotiations with the king. Once again negotiations produced a split in the Independent party, though this time, because of the greater intensity of the crisis, the split went deeper and was permanent, and some of those who had been most actively engaged in negotiations with the king in the previous year, and notably Henry Ireton, were now on the other side.33

Ashton’s follow-up comment – that, in the “second” Civil War of 1648 the English Government, profiting from its external and internal enemies’ failure to synchronize their military operations, proved able “to pick off its enemies piecemeal” – is also suggestive.34 For the comparativist, it is particularly arresting, for English actions in 1648 (much as in 1649–51) resemble the defensive actions of the “Robespierrist” Committee of Public Safety in 1793–94 and the Bolsheviks’ defense of revolutionary Russia in the first four or five years after their October 1917 seizure of state power at Petrograd and elsewhere. Scholars remain divided on the actual eagerness of the generals (and others) to march Charles I to the scaffold. “For over a year,” Braddick has 32 33

34

Ibid. Ashton, The English Civil War, pp. 317–18. On the “second” civil war (that of 1648), see, by the same author, Counter-Revolution: The Second Civil War and Its Origins, 1646–48 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994). Ashton, The English Civil War, pp. 318–20.

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noted, “the army’s politics had been as much anti-parliamentarian as antimonarchical. . . . at least some of those organizing the trial and passing judgement – those at the heart of the action – were seeking ways to achieve a settlement that included the King, or at least had his acquiescence.” For such individuals, arguably, “an acquiescent King was more useful than a definitely dead one.”35 Yet, Ian Gentles has reminded us that there were “powerful elements within the army, the purged House of Commons, and the newly-elected, deeply radical London Common Council (chosen in December 1648, after the army’s coup), which kept up a relentless pressure to carry through the indictment of the king for capital crimes against the English people.”36 Indeed, in light of military/political realities, realities reflected in the growing conviction of crucial protagonists such as Ireton and Cromwell that the “man of blood” had to be done away with for having shed the blood of his own subjects, it is exceedingly difficult to imagine how the process of radicalization in the English Revolution could not have culminated in the execution of the king and the abolition of monarchy. To concentrate on the process of radicalization in the French Revolution requires identifying two successive legislatures rather than (as in the English case) a newfangled, meritocratic army as the principal catalyst for change. It also requires that, as comparativists, we keep our analytical focus for the time being on war – in this case, foreign rather than civil war. In this connection, Thomas Kaiser has recently proposed that those analyzing France’s drift toward war with Austria in 1792 move beyond assertions about the relative importance of external and internal factors in this process and emphasize instead the semi-autonomous dynamic of diplomacy in “poisoning” FrancoAustrian relations.37 In a slight divergence from this useful suggestion, we will contend that a mix of international and domestic factors (but with the accent still on the former) led, first, to the triumph of militant Brissotins over moderate Feuillants in the Legislative Assembly during 1791–92 and, then, to the more definitive victory of Robespierrist Jacobins (or “Montagnards”) over Brissotins (“Girondists”) in the Convention of 1792–93. Much as specialists on English parliamentary politics of the 1640s have learned to use designations like “Presbyterian” and “Independent” with caution, so historians of the French Legislative Assembly have had to ponder C. J. Mitchell’s discussion of the problems inherent in assigning deputies of that body too readily to factions identified as the “Feuillants” and the “Brissotins.”38 His 35 36 37

38

Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire, pp. 564–65. Refer again to Gentles, “The Politics of Fairfax’s Army,” p. 198. See in this connection Thomas E. Kaiser, “La Fin du Renversement des Alliances: la France, l’Autriche et la declaration de guerre du 20 avril 1792,” Annales Historiques de la R´evolution ´ Franc¸aise 351 (2008): 77–98. My thanks go to Professor Kaiser for alerting me to the recent publication of this very interesting article. Refer to C. J. Mitchell, “Political Divisions within the Legislative Assembly of 1791,” French Historical Studies 13 (1984): 356–89; and his full-length study, The French Legislative Assembly of 1791 (Leiden, the Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1988).

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cautionary insight notwithstanding, there can be little doubt that a clique of politicians associated with Jacques-Pierre Brissot, employing a variety of arguments but relying above all on the chauvinistic instincts of the majority of Assemblymen, ran roughshod over the attempts of a few delegates (whether “Feuillants” or not) to preserve pacific Franco-Austrian and Franco-Prussian relations. In this parliamentary confrontation, of course, key geopolitical and domestic issues were tightly joined; yet to ignore the priority of the former over the latter risks underestimating the tenacious hold of grandiose diplomatic tradition on Frenchmen of all political persuasions in the Assembly, as well as underrating the actual threat posed to a temporarily weakened France in the hotly competitive Europe of the early 1790s. It has long been a commonplace of French Revolutionary historiography that Duport, Barnave, Alexandre de Lameth, and other Feuillants holding the initiative early on in the new legislature could not maintain their fellow deputies’ support for a “centrist” policy of irenic constitutionalism royalism. However much such a policy was sabotaged from the start by the intriguing of the king and queen, and by the obstructionism of delegates on the Far Right in the Assembly, it was also seriously undermined by splits among the Feuillants themselves. In particular, some of the Feuillant representatives resolved to follow the flamboyant lead of Lafayette. There is little doubt that the “Hero of Two Worlds” wished to preserve and, if possible, reinforce Louis XVI’s authority. On the other hand, Lafayette seems also to have been casting about for ways to augment his own political prestige alongside that of the king – and that, fatefully, involved for him jettisoning the Austrian alliance dating from 1756 and, indeed, quite possibly going to war with Vienna.39 And so the Feuillants could not even achieve a consensus among themselves, let alone garner support for pacific and conciliatory policies on the Far Right. But perhaps the most formidable threat to Feuillant moderation – and hence to the maintenance of peace and, ultimately, monarchism – emanated from the partisans of Jacques-Pierre Brissot on the Left. The “Brissotin” deputies at this point in the Revolution dominated a Jacobin parliamentary faction already on the rebound from its lean days of the late Constituent Assembly.40 For Brissot and his cronies, consummating what they regarded as an incomplete revolution neatly involved their own assumption of power, and achieving both of these objectives required overthrowing the Feuillant ministers by raising a national 39

40

On Lafayette’s actions, and on the general Feuillant dilemma, see: Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, p. 97; Georges Michon, Essai sur l’histoire du parti feuillant: Adrien Duport (Paris: Payot, 1924); and Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The First Years, esp. Chapter 15. By October 1791, as Tackett has pointed out, there were just about as many Jacobins as Feuillants in the newly convened Legislative Assembly. (Tackett, “Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution,” p. 709.) This represented quite a recovery for the Jacobins since the days immediately following the Champ de Mars “massacre,” when their ranks had been split and temporarily depleted by disagreements over issues arising from the king’s attempt in June to flee the country.

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demand for war with Austria. And, in this, the “Brissotins” and “Fayettistes” found some common grounds for a tactical alliance.41 Thus, the foundation was already being laid for the strangely assorted coalition of politicians – including, in the end, some of the crown’s own misguided parliamentary adherents – that would stampede both king and Assembly into a declaration of war against Austria in April 1792. In analyzing the reasons for the Brissotins’ striking success in orchestrating this campaign, we must concentrate on substantive issues rather than on the ballyhooed oratorical prowess of Brissot himself, Isnard, Vergniaud, Gensonne, ´ Condorcet, and others. From the very start, the Brissotins based their strategy on the well-founded suspicion that the king’s acceptance of the new constitution was utterly insincere. (From a comparativist perspective, in other words, the untrustworthiness of Louis XVI was as much a trump card for the Legislative Assembly’s radicals as that of Charles I had been for the radical “Independents” in the Long Parliament and New Model Army.) To drive this point home, Brissot and his allies began quickly to challenge Louis XVI on issues that left him no room for compromise. Hence, the increasingly acrimonious exchanges between Assembly and sovereign on such questions as the political loyalties of the king’s brothers, Provence and Artois, the status of the emigr es, ´ ´ and the fate of the “non-juring” or “refractory” clergy.42 But the very fact that Brissotin political calculations centered on the king’s growing hostility to the Revolution ensured a discussion of the larger matter of French security – and greatness – in Europe. And it was precisely their obsession with this geopolitical question that assured for the Brissotins their warmest plaudits in the Legislative Assembly. In his first major speech on foreign affairs, delivered to his fellow deputies on October 20, 1791, Brissot denounced the “gigantic international conspiracy” supposedly “designed to restore the old regime,” and then went on to list “the repeated snubs, slurs and insults inflicted on the Revolution by the other European powers.” Tellingly, the speaker proceeded on to appeal to age-old sentiments of French honor. “I tell you,” thundered Brissot, “that you must avenge your glory, or condemn yourselves to eternal dishonor.” His confederates issued a like appeal, as witness Isnard: “The French have become the foremost people of the universe, so their conduct must correspond to their new destiny. As slaves, they were [already] bold and great; are they to be feeble and timid now that they are free?”43 Speaker after speaker descanted on this congenial theme over the following weeks, all the while anathematizing a “plot” against French interests 41 42

43

Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, p. 98. Ibid., pp. 98–99. On the counterrevolutionary machinations at Court, consult again Kaiser, “Who’s Afraid of Marie Antoinette?,” pp. 241–71; and, by the same author, “From the Austrian Committee to the Foreign Plot: Marie-Antoinette, Austrophobia, and the Terror,” French Historical Studies 26 (2003): 579–617. Citations are from Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, pp. 99–101.

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involving princes and emigr es ´ ´ abroad and nobles and clerics at home. Thus did these charismatic evangelists of the “new” France play on the most compelling elements of the political culture of the “old” France: conspiracy-mindedness, distrust of the absolute monarchy, and, perhaps above all else, a sense of Gallic greatness and prestige in the international order. This last point – ironically enough! – required that they season their speeches with uncritical adulation of the Sun King’s “empire” in the (otherwise) benighted days of the ancien r´egime. Brissot and his allies took this powerful argument for war to the Paris Jacobin Society as well, where their invocations of traditional French greatness prevailed against the less inflammatory, more realistic analyses of the international situation offered by Robespierre and several other members.44 The climactic debates in the Assembly came in January 1792, when Brissot’s faction, abetted by the Fayettistes (and, ironically, by some of the king’s supporters as well) utilized a variety of arguments to secure passage of a decree that was virtually an ultimatum threatening war against Vienna. An actual declaration of war – formal, drastic, and irrevocable – had only three months to wait. But while Brissotin oratory at this fateful juncture of the Revolution touched on a number of tangible and politically popular issues ranging from the need to secure the credibility of the assignats to the need to suppress counterrevolutionary strife and conspiracy in the provinces, this was not in itself enough. The Brissotins had to arouse some deeper impulse in the French psyche to permit emotion to reinforce calculation. And that impulse, unsurprisingly, was the French citizenry’s undying Austrophobia and its more positive, more constructive side, French nationalism. Hence, on the one hand, the Brissotins’ indictment of the bellwether 1756 Franco-Austrian alliance. It was this ill-begotten agreement, so they claimed, that had hurled France from its pedestal of greatness into the dust of nullity in European and global affairs. It had resulted almost immediately in Versailles’ losing the majority of its overseas colonies in the Seven Years’ War. And it had frozen the French in a position of impotence as their oldest friends – Sweden, Poland, and Turkey – were bullied into silence or actual partition. Clearly, Brissot and his cohorts charged, the unscrupulous Austrians had drawn every imaginable advantage from the pact of 1756, while the overly trusting French had been left with nothing. On the other hand, these deputies unfailingly conjured up the positive spirits of French nationalism. Speaker after speaker elaborated on the need for a reassertion of traditional French greatness in the world’s affairs. They dilated lovingly on the unique virtues of la grande nation, and insisted that the best way to restore respect for that “nation” was to go to war against the Austrian authors of so much recent French humiliation. At the same time, the Brissotins could also turn to their uses the revolutionary discourse of national 44

The debate between Brissot and Robespierre on this question at the Jacobins is documented in Alphonse Aulard, ed., La Soci´et´e des Jacobins, 6 vols. (Paris: Jouaust, Cerf et al., 1889–97), 3: 292–303.

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sovereignty – and, in doing so, they were joined by speakers from across the political spectrum. French affairs could only be handled by Frenchmen. Every time someone made this point, one historian well versed in the Archives parlementaires has observed, “he was rewarded by a storm of vocal approval from all sides of the chamber.”45 Of course, a certain internationalist idealism (which we will later discern in the English and Russian revolutionary psyches as well) also inclined the French toward war in April 1792. Brissot and his cronies from early on indulged in the fantasy, avidly promoted by the swarm of foreign refugees in Paris, that the oppressed masses of Europe awaited their liberators from revolutionary France; and they were not the only politicians in these heady months who confidently augured an imminent international revolutionary upheaval. Still, after all is said and done, it seems clear that a hundred or so leftist deputies could only have won over what became by April a huge majority in the 750-member Assembly, and so translated their ideas into state policy, by vesting their arguments in the splendid raiment of French diplomatic tradition. Geopolitical issues, consequently, undeniably advantaged Brissot’s cohorts in the short-lived Legislative Assembly and bid fair to benefit them equally in the radical Convention to come. France’s reversion to hallowed ways of war discredited irredeemably a king whose earlier “flight to Varennes” had already exposed his rejection of revolutionary change. Significantly, the overthrow of the monarchy in August 1792 was precipitated by the intervention of Parisians spurred into action partly by economic distress but especially maddened by the news of Prussian and Austrian incursions into France. In ensuing months, the discovery, at the Tuileries, of Louis XVI’s correspondence with other European heads of state would do as much to seal his fate as a like discovery of Charles I’s papers after Naseby in 1645 had undone that monarch; and, for a time, the politicians seemingly poised to derive maximum benefit from that circumstance were Brissot’s foregathered warmongers.46 But if Brissot had been clever enough to play on the patriotic heartstrings of his fellow legislators to further his own political agenda in 1791–92, he was not sufficiently prescient to fear in warfare a phenomenon whose unprecedented manpower and mat´eriel needs would require ever more centralization of government and a concomitant democratization of politics at Paris and in the provinces. In the end, the question of war, which had come to preempt all other matters in the Legislative Assembly, would do so as well in the Convention – and it would swallow up the Brissotin or “Girondist” faction in 1793 much as it had engulfed the Feuillants and other moderate royalists during 1791–92. Matters did not, of course, start out this way with the convening of the popularly elected Convention in September 1792. Brissot and his Girondist 45 46

Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, pp. 105–8. On these issues, see Hardman, Louis XVI, passim; Rude, ´ The Crowd in the French Revolution, passim; and C. J. Mitchell, The French Legislative Assembly of 1791 (Leiden, the Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1988).

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associates had, it seemed, every reason at this point to assume their continuing domination of national politics in what was now officially styled as the French Republic. After all, had they not been among the very first to clamor in the preceding legislature for war against the historic Habsburg foe? Had not their man Charles Franc¸ois Dumouriez, first in the ministry of foreign affairs and then in a prestigious army command, promised military laurels for revolutionary France? And in fact did not the victories at Valmy and Jemappes, however incomplete they might be in some technical respects, reverse the early tide of military fortune in France’s favor as the campaigning season of 1792 wound down? The Girondists, buoyed by these events, felt sufficiently secure in late 1792 and early 1793 to battle the emergent “Montagnard” faction of Jacobins in the Convention on a number of fronts, ranging from responsibility for the “September Massacres” to the king’s trial and punishment to the respective roles to be assigned to Parisians and to provincials in the affairs of the new Republic. All of this might have gone on inconclusively, and certainly never have acquired a new pitch of murderous intensity, had it not been for the dramatic reversal in military fortunes that placed the entire Revolution in jeopardy the following spring and summer. The addition of the Dutch, the Spanish, and above all the British to the list of France’s enemies surely had not been foreseen by Brissot and his partisans in 1792. Even less anticipated, and more immediately dangerous to them, was the treason in April 1793 of their proteg ´ e´ Dumouriez, now a deserter in Austrian hands. In the harsh light of these developments, the political in-fighting between Girondists and “Montagnard” Jacobins in the Convention was gradually to take on the attributes of mortal combat. Whether or not the traditional scholarly division of the Convention in its first year into leftist “Jacobins,” a centrist “Plain” or “Marsh,” and rightist “Girondins” still serves useful analytical purposes has occasioned as much debate as efforts to distinguish among “war,” “middle,” and “peace” groups in England’s Long Parliament and between “Feuillants” and “Brissotins” in France’s Legislative Assembly of 1791–92.47 Yet even in questioning some aspects of the conventional schema, a trio of Americans have at least reaffirmed the idea of a “factional struggle that began in the Legislative Assembly in 1792” and that would end “with the liquidation of the Jacobins’ enemies after June 1793 and with the persecution of Jacobins by the surviving Girondists after July 1794.”48 Indeed, it would seem unreasonable now to deny that representatives 47

48

See, for example, M. J. Sydenham, The Girondins (London: Athlone Press, 1961); Alison Patrick, “Political Divisions in the French National Convention, 1792–93,” Journal of Modern History 41 (1969): 421–74; Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Anne Hildreth, and Alan B. Spitzer, “Was There a Girondist Faction in the National Convention, 1792–1793?” French Historical Studies 15 (1988): 519–36. Ibid., p. 536.

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in the Convention identified at that time as “Jacobins” combatted delegates labeled “Girondists.” Moreover, the Jacobins appear to have gradually won over enough Conventioneers to have constituted a fairly reliable majority in France’s ruling legislature during 1793–94. More to our study’s point: retrospective analysis suggests strongly that it was above all their concentration on the country’s imperative need for strategic security that opened the way for the Jacobins’ ascendancy in the Convention during the most imperiled days of the Revolution. Analyzing the terms of parliamentary debate during the decisive months of April, May, and June 1793 ultimately enables us to understand why the Jacobins prevailed over their Girondist opponents in the increasingly desperate struggle for paramount influence in the Convention, and thus in the revolutionary state-at-war. In those debates, two questions – one transcending domestic considerations and the other entirely or largely limited to domestic considerations – continually interacted. The first question asked how to go about the main business of securing the Republic against its enemies, both foreign and internal. The second question asked how to maintain the Convention’s integrity and independence from radical pressure groups in the capital. The Girondins, to their ruin, placed too much stress on the second question and not enough on the first. They could not see, as the Jacobins and their allies could, that first the Republic must be salvaged by an all-out effort to win the war, and that doing so required that the provinces (at least temporarily) be subordinated to Paris – including, crucially, its patriotic male and female artisans and shopkeepers (sans-culottes and sans-jupons). To identify with provinc¸iaux at Lyons and Marseilles and Bordeaux who opposed the encroachment of national government on local government, and to condemn accordingly the “anarchy” of the Parisians, was to undercut the war effort on which all else depended, and yet this was what Brissot and his confederates did in the spring of 1793. The inevitable response of the more pragmatic Jacobin deputies came with their direct or indirect sponsorship of the journ´ees of May 31–June 2: the massive demonstrations by means of which a tactical alliance of Jacobin politicians and Parisian artisans and laborers of both genders secured the expulsion of twenty-nine prominent Girondists from the Convention.49 The events of May 31–June 2, 1793, however reluctantly endorsed by many of the lawmakers, had the desired and essential effect of purging from the legislature a faction of politicians no longer able to govern effectively but still capable of making governance well-nigh impossible for others. The Parisian insurrection, it has been fairly concluded, “broke the parliamentary deadlock in favor of a group of men who not only had better claims to govern than the 49

On these critical journ´ees, see Rude, ´ The Crowd in the French Revolution, pp. 120–25; and Morris Slavin, The Making of an Insurrection: Parisian Sections and the Gironde (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

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Girondins, but in fact had been doing most of the work of government for some time.”50 Meticulous research into the origins of the members of the Convention has done much to invalidate whatever remained of the old Marxist postulation of critical socioeconomic differences between Girondists and Jacobins. Experience in public affairs and the assumption of responsibility in the Revolution, rather than affluence or social standing, provided the key to variations in political attitudes in this body; and the Jacobins, it turns out, had public “experience” and “assumption of responsibility” to burn. They constituted a large proportion of the ex-Legislative Assemblymen in the Convention; indeed, their record of participation in debates, committee work, and administrative/political labors in the provinces during 1791–92 made that period (in one scholar’s words) “a nursery of the politicians of the Terror.”51 Then, again, while the debate over the king’s fate in December 1792–January 1793 was marked in part by Girondin arguments for clemency that (in light of Louis XVI’s sustained intriguing against the Revolution) revealed scant realism, Robespierre and like-minded representatives, in addition to appraising the king’s recent behavior in much more accurate terms, knew that they had to appeal to the revolutionary idealism of plebeian citizens whose military and political civisme was fueling the Republic’s efforts to survive.52 Jacobin sensitivity to the needs of the sansculottes – activists who had already been spurned by the Girondist orators as “anarchists” – made such a strategy as logical as it was necessary.53 Moreover, it is clear in hindsight that even some legislators not closely leagued with Robespierre endorsed the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, and the willingness of some of them to collaborate on committees like that of Public Safety in the spring of 1793 anticipated the more general willingness 50 51 52

53

Alison Patrick, The Men of the First French Republic (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 135. Ibid., pp. 299–300. Ibid., p. 72. In addition, as Dan Edelstein has recently pointed out, hardliners like Saint Just and Robespierre, going beyond such strictures, argued for denying Louis XVI legal procedure altogether – Robespierre, in particular, for the reason that even assuming in legalistic fashion the king’s innocence would be to put the Revolution itself “on trial” and thereby question its fundamental legitimacy. The Convention did not accept this reasoning, as it turned out; still, as we will see later on, such extreme “theorizing” of revolutionary issues also characterized the arguments of Trotsky and Lenin (in 1918) regarding the fate of Nicholas II. See again Edelstein, “Do We Want a Revolution without Revolution?” esp. pp. 280–82. Edelstein’s argument finds further elaboration in The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), esp. Chapter 3. On the debate over the king’s fate, see also David P. Jordan, The King’s Trial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Michael Walzer, ed., Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); and Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

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of diehard Jacobin legislators to share the administrative burdens of the Terrorto-come in the Convention’s later committee (and plenary) sessions.54 The absence from Paris of some Jacobins toiling as repr´esentants en mission in the provinces prior to the journ´ees of May 31–June 2 may (paradoxically) have allowed the Girondists to prevail on some nonessential issues until then. But the Jacobins would be in charge after June 2, 1793, and would continue to handle a disproportionate share of the state’s administrative work in committees and “on mission” even as they participated (as their other duties permitted) in plenary parliamentary deliberations. Any lingering doubts we might harbor about the importance of French security (i.e., war-related) needs to the downfall of the Girondins and to the success of their Jacobin antagonists necessarily dissolve in light of the subsequent arraignment of the former representatives by the latter. An official, Jacobin-inspired “Address to the French People” proclaimed that the vanquished Girondists had feloniously “neglected the public welfare and exposed the state to the danger of foreign conquest.”55 Then came the formal indictment of the proscribed Girondist leaders, read out by Jean-Baptiste-Andre´ Amar on the floor of the Convention on 3 October 1793, and it faithfully mirrored the revolutionaries’ preoccupation with the threat posed to France by its enemies. Brissot and his cronies, so charged Amar, had plotted to deliver France to the Prussians in the summer of 1792, conspired at the end of 1792 to conceal proofs of the king’s “treachery,” deliberately expanded the war and thus courted national disaster the following spring even as they anticipated Dumouriez’s treason in Belgium and the revolt in the Vendee, ´ and – finally – advocated “federalism” and incited rebellion throughout the imperiled country.56 In all of this, it is fairly obvious, we see, not so much the spokesmen for one set of “class” interests or for one specific discourse of “popular sovereignty,” as the angry and apprehensive avatars of the traditional French sense of national integrity in domestic affairs and national prestige and, indeed, pre¨eminence in the larger world’s affairs. If we stop briefly at this point to compare the war-related radicalization of politics in the French Revolution to that in England’s earlier upheaval, we can point easily enough to several significant differences between the two processes. The heated invocation of past national greatness so pronounced in Girondin discourse aimed against the Feuillants (and, ultimately, against Louis XVI) in 1791–92 was not fully anticipated in Independent tirades against Presbyterians (and, ultimately, against Charles I) during the 1640s. Independents in the Long Parliament and New Model Army, after all, however deferential some of them might have been toward the heroics of past Tudor sovereigns such as Henry VIII and Elizabeth I – perhaps the closest thing in the English ancien r´egime 54 55 56

Patrick, The Men of the First French Republic, p. 302. As cited in Sydenham, The Girondins, p. 22. Ibid., pp. 26–27.

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to the French Sun King’s gloire – had to be concerned above all about the encircling forces of international “papism.” Yet again, we find in the radicalization of English revolutionary politics nothing quite as paradoxical, perhaps, as the fact that, in the case of France, the march to war ultimately advantaged the very Robespierrists who had initially opposed it, while destroying the Brissotin politicians who had from the start promoted it! Then, again – as we noted before – the principal impetus for radicalization in the English Revolution came, arguably, from an army, whereas in France it came from two successive civilian assemblies. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the differences between these two processes, they shared something fundamental in common: an engagement in warfare (whether civil or international in nature) that was absolutely crucial in sweeping aside two monarchs – and their belated if reluctant defenders in two revolutionary legislatures – in favor of national leaders (military and civilian Independents and Robespierrist Jacobins) determined whatever the cost to salvage the revolutions they had inherited. Engagement in warfare proved to be equally decisive in promoting political radicalization in the Russian Revolution – although, in this case, the military struggle in which the moderate revolutionaries were caught up had been raging for several years, and had already swept from power both the ancien r´egime’s final monarch and the first group of his political successors. All scholarly analysis today suggests that the liberal and moderate socialist leaders who desperately strove to control the destabilizing forces unleashed by revolution in Russia from early May until late October 1917 were so hopelessly ensnared in a web of diplomatic and domestic-political contradictions as to make their eventual overthrow by more single-minded extremists virtually a certainty. For one thing, the fact that Iraklii Tsereteli, prime exponent of the doctrine of “revolutionary defensism,” was able in the wake of the April Crisis to establish as much of an ascendancy in the First Coalition Government as he already enjoyed in the Petrograd Soviet’s Executive Committee meant that, at least for the time being, the Russian government was committed to juggling two foreign policies that became increasingly difficult to reconcile with harsh geopolitical realities in wartime Europe. As one specialist on the subject has explained: Throughout May and June, Russia presented to the outside world not only two separate though related policies but also two separate agencies of implementation – the Soviet and the Foreign Ministry. On the one hand, there was the technically unofficial policy of the Soviet leaders: to organize an international socialist conference at Stockholm to discuss the conditions under which peace might be forced on the belligerents and to rally public opinion in the warring countries behind such a peace. . . . On the other hand, there was the official or governmental phase of Russian foreign policy: to seek a revision of Allied war aims via traditional diplomatic channels and to promote an interallied conference for that purpose.57

57

Wade, The Russian Search for Peace, pp. 51–52.

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The other key figures in the cabinet – Kerensky, Prince Lvov, Tereshchenko, and Chernov – agreed with Tsereteli that, although these two policies were to be mutually complementary, one was to precede the other. Specifically, the international conference of socialists (if successfully staged at Stockholm) would – it was hoped – so influence public opinion in the Allied countries as to force their governments to take concrete steps toward peace at the interallied conference that was to follow. Yet, in the first place, there was from the start little if any possibility that Russia’s allies in the war would embrace either of these objectives. Indeed, Robert D. Warth has written, “the Stockholm project was, in fact, already dead because of the opposition of the Allied governments, though it was not to be accorded a decent burial for some time. The socialist and labor organizations were too weak and too divided to alter the policy of their governments by any means more effective than moral protest.”58 As for the prospects of Allied endorsement of the need for an interallied conference sketched out along lines indicated by Tsereteli and his adherents, Miliukov could have counseled Russia’s new leaders to regard them as essentially nil. Even before being unseated as Foreign Minister in the April Crisis, this former historian had been busily dispatching telegrams to Russian diplomats in the Allied capitals complaining that Russia was being disregarded at Allied conferences abroad.59 Realities in this respect did not change over the ensuing months. We know, for instance, that even as Kerensky, in the War Ministry, was preparing a new military offensive against the Central Powers as part of Petrograd’s rather pathetic attempt to please its Western confederates, diplomats from London and Paris were carrying on peace negotiations with Austria behind Russia’s back. That those peace parleys failed had everything to do with Italian territorial claims against Vienna, and nothing whatsoever to do with Russian diplomatic wishes. “We need not inform her [i.e. Russia] of our negotiations until they are practically finished,” one Western diplomat airily informed his Austrian counterpart on May 20.60 It was in part to demonstrate the effectiveness of the “new” army of liberated Russia, and thus compel the Allies to pay greater attention to their foreign policy, that Kerensky’s ministerial colleagues endorsed his ill-fated “June” or “Galician” offensive.61 Brushing aside the warnings of his new Supreme Commander, Brusilov, whose tours of the Northern and Western fronts had taught 58 59 60

61

Warth, The Allies and the Russian Revolution, pp. 87–88. Refer once again to Riha, A Russian European, pp. 314–18. Cited in Warth, The Allies and the Russian Revolution, p. 94. See also, on the utter naivete´ of the Russians regarding their Western “allies,” Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon, esp. pp. 359–60 and 369–70. A recent major study of this abortive offensive is: Louise Erwin Heenan, Russian Democracy’s Fateful Blunder: The Summer Offensive of 1917 (New York: Praeger, 1987). For a more technical study of the army’s deficiencies at this time, see: Robert S. Feldman, “The Russian General Staff and the June 1917 Offensive,” Soviet Studies 19 (1968): 526–43.

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him that the army was already in the advanced stages of demoralization, and hence completely unprepared to resume the offensive, War Minister Kerensky insisted that the offensive go forward.62 But after a few days, the offensive had collapsed, with approximately 200,000 Russian casualties, and resulted in mounting waves of desertions in the Russian ranks – and in a renewed German assault on the Eastern front that would have profound political consequences for the authorities at Petrograd later on. But, as Rex Wade has argued, the very willingness of the Soviet’s leaders to support the June offensive also said much about the confusion and contradictions on foreign policy issues in Soviet as well as in ministerial quarters: For the Soviet leaders, the decision to support the offensive, together with the emphasis on strengthening the army . . . was a drastic error that warped their entire policy. . . . No matter how the presidium group explained the relationship between their peace offensive and a military offensive, it was obvious to all that they were . . . cutting the ground from beneath their own feet. The argument that, ultimately, peace would be brought nearer by an offensive carried little weight at a time when antiwar sentiment was very strong, especially in Petrograd. The idea of an offensive was simply repugnant to the soldiers and workers. Given this attitude and the state of the army, it was a tremendous gamble for the Soviet leaders to stake their foreign policy, indeed their entire future, on the offensive.63

Not surprisingly, the Bolsheviks, if still somewhat marginalized on the Far Left, found in the failed June offensive a propaganda bonanza, not only against an “imperialist” West whose complete disregard for Russian strategic interests had been demonstrated once again in its equivocation regarding Kerensky, but also – and more dangerously – against moderate “socialists” in both the Soviet and the ministries whom they could now all the more easily tar with the brush of Western “imperialism.” Kerensky’s military disaster was also important in vindicating as resoundingly as it did the misgivings earlier voiced by Brusilov regarding the state of the army. There had been those in military and conservative circles who, lacking Brusilov’s persisting loyalty to the government, had actually seen in the offensive a possible means, not only to restore “discipline” in the army and social order in the country at large, but also to redress the balance of political forces at Petrograd in favor of the Far Right.64 But the canny old Commander-in-Chief had been essentially right: the army, willing at most to hold its ground until the signing of a peace that could extricate Russia from its war-induced nightmare, was in no mood for any resumption of hostilities. All the June offensive did, in this regard, was to reinforce the polarization, within military ranks, between 62 63 64

On the vivid – and prescient – testimony of Brusilov, see Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 415–17. Wade, The Russian Search for Peace, pp. 72–73. Ibid., pp. 89–90. See also Heenan, Russian Democracy’s Fateful Blunder, pp. 54–55, on the rampant political speculation at Petrograd in both socialist and conservative circles at the time of the Kerensky offensive.

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the officers, uniformed intelligentsia, and members of the soldiers’ committees, on the one hand, and the rank-and-file, on the other. Kerensky might listen, fatuously, to expressions of support from elite elements in the army; but it was ´ the rank-and-file who, now and in the months to come, would increasingly be calling the tune insofar as the army’s reactions to revolutionary events were concerned. On this point, Allan K. Wildman has essentially the last word: The March events gave the peasants in uniform a vision of land and peace, of their definitive social liberation, but above all of their own collective power to attain such results, and they were not inclined to surrender this vision until the task was accomplished. The intellectuals and activists who staffed the committees were inspired by a like vision and regarded themselves as its legitimate spokesmen, but they failed to perceive how their applications of it in practice, particularly on the war . . . were at odds with those of their constituency. “Revolutionary democracy” could function effectively only if this gap could somehow be bridged. . . . The formation of the Coalition Government and the sponsorship of the ill-starred offensive brought only the parting of the ways, and the unorganized soldier masses, bitterly disillusioned with their leadership, found in Bolshevik slogans the sought-for surrogate.65

Intervening here briefly in our accustomed role as comparativists, we can perceive that, just as the Brissotins in urging and eventually securing a military offensive against Austria in 1791–92 were effectively digging their own political graves, so were the moderate Russian socialists undercutting themselves politically in June 1917 by resuming the offensive against the Central Powers. The antiwar Bolsheviks in the summer of 1917 – much like the antiwar Robespierrists in late 1791 and early 1792 – were markedly more astute, politically, than their opponents on the transcendent question of war and peace. In any case, the failed military offensive of June–July 1917 led to the breakup of the First Coalition Government and to the premature uprising in the capital known as the “July Days.”66 Although on one level of analysis the Bolsheviks and other factions on the Far Left emerged as the principal losers from this crisis, in a deeper, more lasting sense it was the liberals and moderate socialists who truly lost. For, as the summer wore on, all the signs of military disintegration that had manifested themselves at the time of the June offensive – accelerating rates of desertion, fraternization across the lines with the enemy, sharpening divisions in military ranks between officers and soldiers’ committeemen, on the one hand, and the rank-and-file, on the other – continued to gather momentum: as Lenin would have it, disillusioned and utterly exhausted 65 66

Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Road to Soviet Power and Peace (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 402–3. On the July Days, see especially Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968); and David Mandel, Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime: From the February Revolution to the July Days, 1917 (London: Macmillan, 1983).

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soldiers and sailors were “voting with their feet,” giving up on even the limited objective of “revolutionary defensism” articulated earlier by the Tsereteli group. These trends, in turn, generating as they did greater and greater polarization in civilian society – and given a stunning new impetus in late August by news of the German capture of Riga on the Baltic coast – helped to lay the groundwork for General Lavr Kornilov’s abortive right-wing coup (if that is indeed what it was) in the last week of August. Kerensky, now Prime Minister in the wake of the July crisis, had recently appointed Kornilov as Commander-in-Chief in place of Brusilov, with a mandate to restore discipline in the army. To what extent Kornilov’s decision, in late August, to dispatch troops from the front to Petrograd reflected merely a “misunderstanding” between him and the Prime Minister, and to what extent it was from the start unequivocally counterrevolutionary in nature, is still debated among specialists on the subject.67 What is certain is that the maneuver, whatever Kornilov’s precise motivation, failed miserably. The losers in this “affair” were myriad; the winners (if we except the Bolsheviks, who ironically enough played no direct role in resisting Kornilov’s troops) were few. As Sheila Fitzpatrick has pointed out, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet could hardly claim major credit for the frustration of Kornilov’s designs, as workers’ efforts to turn back the advancing troops were largely coordinated “at the local union and factory level.”68 As for Kerensky’s government, its increasingly acute isolation, both from its presumed “allies” in the West and from its own supposed adherents in domestic civilian and military circles, was only further dramatized by the events of late August. Although, as Robert D. Warth has indicated, the Allied governments “officially . . . maintained an attitude of strict neutrality” in the face-off between the Russian Prime Minister and his Commander-in-Chief, “unofficially the conduct of their representatives in Russia and the tone of their most influential organs of opinion left no doubt where the sympathies of the ruling groups in Britain and France lay.”69 The fact that, at one critical point, the Allied ambassadors at Petrograd actually offered to “mediate” the conflict was, in itself, humiliating to a government that, from the start, merited and should have been able to count on the unambiguous support of London and Paris. Foreign Minister Tereshchenko was eventually in a strong enough position to decline politely the offered services of the British and French diplomats; that initially Kerensky had been inclined to welcome outside intervention said nothing very 67

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This historiographical debate is pointed up in the 2008 edition of Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, pp. 59–60. For basic scholarship on the Kornilov “affair” in general, consult: Abraham Ascher, “The Kornilov Affair,” Russian Review 12 (1953): 235–52; James D. White, “The Kornilov Affair: A Study in Counter Revolution,” Soviet Studies 20 (1968–69): 187–205; and, most important, George Katkov, Russia 1917: The Kornilov Affair: Kerensky and the Break-Up of the Russian Army (London: Longman, 1980). Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 60. Warth, The Allies and the Russian Revolution, pp. 123–24.

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reassuring about his government’s fundamental stability. The Western ambassadors, already under withering assault in the progressive/radical press, issued an emphatic denial of any involvement in Kornilov’s machinations; yet the fact that their protestation was (in Warth’s words) “carefully worded so as not to give Kerensky any encouragement and to emphasize that the struggle with Germany was still the issue of paramount importance” only reaffirmed where their priorities truly lay.70 The Kornilov “fiasco” may have been, as Warth has averred, “very embarrassing to the Allies,” but it was inevitably Kerensky and Tereshchenko who had to bear the main burden of ridicule emanating from Bolshevik and other far leftist sources at Petrograd. Moreover, as this last point reminds us, the government’s isolation on the domestic front was also deepened by the Kornilov crisis. Here, the contrast between the ramifications of the July Days and the more damaging consequences flowing from the crisis of late August was telling, and has been aptly summed up by Alexander Rabinowitch: . . . the exigencies of the struggle against Kornilov had pulled the moderate socialists leftward into conflict with the government and toward closer alliance with the extreme left. After the July days, most Mensheviks and SRs had actively supported Kerensky in his attempts to disarm workers and suppress the Bolsheviks; during the Kornilov emergency, on the other hand, the Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution was forced to endorse and facilitate the formation of armed workers’ detachments. Although it is difficult to estimate how many workers first obtained arms and became organized for violent political action at this time, it is safe to say that whatever limited progress had been made earlier in pacifying the Petrograd masses was instantly undone.71

In addition, as we noted earlier, it was precisely in the last days of August and early days of September that Lenin’s party, profiting from the growing delegitimization of the moderate socialist government in leftist eyes, captured control of the strategically situated Soviets in both Petrograd and Moscow. But it was, perhaps, in military circles where the government’s weakening grasp on power was most dangerously demonstrated in the aftermath of the Kornilov affair – something that obviously held vast implications both for the conduct of Russian foreign policy in this time of total war and for the authorities’ control over the levers of physical coercion in state and society. The Army High Command had, of course, been dealt a devastating blow with the arrest of Kornilov and suicide of his assistant, General Krymov; and in mid-September, with the Germans continuing their advance seemingly on the 70 71

Ibid., pp. 128–29. Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 152. The Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution was an emanation of the Soviet Executive Committee, established on August 27–28. On the significance at this time of the formation of workers’ militias and Red Guard units, see again Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution, passim.

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Russian capital, and with mounting demoralization and division within the Russian Army’s ranks, Kornilov’s successor as Supreme Commander, General Mikhail Alekseev, suddenly resigned. “Practically speaking, in this hour of terrible danger,” he was reported as saying despairingly, “I can state with horror that we have no army, while the Germans are prepared, at any moment, to strike the last and most powerful blow against us.”72 Discipline and morale within the army, Alekseev complained, were in a disastrous downward spiral; officers endeavoring still to discharge their duties in defense of Russia were increasingly subject to “martyrdom.” This bleak depiction of the state of affairs within the army has, in the main, been confirmed by Wildman’s subsequent and seminal research on this critical institution. Party Bolshevism had been more or less suppressed at the front (more thoroughly, at least, than in the rear) in the wake of the July Days, according to Wildman, “but the threat of the revived Right and the rigidity of the socialist leadership served to resuscitate it in the course of the Kornilov affair.” More to the point, perhaps, was the pronounced psychological impact of the crisis of late August on the rank-and-file: The Kornilov affair immeasurably confirmed the peasant soldier in his own picture of things and whetted his determination to force the revolutionary institutions to respond to his overwhelming desire for peace and social settlement. Both Soviet power and the Constituent Assembly were potent symbols of these aspirations, just as Kerensky and the Coalition became discarded alternatives, but ultimately the soldier’s vote was for any authority . . . that would promise and deliver a speedy peace.73

Promptings from Bolshevik propagandists to the soldiers to initiate spontaneous “negotiations” across the trenches with the enemy in the name of Soviet power at home “fired the soldiers’ imagination as nothing else,” and further eroded the government’s control over the domestic revolutionary situation even as the ministers were also losing their last vestiges of international credibility. The final two months in this “radicalization” phase of the 1917 upheaval in Russia – more or less corresponding with the brief existence of the Third Coalition Government cobbled together by Kerensky in late September – were marked above all by the accelerating shift of real influence in public affairs from the isolated liberal/socialist authorities to Lenin’s Bolsheviks. And here, as always, the prime catalyst behind events was the woeful inability of the ministers to extricate Russia – spent, bleeding Russia – from the World War. Further heightening the government’s ruinous impotence in foreign affairs was the curious intellectual evolution of Mikhail Ivanovich Tereshchenko, who stayed on in the Provisional Government as Kerensky’s colleague holding the portfolio of Foreign Affairs, but whose subtly changing conception of Russia’s 72 73

Citation from Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 61. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Road to Soviet Power and Peace, pp. 403–4.

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geostrategic interests put him at loggerheads with what most of his compatriots at this point desperately desired and needed – namely, peace at any price. At the time of his initial appointment to the foreign affairs ministry, Rex Wade has written, the youthful liberal entrepreneur from the Ukraine, “unlike Tsereteli and Miliukov . . . seems not to have had a long-range, clearly defined, ideologically supported view of foreign policy.” Although reputed to be “an ardent nationalist,” Tereshchenko was apparently content in the spring and early summer of 1917 to subscribe to Tsereteli’s notion of “revolutionary defensism,” seeing in it perhaps the only way to induce the army to maintain its military mission to any significant degree.74 On the critical issue of Constantinople and the Straits, Tereshchenko may at this relatively early point have displayed somewhat more flexibility than had his cashiered predecessor Miliukov, entertaining the idea of some form of “neutralization” of these strategically vital regions that could accommodate the interests of both Russia and its ever-suspicious Western allies.75 As the summer wore on, however, and as evidence accumulated that the English and French, even while applauding the spilling of Russian blood in costly campaigns in eastern Europe, were failing ever more to take Petrograd’s interests in the Balkans and Asia Minor adequately into account, the Foreign Minister’s stance on these issues seems accordingly to have hardened. During July and August, Wade has observed, Tereshchenko “took on more of the coloration of the traditional Russian Foreign Minister, attempting to safeguard Russia’s international position and interests within the trying context of military defeat, domestic turmoil, and strained relations with the Allies.” By September and early October, Tereshchenko, increasingly disenchanted with Kerensky’s leadership and continuing on in diplomatic service in the Third Coalition Government only with extreme reluctance, was registering his frustration with the course of events by espousing a Near Eastern policy differing very little from that of his tsarist and Kadet predecessors in office: Tereshchenko was unwilling formally to relinquish the Straits. . . . By autumn, he was as determined as Miliukov had been in the spring that Russia’s option to annex Constantinople and the Straits would remain in force, should she want to exercise it after the war. His actions would indicate that he was moving further away from the Soviet position and abandoning the stance of a “new diplomacy” in favor of traditional policies and methods.76

It was almost as though, with Tsereteli and Chernov now gone from the cabinet, taking their policy of “revolutionary defensism” with them, and with estrangement growing between Prime Minister Kerensky and Foreign Minister Tereshchenko, the latter felt free to return Russian foreign policy full circle 74 75 76

Wade, The Russian Search for Peace, pp. 75–77. At least, this is Wade’s contention: see ibid., p. 77. Ibid., pp. 100 and 104.

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to what it had been before. Practically speaking, however, this meant that the government, having discarded its onetime socialist emphasis on peace to be achieved in the very near future, was now shackled more tightly than ever to a Western policy subordinating Petrograd’s imperative need for peace to the Allies’ equally imperative cry of “war to the death” against the Central Powers.77 It was likely only a matter of time before Kerensky’s faltering regime harvested the bitter fruit of its failings in the unforgiving, murderously competitive world of European geopolitics. By late October, it was largely yielding control of the Petrograd military garrison to the so-called Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) – which, as Orlando Figes has observed, was conceived as “an ad hoc body of revolutionary defense” as much against the Germans as against the internal ‘counterrevolution’ – and it was the MRC that made the Bolshevik insurrection-to-come possible.78 (Sheila Fitzpatrick has wryly noted in this connection: “Paradoxically, given the workers’ approval of the Bolshevik ‘peace’ slogan, both they and the Bolsheviks reacted belligerently when the German threat was immediate and actual: the old peace slogans were scarcely heard in the autumn and winter of 1917, after the fall of Riga.”79 ) Thus, however important it is for us to locate the soldiers’, workers’, and peasants’ attitudes toward the war in a socioeconomic context, the process of radicalization in which they ever more insistently demanded decisive action from elitist politi´ cians could not possibly be understood without our first having discussed earlier the implications for elitist power struggles of waging war on such a vast scale. ´ At this point, though, we do need to turn from the dynamic relationship between the waging of war and the radicalization of revolutionary politics in England, France, and Russia to the equally revealing relationship between the politics of war and the politics of social advocacy in these three countries. In other words, we need to ask: to what extent were elitist revolutionary groups ´ such as England’s military and civilian Independents, France’s Brissotin and Robespierrist Jacobins, and Russia’s liberals and moderate socialists induced by their political needs in times of intensifying revolution to acknowledge and even – in some measure, at least – to champion the most pressing causes of their non-elitist compatriots of city, town, and countryside? ´ 77

78 79

Rex Wade’s account of the internal contradictions and ineptitude of the Provisional Government’s foreign policy remains largely accepted today. Two more general accounts of the interaction between war and politics in revolutionary Russia are: Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation. Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics 1905–1925 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 480. Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, pp. 63–64. Kerensky, she feels, would likely have been lynched by the workers as a “traitor and capitulationist” had he tried to disarm them as the Germans approached the Russian capital.

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´ ´ Elitists and Non-Elitists: Uneasy Partners (?) in Deepening Revolutions The question just posed, involving the complicated and ever-evolving relationship between revolutionary protagonists and their urban and/or rural countrymen, has to be answered somewhat differently in each case of sociopolitical upheaval. In England, the primary catalyst for further revolution was the New Model Army of the 1645–49 period, but the possibilities for social change created by that institution’s striking victories were largely limited to soldiers and townsfolk. In France, feuding politicians in the Legislative Assembly and National Convention actually implemented certain policies temporarily or, in some cases, permanently benefiting town dwellers and/or peasants during 1791–93. In the case of Russia, however, it might make more sense to speak of urban workers and peasants seizing the initiative from politically paralyzed liberal and moderate socialist leaders in the rapidly deteriorating conditions of 1917 to improve their own lives whenever and however they could. From the very start, the parliament’s resolution to levy war against Charles I carried implications of social subversion that were bound to trouble some contemporaries. If, as David Underdown has observed, the “harsh pressures of war” conferred “positions of power and influence” on Puritan zealots such as Sir Henry Vane, the younger and doctrinaire republicans such as Henry Marten, those pressures drove other M.P.s to regret their initial defiance of the king. Denzil Holles, for example, a “fiery spirit” and antiroyalist hotspur at the start of hostilities, a few years later deplored the civil war’s undercutting of English society’s “natural” degrees of deference and hierarchy. “The opening words of his memoirs, written in temporary exile in the winter of 1647–48, proclaim Holles’s recognition of the connection between war policy and the threat of social revolution.”80 Many another “peace-party” M.P. shared such sentiments: hence, from Naseby on, the desperate desire of the “Presbyterians” (and even, doubtless, many “Independents”) to stave off further revolution by coming to almost any terms with Charles I. Historians regard the origins, composition, and internal procedures of the New Model Army as very much part of this picture. In profiling the officer corps of the victorious New Model Army, Ian Gentles has (for instance) stressed the contrast between patterns of recruitment to, and promotion within, Fairfax’s and Cromwell’s army, and those obtaining in Prince Rupert’s forces. Even before the political crisis of 1647, Rupert’s force was officered exclusively by peers and gentry, and tolerated no promotion-by-merit from noncommissioned officer (NCO) ranks into commanding ranks, whereas the New Model Army boasted noticeably more lesser gentry and even some non-gentry officers and allowed for promotion of meritorious NCOs into Commissioned Officer ranks. In addition, tellingly, the cavalry brought by Cromwell from the old Eastern Association Army to the New Model Army exhibited considerable 80

Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 58–59.

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religious ferment (Gentles has pointed to ties with Independent and Baptist congregations in the greater London area in 1646 and early 1647) and had a full complement of enthusiastic lay preachers and chaplains. This was, in other words, a force that, if not overtly politicized in the earliest days of its existence, was very likely to become fully politicized once challenged by Holles, Stapleton, and the other “Presbyterians” at Westminster in 1647’s pivotal demobilization crisis.81 Admittedly, significant differences existed between rank-and-file cavalry, on the one hand, and foot soldiers, on the other. Gentle’s prodigious research has yielded the impression of an army whose chronic “recruitment and retention” challenges did not differ that radically from those encountered by the royalists: First, the gulf separating the horse and the foot was even wider than hitherto thought. The men of the cavalry were clearly the sons of yeomen and craftsmen – at the lower end of the scale of ‘middling sort of people.’ While most of them could not afford to equip themselves with a horse and weapons, they thought for themselves to the extent of wishing to serve voluntarily under the parliamentary standard. The foot, by contrast, were drawn from the lowest ranks of society. Few of them had any political opinions, for, if they were not there under protest, they were royalists who switched sides for the sake of a new suit of clothes and regular pay.82

No wonder, then, that Gentles has described those genuinely “new men” in the New Model Army on whom Cromwell came increasingly to rely in battle as “a tight group numbering about 5000 horse and 7000 foot!”83 It was these men, and especially their commanding officers, upon whom the New Model Army’s “godly” leaders lavished their closest attention. Yet, again, the phenomenon of a “godly” army, with its stress on evangelism and lay preaching, religious iconoclasm, spiritual equality, and the reformation of manners, as well as on promotion by merit in the officered ranks, could mean for those who fought under its banners an experience that was unique by the standards of the day. “The state in choosing men to serve them,” Cromwell famously wrote to a Major-General in March 1644, “takes no notice of their opinions. If they be willing faithfully to serve them, that satisfies.” As Christopher Hill commented many years ago, Cromwell chose his own officers and men from those who “made some conscience of what they did.”84 Although these factors cannot by themselves account for the spectacular successes of the New Model Army in the middle to late 1640s, the historian of this revolutionary institution cannot afford to overlook them: 81 82 83 84

Gentles, “The New Model Officer Corps in 1647: A Collective Portrait,” Social History 22 (1997): 127–44. Gentles, The New Model Army, pp. 38–40. Ibid., p. 40. Cited in Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, p. 108.

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There is no gainsaying that the army owed more than a little of its success to the fact that it was relatively well financed, clothed, provisioned and armed. It also enjoyed excellent leadership free of interference by parliamentary committees remote from the scene of action. The military weakness of the adversary, and blunders by the king and his advisers were also major factors. But to complete the picture we must also acknowledge the role of ideas. If ideas are the steam that drives the locomotive of history, then the ideas that powered the army may be grouped under the heading of Calvinistic puritanism, and to a lesser extent, libertarian antinomianism. These creeds enabled the soldiers to overcome their anxiety about their social origins, and their fear about challenging their anointed king.85

In these senses, then, the New Model was a sort of “revolution within a revolution,” permitting within its ranks (under the pressure of military exigency) the discussion and even, in some measure, the practice of “social leveling” and religious toleration more readily associated with sociopolitical upheavals of a much later date. No wonder Cromwell and his fellow generals were accounted “dangerous men” in Presbyterian (and even, probably, some Independent/parliamentary) circles as the 1640s wore on. Yet the assumption of many of the New Model’s apprehensive conservative critics that it might serve – especially in the event of a humiliating rout of its royalist opponents in the Civil War – as an engine of general social and political revolution drastically overshot the mark. As we will have occasion to emphasize later on, Cromwell, once ensconced in state power in the 1650s, would come to reaffirm a belief in the traditional social order mirroring (among other things) his own provenance as an East Anglian gentleman. Even in the topsy-turvy 1640s, however, the army’s controversial interactions with the radical Londonbased Leveller movement should have reassured anxious advocates of social conservatism that, for the New Model’s commanders, military meritocracy and a limited degree of religious toleration were not to be construed as an invitation to overthrow established hierarchies of deference and subordination throughout English society. There are two issues to revisit here: (1) the precise chronology of politicization within the novel military institution headed by Fairfax, Cromwell, Henry Ireton, and others; and (2) the extent to which the politicization that undeniably made headway among the so-called “Agitators” and other activists within the army after the conclusion of the “first” civil war (and was encouraged by Levellers outside the army) was able to win over the generals, and, thus, pose a credible threat to fundamental social as well as constitutional arrangements in mid-seventeenth-century England. The first issue has given rise to a particularly contentious historiography over the past several decades. In a pioneering monograph on the New Model Army published in 1979, and in several stimulating articles, Mark Kishlansky contended that the army was “apolitical” until the spring and summer of 1647, 85

Gentles, The New Model Army, pp. 118–19.

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at which time it was suddenly and swiftly politicized by unforeseen developments relating to matters of arrears of payment, amnesty for acts committed during the recently concluded conflict, and the prospects of disbandment or military service over in Ireland. Moreover, Kishlansky held, “the Levellers and the army were separate and fundamentally divergent movements. Their contact was sporadic and their common causes few.”86 These assertions have given rise to a chorus of scholarly criticisms in ensuing years. At one point, Austin Woolrych commented tentatively: “in place of Kishlansky’s picture of a hitherto apolitical army, . . . it is more plausible to assume that its political awareness developed earlier but remained latent until the parliament rashly provoked it into action.”87 Soon thereafter, Woolrych wrote more conclusively: “In place of Kishlansky’s picture of a hitherto apolitical army, dramatically politicized in the space of two or three months, it seems much more plausible to suppose that a keen but latent political awareness was roused into overt political activity by treatment which soldiers and officers found not only intolerable to themselves but threatening to the causes for which they had fought.” In addition, religious enthusiasm, even if it “did not automatically engender political radicalism,” may still have had more to do with “latent political awareness” in military ranks prior to 1647 than Kishlansky was willing to acknowledge.88 More recently, Ian Gentles has indirectly seconded these criticisms, and has also rebutted any suggestion that there were few or no connections between the civilian Leveller movement and the radicalizing “Agitator” tendencies that were at this time starting to emerge in some of the regiments in the New Model Army: From 1646 onward there was a loose grouping of London ‘activists’ or radical Independents, who sometimes called themselves the ‘Godly party’ (as, of course, did many such groups), many of whom later became known as Levellers. It was these radical Londoners who, early in 1647 if not before, recognized the potential importance of the New Model Army, now threatened with extinction, and who determined to campaign for its continued existence. Secondly, there is considerable evidence of a receptiveness, between 1647 and 1649, within the Army, to Leveller ideas. . . . 89 86

87

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See, on these points: Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and “The Army and the Levellers: The Roads to Putney,” Historical Journal 22 (1979): 795–824. Yet, in the latter article, Kishlansky also (and somewhat inconsistently) conceded that “the catalytic effect of the Leveller movement [upon the army] cannot be denied.” Ibid., p. 824. Austin Woolrych, “Putney Revisited: Political Debate in the New Model Army in 1647,” in Colin Jones, Malyn Newitt, and Stephen Roberts, eds., Politics and People in Revolutionary England: Essays in Honor of Ivan Roots (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 97. Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and Its Debates, 1647–48 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 19–21. Gentles, “The Politics of Fairfax’s Army, 1645–9,” in Adamson, ed., The English Civil War, esp. pp. 176 and 187–88. See also, on these controversies, the recent essays by Austin Woolrych, John Morrill and Philip Baker, and Ian Gentles, in Michael Mendle, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers, and the English State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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To buttress his contentions, Gentles has cited (in this article that came out in 2009) numerous examples of London radicals (including John Lilburne, perhaps the most prominent of all the Levellers) speaking out during 1647 in defense of the New Model against those Presbyterian (and other) politicians who desired to disband it; moreover, he has suggested that Leveller influence in army ranks at Putney that October was more widespread than many revisionists have been willing to concede. A brief word is in order at this point to distinguish between the army radicals known as “Agitators” and the London-based radicals known (from 1647 on) as the “Levellers.” As Woolrych has lucidly explained, the two groups of activists, if they rapidly established some lines of communication in the course of 1647, emerged out of separate historical contexts. The Agitators, and those officers and rank-and-file soldiers with whom they agreed, “had three aims from the start: to secure justice for the soldiers over their pay, their indemnity for acts done in war, and other material concernments; to vindicate the army’s affronted honor and its members’ right to petition; and to frustrate what they saw as a political design by the Presbyterians which threatened to give away much that they had fought for.” Even though some of the Agitators joined with generals and other officers to debate army affairs in a body known, by mid-August 1647 if not before, as the “General Council of the Army,” we should recall Woolrych’s cautionary comment that “the Levellers had very little to do with the initial election of agitators, which was spontaneous, and motivated by the grievances felt by the soldiers as soldiers.”90 It was, indeed, only after the Agitators had become an identifiable lobbying group in military ranks that some of the civilian radicals – John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn, and others – began to focus their attention on them. The Levellers, of course, have attracted a huge amount of scholarly interest over the years.91 By the time they achieved their maximum influence in the radicalizing politics of the English Revolution, G. E. Aylmer has commented, they had developed “quite a comprehensive programme of reforms.”

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2001); and Samuel Dennis Glover, “The Putney Debates: Popular versus Elite Republicanism,” Past and Present 164 (1999): 47–80. Woolrych, “Putney Revisited: Political Debate in the New Model Army,” pp. 98–100. See, for example: Joseph Frank, The Levellers: A History of the Writings of Three SeventeenthCentury Social Democrats: John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955); H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961); Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1972); C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); and G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Levellers in the English Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). Refer also again to Gentles, “The Politics of Fairfax’s Army, 1645–9,” in Adamson, ed., The English Civil War, for some of the most recent contributions to the controversy over the Levellers’ ideas and political role in the late 1640s.

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Their demands included the sole sovereignty of the House of Commons (if not the abolition of the monarchy and House of Lords); a purge of the present Parliament and a fixed term for its existence; election for future parliaments on a new basis . . . ; fuller protection for all men at law, against the state and against over-mighty groups and individuals; drastic reform of the legal system; equal legal rights and liabilities for all, regardless of birth, wealth or influence; the abolition of all monopolies, including corporate ones like the Merchant Adventurers and the Stationers’ Company; the abolition of the excise tax and of compulsory tithes, and the reform of taxation in general so that it fell more equitably on the rich as well as the poor; [and] protection for all dissenting Puritan sects against the intolerance of the Presbyterians (some already went further, and pointed towards the complete separation of Church and State).92

It was several of the spokesmen for these (in any seventeenth-century context) revolutionary ideas who, in the famous meetings at Putney Church, at the end of October, debated, with Cromwell, Ireton, and other personnel in the Army Council, the merits of the Levellers’ tract The Agreement of the People. As we all know today, that debate (in Hill’s words) “turned very largely on the extent of the franchise.”93 Whether, as Christopher Hill and others have maintained, the Levellers were thinking, not so much of universal adult male suffrage in the “modern” sense as of the suffrage of “freeborn Englishmen” (i.e., “those who could freely dispose of their labor, of their property in their own persons”), or whether their spokesmen at Putney had something else in mind, the fact remains that the generals (not altogether surprisingly) suspected that their militant adversaries in these debates had something even more radical in mind – perhaps even a doctrine of “natural rights” running all too logically into communism. Austin Woolrych has argued that Ireton, by pouncing at Putney immediately on the issue of the franchise, came perilously close to isolating himself and his like-minded colleague Cromwell: they would have been better advised, that is, “to direct discussion towards those matters in the Agreement on which consensus was possible, such as liberty of conscience, an early dissolution [of parliament] followed by biennial parliaments, reapportionment of constituencies, and reform of the law.” In doing so, they might have satisfied the genuine desire within the Army Council both for unity and for meaningful change and at the same time have neutralized the Levellers’ dangerous and avowed desire to assault the existing parliament directly.94 Yet, tellingly, the same historian has stressed that the New Model’s commanders had little choice, tactically speaking, but to take a resolute stand against the authors and proponents of the Agreement. After all, they needed desperately to preserve the army’s unity and the existence of the current parliament, at a time when the Levellers were inciting to mutiny within the former institution and counseling a violent breakup of the latter institution; how else, possibly, 92 93 94

Aylmer, ed., The Levellers in the English Revolution, p. 25. Hill, The Century of Revolution, p. 110. Woolrych, “Putney Revisited: Political Debate in the New Model Army,” pp. 109–10.

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to avoid driving society’s “natural rulers” into the arms of an untrustworthy monarch who, even then, was not above scheming to bring the Presbyterian Scots back into English civil conflict on his side? In this latter connection, the outbreak of the “second” Civil War in 1648 would demonstrate that the tactical instincts of Cromwell and his confidants at Putney had been essentially sound.95 For all these reasons, it is hard for us today not to assume an eventual “parting of the ways” between the Army’s Grandees and its Leveller critics on the Left. We may concede, with Ian Gentles, that “at key moments in 1647 and 1648 the Leveller leadership enjoyed a critical influence over the army’s deliberations,” without necessarily concurring that “Had the Leveller leaders played their cards more adroitly, they might well have succeeded in imposing a modified version of their constitution on England.”96 Certainly, the New Model’s leaders remained committed to satisfying as many of the Agitators’ practical “in-house” complaints as they could: after all, they were, first and foremost, professional military men. Regarding the broader critique of contemporary state and society articulated so memorably by the Levellers, however, it was, probably, another matter. True, at two critical points – in late 1647, and again in late 1648 – the generals, attempting somehow to settle with an intractable and unendingly duplicitous monarch, used the popular energies unleashed by the Levellers for their own purposes. Yet, in light of what Lilburne and his fellow radicals stood for, how could Cromwell, Ireton, and the other Grandees have possibly worked with them for any great length of time? Aylmer’s gloss on the Levellers, pointing up the self-contradictory as well as impractical nature of their ideas, comes to mind: To put it bluntly, there was no prospect of their programme being realized by consent; the upper classes would never have abdicated without a struggle. Yet the Levellers were unprepared for armed conflict and violent struggle; moreover, if they had been readier to face this, it would have been self-defeating for their ideals and for much of their political programme. They had a healthy suspicion of the excessive concentration of power in too few hands, whether other people’s or their own. But they showed less awareness of the inevitable need for extraordinary measures to effect the changes which they wanted, and of the further difficulties in dismantling such emergency power once created.97

Aylmer, anticipating here Woolrych and others, was, essentially, right: what he termed the “balance of forces in the country at the time” could not conceivably have permitted the realization of most of the structural reforms set forth in The Agreement of the People and similar documents. That Cromwell and some of his colleagues in the Army (and a similarly inclined Independent faction in the Commons) were able, in the end, to carry some of the reforms 95 96 97

Ibid., esp. pp. 108–09 and 116. Gentles, “The Politics of Fairfax’s Army, 1645–9,” pp. 194 and 200. Aylmer, ed., The Levellers in the English Revolution, pp. 50–52.

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with which they had become associated during the tumultuous 1640s over into the more staid 1650s was probably, under the circumstances, all that could realistically have been expected. That, in accomplishing at least this much, they had to execute an anointed king as a traitor to his own subjects and abolish both the monarchy and the Lords were, in themselves, actions bearing revolutionary implications for the future that should never be underestimated. We mentioned earlier that the possibilities for social change created by the New Model Army’s triumphs during 1645–49 were largely limited “to soldiers and townsfolk.” Nothing differentiates the English Revolution more sharply from the later upheavals in France and Russia than the absence, in our first case of revolution, of a “peasant question.” “The only serious interventions by the rural poor in the whole course of the revolution,” Lawrence Stone has written, “were the assemblies of ‘clubmen’ who gathered in several counties during the latter stages of the war. These were no more than desperate attempts by the rural poor to protect their fields, crops, cattle and women from the depredations of both armies, and themselves from the clutches of the recruiting officers of both sides.”98 Indeed, Gentle’s meticulous research shows that the “rural poor” had as much reason to avoid the New Model’s troops as they had to minimize contact, as best they could, with the king’s forces.99 The larger contextual and developmental point to make here is that, in an age and society in which rural landholding tendencies were already strongly favoring “improving” peers and gentry at the expense of small landed proprietors, parliamentary victory in the civil conflicts of the 1640s could only translate into a reinforcement of such tendencies. Accordingly, in 1646, with victory over Charles I having been achieved, the two Houses of Parliament tentatively abolished “wardship” and the Court of Wards – an initiative formalized by an Act ten years later. As Hill has observed, such a measure not only freed the landed class from the “irritating and erratic death duties” traditionally imposed by wardship; it also conferred upon such proprietors “an absolute power to do what they would with their own, including the right to settle the inheritance of all their lands by will.” On the positive side, such an epochally important measure created one prerequisite for “planned long-term capital investment in agricultural improvements;” on the negative side, it helped to ensure that “copyholders – mostly smaller tenants with no security of tenure – should not win absolute rights in their holdings,” and could consequently be henceforth “evicted by landlords who wished to enclose or consolidate.”100 Finally, it is also revealing in this connection that while the urban-based Levellers, in the words of one of their most trenchant critics, assuredly envisaged “an ideal world of owner-occupiers on the land,” they had in reality “little to offer the landless peasants, or those whose holdings 98 99 100

Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, p. 55. See, on this point, Gentles, The New Model Army, Chapter 5. Hill, The Century of Revolution, pp. 126–28.

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were simply too small for them to subsist upon.”101 In this initial “age of revolution,” consequently, the peasantry, insofar as it figured at all, was largely a passive agent, “acted upon” rather than benefiting from (let alone initiating) revolutionary action. How different, we shall see, were the situations in both revolutionary France and (especially) revolutionary Russia! The foregoing remarks regarding the politics of social advocacy (or, in most areas of policy, the lack thereof) during the radicalizing years of the English Revolution serve well enough as a transition to a reappraisal of such politics in the increasingly revolutionary France of 1791–93. Here, not unexpectedly, we find, not only a growing degree of military meritocracy recalling – and, in fact, exceeding – what we encountered in the case of England, but also a deliberate elitist outreach to civilian society in “civic” and economic affairs ´ almost entirely lacking in England’s less cataclysmic revolution. To begin with, France’s resumption of warmaking on a massive scale was bound to have an especially dramatic impact on that institution (namely, the army) charged most directly with defending the country and projecting its interests and ideals abroad. The shock of Varennes, one expert on the French army has noted, “greatly accelerated the process of change which had been going on since 1789.” Many officers, whether because of growing politicization and insubordination in the ranks, or due to familial pressures brought to bear by embittered emigr es, ´ ´ or out of genuine loyalty to the king’s imperiled cause – or for all these reasons – resigned their commands and left France altogether. On one calculation, 2,160 officers emigrated between September 15 and December 1, 1791 alone, and, from September 15, 1791, to December 1, 1792, “one third of the units in the line army lost one third or more of their authorized officer strength as a result of resignations, illegal absences, and emigrations.”102 The Revolution’s compelling need to replace these officers – many of whom, as well-connected aristocrats, had blocked channels of upward mobility in the old regime officer corps – generated new opportunities for frustrated NCOs, soldiers of fortune, ambitious provincial nobles, and commoners with limited military experience. NCOs and officers of fortune, Scott has written, “came to form an essential element in the officer corps of the Revolution. They brought to their new positions a practical skill, a knowledge of their troops, a commitment to their career, and a devotion to the Revolution that only a minority of the prerevolutionary officer corps possessed.” Ambitious and professionally minded provincial squires who remained in the army after the emigrations of 1791–92 could also expect from the Revolution promotional chances denied to most of them before 1789. Few of them in olden times could have attained even the grade of lieutenant-colonel; by 1792, with their country plunging headlong into war, “many commanded regiments, and the rank of general 101 102

Aylmer, ed., The Levellers in the English Revolution, p. 50. Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution, pp. 109–10.

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was not beyond reach.” Those of them who were willing to place pursuit of career and fidelity to France before any lingering fealty to the crown, and were able to retain the support of their troops, could continue to rise in their profession throughout the 1790s.103 As for commoners who had been neither NCOs nor “soldiers of fortune” as of 1789, they, too, could carve out successful careers in the Revolution. Take, for instance, company-level officers – captains, lieutenants, sublieutenants – in the battle infantry. Jean-Paul Bertaud has given the social origins of the captains in 1793–94 as: 44.2 percent bourgeois, 25.8 percent artisan, and 22.3 percent peasant (with a smattering of nobles, clerics, and foreigners). For lieutenants, the figures were: 36.5 percent bourgeois, 33.6 percent artisan, and 24.4 percent peasant. (For sublieutenants, the percentages were similar.) About half of these company-level officers had known something of the trade of arms prior to 1789, but for the most part they owed their promotions to the Revolution.104 If the exigencies of war more than any other factor “modernized” the army’s officer corps, they just as deeply affected its overall social makeup. Inevitably, France’s exploding manpower needs meant that voluntary enlistment (the “Volunteers” of 1791 and 1792) would be followed by conscription. The turning point came here in 1793. True, the semblance of voluntary enlistment was retained even as the Convention decreed a levy of 300,000 men on February 24, 1793, to bring the army up to full strength. Yet, Bertaud has argued, the legislators on this occasion were actually introducing the principle of conscription, as “all men of ages 18 to 40, unmarried or widowers without children, were put in a state of permanent requisition.”105 With the celebrated lev´ee en masse of August 23, conscription would become a more massive reality. Furthermore, as 1793 wore on, fewer lawyers, teachers, students, and state bureaucrats appeared than had among the “Volunteers” of 1792; most of the new enrolees were “farm laborers and workers in the most ordinary trades.” This “leveling” tendency manifested itself most strikingly with the August lev´ee en masse. Perhaps 16 percent of the draftees revealed urban origins, corresponding more or less to the proportion of the general French population reckoned then as “urban.” Some of these individuals hailed from the “respectable” middle classes – merchants, teachers, notaries, and so on – but increasingly they tended to be artisans and workers. Nonetheless, taken as a whole, the army of the early Republic was heavily peasant in its composition, differing markedly in this respect from the institution of 1789–91. Rural plebeians, that is, predominated in military as in civilian society. Much like 103 104

105

Ibid., esp. pp. 111–20. Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, pp. 178–79, 182–87, and 189. Research on the army officer corps in this period is also summarized effectively in John A. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France, 1791–1794 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 67–96. Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, pp. 90–96.

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Cromwell’s New Model Army, then, though, of course, on a much larger scale, the “new” French army of the 1790s embodied the combination of meritocratic and broadly based “civic-obligation” tendencies commonly associated with revolutionary times.106 (It also developed, in time, a secular revolutionary elan ´ similar to the religious elan of Cromwell’s cavalry regiments; more on that in ´ Chapters 5 and 6.) But in the radicalizing politics of the French Revolution, unlike in those of the English Revolution, what we have already termed the “elitist outreach to ´ civilian society” was as real as was innovation in military affairs. Both in a negative sense – by pursuing and proscribing “nonjuring” clergy and noble emigr es ´ ´ – and in a more positive sense – by accommodating both city and town dwellers and rural peasants in civic and economic affairs – France’s leaders in 1791–93 promoted genuinely “mass-social” dimensions of revolution largely lacking in England’s earlier upheaval. The Legislative Assembly revealed an inclination from the very start to associate “refractory” priests and emigr es ´ ´ with France’s prospective enemies in Europe. Early on, emigrants were threatened with death should they not return to France by January 1, 1792; soon thereafter, the legislature moved to sequester their lands; and it would not be long before legislation forbidding the issuance of new passports allowing new emigrations justified doing so by citing each citizen’s “sacred duty to march to the aid of the country.”107 A like fate befell “non-juring” clergy as France lurched into war – and also bid fair to engulf even “patriotic,” oath-taking churchmen. As civic matters came increasingly to be dominated by military and strategic concerns, the country’s leaders (and wealthy purchasers of ecclesiastical properties as well) tended to assimilate religious issues to larger civic questions. Continued opposition in the provinces to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and other reforms involving the Gallican Church led the Assembly to decree on November 29, 1791, that nonjuring priests be considered “suspects,” and as such “liable to expulsion from communes where troubles occurred.” That the king chose to veto this act along with decrees aimed at “treasonous” emigr es ´ ´ only cast further “civic” discredit on clerical misgivings about revolutionary change that were, however, at least as far as we can tell, perfectly sincere misgivings. It was all too predictable that, in the event of war and its unavoidable reverses, the status of the clergy, like that of the emigr es, ´ ´ would deteriorate further. And in fact early military defeats in the spring of 1792 brought with them legislation aimed at deporting notoriously “refractory” priests as well as initiatives by local officials to arrest 106 107

On all these points, see ibid., pp. 66–74, 90–96, and 130–32. Refer also to Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic, pp. 43–66. See, on these measures, Patrice Higonnet, Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 77–78. Still very useful on the subject of the emigr es ´ ´ is Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration during the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951).

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clergy indiscriminately in some areas and to restrict their domiciliary options and freedom of movement in other areas.108 As the Revolution sank ever more deeply into the morass of war, and as part of the “social leveling” inherent in national mobilization for such a struggle, emigr es ´ ´ and refractory clergy were treated with mounting severity. Emigre´ property, put under state control as early as April 1792, and formally alienated from its noble owners on July 27, was subsequently offered to prospective buyers under terms that became progressively more generous. In August 1792, the deputies, having been reminded that “the sale of emigr e´ property offers a means ´ of binding the country people to the Revolution,” decreed that purchasers of such property were to enjoy priority over tenants, and that local officials were to ensure that those holdings were “divided as usefully as possible into small lots.”109 These provisions were later amended (in June of the following year) to require that emigr e´ lands be divided up “as far as possible, without damaging ´ each farm or estate, into lots or portions,” and the legislators also tried to make headway in a “democratic” direction by providing for landless farmers in communes containing emigr e´ lands but no partible common lands. In such villages, ´ rural proletarians were to rent plots of one arpent apiece directly from the state.110 Such initiatives would be followed up later on by decrees that not only anathematized noble emigrants in language by now become familiar but also hedged in the inheritance rights of emigrants’ relatives still resident in France. For clerics, too, this was a time of tribulations. With the toppling of the monarchy, and an invasion panic touched off at Paris by the menacing terms of the Brunswick Manifesto, all stays were lifted on deportations of non-juring clergy already ordered, and the number of denunciations by “active” citizens required for new deportations was reduced from twenty to six. (“This was tantamount,” John McManners has claimed, “to a universal proscription.”) Perhaps even more revealing of the revolutionary attitude toward the clergy was the fact that all churchmen were now ordered “on penalty of loss of place or pension” to take a new oath binding them to all-out support of the embattled Republic. That 3 bishops and 220 priests (on McManners’ reckoning) were killed in the September Massacres at Paris serves as another dramatic indication of the clergy’s worsening situation. Anticlerical violence also flared up in the provinces, and often in such incidents the distinction between “juring” and “refractory” priests was blurred.111 In the course of 1793, with the Republic combatting, it now seemed, virtually all of Europe, the treatment of clerics and of churchly interests became yet harsher. After March 23, for example, 108 109 110 111

John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), pp. 63–67. Norman Hampson, A Social History of the French Revolution (Toronto: University Of Toronto Press, 1963), p. 149. P. M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 155. McManners, The French Revolution and the Church, pp. 63–67.

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deportations of non-jurors followed immediately on their identification; and after November 22, the injunction to split up noble emigrants’ estates was extended wherever possible “to the remaining ecclesiastical property coming up for sale.”112 Certainly, there were limits to the deepening revolution’s campaign against onetime members of the first two Estates: the French nobility (unlike the Russian gentry in 1917–18) was not swallowed up in toto in the deluge, and the Gallican Church survived, state-supported, throughout this period. On the other hand, when we turn to the French Revolution’s outreach to middle-class and working-class individuals, we find a display of social inclusiveness hardly to be encountered in the England of the 1640s. For one thing, the war crisis over the summer of 1792 began unprecedentedly to democratize French politics by abolishing the old distinction, set in place by the Constituent Assembly, between “active” and “passive” citizens. This led, among others things, to the election of members of a new Convention, and of other public officials in Paris and the provinces, on a male franchise far in advance (it would seem) of anything advocated by Levellers or Agitators at Putney Church in October 1647.113 Most (if not all) male domicili´es over twenty-five could now participate, if they wished to, in the local and national politics of the besieged Republic-at-war. At the very least, they helped to ensure the ascendancy of “bourgeois” politicians at Paris (feuding Girondists and Montagnards and others) and in the provinces; at the most, they came to wield power themselves in some smaller towns and villages, or directly benefited from government programs specifically tailored to their economic needs. Take, for instance, sociopolitical evolution in provincial communities. At Toulouse, moderate lawyers and entrepreneurs who had wrested control of civic affairs from the old elitists of sword, robe, and miter had by 1793 com´ passed a thoroughgoing overhaul of old regime institutions.114 At Bordeaux, the citizens securely ensconced in the hierarchies of trade and the law were now enjoying the full status recognition and political clout that they had so coveted in prerevolutionary days.115 At Lyon, a certain nascent bourgeois 112 113

114 115

Consult, on these issues: Jones, The Peasants in the French Revolution, p. 155; and McManners, The Church in the French Revolution, pp. 63–67. Only domestic servants and the unemployed were still excluded from the franchise; members of the Convention were elected in a two-stage process involving primary elections in local assemblies and secondary elections at the departmental level. (See William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 193.) For more on the subject, see: Patrice Guennifey, Le Nombre et la raison: La R´evolution franc¸aise et les e´ lections (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1993); and Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy 1789– 1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Martyn Lyons, Revolution in Toulouse: An Essay on Provincial Terrorism (Berne: Peter Lang, 1978), p. 39. Alan Forrest, Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 159–60 and 253.

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class-consciousness emerged in 1792 and 1793. Affluent and “respectable” Lyonnais, no longer divided among themselves by obsolete juridical status distinctions, and facing the perceived challenge of democratic demands from silk weavers and other “proletarians,” came together in a concerted defense of the political powers now officially reserved to bourgeois of property, the professions, and commerce.116 Both at Caen in coastal Normandy and at Limoges in the west-central province of Limousin, merchants and craftsmen dominated local politics from 1791 on, and there are some signs that political evolution was favoring a shift of influence within the commercial bourgeoisie toward its less moneyed members.117 Meanwhile, Marseilles seems to have witnessed the ascendancy, by 1793, of bourgeois of various stripes, merchants of moderate income, school instructors, members of the legal professions – of, that is, “the middle-ranking group of articulate and educated individuals” solidly installed in the sectional organizations of the municipal regime.118 And so it went, all over France. However the process might vary from community to community, the general impression we derive from the germane local research is of the “down-shifting” of influence from the noble-dominated elites of the old ´ regime to more middling strata of professionals, entrepreneurs, and rentiers – and even, in some audacious cases, to affluent peasants and their advocates in law and administration. These tendencies, furthermore, would be reinforced in late 1793 (and beyond) by the willingness of repr´esentants en mission from Paris, irritated by the lethargy or open hostility of departmental and district authorities and other local notables who had unwisely embraced the Girondist cause, to purge local officials and replace them with Jacobin and sans-culottes elements.119 But “social inclusiveness” in these days of deepening revolution in France also meant “space” for legislation according new rights to women and children. “The overthrow of the king, the father of the nation” in August 1792, Suzanne Desan has written, “encouraged the French revolutionaries to envision a less patriarchal social and political order. . . . the deputies now counted on constructing a new familial structure to mirror and promote the new political structure.” Much as the republic had now replaced the antediluvian monarchy in France, so too, the “conjugal family rooted in freely chosen, companionate 116 117 118 119

Bill Edmonds, Jacobinism and the Revolt of Lyons, 1789–1793 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 134–35. Paul Hanson, Provincial Politics in the French Revolution: Caen and Limoges, 1789–1794 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p. 212. William Scott, Terror and Repression in Revolutionary Marseilles (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 101–4. Many examples of this practice are provided by Hampson, A Social History of the French Revolution, pp. 209–10. On the situation in the Parisian municipality, see Marc Bouloiseau, The Jacobin Republic, 1792–1794 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. p. 113. On the egalitarian tendencies within some of the provincial Jacobin clubs in this period, see Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The Middle Years, pp. 34–42.

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marriage should replace the lineage family built on puissance paternelle and arranged, indissoluble marriage.”120 And indeed, legislation in August 1792 and subsequent months established the right of divorce for men and women on a wide variety of grounds, including insanity, convictions for criminal offenses, abuse or cruelty, mutual consent or incompatibility, and so on. It also curtailed parental authority over children; placed the so-called e´ tat civil (registration of births, marriages, and deaths) firmly in the hands of the civil authorities; hedged in rights of primogeniture and entail of properties; proclaimed the principle of illegitimate children’s inheritance rights; and (by March 1793) decreed the equal access of all “descendants” to their ancestors’ goods.121 True, revolutionary definitions of citizenship in France still excluded women from suffrage and associated political activities; beyond this (and more directly to the point), even the rights enumerated above were whittled away in Thermidorian/Directorian and, most emphatically, Napoleonic times. Still, crucial precedents for the future had been set; and in some areas (especially testamentary affairs) the legacy of intensifying revolution in France proved to be durable. At this point, however, the question we must pose is: did the revolutionaries, as their country’s emergency inexorably deepened during 1792 and 1793, also respond to circumstances by advocating on behalf of the most economically necessitous in society? Our answer must be: yes, both in temporary fashion (e.g., in response to basic subsistence needs) and – more intriguingly – in permanent, structural fashion (e.g., in response to peasant demands for a definitive end to seigneurialism in the countryside). Discussion of what happened in both of these areas follows. In the late summer and autumn of 1792, deputies at Paris galvanized by the presence of Austrian and Prussian troops on French soil “took the first steps along the road to economic controls.” Government agents were directed to “requisition food and transport for the army at prices fixed by the local authorities;” municipalities were given the green light to employ similar methods to supply local markets; and a census of all stocks of grain in the country was ordered. Yet if, at this juncture, “all shades of revolutionary opinion seemed to be inclined towards the control of the grain trade,” the deputies of the Convention would soon revert to a philosophy of laissez-faire economics – at least in part because of the (momentary) improvement in French military fortunes.122 With the even more acute war crisis of 1793, however, the Convention’s free marketeers were forced to take popular demands more seriously. In a 120 121 122

On these issues, see Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), esp. pp. 62 and 325–31. See also, on these issues, the foundational article by Karen Offen, “The New Sexual Politics of French Revolutionary Historiography,” French Historical Studies 16 (1990): 909–22. Hampson, A Social History of the French Revolution, pp. 158–59.

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bleak spring overshadowed by Dumouriez’s treason and by British entry into the conflict, the legislators endorsed two popular measures that, earlier, would have drawn their censure: the cours forc´e of the assignat (compelling acceptance of this paper currency at face value) and a maximum or ceiling to be imposed by the departments on the price of all grain. On July 27, acceding once more to popular demand, the deputies decreed the death penalty for the hoarding of “necessities” and appointed sectional “hoarding commissioners” to apply the new law. Then, in perilous August, the Convention voted the establishment of public granaries, granted one hundred million livres to the Committee of Public Safety for grain purchases, and authorized all “representatives on mission” to requisition grain for Paris, and for all departments lacking it.123 Crowning all of this legislation would be the Maximum g´en´eral of September 29, which, by allowing (in effect) for a greater markup of wages than of prices on a host of commodities judged to be “of prime necessity,” catered quite transparently to popular interests in the embattled Republic.124 Granted, as we will see later on, the very correlation between French military fortunes and outreach to the masses meant that, once the international situation improved, this became one of several arguments invoked for the purpose of scaling back official efforts to alleviate popular distress. If, however, we turn to the structural issue of seigneurialism in the countryside, we will discover an outstanding example of permanent reform providing an insight into the dialectical relationship between escalating geostrategic engagement abroad and intensifying revolution at home. John Markoff, P. M. Jones, and others, writing on the abolition – at first conditional but then absolute – of the entire seigneurial regime, have (revealingly) stressed the motif of war in connection with the epochal legislation of August 1792 and July 1793. Until the actual approach of war, they have pointed out, lawmaking on major seigneurial questions did not in any systemic way affect what had already been wrought in this area by the declarations of August 4–11, 1789, and by the somewhat more detailed legislation of March– May 1790. Nonetheless, as “interstate tensions became more ominous, peasant insurrection began to suggest a dangerous failure of the existing scheme.” Not altogether coincidentally, peasant revolt attained its second highest peak of the entire revolutionary era in April 1792 – the month of the initial French declaration of war. Over the following months, a spate of legislative attacks on the halfway decrees of August 1789 concerning seigneurialism would culminate 123

124

Ibid., pp. 176 and 192–94, for a discussion of these measures. On popular attitudes toward subsistence issues at Paris, and popular pressures exerted on the Convention in 1792–94, see also Richard Cobb, “The Revolutionary Mentality in France, 1793–1794,” History 52 (1957): 181–96; and George Rude, ´ The Crowd in the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). The Maximum g´en´eral receives thorough treatment in Robert R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 239.

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in laws of late August 1792 that all but destroyed the immemorial system of “feudal” dues and services.125 Of course, much more was involved here than the pressures of high continental politics on the French. At the start of 1792, for instance, a disappointing harvest and an initial outbreak of inflation were cruelly afflicting many peasants. The deputies’ stubborn adherence to freedom of the grain trade only compounded problems for rural – and some urban – citizens. Even Paris suffered price-fixing riots in January and February. In addition to all this, however, war was in the wind. It was, significantly, on June 18 – a day on which Parisians first heard of menacing military moves by Lafayette – that the Legislative Assembly voted lods et ventes and other “casual rights” out of existence unless they were certified to come from a formal concession of land. On August 20, the deputies chipped away further at “casual” and harvest rights, while unconditionally abrogating all dues levied collectively. Yet, with foreign troops now on French soil and with a radical Paris Commune challenging the political status quo, such concessions seemed still to be inadequate. On August 25, the critical act was rammed through the Assembly: essentially, it declared all dues and services defunct unless the affected lords could document their legitimacy. The “burden of proof,” in other words, had now shifted decisively in such matters from peasant agriculturalists and their communities to the seigneurs.126 Particularly fascinating – and pertinent to our analysis – in all of this was the way the war transformed the revolutionaries’ view of seigneurialism. The more Brissot and his allies associated “feudalism” as a benighted legacy of the past with the national Austrian foe, and presented the French military effort as designed to deliver Europe’s groaning masses from their “feudal” chains, the more they were compelled to acknowledge – and condemn – all vestiges of feudalism in France. After all, could Frenchmen risking everything to destroy “feudalism” abroad be expected to brook its continuation in any form at home? Hence (at least in part) the historic decree of August 1792. And this war-assisted, dialectical process would reach its logical conclusion – the unqualified abolition of all seigneurial dues and services, documented or not – with the enactment of the even more celebrated decree of July 17, 1793.127 Indeed, as the French advanced triumphantly into “feudal” territories beyond their borders, the old questions resurfaced insistently. On December 15, 1792, the Convention proclaimed the absolute abrogation of all seigneurial prerogatives in those areas of Belgium and Germany controlled by its forces.

125

126 127

John Markoff, “Violence, Emancipation, and Democracy: The Countryside and the French Revolution,” in the American Historical Review 100 (1995): 360–86. Markoff has explored all of this in much greater depth in The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution, pp. 90–94. See also Markoff, “Violence, Emancipation, and Democracy,” esp. pp. 378–80. See, on this decree, Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution, pp. 90–94.

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Peasants everywhere, it appeared, could look to Paris to support their revolutionary demands. In the meantime, the warring deputies could scarcely afford to ignore rural uprisings at home. In March 1793, Bertrand Bar`ere recommended to his colleagues a package of rural policies combining repression with conciliation; but this plainly was not enough. Again, the linkage between affairs foreign and affairs domestic reasserted itself. If French peasant-soldiers were to hazard life and limb for German or Piedmontese farmers, could France’s lawmakers spare any aspect of “feudalism” in their own country? If the Convention really wanted to encourage antiseigneurial revolt abroad, how could it fail to endorse antifeudal movements at home? And what about French peasants expected to do battle, as devoted patriots, with those involved in internal sabotage against the Revolution? Should they anticipate any reward less generous than the final, unequivocal abolition of seigneurialism? The response to all such queries came with the landmark decree of July 17, 1793. “It took years of rural violence,” John Markoff has concluded, “to push the revolutionary legislatures to make of the dismantling of feudalism a reality recognizable in the villages. And it is far from obvious that they would have done so without the war-time stresses.”128 There is no doubt that in this area, as in others affecting the vital interests of plebeian citizens, wartime expediency was leavened with the yeast of genuine altruism. “The idealism of the Revolution,” R. R. Palmer has insisted, “helped the peasants, removing their feudal burdens, granting them land on instalment payments, promising them education, taking steps to relieve their poverty, endowing them with rights of citizenship.”129 That the same historian, however, has also had to detail the limits of revolutionary bienfaisance as applied to French peasants need not surprise us: the leaders of this upheaval, after all, were never prepared to jettison “bourgeois” socioeconomic interests anchored in existing relations of property-holding and production. Nevertheless, in our accustomed role as comparativists, we cannot help but stress that the revolutionaries in France, unlike their counterparts in England, served peasants (at least, some peasants) rather than “improving” peers and gentry when they swept away the remnants of feudalism. In this as in so many other respects, the process of radicalization in France gave a whole new meaning to the term “politics of social advocacy,” whether the reforms brought about by those politics were permanent or merely temporary. In analyzing the dynamics of deepening revolution in Russia, on the other hand, we may have to abandon the term “politics of social advocacy” altogether, unless we use it to describe the initiatives, not so much of the liberal and moderate socialist leaders hailing from “privilege Russia,” but of their constituents, the soldiers and sailors, workers, and peasants of “Soviet Russia.” Most scholarly inquiry today suggests that, over the summer and early 128 129

Markoff, “Violence, Emancipation, and Democracy,” pp. 378–81. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, p. 312.

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autumn of 1917, the galling inability of the Provisional Government’s leaders to extricate their exhausted country from the World War, and to tackle domestic issues by convening the long-promised Constituent Assembly, permitted polarization (and, inevitably, radicalization) in military, proletarian, and peasant ranks to proceed apace. Increasingly, as this terrible year wore on, the urban and rural masses, content no longer to tolerate the procrastination of their SR and Menshevik spokesmen, seized the factories, mills, mines, and lands for themselves, thus turning (for their own reasons) to the revolutionary prescriptions of Bolsheviks and other extremist ideologues. If the victorious New Model Army had served as the primary catalyst for limited political revolution in the case of England, the disintegrating Imperial army helped to intensify truly massive social upheaval in the case of Russia. As we have already seen, the process of disintegration in 1917 furthered the polarization in military ranks between elitist officers, intellectuals, and soldiers’ ´ committeemen, on the one hand, and rank-and-file troops, on the other. And there can be no doubt as to what occupied average soldiers’ minds in the trenches ever more as 1917 wore on. As Allan K. Wildman has put it: Peace aspirations were but a part of the way the soldiers looked at the world in general, as scions of a peasant culture with its indigenous parochial concerns. The war was simply one more intrusion into this private world of the demands of the holders of political and social power, robbing them of their lives and substance. The social concerns may have been at times obscured by the striving for peace, but they were ever present in the soldiers’ thinking.130

For the rank-and-file in the army, the Revolution first and foremost “signified the definitive end of land-owning society and its unjust laws;” it promised a new distribution of lands back home, a process of distributive justice in which the average peasant-soldier ached to participate. Expectations were just as revolutionary among the peasant-sailors in naval ranks, at Kronstadt and elsewhere.131 To be sure, the revolutionary impact of weary, disillusioned soldiers who were ever more likely to desert the army was hardly limited to rural areas. In his landmark study of social dynamics in the 1917 revolution, John Keep has observed that in many urban soviets “the working-class members were overshadowed by soldiers.” That is not necessarily how things started out early in the year: prior to the traumatic political events of the summer, soldiers 130

131

Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Road to Soviet Power and Peace, pp. 404–5. Additional insights into the soldiers’ mentality in 1917 are provided by Marc Ferro, in “The Russian Soldier in 1917: Patriotic, Undisciplined and Revolutionary,” Slavic Review 30 (1971): 483–512. See: David A. Longley, “Officers and Men: A Study of the Development of Political Attitudes among the Sailors of the Baltic Fleet in 1917,” Soviet Studies 25 (1973): 28–50; and Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Revolution and the Baltic Fleet: War and Politics, February 1917– April 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1978).

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who still might be motivated by a patriotic “defensist” animus against the Germans seem to have counseled political restraint to their civilian-worker comrades in those urban soviets in which the two groups mingled. “As the army became demoralized,” however, “large numbers of men in uniform sought to bring an immediate end to the war by whatever means lay to hand, and the soviet machinery offered tempting opportunities.” In other words, the roles of workers and soldiers in the urban soviets frequently reversed as 1917 wore on, with the latter coming more and more to pressure the former to accelerate the tempo of their revolutionary actions: The failure of the offensive launched on 18 June undermined the army’s shaky morale, discredited the country’s leaders, and sent a wave of deserters pouring into rear-echelon areas. . . . This dissolution accelerated the leftward drift of the urban soviets and prepared the way for the radical change of political allegiance which occurred at the end of August. . . . The mood of the army transmitted itself to the country as a whole.132

Soldiers agitating in urban soviets in the late winter and spring had feared “counterrevolutionary” plots hatched by conservative elements in the officer corps – possibly in league with German officers – against “revolutionary democracy.” Such soldiers tended increasingly in the wake of Kerensky’s disastrous offensive (and, even more, in the wake of the Kornilov affair in August) to focus their conspiratorial anxieties ever more narrowly on Russia’s “bourgeois” industrialists, managers, foremen, and technicians. Yet it was especially in the vast rural hinterland of Russia that soldiers, sometimes vaunting their status as army deserters, stoked the fires of social upheaval. Orlando Figes, long fascinated by provincial Russian history, has provided a vivid description of how soldiers returning to their native countryside in the course of 1917 encouraged peasant assaults on the local gentry (dvorianstvo): The peasant soldiers often took the lead in the march on the manors. Sometimes they encouraged the peasantry to indulge in wanton acts of vandalism. They burned the manor houses to drive the squires out; smashed the agricultural machinery (which in recent years had removed much of the need for hired peasant labour); carried away the contents of the barns on their carts; and destroyed or vandalized anything, like paintings, books or sculptures, that smacked of excessive wealth. It was also not uncommon for these soldiers to incite the peasants to attack the squires. In the village of Bor Polianshchina, in Saratov province, for example, a band of peasants, led by some soldiers, forced their way into the manor house of Prince V. V. Saburov, and hacked 132

John L. H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 118–19. See also, on the soldiers and the soviets in 1917: Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers’ Councils, 1905–1921, trans. Ruth Hein (New York: Pantheon, 1974); and Michael Melancon, “Soldiers, Peasant-Soldiers, PeasantWorkers and Their Organizations in Petrograd: Ground-Level Revolution in the Early Months of 1917,” Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 23 (1996): 161–90.

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him to death with axes and knives. . . . The manor house, which contained one of the finest private libraries in Russia, was burned to the ground.133

There were not nearly enough army units stationed in the depths of rural Russia (even assuming their willingness to be used for repressive purposes) to counteract such soldier-led peasant violence. Indeed, the Provisional Government was even more hobbled in this respect than France’s revolutionary leaders had been in the early 1790s, and for reasons that will require comparative analysis later on. Still, whatever role the demoralized Imperial army may have played in intensifying the processes of social radicalization in Russia in the course of 1917, those revolutionary processes developed an internal dynamic, an internal logic, of their own. Central to their evolution, William G. Rosenberg and Diane Koenker have written in an often-quoted article, was the phenomenon of “social polarization.”134 As it applied to urban Russia, the term involved “the multiple relationships between workers’ activism in all of its forms and the equally complex (and complementary) activism of industrialists and other members of the business community.” In the immediate wake of the February Revolution, industrialists and workers, still motivated (as were many soldiers and sailors) by a “revolutionary-defensist” animus against the Germans, and still “feeling their way” in the sudden void left by the demise of tsarism, had a certain degree of common interest in staving off a complete collapse of the Russian economy. The “simultaneous formation of the Provisional Government and the soviets” may have produced the notorious dvoevlastie in Petrograd and elsewhere, but it also represented an “opportunity to mediate profound social conflict.” The “institutionalization of labor interests” in the soviets may have posed from the start a “threat to the political strength of the regime,” yet it also presented an “opportunity to deflect civil war through negotiation,” if only the workers’ interests could be adequately accommodated within the parameters of the new political situation at Petrograd and Moscow. Unfortunately for the authorities, however, these initial auguries of political and socioeconomic reconciliation and subsequent collaboration were undone by the growing assertion of “class” interests on both sides of the industrialist/proletarian divide: From early April, government officials and moderate socialists alike had attempted to impose limits on the range of strikes and demonstrations. They sought to constrain “formal” protests within boundaries defined by judgments about what was economically feasible and what was considered necessary to meet the country’s basic goals: defense against the Germans (if not outright military victory), social stability, economic and 133 134

Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 365. Many similar examples of soldier-led peasant uprisings are detailed in Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization, passim. William G. Rosenberg and Diane Koenker, “The Limits of Formal Protest: Workers’ Activism and Social Polarization in Petrograd and Moscow, March to October, 1917,” American Historical Review 92 (1987): 296–326.

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social justice, and the orderly creation of democratic political institutions and a rule of law. Even stronger limits had emerged, however, from the impersonal forces of the market and the conscious and collective decisions by organized management to resist any expansion of the rights of workers in the workplace.135

And with the ever sharpening articulation of economic-class interests on both sides of this divide – most notably at Petrograd – came (ominously) a politicization of expectations in both industrial and proletarian quarters. Militant factory-owners and others looked increasingly to a “Man on a White Horse” to deliver them from labor’s escalating demands – hence, in part, the Kornilov affair in August – whereas workers, for their part, evinced a growing interest in the possibility of a purely socialist, Soviet regime. “Underlying all of this,” Rex Wade has written, “was the fundamental question of whether the future society would be based on private property or on socialism. . . . Social and political antagonisms became ever more tightly intertwined.”136 For months, workers had been calling on the moderate SRs and Mensheviks in power to take up a more active role on their behalf, while factory-owners and managers had been demanding government action to help keep workers “in line” and maintain current production quotas set in industry. But from June and, especially, August on, with forces on the Right in full retreat following on Kornilov’s humiliating failure, and with Kerensky and the other ministers still in a state of near-paralysis, diplomatically and politically speaking, workers turned with increasing exasperation to the demands of extremists for “all power to the soviets,” and to their more radical economic solutions involving, inevitably, “greater state control, even socialization, of industry.”137 John Keep has provided this account of some of the evolving dynamics within this increasingly revolutionary class: Chronologically, peaceful forms of protest gave way to more violent and aggressive actions as the year wore on; geographically, the main focal points of unrest were Petrograd and the Northwest, then Moscow and the Central Industrial region; sociologically, the movement was led by workers in larger factories, who were most amenable to organization for militant ends, while those employed in transport, distribution, clerical or service occupations tended to be more modest in their demands. . . . Workers in metallurgical plants fulfilling defense contracts, who were one of the best-paid groups in industry, assumed a vanguard role. The explanation for this lies in their eagerness to 135

136 137

Ibid., pp. 325–26. See also, on these issues, Koenker and Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); William Rosenberg, “The Problem of Market Relations and the State in Revolutionary Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (1994): 356–86; and Paul Flenley, “Indus trial Relations and the Economic Crisis of 1917,” Revolutionary Russia 4 (1991): 184–209. Wade, Russian Revolution, pp. 193–94. Ibid., pp. 186–94. For a careful discussion of how these processes worked themselves out in Moscow, see also Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).

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renounce their close involvement in what seemed to them a disastrous and endless war.138

So much of this, then, comes back once again to the government’s failure to extricate Russia from the World War! Organizationally speaking, these workers, progressively more impatient and at the same time more self-confident, used local soviets, trade union committees and above all factory committees to seize control of their workplaces, often forcibly evicting their hated managers, foremen, and technicians.139 Come the fall, the Bolsheviks would utilize their growing influence in such institutions – as well as in Red Guards and militia units – to consolidate their proletarian support in Petrograd, Moscow, and elsewhere as they moved toward the seizure of state power.140 Meanwhile, a parallel process of radicalization was taking place on an even huger scale in rural Russia. Here, “the collapse of the old authorities, and the new government’s inability to create a viable new administrative structure in their place, left a vacuum which the peasants themselves, or at least those who spoke in their name, made haste to fill.” John L. H. Keep has suggested the measures whose expedited implementation in the countryside might have been able to stave off or at least temporarily contain widespread rural disorder in the summer and fall of 1917: First, the creation of a firm, orderly and coherent structure of authority extending downwards to the district level; second, timely action by such official agencies to eliminate the worst abuses in those regions where social tensions were most acute (for instance, fixing minimum wage rates and rent ceilings according to a geographically differentiated tariff); third, an explicit commitment to pay fair compensation from state funds to those who could prove in court that they had been seriously harmed by these measures; fourth, a sizeable injection of capital into agricultural development.141

All too obviously, however, the endless war interfered with the application of all of these measures, ensuring that, as the nation’s economic productivity continued to spiral downwards, no resources (and no educated personnel) could be spared for rural policing, distributive justice, and developmental projects. The peasants, in effect, were left to themselves: the government’s hierarchies of “land committees” and “supply committees” at the national, provincial, 138 139

140

141

Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization, pp. 68–69. See, in this connection: Steve Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. pp. 65–68, 80–98, and 139–67; and Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization, chapters 6–11. On the workers in the Red Guards and militia organizations, refer again to Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias, esp. pp. 80–114. On the Bolsheviks’ growing influence in the factories in late 1917, see also: Paul H. Avrich, “The Bolshevik Revolution and Workers’ Control in Russian Industry,” Slavic Review 22 (1963): 47–63; and David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1984). Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization, pp. 155, 170–71.

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county, and district levels, set up (as we have seen) in early 1917 to deal with land-redistribution and food issues, became increasingly impotent as the year wore on – or were simply co-opted by local peasants for their own, classoriented purposes.142 There were two developments at the core of the rapidly intensifying peasant revolution in 1917 Russia, and they both reacted back on the Provisional Government at Petrograd in ways that, by undercutting it, helped to pave the way for the Bolshevik coup in October. First, the muzhiki, in defiance of government (and, obviously, large-landowner) wishes, carried out at an everincreasing tempo a redistribution of the properties, lands, and forests that they (and their ancestors) had been coveting for generations. Teodor Shanin has described some of the modalities of this rural movement: Practice had varied greatly over methods of dividing up land between peasants. In some areas, all the land (including peasant allotments of communal land) had been pooled and then equally divided in accordance with the number of consumers per household – in the language of Russian peasant millenarianism, a ‘black redistribution.’ In other areas, peasant holdings had remained untouched and only non-peasant land had been divided up, special attention being given to landless families. . . . Peasants’ privately owned land had sometimes been expropriated in the same way as non-peasant land, but in other cases such land had been treated in the same way as allotments of commune land and, possibly, left in the possession of its owners.143

In thus compassing a new distribution of lands, the peasant communes, applying the old saying “ours was the lord – ours is the land” to deadly effect, chased gentry and other non-peasant elements from the countryside and reaffirmed, strikingly, their autonomy and solidarity. Moreover, the peasants had ways of making their repartitional efforts stick: in 1917, for instance, they frequently infiltrated the so-called “land committees” devised by the Provisional Government to moderate the land revolution and turned them to their own autonomous purposes; in 1918, they took advantage similarly of Left SRand Bolshevik-inspired soviets and other organizations. As the latest research in this area has demonstrated time and time again, the peasants were hardly the “anarchists” conventionally portrayed in accounts of their rural movements: they adapted the institutions (and language) of urban-based governmental authorities to their own unique purposes.144 Yet in doing so they were not only defying the dictates of SR and Menshevik leaders at Petrograd; they 142 143 144

See ibid., Part III, for an especially thorough discussion of these issues. Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia 1910–1925 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 150–51. See, in this connection: Boris Kolonitskii, “Antibourgeois Propaganda and Anti-‘Burzhui’ Consciousness in 1917,” Russian Review 53 (1994): 183–96; Orlando Figes, “The Russian Revolution of 1917 and Its Language in the Village,” Russian Review 56 (1997): 323–45; and the essays by Orlando Figes and others in Esther Kingston Mann and Timothy Mixter, eds., Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).

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were also removing, at one fell swoop, the government’s pillar of gentry support in the countryside, and strengthening the incentive of peasant-soldiers and peasant-sailors to desert the armed forces for their native, land-repartitioning villages. Not surprisingly, the dramatic and often violent scenes of peasant expropriations of isolated and powerless gentry have indelibly impressed historians; yet, as Keep and other scholars have rightly reminded us, the revolutionary process in the Russian countryside entailed more than just the elimination of private landed property. “Relatively little attention has been paid,” Keep has pointed out, “to other aspects of the rural scene, and in particular to the reaction by agricultural producers to the collapse of the national market.” This, then, was the other crucial development at the core of the intensifying peasant revolution in Russia in 1917: . . . this was as important in the short term as expropriation of the landowners was in the long term. Agrarian violence changed the social structure of the countryside; the peasants’ refusal to hand over their produce to official purchasing organizations helped to disrupt the economy. By curtailing food supplies to the towns and to the army it aggravated the social crisis and indirectly helped to bring down the Provisional Government.145

More than ever before in modern Russia, the bulk of the harvest – possibly as much as five-sixths of it – remained on the farm, where it helped to sustain not only millions of rural folk but also an inundation of townspeople and members of the armed forces returning (so to speak) to their roots. In such an exchange, of course, the price of essential commodities was effectively dictated by the producer (i.e. the peasant) to the consumer in the factories and mills, in the army and navy, of besieged Russia.146 In the larger context of Russian economic development, of course, what this meant was that the liberal and moderate socialist leaders in the summer and early autumn of 1917 were (like their ill-starred tsarist predecessors) falling afoul of the structural “disconnect” between the urban/consuming and rural/producing economies. This structural weakness was posing for them, as it had for their immediate precursors in government (and, for that matter, as it would also for their Leninist and Stalinist successors) the conundrum of how to square the worker’s and soldier’s need for affordable food and other agricultural products with the peasant’s need both for industrial goods and for profit margins on his rural produce. This dilemma, apparently insoluble in the emergency conditions of 1917 at Petrograd and 145 146

Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization, p. 172. Ibid., p. 185. The provincial perspective in all of this can be seen in several excellent local studies: see, for example, Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Donald J. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986); and Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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other Russian metropoles, would help to sink Kerensky, Tereshchenko and Company in October much as it had helped to doom Nicholas II and his ministers in February.147 There is, finally, a comparative aspect to the “peasant problem” in 1917 Russia that we, thinking as comparativists, must briefly address. As we saw earlier, the critical difference between the abolition of wardship and the Court of Wards in revolutionary England and the abolition of the last remnants of seigneurialism in revolutionary France lay in the fact that, in the former situation, it was generally well-off gentry who gained at the expense of increasingly insecure “peasant” copy-holders, whereas in the latter situation, it was in the main peasant propri´etaires who benefited at the expense of their erstwhile lords. But what primary distinction are we to draw now between peasant destinies in the French Revolution and the fortunes of rural plebeians in the Russian Revolution? It is likely obvious by now to the reader that if, in the French case, peasant liberation from the “feudal” dues and services of the past did not serve as prologue to a wholesale peasant dispossession of “gentry” as such, in the Russian case the gentry was swallowed up in the deluge of peasant upheaval. Why should this have been the case? Here, two “structuralist” points made by Theda Skocpol in her landmark comparative analysis of the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions come to mind. First, an exogenous fact: the “society-wide political crisis” against the backdrop of which the peasant revolution occurred in Russia was more acute, much more violent than that of the 1790s in France. Whereas, in France, the preexisting royal administration and army were in some measure preserved even if thoroughly revamped in the revolutionary era, in Russia a much more fundamental disruption or actual disintegration of comparable institutions occurred due to the trauma of the World War. “Not only was that breakup essential to the success of the Russian peasant revolution,” Skocpol has observed. It also “influenced the rapidity and the shape of the peasant accomplishments. For much of the intravillage politics of rural Russia in 1917 took the form of younger men, with guns and ideas brought home from their wartime military experience, challenging the authority and caution of the older traditional leaders of the mir, who were also often heads of patriarchal extended families. The result was almost certainly to push the land revolution to its conclusion sooner and more violently.” Second, an endogenous fact: from the very beginning, the peasant commune in Russia (mir, obshchina) manifested a “collective interest . . . in expanding its landholdings” and a “deemphasis of private 147

The abject inadequacy of the moderate SRs and Mensheviks in the 1917 crisis looms large in the following studies: Oliver H. Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958); John D. Basil, The Mensheviks in the Revolution of 1917 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983); and Ziva Galili, The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution: Social Realities and Political Strategies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).

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property rights” that, especially in the context of collapsing state-elitist controls ´ in 1917–18, boded very ill indeed for the gentry. Whereas, in France, peasant communities tended to fall apart “in the face of the conflicting interests of richer and poorer peasants over private property rights” even at the zenith of revolution in the 1790s, and left nobles as landowners generally unmolested, the peasant commune in revolutionary Russia (even allowing for local variations) swept the gentry aside in its unstoppable march toward an all-inclusive, egalitarian land settlement.148 To these two valuable “structuralist” insights, however, we would add a third point, drawn from the “voluntarist” realm of political culture. There was, in the striking ferocity of peasant attacks on the Russian gentry, and their families, lands, and belongings, a personal element of “payback,” of revenge for the exploitative rural class relations, the gentry contempt and peasant abasement of the past. In that incident in the village of Bor Polianshchina in Saratov province that we encountered earlier, we learn, Prince V. V. Saburov had been hacked to death “as a bloody retribution for the role his son had played as the local land captain in 1906, when twelve peasant rebels had been hanged in the village before their screaming wives and children.”149 Whatever his government’s public stance on the imperative need to defend the property rights of country squires, in private Prince Lvov very candidly designated the 1917 revolution as the “revenge of the serfs.” “If only Russia had been blessed with a real landed aristocracy, like that in England, which had the human decency to treat the peasants as people rather than as dogs,” Lvov is supposed to have lamented to several of his ministers. “Then perhaps things might have been different.”150 Perhaps so; but it was now too late. Whereas, in the civil war England of the 1640s the “peasant question” in its modern form hardly even arose, and whereas, in the more revolutionary France of 1792–93, the peasants were freed from the shackles of seigneurialism but generally spared the noblesse as proprietors, in the Russia of 1917 (and 1918) the peasant upheaval was elemental, all-conquering, and leveling in its societal impact. For about ten years, the long-oppressed muzhik became, so to speak, the rural “tsar” in the world’s largest country. Three outstanding impressions seem to emerge from this comparative analysis of intensifying revolution in England, France, and Russia. First, the sheer acceleration of the pace of radicalization, as we progress from one revolutionary situation to the next, testifies to the need for a primarily “structuralist” mode of explanation insofar as that implies a concentration on the tightening nexus between exogenous (i.e., geopolitical) and endogenous (i.e., sociopolitical) pressures on, and challenges to, new governance in these successive situations. Here, the dynamic relationships between war and domestic 148 149 150

Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, pp. 136–40. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 365. Cited in Ibid.

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competitive elitist politics, and between the internal politics of war and the pol´ itics of social advocacy, are particularly revealing. Second, however, the persistence into these revolutionary eras of “political-cultural” tendencies inherited from the past – for instance, the “mirror-imaged,” conspiratorial anxieties of Puritans and Anglicans in England, the anti-Austrian and anti-English xenophobia of politicians and ordinary folk in France, and the anti-German xenophobia and murderous class hatreds in Russia – argues at the same time, and powerfully so, for a “voluntarist” sensitivity to issues of culture, “mentalities,” and personal agency. Third, and finally, Chapter 4 leaves us with a visceral sense of impending tragedy in all three cases of revolution – the tragedy, that is, of popular aspirations and expectations about to be indulged briefly, to be sure, but then ultimately to be dashed upon the jagged reefs of harsh new Terrorist and post-Terrorist realities fashioned by revolutionary statesmen responsible for reconsolidating administrative structures and for “modernizing” public policies, both international and domestic, in these three countries.

5 Revolutionary Climacterics

In The Anatomy of Revolution, Crane Brinton accounted for the climactic “Reigns of Terror and Virtue” in his designated revolutions by discovering in all of them “the same set of variables, differently combined and mixed with all sorts of contingent factors to produce the specific situations the narrative historian of these revolutions tends to regard as unique.” These variables, although “all woven together in a complicated pattern of reality,” appeared to Brinton “not to be related one to another in any important one-way causal relationship.” Indeed, they seemed “more or less like the independent variables of the mathematician, though it is inconceivable that they should be strictly independent.”1 This pioneering comparative analyst of the great European revolutions then proceeded to isolate and discuss what he regarded as seven especially salient factors in this “set of variables:” namely, the “habit of violence” of a country “conditioned” by its history “to expect the unexpected;” the “pressure of a foreign and civil war;” an “acute economic crisis;” a “class struggle” that manifested itself in one fashion or another; a “religious” or ideological belief system, whether spiritual or secular in nature; the “jamming” of untested and inefficient government machinery in the hands of impatient, authoritarian protagonists; and, finally, the increasingly murderous competition for power waged by these rather extraordinary individuals. In all of this (and in keeping with much of the sociological writing of his generation), Brinton repeatedly played up the notion of elements “in constant interaction one with another, a change in one effecting complex corresponding changes in all the others, and hence in the total situation.”2

1 2

Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution, p. 198. Review, in general, chapter 7, “Reigns of Terror and Virtue.” Ibid., p. 203.

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While wondering (inevitably) whether Brinton, writing today rather than in the 1930s, would treat this subject at all differently, we shall deal with the most “advanced,” most perilous phases of the English, French, and Russian Revolutions against our by now familiar backdrop of a post-Marxian historiography marked by the tug-and-pull between “state-centered,” structuralist interpretations and the “political-cultural” or post-structuralist “turn.” To do so, it is arguable, requires that we advance, and substantiate as persuasively as possible, three cardinal assertions. First, the resort to state-sanctioned “terror” in revolutionary France, Russia, and England, if reflecting to some degree cultural and psychological traits inherited from the respective anciens r´egimes, responded above all to circumstances – that is, to dialectically interrelated foreign and internal threats to the governments controlled, for however cursory or prolonged periods, by Jacobins in France, Bolsheviks in Russia, and military/ civilian Independents in England.3 Second, the resort to extreme intimidation symbolized in the three countries by the guillotine, firing squad, and block, which (even in the Russian case) tended to wax and eventually wane with events, should not be allowed to overshadow the less dramatic but over the long haul more fundamental centralization and bureaucratization of state power that notably accompanied radical revolution in Russia but also made its appearance in Robespierrist France and even in Cromwellian England. Third, the revolutionary climacterics in England, France, and Russia unavoidably left in their wake legions of disillusioned citizens, to some extent on the Right but most poignantly on the Left – from embittered Levellers and “saints” in England to defiant enrag´es and H´ebertists in France to “Left” SRs and Bolsheviks and soldiers, sailors, workers, and peasants in Russia. This led, in all three cases, to the supreme (and, probably, inescapable) irony of ruptures between revolutionary rulers and ultraradical followers whose aspirations and energies those rulers had first to accommodate yet in the end to suppress. The Foreign and Domestic Dialectics of “Terror” In discussing the statistics, incidence, and, ultimately, roots of “terror” in our three cases of revolution, we might start most logically with France, then move on to Russia, and, finally, cast an analytical glance back at England. France seems to be a natural starting point, both because the French more or less “invented” the modern language of “terror” by politicizing the word itself and because the Jacobin Terror as a government-sponsored policy has been most thoroughly and satisfactorily researched and quantified by historians. Since the Leninists in Russia so obviously modeled much of their behavior on what 3

For a recent discussion of the relative merits of “circumstantial” and “ideological” interpretations of Terror (especially in connection with events in France and Russia), see Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 96–99.

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their predecessors in France had done before them, and yet at the same time likely exceeded the Jacobins in the extremes of violence to which they were willing (or driven) to go, the Red Terror of 1918 and beyond should certainly be our next port of call. Finally, we need to determine to what extent we can find, in revolutionary England, a pattern of state-sanctioned violence that in retrospect may be seen as anticipating – however faintly – the Jacobin Terror in revolutionary France and the Red Terror in revolutionary Russia. The Jacobin Terror, Richard T. Bienvenu has maintained, began in earnest only on September 5, 1793, when the embattled National Convention, reacting to circumstances, declared “that punishment and coercion were to be the sole policy of the government towards its enemies.” It is probably correct to describe this declaration, as Bienvenu does, as “the psychological turning point in the evolution of the Terror,” since, as he remarks, it “signaled the Convention’s determination to employ ruthlessly instruments of repression that had already been created during the spring and summer.”4 There is indeed a suggestive “time lag” between the creation of most of those “instruments of repression” and their actual utilization on a widespread, institutionalized basis in the besieged Republic. As early as March 10, 1793, for example, the Convention had created the Revolutionary Tribunal at Paris to punish crimes against the Revolution. Just nine days later came one of the foundation stones of the future Terror in the form of a statute outlawing “rebels” who, if captured under arms, were to be executed by military commissions in the field within 24 hours. Two days later, the Law of March 21 legalized the revolutionary or “surveillance” committees (comit´es de surveillance) that had been springing up spontaneously at Paris and in the provinces, ordered that more such committees be established, and explicitly empowered them to arrest and detain “suspects.” April saw the creation of the soon-to-be-notorious Committee of Public Safety (likely modeled, at a distance, on that founded at London early in the English Revolution), as well as passage (on the 23rd) of a decree subjecting refractory priests to mandatory deportation and, if they returned to France, to death. In May came the Maximum (price ceiling) on grain. Over the summer, “hoarding commissioners” (commissaires aux accaparements) were licensed to hunt down those suspected of illegally stockpiling cereals and other items of premi`ere n´ecessit´e.5 Yet, although most of these (and other) measures were in place before the journ´ees of May 31–June 2, it took the passage of three more months – and the great sans-culotte insurrection of September 5 at Paris – to jolt the Jacobins, 4

5

See Richard T. Bienvenu’s article on “Terror” in Samuel F. Scott and Barry Rothaus, eds., Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 1789–1799 (Westwood, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 942–46. Bienvenu chronicles the creation – well before September 1793 – of much of the machinery of what would become the revolutionary government’s terrorist campaign of late 1793 and 1794. On all these measures, see also Hampson, A Social History of the French Revolution, pp. 168–69.

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now securely ensconced in power, into the implementation of Terror on a national scale. “Perhaps it is only fair to conclude,” Donald Greer has written in his renowned statistical study of the Terror, “that the Convention, after having adopted terrorism as an expedient in the spring of 1793, hesitated to make it a permanent policy until conciliation had been tried and failed – until the military disasters of the summer, combined with the menacing agitation of the Parisian sans-culottes, left no other alternative.”6 And certainly Greer’s classic description of the temporal incidence of the Terror – defined as a campaign of officially sanctioned death sentences – can leave no doubt concerning a telling “time lag” between the erection of the machinery of “terror” and the actual unleashing of that dread machinery on recalcitrant citizens in the infant Republic: The curve of executions, beginning in March, 1793, rises to over 200 in April, sinks to less than 100 in May, June, and July, and reaches its nadir in August. In September, October, and November the curve rises steadily, and shoots upward in December, reaching a peak in January, 1794, with the huge total of 3,517 death sentences, 25% of the number tabulated. Our line falls abruptly in February, continues to decline, though less sharply, in March, rises again in April, sinks in May, and then ascends through June to 1397 executions in July, the highest point reached since January.7

The rising tide of executions in the autumn of 1793 and early winter of 1793– 94, Greer concluded accurately enough, heralded in its own way “the resurgence of the Republic.” And, it was largely true, that “resurgence” was the French response to a dialectic of foreign and domestic challenges to Paris that achieved its apogee in the late summer and fall of 1793. On the international front, Vienna and London, aided by other members of what by now was the “First Coalition,” appeared to be closing in on the revolutionaries. Certainly for Austrian Foreign Minister Franz Maria von Thugut, warring in 1793 against revolutionary France meant coldly pursuing Habsburg state interests, dealing in the longstanding currency of territorial borders, subject populations, and state resources and revenues. In Baron Thugut’s reckoning, the eighteenth century’s diplomatic wisdom still seemed to apply: one state’s inordinately large acquisition of lands and/or resources required that other major states be proportionally rewarded. Hence, Thugut’s efforts, in talks pursued with British diplomats, to balance Russian and Prussian gains achieved recently at hapless Poland’s expense by designating lands (in eastern France, just possibly, or, more likely, 6 7

Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), p. 114. Ibid., pp. 111–12. For some scholarly (but not very devastating) critiques of Greer’s work, see: Richard Louie, “The Incidence of the Terror: A Critique of a Statistical Interpretation,” French Historical Studies 3 (1964): 379–89; and Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, “The Incidence of the Terror: Some Lessons for Quantitative History,” Journal of Social History 9 (1975): 193–218.

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in Poland) that might go to Austria in the event of victory in the West. And victory over Paris seemed definitely within Vienna’s grasp in 1793. In August, in fact, Austria’s seasoned diplomat Florimund Mercy-Argenteau argued that the time had come for a final assault on France, as the Republic’s government, economy, and armies had been so gravely weakened. In hindsight, Karl Roider has held, August 1793 was the month in which “Austria was closer to defeating revolutionary France than it would ever be again during Thugut’s tenure as foreign minister.”8 If true, this was in large part because Vienna was concerting its effort against the French with Britain. In August 1793, the key Mediterranean port of Toulon fell to the British; and Prime Minister William Pitt’s naval forces now were also threatening the French Republic’s other coasts. At London, as at Vienna, war was a policy grounded in hard-nosed considerations of national interest. It is important to emphasize that it was the decision at Paris to “revolutionize” the Low Countries, much more than the overthrow of the monarchy or atrocities like the September Massacres of 1792, that had moved Pitt’s government from a neutral stance to advocacy of military intervention. The British regarded the Low Countries as the key to their security, not only on the Continent but also on the sea routes to India – for did not the Dutch (likely soon to be overrun by the French) have a geostrategic foothold at the Cape of Good Hope and in Ceylon?9 Moreover, the British (like the Austrians, for that matter) tended to view the French threat in general ideological as well as specifically strategic terms. As one British specialist has somberly observed, the “conflation of the threat posed by the traditional enemy with a sense that British society and religion were under challenge” was powerful indeed.10 For the leaders of France’s Convention, of course, it was the coordinated campaign of Vienna and London that posed the all-absorbing threat; and this threat was all the more urgent, all the more intimidating in that by the late summer and autumn of 1793 it seemed also to be catching up domestic insurrection in its toils. In Normandy and Brittany to the northwest, in the Vendee ´ to the west, and in many provincial regions of the South wracked by “federalism,” the Republic’s leaders felt that they were fending off a “counterrevolutionary” assault encouraged and in some measure abetted by the First Coalition powers. Clearly, in all these peripheral regions, the fundamental and irreducible tension was that between the war-related demands of an 8

9 10

Karl A. Roider, Jr., Baron Thugut and Austria’s Response to the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 131–35. On Austria’s vulnerability vis-`a-vis Russia and Prussia in this period, consult also Geoffrey Bruun, “The Balance of Power during the Wars, 1793–1814,” in The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 9: War and Peace in an Age of Upheaval, 1793–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 250–74. On these calculations at London, refer to Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, p. 138. Jeremy Black, British Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolutions, 1783–1793 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 470.

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increasingly intrusive, impersonal, and radical central government, on the one hand, and local values, interests, and sensibilities, on the other. The antigovernment violence in rural Brittany known as chouannerie, two specialists on the subject have assured us, resulted from “traumatic” disruptions in the “balance of power” inside individual communities caused by intrusive government agents and their local allies. The chouans could perceive all too clearly that the Revolution spelled an end to the old regime’s relative tolerance of selfgovernment in local affairs and naturally tried to turn the “moral unity of the community” against all proponents of integration into national revolutionary politics.11 In a very real sense, this kind of “political/sociological” interpretation of antigovernment (and, hence, “counterrevolutionary”) agitation could be extended to the Vendee ´ region immediately south of the Loire, as well as to the Massif Central and other areas in the South. “It hardly needs repeating,” one historian has opined, that “the Revolution was . . . chiefly a centralizing and modernizing phenomenon centered in the towns; its consequences were most traumatic in the countryside.”12 For another scholar, the “federalist” revolt in southern cities like Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseilles, and Toulon was “a defense of regional or departmental autonomy,” but also, from a more extended point of view, “an integral part of the debate over sovereignty that had been waged over the past three years at both the national and local levels.”13 Yet if the general question in these restive areas of provincial France was one of rallying to or rejecting the disputed banner of unprecedented governmental interference in people’s daily lives, the specific issue providing the cutting edge to the debate (because it directly concerned by late 1793 the very survival of the Revolution) was the issue of war. “In practical terms,” P. M. Jones has written, “it was the war emergency consequent on the formation of the First Coalition during the spring of 1793 that brought the Terror to every peasant’s doorstep.” The decree of February 24 summoning 300,000 men to the colors was followed up by the celebrated lev´ee en masse of August: one recruitment drive gave way to another, and parliamentary commissaires and (eventually) repr´esentants en mission used the opportunity presented to “give provincials an elementary lesson in republican politics.” This turned out in many cases 11 12

13

See T. J. A. LeGoff and D. M. G. Sutherland, “The Revolution and the Rural Community in Eighteenth-Century Brittany,” Past and Present 62 (1974): 96–119. Harvey Mitchell, “Resistance to the Revolution in Western France,” Past and Present 63 (1974): 122. See also, by the same author, “The Vendee ´ and Counterrevolution: A Review Essay,” French Historical Studies (1968): 405–29. Paul Hanson, The Jacobin Republic Under Fire: The Federalist Revolt in the French Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 244. See also, on this subject, Bill Edmonds, “Federalism and Urban Revolt in France in 1793,” Journal of Modern History 55 (1983): 22–53. Predictably, historians such as Franc¸ois Furet and Mona Ozouf tend to see the federalist revolt (like the Terror itself) in more ideological terms. See their relevant articles in Franc¸ois Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989).

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to be too much for rustic Frenchmen, whose accumulating grievances against Paris overflowed when they had to face the hateful prospect of being dragooned into combat against other Europeans. “In Burgundy, in the Massif Central, in parts of the South West, in Brittany, and more generally throughout the West,” Jones has observed, “a mood of exasperation prevailed. It was as though the issue of whether or not to fight for the republic had brought to the boil a host of simmering discontents.” When the youths of Beaune and Arnay-sur-Arroux, of Autun and Dijon, and of hundreds of other communities cried out that those profiting most handsomely from the Revolution – Jacobin clubbists, public officials, buyers of biens nationaux – should be the first to march to the frontiers, they were personalizing the geopolitical issues that, in deadly combination with provincial opposition to other policies dictated at Paris, furnish the most important explanatory key to the Terror of 1793–94.14 Most arrestingly symptomatic of this dialectic between military and domestic affairs was the civil war that blew up in the Vendee ´ in 1793. If Arno Mayer’s recent review of the literature on the topic led him at one point to state that “it is not unreasonable to assume that the religious element was central” to this sanguinary conflict’s “synchretic driving force,” he was moved to conclude almost immediately thereafter that “it was the implementation of the military draft which unexpectedly triggered the Vendee ´ uprising.”15 We would expect, from all of this, to rediscover in Greer’s analysis a geographical as well as a temporal incidence of terrorist executions during 1793–94 yielding a primarily circumstantial explanation of the Jacobin Terror – and in doing so we would not err. “In the light of numbers of victims,” we are assured, “Paris is dwarfed by the provinces; and in the provinces the principal swath of the Terror described a crude semicircle, beginning in the upper Rhone ˆ Valley, sweeping through southern France, and swinging to a concluding arc in the West.” Only about 16 percent of the death sentences were rendered in the capital; 84 percent were recorded in provincial France. Greer’s conclusions are inescapable – and, in the terms of our analysis, telling: In summary, it is clear that the Terror barely brushed those departements which mani´ fested little or no opposition to the Republic or had no traffic with the foreign enemy. On endangered frontiers and in the departements of local disturbances, the repres´ sion was more severe, and it became harsh on the fringe of the civil war areas in the departements where serious insurrections occurred. In the civil war regions themselves, ´ the Terror wrote its record in blood and reached a peak of severity where the irruption of counter-revolution was most violent.16

14 15

16

Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution, pp. 207, 223–24. Mayer, The Furies, p. 329. Three outstanding studies of the Vendee ´ are: Charles Tilly, The Vend´ee (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); Paul Bois, Paysans de l’Ouest (Paris: Flammerion, 1971); and Jean-Clement Martin, La Vend´ee et la France (Paris: Seuil, ´ 1987). See Greer, The Incidence of the Terror, ch. 3, esp. pp. 38–70, for all of this information.

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Another way of putting this: 52 percent of the Terror’s executions took place in the thirteen departments of the West, and 19 percent in those of the Rhone ˆ Valley in the Southeast. Most of the remaining provincial executions occurred in other peripheral regions (the extreme South, menaced by Spain, and the critical northeastern frontier – the Nord, the Pas-de-Calais – threatened by the Austrians). Concentration on the social incidence of the Terror only reinforces here our application of a th`ese des circonstances, since, in Greer’s words, “it is quite clear that the social distribution of the victims varied from region to region, even from departement to departement, according to the ´ ´ social texture of the counter-revolution.” The Republic, that is to say, was “merciless” toward its enemies, especially its enemies-in-arms, “whether those enemies were Vendeen peasants, Lyonnais stevedores, or the most exalted ´ aristocrats.”17 The extent to which Donald Greer’s analysis, published back in 1935, has stood the test of time, is really quite remarkable: indeed, Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, although venturing some methodological criticisms of Greer’s study in 1975, basically reaffirmed his primary stress on circumstances as motivating the Terror of 1793–94, and ironically enough saved their harshest comments, not for Greer, but rather for a statistical commentary on The Incidence of the Terror (developed by Richard Louie), which had come out in 1964!18 It is likewise noteworthy that the latest scholarship has revealed the primacy of circumstances during 1793–94 in all citadels of urban France, whether of “federalist” inclination or not. As early as May 1793, those Bordelais who were still thinking of resisting the desires of Paris got wind of unnerving rumors of Spanish troops crossing into France and menacing the town of Bayonne. Moreover, panic spread in the department of the Gironde over reports “that 40,000 English troops had disembarked at La Teste on the Bassin d’Arcachon.” Small wonder, perhaps, that in the end Bordeaux remained “patriotic.”19 At Marseilles, we learn unequivocally, the Terror “was principally a means of national defense – the immense military effort of a city which was decidedly anti-militaristic.” The elite citizenry there had, in late 1793, to adopt “a more ´ realistic assessment of their interests than they had shown in their involvement in the federalist revolt – interests which hardly would be served by the English at Toulon or the Prussians at Paris.”20 The Committee of Public Safety’s draconian treatment of ex-federalists at Lyon during the period from October 1793 to July 1794 may have reflected in part Parisian perceptions of Lyonnais “corruption” (and, just possibly, resentment over a rival city’s prosperity?); but the Committee’s paramount concern, Bill Edmonds has insisted, “was to deter further revolt at a time of continuing military crisis.”21 At Toulouse, 17 18 19 20 21

Ibid., esp. pp. 105–10, on the social incidence of the Terror. Refer again to Shapiro and Markoff, “The Incidence of the Terror,” pp. 193–218. Forrest, Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux, pp. 113–14. Scott, Terror and Repression in Revolutionary Marseilles, pp. 344–45. Edmonds, Jacobinism and the Revolt of Lyon, pp. 282–83.

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meanwhile, the progress of the Revolution through the Terror “followed the progress of French arms in the Pyrenees.” The city’s comit´e de surveillance had been created in March principally “to spur on the recruiting drive;” the guillotine was established there securely only “after the anti-conscription riots of September 1793 had frightened the municipal authorities into repressive action.” The eventual relaxation of the Terror at Toulouse – as just about everywhere else – responded directly to the improved military situation in 1794.22 It would seem impossible, then, to deny a primarily circumstantial interpretation of the Jacobin Terror. Yet, just as clearly, circumstances were not everything. Greer himself, in the 1930s, had appreciated this fact, writing, in part, that the “question of circumstantial motivation” became for the historian “far more complex” when he/she had to account for Terror in the spring and summer of 1794, and conceding that economic pressures, and the psychology of overworked, idealistic leaders – “tense, adamant, suspicious” and “apprehensive” as they were – had also to figure in any fully satisfactory explanation of the Terror.23 More recently, specialists like Franc¸ois Furet and others, exemplifying the “linguistic” or political-cultural “turn” in French revolutionary historiography, have expressed new reservations about the th`ese des circonstances as applied to the Terror of 1793–94. Furet had myriad opportunities to express those reservations during the Bicentennial celebrations in 1989. In an article he contributed to his own coedited Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, for instance, Furet argued (among other things) that the actual chronology of events during 1793 made the causal linkage traditionally posited between national emergency and official recourse to Terror largely untenable.24 Instead, he contended, the Jacobin Terror was more ideological than circumstantial in nature, and referred back, fundamentally, to the political culture and certain social practices (dysfunctions, actually) of the ancien r´egime. The Revolution, inheriting as it did the “absolute sovereignty of the king,” effectively converted it into popular sovereignty. “In the end,” Furet wrote, “the Revolution put the people in the place of the king. . . . Wholly obsessed with legitimacy, . . . the Revolution was unwilling to set limits to public authority. It had lived since 1789 on the idea of a new absolute – and indivisible – sovereignty, which excluded pluralism of representation because it assumed the unity of the nation. Since that unity did not exist – and Girondin federalism showed that factions continued to plot in the shadows – the function of the Terror . . . was invariably to establish it.” Furet granted a 22 23 24

Lyons, Revolution in Toulouse, pp. 131–33. See again Greer, The Incidence of the Terror, esp. pp. 115–28. See Furet, “Terror,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, pp. 146–50. He returned to the attack at the 1989 sessions of the American Historical Association. Refer, once again, to “Franc¸ois Furet’s Interpretation of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 16 (1990): 777–802.

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“sociological” dimension to the Terror only in the sense that its violence perpetuated in a more lethal form the “harshness” of the old regime’s caste and “estate” jealousies: in this limited sense, the Terror “may have stemmed from an egalitarian fanaticism born of an inegalitarian pathology in the old society.” Furet’s rendering of the Terror, affirming as it does the primacy of cultural rather than circumstantial characteristics, has been extremely influential, if (unavoidably) controversial. From our analytic perspective of “modified structuralism,” it is easy enough to discover shortcomings in Furet’s argument even while appreciating its originality. First, Furet’s contention (at one point) that according to the th`ese des circonstances the Terror was “merely” the product of events is to create something of a straw man: sociologists from Greer to Louie, Shapiro, and Markoff (not to mention a legion of historians) have never depicted the executions of the period extending from March 1793 to July 1794 as stemming exclusively from the Republic’s perilous international and domestic situation. Second, Furet’s remark (at another point) that “the risks for the Revolution were greatest at the beginning and in the middle of the summer of 1793” would certainly be regarded by diplomatic historians of the period (Blanning and Black, Bruun, Kaiser, and Roider, etc.) as seriously understating the dangers confronted by revolutionary France well into the early autumn of 1793. In addition (in connection with this latter point), there is the fact that the revolutionary leaders’ perception of the geostrategic and internal problems with which they had to deal in the summer of 1793 could not match today’s wisdom of hindsight: it would be a long time before they could be altogether assured of success on either the external or the domestic front.25 Finally – and even more basically – we would have to pose, in reacting to this Furetist analysis, the simple but ineludible question: why, if the Terror was the foreordained legacy of both old regime and early revolutionary political culture, did France’s leaders wait until, specifically, the autumn of 1793 to proclaim terror as “the order of the day”? Obviously, the horrific Great Terror of June–July 1794, which accounted for about half of all executions carried out at Paris from March 1793 to July 1794, and for roughly 8 percent of all Terror-related executions throughout the Republic, remains problematic today even for those historians inclined to reject largely ideological/cultural interpretations of this recourse to state-sanctioned violence. Yet, even here, Greer had at least a partial explanation ready for his readers back in the 1930s: It is easier to begin than to end repressive regimes, and momentum alone is quite sufficient to account for the continuation of this particular regime during the early summer of 1794. For more than a year the Republic had fought to survive, and this struggle, carried on in the face of what often seemed overwhelming odds, had patterned the 25

See, on this point, the recent observations of David Andress, in The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), esp. pp. 195–98.

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psychology of the republicans who governed France. Obliged to fend against multiple attacks, they had unleashed the Terror as a means of defense. They believed that the Republic’s survival was the Terror’s justification. Their minds were steeped in the psychology of terrorism. It would be too much to expect these men suddenly to become sane, moderate statesmen when the crisis had passed.

It “required,” for such men, “the shock of Thermidor to end an anachronism.”26 Yet, as Greer also reminded his readers at another point in his study, fully 36 percent of all death sentences handed down during the final two months of the Terror “were rendered by tribunals or commissions sitting at Laval, Arras, Cambrai, Orange, Nˆımes, and Bordeaux” – that is, in peripheral regions of France where, as late as June–July 1794, circumstantial considerations (meaning, above all, persisting fears of Allied military invasion, federalist sabotage, and royalism) still counted for much.27 Yet to concede, in Donald Greer’s manner, that by the summer of 1794, the minds of revolutionaries like Maximilien Robespierre were “steeped in the psychology of terrorism” is, in a way, to view the official Terror (at its most lethal) as, at least secondarily, a cultural phenomenon. Crane Brinton himself, as early as 1930, and Greer after him, had seen the Robespierrist Jacobins as, in part, “religious fanatics” bent on imposing a kind of Spartan, civic/moral utopia on republican France.28 Obviously, the negative side of such a mentality was the kind of frightening intolerance that, at least at Paris, undoubtedly helped to prolong the Terror. Other specialists, including but not limited to Franc¸ois Furet, have endeavored to establish the origins of the Terror, as a culturally conceived phenomenon, in eighteenth-century France. Furet himself argued that the Revolution – especially in its most advanced and most terroristic phase – was “akin to a religious annunciation,” but in a “secularized” version of such an “annunciation.” This was, in part, Furet’s way of bringing the “contract theory” associated with Rousseau and, in general, with the preceding century’s Enlightenment into the hurly-burly of revolutionary politics in the 1790s; it was also, indirectly, a way of accounting for the transformation of the absolute, divine-right sovereignty of old regime kingship into something unprecedented, at least in the French experience: namely, popular rather than royal sovereignty.29 Keith Baker, on the other hand, has argued that the summons for a Terror in revolutionary France emanated from what he termed 26

27

28 29

Greer, The Incidence of the Terror, pp. 122–23. Even at Paris, it should be stressed, about half of the guilllotine’s victims during the last two months of the Terror were provinc¸iaux who had been recently “shipped in” from the war-torn peripheral regions of France. Ibid., pp. 118–19. On the especially sanguinary activities of the “Popular Commission” at Orange, which convicted 432 individuals during the period from June 19 to August 4, consult again Andress, The Terror, pp. 294–96. See Crane Brinton, The Jacobins: An Essay in the New History (New York: Macmillian Co., 1930), esp. pp. 218–22, 231–42; and Greer, The Incidence of the Terror, pp. 126–28. Furet, “Terror,” pp. 146–50.

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a “mutation” in the discourse of “classical republicanism.”30 Then, again, Dan Edelstein has suggested even more recently that “It was under the aegis of natural right, not the general will,” and not classical republicanism, that “the Montagnards brought ‘terror’ into the Republic.”31 Plainly, for those specialists in the field who exemplify the “linguistic” or political-cultural “turn,” the explanations of the Jacobin Terror that have traditionally keyed on a th`ese des circonstances are inadequate. And it must be conceded that, whatever may be the specific nature of their interpretations of the Terror, they have brought valuable new insights to a long-debated and always contentious subject. Yet it is also true that the old regime’s political culture had involved an insensitivity to “official,” state-sanctioned violence as well as a tension between “social contract” theory and various other rationalizations of absolute monarchy; and it is incontrovertible that, in at least some of the violence of the Terror, we can see a sort of perverse reenactment of the worst, most degrading forms of violence that disfigured the old regime in France. No doubt Richard Cobb was thinking of this when, after citing some of the most egregious acts of violence committed during the 1790s by both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, he alluded to “the violence . . . of the old royal government, of the old royal army, . . . with its barbarous punishments; of the old penal system . . . with its ball and chain and similar refinements; of the old police ordinances and the language of the old administration, which, when addressed to the common people, could express itself only in threats and in the promise of retribution; of the treatment of Protestant children . . . ; of the old ruling class, and of their servants;” and so on.32 Perhaps we should credit the revolutionaries of 1793–94, in accepting the guillotine as the Republic’s “official” instrument of capital punishment, with a modicum of humane intention; they had, after all, just recently abrogated the old regime’s most dehumanizing judicial punishments. Still, in summing up our impressions of the Jacobin Terror, we are constrained to see it as something a bit more complicated (and, hence, a bit less justifiable) than a simple reflex against the interactive international/domestic circumstances menacing France in the mid-1790s. It may have been, chiefly, that; nonetheless, it was also, secondarily, a “political-cultural” phenomenon in terms that historians need to comprehend whether or not they subscribe fully to the recent cultural “turn” in revolutionary historiography. A similar conclusion emerges from any careful reassessment of statesanctioned violence in revolutionary Russia: the so-called “Red Terror” that got underway in earnest in the summer of 1918 was, if primarily an unpremeditated 30 31 32

Refer to Keith Michael Baker, “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in EighteenthCentury France,” in the Journal of Modern History 73 (2001): 32–53. Refer again to Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution, passim. Richard Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 87–90.

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response to threatening international/domestic circumstances, secondarily a throwback to aspects of the political culture of the tsars’ ancien r´egime. There were, to be sure, some genuine differences between the temporal profiles of the Jacobin and Red Terrors. Whereas, in the French case, statesanctioned violence that rapidly intensified in the late months of 1793 ceased fairly quickly at Paris with the overthrow of the Robespierrists in late July 1794, and persisted in several of its provincial bastions only into the early days of August, the analogous phenomenon in Russia waxed and waned (or rose and fell) in undulations extending over nearly four incarnadined years. The most recent comparativist examining the Red Terror has written that its . . . first surge came in the fall of 1918, following the attempt on Lenin’s life, the British landings at Archangel and Baku, and the seizure of Kazan by Kolchak and the Czech Legion. It receded in November 1918, with the stabilization of the front on the Volga as well as the upheaval in Central Europe and the German withdrawal from Ukraine. The Red Terror rose to a second peak in 1919, in face of the difficult struggle with the armies of Kolchak, Deniken, and Iudenich. After their defeat there was another reflux, heralded by the decree of mid-January abrogating capital punishment. But in 1920–21, with the Russo-Polish war, the defiance of Wrangel, and various peasant insurgencies, the first Red Terror again worsened until after the end of the civil war.33

Yet, as even this cursory outline of the Bolshevik Terror’s chronology offered by Arno Mayer suggests, it rose and fell (much like the earlier, if more compact Jacobin Terror) primarily (if not exclusively) with the ebb and flow of circumstantial pressures buffeting the revolutionary state. The applicability of a th`ese des circonstances is furthermore suggested in the Russian case, as in that of the French, by the “time lag” between the creation and the actual utilization, at least on a widespread basis, of the instruments of “terror.” True, as early as November 29, 1917, Trotsky, in addressing the Executive of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets at Petrograd, warned defiantly that the “naked terror” that he and his Bolshevik colleagues were already meting out haphazardly to their “class enemies” would soon be assuming “more frightful forms, modeled on the terror of the great French revolutionaries.” “Not the fortress but the guillotine,” intoned Trotsky darkly, “will await our enemies.”34 Yet, this determination (expressed so soon after the Bolshevik seizure of power) to emulate the “heroics” of the Jacobin Terror notwithstanding, it took a while in Russia, as it had in France, to make of state-sanctioned violence a generalized, systematic policy. This appears most strikingly in connection with the foundation and evolution of the Red Terror’s chief instrument, the Cheka. This “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution, Speculation and Administrative Crimes” operated, Alter Litvin has written, “from 7 December 33 34

Mayer, The Furies, p. 311. Cited in Geoff Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War (London: Longman, 1995), p. 257.

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1917 until 6 February 1922.”35 A decree of December 7, 1917, promulgated by the new state executive, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), assigned this organization the task of fighting against “counterrevolution” and “sabotage” by carrying out preliminary investigations (much like the comit´es de surveillance in revolutionary France) and handing “suspects” over to revolutionary courts. Run by a directory consisting for the most part of Bolsheviks (although with the addition, from January 8 until July 6, 1918, of a handful of Left SRs), and chaired over most of this period by Felix Dzerzhinskii, the Cheka was initially quite small: in December 1917, for example, the central collegium at Petrograd numbered only 23, and when it was transferred (along with the rest of the central government) to Moscow in March 1918, its leadership still numbered only 120. Yet, from February onward, it appears, despite Lenin’s earlier statements about fashioning the new Russia without a revival of either the professional army or the gendarmerie of the detested old regime, the Cheka “grew without interruption, both in size and in the range of its activities.” The organization began to form armed detachments; by June 1918, these were reorganized into 35 battalions of up to 40,000 men, distributed among the central gubernias (i.e., administrative units) of European Russia. Of equal significance, the Cheka from the start boasted a higher proportion of Bolsheviks (renamed, now, “Communists”), and especially men loyal to the Party since before the October revolution, than any other Commissariat in the new government. “By seizing power in Russia,” Alter Litvin has (with at least a modicum of justice) argued, “the Bolshevik leadership had created an extreme situation, and they saw a way out in the organization of a powerful extraordinary punitive institution, capable of terrifying and terrorizing the population. . . . A powerful secret service was created, unconstrained by legal restrictions, which could crush any opposition to the regime.” And certainly the rhetoric of the new organization was ferocious from the very start. A document circulated as early as February by the Sovnarkom, and entitled “The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger!” empowered Dzerzhinskii’s soon-to-be-fearsome Commissariat to deal with “enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators and German spies” without going through the courts; a day later, the list was extended to include “saboteurs and other parasites,” whom the Chekists were authorized to “shoot on the spot.” By the beginning of the summer, the Cheka would be making widespread use “of intelligence methods, surveillance, secret agents recruited from among the arrestees and members of ‘counterrevolutionary organizations,’ interception of domestic and foreign correspondence,” and so on; by July, this organization would be issuing its first fully detailed instructions as to “who precisely was to be shot.”36 35 36

See Alter L. Litvin, “The Cheka,” in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 314–21. Ibid., pp. 314–16. See also, on the Cheka, George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

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Yet the “extreme situation” in Russia, to be perfectly fair to Lenin’s party, was not solely a consequence of its seizure of power in October 1917; it was, David S. Foglesong has acutely observed, part of “an international struggle . . . in which not only Russians and Ukrainians but also Latvians, Estonians, Czechs, Germans, Americans and many other nationalities fought and died; a war waged not only behind the lines in Russia but also in the parliaments and streets of foreign countries; a struggle between Reds and Whites not only to mobilize the bodies and sympathies of Russian peasants but also to win the hearts and open the purses of foreign sympathizers.” The immediate background to events in Russia in 1917–18 was undeniably the Great War, which had originated in part “in the global rivalry of European powers for territory, markets, natural resources and political dominance.”37 The United States’ entry into the war in April 1917 was absolutely critical, for in different ways it racheted up the pressures on both the Allies and the Central Powers: it stiffened the resolve of England, France, and Italy to hang on grimly until Washington’s intervention could decisively affect fortunes on the western front; at the same time, it underscored for Berlin the urgent need to impose peace on Russia (and eventually on its hapless, tardy ally Rumania) so that substantial German forces could be shifted from the eastern front to the western front in advance of any possible American onslaught. Obviously, the deepening of revolution in Russia (especially in the wake of the abortive “Kerensky offensive” of June 1917 and Kornilov movement of August) played much more into the hands of Germany, strategically speaking, than into those of the Allies. The upshot, at least in Russo-German diplomatic terms, was the “Carthaginian” treaty of Brest-Litovsk forced by Berlin on Soviet Russia in March 1918. “By this agreement,” John Wheeler-Bennett has written, “Russia lost 34% of her population, 32% of her agricultural land, 85% of her beet-sugar land, 54% of her industrial undertakings, and 89% of her coal mines.” For the Germans, the gains derived from the October revolution – and from Russia’s utter exhaustion – seemed, at this point, decisive: At one stroke Germany had extended her control of Eastern Europe to the Arctic Ocean and the Black Sea, and had acquired the undisputed arbitrament of the fate of 55 million inhabitants of Russia’s western fringe – so much for the doctrines of “no annexation” and “self-determination”; while by the agreements with Rumania (signed on March 5) and with the Ukraine . . . she had gained access to vast resources of wheat and petroleum. Such was the prospect unfolded before the avid eyes of the Supreme Command; such was the price which Lenin paid for the salvation of the Russian Revolution.38 37 38

David. S. Foglesong, “Foreign Intervention,” in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 106–07. John Wheeler-Bennett, The Forgotten Peace: Brest-Litovsk, March 1918 (New York: William Morrow, 1939), pp. 269–75. See Ch. VII for the military and political details of the treaty. Commercial aspects of Brest-Litovsk were to be fleshed out in later talks.

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Not only had the Germans “successfully broken through the steel ring” of the Allied blockade encircling them and threatening them with starvation; Hindenburg and Ludendorff now had the strategic luxury of deciding how, precisely, to apportion their troops between the largely defenseless western marches of the erstwhile Russian Empire and the decisively critical military front in western Europe. Yet, precisely for these reasons, the Western Powers tried desperately to intervene in Russia – to intervene, initially, for geostrategic reasons, to restore the eastern military front against the Central Powers, but for ideological, antiBolshevik reasons as well. One specialist, elaborating on the subject, has done well to counsel us to avoid “the false dichotomy between strategic and ideological motives.” Although foreign intervention in Russia “was in many respects an outgrowth of the Allies’ war against the Central Powers,” Foglesong has stated, British and French efforts directed against Berlin and Vienna “did not blind them to the rising danger of Bolshevik contagion, and waging the World War did not keep the Allies from pursuing long-term political and economic goals in Eurasia.”39 In any case, British soldiers had occupied the far northern port of Murmansk as early as March 1918; in early August, British forces (with American help) seized Archangel as well. London also dispatched troops to central Asia; in addition, British, French, American, and Japanese forces occupied Vladivostok in the Far East and the stations along the Trans-Siberian Railroad as far west as the Urals. This latter move was undertaken in part to expedite the evacuation, from Russia, of the so-called “Czech Legion,” a contingent of former Czech prisoners-of-war who were to be shifted to the western front so that they could serve as volunteers in France. Unfortunately, Czech mobilization at various points along the Trans-Siberian Railroad became, in mid-summer, a virtual military seizure of that vital link between European Russia and the Far Eastern territories of the revolutionary Russian state. Hence, by August 1918, the Bolsheviks’ situation seemed as desperate as that of the Jacobins in another month of August – that of 1793. If Robespierre and his comrades had been caught between the hammer of Britain and the anvil of Austria, Lenin and his associates were caught between the Germans, who still occupied vast areas of western Russia, and British, French, American, Japanese, and Czech forces gathering in various peripheral regions of Russia. “Step by step,” Richard K. Debo has observed, “the Bolsheviks were forced to retreat from the Urals, the White Sea and Baku. Barely clinging to a foot-hold in the Middle Volga, they were faced with the prospect of losing their last 39

Foglesong, “Foreign Intervention,” pp. 106–07. See also, on the Allied intervention in Russia: W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989); Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987); and G. A. Brinkley, The Volunteer Army and Allied Intervention in South Russia, 1917–1921 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966).

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granary as well as the vital link with the Caspian Sea.”40 Furthermore, just as foreign threats to the revolutionary French had appeared to them to merge dangerously with domestic challenges in the form of chouannerie, Vendeen ´ peasant insurrection, and “federalism,” foreign threats to the Sovnarkom at Moscow seemingly were interacting with internal agitation – most notably, Left SR insurrectionism and peasant uprisings on the Volga and elsewhere – to undermine further the Bolsheviks’ already tenuous hold on power. The Left SRs had been allowed into Sovnarkom and even the Cheka in January, but from the very start the working alliance between Bolsheviks and Left SRs like Boris Kamkov and Maria Spiridonova had been uneasy. As the year wore on, the tensions between the two parties – above all, on the questions of Brest-Litovsk and Lenin’s ruthless treatment of the peasantry – became explosive. Spiridonova and her cohorts – for that matter, like “left” Communists within Lenin’s own party – denounced Brest-Litovsk as a shameful betrayal of the still-hoped-for revolutionary war against international “imperialism,” and objected just as bitterly to policies in Russian villages aimed at exacerbating tensions between the “rich” and “poor” muzhiki. The result, in July–August, was a Left and Right SR terrorist campaign culminating in the assassinations of German ambassador Mirbach (on July 6, 1918), Marshal von Eichhorn (July 30), and Bolshevik Petrograd Cheka chief Mikhail Uritsky, and the serious wounding of Lenin himself on August 30. Whether the SRs had either the will or the organizational ability to form an alternative government in Russia was doubtful; in any case, the Bolsheviks, once securely back in control of the situation, responded, predictably, with trials and (in some cases) executions of SRs identified as “enemies of the state.” From this point on, the Left SRs, who had already withdrawn earlier in 1918 from the Sovnarkom, were forced out of the Cheka and most of the soviets; henceforth, the Bolsheviks (“Communists”) would rule Russia alone.41 Even as they provoked ire on the extreme Left by making peace with Imperial Germany, the Bolsheviks, distinguishing simplistically between rich “kulaks” and “poor peasants” in the villages of Russia, declared a “battle for grain” in the course of which (in imitation of the Jacobins in 1793–94) they sent armed brigades to requisition grain from the muzhiki by brute force. “Committees of the Rural Poor” (kombedy), set up locally by agents loyal to the central government at Moscow to assist the “food brigades” in their requisitional activities, only spurred the peasantry to revolt against authorities whose dogmatic Marxist presuppositions seemed ever to blind them to the solidarities and 40 41

Richard K. Debo, Revolution and Survival: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1917–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 356–57. For a vivid description of the Left SR uprising of early July 1918, see Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 632–35. New doubts about the Socialist Revolutionaries as a cohesive political force in 1918 and thereafter have been recently voiced (and, it must be said, solidly documented) by Scott B. Smith, Captives of Revolution: The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918–1923 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

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sociological complexities of peasant life in the innumerable rural communities of this vast country.42 Significantly, Lenin, gradually shifting Soviet foreign policy from its initial obsession with German occupation to a primary concern with Allied interventionism, marked out the prospective targets of Red Terror by assuming (in what we might call Robespierrist fashion) a nefarious collusion between the foreign and domestic enemies of the revolutionary cause. The western powers, he warned, were banking “on alliance with the internal enemy of the Soviet government,” not only the capitalists and landowners, but also the kulaks. “Ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to them! Hatred and contempt for the parties which defend them – the right SRs, the Mensheviks, and today’s left SRs!” Lenin went on: “The workers must crush the revolts of the kulaks with an iron hand, the kulaks who are forming an alliance with the foreign capitalists against the working people of their own country.” An initial wave of Cheka-orchestrated Terror had followed the abortive Left SR uprising of early July; in the wake of Uritsky’s murder and Lenin’s near-assassination at the end of August, All-Russian Soviet Executive Chair Iakov Sverdlov issued a decree calling stridently for “merciless mass terror against all the enemies of the revolution.” The Red Terror in its most extreme form was now well underway, and would not cease until 1921.43 If we can say with substantial confidence that the Red Terror, like its Jacobin predecessor, was largely if not exclusively a circumstantial phenomenon, we will probably never be able (`a la Donald Greer) to count the number of its victims, or determine its precise social incidence. Yet we can gather, from the available scholarship, that these two state-sanctioned campaigns of revolutionary violence were more or less comparable in both respects. In other words, the Terror of 1918–21 in Russia, like that of 1793–94 in France, reckoned its victims in the tens of thousands, and like its predecessor was every bit as merciless toward the plebeian ranks of society as toward the “high and mighty.” On the first point, one of the lowest estimates (unsurprisingly) came in 1921 from Soviet authorities, who held that from 1917 through 1920 the Cheka had executed somewhat more than 12,700 individuals.44 Richard Pipes, on the other hand, has quoted one scholarly estimate of 50,000 victims of the Red Terror, and another of as many as 140,000. “All one can say with any assurance is that if the victims of Jacobin terror numbered in the thousands, Lenin’s terror claimed tens if not hundreds of thousands.”45 (Actually, we know from Greer’s work that France’s Terror also counted its victims in the tens of thousands, if we add to the roughly 17,000 official death sentences the many thousands of 42 43 44 45

See, on this issue, Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, pp. 66–67, 81–83, and 188–89; and Shanin, The Awkward Class, esp. pp. 145–62. Debo, Revolution and Survival, pp. 356–58. A figure cited in Mayer, The Furies, p. 310. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p. 838.

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victims of mass drownings [noyades], shootings [mitraillades], incarcerations, etc.) There were, also, the facts of the sheer length of the Russian Terror, and of Russia’s population at the time of its revolution – about six times that of France in the 1790s. It is, perhaps, best to sum up Russian issues in the manner of Arno Mayer: “All these estimates are a mixture of incomplete or flawed data and informed conjectures. Such is likely to continue to be the case even after the surviving Cheka and other archives of the ex-Soviet Union become accessible. For certain, the toll in lives was very heavy, probably corresponding to that in the French Revolution in terms of the proportion of the total population. The contrary would be surprising, given the intensity as well as the extent and duration of the Russian civil war.”46 On the second point, one grim indication of the inclusiveness of the Red Terror’s persecutory outreach came from the all-too-vivid recollections of a former inmate of a Cheka jail in Moscow. This individual recalled encountering there “politicians, ex-judges, merchants, traders, officers, prostitutes, children, priests, professors, students, poets, dissident workers and peasants – in short, a cross-section of society.”47 In (Marxist) theory, most of the Red Terror’s victims should have been the “bourgeois” continually denounced by Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks as agents of international “imperialist” conspiracy in 1918 and beyond. Yet the most truthful pages of social history give the lie to this sort of propaganda concerning the Red Terror’s victims. As Orlando Figes has remarked ironically: Of course most of them were not ‘bourgeois’ at all. The round-ups were much too crude for that, sometimes consisting of no more than the random arrest of people on a street blocked off at each end by Cheka guards. People were arrested merely for being near the scene of a ‘bourgeois provocation’ (e.g., a shooting or a crime); or as the relatives and known acquaintances of ‘bourgeois’ suspects. . . . Many people were arrested because someone (and one was enough) had denounced them as ‘bourgeois counterrevolutionaries.’ Such denunciations often arose from petty squabbles and vendettas.48

True, Lenin had written in June 1918: “We must encourage the energy and the popular nature of the terror.”49 The notorious Bolshevik slogan “Loot the Looters!” most likely assured Lenin’s party a certain basis of emotional support among the poor, especially in the early days of the Terror: they had, after all, been subject for so long in the ancien r´egime to exploitation by those wielding power, status, and personal affluence in the favored domains of “privilege Russia.” As the initial animus against German occupation to the 46

47 48 49

Mayer, The Furies, p. 310. See also, on this question, Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 71; and Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, p. 286. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 642. Ibid., p. 643. Marc Ferro, October 1917: A Social History of the Russian Revolution (London: Longman, 1980), p. 265.

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West and against Czechs, British, French, Americans, and Japanese to the East, South, and North gradually gave way to the intra-Russian furies of the Civil War in 1919 and 1920, however, the Terror was all the likelier to become an instrument unleashed against all members of all classes vaguely subsumed under the designation of “counterrevolutionaries.” Hence (as just one example of this) by February 15, 1919, the Sovnarkom was ordering Dzerzhinskii’s feared cadres “to take hostages from among the peasants, and to shoot them if the snow-clearing is not carried out.” The Cheka’s subsequent orders from Moscow to “shoot all counterrevolutionaries” and to “let the regional organizations execute on their own account” must have gone a long way towards ensuring that the Red Terror, before it finally ran its course in 1921, had become a phenomenon affecting all elements of the population.50 It is also undeniable that if the Red Terror, like the Jacobin Terror, was primarily a response to the dialectic of foreign and domestic forces perceived as threatening the “revolution,” it also (much like its predecessor) appropriated some of the constitutional, ideological, and cultural aspects of the old regime whose enduring destruction it assured. Paradoxical though it may seem, Evan Mawdsley has commented, the triumph of terrorists and other “extreme radicals” during the Russian Civil War . . . had much to do with the very strength of the autocracy before 1917. Until less than ten years before the start of the world war there had been no legal parties. The Tsarist state had never tolerated rival forces in the form of political parties or the national minorities, or even in the form of the army or the church. As a result there were no strong forces on hand to take over the country when the autocracy disappeared in February 1917. . . . The Bolsheviks were able to take over . . . ironically . . . because of the state tradition that had been created under the autocracy. Modernization had progressed far enough to give a railway network that enabled the center to regain control of the periphery, and meanwhile the Bolsheviks were able and willing to make use of much of the apolitical debris of the tsarist state, including the army officer-corps and the civil service.51

Moreover, if (as Franc¸ois Furet has argued) the Jacobins carried over into their Terror something of the exclusivist (and, by implication, persecutory) social contract theorizing of Rousseau and other Enlightenment philosophes, Lenin even more consciously incorporated into his Terror the (often ludicrously simplistic) class analysis of Marx and other nineteenth-century socialists. At the same time, alas, there was, in the Russian as in the French situation, a gruesome operational aspect to this appropriation from the old regime. How could there not be? “Many of the Cheka’s most notorious techniques,” Figes has noted, “had been borrowed from the tsarist police. The use of provocateurs, stool-pigeons, and methods of torture to extract confessions and denunciations 50 51

Litvin, “The Cheka,” in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 317–20. Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, pp. 284–85.

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came straight out of the Okhrana’s book.” Dzerzhinskii, like so many of his minions in the Cheka, “had spent half his adult life in tsarist prisons and labour camps.” He and the others had truly “learned the system from the inside.” And their ghastly practices, in 1918 and thereafter, recall for us – and, if possible, even surpass – the infamous noyades and mitraillades of the Terror of 1793–94: Each local Cheka had its own speciality. . . . The Tsaritsyn Cheka sawed its victims’ bones in half. In Voronezh they rolled their naked victims in nail-studded barrels. In Armavir they crushed their skulls by tightening a leather strap with an iron bolt around their head. In Kiev they affixed a cage with rats to the victim’s torso and heated it so that the enraged rats ate their way through the victim’s guts in an effort to escape. In Odessa they chained their victims to planks and pushed them slowly into a furnace or a tank of boiling water. A favorite winter torture was to pour water on the naked victims until they became living ice statues. . . . Some Chekas forced their victims to watch their loved ones being tortured, raped or killed.52

Furthermore, insofar as terror in Russia, like terror in France, had a genuinely “popular” as well as official character, it registered the extent to which the ancien r´egime, taking its vengeance now on the “new” regime, had thoroughly brutalized and dehumanized its workers and muzhiki.53 Peasant women killing victims with their bare hands at Odessa in 1918, in this sense, can only recall for us sans-jupons eviscerating their “aristocratic” victims at Paris in the early to mid-1790s. Yet if the Red Terror fundamentally resembled its Jacobin predecessor in all the ways indicated above, in one curious respect it differed from the “Robespierrist” variety of state-sanctioned violence. Whereas, in the French case, “terror” truly decimated the ranks of those who had struggled to govern revolutionary France prior to 1793–94 – that is, Fayettists and Feuillants, Brissotins or “Girondists,” and even “Dantonist” Jacobins – in the Russian case, “terror,” whatever its hideous excesses, for one reason or another tended to spare those who strove to master the condition of revolutionary Russia during the months from February to October 1917. Admittedly, some of the more moderate revolutionaries (for instance, Kadets Andrei Shingarev and Fedor Kokoshkin) did fall victim to the “furies” in Russia, sooner or later. The fact remains, nonetheless, that Octobrists such as Rodzianko and ex-war minister Guchkov, Kadet and liberal notables such as Miliukov and Tereshchenko, and, most notably, moderate socialist leaders like Tsereteli, Chernov, and Kerensky emigrated (in some cases, perhaps, were allowed to emigrate), and so escaped the firingsquads of subsequent Russian history. (Kerensky, indeed, was still surviving – in upstate New York, of all places – as late as 1970!) As the fires of Lenin’s Red Terror were subsiding in 1921, the apothegm about revolutions “devouring 52 53

Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 645–46. See, in this connection, Richard Cobb, “Quelques aspects de la mentalite´ revolutionnaire,” ´ Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 6 (1959), pp. 86–87, 96–104, 116–20; and Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 646–47.

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their own children” might still have seemed to contemporaries of a comparativist inclination to apply more appropriately to France than to Russia. Yet in the 1930s a new outbreak of “terror,” associated this time with Stalin, would put the Red Terror in the shade, wreaking havoc among the “old” Bolsheviks (and, of course, in other circles as well); and we will have to try, at least briefly, to make some sense of it in this study’s Conclusion. In the meantime, having (presumably) glutted ourselves on the all-too-real horrors of the “classic” campaigns of terror in revolutionary France and Russia, we should cast an analytical glance back at the analogous stage of upheaval in mid-seventeenth-century England, and see whether we can discover there (with all the clairvoyance of hindsight) at least a faint anticipation of “modern” outbreaks of state-sanctioned revolutionary violence. Of course, insofar as any revolutionary tradition was concerned, Cromwell and his confederates during 1649–53, unlike the Robespierrists of 1793–94 and the Leninists of 1918–21, were plowing in absolutely virgin territory. “It is not surprising,” Ronald Hutton has appositely remarked, “that the Commonwealth was somewhat insecure in its identity and that this reflected on its ideology and its propaganda. . . . no people before had formally tried and executed their monarch for crimes against themselves, and there was absolutely no tradition of republican thought in England.” True, a handful of intellectuals in and out of Parliament “drew flattering parallels between [republican] Rome and the new republic. But their ideas were very much those of a small and erudite clique, and even in their case the task was one of trying to justify an event produced by emotion and expediency rather than by theory.”54 Nor, palpably, could there be any theorizing about “terror,” in an age that was unprepared to politicize (i.e., in the French manner) the vocabulary of revolutionary change.55 Still, if the English, unlike their later French and Russian counterparts, instituted no sustained campaign of state-sponsored violence to defend what their revolutionary actions had wrought, this emphatically does not mean that they were at all hesitant about defending themselves in ruthless fashion against all comers, foreign and domestic. And defend themselves they plainly had to do. The much-ballyhooed “insularity” of English geography notwithstanding, it is arguable that the Commonwealth, in the wake of Charles I’s execution in January 1649, had as solid grounds to fear for its survival as would the First French Republic in the late summer and autumn of 1793 and Soviet Russia in the late summer of 1918. The new government, one of its most authoritative historians has recently written, was “in a position of appalling insecurity:” 54 55

Ronald Hutton, The British Republic 1649–1660 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 21–22. For some thoughts on this subject, see: Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth 1649–1659 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); and Sarah Barber, Regicide and Republicanism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).

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Scotland was passively, and most of Ireland actively, hostile. The royalists still had privateer bases in the Scilly Isles, Jersey and the Isle of Man, and a powerful fleet operating out of Irish ports. Not a single foreign state came forward to recognize the Commonwealth, and most were shocked by the unprecedented act of the King’s execution. His heir, now styling himself Charles II, was the guest of the Dutch, who maintained one of the world’s most formidable navies. . . .

Small wonder, as Hutton has observed, that the Rump (i.e., purged) Parliament “set frantically about” building up the English navy, commissioning the construction of “77 warships of the latest design and conscripting thousands of seamen (in defiance of The Agreement of the People).”56 Certainly, Oliver Cromwell was under no illusions concerning the challenges confronting the regicide Commonwealth in the British Isles – let alone in Europe as a whole. Speaking at the army’s General Council on March 23, 1649, before he had accepted the government’s offer of the leadership of the impending Irish campaign, Cromwell voiced his fear that all that God had so far wrought through the agency of the New Model might yet be undone by the “strong combination of Scotland and Ireland.” The Scots, who had recently declared Prince Charles king, not only of Scotland but also of England, Ireland, and France, were displaying, so Oliver proclaimed, “a very angry, hateful spirit . . . against this Army, as an Army of Sectaries.” Yet an even more serious threat to English interests was emanating from Ireland, where thousands of “Papist” troops were allegedly “ready . . . to root out” all local traces of the English, and then – short of a “miracle from heaven” – prepared to fall mercilessly on the English mainland. In citing Cromwell in this fashion, one of his most recent biographers has aptly summed up a psychology that, for so many of the “saints” of the New Model Army, painted the wars of 1649–51 as, in essence, a continuation of the recent “godly” crusade against Charles I: Just as it had been God’s will that the army should prevail in the English war, so it must be God’s will that the army save those English gains from the threats posed by Scotland and, even more pressing, by Ireland. For Cromwell, the same reasoning and motivation which had led him to pursue military victory and regicide at home caused him to see the Irish campaign as a just and necessary war. If they shared these beliefs, Cromwell argued, a sense of ‘love to God and a duty to God’ should motivate the soldiers and instill within them a desire to do God’s service in Ireland.57

If the “saints” recoiled before the prospect of a violent imposition of Irish Catholicism on their “godly” homeland, they probably abhorred with almost 56 57

Hutton, The British Republic, p. 15. The definitive work on this subject is still Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Peter Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 112–13. See also, on the Irish and Scottish campaigns, Gentles, The New Model Army, chapters 11 and 12; and, by the same author, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652 (London: Pearson, 2007).

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equal fervor the Scots’ well-advertised intention to foist their notoriously intolerant brand of Presbyterianism on England.58 As Cromwell and the other leaders of the infant English Republic were well aware, dynastic and other considerations also ensured a strong animus against the English on the Continent. Indeed, when emissaries of the “Kirk Party” currently ruling at Edinburgh eventually came to terms with “Charles II” in April 1650 – terms that augured an eventual assault on the English – they did so on Dutch soil. Intimate ties between the Stuart and Orange families had been personified in the marriage of Charles I’s daughter to William of Orange, who as William II was Stadholder from 1647 until his death in October 1650. The Dutch, who had provided safe harbor for the royalist fleet in 1648 and had hosted Charles II’s court-in-exile during 1649–50, adamantly refused to recognize the regicide English Republic, and through much of 1650 the Orangist faction (backed, seemingly, by public opinion) dreamed of an alliance with France to restore the Stuarts by force. Although the Stadholder’s sudden death in late 1650 (along with the Dutch States-General’s desire at this time to avoid war with London) temporarily reduced the chances for an Anglo-Dutch conflict, commercial rivalry between the two peoples would soon revive them. At the same time, the longstanding dynastic ties between the Stuarts and the Bourbons maximized the impact of Charles I’s execution at Paris. A strongly worded manifesto issued in the youthful Louis XIV’s name spoke of “bloodthirsty regicides sending out emissaries ‘like locusts’ to stir up sedition in every land; it banned all trade with England and pledged France to finance a military force to help the Stuarts recover their throne.” Cardinal Mazarin’s government also recommitted itself to maritime hostilities already existing with London. In Lisbon and Madrid as well, the reigning monarchs denounced the “murder” of Charles I. Only with the convincing demonstration of English power on the seas would come, from Spain, Portugal, and eventually France (and from other European states as well) a grudging recognition of the new regime in England.59 The leading continental powers never did intervene, directly or indirectly, against the Commonwealth in the early 1650s: this was, we recall, the decade during which the French and Spanish, already severely tested by their efforts in the recently concluded Thirty Years’ War, exhausted themselves altogether by fighting on against each other until 1659. Still, in a manner foreshadowing what would transpire later on in revolutionary France and Russia, events outside of revolutionary England interacted dangerously with developments within the newly established republic. For instance, the government’s 58 59

The perspective on all of this at Edinburgh is discussed lucidly in David Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1644–1651 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977). All of this is succinctly discussed in Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, pp. 70–72. Even a Venetian diplomat conceded in 1651 that the Rumpers, if “ignorant mechanics,” nonetheless possessed “the finest navy in the world.” Ibid., p. 72.

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determination to move militarily against the Irish in the wake of Charles I’s execution in 1649 revived Leveller agitation in an army still unhappy over its arrears of pay. Over the next few months, Levellers such as Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn, and Prince published reckless, vitriolic attacks on the Commonwealth’s military and political leaders, promoted a radical vision of democracy within the New Model’s ranks, and eventually were incarcerated on a charge of treason. London apprentices and women staged demonstrations outside the House of Commons. “By April 1649,” Gentles has written, “the metropolis was in a state of high tension.” The funeral of executed army mutineer Robert Lockyer drew a crowd reportedly numbering 4,000; the following month witnessed the crushing of a final military mutiny at Burford in Oxfordshire.60 Then, again, the New Model’s need to move against the Scots the following year reactivated the strategic issue of links between the Presbyterians at Edinburgh, who deplored the persisting lack of ecclesiastical discipline and concomitant growth of sectarianism in England, and English Presbyterians. The latter included former parliamentarians excluded from the Commons by Pride’s Purge, powerful financial interests at London, and even Lord General Thomas Fairfax, who “had been drifting towards Presbyterianism since before the regicide,” and whose refusal to lead the invasion of Scotland in 1650 elevated Cromwell to supreme command within the army.61 Finally, the stated resolution of Henrietta-Maria, the Prince of Wales, Prince Rupert, and other royalist exiles flocking together in France and the Low Countries to compass the overthrow of the English Republic and avenge Charles I’s execution ensured ten years of pro-Stuart conspiracy interweaving, at intervals, all sorts of dramatic events within and beyond English borders.62 There is, therefore, a case for positing, in connection with revolutionary England, circumstances justifying state-sanctioned “terror” (long before the word itself was politicized) and looking forward to the crises besetting the Jacobins in 1793–94 and the Bolsheviks in 1918–21. How, in institutional terms, did the Commonwealth respond to its own existential challenge? It set up no Revolutionary Tribunal or comit´es de surveillance in the French manner, let alone anything remotely resembling Felix Dzerzhinskii’s dreaded Cheka. It did, however, from time to time, set up High Courts of Justice – extraordinary tribunals whose members, by acting as both jurors and judges in political trials, could ward off the acquittal of dangerous conspirators by juries chosen in the customary way. As G. E. Aylmer has reminded us, a High 60

61 62

On these events, and on the connections between the projected Irish campaign and Leveller agitation within the army, see: Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, pp. 385–87; and Norah Carlin, “The Levellers and the Conquest of Ireland in 1649,” Historical Journal 30 (1987): 269–88. Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, p. 418. The standard work on this subject remains David Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649–1660 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960). But for some related information, see also the older work by Paul Hardacre, The Royalists during the Puritan Revolution (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1956).

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Court of Justice had been used against Charles I. Such an institution was also used against a Scottish royalist, the Duke of Hamilton, and others, in February 1649; against East Anglian plotters in 1650–51; and to try the prominent Presbyterian divine Christopher Love and other conspirators in the summer of 1651. (As an exception to this rule, a “court martial” was employed against the earl of Derby and others after the 1651 campaign.) After summarizing these facts, Aylmer felt entitled to conclude that “here the English republicans compare favourably – in humanity and legal correctness at least – with modern revolutionaries.”63 This may be true – at least as far as the comparativist, painfully steeped in the atrocities of the Jacobin and Red Terrors, is concerned; yet obviously seventeenth-century contemporaries could not benefit from such a perspective. On three occasions in particular, the newly established and embattled republican regime in England lashed out at its adversaries with a ruthlessness that genuinely horrified idealists on both the Left and the Right. First, there was the political aftermath of the “second” civil war: in 1649, sacrificial victims were in effect thrown by the Rump parliamentarians to a “godly” army still thirsting for revenge for the royalist “treason” of 1648. The “terror” following on the “act of regicide” has been graphically described by David Underdown: On March 9, after trial by what John Evelyn called “the Rebels’ new Court of Injustice,” Hamilton, Holland, and Capel were beheaded. On April 25 Colonel John Poyer was shot, having lost when he and two others condemned with him by court martial drew lots for the privilege of being executed. In August, Colonel John Morris, who had held out in beleaguered Pontefract for a few hopeless weeks after the King’s death, was condemned with his cornet, Michael Blackburne, at York assizes, and also put to death.

“Cromwell’s New Slaughter-House,” as it was dubbed by some, struck terror into the hearts of royalists throughout England who, especially in the early 1650s, often felt dishearteningly out of touch with the factious, intriguing leaders of their cause remaining (safely) abroad.64 Then came the bloody aftermath of a rather pathetic and premature royalist uprising in Norfolk in December 1650. Here, we note (in our accustomed role as comparativists) an early – if, in terms of sheer numbers, rather minor – example of the comprehensive social incidence of “terror” in revolutionary times. This episode, once again, merits our attention to detail: Most of the prisoners taken in this pathetic affray were men of humble rank and no estates; a few exceptions are worth identifying. Sir Ralph Skipworth was arrested with his chaplain, and sent to the Tower . . . Colonel John Saul, Governor of Crowland in the Civil War, was less fortunate: after Parliament had set up a High Court of Justice to 63

64

G. E. Aylmer, The State’s Servants: The Civil Service of the English Republic 1649–1660 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 31, 35, and 355 (n. 16) for this assessment of England’s “High Courts of Justice.” Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, pp. 12–13 and 17.

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deal with the prisoners . . . , he was found guilty and executed at Lynn. A parson named Thomas Cooper, now a schoolmaster, suffered a similar fate at Holt in front of his own school door; a certain Major George Roberts was hanged at Walsingham; and one of the influential Hobart clan went to his death at Dereham. Altogether 24 prisoners were condemned, of whom 20 were executed, and another dozen or more sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment.

The list of condemned men included “a brewer, a woolen draper, a merchant or two – obscure men.”65 As “obscure,” we would imagine, as most of the artisans, laborers, and peasants who were dispatched by guillotine, noyades, and mitraillades in the France of 1793–94, and most of the minor bourgeois, “proletarians,” and muzhiki executed by Dzerzhinskii’s Chekists in the Russia of 1918–21. Finally – and, perhaps, most dangerously – there was the royalist-Presbyterian “conspiracy” of 1650–51 in an English Commonwealth that would not experience any degree of security until Cromwell had decisively defeated both factions at Worcester (September 3, 1651). From time to time during 1650 and 1651, the Rump arrested leading Presbyterian ministers. “The threat from Scotland, and the danger of an alliance between Scottish and English Presbyterianism, overshadowed all parliamentary proceedings between January and September 1650,” the leading specialist on the period has written, and “fears of a royalist coup in England were widespread.” All of these anxieties came to a head during the spring and summer of the following year, when (at the time of Cromwell’s decisive campaign against the Scots) evidence was uncovered pointing to “a large network of conspiracy, based on the exiled court and the city of London, and involving a number of prominent city Presbyterian ministers.” On May 2, 1651, three of them – Christopher Love, William Jenkins, and Thomas Case – were arrested, along with five laymen, two of whom were linked to several of the most important Presbyterian M.P.s of the pre-Pride’s Purge period. In June, Love was sentenced to death by a High Court of Justice; he was beheaded (along with one of the lay figures allegedly implicated in the latest conspiracy) on August 22. Blair Worden has correctly pointed out that “Love would never have died at parliament’s hands for his religious views alone. He was executed, at a time of acute political danger, for political misdemeanors.” Indeed, on the very day Love went to the block, Charles II’s Scottish army, on its southward advance, was setting up camp at Worcester. However roundly condemned as gratuitously cruel Love’s execution may have been on the Right, Worden’s conclusion on the affair rings true: “No regime as heavily beset as the Commonwealth government by both internal and external dangers could afford to be lenient towards those whom it found guilty of treason.”66 65 66

Ibid., pp. 42–45. A. B. Worden, The Rump Parliament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 222–23, 226, and 242–48. It is telling that Love’s execution effectively “broke the back of clerical opposition to the Rump.”

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Moreover, however inclined an administrative historian like G. E. Aylmer may have been to laud the English revolutionaries for their (relative) “humanitarianism” in a time of maximum insecurity for the English state, a broader comparativist approach, taking British as well as purely English developments into account, might find his assessment to be a bit complacent. The English, after all, considered Ireland (and, increasingly, Scotland) to be their own; and they were clearly prepared, during the climactic 1649–53 phase of their “godly” revolution, to crush opposition to their authority in those regions, if need be, with a brutality that foreshadows for us the atrocities committed later on by French revolutionaries in the Vendee, ´ or by Russian revolutionaries at, say, Tsaritsyn or Odessa. What transpired in Ireland was, in this respect, particularly telling. The overall Irish population, it has been recently estimated, actually shrank by about 300,000 (that is, by 15 to 20 percent) between 1641 and 1652; significantly, the great majority of actual deaths occurred in the 1649– 52 period.67 Most notorious, of course, was Cromwell’s storming of Drogheda (September 10, 1649) and Wexford (October 11, 1649). The mixed royalist forces opposing the Commonwealth’s troops died, literally, in their thousands – apparently around 3,000 at Drogheda, and another 2,000 (on Cromwell’s own estimate) at Wexford. In both cases, the massacres of royalists, at least in a strict sense, violated the rules of war prevailing at the time: at Drogheda, they went on long after serious resistance had ceased, and the officers (most of whom had already been taken into what should have been safe custody) were slain in cold blood; at Wexford, the slaughter continued (without Cromwell’s orders) while negotiations were still in progress. The ambivalent message sent by Oliver to the Rump in the wake of Drogheda shows that he was very much alive to the ethical questions raised by such punitive actions, whatever the attendant circumstances.68 Such questions were also posed in Scotland, where General George Monck’s storming of Dundee (in late August 1651) may have cost the lives of between 400 and 800 townspeople. If, therefore, we take into account, not only the toll exacted by High Courts of Justice, courts martial, and assizes in England, but also the mass killings accompanying military actions in the outlying British territories, viewing them as somewhat analogous to the revolutionary hecatombs in provincial France and Russia, we can reasonably contend that victims of sporadic “terror” in revolutionary England (or, better, revolutionary Britain) anticipated in their 67 68

For the demographics of this, see Padraig Lenihan, “War and Population, 1649–52,” Irish ´ Economic and Social History 24 (1997): 1–21. See, on Drogheda and Wexford, Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, pp. 392–98. Cromwell’s biographers have also been at pains to probe the ethical issues raised by the conduct of his army in Ireland. See, for example: Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), pp. 116–17 and 121–23; Barry Coward, Oliver Cromwell (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 72–74; and Peter Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell (New York: New York University Press, 2004), pp. 84–87.

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thousands the more numerous victims in the politically theorized Terrors of revolutionary France and Russia. And, in this first “modern” upheaval as well as in the later sociopolitical cataclysms under discussion, we can distinguish between circumstantial and psychological/cultural roots of state-approved violence. Clearly, as Blair Worden has insisted, the Commonwealth government, “heavily beset” as it was “by both internal and external dangers,” had every right to strike back at those (royalists, Presbyterians, and others) bent on destroying it and avenging the regicide of January 1649. Again, it would be a stretch not to concede the role of unforeseen circumstances at (for instance) Drogheda and Wexford. The garrison of the former community had stubbornly refused a summons to surrender; and at Wexford, Gentles has noted, the governor, David Sinnott, had repeatedly made “impossible demands” in likewise resisting calls for surrender that, if acquiesced in from the start, could have staved off massive bloodshed.69 At the same time, revolutionary “terror,” if not theorized in political terms in this seventeenth-century upheaval, and not nearly as systematically lethal as it would prove to be later in France and Russia, betrayed nonetheless its own unedifying origins in ancien r´egime practices and prejudices. The beheadings ordered in England by successive High Courts of Justice, for instance, if harkening back to no organization resembling the tsarist Okhrana in this country’s past, nonetheless should conjure up for us myriad examples of similar punishments (and, for that matter, outright torture) inflicted on “offenders” of one kind or another in earlier times. And, by the same token, massacres of Irish “rebels” by Cromwell’s forces seem, to some extent, reflective of ethnic and religious prejudices that were rooted all too deeply in the soil of recent British history.70 The state-sanctioned violence in the climactic stages of all three of our revolutions, then, seems explicable, first of all, in structuralist (here, circumstantial) terms, if also, secondarily, in poststructuralist (here, political-cultural) terms. Brinton may have referred to these most radical phases of revolution in England, France, and Russia as “reigns of terror and virtue;” yet, unfortunately, perhaps, our reappraisal of them makes it difficult for us not to accentuate the former rather than the latter attribute in all three cases. We may also find that a primarily “structuralist” orientation is most helpful to us as we proceed to reassess the reconsolidation of state power in revolutionary Russia, France, and England. The Reconsolidation of State Power If circumstances loom large in any explanation of “terror” in our three revolutions, they would seem to play a comparable role in the efforts the Bolsheviks, 69 70

Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, pp. 394 and 396–97. On this point, a progressive historian like Christopher Hill is especially eloquent. Refer again to God’s Englishman, pp. 121–23.

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Jacobins, and Independents found themselves making to preserve and, indeed, toughen the institutions of state power in their respective countries. Here, we should probably start with Russia, where statism was taken to an unprecedented revolutionary (and, for sure, postrevolutionary) extreme, and then work our way backwards in time through the France of 1793–94 to the England of 1649–53. Such an inquiry may well make it easier for us to understand why, for Max Weber, “the problem of revolution . . . is that it inevitably strengthen[s] the state’s capacity to constrain individual action.”71 For John L. H. Keep, the force of circumstances most definitely reinforced what may have been initially a cultural link in the chain of events leading ultimately to the autocratic rule reimposed by the victorious Bolsheviks on revolutionary Russia: A dictatorial element was embedded in Leninism from its first appearance in 1902 (and arguably also in the radical tradition, both Russian and European, whence it sprang). The chances of an evolution towards dictatorship were augmented by Russia’s entry into the First World War and then by the fall of the monarchy which plunged Russia into chaos and allowed Lenin’s party to emerge as one of the principal contenders for power. They were enhanced immeasurably by the outcome of General Kornilov’s attempt to reverse the leftward tide in August 1917 and then by the October insurrection itself, which led to the formation of a Bolshevik government resting on the soviets and other mass organizations.

The Bolsheviks’ confidence, Keep has written, “was hardened further by each victory in the civil war.”72 Keep’s fellow specialist Robert Service has rendered a like verdict, stating that this “bureaucratic Leviathan” [i.e., the Soviet state] “surely had its seeds in the kind of seizure of power that took place in the October revolution. Authoritarianism was not an accidental side product of Leninism. It was at its core and was cultivated further by the series of ruthless reactions to the circumstances which developed in 1917–20.” The “inception of the one-party state” in Russia, for Service (and, in fact, for many another Russianist as well) only “consolidated the process.”73 Whether the pronounced reconsolidation of state power under Lenin’s aegis emerged circumstantially or whether it was (in Keep’s words) “logically foreordained,” we know that achieving it meant, from the start, overcoming a variety of obstacles. To begin with, the new state executive (Sovnarkom) almost immediately came into conflict with the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets (VTsIK), in whose name the Bolsheviks had (supposedly) seized power. By November 1917, however, with Iakov Sverdlov having replaced Kamenev as Chair of the VTsIK and faithfully carrying out Lenin’s orders, the main initiative in decision making was passing from the 71 72 73

Cited in Kimmel, Revolution, pp. 149–50. Keep, The Russian Revolution, pp. 469–70. Robert Service, “The Soviet State,” in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 312–13.

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Congress Executive to the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), the plaints of non-Bolshevik socialists notwithstanding.74 Again, Lenin’s partisans moved soon to ban the opposition press, and in early January they permitted only one session of the Constituent Assembly – the belated elections to which had, embarrassingly, revealed a Bolshevik Party outvoted (24 percent) by the Left and Right SRs (38 percent) – before having it forcibly dissolved.75 Soon, leading Kadets – and, after them, SR and Menshevik notables – were incarcerated as “enemies of the people.” But perhaps the most basic, existential challenge to Lenin in these early post-October days came from within the very ranks of Bolshevism itself – in connection with pressing geostrategic issues. Lenin’s reluctant decision (in which, significantly, he was supported by Stalin after some initial hesitation) to make peace with Imperial Germany touched off a furious debate within Party circles. Bukharin and other idealistic, “Left” Communists, invoking the heroic memory of the Paris Communards of 1871, argued heatedly that the Bolsheviks, rather than betraying their revolutionary mission by compromising with “bourgeois” elements in society, should, if necessary, fall back on Siberia and resist the Germans from there, waging guerrilla warfare even as they appealed to the European working class to overthrow all the combatant governments and come to Russia’s assistance. In a key session of the Bolshevik Central Committee on February 28, 1918, however, Lenin’s group out-voted the Bukharin group, 5 to 4, to accept Germany’s harsh peace terms. (Four Central Committee members, embracing Trotsky’s “no war, no peace” formula, abstained.) Lenin’s narrow victory, Robert V. Daniels has written, “established the survival of the revolutionary Russian state as the first priority of Soviet foreign policy, and relegated international revolution to the secondary, instrumental role that it continued to play throughout the life of the Soviet regime.”76 And so the state – a specifically Russian state – survived; the Bolsheviks, as Lenin continually argued, urgently needed a “breathing spell” so that they could consolidate their power base and restore the shattered Russian economy. But what, precisely, was to be the Party’s relationship to state institutions? Lenin and his comrades, Richard Pipes has stressed, had a choice of three options. “They could have declared their party to be the government. They could have dissolved the party in the government. And they could have kept 74 75

76

Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 505–6. See also, on Lenin’s Sovnarkom: T. H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom, 1917–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). The utter lack of unity among the SRs on this issue is explored by Oliver Radkey, The Sickle Under the Hammer: The Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the Early Months of Soviet Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), esp. pp. 248–49, 281–306. Robert V. Daniels, “The Communist Opposition: From Brest-Litovsk to the Tenth Party Congress,” in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, p. 246. On the debate within the Bolshevik Party over Russian policy toward Germany, refer again to Wheeler-Bennett, The Forgotten Peace, pp. 258–62, 269; and Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 536–50.

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party and government as separate institutions, and either directed the state from the outside or else meshed with it on the executive level, through interlocking personnel.”77 After some initial hesitation, Lenin (who was largely given his head in critical governmental decisions by his colleagues at this time) selected the last of these options: Party and state remained “distinctive entities,” but the leading Bolsheviks, even as they manned key positions in the Party, also headed the key governmental ministries. For the most part, the ministries were simply taken over from the old regime (although now properly designated as “People’s Commissariats”); yet Russia’s new masters were quite willing, where necessary, to establish new “Commissariats” – such as that for Nationality Affairs, headed logically enough by Georgian Bolshevik Stalin, the Extraordinary Commission (or Cheka), headed, as we have already seen, by Dzerzhinskii, and the Rabkrin (Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate) designed to ride herd over the exploding bureaucracy. They also (at least temporarily) created some top-to-bottom administrative confusion by turning truly popular institutions to new uses. “Not only did they transform the soviets into governmental institutions, but they also encouraged the factory-workshop committees, the trade unions, the soldiers’ committees and the village land communes to carry through an anti-capitalist revolution in any way they saw fit.” The resultant “mish-mash of competing, clashing authorities,” only made worse by the concurrent tendency, in these early days of Soviet improvisation, to create ad hoc bodies to deal with temporary emergencies, eventually led to demands (often coming from Bolsheviks in the localities) for a “more clearly articulated state order,” and for the assertion of “centralist, authoritarian principles.” Needless to say, Lenin, and his ever-faithful Soviet counterpart Sverdlov, agreed with these complaints, which in the end produced an ever greater concentration of power in the Bolshevik (or “Communist”) Party’s central and provincial institutions.78 Hence, a power relationship was established at the height of the Russian Revolution between state and Party which, in its essence, was to persist down to the end of the USSR. On the one hand, the new Russian state – the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, or RSFSR – was formally proclaimed in January 1918 and received its “constitution” in June of the same year. At its head, in Moscow, were the Sovnarkom and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (and its smaller, more specialized committees) and the various ministries, now styled “People’s Commissariats,” staffed by an everburgeoning bureaucracy; locally, there were networks of district and village soviets. But behind the Soviet state, at all levels, were the institutions of the Party, wherein lay all genuine policymaking initiative and power. Most notable here, in retrospect, were the specialization (and, inevitably, concentration of power) that set in within Party circles at Moscow. During the period from late 77 78

Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), pp. 506–7. On all of this, refer again to Service, “The Soviet State,” pp. 303–9.

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1917 to early 1921, the Party came increasingly to defer to its Central Committee; and the Central Committee came in turn to defer to its own inner subcommittees, the policy-formulating Politburo and policy-implementing Orgburo. Fortified in this manner, the Party came as this period wore on to assert its supremacy at all levels, curtailing institutional disorder and confining local initiative within ever stricter limits: The campaign to secure a disciplined administrative hierarchy was relentless; even the various internal party oppositions went along with the slogans of centralist control. Furthermore, the favor shown to the workers, peasants and soldiers was increasingly paralleled by substantial limitations on their . . . independent collective activity. The trade unions were used to bring the factory-workshop committees to heel, and the party and government exerted strenuous control over the trade unions. Soldiers’ committees were simply abolished. District and village soviets were established to rival the peasant land communes . . . 79

Opposition to these developments, both outside and within the Party, was probably to be expected. As we will see in Chapter 6, that opposition became so vocal and widespread by the early months of 1921 that it forced the Communist leadership into a “Thermidorian” relaxation (or outright, if not necessarily permanent, reversal) of some (if by no means all) of its most important policies. Moreover, even before that transpired, the harshness of the drive toward a renewed and reinvigorated autocracy in the new Russia was, of necessity, mitigated somewhat by the simple fact that the Bolsheviks, by themselves, could not possibly govern the country. True, at the center, and in the highest echelons of administration, tried and tested Bolsheviks were, with few exceptions, in charge. Still, the bulk of the People’s Commissariats had to be staffed with functionaries inherited from the tsarist regime. Over half of the bureaucrats in the Moscow ministry offices as late as August 1918, it has been estimated, had labored in some branch of the state apparatus prior to the October Revolution. Many of the central offices also employed legions of young “bourgeois” women, whose clerical duties were for them a novel experience. Farther down the administrative hierarchy, however – and especially in the provinces – the new regime utilized, and increasingly relied on, the services of those whom Marx and Engels would have characterized as “petty bourgeois:” small traders and artisans, shop assistants and clerks, bookkeepers, engineers, factory officials and cooperative activists, and so on. However determined the new government might have been, even at this early date, to develop in the administration a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” literate and skilled workers at this time represented only a very small proportion of those recruited into the Soviet bureaucracy. Even in industrial managerial ranks, whether in the country’s major 79

Ibid., pp. 308–9. For additional insights on all of this, see: Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (New York: Atheneum, 1968); and Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organizational Change 1917–1923 (London: Macmillan, 1979).

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metropoles or in the localities, workers, it appears, made up less than one-third of the personnel. It is, furthermore, highly likely that most of these predominantly lower-middle-class functionaries were attracted to the new regime less by revolutionary idealism than by the relatively generous compensation and short working hours frequently offered in the bureaucracy.80 It was equally manifest, early on, that the civil service of the new state was (in the words of one authority) “riddled with the worst features of the tsarist administration. Venality was rampant and officials were indolent, self-satisfied and hostile to the just demands of citizens.”81 Lenin was acutely aware of the new bureaucracy’s shortcomings – and, as a good Marxist, determined that “bureaucratization” should not be allowed to swamp the Communist values that had supposedly triumphed in the October 1917 revolution. Hence, in part, his insistence on creating a new Commissariat – the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin) – to curtail the worst abuses of the new state’s burgeoning civil service. Yet he must have remained apprehensive to the end about tendencies in this area: in 1922, he was complaining that the old regime, seemingly vanquished so decisively in the 1917 upheaval, was already managing, insidiously, to impose its bankrupt “bourgeois” values on its Communist “conquerors.” The “culture” of the old bureaucracy, he wailed, was “miserable, insignificant, but it is still on a higher level than ours. . . . it is higher than that of our responsible Communist administrators, for the latter lack administrative ability.”82 The technical expertise of “bourgeois” managers, engineers, and other specialists must, Lenin insisted, be embraced by the new state as a realistic necessity, even as that new state remained vigilant in maintaining a firm political control over such individuals. Of course, the drive to recruit, train, and reward new personnel was inherent in specific areas of state reconsolidation as well – most notably, perhaps, when it came to establishing the Cheka in place of the old tsarist Okhrana, and an ideologically motivated Red Army in place of the defeated and by now largely defunct Imperial Army. Yet whatever gains in “social outreach” the Bolsheviks may have scored by essaying such tasks were in the end almost canceled out by the heavy social costs of their attempt to impose what was retrospectively called “War Communism” on Russia in the civil war years. Not much remains for us to say, in this connection, about Felix Dzerzhinskii’s fearsome Chekists. As we pointed out earlier, no Commissariat could boast in its ranks a greater proportion of Bolsheviks, and especially of Party 80

81 82

For a thoughtful treatment of this subject, consult Daniel T. Orlovsky, “State Building in the Civil War Era: The Role of the Lower-Middle Strata,” in Diane Koenker, William Rosenberg, and Ronald Suny, eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 180–209. Service, “The Soviet State,” p. 312. Cited in Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 3rd ed., p. 103. On the Rabkrin, see Thomas F. Remington, “The Rationalization of State Kontrol,” in Koenker, Rosenberg, and Suny, eds., Party, State, and Society, pp. 210–31.

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loyalists from the pre-October 1917 days; and no Commissariat inherited fewer employees from its prerevolutionary counterpart. Insofar as social/vocational composition was concerned, the August 1918 census indicated a Cheka central apparatus whose provenance was 38 percent white collar, 36.7 percent military, 10.6 percent working class, and 14.7 percent peasant and intelligentsia. The ethnic/nationalist composition of the Cheka’s directorate and departmental leaders, as of 1920, was: 77.3 percent Russians, 9.1 percent Jews, 3.5 percent Latvians, and 3.1 percent Ukrainians, with a smattering as well of Belorussians, Muslims, Armenians, and Georgians. Not that surprisingly, Russians made up fifty-two of the eighty-six chairmen of gubernia and of local organizations. Chekists became increasingly important in the army, in railroad and water transport infrastructure, and in other domains of state administration. The Cheka may have ceased to exist in a formal sense in February 1922, but its pervasive and at times violent influence was preserved in its successor institution, the GPU, which was ensconced within the apparatus of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (the NKVD). Practicing a degree of social outreach in a Russian-dominated polity whose professional “white-collar” talents were still very much in demand, the Cheka “was an extraordinary, but certainly not temporary institution, operating in a country in which ‘extraordinary measures’ were a normal, not an exceptional phenomenon.”83 “Social outreach” on a voluntary basis gradually became massive recruitment on a compulsory basis where the Red Army, commanded in its earliest years by Trotsky, was concerned. The old Imperial Army had quickly disintegrated with the assumption of power in late 1917 by the Bolsheviks and their ensuing armistice signed with the Germans. Yet some armed force, it speedily emerged, was needed in its place, in a country ravaged by war, famine, and general economic chaos. Fearful of antagonizing the masses by compelling them yet again to shoulder the burden of military obligations, and sensitive to the ideological preferences of his most committed Party followers, Lenin at first conceived of a replacement army as a “select corps of volunteers led by an elected body of improvised commanders.” In January–February 1918, Francesco Benvenuti has written, “the volunteer Red Army grew out of a heterogeneous and unstable merger between Red Guard battalions and some surviving units of the former Imperial Army in the northwest. Command was provided by party men with some military experience . . . ; and by a number of former high-ranking officers . . . whose abrupt change of political allegiance was made easier by the persistent threat posed by the Austro-German army.”84 In the end, however, this arrangement proved utterly unrealistic: the “persistent threat” posed by the likes of Ludendorff and Hindenberg to Russian 83 84

Refer again to Litvin, “The Cheka,” esp. pp. 315, 318, and 321. For more information on the Cheka, see again Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police, passim. See Francesco Benvenuti, “The Red Army,” in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, p. 405.

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sovereignty in early 1918 urgently required the formation of a much larger armed force resting on a basis of compromise between ideological and professional values and between voluntarist and compulsory recruitment. Following immediately on the signing of the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, a chastened (and wiser) Lenin restated the short-term goal of Soviet power as being the creation of an army of one million men. (Eventually, the Red Army under Trotsky would come to number over 5 million men.) The Russians were enjoined to “learn how to wage war from the Germans.” So-called “military commissariats” would soon be entrusted, in the primary regions of the country, with the military training of young men between eighteen and forty years of age. A decree dated May 29, 1918, reestablished a general military draft; in June, mobilization was formally declared over much of Central Russia. Officers in the new army were to be supervised in a manner that instantly recalls for us the marriage between idealism and professionalism in the armed formations of the English and French Revolutions. As Benvenuti has explained: The problem for the Bolsheviks was how recruits from the old officer corps would react in the event of war against an internal enemy, that is, in the event of civil war. In order to control the political loyalty of the ‘military specialists’ (the ostensibly neutral designation of former tsarist officers), to prevent treason and desertion, and to establish the necessary degree of confidence between them and their troops, one or more ‘political/military commissars’ were attached to every commander from the regimental level upwards. Trained and assigned by a special administration in the War Commissariat, initially the military commissars were not necessarily members of the Bolshevik Party (they became a compact Communist body only during 1919). To become operational, every military order needed to be signed by the commander and counter-signed by the commissar.85

Although such a disposition of affairs patently challenged the military principle of “one-man command” and sanctioned some organizational confusion in the form of “dual command,” its advantages were seen for the time being as outweighing its disadvantages. The regimental and other commissars served to guarantee a certain degree of ideological solidarity between army and Soviet state, and compensated somewhat for the abrogation of the practice of electing commanders – and for the presence of ex-tsarist officers reimposing traditional standards of military discipline on troops of the line. The resort to massive compulsory recruitment led, in Russia as it had in revolutionary England and France, to military formations made up increasingly of agricultural workers and peasants. As Mark von Hagen has especially stressed, it also profoundly affected the composition of (and recruitment patterns within) the Communist Party itself: Army imperatives affected recruitment policies, techniques of party purge, and, by extension, the social and occupational profile of party leadership. In general, the party 85

Ibid., p. 408. Benvenuti enlarges upon all of this in his full-length study: The Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 1918–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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in the army quickly became a career path that promised a high degree of upward mobility. Military service was recognised as an important, if not the most important, test of political loyalty and effectiveness in the new state; alternatively, desertion, refusal to serve in the army, or military failure was branded the most serious offense a party member could commit and certainly constituted grounds for expulsion.86

Although desertions (and refusals to respond to initial military call-ups) plagued the Red Army chronically (especially during the early phases of the civil war and again during the Russo-Polish War in 1920), the institution maintained its integrity until massive demobilization, necessitated by the state’s penury, depleted its ranks from January 1921 on. The Army became for some years (in Benvenuti’s words) the “Cinderella of the Soviet state;” nonetheless, its commissars’ ideological enthusiasm and its strident calls to defend the revolution in Russia during the years of maximum peril left an enduring imprint on the quasi-military ethos of Party and state in the years to come.87 The massive recruitment of agricultural workers and muzhiki into the Red Army during 1918–21 was all the more to be expected in light of the contemporaneous and even more massive migration of desperately hungry urban workers back to their ancestral peasant villages in the countryside.88 The so-called War Communism of 1918–21 was arguably, in its most basic aspects, a political reaction to this economic/demographic crisis. Technically, Pipes has observed, War Communism comprised the following measures: the nationalization of nonagricultural means of production, transport, and large and medium-sized enterprises; the substitution of a government-controlled distribution system for private commerce; the substitution of state-regulated barter for monetary exchange and accounting; the imposition of comprehensive economic planning on the whole country; and, finally, the introduction of compulsory labor for all able-bodied adult males and (on occasion) for women, children, and able-bodied elderly. These unprecedented measures, Pipes has contended, were designed “both to undercut the economic base of the opposition to the Communist regime and to enable that regime to reorganize the national economy in a thoroughly “rational” manner.”89 86

87 88

89

Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 89. On recruitment issues, see also Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation. Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). Benvenuti, “The Red Army,” p. 414. For valuable insights on the depopulation of Russian cities and towns in this era, see Daniel R. Brower, “The City in Danger:” The Civil War and the Russian Urban Population;” and Diane P. Koenker, “Urbanization and Deurbanization in the Russian Revolution and Civil War.” Both articles appear in Koenker, Rosenberg, and Suny, eds., Party, State, and Society, pp. 58–104. Pipes, The Russian Revolution, pp. 672–73. For two studies that elaborate on these issues, see: Thomas F. Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia: Ideology and Industrial Organization, 1917–1921 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984); and Sylvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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Yet, it is perhaps Orlando Figes who has explained War Communism most lucidly – placing it in a comparative/social context that carefully avoids the theorizing of both Left and Right on this contentious subject. If, for those on the Left, War Communism was “essentially a pragmatic response to the military exigencies of the civil war,” whereas, for those on the Right, it was “derived directly from Leninist ideology,” for this practitioner of Soviet social history War Communism, in the final analysis, was “essentially a political response to the urban crisis of 1918.” In the spring of that year, he has observed, Lenin and his closest associates . . . were obsessed by the example of the Paris Commune. . . . The Bolsheviks were all too conscious of the fact that their power base, like that of the Communards, was confined to the major cities, and that they were facing defeat because they were surrounded by a hostile peasantry with whom they had no goods to trade for food. They had convinced themselves that, unless they extended their power to the countryside and launched a crusade against the ‘grain-hoarding’ peasants, their urban revolution, like that of the Commune, would be destroyed by starvation. The flight of the workers from the cities and their strikes and protests against food shortages were seen as the first signs of this collapse.

The Bolsheviks, consequently, had to “seize the peasantry’s grain by force” and secure “a firm grip on industry” if they (and their dreams for Russia) were to survive.90 Such an analysis, plainly, entailed an invocation, not only of the 1871 Commune, but also of the arm´ees r´evolutionnaires of 1793, which, as French revolutionary specialists have long emphasized, were deployed by France’s Jacobin leaders to requisition desperately needed food for Paris (and for the regular army) in the countryside. At bottom, the “War Communism” experiment reveals nothing so much as a Bolshevik Party as frustrated as the moderate Provisional Government had been before it, and as bedeviled as the Stalinist leadership was soon to be after it, by the problems inherent in attempting to synchronize Russia’s urban and rural economies. That the new Soviet regime could not fully comprehend, let alone fully sympathize with, the aspirations and anxieties of workers in their soviets, trade unions, and factory committees, and of peasants in their rural “soviets” and traditional communes, would only hasten the day (specifically, in March 1921) when Lenin and his colleagues would – at least in the domain of economics – have to beat a temporary retreat by devising some “system” making less furiously paced, draconian demands on the overtaxed Russian populace. State reconsolidation in the critical stage of revolution in France was not, as a whole, nearly as drastic a phenomenon as it was later to be in revolutionary Russia. Although the working relationship between state and Jacobins in many respects did foreshadow that between state and Bolsheviks, it did not, unlike the 90

Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 614–15.

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later partnership, eventuate in a totalitarian government. Moreover, economic improvisation in the France of 1793–94 anticipated some but by no means all of the aspects of “War Communism,” and was treated in a much less systematic fashion. On the other hand, we can discern, in the realms of state bureaucratization and military reform, a much more telling parallel between the climactic phases of the two revolutions. Certainly, the French responded to the supreme crisis of late 1793 by temporarily investing new powers in their government.91 In September, the Committee of Public Safety assumed the role of appointing members of all the other executive committees, systematized the detention of all political “suspects,” and began to transform local comit´es de surveillance into agencies of the central government. On October 10, the Convention, formally declaring the country’s “provisional government” to be “revolutionary until the peace,” endorsed the Committee of Public Safety’s proposal that it be accorded control over the ministers and all “officially constituted” authorities, all generals in the armies of the line, and all domestic “paramilitary” forces (i.e., arm´ees r´evolutionnaires). The Convention at the same time empowered the Committee to seize and reallocate foodstuffs and other essential commodities everywhere in the Republic. On November 25, the legislature decreed that whenever its members were acting in the provinces as repr´esentants en mission, they must strictly obey all mandates of the Committee of Public Safety. Finally came the law of 14 Frimaire (December 4), in all but name the “constitution” of the governmental Terror. Under its auspices, all officials were now subject to the rigorous oversight of the Committee of Public Safety and the hardly less powerful Committee of General Security. (For the comparativist, the increasingly contentious relationship between these two Committees may recall in some respects that between Sovnarkom and the Congress of Soviets Executive Committee in Russia.) A swarm of locally elected administrators, or those of them who survived the purge for which the new law provided, became “national agents” who could be removed at the whim of the Convention. In addition: comit´es de surveillance were now absorbed into official government agencies; local functionaries were enjoined not to sponsor unauthorized assemblies; and all raising of troops and of funds was to be sanctioned at Paris. Logically enough, all of these provisions were to be enforced by the ever-more-formidable Committee of Public Safety. And behind this pronounced concentration of power in governmental institutions, responding as it did (like the increasing use of the guillotine) to the dialectic of threats to revolutionary France, lay the action of victorious Robespierrist Jacobins in the capital – and of Jacobin clubs in the provinces. By early 1793, it seems, the number of Jacobins ensconced in local office had reached 91

On the points that follow, see: Robert R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941), esp. pp. 66– 67, 74–75, and 124–27; and, in a broader sense, David Andress, The Terror, esp. Chapters 7–10.

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a new high; as 1793 wore on, the clubs themselves were transformed, by gradual stages, into agencies of the government. Much of this was due to the fact that “representatives on mission,” often exasperated by the lethargy or open hostility to the revolutionary cause manifested by departmental and district authorities and other local notables, decided to purge such officials and replace them with Jacobins (and even sans-culottes outside the clubs). It goes without saying that the key to Jacobin ascendancy, in many localities as in the conclaves of power at Paris, lay in a willingness to subordinate all other considerations to that of securing victory in foreign and civil warfare.92 The parallel here between the situations in France in 1793–94 and Russia in 1917–21 is sufficiently striking to have intrigued even scholars writing on the latter upheaval. The “hundreds of Jacobin clubs scattered throughout France were not, strictly speaking, a party,” Richard Pipes has rightly noted, “but they did acquire many of its characteristics even before the Jacobins came to power.” Disposing of power briefly “by monopolizing all executive positions and arrogating to themselves the power to veto government policies,” the Jacobins undeniably furnished “a prototype which the Bolsheviks, leaning on Russia’s autocratic traditions, brought to perfection.”93 Yet this last assertion was, for Pipes in this context, the cardinal point: Lenin’s party, by the early 1920s, “brought to perfection” a “prototype” of one-party statist rule that Robespierre’s faction fell short of achieving in the 1790s. Why should this have been the case? Why, that is, did the Montagnard “dictatorship” of 1793– 94 collapse so abruptly in late July 1794, whereas the partnership between Bolsheviks and soviets only further evolved after the civil war years into a totalitarian one-party state? Theda Skocpol, writing from an analytical perspective of comparative structuralism, attempted to explain this conundrum by focusing on issues of domestic economic organization. Although the Jacobins were, in part, weakened by “economic and political contradictions” involving Parisian sans-culottes and small-scale peasant landowners whose interests in the end diverged from those of Robespierre and his cohorts in the Committee of Public Safety, the Bolsheviks, as she pointed out, would later suffer from similar “contradictions.” Still, the Bolsheviks could depend on “state-controlled industries and could devote themselves after 1921 to devising ways to use state power to expand those industries and the numbers of factory workers employed in them,” whereas the Jacobins in the mid-1790s, “even if they had been consistently willing to conceive of themselves as the ‘party of the sans culottes,’ did not have objectively available to them any expansionist economic mission to sustain them 92

93

See, on all of this: Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The Middle Years (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 34–42; Hampson, A Social History of the French Revolution, pp. 209–10; and Marc Bouloiseau, The Jacobin Republic, 1792–94 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. p. 113. Pipes, The Russian Revolution, pp. 506–09.

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in state power beyond the military victories of 1793–4.”94 Skocpol’s insight is valuable as far as it goes; yet it probably needs to be broadened and deepened further by raising (or enlarging on) three other points of differentiation between the two situations. (1) The Montagnards (paraphrasing Pipes) could not “lean on an autocratic tradition” nearly as pronounced as that available to the Bolsheviks in post-tsarist Russia; they could not, in other words, benefit from a political culture predisposing “ordinary” people to acquiesce nearly as abjectly in the dictates of autocratic rule. (2) The Robespierrist Jacobins were temporarily exercising state power in a society whose bourgeois (and even, to some extent, noble) influence and interests had not been as close to obliteration as they were to be in revolutionary Russia. That surviving influence, and those interests, had eventually to be accommodated – once the immediate military crisis was past. (3) Perhaps most crucially – and, to do her justice, Skocpol referred to this in her analysis – whereas Russian anxieties about geostrategic security (as we will see in Chapter 6) were only reinforced in the years after 1921, France emerged from the Jacobin Terror in a geopolitically secure position, and resumed an ever more expansionist foreign policy. The consequences of this for Robespierre and the other “ideological” Jacobins desiring to prolong the Terror beyond late July 1794 were fatal: because (in R. R. Palmer’s words) “most people considered its usefulness over when the Allies were defeated,” the Robespierrists hoping (via the Terror) to impose utopian, Rousseauistic values on France were most likely doomed.95 The economic Terror in France proved likewise less systematic and ambitious than War Communism in Bolshevik Russia. Of course, it may have built up less of a head of steam to begin with since the Jacobins of 1793–94, unlike their counterparts in the Russia of 1917–21, were proceeding from no iron-clad ideological assumptions regarding the inevitability of socioeconomic “class” warfare. Yet, if only in a piecemeal fashion, the revolutionary leaders in France did put into place some economic policies anticipating the later features of War Communism. We have already noted, for instance, the imposition of price controls, first on grain (May 1793) and then on a broad range of items of premi`ere n´ecessit´e (September 1793); the passage of a ferociously worded law against “hoarding,” and the appointment of commissaires aux accaparements during the summer; the establishment of the cours forc´e for the revolutionary assignats; the deployment of paramilitary arm´ees r´evolutionnaires (what the Bolsheviks would later term “food brigades”) in the countryside to requisition 94 95

Refer to Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, pp. 190–93, for this comparative evaluation of the French and Russian revolutionary situations in 1793–94 and 1917–21, respectively. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, pp. 361–62. The literature on the “Incorruptible” is, of course, voluminous. Perhaps the classic biography remains that of J. M. Thompson, Robespierre, 2 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1935); it has been supplemented, if not superseded, by many subsequent works. An elegant discussion of the ideology of Jacobin civic “virtue” is provided by Patrice Higonnet, Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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food from the peasantry; and so on. The exigencies of 1793 also forced the Conventionnels to weigh the possibilities of progressive taxation. As early as March 18, they declared that “in order to attain a more accurate proportion in the distribution of the burden each citizen has to bear according to his abilities, there shall be established a graduated and progressive tax on luxury and both landed and transferable wealth.”96 Away from Paris, repr´esentants en mission, unhampered by close governmental oversight, often took advantage of their freedom of maneuver to levy all manner of imposts, in currency and in kind, on moneyed citizens.97 Nonetheless, there is irrefutable evidence that most Jacobin revolutionaries, adherents at heart of eighteenth-century precepts of laissez-faire economics, never regarded such measures as anything other than temporary. In the matter of taxation, for instance, the same legislators who on March 18, 1793, seemed to be enunciating advanced principles of progressive taxation used the same occasion to threaten with death anyone who should advocate a division of lands or “any other measure subversive of territorial, commercial and industrial property.” The “unprecedented taxes raised all over France,” Jean-Pierre Gross has pertinently commented, “were only justified by . . . exceptional circumstances [and were raised] in order to provide urgently needed funds in a time of war.”98 Again, when the Convention reluctantly introduced the celebrated Maximum g´en´eral in late September 1793, it very pointedly remarked that “in normal times” the laws of supply-and-demand worked perfectly well: “This balance is infallible. It is useless for even the best governments to interfere.” And, of course, those cheering this impromptu introduction of price controls might have done well to note that, even in the gathering crisis of late 1793, it was accompanied by a schedule of wage controls.99 Small wonder that with the gradually solidifying military (and domestic) situation of the government in late 1793 and early 1794 came a slow but steady scaling back of official efforts to alleviate popular distress. Just a month after the promulgation of the General Maximum, in fact, the Convention voted to allow prices to rise, reflecting the costs of transportation and a 5 percent wholesaler’s and a 10 percent retailer’s profit. By the spring, the Maximum, seriously attenuated by authorized loopholes, was becoming little more than “an instrument of discipline, available on occasion to check profiteering or counter the demands 96

97

98 99

Jean-Pierre Gross, “Progressive Taxation and Social Justice in Eighteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 140 (1993): 79–126. Gross has expatiated on all these issues in: Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). A good example of this is the zealous work of Saint-Just and Le Bas in Alsace. See Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, pp. 177–201. Other examples are detailed in the more recent work of Michel Biard, Missionnaires de la R´epublique: Les repr´esentants du peuple en mission, 1793– 1795 (Paris: Editions du CTHS, 2002). Gross, “Progressive Taxation and Social Justice in Eighteenth-Century France,” p. 119. See, on these issues, Rude, ´ The Crowd in the French Revolution, pp. 125–30 and 252; and the further information furnished in Andress, The Terror, pp. 213–14.

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of labor.” The government also with mounting frequency granted premiums and sudsidies to businessmen, privatized some of the munitions plants that had been momentarily “nationalized” the year before, dismantled the remnants of the preceding summer’s antihoarding legislation, tolerated a growing amount of export trade, requisitioned labor for various employers, and (after suppressing Hebertist radicals in the Paris Commune) applied wage controls ´ to workers in the capital previously unaffected by them.100 Meanwhile, many a peasant petitioned in vain (in this most “radical” stage of France’s upheaval) for controls to be extended from wages and prices to rural rents, objected to the share-cropping system of m´etayage, failed to secure advantageous terms for the purchase of biens nationaux, and by the spring of 1794 found himself menaced with the Revolutionary Tribunal if he failed to appear for state-mandated agricultural labor.101 If, in comparative summation, the termination of “War Communism” by the Bolsheviks in early 1921 did not signify any abandonment in principle of socialist tenets in the field of economics, there can be little doubt that the relaxation of economic Terror in Jacobin-dominated France was a source of vast relief to revolutionaries who (with a few notable exceptions) defined their radicalism in other than economic terms. Still, we may be able to draw more suggestive parallels between these two upheavals in the critically important areas of bureaucratization of governance and military modernization. Certainly, modern research discloses to us, in the case of France as in that of Russia, a correlation between the triumph of extreme revolution (under the pressure of circumstances) and the establishment of unprecedentedly “modern” bureaucracy as measured by size, internal procedures, social origins, and esprit de corps. On the issue of size, Clive Church has calculated that by 1794, “there must have been at least 13,000 officials and employees in Paris alone, and probably more than 15,000.” Outside the capital, “there could have been 250,000 or perhaps even 300,000 if one includes elected officials, field, local, and military employees.”102 Insofar as its internal organization was concerned, the new bureaucracy observed rules of hierarchical distribution of power. The Convention’s executive committees presided over state agencies situated in lower echelons of public authority. (They took over, for the time being, the most urgent functions of the old regime’s ministries, whereas, in Soviet Russia, most executive government functions, as we have seen, were discharged by 100

101

102

This is all succinctly summarized in Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, pp. 239–40, 311–12, and 316. For some revealing insights into how all of these recisions of earlier legislation were received by the Parisian populace, see the essays in Jeffrey Kaplow, ed., New Perspectives on the French Revolution (New York: John Wiley, 1965). Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, pp. 312–15. On the conversion of land grants promised to necessitous Frenchmen under the terms of the so-called “Ventose ˆ Decrees” of March–April 1794 into little more than vouchers to the poor, refer to P. M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution, p. 155. Clive H. Church, Revolution and Red Tape: The French Ministerial Bureaucracy 1770–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 94–95.

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ministries that were simply renamed “People’s Commissariats.”) The machinery of state in the France of 1793–94 was also highly centralized, not only because of the political oversight of the Committee of Public Safety but also because of the imposition of new administrative controls on state services.103 (In the Committee’s supervisory role and in the new administrative controls imposed on government agencies we may, as comparativists, see something of a premonition of Lenin’s Rabkrin ministry, designed to curb administrative abuses.) Finally, there is the matter of the origins, experience, and esprit of these new bureaucrats. On the question of social origins, the sources available to Church were apparently not as revealing as those utilized by Russian scholars like Orlovsky, Remington, and others; but they have enabled him to affirm that “the civil service was not drawn from the dregs of the middle class, but from its upper and more respectable echelons,” and to indicate “a new group of speculators, n´egociants, land-owners, farmers, lawyers, politicians, and administrators” as replacing, by the mid-1790s, the prerevolutionary administrative 104 The difference between upper middle-class recruitment to the bureauelites. ´ cracy in France and lower middle-class recruitment to that emerging in Russia may, at least indirectly, reflect the relatively greater prominence of “notables” and haute bourgeoisie in French society. Yet at the same time, the unrelenting pressures under which the young First Republic was attempting to survive did not allow it to inquire too closely into the exact motivation and qualifications of those it hired: excessive delay in recruitment, after all, could adversely affect the war effort. Ideologically motivated “patriots” were likely outnumbered greatly in the new ranks of officialdom by opportunists driven into state service by the economic and social dislocations of war – a state of affairs once again anticipatory of the situation later obtaining in Russia’s new Soviet bureaucracy. On the other hand, once in office, these administrators – like their Soviet counterparts, the chinovniki studied by Daniel T. Orlovsky and Thomas F. Remington – were all laboring for the same master, the state. “They all worked within much the same structural pattern of divisions and bureaux, and more importantly, they were part of bodies which in the case of the commissions were very much an amalgam of varying services and recruits.” They were salaried; they had to meet unexampled standards of discipline; and they had to work through written records as never before. There can be little doubt that, by this time, bureaucratization in Jacobin France was well on the way towards satisfying at least some Weberian criteria. Henceforth, Clive Church has stressed, the principal challenge would be to consolidate the new administration, purging it as much as possible of the disreputable old ways of prejudice, indolence, and corruption.105 Lenin’s successors, we know, would confront a similar challenge in the late 1920s and 1930s. 103 104 105

Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., pp. 215–16 and 220–21. Ibid., pp. 96–100.

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Any comparative analysis of military reconsolidation during the Jacobin and Bolshevik “reigns of terror and virtue” must commence by acknowledging a significant institutional difference between the two processes: whereas, in the latter case, the embattled Bolsheviks were “starting from scratch” with a brand new army, in the former case the Jacobins had the (relative) luxury of revamping an existing army dating from ancien r´egime times. That caveat having been registered, we can still trace revealing ways in which France’s “terrorist” leaders, in tackling issues of officer promotion, recruitment of soldiers of the line, ideological motivation, and civilian/governmental control, unknowingly anticipated some of the military reforms of Lenin, Trotsky, and their comrades in their revolutionary crisis. There are three particularly useful points to make in this connection. First, we can draw an intriguing parallel between the ex-tsarist officers who, euphemistically referred to as “military specialists,” played such an important role in 1918–21, and erstwhile commanding officers of Louis XVI’s army who – along with ambitious and professionally minded rural noblemen likewise remaining in the French army after 1792 – helped to ensure the revolution’s military successes in 1793–94. In both cases, unforeseen developments – the disintegration of the Imperial Army in Russia, the waves of emigration in 1791–92 from France – opened new pathways of promotion to those militaires who were willing to place pursuit of career and loyalty to the homeland ahead of any lingering fealty to discredited monarchism.106 Additionally, just as extsarist officers, motivated in part by their hatred of occupying German forces, were willing enough to tolerate the influx into Red Army officer ranks of nongentry, so, in the case of France, ex-royalist militaires actuated in part by their hatred of France’s adversaries accepted the presence of (for instance) those company-level officers – captains, lieutentants, sublieutenants – whose bourgeois and even peasant origins have been documented by Jean-Paul Bertaud and others.107 Second, just as Lenin’s conversion in the bleak circumstances of early 1918 to the “un-Marxist” notion of a massive professional army based on compulsory military service led eventually to fighting forces consistingly largely of agricultural workers and peasants, so, in the earlier, French crisis did the somewhat more gradual shift from “volunteers” to draftees. Even with the February 1793 “levy of the 300,000,” fewer lawyers, teachers, students, and state bureaucrats appeared than had among the storied Volunteers of 1792; most of the new enrolees were “farm laborers and workers in the most ordinary trades.” This 106 107

See again, in the French case, Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution, esp. pp. 111–20. Refer, again, to Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, pp. 178–79, 182–87, and 189. Research on France’s army officer corps in this period is also summarized in John A. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France, 1791–1794 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 67–96.

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“leveling” tendency was only confirmed with the August lev´ee en masse. If, to be sure, 16 percent of the draftees of August 1793 still revealed urban origins, even among this minority of new troops artisans and workers increasingly outnumbered scions of the “respectable” middle classes; meanwhile, the other 84 percent of the soldiery betrayed an overwhelmingly rural provenance. The republican army that would eventually triumph at Fleurus in June 1794, like its Soviet counterpart in the decisive stages of the civil wars in Russia, was heavily peasant in its composition, and drew its personnel from an ever greater number of provincial localities.108 Finally, the tension between ideological/political and military/professional values that existed in military ranks in early Soviet Russia had also challenged military planners in revolutionary France. As early as 1790–91, in fact, the Constituent Assembly had insisted on “sending to the various armies deputies who had instructions to report on the political loyalty of their generals;” this practice was systematized during the Terror, when deputies from the Convention, serving as repr´esentants aux arm´ees, foreshadowed in many respects the “political/military commissars” later attached to every Red Army commander at the regimental level and up.109 Yet, over the long run – that is, during Robespierre’s time and after – the Republic’s armies increasingly became a bastion of professional values that would leave pure Jacobin idealism far behind. Officers were, with growing regularity, selected for their occupational merit – that is, for their grasp of strategic issues, their technical knowledge, their discipline and efficiency – and the men in the ranks, if still encouraged to involve themselves in the politics prescribed from Paris, were expected above all to obey those in authority.110 Soldiers in both late-revolutionary France and late-revolutionary Russia, it is safe to conclude, saw themselves in part as bearers of an ideological message, but perhaps even more as professionals who had mastered the technical aspects of a vocation that they could now proudly exercise in common.111 If, therefore, we must conclude at this juncture that state reconsolidation in the most perilous phase of the French Revolution was not characterized by the emergence of one-party, totalitarian rule or by anything in the economic sphere as severe (or as consciously theorized) as “War Communism,” it assuredly did entail developments in the realms of bureaucratization and military reform comparable to later developments in Soviet Russia. But what, in all 108 109

110 111

On all these points, see: Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, pp. 66–74, 90–96, and 130–32; and Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic, pp. 43–66. On the emissaries to the French armies in 1790–91, consult Alan Forrest, The Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), pp. 42–45; on the activities of the commissaires aux arm´ees in 1793–94, refer again to Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, pp. 350–53, and to Biard, Missionnaires, pp. 413–17. Forrest, The Soldiers of the French Revolution, pp. 55–56, 76, and 123–24. See also Mark von Hagen’s comments on this issue as it applies to Russia in his study Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship, chapters 5–6 and Conclusion, esp. pp. 326–28.

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these respects, can we say about state reconsolidation in the English Commonwealth from 1649 to 1653? Retrospective analysis indicates some interesting English precedents for most of the state-building processes we have identified in the cases of the later upheavals in France and Russia – even though, for sure, English statist tendencies were much less pronounced than those in the two “continental” revolutions. Take, to begin with, the question of centralization under the aegis of the state-and-party relationship. Certainly, the tendency was there. Circumstances, David Underdown has written, dictated a concentration of governmental powers at London – foreshadowing (he might as well have added) the much greater concentration of powers at Paris in 1793–94 and at Petrograd – Moscow in 1917–21: The need for strong government was obvious. High prices, shortages, near famine in some places; depression and unemployment; smouldering opposition by the poor and ‘middling sort’ to the excise: all intensified the fear of Leveller or Digger explosions. The gentry were no less restive. Complaints about taxation and quartering were as common early in 1649 as ever. . . . Everywhere else the culprit was the Army. . . . Any delay in the collection of assessments brought swift retaliation from the Army.

And, of course, add to all these domestic issues the external dangers posed by the Irish, the Scots, the continental Powers, and the royalists – no wonder, Underdown’s verdict that “circumstances drove the Rump inexorably down the path of centralization. . . . circumstances dictated centralization.”112 Insofar as the official state-institutional aspect of this process was concerned, the collaboration that emerged early on between the new Council of State and certain key Committees in the Rump Parliament such as the Army and Indemnity and Compounding Committees would appear, from our analytic viewpoint, to foreshadow in at least some respects the working relationships between the Committees of Public Safety and General Security in France, and between the Sovnarkom and the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets in Russia. In the English case, the Council of State, inheritor of executive powers wielded in the mid-1640s by the Committee of Both Kingdoms, and in 1648–49 by the Derby House Committee, only augmented its powers in the tense circumstances following the regicide. Gerald Aylmer has spoken directly to this point: The powers delegated to this body were extremely wide; moreover, they were later to be increased after practical experience of its needs. . . . Although ultimately the Council of State was answerable to the House, its powers were executive rather than advisory. Except for the raising and issuing of money, it could initiate and carry through an almost unlimited range of business. It could give orders to the armies and navies of the State, carry on relations with foreign countries, and take measures for national security. Later it was given the powers of the Lord Admiral and these were in turn entrusted to 112

Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 297–98.

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its Admiralty Committees. . . . The Navy Commissioners were [also]answerable to this Committee.113

Although on army issues the Council of State had to defer to Parliament’s Army Committee, and though its multiplying responsibilities forced it to delegate authority frequently to a bewildering variety of standing committees and smaller, temporary ad hoc committees, it remained in the crisis-ridden early 1650s a focal point of governmental authority. That some of the Councilors were also generals who directed the Army through their membership in the Army’s Council of Officers, and that the majority of them were M.P.s as well, helped to grease the wheels of cooperation between what we might today term (somewhat anachronistically) the “executive” and “legislative” branches of the central government. Then, of course, there was – at the height of revolution in England, as there would be in the critical phases of revolution in France and Russia – the challenge of governing the outlying regions of the realm. “The government’s first preoccupation was stability. It had to govern the country and take whatever local allies it could find.”114 And this, at a time when the Commonwealth had, on the one hand, alienated the old governing families in the shires and yet, on the other, abhorred as much as those families did the possibility of further revolutionary changes that might bring the lower orders in those regions to power. However mightily they might endeavor to retain the loyalty and preserve the functions of the local J. P.s and sheriffs, many of whom apparently regarded their commissions as invalid in the wake of the regicide, the authorities at London relied even more on the County Commissioners to make London’s writ apply nationally. “Besides [wielding] their directly military functions,” Underdown has noted, “the commissioners were authorized to investigate conspiracies and suspicious meetings, and to disarm papists and ill-affected persons.” Eventually, they were also accorded the power to assess proprietors boasting a certain measure of affluence for “horses and arms.”115 For the comparativist, it is likely not too far-fetched to see the County Commissions as forerunners of the “national agents” and comit´es de surveillance of revolutionary France, and of the town and village soviets of revolutionary Russia. So far, so good. Yet the state–party partnerships implementing genuinely revolutionary changes in France and Russia would ultimately derive their discipline and dynamism from, respectively, Jacobin and Bolshevik radicals who 113

114 115

Aylmer, The State’s Servants, p. 18. On naval administrative matters, see also Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 42–72. The military/fiscal aspects of statebuilding in this period are discussed in detail in Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 213–21; and James S. Wheeler, The Making of a World Power: War and the Military Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Stroud, 1999), Chapters 3–8. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, p. 297. Ibid., pp. 297–306.

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really wielded power in those upheavals. In the English case, however, the “Independents” whom we have identified as analogous to the Jacobins and Bolsheviks, however committed to religious melioration and to limited social, religious, and parliamentary reform, were hardly of a radical bent in those areas, and in any case had, in the months following Charles I’s execution, nothing like the stranglehold on key governing institutions that their subsequent revolutionary counterparts enjoyed. True, in January 1649, the victorious Rumpers “required all men aged eighteen and over to take an Engagement to be true and faithful to the Commonwealth, as now established without king or Lords,” and it used this 1649 Engagement to purge unreliable J.P.s, sheriffs, ministers, and other public figures over the next few years; in such a measure we can, perhaps, descry a faint anticipation of the much more punitive purges ordered in Jacobin and Bolshevik ranks in the later upheavals.116 Still, no less an authority on these matters than Underdown has observed that the Rump of 1649–53 “never approached the fervor of the [French] Convention.” That the Commons “still contained a large proportion of Presbyterians was obvious to contemporaries,” Underdown has written, “many of whom were less inclined than later historians to blanket all Rumpers under the name Independent.”117 Another way of putting this, perhaps, is to stress that, insofar as the M.P.s of the post-1648 period were concerned, “the old line of division between Presbyterians and Independents was no longer so sharply drawn,” as many orthodox Calvinists of both erstwhile factions found a worthwhile common cause in resisting the demands, not only of secular Levellers, but also of increasingly millenarian religious extremists.118 In any case, among other species of reform that would be lacking in the Commonwealth phase of the English Revolution would be anything of an economic nature prefiguring, to any significant extent, the emergency measures promulgated by the Jacobin-dominated Convention in late 1793 – let alone the radical economic changes retrospectively grouped under the rubric of “War Communism” in early Soviet Russia. Certainly, the need for the improvement of ordinary people’s material fortunes was evident to all but the most blinkered contemporaries – what with the disastrous harvests of 1646–49, the depressed conditions of trade, skyrocketing prices for foodstuffs and coal, swelling numbers of vagrants on county roads, and so forth. “The need for more effective poor relief,” Underdown has observed somberly, “was still an urgent matter.” But how did the Rump respond? 116

117

118

On the Engagement, see Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 452; and – in greater detail – Sarah Barber, “The Engagement for the Council of State and the Establishment of the Commonwealth Government,” Historical Research 63 (1990): 44–57. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 258 and 268–69. A similar reading of the balance of political forces within the Rump provides one of the principal themes in Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). On this point, refer again to Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, pp. 452–53.

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The Rump did what any government would have done; they tried to bring prices down. In March 1649 . . . they ordered the J. P.s to enforce the laws against engrossing. . . . Not until September . . . was the levy [on coal] taken off, and fiscal necessity soon led to its restoration, though at a lower rate. More general measures of price control did not get very far. . . . An Act regulating the price of beer was passed in September 1649. . . . In April 1649 a general order was sent to J. P.s reminding them of their duty in setting wage rates. The Rump was doing what any government would have done. A revolutionary government might have been expected to do more.119

True, an Act for relieving and employing paupers (and for punishing vagrants) was passed in May 1649; yet it applied only to London, and it was the only such statute that saw the light during the Rump’s entire history. The well-advertised grievances of copyholding and small-holding proprietors were ignored: as we observed in an earlier context, the abrogation of feudal tenure in “revolutionary” England had far fewer beneficial implications for small rural folk than the analogous reform had in France in the 1790s. “It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the Rump was more protective of the rich and powerful than of the poor and oppressed.”120 Agitation for state-sponsored reform in some areas – the law, religion, parliamentary selection, and so forth – may have temporarily revived with each of Cromwell’s triumphs on the field of battle during 1649–51; yet even that periodic agitation in elite “Independent” circles ´ very seldom came to grips with the economic travails of the Commonwealth’s most necessitous citizens. Nonetheless, if the collaboration of state and Independents in the most advanced phase of the English Revolution had much less of an impact in domestic affairs than would the partnership of state and Jacobins in the France of 1793–94, let alone that of state and Bolsheviks in the Russia of 1917–21, we can still discern some “modern” aspects of state reconsolidation in England in the areas of bureaucratic and military reform. Regarding the first point, Gerald Aylmer’s meticulous research suggests, if not the veritable explosion of bureaucracy associated with the later upheavals in France and Russia, tendencies definitely pointing in the direction of a more modern civil service. “In the personnel of central government,” he has written, “there was a massive change. The social composition of the office-holding body became strikingly less upper-class, and far more representative of the ‘middling sort’ (amongst whom we should include the parochial gentry and the urban ‘pseudo-gentry.’)” This generalization held for the armed forces, local government, and Parliament, as well as for the officialdom of the central administration (if not, to the same extent, for the judicial personnel in the common-law 119 120

Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 280–84. Ibid., p. 284. Regarding the potential benefit for plebeian English citizens of legal reform in the revolutionary era, consult Donald Veall, The Popular Movement for Law Reform 1640–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); and Stuart E. Prall, The Agitation for Law Reform in the Puritan Revolution (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966).

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courts and the court of Chancery). Apparently, too, higher salaries were being paid to the state’s servants than had been the case under the monarchy. Whether this “induced or made it easier to enforce higher standards of administrative probity is more arguable.” Still, “although corruption still existed, and some guilty men went unpunished, the conclusion seems inescapable that more was being done about it than had been done under the monarchy.”121 Clearly, for Aylmer, the role of the Parliament in all these respects was also central: The Long Parliament’s attitude towards fees, venalty, and corruption, for all the failings of some of its own members and some of its servants, did differ substantially from that of the royal government before the Civil War; this was not all double-talk and windowdressing. . . . within the limits of their beliefs and outlook the parliamentarians were trying to operate more honestly and efficiently a system which was definitely more open to talent regardless of social background, given the right ideological ticket of entry.

The “work and careers” of the civil servants studied so assiduously by Aylmer may not yet indicate a situation fully satisfying the professional criteria of a Max Weber; nevertheless, that work and those careers do suggest “that a new kind of public service, in some ways a new administrative system, was coming into existence in republican England until its development was retarded, if not reversed, by the events of 1660.” The “concept of serving the State or the public” did, in the final analysis, “imply a difference from serving the King.”122 If, then, the survival of the new ways of bureaucracy in postrevolutionary (i.e., Restoration) England was somewhat problematic – in this respect, at least, marking this situation off from those of the two later revolutions – at least the modern tendency toward state bureaucratization evidenced itself in the immediate wake of the regicide. Can we also make out, in the armed forces, developments that presage those in revolutionary France and revolutionary Russia? It is difficult, for lack of adequate published research, to establish too tight a parallel between the Commonwealth’s army and those forces fighting for Jacobin France and Bolshevik Russia. If we can assume that Ian Gentle’s findings for the recruitment of cavalry and infantry in the New Model Army of the mid-1640s generally hold as well for the army that Cromwell took to Ireland in 1649 and to Scotland in 1650–51, we can most likely speak of troops of the line made up predominantly of yeomen’s and artisans’ sons (for the horse) and of those from the “lowest ranks of society” (for the foot). That, on the eve of the Irish campaign in 1649, the authorities had to have recourse to the forcible impressmen of men to fill the military ranks would surely argue for a similar social profile, at least insofar as infantry units were concerned.123 121 122 123

Aylmer, The State’s Servants, p. 328. Ibid., pp. 341–42. On these points, refer again to Gentles, The New Model Army, pp. 38–40 and 350–53. H. M. Reece has provided some useful additional information on this subject in The Military Presence in England, 1649–60. D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1981.

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In this respect, at least, we have a tell-tale prefigurement of what transpired in the later revolutions: namely, an increasingly massive induction of plebeian rural Frenchmen and Russians (i.e., agricultural workers and peasants) into the armies of 1793–94 and 1918–21, respectively. Yet we need also to keep in mind that, in the years after the regicide, the Rump (and, for that matter, its legislative successors) were ever endeavoring to economize (and, belike, strike a blow at sectarian radicalism) by reducing the size of the army’s ranks. It was quite another matter, or course, when it came to naval policy. As we have already seen, one of the Rump’s most urgent challenges in 1649 was to build up (or “new-model”) the English navy so as to be able to counterbalance the naval forces of the royalists and continental Powers and so secure the infant Republic. And here, we may be able to draw some parallels between the social profiles of the officer corps and the compromises struck between idealism and professionalism in the English, French, and (in somewhat lesser measure) Russian revolutionary navies. Bernard Capp’s work enables us to portray, in the case of England, a naval officer corps that, in the exigent circumstances of the moment, practiced a broad degree of social outreach. “The navy of the 1650s,” Capp has stated, “contained very few of the gentlemen-captains prominent in the 1630s and none of the aristocratic captains, appointed on the strength of court connections, to be found after the Restoration.” Instead, the “tarpaulin” officer dominated the Commonwealth’s navy. Even if “restricted to professional seamen of non-gentle birth,” the term “tarpaulin” still spanned the “vast gulf separating the ordinary, penniless sailor from the rich shipmaster commanding a great East Indiaman.” This was, Capp has insisted, “the greatest age of the tarpaulin officer” – even if the Rump definitely preferred to entrust the best ships to the stewardship of rich shipmasters rather than to men of humble birth.124 As far as motivation was concerned, both ideological fervor and the imperatives of professionalism loomed large. On the one hand, Capp states flatly that “for the first and only time in its history the navy became a stronghold of political and religious radicalism, with ideological commitment figuring prominently in appointments and promotions.” All the same, however, appointment and subsequent promotion were also contingent on a demonstrated mastery of the profession. Indeed, we are informed, “a more professional outlook gradually developed, as war became a permanent condition and large fleets had to be sent out each year.” The most coveted appointments were, with increasing regularity, filled by promoting men who had already proven themselves in the service, rather than by recruiting untested outsiders. That officers came to compete ever more fiercely over jobs and promotion testified in its own way to a fleet of professionals as much as of “saints afloat.”125

124 125

Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, pp. 175–77 and 398–99. Ibid., pp. 396–401.

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The comparativist will doubtless be quick to perceive parallels between this situation and that obtaining later in the naval ranks of Jacobin-dominated France. The Convention, reacting to geostrategic exigencies similar in many ways to those that had haunted the men of the Rump Parliament, expedited the elevation to lieutenancies of both “military” and “merchant marine” officers, and authorized the naval ministry to choose for the Grands Corps meritorious officers of any of the lower grades. True, at the height of the Terror, Jeanbon St. Andre, ´ naval specialist for the Committee of Public Safety, came under tremendous pressure to promote individuals solely on the basis of ideological considerations. Yet those most knowledgeable on the subject affirm that Jeanbon’s promotion to the highest grades of such men as Villaret-Joyeuse, Van Stabel, Cornic-Dumoulin, and Pierre Martin demonstrates that, however attuned they might be to the slogans of Jacobin idealism, the men ruling France in its hour of maximum peril had above all to be concerned about securing talent, experience, and discipline in the naval officer corps.126 Although the French navy for a variety of reasons never played as central a role in legitimizing (and, specifically, shaping the foreign policy of) the French Revolution as its English counterpart played in influencing the earlier upheaval, comparing the social profiles and ideological and professional motivation of the commanding personnel of the two institutions helps to fill out our view of the processes of state consolidation characterizing the “crisis stages” of both revolutions. Although we know much less about the famously radicalized Baltic Fleet based at Kronstadt in old regime and revolutionary Russia, the work of Norman Saul, Evan Mawdsley, and others surely does indicate a dramatic Bolshevik impact on this institution recalling the changes wrought in naval ranks in the two earlier upheavals. The vast majority of youths entering Imperial Russia’s Naval Cadet Corps between 1910 and 1915, Mawsdley has affirmed, issued from noble or (at the very least) affluent, well-educated families; promotion within these ranks, Saul has written, was “on the basis more of age and connections than of merit,” hence making for a “noble satrapy” in the officered Fleet.127 Although the Great War – and the early phases of the 1917 revolution – brought fewer changes to the officer corps at Kronstadt than to the Imperial Army, by late 1917 and early 1918, the Bolsheviks’ insistence on democratizing the fleet by extending the elective principle to all units and ranks and “sovietizing” the naval administration in general predictably drove many aristocratic senior officers out of the Baltic Fleet. In many cases, however, their places were eagerly assumed by “the younger and more liberal and popular officers,” who 126

127

On all of these points, see: Norman Hampson, La Marine de l’An II: Mobilisation de la Flotte de l’Oc´ean, 1793–94 (Paris: Marcel Rivi`ere et Cie., 1959), pp. 188–201; and William S. Cormack, Revolution and Political Conflict in the French Navy, 1789–1794 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 145–47 and 269–71. Consult Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Revolution and the Baltic Fleet: War and Politics, February 1917–April 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 5–6; and Norman E. Saul, Sailors in Revolt: The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917 (Lawrence, Kans.: Regents Press, 1978), pp. 12–13.

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“stayed at their posts for a variety of reasons” including the standard mix of patriotism, professional ambition, economic concerns in a context of growing economic chaos, and so on.128 Although the newly designated “Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Fleet” was to know many bitter vicissitudes in the years immediately ahead, elements of it ultimately reemerged in the modernized Soviet Navy. That “state consolidation” signified something especially drastic in the case of Russia, and was at its mildest in the case of England, is not of course any more astounding than the similar impression we derived earlier from reviewing the patterns of “terror” in our three revolutions. Under the aegis of Bolshevism, the state–Party relationship in Russia blossomed into a dynamic species of totalitarianism fated to endure for nearly seven decades. In France, the state–Jacobin partnership regimented government and society chiefly (if not exclusively) for the purpose of defeating the First Coalition – and then abruptly relaxed its iron grip. In England, however, as David Underdown has written, there were “distinct limits to the radicalism of even . . . the architects of the revolution:” Most of them, like Oliver Cromwell, were dedicated Puritans, but they were also country gentlemen who had no thought of changing the social order. Disturbed by the breach in the godly party, worried by their isolation, and fearful of the Levellers to their left and the Royalists to their right, they held out an immediate olive branch to the conformists, to men who were even less interested in making further changes than they were themselves. The Rump’s frustrations were of its own making, and followed logically from the nature of the revolution.129

That the Council of State, “effective enough as an executive,” displayed “little skill in getting the necessary business done in the House with sufficient speed”130 may have been an additional problem; yet this was really beside the point. Cromwell and the other “Independent” Grandees, and their outnumbered ideological brethren in the Rump, could not in the nature of things have been Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon, Billaud-Varenne, and Collot d’Herbois, let alone Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. On the other hand, it is also true (and of enduring fascination to English revolutionary historians) that Cromwell and his closest confederates were sufficiently frustrated by the dilatory pace of reform in the Rump to throw it out in April 1653 and replace it with a picked group of “saints” (the so-called Barebones Parliament), who held center stage in the Commonwealth for the remainder of 1653. This fact reminds us that, when it comes to the (ultimately thwarted) hopes and idealism of those on the “ultra-revolutionary Left,” all three of our revolutions in their most imperiled stages are equally deserving 128 129

130

Ibid., pp. 207–9; and Mawdsley, The Russian Revolution and the Baltic Fleet, pp. 132–40. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 295–96. Underdown’s assessment is strongly endorsed by Worden, The Rump Parliament, esp. pp. 41–43; and, most recently, by Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, esp. pp. 514–26. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 295–96.

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of our notice, and in this respect can therefore be revisited in their actual chronological order. Disillusionment on the Extreme Left As we noted in introducing this chapter, the eventual disillusionment of ultraradicals in each of our revolutions with the course of events led to what some might call the “dialectical” paradox of revolutionary rulers being constrained to suppress “popular” energies that they had earlier been only too glad to appropriate on their way to seizing state power. We see this clearly in the case of England in connection with secular radicals like the Levellers and religious extremists such as Fifth Monarchy Men, Baptists, and others; we see it again in the case of France with regard to enrag´e and H´ebertist sans-culottes; and, yet again, we see it in the case of Russian “Left” Socialist Revolutionaries and Communists and “sovietized” soldiers, sailors, workers, and peasants. The irresolvable disagreements between Army Grandees and Levellers helped (along with the regicide) to usher in the Commonwealth in 1649; the equally intractable discord between the generals and the “saints” assembled in the so-called Barebones Parliament in late 1653 helped likewise to terminate the English experiment in radical revolution. In the so-called Whitehall Debates of December 1648–January 1649, John Lilburne’s party and the Cromwellian generals (led, on this occasion, it appears, by Henry Ireton) produced rival Agreements of the People, hence resuming the debate associated less than two years before with Putney Church. Both sides, at least initially, appeared willing to compromise on some issues; the “principal point at issue” in the exchanges at Whitehall, Aylmer has written, was “the civil magistrate’s power in matters of religion.” Ireton’s party, it is true, made no effort to force its version of the Agreement on the Rump in the troubled aftermath of the regicide; and indeed its sincerity in debating Lilburne and his fellow radicals at this late date has been questioned by more than one historian. “On the other hand,” according to Aylmer, “the second Leveller and the officers’ Agreements did provide a starting point for parliamentary discussions of the redistribution of seats and other reforms, later in the year.”131 In the meantime, however, Lilburne and other malcontents – including, most notably, Walwyn, Overton, and Thomas Prince – reverted to the dangerous game of attempting to harness the perdurable discontent in Army ranks over arrears of pay to their radical purposes. Burning their bridges behind them, they launched a series of increasingly outspoken attacks against the institutions of the Commonwealth – and singled out the New Model’s officers for special 131

See Aylmer, The Levellers, pp. 40–46, for this phase of the quarrel between the Levellers and the authorities at London; but see also Gentles, The New Model Army, chapter 10; and Philip Baker, “Rhetoric, Reality and the Varieties of Civil-War Radicalism,” in Adamson, ed., The English Civil War, pp. 202–24.

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abuse. Ian Gentles has summed up the incendiary essence of their pamphlet indictment of the Army: What would satisfy the radicals? Nothing less than the immediate restitution of the General Council of 1647, with sovereign power over all the army’s actions. In addition the soldiers must have the uninhibited right to petition parliament, while the exercise of martial law must be sharply curtailed. Officers and men were to be on an equal footing. Indeed, it was the soldiers who were the essential part of the army, the officers being ‘but the form or letter.’ The soldiers therefore had the right to control and overthrow the officers if they threatened their life, liberty, or freedom. It was a quixotic and inherently anarchistic vision of the army.

“Such a vision had never been realized before,” Gentles added in a suggestive comparativist vein, “and would scarcely ever be tried by even the most revolutionary armies in the next three centuries.”132 To make things even worse from the Grandees’ point of view, radicals within military ranks – some of them anonymous, some of them not so anonymous – were at about the same time petitioning the Rump with their own, by now familiar grievances. One of those petitions, the New Model’s latest historian has informed us, added to the standard litany of complaints about arrears of pay and other professional matters a Leveller-like call for the abolition of tithes, liberty of conscience, the freeing of prisoners for debt, and the relaxing of the existing code of martial law, and invoked as well the cause of “the poor of this nation, whose miseries cry aloud in our ears for redress.”133 Unsurprisingly, this kind of defiance of the Army’s leadership led to a swift crackdown by Cromwell and his fellow officers: a number of the military complainants were court-marshaled, while (in late March) Lilburne, Walwyn, Overton, and Thomas Prince were haled before the Council of State and soon thereafter committed to the Tower. Yet even as the Leveller leaders awaited trial, their supporters endeavored, not only to intensify a campaign aimed at subverting discipline in the Army, but also to spread discontent among wider sectors of urban and suburban society. Perhaps most remarkable were the repeated attempts by hundreds of mobilized women to petition the Rump: on one notable occasion, these female demonstrators, passing beyond the issues of the moment, proclaimed “gender equality” in terms that look forward – at a certain remove – to later sociopolitical upheavals in Europe: Since we are assured of our creation in the image of God, of an interest in Christ equal unto men, as also of a proportionate share in the freedoms of the commonwealth, we cannot but wonder and grieve that we should appear so despicable in your eyes as to be thought unworthy to petition or represent our grievances to this honourable House.134 132 133 134

Gentles, The New Model Army, p. 319. Ibid., p. 318. Cited in ibid., p. 324. See also, on women’s issues in this crisis, Patricia Higgins, “The Reaction of Women,” in Brian Manning, ed., Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London: E. J. Arnold, 1973), pp. 200–05. An earlier and fascinating discussion of women’s roles in

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Young men and apprentices from the area of the capital also petitioned the Rump. “Leveller agents are also known to have been active,” Gentles has averred, “in Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Essex, Suffolk, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Wales.”135 Yet doubtless Leveller agitation was at its most dangerous for the regime insofar as it helped to stiffen the already widespread resistance in Army ranks to the proposed Irish campaign. This resistance was to culminate in the mutinies of May 1649 at Banbury, Burford, and Northampton, described by one expert on the era as “the most serious and sustained attempt at popular revolution by physical force in seventeenth-century England.”136 Yet, in the end, the same specialist has granted, the soldiers’ uprisings at Burford and elsewhere were “in truth very feeble and easily suppressed.” The Irish campaign, as we know, was to proceed on the heels of that suppression; in the meantime, Lilburne and his cohorts were to discover that the sheer violence of their diatribes against the Army and Commonwealth had alienated most of the support remaining for them among the officers. Moreover, the emergence at this time of Gerrard Winstanley and his rather pathetic, protocommunist “Digger” or “True Leveller” movement in Surrey furnished to the “mainstream” Levellers’ opponents a very handy stick with which to belabor them.137 Though Lilburne was to win something of a moral victory by successfully defending himself in court in October 1649, and although the other three Leveller leaders who had been incarcerated with him in March were released on the sole condition of taking the Engagement to the Commonwealth, “nothing could . . . disguise the fact that by the autumn of 1649 the Levellers had been decisively defeated. Indeed, as an organized political movement they scarcely any longer existed.”138 We have already seen that historians have been able to attribute the Levellers’ rapid political decline to all sorts of factors, both immediate and fundamental. In his recent massive conspectus on revolutionary “Britain,” the late Austin Woolrych, without explicitly rejecting any of those explanations, suggested that “religion was probably the sphere in which the Levellers were most out of touch with the majority of their contemporaries.” In this contentious area of public policy, that is, the Levellers’ talk of “disestablishing” religion

135 136

137 138

the various radical groups of the times is that of Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1972), esp. pp. 306–23. Gentles, The New Model Army, p. 329. Aylmer, The Levellers, pp. 40–46. On Leveller attitudes toward the Irish campaign in 1649, see Norah Carlin, “The Levellers and the Conquest of Ireland in 1649,” Historical Journal 30 (1987): 269–88. On the mutinies themselves, refer again to Gentles, The New Model Army, pp. 331–48. For a sympathetic portrayal of the Diggers in the English Revolution, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, esp. Chapter 7. Aylmer, The Levellers, pp. 40–46.

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altogether alienated civilian and military authorities for whom a statesupported faith remained an unchallengeable sine qua non; at the same time, many of the sectarian groups and radical congregations of this period found Lilburne and his fellow radicals too secular and egalitarian for their tastes.139 From our analytical perspective, however, the most telling development here was the irreversible rupture between onetime (if uneasy) allies of the increasingly revolutionary, late civil war years. This could not have been pointed up more dramatically than by what Lilburne purportedly overheard Cromwell shouting in Counciliar chambers on March 28, 1649: “I tell you, sir, you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them in pieces. . . . Sir, I tell you again, you are necessitated to break them.”140 This parting of the ways between regicides committed ever more firmly to the routines and order of governance and unappeased ultra-radicals excluded from the inner conclaves of such governance is something we will be encountering again in the French and Russian Revolutions. But if Cromwell and the Commonwealth’s other rulers had to weather in 1649 the embittered recriminations of onetime secular supporters, they were destined, four years later, to undergo a similar experience yet again – only this time with a variety of impractically radical saints and secularists. The precise motivation behind Cromwell’s sudden decision on April 20, 1653, to dissolve the Rump may never be known, and need not detain us here.141 What is of critical importance is the dilemma that his escalating frustration with the glacial pace of “reform” in the Rump posed for him by the spring of 1653 – a dilemma that Woolrych has perhaps most effectively summarized: His precipitate dissolution of the Rump left him with very little freedom of movement. Since he was in no position, legal or practical, to hold elections to an authentic parliament, his choice lay between some form of military dictatorship or a nominated assembly broad-based enough to attempt the desired reforms on which the Rump had stalled for so long. He chose the latter, not as an ideal form of government or as a permanent solution, but as a stage towards the resumption of elected parliaments, which he evidently hoped to see by about the end of 1655. But given his fervent Puritan faith in providence’s watch over the people of God in England, he placed extravagant hopes in the assembly that he had summoned, and in his opening speech he expressed them in unguarded terms which the saints would never let him forget.142

In hindsight, it may be relatively easy for us to see what Oliver, momentarily transported by expectations that were (for him) somewhat uncharacteristically 139 140 141

142

For this reassessment of the Leveller movement, see Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, pp. 447–49. I have quoted this frequently cited outburst from Gentles, The New Model Army, p. 322. For some of the latest speculation on this subject, see Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, pp. 531–36. But see also Blair Worden, “The Bill for a New Representative: The Dissolution of the Long Parliament, April 1653,” English Historical Review 86 (1971): 473–96; and, by the same author, The Rump Parliament, Part 5, passim. Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 392.

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optimistic, could not divine: namely, that he was in reality setting the stage for a second rupture with ultra-radical fellow travelers. In reappraising this second falling-out between the Commonwealth and some of its adherents on the “ultra” Left, it is crucial for us to make three points. First, in reviewing the work of the so-called “Barebones Parliament” (so nicknamed by contemporaries as a sneering reference to one of its members, Praisegod Barebones), we note, as comparativists, something unique in historical terms: only in the English Revolution were individuals we have been able to regard as “ultra-radicals” actually invested (however briefly) with legislative state power. Neither the Robespierrist Jacobins of 1793–94 nor the triumphant Bolsheviks of 1917–21 chose to entrust such power even momentarily to those even farther to the Left than themselves.143 Whether we interpret this positively as a reflection of the potency of chiliastic religious expectations in the mid-seventeenth century or (somewhat more negatively) as a reflection of the less-than-revolutionary temper of the Rump Parliament of 1649–53, or likelier as a bit of both, it is nonetheless a point worth registering. Second, in analyzing the membership of this “nominated” parliament that held sessions from its installation in early July 1653 until its dissolution by Cromwell about five months later, Austin Woolrych has persuasively modified posterity’s impression of an assembly whose members could be fairly mocked by contemporaries for their socially inferior origins, political ineptitude, and “Puritan canting.” Regarding the first and second of these strictures, he has this to say: Barebone’s Parliament differed unquestionably in its social composition from a normal House of Commons, and for nearly half the members this was their sole appearance at Westminster. Nevertheless the great majority of them were drawn from the top 5% of the population, and the traditional governing class was well represented. Contrary to popular report, the number of tradesmen was small, and of lay preachers still smaller. The range of experience on which the assembly could draw, especially in local administration, was not contemptible. Neither social inferiority nor ignorance of the tasks of government was a sufficient a priori reason why it should fail, given the limited duration and the interim nature of the authority to which Cromwell summoned it.144

As for the “Puritan canting” gleefully attributed to this assemblage by its many detractors: if it figured at all among Barebones’ members, it must have been largely confined to what Woolrych has termed a minority of “merchants and professional men, with doubtful pretensions to gentility or with none,” for it was only among these socioprofessional groups that religious radicals appeared “in a clear majority.”145 This stress on the limited representation of millenarian 143

144 145

Although, admittedly, Russianists would remind us that Maria Spiridonova’s Left SRs might have been able (had they been so inclined) to seize state power in Russia in the chaotic days of July 1918. Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, pp. 165–93. Ibid., pp. 232–33.

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sectarians in the “parliamentary” sessions of July–December 1653 has also figured in the works of most of Woolrych’s colleagues in the field.146 Nonetheless (and this is our third point), the radicals in Barebones, however outnumbered by greater and lesser gentry of mostly moderate sociopolitical views, managed to create a disproportionate stir with their talk of ending tithes and lay patronage, codifying English law, abolishing the court of Chancery, and so forth. Woolrych has described the deepening divisions that consequently set in within the ranks of the Barebones Parliament: Soon . . . the radicals’ objectives with regard to tithes, lay patronage, the reform of the law, and other matters came to be seen as a threat to property, and this greatly strengthened the tendency of the House to polarize. The members in the upper social brackets had the most to lose, especially if they owned advowsons or impropriated tithes, though material interest was only one factor in the growing cleavage. Class snobbery must have been another, for when the more extreme radicals started to claim a special call from Christ to pursue their unpopular policies, it made it the harder to bear that so many of them were merchants, ex-soldiers, [squirelings] from the backwoods, and other types who never would have been legislators but for the revolutions of the times.147

Although it was, specifically, a committee report calling the maintenance of tithes into question that led to the final breach between “entrenched conservatives” and “sectarian radicals,” and to the decision of some of the former to “resign” their commissions back into Cromwell’s hands, any one of a number of other, equally inflammatory issues could have eventually precipitated the dissolution of Barebones, and thus the definitive defeat of the ultra-radicals, in December 1653. It is also significant from the analytic perspective of this entire study that Cromwell’s decision to liquidate his experiment in “saintly” reform came against the usual backdrop of dialectically related external and internal threats to the ever-insecure English Republic. If millenarian preaching both within and outside parliamentary ranks was coming increasingly to aggravate the Commonwealth’s sense of insecurity, this was in part because the Fifth Monarchists and others were fulminating in late 1653 against negotiations at London aimed at terminating the First Anglo-Dutch War; simultaneously, rumors concerning the irrepressible John Lilburne’s recent royalist contacts acquired new urgency in the face of an escalating pro-Stuart insurrection in the Scottish Highlands (“Glencairn’s Rising”).148 Cromwell, by now all but head of state (and soon to be Lord Protector under a constitution of John Lambert’s fashioning) had, 146

147 148

See, for example, Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), esp. pp. 66–75 and 151–55; the various essays in J. F. McGregor and Barry Reay, eds., Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Scott, England’s Troubles, Chapters 11–13. Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, pp. 232–33. Ibid., pp. 320–24.

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therefore, to act under the usual, interrelated foreign and domestic pressures on his country. All of this was lost, of course, on the “saints” infuriated by what they regarded as Cromwell’s betrayal of their “godly” cause: the Fifth Monarchists, for instance, “went into permanent and unwavering opposition,” according to their principal historian, reviling Oliver for “accepting” the resignation of Barebones’ moderate members, “and so disrupting the reign of the saints.”149 The Lord Protector, over the final wearying years of his life, would have to reckon with the ire of disillusioned ultra-radicals in addition to all his constitutionally prescribed responsibilities of office. At least (the comparativist might interject at this point) Cromwell survived the most dangerous phase of his country’s upheaval; Robespierre and several of his confidants (Saint-Just, Couthon, Lebas, Augustin Robespierre) would not be so lucky in France’s revolution. Moreover, if the better part of four years in England separated the final rupture between Cromwellians and Levellers from the subsequent breach between Cromwellians and “saints” in the Barebones Parliament, less than a year intervened in France between the Jacobins’ repudiation of enrag´e activism and their suppression of H´ebertisme. Still, the ultra-radicals’ disillusionment with those revolutionaries wielding state power would be as palpable and as painful in the latter case as in the former. Although there was never a highly integrated “enrag´e party” either at Paris or – even less – in the provinces, we do know of five individuals – Jacques Roux, the so-called “red priest,” Theophile Leclerc, Jean Varlet, Pauline Leon, ´ ´ and Claire Lacombe – who, in the words of their chief historian, were regarded by contemporaries in the spring and summer of 1793 as “members of the same ‘party,’ or at least of a conscious political alliance.”150 They often appeared at the Cordeliers Club in early 1793, even as the Girondists and Montagnards were locked in their death struggle in the Convention; they could claim Marat’s advocacy for a time; and they tended to associate themselves with sans-jupon activists who briefly flourished in the Parisian Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. Insofar as Roux, Varlet, and the others had a coherent program, the gist of it lay in three areas: “the rigorous repression of food-hoarding and money speculation by legislation and intimidation; the intensification of the political Terror against actual counter-revolutionaries, and against the potentially counter-revolutionary classes of aristocrats, priests and bourgeois; and a purge of the ‘counter-revolutionary classes’ from the army and the administration in favor of patriotic sans-culottes.”151 As R. B. Rose has correctly

149 150

151

Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men, pp. 66–75. See R. B. Rose, The Enrag´es: Socialists of the French Revolution? (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1965), p. 73. For further discussion of the enrag´e program, and for some of the specific pronouncements of Roux, Leclerc, and Varlet, see Marc Allan Goldstein, ed., Social and Political Thought of the French Revolution, 1788–1797 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), pp. 362–70, 456–69, and 474–88. Rose, The Enrag´es, p. 79.

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observed, however, the enrag´es never held any monopoly on any of these positions, which to one degree or another were co-opted in the worsening crisis of 1793 by the Robespierrist Jacobins (for their own, expediential purposes) once they had disposed of Girondist “obstructionism” in the Convention. Yet individuals like Varlet, Roux, and Leclerc were, perhaps, distinctive for the “extraordinary and single-minded violence” that they brought to their campaign of orchestrating pressure (after the May 31–June 2 insurrection) on the Convention and its executive committees to implement their economic and political demands. For the comparativist already familiar with Leveller “gender” tactics utilized against the New Model and the Rump in 1649, the apparent tactical alliance in 1793 between enrag´es and radicalized Parisian sans-jupons is even more intriguing. We know, for instance, that throughout August 1793, Theophile ´ Leclerc, editor at that juncture of a Marat-styled newspaper, L’Ami du Peuple, solicited the support of the Revolutionary Republican Women for the enrag´e campaign for an arm´ee r´evolutionnaire to arrest former nobles, clerics, and speculators and to requisition foodstuffs in rural areas. In an article dated August 4, Leclerc appealed in these terms to politicized women in the French capital: It is your special duty to warn of [the ambitions of hoarders and aristocrats], Republican Revolutionary Women, generous women truly above all praise for the courage and energy you have developed; your sex, gifted with a much greater sensibility than ours, will feel more vividly the misfortunes of our country, and your tender solicitude for the fate of your husbands, brothers, and children will make you adopt this infallible measure for public safety. . . . Go – by your example and your speech awaken republican energy and reanimate patriotism in lukewarm hearts! Yours is the task of ringing the tocsin of liberty! Time is short, the peril extreme! You have deserved first place, fly, glory awaits you! . . . 152

Both Pauline Leon ´ and Claire Lacombe, as members of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women and in their roles as enrag´ees, were prominent during these times among those repeatedly petitioning the Convention for implementation of political and economic Terror.153 Inevitably, they recall for us those Englishwomen who, turning to both Biblical and secular precedents, 152

153

Leclerc is cited in Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789–1795 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 175. Numerous examples of their activism are noted in ibid., passim. See also, on Lacombe, Leon, ´ and other female activists in the 1790s: Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); Sara Melzer and Leslie Rabine, eds., Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Shirley E. Roessler, Out of the Shadows: Women and Politics in the French Revolution, 1789–1795 (New York: Peter Lang, 1996); and Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution, trans. Katherine Streip (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

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had articulated their own revolutionary demands before the scandalized Rump in the spring of 1649 even as John Lilburne and his coagitators languished in the Tower. Yet, in the end it was the same old story: genuine but essentially “mainstream” radicals (in this case, Jacobins), having appropriated the support of Roux, Leclerc, Varlet, and other extremists in their struggle for state power, eventually (and inescapably) found it necessary to turn against enrag´e and other sources of disorder and potential revolt. The falling-out between Robespierre and Jacques Roux on the specific issue of economic terror was, for the enrag´es’ primary historian, particularly poignant: Neither Robespierre nor Jacques Roux had any love for merchants and businessmen. Robespierre hoped to shame or terrorize them into ‘virtue,’ into working for the Republic. Roux was less sanguine about the possibilities of such a reformation, but in any case his horizons were a good deal narrower. . . . His political platform was correspondingly narrow: first, apparently, revenge by a new ‘September Massacre’ of the most blatant profiteers, then draconian legislation and terroristic action to force merchants and shopkeepers to carry on their trade virtually as a social service for the poor rather than as a means to profit. In the view of the Jacobin rulers of France, neither project could possibly be reconciled with the maintenance of order, the safety of society, or the survival of the republic.154

Indeed, there was no more chance of reconciling Robespierre’s economic views with those of Roux and his allies than there had been of reconciling the New Model Grandees’ views on the franchise (and on a myriad of other issues) with those of Lilburne and Company in 1647 and 1649. And, just as the Levellers and their fellow travelers had become stridently critical of the Cromwellians’ growing power in the wake of Charles I’s execution, so agitators like Leclerc and Roux became increasingly disillusioned with the gradual consolidation of the Jacobin dictatorship in the summer and autumn of 1793. The expulsion of Roux and Leclerc from the Cordeliers Society on June 30, Marat’s furious denunciations of them and of the other enrag´es in his journal in early July, the eventual incarceration of Roux and Varlet in September, and the Jacobins’ forcible dissolution of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women in November – these, and other, events were for the enrag´es so many dolorous milestones along the road to their movement’s demise. Yet well in advance of the Society’s dissolution, events had forced Roux and the others to undertake what R. B. Rose has called an “agonizing reappraisal” of their attitude toward the Terror itself. In their final days of freedom, both Leclerc and Roux used their journals (the Ami du Peuple and the Publiciste) to question the punitive actions of the Revolutionary Tribunal and comit´es de surveillance at Paris and the mounting numbers of arrests and 154

Rose, The Enrag´es, pp. 45–46. For Jacques Roux’s “Manifesto,” published on behalf of the Enrag´es on June 25, 1793, see again Goldstein, ed., Social and Political Thought of the French Revolution, pp. 474–83.

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executions both at the capital and in the provinces, and to speculate as to whether “a rigidly defined system of law” was not, after all was said and done, to be preferred “to the flexible terror, as being less likely to be perverted for personal ends.”155 Had they but known it, unruly extremists like Jacques Roux, Theophile ´ Leclerc, and Jean Varlet were but anticipating, in the late summer and autumn of 1793, similar strictures that would be hurled at the Robespierrist Jacobin dictatorship in the spring of 1794 by Hebertists and others. The term “Hebertism” ´ ´ referred to Jacques-Rene´ Hebert, deputy procurator to the Paris Commune in ´ 1793–94, who, along with a number of other, increasingly restive spokesmen for the Parisian sans-culottes (Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, A. F. Momoro, Charles-Philippe Ronsin, Franc¸ois Nicolas Vincent) presented a new version of the old enrag´e challenge to the accumulation of powers in the hands of the men of the Convention’s executive committees.156 Yet, as R. R. Palmer has truly observed, men like Hebert, Chaumette, Vincent, and Ronsin were ´ essentially rabble-rousers, “men without ideas, living by mere confusion. They had no solution for the economic crisis on which they thrived.” Much like the “enrages,” ´ they were more a faction or “medley of factions” than a disciplined “party” in the modern sense of the term. “They were mostly functionaries and public jobholders, revolutionaries on the lower rungs of the ladder,” the officiers who, “representing the anarchical side of the Revolution, . . . were a nuisance, even a menace, to the organized revolutionary state.”157 Significantly, when a handful of such malcontents, hoping to use the Cordeliers Club as their springboard, attempted in March 1794 to rally the Commune, the revolutionary sections, and perhaps even elements in the Convention to their insurrectionary “cause,” their efforts were a fiasco, and only led, for most of them, to the guillotine. Just as the “saints” of the Barebones Parliament in late 1653 could not comprehend Cromwell’s preoccupation with intersecting foreign and domestic issues, so the “Hebertists” could not appreciate the ´ strategic preoccupations of the governing Jacobins. “There is little doubt,” Morris Slavin has written, “that the Jacobins/Montagnards were concerned, above all, about winning the war. If sans-culottisme had to be sacrificed and its spokesmen curbed in order to establish that “unity and indivisibility” that defined the Republic, so be it. In this respect the government acted, it appears, not from any abstract class bias but from the immediate need to support the war effort.”158 In December 1653, a vexing combination of Scottish and English royalism, Dutch diplomatic impatience, and fiery domestic religious 155 156

157 158

Rose, The Enrag´es, pp. 79–81. The principal work on the Hebertists is: Morris Slavin, The H´ebertistes to the Guillotine: ´ Anatomy of a ‘Conspiracy’ in Revolutionary France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994). Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, p. 294. Slavin, The H´ebertistes to the Guillotine, pp. 254–55.

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agitation had forced Cromwell’s hand with regard to Barebones; in March 1794, the need to defeat First Coalition forces convincingly and at the same time deal with political agitation at home similarly forced the ruling Committees’ hands against the rabble-rousers in the Cordelier Club, Commune, and Parisian comit´es r´evolutionnaires. Yet the analogy between December 1653 in England and March (Ventose) ˆ 1794 in France should not be forced. After all, the Hebertists were, like ´ the enrag´es of the preceding summer, popular with the sans-culottes and sans-jupons (artisans, small merchants and shopkeepers, and laborers) whose energies (and political/economic discontents) had helped the well-off Jacobin lawyers, entrepreneurs, and professionals to vault over the Girondists into state power; to alienate them now could be, at least for Robespierrists intent on continuing and even intensifying the Terror, dangerous in a way that the “saints” in and out of Barebones never were for the less utopian and less paranoid Cromwellians. Hence, the “rupture” between governing elite and popular forces, man´ ageable in late 1793 and even, arguably, in March 1794, for a combination of geostrategic and domestic/political reasons, became more lethal by midsummer 1794. When, at that time, the assertion of French arms abroad (and the suppression of the last vestiges of counterrevolution at home) made it safe to quarrel in the governing committees and in the Convention over what many at Paris now saw as the excesses of the Terror, there was really no philosophy or argument that could justify sustaining those sanguinary excesses or the politicians most persistently identified with them. There was certainly nothing in the nature of a “personality cult” that could have indefinitely focused Jacobin (let alone more broadly based) loyalties on, say, a clique of “Robespierrists.” Nor could even so terrifyingly idealistic a Jacobin as Saint-Just have divined in dictatorship a permanent solution to constitutional problems in France. Even after the Ventose ˆ crisis had blown over, the Robespierrists (if we can even assume the momentary existence of such a group) did not regard themselves as “absolute” in any lasting legal sense. The irreducible problem here may have lain in Maximilien Robespierre’s peculiar personality. Although many an historian has wandered in the sometimes-frightening corridors of that personality, no one has described its worst features more memorably than Robert R. Palmer: Robespierre had the faults of a self-righteous and introverted man. Disagreement with himself he regarded . . . as error, and in the face of it he would either withdraw into his own thoughts, or cast doubt on the motives behind the other man’s opinion. He was quick to charge others with the selfish interest of which he felt himself to be free. A concerted action in which he did not share seemed to him to be an intrigue. He had the virtues and the faults of an inquisitor. A lover of mankind, he could not enter with sympathy into the minds of his own neighbors.159 159

Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, pp. 6–7. Dan Edelstein has argued, intriguingly if not altogether convincingly, that if Jacobins such as Robespierre and (even more) Saint-Just had had their way, revolutionary France would have jettisoned formal constitutionalism and “popular

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All of the most frightening, most conspiratorial aspects of that personality grinned out from the disastrous speech “The Incorruptible” made in the Convention on July 26 (8 Thermidor) 1794. In carefully analyzing that speech, David Andress has done well to stress the points in it where its author, once again seeing “treachery” everywhere, explicitly spoke of “a conspiracy against public liberty” in the Convention and in the governing committees themselves – but without naming any of the individuals supposedly implicated! In doing so, as Andress has remarked, Robespierre was signing his own death warrant.160 Now that France appeared to be safely on the offensive on all military fronts, the ex-bureaucrats, lawyers, and entrepreneurs of the Convention, desiring above all to get back to legislative and economic business-as-usual, had no remaining stomach for The Incorruptible’s paranoid utopianism. On the “popular” side of the disintegrating Jacobin–sans-culotte partnership, disillusionment with the Robespierrist dictatorship had been growing apace ever since the Hebertists’ downfall, exposing more fully contradictions ´ within that alliance that had never, in truth, been transcended altogether. Some of those contradictions were economic in nature, involving tensions between the propertied and propertyless, between capital and labor, between producers and consumers. Such economic tensions became painfully evident for the government’s plebeian supporters at Paris when (on 5 Thermidor) the authorities, no longer inhibited in their actions by Hebertists in the Commune, publicized ´ their determination to enforce the wage ceilings stipulated in the September 1793 Maximum g´en´eral – wage controls whose implementation throughout the capital would amount, for many sans-culottes, to a substantial reduction of their purchasing power.161 There were also gendered tensions within sansculottisme: activist sans-jupons could and did find themselves at odds with their male counterparts, not to mention the exclusively male, bourgeois politicians in the Convention.162 Most telling, however, were the growing political strains in this alliance, strains only exacerbated by the revolutionary government’s prosecution of the war against the First Coalition. Albert Soboul has enlarged on this point in his classic study of the Parisian sans-culottes:

160

161 162

sovereignty” permanently, locating the source of statist authority in “nature” rather than in the will of the “people.” (See Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right, p. 214.) Even if this had been their intention, however, there is scant reason to believe that most of the Conventionnels would have been willing to go along with such a vision. See also Marisa Linton’s reservations about this interpretation, as expressed in her review of Edelstein’s book in the American Historical Review 116 (2011): 403–06. See Andress, The Terror, pp. 332–36. The full text of Robespierre’s disastrous speech of 8 Thermidor is given in Richard T. Bienvenu, The Ninth of Thermidor: The Fall of Robespierre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 143–74. See also, on Robespierre’s actions in the Convention, John Hardman, Robespierre (London: Longman, 1999), esp. pp. 188– 89. On this point, see George Rude, ´ The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), esp. pp. 128–41. On this point, consult again the sources on women’s roles in the popular revolution at Paris (and elsewhere) that are cited above, in note 153.

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On the political front, the war required an authoritarian government and the sansculottes were fully aware of this, since they had assisted in its creation. But from the first, the demands of war resulted in practices that were contradictory to the form of democracy envisioned by the Montagnards and the sans-culottes. Furthermore, democracy, as practiced by the sans-culottes, tended spontaneously toward a direct form of government, which appeared incompatible with the exigencies of wartime conditions. The sans-culottes had called for a strong government which would eradicate the aristocracy; they were not prepared for the fact that in order to win, this government would be obliged to force them to toe the line.163

Here, the Hebertists and their forlorn successors in the spring of 1794 discov´ ered what their enrag´e predecessors had experienced the year before: namely, that the Jacobin regime (in the name, to be sure, of the overall revolutionary cause) was becoming a bureaucratic leviathan prepared to sweep aside anyone in its way, whether positioned on the Far Right or on the Far Left. To use the word “bureaucratic” is to suggest more insidious ways in which prosecution of the war weakened the very sans-culottes on whom Robespierre and his closest cohorts could decreasingly rely in the critical summer of 1794. For one thing, plebeian militants given jobs in the swelling ranks of officialdom became little more than docile tools of statist authority, while the activism of their sectional organizations was curtailed by the burgeoning demands of national defense. Thus, the spontaneity and militancy of the masses atrophied; the energy and enthusiasm of the sections and streets were transferred to the state’s bureaux and armies, and were applied to duties discharged at the behest of the ever more authoritarian government. Then, again, the waging of the war deprived the leading militants of many of their natural acolytes – young apprentices and shop workers who were inclined to action in domestic politics, but who now saw defending the nation as their most pressing civic duty. Conscription thereby depleted the ranks and attenuated the revolutionary ardor of the popular movement.164 These dynamics were presumably at work in other major communities as well during this period; but it was naturally at Paris that they operated most directly to undermine the popular basis of the Revolutionary Government of the “Year II.” Thus, the rupture between revolutionary leaders and revolutionary followers in 1794 – a rupture that, for those politicians tarred in the end with a Robespierrist brush of utopian and self-defeatingly paranoid idealism, proved far more fatal than the ruptures of 1649 and 1653 had proven for the Cromwellians 163

164

Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government, 1793–1794, trans. Remy Inglis Hall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), ´ p. 252. For an interesting methodological critique of Soboul’s masterwork, see Richard Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), esp. pp. 87–90 and 120–27. On these points, refer again to Soboul, The Sans-Culottes, pp. 260–62; Cobb, “The Revolutionary Mentality in France,” History 42 (1957): 181–96; and Slavin, The H´ebertistes to the Guillotine, pp. 264–65.

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in revolutionary England. It also proved more fatal for the Robespierrists in France than any disillusionment on the Far Left would prove for Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks in Russia after 1917 – even though, admittedly, that disillusionment was to give the Leninists a nasty scare. The massive uprising of “sovietized” sailors at Kronstadt in March 1921, coinciding with the tempestuous Tenth Bolshevik Party Congress at Moscow, capped several years of growing unrest among far leftist SRs and SDs, proletarians, peasants, and military personnel, and forced on Lenin an “agonizing reappraisal” of his entire revolutionary strategy.165 As we noted in an earlier context, Lenin’s reluctant but probably unavoidable decision to make peace with Imperial Germany early in 1918 provoked fury among the “idealists” in both the Socialist Revolutionary and Bolshevik camps. Indeed, around the time of Brest-Litovsk, Bukharin’s “Left Communists” actually held talks with Maria Spiridonova’s Left SRs to explore the possibility of ousting Lenin and replacing his government with a new, ultra-leftist coalition regime pledged to continuing the war by “revolutionary” means against Berlin. The Bukharin group in the end withdrew from the parleys. That they did so made good geopolitical sense: as Richard K. Debo has noted, a successful ultra-leftist reversal of Soviet foreign policy would most likely have led to a resumption of German hostilities against practically defenseless Petrograd and Moscow, “and with their fall the entire apparatus of the Soviet state could have collapsed.”166 Lenin had the good sense to make his own peace with individual Left SRs, thereby isolating the Left SR Central Committee and enabling his party for a time to pose as defender of the Revolution against “fanatical extremists;” by the same token he overlooked the four votes cast by the Bukharin group against Germany’s humiliating peace terms in the Bolshevik Central Committee on February 28, 1918. Nonetheless, ultra-leftists in both parties continued to make things difficult for the Soviet regime over the next several years. If the Left SRs were especially outraged by what they regarded as Lenin’s “sellout” of the international revolutionary cause on the altar of geostrategic expediency, they were almost equally alienated by aspects of his domestic policies.167 They railed against Dzerzhinskii’s “indiscriminate” terrorism, deplored policies that they saw as inimical to workers’ and peasants’ interests, and, above all, anathematized the substitution of a bureaucratic, overcentralized one-party state for the “free” coalition of Soviet parties behind whose 165

166 167

On Kronstadt in March 1921, see, in particular: Paul H. Avrich, Kronstadt 1921 (New York: Norton, 1971); and Israel Getzler, Kronstadt, 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Debo, Revolution and Survival: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, p. 314. On the following points, see: Michael Melancon, “The Left Socialist Revolutionaries, 1917– 1918,” in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 291–99; and Oliver H. Radkey, The Sickle Under the Hammer: The Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the Early Months of Soviet Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963).

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fac¸ade (so they argued) the Bolsheviks had selfishly seized state power for themselves in November 1917. In late 1918, there were new mutterings about overthrowing Lenin’s regime in Left SR circles; soon, Kamkov’s and Spiridonova’s faction would be fomenting massive rural uprisings against the socalled Poor Peasant Committees (kombedy), and helped as well to encourage workers’ strikes and demonstrations that continued well into 1919 and beyond. Left SRs were also implicated by the Cheka in antigovernment agitation in Red Army ranks. “Even two years later,” Michael Melancon has averred, “the Kronstadt uprising and other anti-Communist disorders occurred at Left SR instigation. Thus the history of the Left SR party and activism, although never blessed with success, continued long beyond the usually ascribed mid-1918 termination point.”168 Still, however furiously Felix Dzerzhinskii’s Chekists might pursue the dissident Left SRs, Lenin’s new regime no doubt faced a more vexing challenge in the inner councils of the Bolshevik (Communist) Party itself – a challenge that persisted long after the German military collapse in November 1918 eased exogenous pressures on Soviet Russia.169 Led now by the economist Valerian Osinskii-Obolenskii, the Left Communists launched a critique of the government on a broad range of domestic issues. For starters, they castigated Lenin’s campaign to create a new bureaucratic chain of command in government and industry at the expense of the revolutionary notion of soviets’ and workers’ control, a notion that Lenin himself had preached up in his 1917 essay State and Revolution. The Left Communists used their short-lived journal, Kommunist, to lash out against “the deviation of Soviet power and the majority of the party on the ruinous path of petty-bourgeois policies,” and announced that the so-called “left wing of the party” would intrepidly “stand in the position of an effective and responsible proletarian opposition.”170 If, against the bleak backdrop of civil war in late 1918, the Left Communists temporarily closed ranks with the Bolshevik Party majority in an all-out struggle for survival, and must have genuinely welcomed the Party’s affirmation (at its Eighth Congress in March 1919) of “proletarian democracy,” of the “suppression of the resistance of the exploiters,” and of “the [eventual] abolition of state authority,” they just as plainly reserved the right – in less perilous times – to contest the tendencies toward the centralization of authority and autocratic methods of governance prevailing in Lenin’s new Russia. 168 169

170

Melancon, “The Left Socialist Revolutionaries, 1917–1918,” p. 297. On the “left opposition” in Communist Party ranks, see: Robert V. Daniels, “The Communist Opposition: From Brest-Litovsk to the Tenth Party Congress,” in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 245–55; Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960); Leonard B. Schapiro, The Origins of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase, 1917–1922 (London: Macmillan, 1977); and R. J. Kowalski, The Bolshevik Party in Conflict (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991). Daniels, “The Communist Opposition,” p. 247.

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Three of the flashpoints of ultra-leftist challenge to the emerging status quo in Bolshevik Russia involved the “military opposition,” “Democratic Centralism,” and the “Workers’ Opposition.” Far leftist Vladimir Smirnov (with the initial support of Joseph Stalin) headed a “military opposition” clique which, at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, challenged Trotsky (and, by implication, Lenin) over measures “professionalizing” the Red Army: the employment of former tsarist officers (now dubbed “military specialists”); the reestablishment of conventional command and discipline; the abolition of elected party soviets in the Army; and so on. Lenin actually came to Trotsky’s defense at the Congress, and a compromise on military/disciplinary matters was cobbled together.171 Smirnov, in alliance with Osinskii and Timofei Sapronov, soon thereafter formed the “Group of Democratic Centralists” whose somewhat oxymoronic title implied a much more fundamental challenge to the basic direction of “communism” as ensconced in Russia. The “Democratic Centralists” inveighed against Moscow’s growing supremacy over the provinces, suggested that a dangerous imbalance was developing between Party and Soviet institutions, with the latter being increasingly subordinated to the former, and saw a creeping “militarization” invading all aspects of civilian authority and favoring hierarchy over principles of collegialism and egalitarianism. (That “Democratic Centralism” soon struck a notably responsive chord in the Ukraine raised the general – and potentially destabilizing – issue of ethnic integration into the new Soviet Russia; in April 1920, the authorities at Moscow felt constrained to purge the elected Ukrainain leadership.)172 Finally, as a communist victory in the civil war appeared increasingly probable in the course of 1920, yet another “deviation” on the Far Left emerged in the form of the “Workers’ Opposition.” Led by Aleksandr Shliapnikov, S. P. Medvedev, and prominent Bolshevik feminist Aleksandra Kollontai, this movement looked back to the “workers’ control” agitation of 1917 and called for the trade unions to run industry independently of the Party, for all non-proletarian elements to be expelled from the Party, and for Party officials themselves to labor manually at least three months a year!173 In September 1920, the Ninth Party Congress, 171 172

173

For further discussion of the “military opposition” in 1918, refer back to Benvenuti, “The Red Army,” pp. 409–10; and to von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship, passim. The issues in the Ukraine have been most recently summarized by Mark von Hagen, “The Ukraine,” in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, eds. Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 728–40. But for a more general discussion of issues of ethnic politics in postrevolutionary Russia, see Ronald G. Suny, “State-Building and Nation-Making: The Soviet Experience,” in Miller, ed., The Russian Revolution, pp. 236–55. There is, of course, an ever-growing literature on Kollontai and on Russian feminism in general in this period. See, for example: Barbara E. Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); Clements, Bolshevik Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Beatrice Farnsworth, Alexandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism and the Bolshevik Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980); and Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).

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at which all of these “left opposition” forces seem to have reached the acme of their popularity, adopted what Robert V. Daniels has termed “a remarkable resolution affirming the norms of democracy and free criticism within the party, and calling for steps to curb bureaucracy and eliminate economic inequality.”174 Yet, as we shall see in Chapter 6, Lenin and the other authoritarian types in the Party would decisively reverse this apparent trend toward a modicum of “democracy” and egalitarianism in Communist Party ranks at the absolutely pivotal Tenth Party Congress in March 1921. They did so in part by taking advantage of the coincident uprising of troops and sailors at nearby Kronstadt. This rebellion, destined to leave a tragic smear of blood across the face of early Communist rule in Russia, took up many of the complaints of the “Left Communists;” yet it was also an autonomous “popular” phenomenon, and as such it was only the most critical of many revolts of “ordinary” Russians (in both urban and rural settings) against their new Bolshevik masters during 1918–21. To start here with the peasants: Lenin and his cohorts, by sending their (Jacobin-style) “food brigades” into the countryside to requisition agricultural produce, by transforming the peasants’ organs of self-rule into bureaucratic organs of the new state, by threatening small-holding muzhiki with collective farms, and by drafting young men into the military conflicts of the period, only stoked fires of peasant resistance. As doctrinaire Marxists out of touch with age-old realities in rural Russia, the Bolsheviks, with all their clarion calls for “class warfare” between “kulaks” and “poor muzhiki” in the countryside, never genuinely understood what “peasant Russia” expected to get out of the overthrow of tsarism and its “liberal” successors in 1917. As Teodore Shanin has illuminatingly written: The meaning attached by the peasantry to the expropriation of non-peasant land, to the breaking-up of enclosed farms, and to the widespread leveling of the revolutionary period was not one of inter-peasant ‘class warfare’ in the terms of the urban world. These socio-economic changes actually took place within the framework of the traditional peasant social structure and made for its reinforcement. By the end of the period of war and revolution, both the Committees of the Poor and the grandiose projects for state food factories had disappeared from the Russian countryside. So had the majority of the enclosed farms. What remained, with little or no change, were the traditional peasant households and communes. . . . 175

This was, doubtless, what Russia’s new Communist masters were left with by 1921 in their vast but still deeply traditionalist country. In the interim, however, savage resistance to Lenin’s attempt to “leap forward” with so-called “War Communism” visibly scarred the landscape. 174 175

Daniels, “The Communist Opposition,” p. 249. Shanin, The Awkward Class, p. 161.

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Orlando Figes has vividly described the modalities and suggested something of the sheer geographic reach of peasant rebellion in the Russia that the Bolsheviks-renamed-Communists claimed to be ruling in the first few, crisisridden years after the October Revolution: . . . the peasants. . . . began to take up arms in sporadic local revolts and rebellions of increasing frequency, size and violence. Two thousand members of the requisitioning brigades were murdered by angry peasants during 1918; in 1919 the figure rose to nearly 5,000; and in 1920 to over 8,000. By the autumn of 1920 the whole of the country was inflamed with peasant wars. . . . In the central Russian province of Tambov the Antonov rebellion was supported by virtually the entire peasant population: Soviet power ceased to exist there between the autumn of 1920 and the summer of 1921. In Voronezh, Saratov, Samara, Simbirsk and Penza provinces there were smaller but no less destructive peasant rebel armies creating havoc and effectively limiting the Bolsheviks’ power to the towns.

And so it went, over the length and breadth of the country, from the steppelands between Ufa and the Caspian Sea to the mountainous Caucasus, from Belorussia in the West to the Siberian regions of Omsk, Tobolsk, Ekaterinburg, and Tomsk in the East.176 “The aims and ideology of the revolts,” Figes has written, “were strikingly uniform and reflect the common aspirations of the peasant revolution throughout Russia and the Ukraine. All the revolts sought to reestablish the peasant self-rule of 1917–1918.”177 In a way, an analogous desire for “worker selfrule” is what actuated the waves of proletarian strikes that tore across Russia in February 1921. Yet here, the immediate spur to action in most cases seems to have been desperate hunger – hunger that to some extent was, for sure, a “natural” result of Russia’s severe climate and poor soils, but that was also exacerbated artificially by the disastrous “War Communism” experiment. Peasants expressing their hatred of the new regime in rural areas by burning their grain, feeding it to their livestock, or converting it into moonshine meant, in urban settings, workers who could not get their hands on the food that they and their families needed to survive. Tumultuous workers’ meetings in Moscow and then in Petrograd anathematized Communists’ privileges, demanded “free” soviets 176

177

Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 753. Figes draws much of his material from his monograph, Peasant Russia, Civil War, passim. For additional information, see: Vladimir Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). Oliver H. Radkey’s somewhat older study The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia: A Study of the Green Movement in Tambov Region, 1920–21 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976), is also still very helpful in this regard, as are two works by Peter Kenez: Civil War in South Russia, 1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), and Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920 (Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1977). Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 756.

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(and even, in some cases, a reinstated Constituent Assembly!) and called for the restoration of free trade and bartering with the muzhiki of the countryside.178 By February 23, martial law had to be declared in the capital. At Petrograd, thousands of workers joined together in what was in effect a general strike – and, even more ominously, this action attracted the support of several thousand soldiers. In the eyes of Lenin and his affrighted comrades, 1917 seemed to be looming again on the horizon – only, this time, it was aimed against them. It was probably only a matter of time, too, before this “re-enactment” of the 1917 drama caught hold across the Gulf of Finland at the Kronstadt naval base, where the sailors had just four years before been among the first to call for Soviet democracy. But this was precisely the problem in 1921: whereas “Soviet democracy” had become little more than a commemorative slogan in Leninist circles, it continued to be a goal embraced with deadly seriousness at Kronstadt.179 Thus, the 18-day rule of the Kronstadt Revolutionary Committee (March 1–18, 1921), which, in a manner recalling for some the ill-starred Paris Commune of 1871, razed the Communist apparatus, organized reelections for the trade unions, and prepared for new elections to the soviets. A heartfelt statement published in the rebels’ own version of Izvestiia on March 8 amounted to little less than an indictment of the entire trend away from “democracy” and toward renewed autocracy in Russia: By carrying out the October Revolution the working class had hoped to achieve its emancipation. But the result has been an even greater enslavement of human beings. The power of the monarchy, with its police and its gendarmerie, has passed into the hands of the Communist usurpers, who have given the people not freedom but the constant fear of torture by the Cheka, the horrors of which far exceed the rule of the gendarmerie under tsarism . . . The glorious emblem of the toilers’ state – the sickle and the hammer – has in fact been replaced by the Communists with the bayonet and the barred window, which they use to maintain the calm and carefree life of the new bureaucracy, the Communist commissars and functionaries.180

Here was a dramatic and tragic “rupture” between revolutionary leaders and their erstwhile popular followers that (like the breaches between Cromwell and the Levellers in 1649, between Cromwell and the “saints” of Barebones in 1653, between Jacobins and enrag´es in late 1793, and between Jacobins and Hebertists in early 1794) could have only one practical outcome – that is, the ´ 178

179 180

On the worker’s agitation, see Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 391–94; Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Councils, 1905–1921, trans. Ruth Hein (New York: Pantheon, 1974); T. F. Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia: Ideology and Industrial Organization 1917–1921 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984); and Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 758–60. On the Kronstadt uprising in March 1921, refer again to Avrich, Kronstadt 1921, passim, and to Getzler, Kronstadt, 1917–1921, passim. Cited in Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 763–64.

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definitive crushing of genuine revolutionary spontaneity and idealism – all in the name (paradoxically enough!) of the revolutionary “cause.” There were, to be sure, further “mopping-up” operations that had to be conducted by the authorities over the spring and summer of 1921 – once the Kronstadt uprising had been put down with what we can only call sickening ferocity on March 16–18.181 The striking workers at Moscow, Petrograd, and in the other metropoles of European Russia were for the most part neutralized by a combination of judicious concessions, threats, and (where necessary) outright military suppression; in the countryside, most of the peasant revolts had to be put down with brute force. The Communists also took advantage of the disorders of the past several years to suppress both the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, who (predictably, perhaps) were accused in facile fashion of having “organized” the workers’ strikes and the peasants’ revolts. It is not, certainly, altogether unfair for Orlando Figes to suggest that the arrest of some 5,000 “counter-revolutionary” Mensheviks during 1921, and the “grotesque” show trial of sundry SR leaders the following year, constituted “last desperate measures by the Bolsheviks to claim a popular legitimacy for their bankrupt revolution.”182 Yet all such talk about “popular legitimacy” grasped at but unattained by Bolsheviks (as, indeed, by their Independent and Jacobin precursors) in extreme revolutionary times must not lead us to stereotype those “ordinary” people all too easily regarded as (potentially) ultra-radicals “up for grabs” in England, France, and Russia. In this connection, the recent (and increasingly sophisticated) historiography on revolutionary women is perhaps most telling. Those laboring in this field tend now to insist that we see such individuals, not as monolithic, but rather as being every bit as diversified and as “conflicted” in their concerns as their male counterparts. For instance, women petitioning on behalf of (male) Levellers in revolutionary England, Patricia Higgins has reminded us, “did not abandon their customary deference to men and to a male-dominated society,” even though they did “tentatively put forward justifications for the involvement of women in politics based on the equal rights of men and women.”183 Ann Hughes has likewise rejected any simplistic views on this subject, pointing to “incoherencies” in Leveller rhetoric on gender issues “indicating some of the instabilities and tensions surrounding early modern understandings of women.” Such “incoherencies,” according to Hughes, also reflected the “discursive problems of establishing a picture of women who were both honest and active in a public world.”184 181 182 183 184

Some of the unsavory details of this crackdown are provided in Avrich, Kronstadt 1921, pp. 46–51. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 769. Refer again to Higgins, “The Reactions of Women,” p. 222. Ann Hughes, “Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature,” in Amussen and Kishlansky, eds., Political Culture and Cultural Politics, pp. 181–82.

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Similar observations apply for the roles of women in the two later revolutions. In the case of France, Olwen Hufton has not only acknowledged the tensions in urban areas between politicized women and those of their sisters chiefly concerned about urgent economic problems, but has also insisted on the crushing numbers in the First Republic’s rural hinterland of peasant women “who boycotted the mass of the constitutional priest, who in the hard years of 1793– 4 organized clandestine masses, who continued to slap a cross on the forehead of the newborn, who placed a Marian girdle on the stomach of the parturient, and who gathered to say the rosary and taught their children their prayers.” Far, far indeed were such women from the reportedly “liberated” sans-jupons of the great insurrectionary journ´ees of Paris and other cities in 1793–94.185 In the case of Russia, we receive similar impressions about the complex roles played by women in the crisis of 1917–21 from Barbara Clements, Wendy Goldman, Kent Geiger, and a host of other specialists in this field. Even most Bolshevik women, Clements has written, “were in fact less radical than the proclamations that applauded their coming,” and the vast majority of their working-class and peasant sisters would have had no sympathy whatsoever for Aleksandra Kollontai’s advanced notions about companionate sexual relationships, socialized child-rearing, and the like.186 Whatever their thoughts about the desirability of challenging aspects of Russian “patriarchy,” most of these urban and rural women clung to traditional marriage as “a working partnership, a joint commitment to the economic survival of the family.”187 Hence, in the most critical days of revolution in Russia, much as in those in England and France, women played complicated roles and exposed complicated concerns that make it impossible for us to assign them any more reductively than we could assign any other group to a fixed position on the “far left” of the political spectrum. To sum up: as comparativists striving to avoid all kinds of oversimplification in the emotional minefields of seismic revolutions, we surely cannot afford to dismiss the Bolsheviks (or, by implication, their Independent and Jacobin precursors) as being little more than grim-faced paladins of “bankrupt” sociopolitical upheavals. As distressing a general impression as we may have drawn from reappraising, in this chapter, “reigns of terror” of mounting severity, increasingly pronounced patterns of centralization and bureaucratization of state power, and ever more violent ruptures between elitist leaders and politi´ cized (but not monolithic) masses in revolutionary England, France, and Russia, 185 186

187

Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution, pp. 94–97. Consult, in this connection: Barbara Clements, “Bolshevik Women,” in Miller, ed., The Russian Revolution, pp. 108–09, 111–12, and 117–18; Clements, Bolshevik Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Wendy Z. Goldman, “Working-Class Women and the “Withering Away” of the Family: Popular Responses to Family Policy,” in Fitzpatrick, Rabinowitch, and Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP, pp. 126–39; and H. Kent Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). Goldman, “Working-Class Women,” pp. 138–39.

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that general impression still cannot obliterate from our minds an awareness of the tremendous external and domestic pressures under which our revolutionary protagonists had to function. Richard Pipes, very decidedly no admirer of Russian Bolshevism, felt nonetheless compelled, in his massive monograph on the Russian Revolution, to cite a Menshevik statement (in the wake of October 1917) that “any violent liquidation of the Bolshevik coup” would “result inevitably in the liquidation of all the conquests of the Russian Revolution.” Pipes also conjured up the even more ironic example of extreme monarchist Vladimir M. Purishkevich, who, in May 1918, after having languished for half a year in a Soviet prison, could yet allow grudgingly that, however unfortunate it might be from his point of view, “Soviet authority” was, at the very least, “firm authority.”188 From the viewpoint, therefore, of those desiring the sheer survival, let alone the long-term reconsolidation, of England, France, and Russia in the perilous circumstances of the mid-seventeenth, late eighteenth, and early twentieth centuries, there may have been no realistic alternative to the authoritarian (at times, cruelly authoritarian) practices and institutional tendencies of, respectively, 1649–53, 1793–94, and 1917–21. Whether this is a fully acceptable assertion or not is ultimately a matter to be left to the (informed) individual’s judgment. Our more immediate task, in Chapter 6, will be to reassess the ways in which those policymakers, activists, and just “ordinary” folk who survived their countries’ most lethal days of revolution dealt with the challenges they inevitably inherited from those dangerous – if, at their best, inspirational – times.

188

Citations here are from Pipes, The Russian Revolution, pp. 562 and 556. The “tremendous external and domestic pressures” under which the Bolsheviks were laboring were also reflected, to some extent, in their evolving position on how to deal with the Imperial family. Trotsky, at least, seems initially to have desired to put Nicholas on trial – very much as Louis XVI had been in the French Revolution. In July 1918, however, both Trotsky and Lenin sanctioned, and Lenin may have ordered, the immediate execution of all members of the Imperial family. “Military considerations” played a role here – but so did the leading Bolsheviks’ fear that to put Nicholas on trial in any formal sense would, by implication, be to question the basic legitimacy of the Russian Revolution itself. Note how such theorizing resembles that of Saint-Just and Robespierre regarding Louis XVI in the parallel case of revolutionary France. Orlando Figes discusses this question lucidly in A People’s Tragedy, pp. 635–40.

6 Thermidor?

The notion of “Thermidor,” borrowed by comparative analysts from the revolutionary month (July 19–August 17, 1794) in which the Robespierrists fell from power, has probably occasioned more conceptual heartburn for those analysts than almost any other term in their lexicon. The challenge in the literature (specifically as it pertains to England, France, and Russia) has been, not so much to determine when Thermidor superseded the respective “reigns of Terror and Virtue,” as to determine when, exactly, Thermidor shaded into subsequent phases of history. At what points, that is, did our upheavals actually end, and when did unambiguously “postrevolutionary” eras supervene in England, France, and Russia? In our first two cases, the Stuart Restoration of 1660 and Bonaparte’s coup of 18–19 Brumaire, Year VIII (i.e., November 9–10, 1799) may be regarded, without too much fear of contradiction, as writing finis to the English and French Revolutions. Where Russia is concerned, however, we encounter much more in the way of scholarly disagreement. Robert V. Daniels, for example, tended to equate Thermidor in Russia with the “New Economic Policy” (NEP) period of the 1920s; Sheila Fitzpatrick, on the other hand, has identified the symptoms of a “classic Thermidor” – such as “the waning of revolutionary fervor and belligerence, new policies aimed at restoring order and stability, revival of traditional values and culture, solidification of a new political and social structure” – as, in fact, more in evidence in the Russia of the 1930s than in that of the 1920s.1 For his part, Crane Brinton 1

Refer to Robert V. Daniels in “Comment: Does the Present Change the Past?” p. 434; and to Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, pp. 2–4. On the Communist Party’s fierce debates during the 1920s regarding the applicability of the term “Thermidor” to postLeninist Russia, see Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky: The Prophet Unarmed, 1921–29 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 312–32; and Michal Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism, trans. George Saunders (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 22–23.

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was still wrestling with the problem in the final (1965) edition of The Anatomy of Revolution: if, at one point, he concluded that “Thermidor in Russia . . . still prevails to a degree in the mid-twentieth century,” he suggested at another point that the “Russian troubles” of the years 1930–65 were essentially as “postrevolutionary” as were the often-chronicled nineteenth-century Parisian uprisings in the case of France.2 Clearly, there is no easy answer – indeed, there are all too many possible answers – to this conundrum. For our purposes in this chapter, however, it may prove useful to assume (as Brinton seemed at one point to presuppose) that Stalin’s violent “revolution-from-above” in 1928–29 amounted to a major watershed between the final, Thermidorian phase of a revolution precipitated by the implosion of tsardom in February 1917 and the tense and often turbulent “aftermath” of the Russian Revolution in the 1930s. Such a decision regarding periodization would resultantly leave us with an English “Thermidor” more or less coterminous with the Protectorate of 1653–59, a French Thermidor extending from the Convention’s final year (1794–95) to the Bonapartist coup of November 1799, and a Russian Thermidor extending from early 1921 to, say, 1928 or 1929. Proceeding (for the sake of argument) on this basis, we may then find ourselves, as comparativists, concerned to substantiate three propositions that go far toward defining these final stages of the upheavals under review. (1) The Thermidorian eras sometimes depicted in textbooks as little more than “reactions to Terror” turn out, on closer scrutiny, to have been much more complicated, in some respects, than once thought. (2) Thermidorian geopolitics involved one of two possible courses of action: whereas the French embarked on unabashed expansionism, England (under Cromwell) and Russia (under Lenin and his successors) followed more cautiously crafted, opportunistic foreign policies. (3) In all three countries, those we may refer to as “late-revolutionary” protagonists found themselves grappling with crises of revolutionary legitimacy within long-established contexts of interrelated foreign and domestic pressures bearing on their respective states. The Complexities and Contradictions of Thermidor Since the term Thermidor drew its initial inspiration from the French revolutionary experience, it might be best to explore the complexities and contradictions of this phenomenon first of all in connection with the post Robespierrist French Republic. We can then cast our comparative/analytic glance forward to the Russia of 1921–28, and finally back to the England of 1653–59. In all three cases (albeit to varying degrees), we may discover that underlying the relaxation of emergency controls and the reassertion of traditional patterns of social deference, socioeconomic inequality, and some rather brazenly hedonistic behavior commonly associated with Thermidor were certain hard, no-nonsense 2

Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution, pp. 233 and 227–28.

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realities of an administrative nature pointing to the ongoing processes of state reconsolidation. Certainly, there was an undeniable political, economic, and social backlash against the Jacobin Terror in Thermidorian France.3 Despite some efforts on the Committee of Public Safety to contain the political damage consequent on the execution of Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon, the Convention over the ensuing weeks and months took steps to reverse what was now seen as a dangerous overconcentration of power in the executive agencies of government. The members of the CPS were subjected to periodic (and automatic) renewal; before the end of August 1794, the Committee lost its oversight functions where other executive committees and regional bodies were concerned. On August 1, the rival Committee of General Security was purged of Robespierrists, and on the same day the Law of 22 Prairial, which had legitimized the six-week “Great Terror” at Paris, was rescinded. A narrower mandate was accorded to the Revolutionary Tribunal at the capital; stricter rules were drawn up for the definition and internment of “suspects;” and several thousand prisoners were released at Paris and in the provinces during August. At the same time, the powers of the Paris Commune and of the comit´es de surveillance in the capital and in provincial France were curtailed; so were those of the “representatives on mission” whose word, in provincial affairs, had so recently been final. Before year’s end, the Paris Jacobin Club had been shut down and its sister societies in the localities hobbled or silenced; a large number of Girondins (ironically saved from execution during the Terror by Robespierre himself) had been readmitted to the Convention, thus shifting initiative in that body back toward the Center; and those designated as notorious terrorists – for instance, Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varenne, and Bar`ere from the Committee of Public Safety, Vadier, Amar, and Jacques-Louis David from the Committee of General Security, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, and others – were marked out for prosecution. Something of a psychological threshold was crossed on May 6, 1795, when Fouquier-Tinville and fourteen of the jurors of the once-dreaded Parisian Revolutionary Tribunal were sentenced to death. This dismantling of the political machinery of the Jacobin Terror was accompanied by economic and, inevitably, social “reaction,” both at the capital and (at different times) in the provinces. Of course, the Robespierrists themselves, as we pointed out earlier, had begun the retreat from the emergency economic measures implemented during 1793; the Thermidorian Convention merely accelerated this process.4 The deputies began to abandon the 3

4

On the political aspects of what follows, see Bronislaw Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre, trans. Michael Petheram (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 60–92; Denis Woronoff, The Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 1794– 1799, trans. Julian Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 3–5; Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 282–83; and Andress, The Terror, pp. 345–54. On economic developments in 1794–95, see Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 285–90; and Woronoff, The Thermidorean Regime, pp. 8–13.

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Maximum’s price ceilings in October 1794, and on December 24 abolished the Maximum altogether, along with all restrictions on trade. They also closed down the armaments workshops in the capital, winked at speculation, and did nothing to prevent the debasement of the paper currency. As Denis Woronoff has pointed out, economic “reaction” for most urbanites meant above all skyrocketing food prices and resultant hunger, and these grim realities were aggravated by additional factors – for instance, poor weather for the 1794 harvest, military manpower demands that deprived agriculture of labor services, and peasant sellers infuriated by requisitions of their crops. For the peasants, “the hiding of grain was . . . [the] classic counter-attack, probably accompanied by a cut-back in sowing and a reduction in livestock”5 – much as would be the case for the peasants in Russia in 1921. The situation in France was only made worse by the ravages of the winter of 1794–95: the extreme cold froze rivers solid, made many a road impassable, and therefore distorted price structures even more severely by hampering the circulation of foodstuffs and other essential goods. Popular anger at Paris over near-famine conditions in the spring of 1795 was largely responsible for the Germinal-Prairial food riots that George Rude´ and others have methodically studied.6 Political rejection of the excesses of the Terror fathered social as well as economic reaction. The massive releases of prisoners in the wake of 9 Thermidor meant the recirculation, in “polite” society, of many nobles and affluent bourgeois whose thoughts, naturally enough, turned to “class” vengeance, to royalism, and (at times) to outright political thuggery. In these manifestations they were often joined by ex-terrorists (Fouche, and Tallien, for exam´ Freron, ´ ple) who, trimming with the winds of shifting opinion, sought in activism on the Right a convenient cover for their recent persecutory behavior (especially in provincial locales) on behalf of the Jacobin Left. Thermidorian reactionism at Paris was perhaps most menacingly personified in the jeunesse dor´ee (“Gilded Youth”) whom David Andress has portrayed as sporting “dandyish costumes, with wide collars, pinched waists and bizarre hairstyles, and an air of aristocratic disdain,” and as rejecting “the whole culture of Spartan modesty that had permeated politics over the previous year.” These “political thugs . . . haunted the public spaces of Paris, attacking reputed terrorists and shouting down opposition in places such as the theatres, still a central venue for political displays.”7 Meanwhile, in the provinces, especially in the Southeast – the Rhone ˆ Valley, Provence, eastern Languedoc – and in the West – Brittany and the Vendee ´ – where the Terror had been at its most lethal, groups very similar to the Parisian jeunesse dor´ee wreaked a commensurately sanguinary vengeance on those who could, in 1794–95 and beyond, be associated with the 5 6 7

Ibid., pp. 8–12. Rude, ´ The Crowd in the French Revolution, esp. Chapter 10. Andress, The Terror, p. 350. See also, on this phenomenon: Franc¸ois Gendron, La Jeunesse ´ dor´ee. Episodes de la R´evolution franc¸aise (Quebec: Presses de l’Universite´ de Quebec, 1979). ´ ´

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Jacobin regime of 1793–94.8 The passage of decrees allowing ex-Federalists and aristocratic emigr es ´ ´ back into France only further swelled this reactionary tide throughout the postRobespierrist First Republic. Economic and social reaction was also mirrored in the heightened contradictions of women’s roles. For every notorious Ther` ´ ese Cabarrus (mistress and later wife of Thermidorian Tallien) who was in a position to set fashions for the pampered nouvelles riches of the postRobespierrist era, there were hundreds of less fortunate women at Paris and in other urban centers beggared by hoarding, speculation, and inflation, as well as ever more restricted in their political activism and formally denied familial rights by legists tacking ever more to the Right during the 1790s.9 Paradoxically, however, women in rural localities in this period were perhaps likelier to challenge officialdom with other concerns in mind: such individuals, Olwen Hufton has written, above all “wanted a warm, comforting, personal and familial religion with its own sociability patterns which endorsed the family in its collective celebration of births and marriages and gave the hope of salvation through Christian burial of the dead.”10 We will see similar contradictions in women’s status and objectives in the Russia of the 1920s. Yet, however legitimate and indeed fascinating much of the scholarly literature on those rejecting the excesses of Jacobin rule in France after 9 Thermidor may be, it should not blind us to the fundamental continuities of administrative centralization, bureaucratization, and fiscal and military reform in the years intervening between the fall of the “Robespierrists” and Bonaparte’s accession to power. In these developments, even more, perhaps, than in the antics of the “Gilded Youth,” the drama of the leftist and royalist journ´ees of 1795, and the adventures of repatriated ex-Federalists and e´ migr´es we find the essence of the revolution as a solidifying reality in the France of the mid-to-late 1790s. Take, to begin with, the unexciting but ever-important question of administrative centralization. The Thermidorians discreetly endorsed in retrospect the Committee of Public Safety’s use in 1793–94 of agents nationaux to assert the authority of Paris in the provinces. To be sure, elected local governments were reinstated; nonetheless, they had henceforth to cooperate with officials dispatched from the capital. The five-man Executive Directory which gave its 8

9

10

On Thermidor in these areas, see Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 287–93; Gwynne Lewis, The Second Vend´ee: The Continuity of Counter-Revolution in the Department of the Gard, 1789–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); and the essays in Colin Lucas, ed., Beyond the Terror: Essays on French Regional and Social History, 1794–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See, on these issues, Marcel Garaud and Romuald Szramkiewicz, La R´evolution franc¸aise et la famille (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), esp. pp. 167–76; and Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Olwen Hufton, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, Vol. I, 1500–1800 (London: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 481–86. See also, by Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1992).

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name to the overall constitutional regime of 1795–99 appointed a salaried commissaire to every one of the administrative bodies in the departments and cantons. These commissaires ensured that officials elected in the localities implemented the laws and decrees promulgated by the central government. Cantonal commissioners had to report directly to their departmental superiors, who in turn owed a regular accounting to the Interior Ministry about conditions in their departments. The commissaires could recommend disciplinary action against recalcitrant local officials, and even assume their functions in times of emergency. Therefore, hierarchical administrative arrangements enshrining the concentration of state power at the center survived the often-dramatized institutional reaction against governmental “terror.”11 True, the new system of “commissioners to the departments and cantons” was not without its weaknesses. The commissaires for the most part were local political figures selected for the Directors by delegates to the new bicameral legislature representing the regions in question, rather than apolitical functionaries; as a result, they were vulnerable at all times to the shifting winds of national politics. In addition, they found themselves frequently at odds with the elected administrators in the departments and cantons who were charged on a day-to-day basis with such crucial matters as supervising the raising of taxes, maintaining public order, and supplying local markets. Still, one of the leading scholars on the subject has concluded that the Directory’s commissaires performed their tasks well enough to ensure that the writ of Paris continued to run fairly strongly in the provinces.12 The Directory also made a novel attempt to integrate rural France – as represented by the village communes – into the structures of state authority and civic life. The rural communes were grouped into administrative “super communes” under the watchful eyes of commissioners at the cantonal level; cantonal municipalities hence were links in a chain of command and communication extending from Paris down to the humblest peasant village. For the very first time, the villages were expected to hire constables and maintain local roads, and to do so at their own expense. Admittedly, this arrangement was somewhat reminiscent of the old regime’s subordination of villages to the state. But it also looked forward in a basic fashion to the future. When the state imposed specific new mandates on citizens in the rural localities, it was prefiguring the integration of the countryside into an increasingly well-ordered polity. This process may not have been completed until late in the nineteenth century; still, it was surely under way in the revolutionary era.13 11

12 13

On all of this, see Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 53; and Woronoff, The Thermidorean Regime, passim. Ibid., esp. pp. 37–38, 40–42. On these issues, see Woloch, The New Regime, esp. pp. 427–28; and Woronoff, The Thermidorean Regime, esp. pp. 40–42. For the consummation of this integrative process under the aegis

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As state power continued to grow in an administrative sense, ever more tightly subordinating rural France to urban France and outlying regions to the capital, it continued to grow in a purely bureaucratic sense as well. Clive Church’s research has established this point, revealing the Revolution’s later years to have been pivotal to the “coming of age” of the French civil service. We can see this foundational development reflected in the professional experience, social differentiation, and geographical provenance of the civil servants at Paris, as well as in the bureaucratized routines to which they were increasingly subjected. Church has pointed out that, of the 4,340 civil servants he has identified as staffing the Directory’s ministries, “2 in 7 at least . . . had held administrative appointments before 1789,” and as such furnished the ministries and other central administrative organs with a “hard core of fairly senior clerks well versed in the responsibilities, traditions and expertise of the old civil service.” Yet an even higher proportion of these functionaries had also held significant posts in the burgeoning bureaucracy of the early years of revolution. “The Directory,” that is to say, “completed the assimilation of the hordes of bureaucrats thrown up by the exigencies and social chaos of the Revolution and married this new corps with the cadres inherited from the Ancien R´egime” – very much as the revolutionary concept of the amalgam (to be discussed later) operated in the Republic’s armies.14 At the same time, however – and this resonates meaningfully with the structuralist emphasis in our overall interpretation – the ongoing professionalization of the bureaucracy meant less rather than more “democracy” in the ranks of officialdom. Greater subordination and deference inside the civil service went hand-in-hand with its internal division along social lines under the new regime. Very few of those occupying senior positions came from the army or navy, from the “public sector” administration of the postes or the assignats, or from the commercial or “menial” services. They came rather from more elitist quarters: ´ for instance, from the liberal professions, the diplomatic corps, the prestigious monde of justice and old royal officialdom, or even the ranks of religion. They hailed, that is, “from a higher social category and from a more restricted range of professions and administrations than their inferiors in the hierarchy.”15 Even at the height of the Terror, Jacobin egalitarianism, which had leaned toward conferring bureaucratic posts on revolutionary activists and other “unprofessional” types, had eventually had to defer to a more pragmatic philosophy stressing above all the war-related need for an efficient (and thus, unavoidably,

14 15

of the Third Republic, see esp. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976). For these findings, see Clive H. Church, “The Social Basis of the French Central Bureaucracy Under the Directory, 1795–1799,” Past and Present 36 (1967): 64–67, 72. Ibid., pp. 68–69. Church has of course expatiated on these themes in his monograph Revolution and Red Tape, esp. pp. 175–212.

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hierarchical) civil service. With the waning of Jacobin idealism, social differentiation and a corresponding emphasis on hierarchy within the burgeoning world of state officialdom were bound to become – and did indeed become – paramount realities. Other characteristics stamping the Directory’s civil servants as increasingly “modern” and oriented to statist purposes included their geographical origins and daily work routines. “The vast majority of all the employees,” Church has observed, “were drawn from the north-east of France. 40% of the departments produced 85% of the clerks, and most came from the triangle – Rennes, Lille and Besanc¸on. Within this area, the Parisian region dominated, supplying 48.5% of the total.”16 Given that, in general, the Parisian basin and northeastern regions of the Republic were most closely attuned to the purposes of the Revolutionary Government and/or most directly exposed to attack by the British, Austrians, and Prussians, it is likely of some import that these historic “hotbeds” of French patriotism supplied a disproportionate number of functionaries to the state. Granted, citizens now, as during the recent Terror, were driven into government service in part by expediential considerations – for instance, the desperate need for security in a time of economic upheaval and political uncertainty, along with the venerable and unquenchable French taste for office in good times and bad. Still, it would be unwise to take no account of the “idealism released by the Revolution among the young who saw in the civil service a chance . . . of serving the Republic.”17 Such individuals, many of them in their forties, thirties, or even (in some cases) twenties, were at points in their lives where they were most likely predisposed to internalize the state’s expansionistic and ideological values. As the 1790s wore on, moreover, this process must have been reinforced by the integration of these state servants into the increasingly precise routines, punctilious work schedules, and voluminous paperwork of government bureaucracy. Yet however impressive the administrative and bureaucratic advances of the post-Terrorist state in France – advances that, by themselves, necessarily complicate our notion of what “Thermidor” means in the case of the French Revolution – the acid test of their short-term success lay in the realms of fiscal and military modernization. Given the government’s ongoing commitment to an expansionist foreign policy – an issue we explore in depth later on – realities could hardly have been otherwise. But when it came to both financial and military reform, the waging of war proved a mixed blessing at best: it spurred the country’s leaders to innovate in both areas yet simultaneously imposed its own limits on what in both areas was actually achievable. Certainly, financial reform racked up continuing and new successes in this period. To begin with, whatever problems the reorganized Treasury and Finance Departments encountered, they remained vastly more efficient 16 17

Church, “The Social Basis of the French Central Bureaucracy,” p. 62. Ibid., p. 68.

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than their predecessor agencies of prerevolutionary days. The budgetary and accounting reforms so dearly accomplished earlier in the decade were preserved, and slippery financiers such as Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard never secured the kind of stranglehold on state finances that the venal accountants and tax farmers of the old regime had enjoyed.18 More specifically attributable to the period of the Directory, however, and equally portentous for the future, was the comprehensive overhaul of the country’s system of taxation. For one thing, the allocation and collection of direct imposts, together with any appeals to which they might give rise, were now to be transferred from local elected officials to committees of appointed bureaucrats working in the departments under the vigilant eyes of central government commissaires. The direct taxes themselves were also being taken thoroughly in hand. Legislation established a system of four basic imposts (on trade licenses, on land, on “doors and windows,” and on citizens and their movable property) that was fated in essence to last down to the start of the First World War. Again, the Directory invented or revived a host of indirect taxes: they ranged from highway tolls to powder and saltpeter and tobacco impositions to mortgage, registration, and stamp duties.19 Yet, despite such labors to resuscitate state finances, the revolutionaries were floundering in a bottomless ocean of war-making, and thus could never find a way to stave off national bankruptcy. The fact that war expenditure simply could not be contained, by aggravating other shortcomings in the system such as the widespread failure of French citizens to pay their taxes, and shortfalls in state revenue accruing from the sale of biens nationaux, only led to everwidening budget deficits and (indirectly) to a ruinous depreciation and eventual collapse of the paper currency.20 The all-consuming war required a regime of forced loans during 1795–99 carefully shorn of any “progressive” traits that could have revived memories of Jacobin “terrorism;” the loans wound up (ironically enough!) fattening the purses of contractors and bankers indispensable to the government’s survival.21 Ironic also was the fact that the war thwarted the authorities’ efforts to draw all fiscal operations into the public domain: this enabled the previously cashiered Ouvrard after 1797 to take naval supplies out of a government r´egie and manage them as a private enterprise “in 22 Again, the war militated directly against the manner of the ancien regime.” ´ the government’s goal of generating more taxable revenue through economic 18 19

20

21 22

See Bosher, French Finances, 1770–1795, pp. 251 and 317. On all of this, see Albert Goodwin, “The French Executive Directory – A Revaluation,” History 22 (1937): 201–18; Bosher, French Finances, passim; and Church, Revolution and Red Tape, Chapters 4 and 5. On the assignats and associated problems, see Seymour E. Harris, The Assignats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930); and Goodwin, “The French Executive Directory,” pp. 322–23. On this point, see Gross, “Progressive Taxation and Social Justice,” p. 121; and Woronoff, The Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, p. 97. Bosher, French Finances, 1770–1795, p. 314.

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development, not only by cutting French entrepreneurs out of international trade exchanges, but also by drafting young men away from “neglected arts, agriculture, and commerce” at home.23 And, most fatefully, perhaps, the war’s crushing financial burden forced the French state into an ever-greater reliance on booty from the conquered territories on the Continent. During 1797–99, Denis Woronoff has estimated, the revenue extorted from that source “brought in . . . about a quarter of the annual budget.”24 For these and related reasons, a state bankruptcy was foreshadowed in a law of September 30, 1797, which “consolidated” only one-third of the public debt while indefinitely putting off redemption of the remaining two-thirds of state indebtedness. “The consequent shock to public credit may be imagined,” Albert Goodwin has written. “The spectre of national bankruptcy which had haunted Mirabeau in the early days of the revolution had at last materialized.”25 But if there was much that was paradoxical and self-limiting about financial reform under the pressures of war, the same could be equally said about military modernization. Historians, for instance, agree that during 1794–99, the French army’s officer corps continued to acquire greater professionalism. Howard G. Brown has observed that a list of prospective generals submitted to the post-Robespierrist Convention by military specialist E. L. A. DuboisCrance´ bespoke “the importance of zeal, activity, and intelligence as well as the specifically military virtues of length of command, expertise in a particular branch of the army, and above all bravery” as criteria for advancement. That the legislators did not accept every one of Dubois-Crance’s ´ candidates in no way relegated such requirements to a back burner.26 Quite to the contrary: legislation of April 1795 placed an unparalleled emphasis on experience as a criterion for promotion in the ranks; it also set up bureaucratic procedures to eliminate incompetent officers who were over-age, and yet at the same time used a new requirement of four years served in a given rank prior to any promotion to weed immature young madcaps (sabreurs) out of command positions.27 On the other hand, if many of the qualities soon to characterize Napoleon’s officer corps already manifested themselves in the army’s commanding personnel under the Directory, the process of professionalization remained somewhat tentative. Even under the Convention in 1794–95, efforts to institutionalize “impersonal” criteria for the selection of generals were at times directly 23

24 25 26

27

See, on these issues, Franc¸ois Crouzet, “Wars, Blockade, and Economic Change in Europe, 1792–1815,” Journal of Economic History 24 (1964): 567–88; and Woloch, The New Regime, p. 388. Woronoff, The Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, p. 97. Goodwin, “The French Executive Directory,” pp. 323–25. Howard G. Brown, “Politics, Professionalism, and the Fate of Army Generals after Thermidor,” French Historical Studies 19 (1995): 151–52. Brown has expanded on these issues in War, Revolution, and the Bureaucratic State: Politics and Army Administration in France, 1791– 1799 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, p. 280.

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contravened by unjustified appointments that fostered factionalism, brought civilian supremacy into contempt, and eroded professionalism. But the larger point here is that the Directory’s subsequent (and ever-growing) dependence on military success for its very legitimacy – a deadly fruit of its own overextended foreign policy – tempted it into the trap of currying favor among army commanders by authorizing them to promote through the ranks whomever they pleased. This could only have the effect of encouraging clientage and undermining recent decrees mandating greater experience and technical proficiency in officer ranks.28 In similar fashion, the professionalization of the rank-and-file soldiery continued along a path marked by a host of pitfalls. Through much of the Revolution, it is true, the infantryman could claim the right to be adjudged by his professional peers and was no longer subjected to degrading punishments meted out by an authoritarian organization. In addition, reformed recruitment procedures made for less discrimination in the ranks and produced by gradual stages a fighting force more representative of the nation. Equally significant were the tangible amenities, instruction, compensation, and provisions for the future that came to be associated with military service. Thus the government tried to resolve issues of pay and supply so as to ensure that the recruit could realistically expect the logistical support needed – support in the form of adequate provisions and housing, of serviceable weapons and abundant ammunition, of care when he was wounded, and of pensions for his widow and children if he were to be killed.29 Yet, here, too, fiscal exigencies related directly or indirectly to the Republic’s increasingly expansionist (and expensive) foreign policy all too often left the army “denuded of funds,”30 thus signifying a government hobbled chronically in its ability to equip, instruct, and care adequately for its soldiers and to guarantee decent benefits to their dependents and/or survivors. Still, it was perhaps the endemic problems of desertion, draft dodging, and soldiers’ refusals to return to the ranks on the expiration of furloughs and “hardship” leaves that exposed most starkly the contradictions and limitations inherent in military modernization in late revolutionary France. By the late 1790s, there could be no doubt, the overriding challenge for military organizers (and, by extension, for those managing France’s foreign policy) was: how to counter the insidious and erosive plagues of draft dodging and desertion?31 The answer eventually came with the celebrated “Jourdan Law” of September 28 29

30 31

Refer again to Brown, “Politics, Professionalism, and the Fate of Army Generals,” pp. 151–52. On all of this, see Forrest, The Soldiers of the French Revolution, pp. 192–93. See also Isser Woloch, The French Veteran from the Revolution to the Restoration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). This is Alan Forrest’s expression, in The Soldiers of the French Revolution, p. 193. For some germane statistics in this area, see: Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, esp. pp. 272–75; and Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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1798, the foundation-stone of state conscription for many years to come in war-prone France. Under this law, Isser Woloch has explained: . . . men between the ages of 20 and 25 would thereafter be subject to conscription, but would actually be called to service by legislative decree only as needed. Each annual birth cohort formed a “class” of conscripts (a new term designating young men who became subject to conscription in a particular year rather than those actually inducted). Mobilization would begin with the class of 20-year-olds, and would move forward as needed. If they were not called by the end of their 25th year, conscripts would be permanently discharged from the obligation.32

Insofar as the loi Jourdan intended to deny conscripts actually called to the colors the old option of hiring replacements, it seemed to exemplify the “civic leveling” so frequently imposed (and, indeed, vaunted) by civic-minded revolutionaries in France. Nonetheless, the bitter and deep-seated opposition to conscription in many departments led the government (in a follow-up statute of April 17, 1799) to allow “conscripts” to choose (and, presumably, pay) “volunteers” to replace them in advance or to draw lots among themselves; those drawing in bad luck could also purchase replacements. Whether such a concession reinforced what Jean-Paul Bertaud has identified as a tendency in 1798– 99 “toward a militarization of society as desired by career soldiers” remains debatable.33 At the very least, however, policymakers must have viewed any such tendency as a potential source of destabilization in late-revolutionary government and society: witness their desperate (but ultimately unsuccessful) attempt in the late 1790s to use civilian commissaires aux arm´ees to rein in the increasingly blatant interference of Bonaparte and other generals in military, administrative, and even diplomatic affairs.34 If, as we turn from France to Russia, there was in the latter case a comparable reaction against recent revolutionary excesses during what we have defined as the Russian “Thermidor” of 1921–28, it occurred almost exclusively in the economic and sociocultural spheres, and not in politics or in government. “Thermidor” in this country, that is so say, was even more “schizophrenic” than was Thermidor in France, more sharply split between a theorized tactical retreat in economic affairs and an uncompromising strategic advance in totalitarian political affairs. Or, as Bukharin succinctly (and candidly) put it to the Comintern (Third Communist International) in July 1921: “We are making economic concessions in order to avoid political ones.”35 The “economic concessions,” of course, took the form of the so-called New Economic Policy (NEP), a presumably temporary retreat from the requisitions, quotas, and, in general, emergency coercive measures of “War Communism” 32 33 34 35

Woloch, The New Regime, p. 390. Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, p. 344. Ibid., 328–31, where Bertaud describes the increasing tension between generals such as Hoche and Bonaparte and the Directors at Paris over the role of the commissaires aux arm´ees. Cited in Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 769.

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designed to allow Russians a “breathing spell” before they continued on in their historic march toward a fully socialized economy and society. The NEP proceeded, conceptually and practically, from the age-old problem of how (in Russia) to synchronize the urban/military and rural economies: how, more specifically, to encourage the peasantry to produce grain and other agricultural goods for workers and soldiers, all the while supplying those peasants with finished commodities from the growing industrial sector. The immediate answer, as articulated at the Tenth Bolshevik Party Congress in March 1921 and in other forums, lay in replacing wartime requisitioning of peasant produce with a tax in kind, and in tolerating (at levels below the “commanding heights” of the economy) the revival of free exchanges of goods and services between city and countryside. Yet, as Sheila Fitzpatrick has nicely summed it all up, the NEP very soon came to mean much else besides: Foreign investors were invited to take out concessions for industrial and mining enterprises and development projects. The Finance Commissariat and State Bank began to heed the advice of the old ‘bourgeois’ financial experts, pushing for stabilization of the currency and limitations on government and public spending. The central government budget was severely cut, and efforts were made to increase state revenue from taxation. Services like schools and medical care, previously free, now had to be paid for by the individual user; access to old-age pensions and sickness and unemployment benefits was restricted by putting them on a contributory basis.36

When fully applied in the Russia of the 1920s, such policies meant (among other things) concessions to petty “bourgeois,” to enterprising traders and intelligentsia, and above all to muzhiki in the countryside, concessions that few idealistic Communist veterans of the halcyon “War Communism” days could have ever anticipated as even temporary consequences of their revolution. And how long was this “peasant Brest-Litovsk” (as geopolitically attuned Communists tended to dub the NEP) expected to last? This was a contentious question in party ranks from very early on. “The NEP,” so Zinoviev hopefully pronounced in December 1921, “is only a temporary deviation, a tactical retreat, a clearing of the land for a new and decisive attack of labour against the front of international capitalism.” Yet, Lenin was usually more cautious in his statements on the subject. At one point he talked vaguely of a prolonged period of retreat lasting “not less than a decade and probably more.” In May 1921, he somberly spoke to his party colleagues of the NEP as likely to be followed “seriously and for a long time,” and went on, dampeningly: “we must definitely get this into our heads and remember it well, because rumors are spreading that this is a policy only in quotes, in other words a form of political 36

Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, pp. 95–96. On the economics of the NEP, see also M. Dobb, Soviet Economic Development after 1917 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951); and Sergei V. Iarov, “The Tenth Congress of the Communist Party and the Transition to NEP,” in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, esp. pp. 122–27.

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trickery that is only being carried out for the moment. This is not true.”37 Such observations reflected Lenin’s struggle to situate Russian socialism in its larger historical and developmental context. The Bolshevik coup d’´etat of October 1917, by abruptly “injecting” socialism into a backward, peasantdominated country whose “bourgeois” revolution had in some respects barely gotten off the ground, confronted Russia’s new rulers with the task of “building communism with bourgeois hands,” of requiring that socialism compete, for the foreseeable future, with a “free market” economy. Lenin was as cognizant as any of his more impetuous colleagues of the dangers of their regime drowning in a sea of “petty bourgeois” capitalism. But, given domestic realities – not to mention the international reality of capitalism still ascendant in postwar Europe and elsewhere – what alternative was there, for the time being, to the compromises of the NEP? “In the main,” Lenin regarded the market – “regulated by the state and gradually socialized through co-operatives – as the only way to socialism;” few of his closest associates were inclined, in the early 1920s, to disagree too strenuously with him.38 Nonetheless, much as idealistic Jacobins in post-Robespierrist France had deplored the extremes of wealth and poverty and the thuggery and peacockish manners of the jeunesse dor´ee and others, so Communist “true believers” decried the glaring socioeconomic inequities of the NEP in Russia’s “Roaring Twenties.” Was their society not (so they apprehensively queried) on the slippery slope leading back to the old, exploitative capitalism? They especially despised the “Nepmen,” those profiteering middlemen who, until the state and the co-operatives could exercise their assigned roles, played such a central role in facilitating exchanges between the urban industrial sector and the rural agricultural sector. The Nepmen were indeed, as Orlando Figes has graphically portrayed them, “a walking symbol of this new and ugly capitalism. They dressed their wives and mistresses in diamonds and furs, drove around in huge imported cars, snored at the opera, sang in restaurants, and boasted loudly in expensive hotel bars of the dollar fortunes they had wasted at the newly opened race-tracks and casinos.”39 Still, many observers at the time saw the new “free market” conditions as an improvement over the shortages, black market, and coercive measures of War Communism. Not unexpectedly, perhaps, it was foreign “capitalists” such as American industrialist Armand Hammer who most unreservedly sang the praises of this aspect of the NEP. Its “immediate” effect, he marveled, . . . was to bring forth untold quantities of goods of every variety which suddenly appeared as if by magic. The shelves of stores formerly empty were overloaded with 37 38

39

Citations of Zinoviev and Lenin are from Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 770. Ibid., pp. 769–70. An in-depth analysis of these developmental issues is provided in Esther Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 771–72.

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articles which had not been seen since the days of the Bolshevik revolution four years before. In addition to a great variety of food products and delicacies, one could buy the choicest French wines, liqueurs and the best of Havana cigars. The finest English cloth lay side by side with the most expensive French perfumes. It took the magic of the NEP to bring forth these goods from their hiding places in cellars, barns, and secret hoards.40

On the other hand, anarchist Emma Goldman, if conceding that the NEP had turned Moscow “into a vast market place” boasting “stores . . . mysteriously stacked with delicacies Russia had not seen for years,” was haunted nonetheless by the popular desperation only thrown into starker relief by such largesse. “Men, women and children with pinched faces and hungry eyes,” she later recalled, “stood about gazing into the windows and discussing the great miracle: what was but yesterday considered a heinous offence was now flaunted before them in an open and legal manner.”41 And, to those party enthusiasts who jealously harbored memories of the October Revolution, the question (as one of them phrased it) kept recurring: “If money was reappearing, wouldn’t rich people reappear too? Weren’t we on the slippery slope that led back to capitalism? We put these questions to ourselves with feelings of anxiety.”42 As the 1920s wore on, such “feelings of anxiety” also increasingly plagued more seasoned Communist leaders in Russia. Yet, as Alan Ball has observed, the flourishing of retailers and retail trade in city and countryside was for them symptomatic of the larger fact that, unaided by the state, the infant “socialized” sector of the Russian economy simply could not compete effectively with its private sector: The sizable role assumed by the private procurement network reflected in part the shortages of resources and buyers that plagued the “socialist” competition, especially in the first part of the decade. But the main advantage enjoyed by private purchasers lay in their freedom to offer peasants higher prices than could state procurement agents, who were generally restricted by price ceilings. Private middlemen commonly outbid the state’s buyers and still resold their acquisitions for a profit, relying on a demand that exceeded the supply of many farm products.43

The “Nepmen,” if annoyingly vulgar reminders to the average Russian of persisting economic and social inequalities in the new, post-Terrorist society, were reminders to Communist Party officials of their failure to induce most 40

41 42 43

Cited in Alan Ball, “Private Trade and Traders during NEP,” in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 89. See also Ball’s larger monograph: Russia’s Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921–29 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Citation from Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 771. Cited in Ball, “Private Trade and Traders During NEP,” p. 89. Ibid., p. 97. On the party’s simultaneous efforts to shape working-class “consciousness” on the shop floor in metropoles such as Moscow, see John B. Hatch, “Labor Conflict in Moscow, 1921–1925,” in Fitzpatrick, Rabinowitch, and Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP, pp. 58–71.

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peasants to join cooperatives in the countryside so that the state-controlled economic sector could compete, in the realm of agricultural and industrial prices, with the booming private economic sector under the NEP. The time would eventually come, for Lenin’s successors, to “confront decisively the troubling state of affairs in the countryside which made it so difficult for the party to obtain a steady, reliable source of grain without having to pay freemarket prices for it.”44 It is also true that, in the Russia of the NEP as much as in the France of the post-Robespierrist Convention and Directory, the insecure status of women and children was a sobering reflection of the uncertain times. As Wendy Z. Goldman and other scholars have shown, the ratification, by the Soviet Central Executive Committee, of a new Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship in 1926 took place against a backdrop of trying, often desperate conditions for women and children in post–civil war Russia. Most reformers agreed that an earlier family code, promulgated in 1918, had not successfully dealt with the social problems inherited from the October Revolution. As Goldman has written: Millions of homeless children roamed the streets. Thousands of families had fallen apart under the strains of survival. With the onset of the NEP in 1921 and the partial restoration of free market conditions, many state enterprises closed. Women figured prominently in the ranks of the unemployed. Impoverished widows and batrachki (landless peasant women), unable to survive in the countryside, swelled the ranks of the female unemployed in the cities. Between 70,000 and 100,000 women lived in de facto unions without the legal protection of registered marriage. Such women were frequently abandoned as soon as they became pregnant. With few opportunities for employment and no recourse to alimony, many turned to prostitution.45

Many women, in both urban and rural society, unimpressed by the 1926 Code’s invocation of the Bolshevik notion of marriage as a “companionate union” of individuals forged by mutual affection and supposedly common interests, railed against such “modern” arrangements as inadequately guaranteeing their economic security and that of their children. As comparativists, we can perceive in their plight a condition recalling some of the insecurities of women in postRobespierrist France.46 To pursue the parallel a bit further – and, at the same time, anticipate important developments during the subsequent Stalinist era – we can detect a rough 44 45

46

Ball, “Private Trade and Traders during NEP,” p. 97. Wendy Z. Goldman, “Working-Class Women and the “Withering Away” of the Family: Popular Responses to Family Policy,” in Fitzpatrick, Rabinowitch, and Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP, pp. 127–28. See also, on this debate Kent Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); and Wendy Z. Goldman, “Freedom and Its Consequences: The Debate on the Soviet Family Code of 1926,” Russian History 11 (1984): 362–88. Refer again to the works, cited earlier, of Garaud and Szramkiewicz, Desan, and Hufton. Clearly, there were differences as well as similarities between women’s dilemmas in the two upheavals.

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counterpart to the social conservatism of late-revolutionary (and Napoleonic) legislation on French familial issues in certain Russian statutes of 1936. As Goldman has noted, whereas the 1936 legal changes have often been regarded by historians as “part of a larger “retreat” designed by Stalin to increase the power of the state,” they also catered to the needs of abandoned women and children by (among other things) making divorce more difficult to obtain, by outlawing abortion, and by stiffening the punishments for men refusing to pay their alimony expenses. The experience of all too many Russian working-class women under NEP had driven home the lesson that “painful problems ensued from applying a vision of legal freedom to an economic structure ill designed to support it.”47 Yet to return to the question of Stalin and statism is to refer once again to the harsher, political side of the era. Bukharin, as we noted earlier, had warned the Comintern in July 1921 that he and his comrades were making “economic concessions” in order to avoid “making political ones;” and he really meant this. Indeed, by the time Bukharin made his defiant pronouncement to the delegates assembled at the Third Communist International, truly fateful steps had already been taken by the Bolshevik Party down a path toward a fully totalitarianism system that would eventually devour Bukharin himself and many another “child” of the Russian Revolution. As many specialists have pointed out over the years, those measures were adopted (at the Tenth Bolshevik Party Congress in Moscow) against the backdrop of political disorders at Kronstadt and elsewhere in Russia, and as a reaction (in part) to multiplying ideological challenges to the party leadership on a variety of issues. Yet they also represented a continuation of the trend, over the past several years, toward an ever-greater concentration of power within the ruling party in its Central Committee and its even more specialized subcommittees – its Politburo, its Orgboro, and its purging agency known as the Central Control Commission.48 In any case, Lenin at this historic Congress secured passage of two resolutions condemning the Workers’ Opposition and effectively restoring the Ninth Party Congress position charging the state with controlling industry through a system of “One-Man Management” while “consulting” the trade unions on managerial appointments and other matters. But the really critical decision reached at Lenin’s insistence involved the ban on intraparty factionalism. “This secret resolution,” as Figes has summarized it, “outlawed the formation of all party groupings independent of the Central Committee. By a two-thirds vote 47

48

Goldman, “Working-Class Women and the “Withering Away” of the Family,” p. 139. Other aspects of this issue are illuminated in R. E. Johnson, “Family Life in Moscow during NEP,” in Fitzpatrick, Rabinowitch, and Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP, pp. 106–24. Three of the classic monographs on this subject are Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960); Adam Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (London: Secker and Warburg, 1966); and Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy (London: Macmillan, 1977).

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of the Central Committee and the Control Commission such factions could be excluded from the party. . . . Henceforth, the Central Committee was to rule the party on the same dictatorial lines as the party ruled the country; no one could challenge its decisions without exposing themselves to the charge of factionalism.”49 From our perspective today, it seems all too obvious that, in the end, Stalin would be the primary beneficiary of this ban on “factionalism” (what he would later term “deviationism”) – Stalin, who would later employ the same exclusionary tactics against opponents like Bukharin and Trotsky that Lenin brandished in 1921 against the Workers’ Opposition. And, indeed, as early as April 1922 – well in advance, that is, of Lenin’s final retirement from the scene – the steely Georgian would already be progressing one important step further toward the acquisition of such a powerful position in party councils, when (with Lenin’s enthusiastic support) he assumed the position of first General Secretary in the over-all executive coordinating body known as the General Secretariat of the Party. At this point in all such analyses, the pertinent question is inevitably raised: to what extent does Lenin bear ultimate responsibility for the rise to supreme (and, often, tyrannically exercised) power of Joseph Stalin? As Lewis H. Siegelbaum has on the one hand asserted: “It is true that in his last writings, Lenin strove mightily to find a way of curbing the abuse of power and personal privilege by party and state functionaries.” On the other hand, the same synthesist has conceded that “it also seems evident that the solutions he urged were inadequate if not misguided.” Regarding the subsequent course of Soviet history, Siegelbaum has added that “if it makes little sense to hold Lenin accountable for the crimes of Stalin, using Lenin’s “Testament” as evidence with which to convict his eventual successor is no less problematic.”50 And in fact the “problematic” aspect of any attempt to disassociate Lenin too radically from his eventual successor has been accentuated by a number of specialists on the question. Sergei V. Iarov, for example, has stressed in a careful deconstructionist fashion the extent to which the all-important ban on intraparty factionalism, approved clandestinely at the Tenth Bolshevik Party Congress in March 1921, reflected certain strains in Leninist thought that can only be called totalitarian in nature: All the documents and accounts that have been preserved show that Lenin was . . . the key figure in the argument about party unity which erupted at the congress. . . . there was one question on which he touched time and again, even when it was not related to the subject on which he was speaking – the struggle against deviations. On this matter his speech was remarkably emotional, categorical and scathing, and contrasted even with the interventions of other speakers who were not always restrained in their choice of words. . . . One of the major features of his political thinking was an aversion to 49 50

Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 764–65. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 133–34.

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any kind of dissenting ideas which went beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy, and to factionalism which destroyed the monolithic nature of the party.51

Sheila Fitzpatrick has described much the same kind of steely mindedness in Lenin’s insistence on distinguishing always between retreat in economic matters (hence, the need for the NEP) and a forthright, almost military-style posture in political matters. Thus, Lenin’s pronouncements on party affairs: When an army is in retreat, a hundred more times discipline is required than when the army is advancing, because during an advance everyone presses forward. If everybody started rushing back now, it would spell immediate and inevitable disaster. . . . When a real army is in retreat, machine-guns are kept ready, and when an orderly retreat degenerates into a disorderly one, the command to fire is given, and quite rightly, too.

The Spartan conclusion Lenin derived from such an analysis was that, within the Communist Party, “the slightest violation of discipline must be punished severely, sternly, ruthlessly.”52 Whatever Lenin’s strictures against Stalin in the so-called “Testament” with which, at the very end, he may have hoped (in collusion with Trotsky) to prevent the further accumulation of power in the General Secretary’s hands, and whatever his nebulous endorsement of “free discussion” (but, of course, never of “factionalism”!) in party ranks, the path seems retrospectively to have been cleared for additional totalitarian developments in Soviet Russia even before Lenin’s death in January 1924. Those additional developments included the purging of Workers’ Oppositionists from Communist ranks, the subjection of a group of SRs to show trials, the expulsion of hundreds of prominent Kadets and Mensheviks from the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), and the formal outlawing of all parties other than the ruling Communists. And for all of this, Lenin’s own deeds and rhetoric must bear some responsibility. On the other hand, when it came to questions of ethnicity and nationalism, which played a notable role in the processes of ongoing statist centralization in Russia’s Thermidor, the tensions between Lenin and Stalin were palpable, and remained so down to Lenin’s last days of political influence. In earlier intraparty debates on nationalist questions, Lenin, in opposition to many of his comrades (including Stalin) who had supported a strict subordination of nationalism to socioeconomic “class” considerations, had spoken of a putative revolutionary state in which regional and ethnic autonomy could somehow be reconciled with centralized state power. At the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, the final resolution had mirrored the persisting disagreement within the party over this issue. As Ronald G. Suny has written, the Bolsheviks at this juncture 51 52

Sergei V. Iarov, “The Tenth Congress of the Communist Party and the Transition to NEP,” p. 120. Citations are from Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 97.

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. . . reached no consensus on nationality policy, and the conflict between those who, like Lenin, considered the national agenda of non-Russians and those who, like Stalin, subordinated the national to the “proletarian” continued until the former’s death and the latter’s consolidation of power within the party. On the ground, Communists decided themselves who was the carrier of the nation’s will, and after the initial recognition of independence for Finland, Poland, the Baltic republics, and (for a time) Georgia, few other gestures were made toward “separatists.”53

Five years later, the Constitution of 1924, by virtue of which the old RSFSR was superseded by the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), purported to balance Great Russian and other ethnic forces within the Soviet state – even if, inevitably, the Communist Party was the ultimate arbiter of nationalist issues in that state. “The first state in history to be formed of ethnic political units,” Suny has written, “the USSR was a pseudofederal state that both eliminated political sovereignty for the nationalities and guaranteed them territorial identity, educational and cultural institutions in their own language, and the promotion of native cadres into positions of power.”54 A final point to make about the contradictions of “Thermidor” in Russia has to do with the role of the military establishment in NEP society and beyond, and will naturally recall for the comparativist the “militarization” of society under the French Directory. Mark von Hagen has gone so far as to characterize the new order that eventually emerged under Stalin as “an uneasy mix of socialism and militarism that permeated all levels of political, social, economic, and cultural life,” and has found significant antecedents to that synthesis in developments of the 1920s.55 Prominent among those developments, according to von Hagen, was the appointment by the Communist Central Committee in June 1923 of an investigatory commission to suggest ways of reforming – and thereby rehabilitating – an institution whose importance to the defense (and, in good season, assertion) of Soviet institutions and values was obvious to many if not all contemporaries: The primary aims of the reformers were to restore the military organization to stable and regular operations, to standardize service manuals and disciplinary policy, to place the 53

54

55

Ronald G. Suny, “State-Building and Nation-Making: The Soviet Experience,” in Martin Miller, ed., The Russian Revolution, p. 242. A pioneering work in this field is Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954). But see also Ronald G. Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917– 1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), for insights that over recent decades have ignited an unprecedented interest in Soviet nationality issues. Suny, “State-Building and Nation-Making: The Soviet Experience,” p. 252. The issues as of 1924 are nicely recapitulated by Lewis H. Siegelbaum in Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, pp. 117–26. Mark von Hagen, “Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: From Defending the Revolution to Building Socialism,” in Fitzpatrick, Rabinowitch, and Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP, p. 156.

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army on a firm and adequate annual budget, and to raise morale and ensure soldiers’ and officers’ political loyalty to party and state leaders and their policies. Under the banner of “militarization” the reformers . . . declared that they were seeking to remilitarize an institution that had fallen prey to harmful influences and was no longer suitable as a combat organization.56

Although these reforms unsurprisingly encountered resistance from those groups in the Soviet army – “military specialists,” political commissars, and others – who stood in one way or another to lose influence as a result of their implementation, they succeeded in benefiting both the state and (eventually) the soldiers themselves. The upshot of these reforms was that, in the 1930s, the authorities at Moscow could increasingly count on both a group of more highly motivated active officers and soldiers of the line and a considerable reserve of veterans dwelling in the countryside who could assist them in rural administrative aspects of the crucial collectivization campaign.57 Although the imagery of war-making (as we have already seen in connection with several of Lenin’s fierce pronouncements on issues of party discipline) permeated the rhetoric of Soviet leaders in the Russian Thermidor, “militarization” as such did not subvert civilian control of the state in this phase of the Russian Revolution to the same extent as it did the Directory’s hold on power in Thermidorian France. There was, in other words, no Russian equivalent of the commissaires aux arm´ees sent out by threatened civilian leaders at Paris in the late 1790s as part of an unsuccessful endeavor to counter the burgeoning influence of charismatic army generals. Geopolitics may well help to explain this difference between the two upheavals: whereas Russia’s international posture in the 1920s was definitely one of defensiveness, and as such hardly tailor-made to accommodate the restless ambitions of militarists in positions of command, France in its final stage of revolution was definitely returning to its traditional hegemonic ways in European power politics, and as such was vulnerable to the machinations of overly ambitious generals. Still, the restructuring of military institutions in late-revolutionary Russia, like the analogous process in late-revolutionary France, was part of a cluster of tendencies toward state reconsolidation that in some respects complicates all simplistic notions of Thermidor. The next question we must ponder is whether we can in hindsight speak of comparable complications in the final phase of the revolution in mid-seventeenth-century England. Here, too, periodization is somewhat at issue, much as in the case of Russia – only, in this case, regarding the beginning rather than the end of Thermidor. Christopher Hill, for one, had no doubt at all that it was “impossible . . . to 56

57

Ibid., pp. 162–63. On the analytic value of the term “militarism” in comparative/developmental studies, see: Volker R. Berghahn, Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861– 1979 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982). Von Hagen, “Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship,” pp. 163–69.

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exaggerate the psychological importance of the failure of the Barebones Parliament for Oliver Cromwell.” Whatever the professional historian might think, Hill insisted, “for Oliver 1653 was undoubtedly the high point of the Revolution; after the failure, as he saw it, of Barebones to unite God’s people, his high hopes had gone.” Henceforward, the Protector would be, essentially, “a tired, disillusioned old man, still confident that he enjoyed a special relationship with God, but with few positive ideas left, on the defensive.”58 Yet few of Hill’s colleagues have been quite this pessimistic – quite as ready, that is, to recognize such a sharp break between the period prior to December 1653 and the remaining years of the “British Republic.” Insofar as the administrators of the Cromwellian Protectorate can be legitimately painted as “those who consciously or unconsciously decelerated, even retarded, social change, and prevented English society from transforming itself as fast as it would otherwise have done,” Gerald Aylmer has suggested, Hill’s thesis of a “Protectorate . . . in some respects less radical than the Commonwealth” probably makes some sense. Admittedly, the evidence for this thesis is sufficiently incomplete to leave room for alternative interpretations; still, “we should not run away from the evidence which is there.”59 Others have not been so sure, however; this seems especially true among the Protector’s multiplying biographers.60 One of the most balanced of commentaries on the question, however, was that of the leading specialist on the constitutional transition from the Commonwealth to the Protectorate. Austin Woolrych conceded an obvious “modicum of truth” in the familiar notion that the establishment of the Protectorate amounted to some sort of conservative reaction. “Yet a conservative reaction,” he reasonably went on, “implies some kind of radical establishment to react against, and this is where questioning voices raise themselves. . . . the Commonwealth had been a republic largely without republicans, or at least with too few of them, and even those few too lacking in political stature, to make it viable.”61 Hence, in reviewing the internal contradictions of the English “Thermidor,” we will not expect to discover the truly jarring discrepancies between various forms of a return to “normalcy,” on the one hand, and continuing statist reconsolidation, on the other, that were especially striking in the late-revolutionary stages of the French and Russian upheavals. Nonetheless, current scholarship does enable us to detect mild tendencies on both sides of the Thermidorian equation. Even Woolrych conceded that, insofar as governmental and legal affairs were concerned, pragmatic and conservative people “must have found it comforting that the constitutional balance 58 59 60

61

Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, pp. 143–45. Aylmer, The State’s Servants, p. 318. See, for example, Coward, Oliver Cromwell, esp. pp. 98–114; Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell, esp. pp. 173–74; and Derek Hirst, “The Lord Protector, 1653–1658,” in John S. Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1990), pp. 119–48. Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, pp. 393–94.

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between Protector, Council of State, and parliament” called for under Lambert’s “Instrument” in the wake of the radical Barebones fiasco “bore a recognizable resemblance to the old trinity of king, privy council, and parliament;” many more were “relieved that the ancient common law of England was no longer under threat, whatever reform it might face in particulars.”62 Moreover, the purgative and prosecutorial aspects of the 1649–53 stage of revolution were now toned down if not altogether eliminated. True, the new regime warned in one of its first pre-parliamentary “ordinances” that preaching or writing that supreme power did not reside in the Protector and parliament, and administrative authority in Protector and Council of State, would still be adjudged to be treason; still, the old 1649 “Engagement” to be faithful to the Commonwealth without a king and House of Lords, utilized so often to “remove” individuals from administrative, judicial, and clerical ranks in the aftermath of the regicide, was rescinded, and no new loyalty test was established to replace it. Perhaps even more significant was the waning of “terror” (English-style) under the Protectorate, as Woolrych himself was quick to acknowledge: In fact there were to be remarkably few political prisoners under the Protectorate. Among such as there were, some were held without trial because the charges to which they were liable carried the death penalty, which the government was reluctant to inflict. Throughout the Protectorate, no one suffered death for a political offence unless he planned or engaged in armed rebellion or conspired to assassinate Cromwell. To try such offences, the regime only twice resorted to a high court of justice (the Rump had done so five times, in a shorter span of time), and only eight men suffered death by these courts’ sentences. Torture was never employed by the Protectorate, and no civilian was ever tried by court-martial.63

Probably the geopolitical context here explains much: however shabby its treatment of certain religious dissidents in the late 1650s, the Protectorate (much like the Directory in late-revolutionary France, and the Soviet regime in laterevolutionary Russia) was experiencing a diminishing degree of external pressure, and so could afford to be more humane in its administrative and judicial procedures. It is also true that something of a social reaction set in with the dissolution of the Barebones Parliament in December 1653. Cromwell himself most famously set the tone in this regard less than eight months later with his invocation, at the opening session of the first Protectorate Parliament, of “the ranks and orders of men, whereby England hath been known for hundreds of years: a nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman,” and his charge that “men of Levelling principles” had recently been subverting property and striving “to make the tenant as liberal 62 63

Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, p. 580. Ibid., p. 582. On the point regarding the high courts of justice, see Aylmer, The State’s Servants, p. 355 (n. 16). Again, as Ronald Hutton has pointed out, four notoriously antiroyalist judges were removed from the Commonwealth’s bench, and nearly thirty incarcerated royalists were set at liberty. Hutton, The British Republic, pp. 62–64.

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a fortune as the landlord.” In an age that recognized no hard and fast boundaries between matters political and matters religious (and in the wake of the extremist religious antics associated in the minds of Cromwell’s auditors with the preceding year’s assembly of “saints” at Westminster), the Protector went on logically enough to castigate the unchecked preaching of “prodigious blasphemies” and to reject those sectarian types who, by anathematizing the very concept of a law-abiding, ordained ministry as being somehow “antichristian,” threatened themselves to pull down the foundations of society.64 “There is also no denying,” one of Cromwell’s biographers has written, that the great man “as Protector often looked and acted like a king.” The Protectoral court soon assumed some of the ceremonial trappings of royalty; the Protector himself came to be addressed as “Your Highness” by English courtiers and foreign ambassadors alike; and by 1656, if not before, people were slipping into the habit of referring to the Council of State as the “Privy Council.”65 In light of all this, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Protector, having abandoned the Rump’s oath of Engagement, should also have intervened frequently to protect ex-Royalists from the rigor of the sequestration commissions dealing in landconfiscation matters, thus enabling many erstwhile supporters of Charles I to recover (admittedly at some financial cost to themselves) many of the major estates they had lost at the behest of the more radical regimes of the late 1640s and early 1650s.66 “Polite” circles at London unavoidably took note of all of this. If, as comparativists, we cannot point to exact counterparts in London society in the late 1650s of Ther` ´ ese Cabarrus and of the Parisian jeunesse dor´ee mocking destitute sans-culottes and sans-jupons, or of the wives and mistresses of “Nepmen” shamelessly flaunting their companions’ ill-gotten wealth before the eyes of the starving in late-revolutionary Moscow, we can nonetheless detect certain developments hinting at such extremes of affluence and indigence. “In London,” Hill has written, “the oligarchy came back to power. Between 1640 and 1654 there had been no Lord Mayor’s shows: they were resumed in 1655. John Evelyn first saw women painting themselves in May 1654; by August of that year it even seemed safe to address a bishop by his title, ‘the times now being more open.’” At the opposite extreme, we learn, “the excise was extended to many hitherto untaxed objects of popular consumption;” the poor complained bitterly but (of course) in vain.67 The scandalous fashions and mores of Restoration society had not yet settled in; but they were, in some respects, prefigured under the Protectorate. 64 65

66 67

All of this is summarized in Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, pp. 602–05. Refer to Coward, Oliver Cromwell, pp. 99–102. On the court ceremonial under the Protectorate, see: Roy Sherwood, The Court of Oliver Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and, by the same author, Oliver Cromwell: King in All But Name (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). A point made by (among many others) Barry Coward, in Oliver Cromwell, pp. 99–102. Hill, God’s Englishman, pp. 150–51.

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There were also more tangible, institutionalized reflections of Thermidor in late-revolutionary England. At both the center of power and in the counties, public influence shifted upwards – not drastically, but upwards nonetheless – in social/hierarchical terms. The Council of State, we are told, was increasingly dominated by “the conservative wing of the generals, mostly of gentry origins” (Lambert, Desborough, Sydenham, Lisle, Edward Montagu) together with three baronets (two of whom had figured prominently in the dissolution of Barebones); no fewer than three of the Councilors – Lisle, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, and Montagu – were to become peers after the Restoration in 1660. Other advisers to the Protectorate further reinforced its ties with the aristocracy.68 It hence appears almost an understatement for Barry Coward to agree that “the membership of the Protector’s new Council of State may . . . have been determined with at least one eye to cultivating the support of conservative opinion.”69 In the meantime, Ronald Hutton has concluded from studies conducted in the counties that if, during the Barebones interval, “radicals from the minor gentry or non-landed classes tended to be added to the commissions for the peace and the ‘assessment,’ under the Protectorate, “individuals of more ‘moderate’ beliefs and of higher social status tended to be put in.” The Protectorate’s commissions, in other words, including “slightly more of the traditional elite,” had a somewhat greater chance of accommodating the views and meeting the needs of that elite – this, with the proviso ´ that most of the country’s “natural rulers” in fact remained outside the power structure until the Restoration.70 There was one example of an English Thermidorian Reaction even preceding, by a few days, the fall of the Barebones Parliament: this involved the governance of the navy.71 A new and radical group of Admiralty Commissioners appointed by the “saints” at Westminster early on in their period of influence were removed from power at the start of December 1653. The Council of State newly elected on December 1 betrayed its conservative propensities by deciding, two days later, to drop from the Commission Fifth Monarchists John Carew and Nathaniel Rich, along with Hollister, Langley, and Salmon; the new recruits included prominent Cromwellian Colonel Philip Jones (soon to be a key figure in the Protectorate) and noted moderates such as Colonel John Clarke, John Stone, and Edward Horsemen. The new Admiralty men, Bernard Capp has remarked, “proved active, capable, and reliable,” but were to display “none of their predecessors’ ideological fervor in the selection of officers.” One of the few remaining “saints” in the navy, John Poortmans, 68 69 70

71

Ibid., pp. 143–45. Coward, Oliver Cromwell, p. 99. Ronald Hutton, The British Republic, pp. 78–80. This picture of a shifting social representation in the localities is confirmed in Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, pp. 700–701. The trends, according to Woolrych, were particularly clear in the matter of the appointments of J.P.s. – especially as the decade wore on. On this issue, refer again to Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, esp. pp. 126–28.

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feared the worst from such changes: if “godly” men were to be so discarded in this fashion, he informed a correspondent, it was likely that the Lord would withdraw His favor from the Republic’s fleet. Poortmans’ dissatisfaction with the trend of affairs only deepened over the ensuing months, and he left the naval service altogether in the autumn of 1654. The “spirit of the Protectorate” had, it would seem, “captured the Admiralty even before it was inaugurated.”72 Thus for the mild but well-documented manifestations of what Capp has called the “spirit of the Protectorate” – what appears in our comparative schema as one aspect of the English “Thermidor.” In reviewing English developments, can we point at the same time to countervailing statist tendencies presaging, in any meaningful fashion, statist tendencies in the later upheavals? We do, in fact, see in constitutional and political developments in the Protectorate a certain resumption of the work of state-building inherited from the recent era of the Commonwealth. There was, to begin with, the question of the Lord Protector’s authority under the Protectorate. “Oliver Cromwell dominated the political life of England throughout the 1650s,” Derek Hirst has averred, “and wielded more raw power than any English ruler before or, perhaps, since.”73 Indeed, by the time of the Second Protectorate Parliament, Hirst has noted, those conservative M.P.s urging Oliver to take the crown (in 1657) seemed to be wondering whether a “Lord Protector” as such could be hedged in by any of the “laws and customs” bequeathed to England from its monarchist past.74 Other specialists, if not prepared to go quite that far in emphasizing the concentration of executive power under the Protectorate, have conceded that John Lambert’s foundational Instrument of Government did invest Cromwell as Lord Protector with a formidable amount of authority from the start. “Under this constitution,” G. E. Aylmer has written, Oliver “enjoyed supreme executive power as head of state, though in many areas he had to act with the consent of his Council.”75 He was also expected to consult with a unicameral, 460-member legislature representing Scotland and Ireland as well as England and Wales and convening for at least five months every third year. Although these triennial parliaments were “given apparently extensive and supreme legislative rights” along with a supervisory role in all important matters of executive governance and administration, their real powers, as envisioned under the Instrument, were less than might at first meet the eye. As Peter Gaunt has put it:

72

73 74 75

Ibid., p. 128. A similar trend away from ideological and toward more purely professional criteria in selecting officers for the French navy would, we recall, manifest itself even before the overthrow of Robespierre in late July 1794. See again Cormack, Revolution and Political Conflict in the French Navy, esp. pp. 145–47 and 269–71. Hirst, “The Lord Protector, 1653–1658,” p. 119. Ibid. Aylmer, The State’s Servants, p. 45.

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. . . the impression of parliamentary omnipotence was illusory, for the legislature was surrounded by potentially severe restrictions, including the prerogative of the Protector to veto any legislation which in his sole and unquestionable opinion ran counter to the constitution. Several important provisions of the Instrument were specifically deemed inviolable and beyond alteration or revision by future legislation. Indeed, there was no provision for any form of constitutional amendment and Cromwell may have initially considered that the whole document was sacrosanct. In such manner was the ground prepared for co-operation and conflict.76

Although, in revisionist mode, Gaunt has done his best to accentuate the positive in these arrangements and the actual cooperation attained between the Protector’s government and the first Protectorate Parliament in late 1654, he has also acknowledged that Cromwell, encountering adamant opposition to the Instrument’s work from M.P.s such as Arthur Hesilrig, John Bradshaw, and Thomas Scott, forced “somewhere between seventy and ninety forthright opponents of the regime” out of the assembly altogether. Despite all of Oliver’s solicitous rodomontade concerning “a free parliament,” the M.P.s soon discovered that (in Gaunt’s phrasing) “there was a distinct limit to Cromwell’s brand of freedom.”77 Whatever their disagreements over issues such as the Protector’s powers of war and peace, the treatment to be meted out to turbulent religious dissidents, and the overall nature of the Church settlement in England, Cromwell and his most entrenched critics came to blows especially over fiscal/military issues. In fact, the burgeoning requirements of a modern “fiscal-military state” had called forth several important financial/administrative reforms from the new regime even before the M.P.s had first assembled at Westminster. During the January–September 1654 period, more than twenty of the executive “ordinances” promulgated by the Protector and his Council of State dealt with matters of finance: notably, those of June 21 and September 2 consolidated the public revenues in one Treasury and established the jurisdiction of the Court of Exchequer in fiscal matters. In so doing, the government hoped to curb the waste, duplication of effort, and blatant corruption fostered during the 1640s by the proliferation of fiscal agencies, exploit existing revenue sources more efficiently, and thus buttress the finances of a state increasingly at war during the 1650s.78 These reforms, if not dramatic in themselves, helped to sustain what Michael J. Braddick has called a “revolutionary” increase in the military capacity of the English state dating back to the 1642–46 period, a development 76 77 78

Peter Gaunt, “Law-Making in the First Protectorate Parliament,” in Jones, Newitt and Roberts, eds., Politics and People in Revolutionary England, esp. pp. 165–66. Ibid., p. 181. See, on this subject: Ivan Roots, “Cromwell’s Ordinances: The Early Legislation of the Protectorate,” in G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660 (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 143–64; and Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, pp. 588–89. Wheeler, in The Making of a World Power, Chapters 5–8, discusses the tripartite system of taxation (assessments, customs, and excise) that fully emerged during these years.

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that in the 1650s supported a “record of military success which any previous regime would have welcomed.”79 The constitutional implications of these statist reforms, on the other hand, especially where the standing army was concerned, would eventually so envenom relations between the Protector and his parliaments as to engender a full-blown crisis of revolutionary legitimacy for the late-revolutionary government in England. For the bureaucracy as a whole, G. E. Aylmer’s conclusion, cited earlier with regard to the period prior to December 1653, seems to hold equally well for the middle to late 1650s: “a new kind of public service, in some ways a new administrative system, was coming into existence in republican England until its development was retarded, if not reversed, by the events of 1660.” At another point, returning to this subject, Aylmer elaborated: To estimate whether the rule of the Long Parliament and then of the republic was any more equitable than that of its predecessors we need to look closely at the new institutions and how they operated; at the public services which were also used by private citizens, such as the Post Office, and above all at the fiscal system. Were the rich as undertaxed as they had been before 1642? The answer must surely be No. The navy which won the first Dutch War of 1652–54 had plenty wrong with it, but it was a more efficient and – for the ordinary man in it – even marginally a less brutal service than the royal navy of pre-1642. Nor were all the committees which affected the everyday lives of ordinary people high-handed and tyrannical, corrupt and irresponsible at every turn. . . . The new bureaucracy certainly existed.80

James S. Wheeler has more recently (if guardedly) endorsed this conclusion, most notably as it pertains to customs taxation: “In some ways,” he has written, “the customs system of the late 1650s approached the modern ideal of bureaucratic efficiency and honesty, although this point can be pushed too far.” A “process of professionalization” was at least discernible in this area of the state’s finances.81 The tendencies toward statist reconsolidation in late-revolutionary England, finally, had drastic implications for those in the British Isles who were notably not English: namely, the Irish and the Scots, subdued militarily by Cromwell and the other generals of the New Model Army in the whirlwind campaigns of 1649–51.82 If, in late-revolutionary Russia, arguments between Lenin, Stalin, and other Soviet leaders regarding the proper relationship between ethnicity and socioeconomic class relations littered the road from the formal creation of the predominantly Great Russian RSFSR of 1921 to the more ethnically 79 80 81 82

Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, esp. pp. 219–21. See also Wheeler, “Navy finance, 1649–60,” Historical Journal 39 (1996): 457–66, for more information on this subject. Aylmer, The State’s Servants, pp. 341–42. Wheeler, The Making of a World Power, pp. 143, 146–47. The following discussion is based primarily on David Stevenson, “Cromwell, Scotland and Ireland,” in John Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, pp. 149–80; and Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, esp. pp. 664–76.

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inclusive USSR of 1924, under the Protectorate the most arresting distinction in ethnic affairs was that between the treatment meted out arbitrarily to the Irish and that accorded to Scotland. In the case of Ireland, as David Stevenson has written, “England had sought complete conquest and union into one commonwealth from the start of Cromwell’s campaign,” regarding this unhappy land essentially as “a dependency.” In the case of Scotland, however, England had (as if by accident) “conquered an independent State,” desiring primarily to “remove the threat the alliance of the covenanters with Charles II presented to the commonwealth: quite how this would be achieved was secondary, dependent on how the situation developed.”83 The Act for the settlement of Ireland was almost entirely punitive in nature, motivated by English thoughts of revenge for the Rebellion of late 1641 and thereafter; there was to be a widespread replacement of native Irish landowners and ex-soldiers (thousands of whom did go into “voluntary” or forced exile) by “godly” Protestant proprietors and former soldiers. It is true that, before the “troubles,” Catholics had owned nearly 60 percent of Irish land, and that this proportion was reduced by the 1660s to about 20 percent (largely in Connaught); still, attempts to establish a new Protestant presence throughout the country met with all sorts of problems. In Scotland, where the majority were at least protestant from the start, the Protectorate mounted a more sustained effort to accommodate powerful interests such as Presbyterian ministers and landowners; yet General Monck in the late 1650s described the Scots as ill-disposed toward the occupying English, and Cromwell himself, just months before his death in 1658, spoke of the Scots as “a very ruined nation.”84 The so-called “Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland” was less an organic amalgamation of three societies into one larger community than a fairly transparent device for prioritizing the religiocultural interests and strategic defensive needs of God’s (protestant) “Promised People” in England. In any case, this “Commonwealth” did not survive the return of the British Isles to Stuart rule in 1660 and thereafter. To allude to the “defensive needs” of Cromwellian England is, in part, to recall that the English “Thermidor,” like the analogous stages in the later revolutions in France and Russia, occurred in a larger context of international affairs. This means that, like so much else, the internal complexities and contradictions of our “Thermidorian” periods can be adequately appreciated only in this larger context, a context involving our “old friend,” the everlasting dialectic between foreign and domestic affairs. Thermidorian Geopolitics: Expansionism and Expediency It is useful to recall, at this point, that in earlier chapters we stressed the importance of woefully unsuccessful foreign policies as critical prerequisites for revolutions in England, France, and Russia, and the centrality of interacting 83 84

Stevenson, “Cromwell, Scotland and Ireland,” p. 163. Citations from ibid., p. 178.

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external and endogenous factors to the ensuing processes of revolutionary change in the three countries. In the “Thermidorian” phases of all three upheavals, the domestic reforms we have been analyzing chapter after chapter began to “pay off” in international terms as the French, English, and Russians found ways to advance their geostrategic interests. In brief: the French, still ensconced (as they had been for over a century) at the heart of Europe’s international state system, now returned to their old hegemonic ways on the Continent, while the late-revolutionary English and Russians, situated much more precariously (in the 1650s and 1920s, respectively) on the periphery of that durable state system, did what they could to reestablish their countries’ security in worldly affairs. In the French National Convention’s final year (1794–95), the deputies, having safely disposed of the Robespierrist “terrorists,” discarded all thoughts of defensive strategy and moved unabashedly onto the offensive. The Republic’s victory at Fleurus in Belgium (June 26, 1794) was pivotal to this process in that it definitively removed long-standing enemy pressure on the northeastern borders and heralded a reversion to historic French aggression in the Low Countries. Scarcely less significant, however, were victories in late 1794 on other fronts: those successes allowed the Thermidorian armies to carry the war eastward into the German Rhineland, south-eastward against PiedmontSardinia in Italy, and southward across the Pyrenees into Spain.85 Savoring the intoxicating wine of such successes, France’s late-revolutionary leaders seized the opportunity to proclaim to the world that their country “was back.” Rumors of peace prompted official spokesman Merlin de Douai to announce in the Convention on December 4 a foreign policy whose implementation could only bode ill for the rest of Europe. Yes, said Merlin, his compatriots wanted peace, but it must be a peace “worthy of our intrepid defenders.” When the French people no longer saw the war as necessary “either to appease their wounded dignity or to guarantee themselves against new perfidies,” he continued, only then would they “rein in the steeds of victory, then only will they command peace.” The day after these defiant words had rung out in a wildly applauding Convention, the deputies ordered that Merlin’s oration be translated into “every tongue” and relayed to all the armies and communes of the Republic. Equally revealing was the fact that talk of imminent peace was contemptuously ascribed (by delegate Andre´ Dumont) to surviving “Robespierrists.”86 There were additional signs of what was to come. A German diplomatic agent, reporting back to his home government in the Rhineland after a stay of several months at Paris, warned in December that a majority in the 85 86

For a useful review of all these issues, see Steven T. Ross, Quest for Victory: French Military Strategy, 1792–1799 (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1973). Citations from Sydney Biro, The German Policy of Revolutionary France: A Study of French Diplomacy during the War of the First Coalition, 1792–1797, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), Vol. 2, pp. 262–63.

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Convention favored continuation of the war and stated moreover that French war aims “were of such a nature that France’s enemies could not possibly subscribe thereto.” Even more telling (because more specific) were remarks in the Convention in late January 1795 by Boissy d’Anglas: speaking in the name of the Thermidorian Committee of Public Safety, he declared that the Republic’s imperative need for indemnities and for a durable peace securing it from “all invasion . . . for a long series of centuries” would “compel” it to wage war to attain French boundaries designated by “Nature.” Yet from what Boissy d’Anglas and other speakers said on this occasion, Sydney Biro is likely correct to infer in the Convention a growing will to extend French power beyond the supposedly “natural” limits of the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees.87 Soon, French cavalry would be riding into Amsterdam on the ice; French administrators would be following victorious soldiers into the wonderland of petty principalities in the Rhineland; and a youthful Bonaparte, at the direction of the government, would be poring over topographical maps of a yet-to-be-invaded Italy. Realpolitik would drown out the “new diplomacy” associated in some quarters with Jacobin idealism, and the men of the new France, as their country grew ever more predatory, would find themselves “enmeshed in the diplomatic imbroglios of old.”88 Not all of this was immediately self-evident in the year or so after the French breakthrough at Fleurus. What did become increasingly obvious by 1795, nonetheless, was that the Republic’s multiplying victories were subjecting the First Coalition to severe strains. Before the year was out, in fact, three major players – Prussia, Spain, and the United Provinces – had dropped out of the anti-French alliance, leaving Great Britain and Austria more or less to “go it alone” against Paris. Not that the martial accomplishments of the French, however impressive they might be, constituted the sole factor in this strategic equation. The revolutionaries could derive much comfort – and, in the end, would benefit mightily – from the inability of the countries in the First Coalition to subordinate their own selfish interests to the common cause of defeating Thermidorian France. In the eastern marches of Europe, Catherine II’s Russia was positioned as always to play the feuding “Teutonic” states of Prussia and Austria off each other even as it dutifully paid lip service to the 87

88

For these citations, see again ibid., p. 263. For a classic critique of the “natural frontiers” concept as a motivating force in French foreign policy, see Gaston Zeller, “La Monarchie d’Ancien Regime et les fronti`eres naturelles,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 8 ´ (1933): 305–33. The concept has been partially rehabilitated by Peter H. Sahlins, in “Natural Frontiers Revisited: France’s Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century,” American Historical Review 95 (1990): 1423–51. Linda Frey and Marsha Frey, “‘The Reign of the Charlatans is Over’: The French Revolutionary Attack on Diplomatic Practice,” Journal of Modern History 65 (1993): esp. pp. 742–43. Or, as Biro has put it: “The enlightened propaganda that once aspired to introduce a better world became the instrument of a lust for conquest as insatiable as that which ever emerged from a royal chancellery.” Biro, The German Policy of Revolutionary France, 2: 479–80.

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ideological crusade against the barbarous regicides of France. To the west there was, as ever, the other “flanking state” of Europe, Great Britain, and the British would find their calls for a sustained Coalition unity falling on deaf continental ears even as they themselves were distracted at times from strictly European affairs by developments in the vast world beyond Europe. The French, needless to add, would be more than happy to rush into the geopolitical vacuum created by the unraveling of the First Coalition. Catherine II had long held transparent designs on both Poland and Ottoman Turkey, and was able to further those designs by profiting both from Vienna’s and Berlin’s preoccupation with revolutionary France in the west and from their mutual distrust in German and east European affairs. These realities lay behind the Second Partition of Poland (in 1793), the Third Partition of 1795 (as a result of which the Polish state ceased altogether to exist), and the reaffirmation of longstanding pledges between St. Petersburg and Vienna to divide Turkey’s European possessions when the time should prove right.89 It is likely that Prussia’s steadily waning enthusiasm for the campaign against Paris in the course of 1793 had been directly linked to its growing anxiety over Russian and Austrian machinations to the east, and this made it all the easier for France to detach Berlin (and then, in short order, the Spanish and Dutch) from the First Coalition. The Treaty of Basle, concluded in March 1795, established Prussian neutrality, created a “neutral zone” in northern Germany in which Berlin might eventually make territorial gains, solidified France’s grip on the Left Bank of the Rhine, and ensured French mastery of the Dutch before the end of the year. Spain, too, would soon be compelled to drop out of the war; indeed, the Treaty of San Ildefonso would revive the Franco-Spanish alliance of late Bourbon times and (at least in theory) add Spanish naval forces to those of the French and Dutch.90 Before the end of 1795, consequently, Austria was left practically alone on the Continent to face the rising power of Thermidorian France. The Habsburgs received verbal support (but little else) from a Russia increasingly beguiled by thoughts of expansion into central Asia, and financial support (but little else) from a British state similarly distracted by interests far beyond the traditional battlefields of west-central Europe.91 Yet, even as the First Coalition crumbled around them, Vienna and London continued at bottom to share a resolution to oppose French expansionism, and they only awaited an appropriate 89

90

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These issues are discussed by Geoffrey Bruun, “The Balance of Power during the Wars, 1793– 1814,” in The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 9: War and Peace in an Age of Upheaval, 1793–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 250–74. The French negotiations with Prussia, the Dutch, and Spain are usefully recapitulated in Martyn Lyons, France Under the Directory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 192– 94. Refer also to Bruun, “The Balance of Power during the Wars,” pp. 255–56. The limited and selfish nature of British support for Vienna during the 1790s is a major theme in Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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opportunity to construct a new “grand alliance” against Paris. Austrian Chancellor Franz-Maria von Thugut, while doubtless concerned to pursue traditional Habsburg interests in Europe, was also (and increasingly) obsessed by what he saw as the strategic and sociopolitical threat posed to the entire Continent by a French Revolution triumphantly on the march. Thugut, his most recent biographer has explained, “would not seek peace” with a France that “was still a dangerous force that threatened to destroy the political and social fabric of Europe. . . . it mystified him that the Prussians, regardless of their feelings toward Austria or toward him, still did not comprehend the true danger of revolutionary France.”92 At the same time, the British, for their own set of reasons, were similarly determined to oppose Thermidorian France. Whatever their gains on the global stage, they were still facing their permanent strategic nightmare: the prospect of an enemy’s achievement of hegemony on the Continent and consequent attempt to marshal all continental resources to defeat them in their own (maritime) element. In this case, the collapse of the First Coalition in 1795 seemed to leave William Pitt’s ministry with little choice but to continue subsidizing Austria and hope for some dramatic turn of events in Europe from which a new combination of European powers might emerge to fight the French.93 As it happened, that turn of events was not to be long in coming, and would stem from a predictable quarter: unremitting French aggression that seemed to portend the revolutionaries’ domination of much of Europe. There was, truly, no real let-up in the message of expansionism emanating from Paris. Even in the waning sessions of the Convention in October 1795, Merlin de Douai was already pointedly linking “the consolidation of the Republic and the peace of Europe” with the extension of France to the Rhine; and this continued to be the guiding spirit in ruling circles at Paris after the inauguration of the new constitutional regime known as the Directory. Indeed, the coup d’´etat of 18 Fructidor, Year V (September 4, 1797) left the five-man executive Directory dominated by Jean-Franc¸ois Reubell, Franc¸ois de Neufchateau, and inveterˆ ate expansionist Merlin de Douai, and they constituted “a stable pole around which all the other forces pushing for the grandes limites could cluster.”94 Those “forces” included a plethora of industrialists, merchants, and financiers advocating an aggressive foreign policy for the new markets, raw materials, and speculative opportunities it might afford in interior Europe; and they were given an additional momentum by the French government’s growing tendency 92 93

94

Karl A. Roider, Jr., Baron Thugut and Austria’s Response to the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 181–82. For the British perspective on all this, see Edward Ingram, Commitment to Empire: Prophecies of the Great Game in Asia, 1797–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); and Piers Mackesy, War without Victory: The Downfall of Pitt, 1799–1802 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), esp. pp. 228–30. T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 74–75.

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to see its conquests, not only as keeping the generals and their armies happily occupied, and their entrepreneurs placated, but also as financing their increasingly bellicose foreign policy in its entirety.95 Yet, as always, the French were also mesmerized by visions of gloire to be achieved in a Europe that seemed now almost to be inviting such adventurism. But this time Gallic ambitions would take on a dimension that the Sun King himself, in old regime days, might have found breathtaking. Even before the Fructidor coup d’´etat strengthened the hand of the expansionists in the government, the French war effort had received a dramatic boost from the heroics of Bonaparte on battlefields in northern Italy. Yet, revealingly, the Directory had been projecting French power beyond the so-called “natural boundaries” even before the Italian campaign of 1796, converting conquered Holland into a “Batavian Republic” subservient to French wishes and covetously eyeing lands east of the Rhine. What Bonaparte’s Italian triumphs over the Austrians permitted Paris to do was to reiterate its demand for historic gains in western Germany even as it carved out a new sphere of influence in Italy. By the terms of the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 1797), Vienna, in return for gains at the expense of the partitioned Venetian Republic, had to abandon Belgium and the Left Bank of the Rhine to France and recognize new, French-dominated entities in northern Italy, the “Cisalpine” and “Ligurian” Republics. Moreover, Campo Formio not only legitimized the new French presence in the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy; it also presaged the collapse of the Habsburgled Holy Roman Empire in central Europe.96 The Habsburgs’ most venerable – and validating – links with Europe’s mythic past were now being jeopardized, even as Habsburg Austria’s current Great Power status was being reduced, in the struggle with the Thermidorians at Paris. These developments, arresting as they were, only whetted the appetite of the French, who now moved inexorably back into a mode of aggression on high seas and Continent alike. Desultory talks with the British, under way at Lille since early July, were cut off abruptly in the wake of 18 Fructidor; before the end of October, preparations were launched for an invasion of England. At the same time, “if the reluctant acceptance of Campo Formio meant an end to the war with Austria for the time being,” as Blanning has commented, “it did not prevent further expansion on the Continent. In fact, French influence spread further and faster during the year of ‘peace’ than it had done during wartime.”97 Indeed. In late 1797 and 1798, French military intervention helped to secure the foundation of a “Helvetic Republic” in Switzerland, and 95

96 97

On the domestic roots of the Directory’s foreign policy, see Biro, The German Policy of Revolutionary France, esp. 1: 963–66, and Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany, pp. 76–77. For details on all this, see Bruun, “The Balance of Power during the Wars,” pp. 255–56; and Biro, The German Policy of Revolutionary France, 1: 958. Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, p. 176.

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Paris would soon annex outright two erstwhile members of the Swiss Confederation: such developments portended French control of crucial mountain passes connecting northern Italy with theaters of action in eastern France, western Germany, and the Low Countries. Meanwhile, in February 1798, French forces invaded the papal states, exiled the pope, and proclaimed a “Roman Republic” at Italy’s ancient capital. Later, a “Parthenopian” or “Neapolitan” republic was established – on the authority of French bayonets – at the foot of the peninsula. Once the strategic northwest Italian state of Piedmont had been occupied and (eventually) annexed to the French Republic, the writ of Paris would run uninterruptedly from the North Sea to the central Mediterranean.98 As if this were not enough, the Thermidorian leaders, taking advantage of the enduring split between Berlin and Vienna, used a major Congress convened at Rastadt in 1798 to solidify the French position in Germany – most glaringly at the expense of the humiliated Austrians.99 All of this was sufficiently troubling to advocates of a balance of power in European affairs; but when the Directory’s soaring ambitions began to extend to areas far to the East, thereby threatening Russia and Turkey as well as Great Britain and Austria, the possibilities for renewed coalition warfare – only this time, on a truly colossal scale – increased commensurately. As early as January 1798, a Russian spy in the French embassy at Berlin sent worrying reports back to St. Petersburg about a possible French attempt to intervene forcibly in Polish affairs – supposedly to fashion a resurrected Polish state from the Partition spoils of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. That a seven-thousand-man Polish Legion was currently serving under French colors in the West, and that military units of Polish exiles were also being formed in the Danubian basin in the southeast, seemed to lend credence to these stories.100 Even earlier, however – in July 1797, to be specific – Talleyrand, soon to be named foreign minister at Paris, had claimed even more audaciously in an address to the cognoscenti of the Institute that “nothing is more important than to establish ourselves on a sound footing in Albania, Greece, Macedonia and the other provinces of the Turkish Empire in Europe, especially those with a Mediterranean coastline, and most notably Egypt, which one day could prove immensely useful for us.”101 And in fact, a governmental decision to conquer Egypt, hence making this the centerpiece of the French thrust to the east, came on March 5, 1798. For historians of the longue dur´ee of international affairs, the challenge posed by the French Revolution in its Thermidorian phase to the equilibrium

98

99 100 101

For classic syntheses on France’s “sister republics” in the 1790s, consult R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: The Response (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964); and Jacques Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, trans. Herbert H. Rowen (New York: Free Press, 1965). Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, esp. pp. 176–78, for the pertinent details. Ibid., p. 190. Talleyrand is cited in ibid., p. 180.

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of geopolitical forces in Europe by 1798 was starkly “modern,” looking forward to Napoleon – and, ultimately, to the Germany of 1914–45 – even more than it recalled the earlier expansionism of Charles V and Louis XIV. For the very first time, it is worth emphasizing, a continental state was menacing the vital interests of both “flanking powers” (that is, Great Britain and Russia) as it simultaneously ran roughshod over the more traditional battlefields of west-central Europe. Even as the revolutionaries repeatedly struck at Britain indirectly through the partially opened “back door” of Ireland, they called the entire British Empire into question through an occupation of Egypt that might in turn provide a base for a descent on India (via the Red Sea or the “overland route”).102 At the same time, by upending the status quo in a Germany frozen for centuries within the framework of the “Holy Roman Empire,” by (reportedly) scheming to reverse the massive changes wrought in the three Polish partitions, and by appearing in force in the eastern Mediterranean and on its strategic littoral, the French not only infuriated the Russians but also (and remarkably) reconciled them with their inveterate foes, the Ottoman Turks. Paris also wanted to block any effort by Austria to parlay its new Adriatic possessions into a major Mediterranean presence – and this could only lend additional credence to Thugut’s warnings, long undervalued even at Vienna, that a resumption of coalition warfare against the overbearing French was imperative. The revolutionaries, then, did much to pave the way for a conflict of even greater international scope than that of 1792–97. When Pitt invited the new tsar, Paul I, to take the lead in organizing what would become the Second Coalition, he suggested a program of diplomatic goals strikingly anticipatory of the settlement later hammered out at the Congress of Vienna. France should be reduced to its prerevolutionary borders, and any renewed French expansionism precluded by, among other things, the creation of a Dutch/Belgian state in the Low Countries and the fashioning of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia-Savoy in Italy. The Swiss would regain their territories and sovereignty; Austria might receive Italian possessions as a compensation for losing Belgium; and Prussia might be lured into the coalition with the promise of German acquisitions.103 Austria’s Chancellor Thugut, too, was “seeking a new kind of coalition,” groping, at least, toward “the concert that would later emerge under Metternich’s auspices in 1814.” Painfully recalling how the lack of cooperative planning had hobbled the allies in the First Coalition, Baron Thugut insisted that, this time, “comprehensive plans must be laid, the right objectives chosen, and the 102

103

On the Irish situation and its strategic ramifications in the 1790s, see Thomas Pakenham, The Year of Liberty: The Great Irish Rebellion of 1798 (New York: Random House, 1998). On the strategic threat posed to British India by the French presence in Egypt, see esp. Edward Ingram, Commitment to Empire, passim. For the details of this strategic planning, consult Bruun, “The Balance of Power during the Wars,” pp. 256–57.

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proper timing selected so that the coalition would achieve victory.”104 That St. Petersburg and Constantinople were prepared to bury the swords of their historic rivalry and join in the common effort against the French boded well for the prospects of the new alliance. True, Prussia’s adamant and short-sighted refusal to relinquish its neutral status was a major disappointment to the allies; but this in itself did not necessarily doom their enterprise. Indeed, the members of the Second Coalition were able to agree on a common set of war plans whose successful implementation would presumably lead to the overthrow of the Directory, the restoration of the Bourbons, and the curbing of French power. In general terms: an Austro-Russian force was to drive the Republic’s armies out of Italy; Russian troops would then liberate Switzerland and move into eastern France; and an Anglo-Russian army would simultaneously liberate the Low Countries and then advance into northern France. In the summer of 1799, this military strategy seemed well on the way to achieving complete success: the “sister republics” in Italy collapsed as the Directory’s forces were driven out of the peninsula; the French were initially defeated in Switzerland and expelled from the Rhineland; and the northeastern French provinces seemed imperiled by the projected Anglo-Russian invasion. The Coalition’s successes, it is true, derived in part from mistakes committed on the other side. The French, for instance, threw undermanned and inadequately provisioned armies against superior enemy forces “along a line stretching from Alsace to the Adriatic Sea” rather than concentrating decisive forces on a few vital points, thus courting military disaster. Moreover, French problems were only compounded by Spain’s failure to coordinate its naval forces with those of the Republic to which it was allied.105 Had the French sowed too aggressively in Europe, and were they about to reap the whirlwind? But the French were saved in 1799, as they had been earlier in the decade, by a combination of factors: the proficiency of their own forces, the military advantages often to be derived from defending interior positions, and – most critically, perhaps – discord among the allies. The joint Austro-Russian campaign in Italy soon became mired in dispute: the Habsburgs had acquisitive designs in the peninsula that Paul I’s government and generals could not endorse. Again, the revival of tension between London and Vienna over the ultimate status of Belgium, and over certain German issues, has been similarly documented. More sharply disputed among specialists are the diplomatic and military reasons for the rout of Russian forces by Massena’s army at the ´ Second Battle of Zurich in September; whatever the merits of the scholarly arguments on the subject, the fact remains that this French victory was pivotal in 104 105

Roider, Baron Thugut and Austria’s Response to the French Revolution, pp. 287–88. On the details of the military campaign of 1799, see Steven T. Ross, “The Military Strategy of the Directory: The Campaigns of 1799,” French Historical Studies 5 (1967): 170–87; and A. B. Rodger, The War of the Second Coalition, 1798–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).

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dislocating the entire allied war effort.106 There may be considerable truth to Karl Roider’s contention that the defeat was “largely a result of the many handicaps characteristic of coalition warfare,” and that the overall allied strategic conception of the 1799 campaign was itself “impractical to begin with.”107 Be that as it may, the reverses of the Russians in Switzerland, their defeat (along with that of their British confederates) at the hands of General Brune in Holland, and the exacerbation of allied tensions in all theaters of action prompted a disgusted Tsar Paul I to withdraw from the Second Coalition (October 22, 1799). It would only be a matter of time before the French, negotiating separately with the Russians, Austrians, and British, compassed the official demise of yet another coalition aimed against them. Bonaparte, soon to accede to power in France, would (briefly) be leagued with Paul I in a fantastic scheme to invade India by way of central Asia; eventually, pacts signed with Austria and Britain at Luneville and Amiens, respectively, would ´ seem to augur a durable French preponderance in the affairs of western and central Europe – if not beyond.108 To review the geopolitics of the 1794–99 period, then, is to see the “Thermidorian” French coming back full circle – back, that is, to the most resplendent days of their country’s prerevolutionary past. “However much change the Revolution may have brought to the domestic structures of France,” Blanning has concluded, “in international terms a better description than revolution would be ‘revival’: the revival of French power after three-quarters of a century of feeble leadership, misconceived policies and demoralizing failure.”109 France had, also, traveled far back along the road from the heady revolutionary cosmopolitanism of the early 1790s to the raison d’´etat of the supposedly rejected past. That, it turned out, was the real price to be paid in the “real” European world for France’s full recovery of its historic international stature.110 When we turn to late-revolutionary England and Russia, however, we are likely to discover something considerably less grandiose, in the realm of Thermidorian geopolitics, than what the French had attained by the end of the 1790s. There is an intriguing and frequently overlooked analogy to be drawn here between England in 1653–59 and Russia in 1921–28. For both countries, Thermidorian geopolitics meant not so much (as in the case of France) a reach 106

107 108 109 110

Steven T. Ross, in “The Military Strategy of the Directory,” esp. pp. 183–84, has ascribed the Russian defeat at Zurich, at least in part, to Thugut and the Austrians. For a defense of Thugut in this connection, however, refer to Paul W. Schroeder, “The Collapse of the Second Coalition,” Journal of Modern History 59 (1987): esp. p. 285. Roider, Baron Thugut and Austria’s Response to the French Revolution, pp. 326–27. On these dramatic diplomatic developments, refer again to Bruun, “The Balance of Power during the Wars,” pp. 256–60. Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, p. 207. On this point, see again Linda Frey and Marsha Frey, “‘The Reign of the Charlatans is Over,’” esp. pp. 742–43.

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after European hegemony as an exercise in “strategic expediency,” in profiting from a momentary pause in the age-old struggle for continental supremacy to reestablish a degree of security and even, perhaps, acquire a certain “laterevolutionary” prestige in worldly affairs. In more specific terms: Cromwell and his Protectorate maneuvered astutely in the geopolitical space created by the real (if transient) equilibrium between a declining Spain and a France not yet mobilized by Louis XIV for semipermanent warfare, whereas Lenin and his successors in the 1920s benefited in a like fashion from a temporary check in the drive of modern Germany toward European hegemony. The most recent historiography on the Protectorate’s foreign policy has appeared to occupy a middle ground between older extremes of depreciative and adulatory commentary on the subject. As far back as the 1660s, on the one hand, ex-republicans such as Slingsby Bethel ridiculed Cromwell for having short-sightedly subordinated England’s economic and political interests to religious considerations, for having ignored London’s trading rivals in Amsterdam and identified a declining Spain, rather than the resurgent France of the Sun King, as the great adversary of the future. An updated version of this critique was offered, notably, by Menna Prestwich in the 1950s.111 At the other extreme, Christopher Hill accentuated the “fantastic scope” of Cromwellian foreign policy, something all too often taken for granted precisely because (according to Hill) it “set the pattern for the future.” In Hill’s rendering: The governments of the 1650s were the first in English history to have a world strategy. After Blake had subdued the pirates of Algiers, Cromwell envisaged maintaining control of the Mediterranean by the occupation of Gibraltar or Minorca. Bremen would give the entry to Germany. Dunkirk would be a bridle on Dutch and French alike. The Western Design . . . was linked with the plans of the East India Company: the seizure of Cartagena was contemplated. Preparations were made for expelling the Dutch from New Amsterdam, the French from Canada.

Not all of these audacious schemes were realized, Hill was quick to concede. Moreover, such a globally oriented policy could have hopelessly overtaxed the country’s resources, even in the wake of a “modernizing” revolution. Again, the Levellers, and others of “progressive” inclination, were arguably “right in thinking such a policy not in the best interests of the English people.” Still, for better or for worse – if we were to believe Hill – “England’s world position was transformed out of all recognition.”112 Between these extremes, in recent decades, have been scholars such as Roger Crabtree, Charles P. Korr, and Timothy Venning, who, on the one hand, have rejected a Protector caricatured as formulating an “anachronistic,” Elizabethan-style foreign policy blinkered by anti-Habsburg religious prejudice, 111 112

See Menna Prestwich, “Diplomacy and Trade in the Protectorate,” Journal of Modern History 22 (1950): 103–21. Hill, God’s Englishman, pp. 165–68.

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and, on the other hand, have resisted the stately notion of Cromwell as author of a “future-oriented,” global foreign policy.113 The Cromwell they portray was a national leader eager, assuredly, to implement policies embodying the will of Providence, but in such a fashion as to accommodate and indeed further the country’s most important economic and political interests as manifested, specifically, in the mid to late 1650s. To this effect, Crabtree has usefully cited one of the Protector’s contributions to the crucial Counciliar debate on English foreign policy that took place in July 1654: “We think God has not brought us thither where we are but to consider the work that we may do in the world as well as at home, and to stay from attempting until you have superfluity is to put it off forever . . . Now Providence seemed to lead us hither, having 200 ships. . . . we think our best consideration [is] to keep up this reputation and improve it to some good. . . . Thence we came to consider the two great crowns, and the particular arguments weighed, we found our opportunity point this way.”114 The “two great crowns” referred, palpably, to Bourbon France and Habsburg Spain, whose ongoing continental and maritime struggle was to outlast the Thirty Years’ War by eleven years and provide the Protectorate a space for maneuvering in international affairs that it ordinarily would not have had; the “200 ships” cited by Oliver had just been utilized to impose a peace largely favorable to English interests on the Dutch, thus ending the First Anglo-Dutch War. Those gathered in the Council of State in July 1654 had now the apparent luxury of deciding whether an alliance with one of the “two great crowns” against the other could materially advance Protectoral political, economic (and, perhaps, religious) interests. Certainly, the treaty signed by the English and Dutch at Westminster in April 1654 furnished an auspicious setting for these deliberations.115 Under its terms, English ships regained access to the Baltic, with all that this implied in commercial matters, and the Dutch acknowledged the obligation to “strike the flag” in salute to London’s vessels. The English Navigation Act of 1651 was not mentioned in the treaty of April 1654, but the Dutch implicitly accepted its provisions regarding London’s carrying trade; likewise, the English right to search ships suspected of flouting the Act’s provisions was established in de facto fashion, as the English navy plainly held the power to enforce it. 113

114 115

Consult: Roger Crabtree, “The Idea of a Protestant Foreign Policy,” in Ivan Roots, ed., Cromwell: A Profile (New York: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 160–89; Charles P. Korr, Cromwell and the New Model Foreign Policy: England’s Policy Toward France, 1649–1658 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); and Timothy Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). Cited in Crabtree, “The Idea of a Protestant Foreign Policy,” pp. 178–79. The classic work on the First Anglo-Dutch War of 1652–54 is Charles H. Wilson, Profit and Power: A Study of England and the Dutch Wars (London: Longmans, 1957). But see also, on the ideological aspects of this rivalry, Stephen C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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Perhaps even more striking, however, were the treaty’s political consequences. The Dutch, in effect, were required to abandon any support they might have been tendering to Charles II and the Stuart party, and to ban all royalist privateers from their harbors. Furthermore, a secret agreement with the province of Holland obliged the Dutch to block in perpetuity any member of the traditional pro-royalist Orange family from the office of Stadholder in the Netherlands. The treaty was reported to be wildly popular among the English, ending as it did a war that had never been welcomed by most of them. As for the Dutch policymakers, they were eager enough to preserve this peace for the remainder of the decade despite its many disadvantages: this was all the more the case in light of claims, issued then and later on, that their economy had been battered more severely by this relatively short war against the English Republic than it had been by the entire “Eighty Years’ War” of liberation against Imperial Spain. Bernard Capp has underscored what were, in such circumstances, the humbling wages of war for the Dutch: Despite the treaty’s silence Dutch merchantmen and warships proved ready, almost eager, to salute and submit to English searches in 1654. When several met an English squadron a few weeks after peace was signed the seamen ‘not only lowered their sails, but let them fall upon the decks, and flinging up their caps, they fell a-dancing and capering’. . . . The Dutch had failed totally in their major war-aim, to secure the right of their ships to trade freely everywhere unhindered by the English navy or the Navigation Act. Their diplomats tried repeatedly over the next few years to negotiate a revision of the treaty, in vain.116

The Spanish – having surrendered at Westphalia in 1648 all right to interfere in affairs at Amsterdam and elsewhere in the northern Netherlands – were more than delighted, after 1654, to taunt the Dutch for having accepted such “shameful terms” in mercantile matters from their English trading rivals. Having, therefore, laid down the law to the Dutch in a manner reinforcing English interests and creating what Capp has called a “sense of boundless confidence” in ruling circles at London, the Council’s next decision (in June 1654) was whether to wage war against France or Spain. Anglo-French relations had, admittedly, been very tense in the early 1650s: Cardinal Jules Mazarin, governing on behalf of the teenaged Louis XIV, had only belatedly recognized the regicide English Commonwealth; Bourbon-Stuart ties were continually being invoked by the exiled English queen Henrietta-Maria at Paris; and an undeclared naval war between privateers on both sides still roiled the diplomatic waters. That, in spite of all of this, and after a prolonged period of angling for subsidies and other favors at both Paris and Madrid, Cromwell and the Council eventually decided for hostilities against the latter, launching the so-called “Western Design” against Spanish colonies and trade in the West Indies late in 116

Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, pp. 85–86. The Anglo-Dutch negotiations and the eventual treaty’s provisions are also discussed in Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, pp. 282–84 and 322–25.

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1654, provides for us as comparativists fascinating indications of how closely, indeed dialectically interrelated foreign and domestic considerations remained for the late, “Thermidorian” revolutionary leaders in England. We can review these interrelated concerns under three headings: dynastic/ ideological, economic/constitutional, and Cromwellian/idiosyncratic. To begin with, we recall that, just recently, the Dutch had been more or less coerced into abandoning any advocacy of the Stuart cause; improved Anglo-French relations would ensure that Charles II, denied Dutch support, would also be deprived of Mazarin’s support. And this, by forcing Charles into the arms of Spain, would suit English purposes admirably, for many reasons. As one contemporary observed of Counciliar thinking on this subject: It was foreseen that the excluding the king out of France would cast him upon Spain, which some thought a difficulty, but the Protector an advantage. 1) Because his being in the hands of the Spaniards would make his return more difficult, the religion and interests of that crown being hated generally, both by the English and Scots, and affected only by the Irish. 2) And in case the Spaniard by the help of the Irish, had by a war attempted the restitution of the king; it was conceived to be the likeliest means of uniting the several divided interests of the kingdom together in that quarrel.117

Cromwell appreciated the undiminished potency of anti-Catholic paranoia in England and Scotland, and sought now to take good diplomatic advantage of it by further tarring the Stuart cause with the hated brush of “papist” associations, thus further buttressing the Protectorate’s popularity at home. “Protectoral foreign policy,” as Jonathan Scott has phrased it, was “anti-popish and anti-Spanish. Its positive objective was the composing of ‘Jealousies and differences amongst those of the reformed and Protestant Religion’. . . . Domestic policy connected protestant liberty of conscience with the quest for ‘healing and settling,’ political and spiritual, which was the internal mirror of this foreign policy.”118 An economic/constitutional nexus favoring a pro-French, anti-Spanish policy in 1654 and thereafter nicely complemented the dynastic/ideological nexus. Timothy Venning has summed up much in stating, tersely, that “financial requirements meant that the target [of English assault] had to be remunerative. New taxes would cause internal discontent. The Spanish empire was reckoned to be rich and easy to attack.”119 Once again, all or at least most germane considerations seemed to be driving Cromwell and his associates toward war with Madrid and rapprochement with Paris, and they involved both domestic and international calculations. Occupying the navy (and part of the New Model Army) abroad at the expense of a Spanish Empire viewed at London 117 118 119

Cited by Crabtree, “The Idea of a Protestant Foreign Policy,” pp. 180–84. Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 159. Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, pp. 71–73, offers this observation and others as part of the English rationale in 1654 for the implementation of an anti-Spanish, pro-French foreign policy.

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as providing relatively “easy pickings” would not only mean, if all went well, unprecedented triumphs over a country feared and hated since Elizabethan times for religious/ideological as well as political/dynastic reasons; it would also (it was fervently hoped) obviate the need for new taxation at home, thereby defusing at least some of the opposition to homebred “militarism” and enhancing the constitutional legitimacy of the Protectoral regime itself. Finally, there were what we have chosen to identify as purely “Cromwellian/ idiosyncratic” realities behind the decision, by the Council in its session of July 20, 1654, to attack the Spanish West Indies (the “Western Design”) and look toward improved Anglo-French relations. The same notion of “godly” leadership that helped to steer Oliver in his domestic policies actuated him as well to move against the Spanish: after all, Madrid had for long been associated in patriotic English minds with the international catholic “conspiracy” against English security and homeland liberties. If, now, Spain could be inveigled into providing asylum for the Stuarts, so much the better: as Crabtree has observed, “Oliver’s dispensations had led him to believe that the Stuarts by a special dialectic both were and ought to be on the losing side, and he carried this idea over into his foreign policy.”120 Something of the same mentality, associating “godly” with purely secular concerns, and international with domestic causes, was to manifest itself two years later in the Protector’s address to the opening session (September 17, 1656) of the Second Protectorate Parliament: He would speak first, he said, of what had been done out of necessity to preserve the very being of the nation, and then of what was needed for its well-being – for the fulfilment, that is, of the great things that God had in store for it. Under the first head he justified the war with Spain, ‘a natural enemy,’ made so ‘by an enmity put into him by God.’ No honest or honorable peace was to be had with such a power, for it would be ‘but to be kept so long as the pope said amen to it.’ As for England’s almost unprovoked aggression in the Caribbean, ‘Being denied just things, we thought it our duty to get that by the sword which we could not otherwise do. And this hath [ever] been the spirit of Englishmen.’121

It is in this sense that, as one specialist has argued, a “protestant foreign policy” was for Cromwell at one and the same time “the consummation of God’s will” and “the benefiting [of] a nation devoted to that will” – just as surely as it dialectically commingled the Protector’s domestic and foreign concerns.122 As it turned out, the “Western Design” has been fairly described as “Cromwell’s most ambitious venture and his greatest disaster.”123 The expedition, 120 121 122 123

Crabtree, “The Idea of a Protestant Foreign Policy,” pp. 178–79. Cromwell is cited by Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, pp. 646–47. Crabtree, “The Idea of a Protestant Foreign Policy,” pp. 188–89. For this description, and a succinct account of the adventure itself, see Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, pp. 87–92.

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which gave the English Jamaica but denied them acquisition of the much more valuable Hispaniola, failed for a variety of reasons, but most of all, probably, because Cromwell and the other military planners would not sufficiently commit to it the most experienced troops of the New Model Army. Rather than backing down at this point, however, Cromwell continued naval hostilities against Madrid’s shipping wherever possible, and eventually drove Spain’s Philip IV to declare war (March 1656) against London. By this time, however, prolonged negotiations between the Protectorate and Mazarin’s government had already produced (in October 1655) an Anglo-French “treaty of friendship” – a pact that, significantly, included a secret clause binding the French to expel both Charles II and his brother James and terminate all aid to the royalists. Charles P. Korr’s research has led him to conclude that the Council at London proceeded from the start “on the smug assumption that France wanted closer ties with England so badly that it would support the Protectorate if it was allowed the opportunity.”124 Whether or not this was literally the case, the English were well aware that, for Mazarin, securing London’s support against Madrid would serve a number of domestic as well as foreign purposes; then, again, Paris was as impressed (indeed, it seems, terrified) as most other European capitals were in 1654–55 by the aggressive naval prowess of Blake and other admirals in the fleet of the English Republic. The most spectacular result of the Anglo-French alliance was the decisive defeat of Spanish and associated forces at the Battle of the Dunes (June 4, 1658), followed up ten days later by the capitulation of Dunkirk and its transferral from French into English hands (by the nineteen-year-old Louis XIV himself!) As Austin Woolrych has written, this strategic procurement “put paid to any possibility of using the Spanish Netherlands as a launching-pad for a royalist invasion;” it was also, in common parlance, “a bridle to the Dutch;” and it meant, in addition, that Dunkirk could no longer be used by privateers sallying forth to harry English merchant shipping. In the broadest possible strategic sense, English acquisition of Dunkirk, avenging, so to speak, Mary Tudor’s mortifying loss of Calais almost exactly a century before, “very significantly raised the Protectorate’s status among the European powers.”125 It represented, arguably, the finest fruit of Cromwell’s ability to extract maximum advantage for England on the Continent from the temporary (and, for those times, atypical) absence from the scene of any Great Power threatening an imminent preponderance in geostrategic affairs. Even Clarendon would concede of Cromwell, many years after the Stuart Restoration, that “his greatness at home was but a shadow of the glory he had abroad. It was hard to 124 125

Korr, Cromwell and the New Model Foreign Policy, pp. 92–96, for this discussion of negotiations leading up to the Anglo-French pact of October 1655. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, pp. 692–93.

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discover which feared him most, France, Spain, or the Low Countries, where his friendship was current at the value he put upon it.”126 If current historiography in general recognizes the Protector’s success in navigating cautiously (and for as long as possible) between the eternally dueling French and Spanish crowns, and then as deciding between them, for warmaking purposes, in such a way as to enhance his regime’s international clout and domestic popularity, it also seems to endorse the wisdom of his Baltic policies. As Crabtree has remarked, the same critics who traditionally (and simplistically) viewed the Protector as being somehow mesmerized by anachronistic “Elizabethan” notions and as sacrificing England’s political and economic interests to his personal religious prejudices in western European affairs also portrayed him as mistaking Charles X of Sweden for the earlier Protestant champion Gustavus Adolphus, and as being obsessed by the need to form a Protestant League against the Habsburgs in the 1650s recalling the protestant alliances of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.127 Yet, as Michael Roberts insisted in an important group of essays on Swedish history and diplomacy, and as other specialists have since agreed, Cromwell was very careful in his diplomatic dealings with Charles X during 1655–58 not to commit the Protectorate to a full-blown offensive military alliance with this bellicose Swedish ruler. Such a commitment would likely have left England dangerously embroiled in war with Charles’s many enemies, upset the strategic balance among the states controlling access to and commerce in the Baltic, and very possibly driven the Dutch (who were still embittered over the results of the First Anglo-Dutch war) into the welcoming arms of Spain and the Stuarts.128 The Venetian ambassador to London may have voiced the fear (in private correspondence of August 1658) that the Cromwellians “aim at taking possession of [every] part of the world,” and “in the matter of religion . . . aim at nothing less than one day infecting the whole Catholic world with Lutheranism,” but this was in reality to overstate the case.129 Whatever his admiration for Gustavus Adolphus and instinctive sympathy for protestant interests everywhere on the Continent, Cromwell was as concerned about secular issues such as English commercial access to the Baltic, diplomatic relations with the Dutch, and the need to deal with Spanish and Stuart designs against his government as he was motivated by sentiments of “confessional solidarity.” Cromwell’s death in September 1658 not only led to a brief period of political instability within England but also deprived the country of a leader who had 126 127 128

129

Quoted in Ibid., p. 693. For this historiographical discussion, refer again to Crabtree, “The Idea of a Protestant Foreign Policy,” esp. pp. 160–61. See Michael Roberts, Essays in Swedish History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), esp. chapter 6: “Cromwell and the Baltic.” Robert’s analysis is generally endorsed by Crabtree, “The Idea of a Protestant Foreign Policy,” esp. pp. 184–87, and by Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, esp. pp. 252–53. Cited by Roberts, Essays in Swedish History, p. 174.

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done much to reassert London’s influence in international affairs. Within just a few years, the diarist Samuel Pepys would be invidiously contrasting the failures of Stuart Restoration foreign policy with Oliver’s successes: “It is strange,” Pepys would write in 1667, “how . . . everybody doth nowadays reflect upon him [i.e., Cromwell] and commend him, so brave things he did and made all the neighbour princes fear him.”130 As we noted earlier, even so committed a royalist as Clarendon would subsequently pen strikingly similar reflections. In the broader context of English revolutionary developments, then, we can speak of a “Thermidorian” foreign policy that, if not all-conquering in the French Thermidorian sense of the term, was certainly resourceful and expediential. Still, it turned out in the end to be more an anticipation of national strategic might in the future than a reality permanently secured at this time. As we will now discover, we can, as comparativists, describe the foreign policy of “Thermidorian” Russia in roughly analogous if by no means congruent terms. Certainly, in retrospect, Trotsky’s successor as Russian foreign minister, onetime tsarist diplomat Georgi V. Chicherin, seems to have benefited as much from postwar Germany’s temporary weakness and isolation as Cromwell had earlier profited from the struggle between Habsburg Spain and Bourbon France.131 Yet the situation for the Russians in the 1920s was naturally more complicated than that. To begin with, as Teddy J. Uldricks has pointed out, Lenin’s writings, which continued to provide a sense of direction for the new and insecure Soviet regime even as their author faded from the scene after 1922, outlined both traditional and novel foreign policy strategies to be pursued from Moscow. On the one hand, Chicherin’s defense of the “socialist fatherland” must always involve the exploitation of divisions among the powers; yet, Uldricks has noted, this “tactic of allying with one great power against another, although it found sanction for the Bolsheviks in Lenin’s writings, was scarcely a Marxist concept. It was the same balance of power strategy employed by the most able diplomats of the Old Regime.”132 It was also, for Chicherin, much of a piece with combatting the influence of the League of Nations, an organization which, for the Foreign Affairs Commissar, seemed the very “embodiment of Anglo-French capitalist domination.” But along with this strategy came an even more distinctively Leninist idea: “the enlistment of the oppressed colonial peoples in the struggle against the imperialists.” In Teddy Uldricks’s words: 130 131

132

Pepys is quoted in Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, pp. 693–94. Two classic studies help to set the context here: E. H. Carr, German-Soviet Relations Between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1951); and Louis Fischer, The Soviets in World Affairs: A History of Relations between the Soviet Union and the Rest of the World, 1917–1929 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951). Also useful, as always, for the immediate postwar years is Debo, Survival and Consolidation: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1918–1921, esp. the Conclusion. Teddy J. Uldricks, Diplomacy and Ideology: The Origins of Soviet Foreign Relations, 1917– 1930 (London and Beverly Hills, Calif.: SAGE, 1979), pp. 147–48.

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The Bolsheviks also laid special stress on cooperation with underdeveloped nations in the struggle against the European great powers. Soviet diplomats strove to encourage the anti-colonialist movements because such activities weakened the power of the imperialist states and at the same time identified the Soviet Republic with a progressive cause. . . . The forces of ‘national liberation’ were seen as valuable allies of the USSR because they were to play the progressive role of bringing the benighted colonial populations out of darkness and smashing the strangle-hold of imperialism on the world.

It is intriguing, in this connection, to note the comparativist terms in which Lenin praised the supposedly “progressive” bourgeoisie of a rising Asia: whereas the western bourgeoisie was irredeemably “rotten,” and already confronting its “gravediggers” (i.e., western “proletarians”), in Asia – said Lenin – there was still “a bourgeoisie capable of standing for a sincere, energetic, consistent democracy, a worthy comrade of the great teachers and revolutionaries of the end of the eighteenth century in France.”133 It is also true, however, that despite the admixture of Marxist/Leninist antiimperialism in the foreign policy pursued during the mid to late 1920s by the new head of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel, or NKID), Chicherin and his lieutenants (notably including his successor-to-be Maxim Litvinov) came gradually to subordinate ideology to realpolitik. “From the defense of Bolshevik Russia as the center of the world communist movement to the defense of the USSR as a national state was only a short step. Although in theory the two positions were widely separated, in practice the former, given the political situation in Europe, logically led to the latter.”134 Of course, this evolution in foreign policy from revolutionary cosmopolitanism or internationalism towards a raison d’´etat conjuring up memories of the old regime is already an old, old story for us as comparative analysts; we are more than familiar with it in connection with English and French developments! In the Russian case, it was also personified in the career and interests of Chicherin himself, as a former diplomat and archivist of tsarist times. We know from the historiography on the subject that the Commissar, endowed with his new responsibilities by Lenin himself, viewed difficulties between the USSR and Great Britain in the 1920s as in many ways a continuation of the nineteenth-century rivalry between London and the tsars; that his writings on Asia teemed with allusions to past British imperialism and to the policies of Tsar Alexander II and his foreign minister Gorchakov; and that, at one point in 1927, he described himself in a letter to a friend as having lectured the Politburo on the earlier Metternichian alliance system and Tsar Nicholas I’s role in it!135 133 134

135

Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., pp. 150–51. This evolution in Chicherin’s handling of Soviet foreign policy during the 1920s has also been studied by Timothy Edward O’Connor, Diplomacy and Revolution: G. V. Chicherin and Soviet Foreign Affairs, 1918–1930 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988). Uldricks, Diplomacy and Ideology, pp. 150–51.

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Still, Chicherin’s course of action was prescribed for him above all by his country’s economic and security requirements in the decade following on the Great War. The chief of the Narkomindel might look askance at the League of Nations as incarnating the sinister forces of Anglo-French “capitalism,” but (and this was one of the many contradictions of Russian foreign policy in the early 1920s), he also knew that the domestic developmental requirements of the NEP required a foreign policy stressing “peaceful coexistence” for the foreseeable future. As one specialist has put it: Peace was a prime requisite of a program aimed at rebuilding the country’s industrial sector while simultaneously raising the general standard of living. Wars or even an impressive defense establishment were simply too expensive. The NEP further required not merely peace but the active assistance of foreign capitalists. Over half of the plants and factories in Russia were standing idle because their capital equipment was worn out or in disrepair. Nothing could be done without machines and tools from the advanced industrial countries. Foreign loans and, above all, foreign trade were also essential in order to finance this program.

It was, of course, true that the “normalization” of relations between what was (prior to 1924) the RSFSR and other states had begun before the NEP was fully in place; still, over the next few years, “industrial recovery required that this trend be greatly accelerated.”136 Eventually, as the 1920s wore on, those arguing over economic/developmental issues within the USSR would begin to distinguish between the issue of acquiring productive technology and machinery from America and industrialized Europe (still seen at that time as an imperative) and the much more debatable issue of whether to fund such imports from foreign or “domestically extracted” capital. The linkages between international and domestic policies would in this regard prove over time to be crucial for the political destinies of all the late-revolutionary protagonists in Russia.137 This was not, however, apparent in the early 1920s, as Lenin faded from the scene and Chicherin did his best to apply “Leninist” ideas in the domain of foreign affairs. In that realm, obviously, economic requirements could not be, and were not, disassociated from security requirements. Here, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs saw Soviet Russia and Germany as sharing a number of common concerns; and it was Russo-German relations that would provide the chief of the Narkomindel with his greatest triumph in international matters. Both Berlin and Moscow were hostile to the Versailles settlement dictated by the victorious Allies, and both felt profoundly isolated from and by the community of predominant powers as defined at Paris in 1918–19. Why, then, should these two “outcast” nations not collaborate in furtherance of their respective 136 137

Ibid., pp. 69–71. A point made perhaps in most illuminating fashion by Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), esp. p. 276, but also all of Chapter 11.

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political, economic, and military interests?138 When, in early 1922, Chicherin’s Russian delegation stopped at Berlin on its way to a conference called to mediate (at Genoa) a variety of contentious European issues, the Russians and some German Foreign Ministry officials actually drafted a treaty providing for a degree of political and economic cooperation (and clearing the way for a certain amount of military collaboration) between Berlin and Moscow. Although, at the eleventh hour, the German Foreign Minister, Walter Rathenau, refused to sign the pact, fearing that to do so would jeopardize his country’s interests at Genoa, the Allies’ perceived insensitivity to German concerns at the conference actually precipitated the signing of the Rapallo Treaty between the resentful Germans and the happily accommodative Russians on April 16, 1922. “Allied policy had driven Germany and Russia together. The Rapallo Treaty . . . represented a great victory for Soviet diplomacy. Moscow had served notice to the Western powers that the Soviet state could be ignored only at their own peril.”139 What, precisely, were the provisions of the Treaty of Rapallo? It has been succinctly described as “a simple document of six articles” that called for the immediate resumption of diplomatic and consular relations between Moscow and Berlin, for mutually conceded “most favored nation” treatment in matters of trade, and for the mutual repudiation of all claims hitherto lodged for “costs and damages” arising from the recently concluded war. Under its terms, Chicherin’s government formally renounced all claims it could have made on Berlin under Article 116 of the Treaty of Versailles, and Germany would waive any complaints registered by its own citizens against the nationalization of German property within Soviet borders – such waiver only to be renegotiated should Moscow at some future date make concessions on the nationalization issue to some other country.140 Rumors about clandestine military clauses in the Treaty of Rapallo widely circulated in diplomatic circles at the time, and historians from that day to the present day have (inconclusively) debated the veracity of such reports.141 To some extent, however, such speculation may be beside the point. Trotsky had apparently initiated talks with German armament manufacturers as early as 138

139 140

141

For a provocative “take” on Versailles, see Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). On the “community of fate” (or schicksalgemeinschaft) allegedly binding Russia and Germany together in the 1920s, refer to Kurt Rosenbaum, Community of Fate: GermanSoviet Diplomatic Relations, 1922–1928 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1965); and Uldricks, Diplomacy and Ideology, esp. pp. 72–73. Ibid., pp. 72–73. On these points, see O’Connor, Diplomacy and Revolution, pp. 91–93. On Rapallo, see also Rosenbaum, Community of Fate, Chapter 1; and Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics, Chapter 11. See, on this debate, Gordon H. Mueller, “Rapallo Reexamined: A New Look at Germany’s Secret Military Collaboration with Russia in 1922,” Military Affairs 40 (1976): 109–17; and O’Connor, Diplomacy and Revolution, Chapter 4.

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1921, and it was known throughout Europe that the Red Army, desperately needful as it was of modern military equipment, and unable to obtain it from the woefully underdeveloped Soviet industrial sector, hoped to tap into German industrial/military know-how and resources. For their part, German industrialists, forbidden by the Versailles pact to manufacture weapons and munitions, and German diplomats and generals, working with a Reichswehr strictly limited in size and prohibited from training new military recruits, proved amenable to instructing Soviet soldiers and providing some military mat´eriel in return for the opportunity to train German military personnel surreptitiously in Soviet Russia. A secret Russo-German military pact to this effect was signed on July 29, 1922, and ratified more formally the following February. There remains at most, in the words of Chicherin’s most recent biographer, a “reasonable possibility” of a military aspect to the previous talks at Rapallo, even if “there is no available evidence to suggest that Chicherin was involved in military talks with the Germans, either in Berlin or Genoa.” However this may be, Timothy E. O’Connor has effectively summed up the larger strategic significance of the diplomacy of 1922: By signing an agreement with the Germans, the Soviets were able to prevent the formation of a common front against Bolshevism and further prolong the “breathing space” ushered in by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. At the Genoa Conference Chicherin demonstrated that he was able to compete successfully with the leading diplomats of Europe. Lloyd George later acknowledged that Chicherin had performed superbly, deftly exploiting weaknesses in the opposition while skillfully defending his own position.

O’Connor’s conclusion that the Rapallo pact marked the “high point” of the Commissar’s diplomatic career and “served as the cornerstone of Soviet foreign policy during his tenure” seems reasonable.142 Still, Chicherin’s ability to play a recently vanquished and resentful Germany off the Western Powers (and, incidentally, to explore divisions on specific issues among the western states themselves) gradually lessened as the decade wore on. This was due to a number of factors, the most fundamental of which probably ` was a subtle yet significant shift in Germany’s position vis-a-vis Russia and the West. German Chancellor Gustav Stresemann proved to be increasingly able “to strike a balance between the Western powers and the Soviet state that was not part of the atmosphere of the early post-Rapallo period, when there was a clear eastern approach to German foreign policy. In this respect the Soviets felt much less confident and secure about German friendship and support in 1925–1926 than they had in 1922–1923.”143 Not that Chicherin, Litvinov, and other leading Soviet diplomats had any specific reason to fear that developments such the new territorial and other understandings achieved between 142 143

Ibid., pp. 91–93. A similar verdict is rendered by Uldricks, Diplomacy and Ideology, pp. 72–73 and 147–48, and by Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics, Chapter 11. O’Connor, Diplomacy and Revolution, pp. 111–12. Kurt Rosenbaum has described this subtle shift in Germany’s European role in similar fashion: see Community of Fate, esp. pp. 281–82.

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Berlin, on the one hand, and London and Paris, on the other, at Locarno in 1925, and the admission of Germany into the League of Nations in September 1926, foreshadowed any participation by the Weimar Republic in economic and military sanctions aimed by the West against Moscow. “Every step West” taken by Berlin, as Kurt Rosenbaum has been at pains to stress, “was balanced by another to the East: Locarno by the signature of the Commercial Treaty of October 12, 1925 (albeit without a neutrality preamble), and entry into the League of Nations by the Treaty of Berlin, strengthened by exemption of Germany from the provisions of Article 116 of the Covenant.”144 Chicherin was as steeped in nineteenth-century balance of power politics as was his counterpart at Berlin: he realized, accordingly, that Germany wished (reasonably enough) to avoid any lopsided, unilateral alignment with either West or East. Then, again, he was able to diversify the USSR’s diplomatic portfolio, and reinforce Russian security, by concluding bilateral agreements with countries ranging from Lithuania in central Europe to Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan in western and central Asia. Nevertheless, the Russo-German Commercial Treaty of October 1925 and the 1926 Treaty of Berlin, however helpful in counterbalancing, to Russia’s benefit, ongoing rapprochement between Germany and the West and thereby staving off Soviet diplomatic isolation, “were not commensurate with the Rapallo accord.”145 Moscow in this respect could have been forgiven for looking back at the early 1920s, from the vantage-point of 1926 and beyond, with a touch of nostalgia. That it did so was most likely reflected in the “great war scare of 1927,” about which so much has been written in recent years. Sheila Fitzpatrick has quite correctly noted that the fears about an imminent assault on the Soviet Union by a combination of “capitalist” powers that gained widespread currency at this time both in party circles and in Russian society at large should be seen retrospectively as predating rather than as responding to the massive “strains of crash industrialization and collectivization.”146 But the story here involves far more than the string of recent rebuffs to Moscow’s foreign policy to which she has alluded – rebuffs such as the British raid on the Soviet trade mission (ARCOS) in London, the assassination of a Soviet official in Poland, the breakup of the Nationalist-Communist alliance in China, and so forth. Insofar as the international aspects of the crisis were concerned, O’Connor is likely closer to the truth in suggesting that the diplomatic rupture between London and Moscow, by conceivably forcing Germany to support one side against the other, raised for the Soviets the specter of an anti-Russian, 144 145 146

Ibid., pp. 281–82. O’Connor, Diplomacy and Revolution, pp. 111–12. Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 120. For a careful reconsideration of the issue, see John P. Sontag, “The Soviet War Scare of 1926–27,” Russian Review 34 (1975): 66–77. Rosenbaum’s assertion that the war scare was “designed [by Moscow] to divert the attention of the Russian people from the internal problems created by Stalin’s program of industrialization” (Community of Fate, p. 247) is too simple an explanation of the phenomenon.

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London/Berlin/Warsaw alliance – and possible military assault. As he has aptly observed, the Russians “regarded Germany as the key to Soviet security. The Soviets had based their security on Germany’s neutrality and refusal to participate in an anti-Soviet coalition. The Soviet war-scare of 1927 was principally the result of an erosion of confidence in Germany.”147 Yet, undoubtedly there were also domestic dimensions to the “war scare” of 1927. Mark von Hagen, for instance, has pointed to the “militarized political culture of the 1920s” – a political culture that, reflecting as it did, at least in part, Russia’s truly traumatic experiences in the Great War and consequent revolution and civil war, hardly needed to be fostered artificially by Lenin and his successors: Society was permanently mobilized for war, and all institutions of socialization and education were geared toward inculcating military-patriotic values. The Soviet militarizers defended a political culture that placed very high value on personal sacrifice and obedience. Whereas other societies could afford to indulge their citizens’ material self-interest and to tolerate personal or family claims on loyalty, the Soviet state had emerged from years of war as an alarmingly vulnerable pawn in the international arena; only collective self-sacrifice could ensure the nation’s survival in the wake of the devastation of human and material resources.148

Furthermore, as Jon Jacobson has pertinently noted, this kind of “militarized” political culture – and, indeed, the entire teleology of inevitable conflict between the forces of “imperialism” and those of socialism – were grounded in the unchanging and undeniable realities of geopolitics. “The October Revolution,” that is, “could not change geography. Soviet Russia, like tsarist Russia, remained vulnerable to attack from Europe. From the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea, Russia’s frontier on the northwest and the west was 2,000 miles long and without natural barriers on which to anchor defensive preparations.”149 No wonder, then, that with talk of war in the air as early as the summer of 1926, with specific denunciations of a British-led scheme to launch a new interventionist war against Russia circulating by September 1926, and with a full-blown war scare agitating elitists and ordinary citizens alike by the early ´ summer of 1927, the muzhiki began to withhold their grain from the market, and panic buying of basic consumer goods led to shortages in some urban and rural settings. But did those in policymaking circles really lend credence to such rumors, or were they simply (and cynically) guilty of scaremongering, of manipulating such reports for their own purposes? Perhaps a little of both. The predominant view in the historiography – that there was, in fact, no genuine danger, for the time being, of such a drastic turn of events – seems to take its 147 148

149

O’Connor, Diplomacy and Revolution, pp. 154–56. Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship, pp. 336–37. Von Hagen has reiterated these views in his article, under the same title, in Fitzpatrick, Rabinowitch, and Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP, pp. 156–73. Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics, pp. 216–17.

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cue from that of Chicherin, Litvinov, and others in Narkomindel, as well as that of the less excitable Politburo members, such as Aleksei Rykov.150 And in fact, the Baldwin ministry at London had no intention of leading such a campaign, despite the diplomatic rupture between Britain and Soviet Russia; in addition, at various points, officials at Paris, Warsaw, and (most critically, perhaps) Berlin assured Chicherin that a war against Moscow was definitely not in the offing.151 Yet some in the Comintern (including, apparently, the emotional Bukharin) found substance in these alarming rumors. So (it is at least arguable) did Stalin, who was at this time consolidating his power in the party and Soviet state. We know, for instance, that late in 1927 the General Secretary spoke in a document sent secretly to the Politburo of suspected individuals “propagating opposition views;” such individuals were to be “regarded as dangerous accomplices of the external and internal enemies of the Soviet Union,” and dealt with accordingly.152 Then, in the following March, Stalin authorized the first in a series of “show trials of bourgeois experts, in which the prosecution linked the internal threat from class enemies with the threat of intervention by foreign capitalist powers, and the accused confessed their guilt and offered circumstantial accounts of their cloak-and-dagger activities.”153 Yet again, the General Secretary, in a confidential letter to the head of the OGPU, would soon be alluding darkly to “bourgeois” groups to be found both within and outside the USSR, groups that were “the most powerful in terms of capital” and in terms of their “connections with the French and English governments.”154 If it is beyond question that Stalin was ever ready to use a “war scare” to further his own domestic purposes, it is also worth recalling that the crafty Georgian had, like his comrades, been acting for years in (and must have been somewhat affected by) Russia’s deeply conspiratorial and militaristic political culture. Hence, the “war scare” of 1927 needs always to be appraised in a context of interacting foreign and domestic forces. Certainly, too, it was symptomatic of what Teddy Uldricks has called “a period of uncomfortable transition for many of the Narkomindel’s diplomats.” The Soviet foreign service suffered a rash of defections during the middle and late 1920s. . . . Stalin and his henchmen were then completing their conquest of power. . . . The Old Bolshevik leaders had been cosmopolitans of largely middle class origins, but 150 151 152

153

154

Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 121. The relevant historiography on this question seems to be effectively summarized in Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics, p. 225. This document is cited in Michal Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism: The USSR on the Eve of the ‘Second Revolution,’ trans. George Saunders (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 35–36. Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 122. On this so-called Shakhty trial and the subsequent trial of alleged “Industrial Party” saboteurs, consult Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society Under Lenin and Stalin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), esp. chapters 3–5. Cited by Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 123.

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the new Stalinist cadres which were coming to dominate Soviet politics sprang from lower, coarser stock. . . . many of the apparatchiki tended to view the Narkomindel staff with suspicion and hostility – all the more so since the Commissariat included veterans of the Imperial Foreign Service as well as former Mensheviks, Kadets and other supposedly ‘class hostile’ elements.155

Chicherin himself, it is worth noting in this connection, had been a Menshevik in wartime exile prior to joining the Bolshevik Party in 1917. Yet if his star was on the wane in the late 1920s, this was due more to a host of interrelated contemporary developments. On the one hand, there was the paradox that, by successfully working to overcome their postwar isolation at the hands of the Allies, both the Russian and German foreign ministries had, by virtue of that accomplishment, lessened the value of their “special relationship.” The RussoGerman schicksalgemeinschaft, or “community of fate,” by which Chicherin and others in the Narkomindel had set such great store, was now becoming a thing of the past. At the same time (as we will be emphasizing in the final section of this chapter), the failure of capitalists in the West to invest as heavily in the Russian economy as Lenin had earlier predicted led inexorably, under Stalin, to a renewed appeal to Russian national pride and xenophobia and, eventually, to Five-Year Plans stressing Russian autarky in economic/developmental affairs.156 All of this diminished (at least for the time being) the value to the Soviet regime of Chicherin, his successor Litvinov, and the diplomats who answered to them in the Foreign Affairs Ministry and foreign service. Yet, state authorities acknowledged then (as most diplomatic historians have recognized since) that Chicherin’s deft stewardship of Russian foreign policy during the late-revolutionary period afforded a vital degree of security to a young Soviet republic just recently emerged from the crucible of world war and domestic upheaval. As comparativists, we can draw an analogy between the geopolitics of Thermidorian England and those of Thermidorian Russia, note how they differed from those of Thermidorian France – and yet point out as well patterns that may apply to all three of our revolutions. On the one hand, both Cromwell and Chicherin profited from a momentary pause in the “struggle for mastery” in Europe to achieve a measure of security and even prestige for their republics. On the other hand, those hard-won gains were fragile: they largely vanished in the English case with Cromwell’s death in late 1658, and would only be securely established thirty years later; in the Russian case, Stalin and his cadres would necessarily continue uninterruptedly to pursue security during the perilous years after 1928–29. Only in the case of France, it appears, can we speak of a triumphalist foreign policy outlasting Thermidor – at least for about fifteen 155 156

Uldricks, Diplomacy and Ideology, pp. 89–91. The complicated linkages between Soviet foreign policy and the growing debate in party circles over issues of economic development in the late 1920s are dealt with in especially sophisticated fashion by Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics, esp. pp. 275–80.

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years. Yet, in all three of our upheavals, it is also clear, those shaping foreign policy were able to pursue their objectives on the basis of domestic reforms lacking to the ministers of the old regimes – even if, in doing so, they could not in the final analysis escape serious internal challenges to the legitimacy of the new regimes whose diplomatic interests they were striving to defend and to further. Thermidorian “Crises of Legitimacy” If, in the realm of international affairs, it seems possible to draw a limited analogy between the late-revolutionary phases of the English and Russian Revolutions, on questions of domestic legitimacy it makes the most sense to start with a parallel between England and France, and then move on to Thermidorian Russia. In both the English and French cases, we shall discover, the late-revolutionary regimes (i.e., the Protectorate and the Directory) ultimately foundered on the rocks of delegitimizing military, religious, and fiscal/constitutional issues continually referring back to the interrelationships of foreign and domestic policy. In the case of Soviet Russia, the challenge to late-revolutionary legitimacy was just as genuine, but was ultimately surmounted. It took the unprecedented form of an increasingly ascerbic debate in party leadership circles over economic/developmental strategies reflecting both Russian insecurities in global affairs and a growing domestic disillusionment in idealistic Communist Party ranks. The sudden proliferation of paper “constitutions” in both the English and French Revolutions itself serves as something of an indicator of revolutionary regimes in these two countries that never managed altogether to establish their legitimacy in the citizenry’s eyes. In the English case, the Protectorate was served, first, by the “Instrument of Government” authored primarily by John Lambert, and then (after the discredited if in many respects well-intentioned trial of the Major-Generals) by the “Humble Petition and Advice.” Ronald Hutton has noted of the former document that, even if it “suited the Protector and Council too well to be scrapped” in the wake of the First Protectorate Parliament’s dismissal, it had nonetheless “never received legal endorsement,” as the M.P.s had never really finished revising it. If, on the other hand, the latter “constitution” (adopted in 1657) arguably “did possess a legitimacy, as a decision of Parliament, which the Instrument had lacked,” this still “did not necessarily mean that it would work.” And in fact, Hutton has summarized his impression of the period, at least constitutionally speaking, by affirming that the 1657 document did not in fact “work,” thereby ensuring that an “atmosphere of the provisional and the unstable still surrounded the regime.”157 And this, despite the fact that (as we have already seen) historians ranging from Peter 157

Hutton, The British Republic, pp. 67, 73–74, and 76. See also, on constitutional and related issues of this period in revolutionary England, Barry Coward, The Cromwellian Protectorate (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

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Gaunt to Ivan Roots have lauded specific accomplishments (if not celebrated the overall success) of Cromwell’s two “Protectorate” Parliaments. Oliver himself has, of course, been the focal-point of a contentious literature on the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of the political regime in late-revolutionary England. It is interesting, from our perspective as comparativists, that just as Cromwellian foreign policy has had to be “rescued,” in a fashion, from invocations (positive or negative) of the Elizabethan era, so, in a way, has been his management of parliamentary affairs. In a stimulating essay that appeared nearly forty years ago, H. R. Trevor-Roper contended that, as an instinctual and hidebound conservative, as a “back-bencher” unable to transcend the “simple political prejudices of those other backwoods squires whom he had joined in their blind revolt against the Stuart court,” Cromwell had never been able to grasp the subtleties of politics or master issues of patronage and procedure in his dealings with Parliament as Elizabeth I had so efficaciously done in recent Tudor times.158 One of Trevor-Roper’s most distinguished students, Roger Howell, Jr., subsequently conceded that “the inability to achieve an effective civil settlement” indeed remained “the essential failure of the Revolution;” still, to say this, Howell continued, was merely to signify that the problem had been correctly identified, and not to suggest that Trevor-Roper had furnished a “convincing answer” to it. “The central difficulty with the Trevor-Roper thesis,” for Howell, was that “Elizabethan-style parliamentary management by itself was not the answer to the political problems of the 1650s, nor, for that matter, was it even within the realm of practical possibility.”159 Things had become too polarized, too ideological in the legislatures of the 1650s for the old tactics of compromise and consensus-building to replicate their successes dating from an earlier era. Yet, Howell – like so many other students of the period – remained deeply ambivalent about the Lord Protector. If, on the one hand, Oliver “clearly saw the importance of a civil settlement,” was groping toward “the concepts of separation of power and constitutional checks and balances as protective devices against arbitrary government,” and was hoping that, somehow, Parliament could function as a vehicle for the expression of “the principle of consent,” on the other hand his rule in late-revolutionary England exposed a “darker side” as well: It is obvious that his conception of political liberty was substantially moulded in traditional and conservative practices. Anything approaching democracy in a political form was, to his eye, a manifest absurdity. It could not seem otherwise to him in a world where the godly were mixed with the ungodly. He believed firmly too in a ‘natural’ magistracy and in a system of ranks and orders. . . . And, if need be, he had few qualms 158 159

See H. R. Trevor-Roper, “Oliver Cromwell and His Parliaments,” in Roots, ed., Cromwell: A Profile, pp. 91–135. See Roger Howell, Jr., “Cromwell and His Parliaments: The Trevor-Roper Thesis Revisited,” in R. C. Richardson, ed., Images of Oliver Cromwell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), Chapter 8.

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about employing force to curb those who would upset that order. . . . He could never escape the ambiguity of ruling by military force. Whatever his personal feelings about arbitrary government (and there seem no grounds to doubt his sincerity in this regard), the necessities of preserving order in a divided society, and the desire to bring reform to it, led him in turn to be arbitrary.

The astonishing thing was not, Howell concluded, that Cromwell’s contributions to “the story of political liberty” were as limited as they were, but rather “that they were as significant as they were.”160 As Howell’s commentary suggests, scholarly ambivalence toward the Lord Protector often keys on the charge that he was, in essence, a “military dictator” in a very modern sense. Ironically, historical writing on this point seems at times to take its cue from politicians of the later revolutions: after all, did not Robespierre’s detractors (in Thermidor) frequently liken him to Cromwell, and did not Trotsky’s stint as War Commissar leave him open to the accusation, in the mid-1920s, that he had schemed to become a Russian Cromwell, militarily subverting the Soviet regime? Fortunately, today’s specialists bring a somewhat more nuanced approach to the subject. Austin Woolrych, for instance, in a seminal article of 1990 and in his huge conspectus on the “British” Revolution, painted Oliver as, in essence, a customary, traditionalist “constable” striving to honor his charge to observe the laws, preserve social order, and defend the “people of God.”161 Tellingly, Woolrych stressed the civilian character of the Protectorate – at least in certain areas and for certain purposes: In Cromwell’s England, as under the monarchy, most justice and most local administration lay in the hands of the county magistracy. The only period when their local supremacy was seriously encroached upon by the military was that of the majorgenerals. . . . Throughout England and Wales the commission of the peace was an overwhelmingly civilian body. Naturally some army officers were appointed to it, and some enjoyed a standing in the social hierarchy of their counties that would have made it anomalous not to appoint them. But there were at any one time at least 2,500 JPs in the country, and fewer than 90 of them were serving officers. . . . There was an even smaller military presence among those other agents of central authority, the commissioners for collecting the monthly assessment.162

Yet, all of this notwithstanding, Oliver was still (in Woolrych’s rendering) impaled on the horns of two irresolvable dilemmas: (1) his reliance on the army militated against his wish to civilianize his rule at all levels through a collaboration with regularly elected parliaments; and (2) his need to accommodate gentry, burgher, and professional interests ran at times against his advocacy 160 161 162

Howell, “Cromwell and English Liberty,” in ibid., chapter 10. Citations are from pp. 168–73. Woolrych, “The Cromwellian Protectorate: A Military Dictatorship?” in History 75 (1990): 207–31; and Britain in Revolution, esp. pp. 582–83. Ibid. See also H. M. Reece’s unpublished Oxford D. Phil. Thesis, The Military Presence in England, 1649–60, for some of the statistics relating to military participation in local governance during the 1650s.

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of the “people of God,” that is, of visible “saints” in the Puritan sense of the term. Actually, for Woolrych, it was the latter, spiritual dilemma that especially drove the Protector to adopt arbitrary practices of governance.163 Others have not been so sure. Howell, in refuting Trevor-Roper’s ideas, pointedly saved for last the question of “the position of the army,” and asserted unequivocally that “the weapon that had won the revolutionary war made the peaceful settlement of it impossible.” So long as the army could intrude into the Protectorate’s domestic politics, Howell wrote, “it both stood in the way of the legitimation of the government via the parliamentary route and heightened the level of the politics of frustration and confrontation within Parliament itself.”164 A similar conclusion, with its stress on the delegitimizing role of the New Model Army, has been drawn by most Cromwellian biographers. Peter Gaunt, for example, however generously he credited Oliver with “doing God’s will” as best he could and “working for the greater good of the nation and its people,” could not, in the final analysis, avoid the reluctant conclusion that “the Protector and his entire regime were always an imposition, ultimately surviving only through army backing.”165 Many of Gaunt’s fellow specialists writing since 2000 – J. C. Davis and Barry Coward come most immediately to mind – have found themselves constrained to return time and again to the delegitimizing significance of this “military factor” throughout the period of the Protectorate.166 The essential failure of the Protectorate to achieve a requisite degree of legitimacy in the eyes of those in the country who really mattered can best be seen, in specific terms, in connection with the fate of Oliver’s two parliaments and the intervening episode of the major-generals. Despite truly heroic efforts to rehabilitate the reputation of the First Protectorate Parliament of 1654–55, Gaunt has had to allow after all that government-legislative relations foundered by January 1655 “upon the twin rocks of finance and the army” – issues, moreover, that the MPs correctly saw as inextricably interrelated. To be sure, heated exchanges between the two sides over a variety of questions – aspects of the new constitution, the treatment of religious enthusiasts, the advisability

163

164 165

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Woolrych, “The Cromwellian Protectorate: A Military Dictatorship?” esp. pp. 207–13 and 215–19. Refer also to this historian’s article “Cromwell as a Soldier,” chapter 4 in J. S. Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. Howell, “Cromwell and His Parliaments,” p. 134. Peter Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 205. The troubled relationship between the Lord Protector and his Parliaments has been explored most recently in David L. Smith and Patrick Little, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), as well as in Smith, ed., Cromwell and the Interregnum: The Essential Readings (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003). See J. C. Davis, Oliver Cromwell (London: Arnold, 2001), esp. pp. 200–201; and Barry Coward, The Cromwellian Protectorate (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 162–69. This despite the fact that both Davis and Coward credit Cromwell with the desire to somehow “civilianize” and hence fully legitimize his regime.

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of reviving kingship in one guise or another, and so on – roiled the waters throughout this period: But it was when MPs set about reducing the size and cost of the standing forces and rashly attempted to gain future control over the military that the whole edifice collapsed. Parliament called for an army of 30,000 men, all but halving the existing forces, and set a military budget barely adequate to support that number. Moreover, although Cromwell was given joint command of the standing forces for life, members voted that after his death sole control was to pass to parliament, which would then dispose of military command as it ‘shall think fit.’ Even Cromwell’s lifetime joint control was effectively undermined, for the annual military budget was to extend only until December 1659, after which Cromwell, if still alive, would have to apply to parliament for a renewed grant.167

The impasse between Whitehall and Westminster over these fiscal/military issues was only aggravated by parliamentary attempts to assert “permanent and sole” control over the local militias as well, and led to the Protector’s irritated dismissal of his first Parliament in late January 1655. The curious episode of the Republic’s military rule by the major-generals (1655–57) took place against the backdrop of Cromwell’s failure at least to initiate the process of legitimizing his rule via traditional parliamentary methods. This experiment, Christopher Durston has very recently argued, “was an attempt to square this particularly vicious political circle by enhancing the security of the regime and furthering godly reform, while at the same time reducing the overall burden of the large military establishment.”168 Scholars writing on the major-generals prior to the publication of Durston’s unprecedentedly detailed study disagreed both over the extent to which Cromwell’s “swordsmen and decimators” interfered in the ordinary routines of J.P.s and other ‘natural rulers’ in the counties and over the precise character of the hostility they undoubtedly encountered in endeavoring to carry out the central government’s mandates on their local rounds.169 Durston, while rejecting (much as did Anthony Fletcher) the tendency of scholars like David Underdown to stress unduly the disruptive role of the major generals on the local level, accepts 167

168 169

Gaunt, “Law-Making in the First Protectorate Parliament,” p. 183. The huge and disproportionate importance of war-related expenditures in all the budgets of the Protectorate period has been underlined and, to some extent, even quantified by Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, esp. pp. 246–50. Cromwell’s own naivet´e in technical matters of state finance is stressed by Derek Hirst, “The Lord Protector,” p. 144. Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 4–5. See, notably, on these points: Underdown, “Settlement in the Counties, 1653–58,” in Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–60 (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 176; Ivan Roots, “Swordsmen and Decimators,” in R. H. Parry, ed., The English Civil War and After (London: Macmillan, 1970); and Anthony Fletcher, “Oliver Cromwell and the Localities: The Problem of Consent,” in Jones, Newitt, and Roberts, eds., Politics and People in Revolutionary England, Chapter 10.

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most of his predecessors’ explanations of the sources of the opposition to these Cromwellian agents that assuredly did manifest itself in this period: To some extent, this hostility can be attributed to the fact that they were agents of centralization, for they had been sent into the provinces by the national government and throughout their period of office remained directly responsible to it. To a rather greater degree, it stemmed from the fact that they were soldiers. . . . for many contemporaries and later commentators the rule of the ‘swordsmen and decimators’ . . . became a convenient and powerful symbol of the military nature of the unpopular Interregnum state.

Yet Durston also cites, as “additional, and probably more potent” reasons for this regime’s lack of popularity in local eyes, its “lack of constitutional legitimacy and its overtly godly nature.” In a manner somewhat reminiscent of Woolrych, Durston especially plays up the reputed “godliness” of the majorgenerals – and, thus, the religious/ideological nature of their mission – as alienating them from the “natural rulers” (and, perhaps, others as well?) in the shires. “The quintessential feature of the rule of the major-generals,” he goes so far as to suggest, “was not that it was army rule, nor that it was London rule, but rather that it was godly rule, and it was as such that it was decisively rejected by the great majority of the English and Welsh people.”170 Perhaps. It is, naturally, difficult to establish any hard-and-fast ranking of factors here; maybe the safest thing to do would be to emphasize the mutual interplay, the interconnectedness of reasons why this brief experiment did little or nothing to buttress the legitimacy of the Protectorate in the eyes of most of the people in the mid 1650s. Then, again, we need to recall in this connection – as Durston, appropriately, does – the context of extreme polarization in which the major-generals struggled from the start to function. On the Left, erstwhile Cromwellian colleagues like John Bradshaw, Arthur Haselrig and Edmund Ludlow, convinced that the Protector had irredeemably betrayed the “good old cause” of republicanism, “were by 1655 deeply hostile to the regime and regarded as a major security risk.” Religious fringe groups like the Quakers and Fifth Monarchists added their messianic calls for a violent overthrow of all secular authority and for social egalitarianism to the chorus of leftist denunciations of those in power. On the opposite extreme, Cromwell faced what Durston has fairly called “the implacable hostility of the exiled Stuart court and its thousands of supporters within England.” For a plethora of social, economic, political, and ideological reasons, the royalists in the country clung desperately to hopes that “Cromwell’s regime might be toppled by an armed uprising, the assassination of its head, or a mutiny by a republican section of the army.”171 Despite Woolrych’s sympathetic assertion that the majorgenerals “do not deserve the kind of anathema that they commonly received” 170 171

Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals, pp. 230–32. Ibid., pp. 4–5.

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from later historians with various political axes to grind, he did not challenge the verdict currently prevailing that they must in the end be counted among the Protector’s major mistakes.172 Like the parliament preceding them, and like the one that came immediately after, they did not (probably, in the circumstances, could not) solve the regime’s most basic problem: its failure to legitimize itself in the eyes of the country’s “natural rulers.” This brings us to what, in hindsight, was likely Cromwell’s last chance to achieve such legitimacy – namely, the Second Protectorate Parliament (1656– 58). Unhappily, with whatever dramatic events it was attended – such as the offer of the crown to Oliver, the adoption of yet another written “constitution,” and so on – retrospective analysis does not indicate that its two sessions offered the regime any greater chance of achieving durable legitimacy than had either the First Protectorate Parliament or the recent rule of the major-generals. While Durston has ascribed some of Cromwell’s chronic difficulties in dealing with the 1656–58 Parliament to the inauspicious circumstances under which it was elected in 1656,173 it is hard to imagine that any legislature at this juncture would have looked on the Protector favorably. Significantly, this parliament (just like its predecessor in 1654) had to be purged before the government could even envision the possibility of managing it successfully; yet, even with this accomplished – and, most strikingly, perhaps, in its January 1658 session, convened in the aftermath of Oliver’s refusal of the crown – it gave notice to the Protector that it was still opposing him on the crucial fiscal/ military issues. Something of the atmosphere of that session (and of what it both recalled from the past and augured for the future) was conjured up by Ivan Roots: On 25 January the Lord Protector . . . spoke urgently to both Houses, lecturing them on the necessity to resist the temptation to fritter time away on inessentials while the facts of the times, simmering threats at home and abroad, called for drastic and immediate measures. All that stood between them and ‘another flood of blood and war’ was his government and a ‘poor unpaid army.’ This strong hint that priority should go to a money grant was ignored. In phraseology reminiscent of that of early parliaments of Charles I, the members claimed that in no circumstances might the grievances of the people be put aside pending a supply vote.174

Shades of Charles I – and the “eleven years’ tyranny”! That, within days, Oliver had dismissed yet another parliament with a bitter tirade against its 172 173

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Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, pp. 629–30. Specifically, Durston has faulted the major-generals for pressuring Oliver to hold parliamentary elections at this time, underestimating as they allegedly did the “hostile climate of public opinion” that was bound (in 1656) to lead to political results unfavorable to the Protectoral regime. Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals, pp. 201–02. Roots, The Great Rebellion: 1642–1660, rev. ed. (Gloucestershire: Allan Sutton, 1995), pp. 223–30. See also Roots, “Lawmaking in the Second Protectorate Parliament,” in H. Hearder and H. R. Loyn, eds., Studies in British Government and Administration (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1974).

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“obstructionism” was probably foreordained, speaking as it did of persisting domestic/international realities on which many a prospective collaboration between government and parliament had foundered in England’s troubled seventeenth century. On this occasion, those realities once again involved both domestic polarization and the crucial fiscal/military nexus. On the first point: Oliver had just recently forfeited whatever lingering chance he might still have had of conciliating those on the Right by refusing the crown, whereas, on the Left, thousands of Londoners in early 1658 signed a petition that, “almost certainly with the connivance of republican MPs, and supported by malcontents in the army, sectaries and fifth monarchists,” was calling stridently for the overthrow of the Protectorate, the restoration of something like the Rump, and complete freedom of conscience.175 On the second point, there can be no doubt that the way forward, given especially the government’s costly foreign policy, looked increasingly uncertain. “Need for money was at the root of all evil. Thurloe saw it as putting the government to the wall in all its enterprises.”176 Not only were the county assessments, primary revenue source for the army, already intolerably high in the eyes of most rural gentry; the City of London, too (in yet another throwback to the confrontation in the early 1640s between Charles I and John Pym) would refuse further financial aid to the authorities. Timothy Venning, for whom Cromwell “lacked imagination in this as in other matters and could not see the usefulness of innovation,” has accordingly blamed the Lord Protector for not exploring the potential for adopting “money-raising schemes in collaboration with the City that might have offset the impossibility of raising the county assessments to pay for the Army.” By the same token, however, he has conceded that Oliver was “further hampered” by the fact that his government was composed “of a mixture of officers and civilians . . . who conceived of economic matters as not deserving any degree of priority (when they understood such matters at all).”177 In any case, Venning is surely correct to argue that, in the last analysis, Cromwell, Thurloe, and the other leading figures in the government had above all to find some way to cater to the needs and sensibilities of the gentry, who were the “natural leaders” in the shires, were fated to dominate any parliament, and were crucial to the Protectorate in its efforts to beat back any further royalist conspiracies. In concluding this reappraisal of the “crisis of legitimacy” in laterevolutionary England, we need to take both the immediate and the long-term, evolutionary picture into account. In the short term, we can concur with Roots that the Cromwellian system’s stability “hung on the fast-fraying threads of the 175 176 177

Roots, The Great Rebellion, pp. 223–30. Ibid. Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, pp. 241–42. For Cromwell’s candid admission of his own lack of expertise in fiscal matters, refer again to Hirst, “The Lord Protector,” p. 144.

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life of the present Protector.” When, after Oliver’s death, the army grandees made and then unmade his son and designated successor, Richard Cromwell, and when, after a dizzying period of political instability, anarchy once again threatened, the return of the Stuarts became, first, conceivable, and then all but unavoidable.178 Yet over the long haul, Timothy Venning is undoubtedly justified in asserting that “the . . . ultimate answer” to the struggles between the legislative and executive branches of government that bedeviled the Protectorate from beginning to end “was that close alliance of personnel between the two which would end with the head of the Executive leading the government via (or from) the Legislature.”179 It would, we know, take another (judiciously limited) dose of “revolution” to ensure the implementation of such a legitimizing compromise in the closing years of the seventeenth century. The analogy to be drawn, in this final section of this chapter, between the “crises of legitimacy” in Thermidorian England and late-revolutionary France is, in many ways, a suggestive one. True, we do not have to deal, in the latter case, with any individual as dominant as Oliver Cromwell – Napoleon, after all, acceded to power only at the end of the period. Still, in reassessing France’s constitutional issues, its polarized political culture, its religious controversies, and its transcendent fiscal/military dilemma, we are likely to be struck by how closely the crisis of legitimacy lurking at the heart of the Directory actually resembled that which had so insidiously hollowed out the Cromwellian Protectorate. Certainly, the constitution drawn up for France by the Thermidorians in 1795, however ingenious in its details, concealed as many pitfalls as had the Instrument of Government and Humble Petition and Advice in the case of England. Under its terms, power was apportioned between a legislature composed of two chambers, the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of “Elders” or “Ancients,” and a five-man Executive Directory. The Council of Five Hundred (all of whose members had to be at least thirty years old) would propose laws to the upper chamber, whose 250 deputies (aged forty or older) would sanction or reject those laws. The original Directors were selected by the Elders from a list of ten candidates for each position drawn up by the Five Hundred. One Director was to “retire” each year, and he would be ineligible for reappointment for five years. Moreover, the Directors were forbidden, without legislative approval, to post troops within sixty kilometers of the assemblies. Thus, the risk of undue pressure being exerted by the executive on the legislature would (supposedly) be curtailed. Yet the Directors would supervise the daily labors of the ministers and the personnel of government, and were to be represented in the local departments and cantons (as well as in the tribunals and, at various times, in the armies) by commissaires overseeing the implementation of laws by elected departmental and cantonal officials, the disposition of justice, and 178 179

Roots, The Great Rebellion, pp. 230–31. Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, p. 250.

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military matters. Finally, all elected officials, from national assemblymen down to local administrators, were to be chosen during a ten-day cycle of voting in late March and early April. The electoral system prevailing during 1795–99 recalled those systems instituted at earlier points in the Revolution in that it was “two-tiered” and indirect, permitting a much broader adult (male) franchise at the primary stage than at the secondary stage.180 Many years ago, Albert Goodwin contended resolutely that there was “something to be said for the view that the main constitutional difficulties of the Directors were in the course of time solved.” He even suggested that the frequent coups d’´etats for which the regime became notorious, “far from being an indication of the essential instability of the government,” could be viewed, alternatively, “as a source of strength,” as “consonant with the best interests of the country at large.”181 Perhaps; but critics of the “Constitution of the Year III” have weighed in forcefully over the years. Martyn Lyons’ strictures against its provisions have been fairly typical. He has noted, for example, that a five-man executive might easily fall prey to internal squabbling, and that blind chance might constrain its usefulness insofar as lots were ostensibly to be drawn annually to decide which Director would retire. More problematic, perhaps, was the “rigid separation of powers” mandated by the Constitution. The ministers could not sit in the legislature, and the Directors had to communicate with the deputies by official “messages.” Moreover, because the Five Hundred managed the purse strings, it could, if dominated by a hostile majority, paralyze the Directors. “The Directory, which had no power of dissolution, and no veto, could only reply by unconstitutional methods.” The way was open, in other words, for the coups and the executive purges of the legislature and (likely) of local government for which the Directors indeed gained notoriety – and which, for Lyons and many others, scarcely betokened governmental stability. There was also the fact that the procedure for amending the Constitution was “almost Byzantine in its complexity.”182 It would be difficult today to disagree with the inference Lyons has drawn from all of this: namely, that the politique de bascule (i.e., seesaw political policy) and the “exceptional laws” of the Directory reflected less than favorably on the Thermidorians’ constitutional handiwork. Still, in this case as in that of late-revolutionary England, the inadequacies of paper constitutions acquired undue importance in a political culture characterized by a distrust of pluralistic politics and profound social polarization. 180

181 182

On these arrangements, see Woronoff, The Thermidorian Regime and the Directory, pp. 29– 42; and Crook, Elections in the French Revolution, pp. 131–57. The role of a reemergent Abbe´ Siey`es in the creation of this “Constitution of the Year III” is discussed in Bronislaw Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre, trans. Michel Petheram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 225–30 and 248–58. Albert Goodwin, “The French Executive Directory – A Revaluation,” History 22 (1937), esp. pp. 215–18. Lyons, France Under the Directory, pp. 18–20.

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Regarding the first point, we saw earlier that one of the central legacies of the ancien r´egime to the upheaval in France was its preference for political consensus in society, its mistrust of a free, contestatory politics of factions or parties. And the tendency hardly expired with Robespierre. If, in theory, the Directory offered representative governance based – at least in part – on electoral politics, it never unreservedly accepted the need for a system of freely competing political parties. “It was better to die with honor defending the republic,” Director Louis-Marie La Revelli` ere-Lepeaux revealingly held, “than ´ ´ to perish or even to live in the muck of parties and . . . factions.”183 At best, Bronislaw Baczko would later write, “democracy” in the French revolutionary sense “joined together individualism and a true cult of unanimity, representative government and the refusal to allow any interest other than the ‘general interest’ to be represented, the recognition of the freedom of opinion and the mistrust of divisions in public opinion.” “Democracy” in this sense ineluctably “mixed modernity with archaism.”184 As for the phenomenon of social polarization, it challenged the Directors and their partisans as implacably as, in late-revolutionary England, it had dogged Cromwell and his major-generals. On the Right, the authorities could never afford to forget the e´ migr´es and ex-nobles sullenly “dug in” on their rustic estates, individuals who were probably of one mind in desiring a return to the good old days of privilege, social deference, and all the perquisites associated with seigneurialism. They were keenly aware as well of the Declaration of Verona (1795) in which the comte de Provence (“Louis XVIII”) promised a complete restoration of the old regime’s social structure and prerogatives.185 By 1796–97, in addition, the Directors would be lashing out against so-called “Philanthropic Institutes” engaged in recruiting political candidates and mobilizing voters on the Right. At the same time, however, there was also consternation aroused in governing circles by the increasingly aggressive leftist campaign – most markedly in the aftermath of Fructidor, Year V – to broaden the social basis of French politics. As one historian of Jacobin activism in these late days of the Revolution has observed, the politicians and clubbists on the Left did not define their sociopolitical goals with any great precision. Still, they did share “a minimal preference for a republic where political oligarchy and social pretension would be attacked, and where the ‘workingman’ had a rightful place in civil and political life.” Yet “workingmen” of all stripes still suffering from a low social status and poor education, still associated in 183

184 185

Citation from Lynn Hunt, David Lansky, and Paul Hanson, “The Failure of the Liberal Republic in France, 1795–1799: The Road to Brumaire,” Journal of Modern History 51 (1979): 737–38. Baczko, Ending the Terror, pp. 109–10. On the social views of those on the Far Right, see: Jacques Godechot, La Contre-R´evolution: Doctrine et Action (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961); and D. M. G. Sutherland, France, 1789–1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), passim.

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elitist eyes with the recent Jacobin/sans-culotte Terror, and engaged to some ´ extent now in revitalized Jacobin activism, naturally raised the hackles of the authorities at Paris quite as much as did pro-royalists on the Far Right.186 No doubt from the government’s point of view, the “solid” Frenchmen to whom it wished to restrict the full rights of active citizenship composed what Colin Lucas has called a “political nation:” such men “continued to form the pays l´egal of property owners who voted in national elections and provided the personnel of local government.”187 But was there in fact a “political nation” in the center of the political spectrum, a stratum of “natural rulers” (to use the British expression) rooted in socioeconomic interests to whom the Republic’s civilian leaders could appeal? Recent scholarly commentary certainly does very little to validate the Marxian paradigm of a “bourgeois” Directory anchored in the bedrock of entrepreneurial and other middle-class interests. Indeed, Clive Church has gone so far as to state that “the Directory failed precisely because it was not a bourgeois regime. . . . The Directors and their supporters were basically a political group, lacking roots in society, and consequently failing to maintain themselves in power.” The regime, he has argued, had no reason to be surprised if, in the end, businessmen and other notables whose aspirations it had never adequately represented abandoned it, preferring a “leap in the dark” with an outsider like Bonaparte.188 If Church’s compatriot Martyn Lyons has found this approach smacking too much of “bureaucratic reductionism,” and thus has painted the Directory as reflecting (like all its predecessor regimes in the revolutionary era) the social biases of middling strata in French society, he has, nonetheless, allowed that “it may indeed be too simple to describe the Directory as a bourgeois Republic, since, in the last resort, the bourgeoisie abandoned the regime.”189 The government’s legitimacy seems even more precarious if we take into account provincial and religious issues. Students of late-revolutionary political culture, for example, have recently stressed how unavailing were efforts by the leaders of the so-called “First Directory” (1795–97) to persuade prominent local citizens that what transpired at Paris affected them directly. To do so would have required demonstrating to provinc¸iaux that the government was able to deal with local problems, perceived as such in a local context. It made little difference what the Directors and assemblymen viewed as their diplomatic and domestic objectives if, in the departments and cantons, their commissaires 186

187 188

189

The seminal work on the Jacobin revival in the late 1790s is: Isser Woloch, Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement Under the Directory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), esp. pp. 92–93, 95–96, and 112. Colin Lucas, “The First Directory and the Rule of Law,” French Historical Studies 10 (1977): 258. Clive Church, “In Search of the Directory,” in J. F. Bosher, ed., French Government and Society, 1500–1850: Essays in Memory of Alfred Cobban (London: Athlone Press, 1973), esp. pp. 274–76, 279–80, and 288–89. Lyons, France Under the Directory, pp. 236–37.

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and other agents were unable (for instance) to maintain order on the highways, apply military conscription fairly, defuse subsistence crises, and find ways to mediate arguments for and against governmental intrusion into judicial affairs. Seen in this light, the regime’s problems were daunting, possibly even insoluble, from the start. By 1796, the Directory was finding it difficult to convince the politicized citizens in the departments that it could solve local problems in a professional, nonpartisan fashion. The Directors subsequently staged the Fructidor coup (in September 1797) to overturn earlier elections that they (correctly) construed as rejecting their local policies of 1796. Yet, ironically, this led the so-called “Second Directory” (of 1797–99) to adopt illegal political and administrative measures that in turn only further delegitimized the government in provincial eyes.190 Then, there were (in France as, earlier, in England) religious issues. The Republic’s ostensibly neutral but actually intolerant and, at times, persecutory stance on religious affairs only deepened its isolation in provincial France. The Thermidorian/Directorial leaders have won some scholarly plaudits for trying to instill a new civil religion in the minds and hearts of the citizenry.191 Yet there is scant evidence to indicate that the new faith, with its transparently political overtones, ever caught on in a major way among the traditionally Catholic masses. What is more, the government, even in the relatively tolerant times preceding the leftist Fructidor coup, only grudgingly conceded Catholic liberties. Sundays were ordinary working days under the revolutionary calendar, and the sacred holidays also fell victim to the new temporal schema. In addition, local officials played an intrusive role of surveillance over religious services: preachers were often dismayed to find police spies attending their sermons. Moreover, priests were subjected to civic tests reminiscent of the Civil Constitution of 1790–91 and were answerable, under penalty of arbitrary deportation, for any violations of the myriad rules against bells and “exterior signs.” Yet again, those courageous enough to open Catholic schools could incur official wrath if they failed in any respect to observe the Republican calendar.192 Unsurprisingly, the regime’s treatment of Catholic clergy and communicants only hardened in the wake of Fructidor. It imposed a tough 190

191

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For this provincial perspective, see: Lucas, “The First Directory and the Rule of Law,” pp. 231–60; Hunt et al., “The Failure of the Liberal Republic in France,” esp. pp. 736– 38; Richard Cobb, Paris and Its Provinces, 1792–1802 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); and Alan Forrest, The Revolution in Provincial France: Aquitaine, 1789–1799 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). See, for example, Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Ozouf’s articles on the “Revolutionary Calendar” and “Revolutionary Religion” in Furet and Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, pp. 538–70. McManners, The French Revolution and the Church, pp. 120–21. The Thermidorian Convention had officially disestablished the Catholic Church in legislation of September 1794 and February 1795. Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 287–88.

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loyalty oath on all priests determined still to minister to their flocks, and arrogated to itself the power to deport or incarcerate “refractory” priests by simple administrative fiat.193 The Directory’s behavior is explicable on several counts. For one thing, the political culture in which the policymakers of the late 1790s were operating tended to blinker their religious perceptions much as it did their political perceptions. Just as the Directors found it difficult to accept the notion of organized and freely competing political parties, so they could not in the end resist the temptation to police and even persecute a disestablished Catholic Church supposedly entitled to compete with other faiths for the popular favor. More important, however, was the “force of circumstances.” The regime, challenged at home by extremists on both the Right and the Left, and eventually besieged on the international front by the Second Coalition, was tempted increasingly to confuse apolitical Catholicism with the royalist-counterrevolutionary cause, and to enlist Jacobin anticlericalism in a patriotic (if sporadic) campaign against recalcitrant priests (and their rumored e´ migr´e confederates) in the provinces. And, just as earlier in the decade, so now, harassing cur´es and vicaires only helped to turn the local populace against Paris. “Local documents are full of examples of strife and resistance over the religious issue,” Clive Church has noted. “In the quiet department of the Haute Marne this was practically the only cause of public disorder, leading on one occasion to a whole village rioting when two luckless gendarmes tried to arrest a refractory priest.” While we may assume that most rural communities aroused at times from political quiescence in this period were not exercised solely about religious questions, we can agree with Church that the government’s draconian treatment of priests and their flocks was “a major cause of the alienation of public opinion during the later stages of the Directory’s existence.”194 Yet if the Directory (like the Protectorate) undercut its own position on a host of domestic issues of a constitutional, socioeconomic, political-cultural, and religious nature, it likely sealed its own doom most decisively (again, much as had Cromwell’s regime) on structurally transcendent issues of finance and war. Continental warfare and its attendant costs eroded the regime’s legitimacy both directly and indirectly: directly, by crippling its finances and sapping its bases of support in society, and indirectly by militarizing domestic politics to the point where only the generals and their armies could rescue governance at Paris from the consequences of its own systemic weaknesses. On the former point: it was the ruinously expensive French foreign policy that prevented the Directory from resolving the protracted financial crisis that had haunted the revolutionaries ever since 1789. Moreover, official efforts to resolve that crisis only cost the government support in what should have been its key middle-class constituencies. Thus, the final agonies of the assignats 193 194

McManners, The French Revolution and the Church, pp. 121–27. Church, “In Search of the Directory,” pp. 286–87.

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(and, then, of the mandats territoriaux) must have diminished the Directory in the eyes of its creditors, military and civilian pensioners, government employees, and others dependent on the Revolution’s paper currency far more than they rehabilitated the regime in the eyes of debtors and speculators lucky enough to profit from that currency’s disastrous depreciation.195 Even more damaging was the notorious “two-thirds bankruptcy” of 1797, which, however necessary it may have seemed from a strictly fiscal point of view, effectively wiped out two-thirds of many rentiers’ most crucial form of income.196 Then, again, there were the shipbuilders, insurance agents, merchants, and refiners of port cities such as Le Havre and Nantes, La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Marseilles, whose lucrative returns from overseas colonies and trade were in the late 1790s stifled by the British blockade.197 For every military contractor like Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard resourceful enough to batten off the situation there must have been a veritable army of bourgeois citizens financially imperiled by Directorial war policies. As for the masses: Gwynne Lewis has found that, in the southern department of the Gard, the endless war, “although reviving the revolutionary ardor of some, particularly the urban workers, offered little to the rural Catholic population.”198 From the central department of the Seine-et-Oise came a like appraisal of popular attitudes by the state’s local commissaire: “The French victories appeal to a section of them, but do not touch them greatly, because they are purchased at the cost of their sons’ blood, and the peasantry are not sufficiently committed to accept such sacrifices.”199 And, whatever republican historiography may tell us, nothing was as ideally devised to sow widespread fear and hatred of late-revolutionary war-making among the provincial French as the military conscription that was fully institutionalized in the loi Jourdan of 1798.200 Insofar as the indirect impact of ever-expanding warfare was concerned, it took the form of militarizing both the Right and the Left in France, hence furthering the polarization of political forces in the Republic. On the Right, the conservative delegates in the assemblies (the so-called “Clichyites”) were painfully aware of – and found it increasingly difficult to dissociate themselves from – those implacable royalist foes of the Revolution who tended to 195 196

197 198 199 200

On the Directory and its bureaucracy, see Church, Revolution and Red Tape, esp. pp. 111–44. On the partial bankruptcy of September 1797, the standard (if cursory) analysis is still that of Goodwin, “The French Executive Directory – A Revaluation,” pp. 201–18. But see also the more recent work of Michel Brugui`ere, Gestionnaires et profiteurs de la R´evolution: L’Administration des finances franc¸aises de Louis XVI a` Bonaparte (Paris: O. Orban, 1986), for a contextual discussion. On this point, see Franc¸ois Crouzet, “Wars, Blockade, and Economic Change in Europe, 1792–1815,” Journal of Economic History 24 (1964): 567–88. Gwynne Lewis, The Second Vend´ee: The Continuity of Counter-Revolution in the Department of the Gard, 1789–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 134–35. A report cited in Church, “In Search of the Directory,” p. 286. Ample evidence to this effect is adduced in Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters, passim., and The Soldiers of the French Revolution, passim.

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discredit all of its critics by taking up arms against France. When the comte de Provence issued his inflammatory and inflexibly reactionary Declaration of Verona in 1795, when irreconcilable e´ migr´es sought to prolong the civil war in the Vendee, ´ assassinate republicans, or foment military uprisings in the eastern and southern provinces, and when rightist spokesmen lobbied the other European powers to form a new coalition against Paris, they were contributing to the militarization and polarization of politics in “Thermidorian” France.201 Yet essentially the same thing was also happening on the Left. Most arresting in this regard was the sympathetic entente that gradually developed between the armies abroad and progressive activists at home.202 In the troubling wake of elections in the spring of 1797 resuscitating the Right, apprehensive “patriots” found themselves to be seeking salvation from the victorious republican armies stationed in Italy and Germany. The immediate response to their pleas came in the form of the leftist coup d’´etat of Fructidor (September 1797). Then, over ensuing months, Jacobins benefiting from this political purge from one end of the Republic to the other seized every occasion to proclaim solidarity with France’s brave militaires. Some clubs fraternized ostentatiously with passing detachments of troops. Some even tried to involve army units in local political controversies pitting the “honest” patriots against citizens suspected of sinister designs against the Republic.203 Most telling, though, were the attempts of local clubbists to demand that the policymakers at Paris mobilize the nation’s fiscal resources to award long-promised veterans’ bonuses to the intrepid d´efenseurs de la patrie. How better (they apparently calculated) to strengthen the ties between soldiers and reenergized activists on the Left?204 As the Directory struggled to maintain its footing amidst all these swirling forces in late-revolutionary France, it resorted from time to time to its notorious politique de bascule, its ploy of purges and counter-purges against irreconcilables on the Right and on the Left. In doing so, it inevitably recalls for us as comparativists nothing so much as the Cromwellian Protectorate, with its purges of the First Protectorate Parliament in 1654 and the Second Protectorate Parliament in 1656, and its arbitrary, hated imposition of the major-generals on a society whose profound polarization seems in retrospect to have anticipated (at a distance, to be sure) that of late-revolutionary French society in the 1790s. There was, however, at least one outstanding difference between these two late-revolutionary situations. In the case of England, Cromwellian militarism pretty much succumbed with the Protector in September 1658: his son Richard, as we saw earlier, was never really embraced by the army, and 201 202 203 204

See, for example, Harvey Mitchell, The Underground War against Revolutionary France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), esp. pp. 249 and 252. Woloch, Jacobin Legacy, pp. 70–76, for this discussion of a military/civilian “understanding” on the Left. Ibid., pp. 134–35. Ibid., pp. 165–69, for Woloch’s thorough discussion of the veterans’ bonus as a political issue.

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the resourceful, expediential foreign policy of Oliver Cromwell was soon to be replaced (for nearly three decades) by the truly inglorious and impotent diplomacy of the later Stuart kings. In the case of France, much to the contrary, the personalities and forces of a triumphalist, ever more aggressive militarism unloosed on the Continent were soon to hurl the thoroughly delegitimized Directory into the “dustbin of history,” and make way for an unprecedented regime of (quite literally) Napoleonic proportions. Although there was, admittedly, a final, dramatic efflorescence of leftist political enthusiasm in 1799 due to the crisis of the War of the Second Coalition (much as there had been a short-lived reawakening of the “Good Old Cause” under the restored Rump in England in 1659), changes in the personnel of the Directory – including, above all, the elevation to executive power of the abbe´ Siey`es – pointed to a fundamental revision of constitutional arrangements in France.205 As Lyons has commented, “there were many former supporters of the Directory who now sensed the inadequacy of the Constitution of the Year III. . . . A strong government had to be found to defeat the Coalition, eliminate the deficit, and control political extremism.”206 But, given the profound militarization of late-revolutionary France – of its foreign policy, its polarized leftist and rightist politics, and many of its strategic institutions – what were the chances that yet another civilian politician or coterie of politicians could furnish that “strong government” at Paris? Early on in the Revolution, observers as ideologically dissimilar as Edmund Burke in England and Maximilien Robespierre in France had foreseen the possibility of a military finale to this upheaval. Napoleon may not himself have been “inevitable;” yet, given all that had transpired up to this point in revolutionary France, someone very much like him was, by this time, scarcely to be avoided.207 If, in the cases of England and France, we can draw a number of meaningful parallels between the “dynamics of delegitimization” of two late-revolutionary regimes, how, in this connection, are we to fit Thermidorian Russia into our comparative schema? We must note right off the bat that the late-revolutionary Soviet regime – unlike England’s Protectorate and France’s Directory – managed to weather its “crisis of legitimacy,” and that this particular crisis keyed 205 206

207

See, on these developments, Lyons, France Under the Directory, pp. 224–29, and Woloch, Jacobin Legacy, pp. 367–71. Lyons, France Under the Directory, pp. 228–29. A similar emphasis on the readiness of many Thermidorians “to scrap their constitution altogether and start over” by 1799 is found in Isser Woloch, Napoleon and His Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), pp. 3–5. Howard G. Brown has also argued strongly – and, I think, persuasively – that the Directory was compromised from the start by its lack of fundamental legitimacy in the eyes of crucially situated groups in French society. He also stresses (much as does our analysis) the importance of the militarization theme in the emerging “security state” of what he calls “postrevolutionary” France. Howard G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006).

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on unprecedented imperatives of accelerated industrialization harboring vast implications for Russia’s sheer survival in global affairs as well as for the Russian Communist Party’s fundamental legitimacy in domestic affairs. To begin with, the growing disillusionment of Lenin’s successors with the NEP in the aftermath of the Bolshevik leader’s death in January 1924 was mirrored, in part, in their near-obsession with, precisely, the Thermidorian precedent. To many idealistic Communists, Fitzpatrick has written, “NEP had the smell of Thermidor, the period of degeneration of the great French Revolution.” As the debate over economic/developmental strategies to be pursued heated up, protagonists in that debate accused each other of scheming to impose a Russian version of “Thermidorian degeneration” on their revolution – and were not altogether above invoking the “salutary effects of the guillotine” as hedging against such an unthinkable betrayal.208 Even when consigned, later on, to political oblivion, Leon Trotsky would still be conjuring up “Thermidorian” (not to mention Bonapartist) parallels against General Secretary Stalin, the man who had condemned him to that fate. But to make this last point is to rush ahead of our analysis. As we observed earlier, even at the time of its inception in 1921 Lenin’s New Economic Policy had sowed division in party ranks; and Lenin himself had always been careful to emphasize the temporary nature of this tactical retreat in a country that was never to lose sight of its long-term, historic mission to “build socialism.” Paradoxically, the very successes chalked up by NEP by the mid-1920s helped to clear the way for a basic reassessment of how Soviet Russia was to break fully into the sunlit pastures of industrialization, urbanization, and the other aspects of “modernization.” On the positive side, Lewis H. Siegelbaum has conceded, “the condition of Soviet industry by all accounts took a marked turn for the better in 1924. For the next two years, steady progress was made in the expansion of output, employment, productivity, and profitability. Consumer goods industries continued to lead the way, financing their operations mainly from the quick turnover of sales to an expanding peasant market.” Furthermore, during 1924/25, iron and steel production rose markedly, “thanks to a more liberal long-term credit policy and the revival of coal production in the Donbass.” On the debit side, however, Siegelbaum has recorded that the capital goods and extractive industries still could not rival the production quotas achieved before the Great War: if, for instance, cigarette production was at 102 percent of the 1913 total and that of textiles was at 66 percent, “steel output amounted to only 43.8% and iron ore was no more than 23.8%.” Even worse, by 1925 the upward structural limits of industrial recovery were already in sight: official estimates had existing industrial plant being utilized up to 85 percent of capacity, and governmental planning agencies such as Gosplan and the Supreme Economic Council (Vesenkha) were 208

Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 119. On the party’s invocation of Thermidor during the 1920s, see again the sources referenced in n. 1.

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as a result setting up commissions to investigate the fixed capital requirements for a transformation of factories, equipment, and productive processes.209 As Siegelbaum and a legion of other historians have explained, this was the “point of departure” for what scholars still refer to as the “Soviet industrialization debate” – a debate that also caught up in its toils basic questions of party policy toward the peasantry and towards Russian geostrategic requirements in an age of rapid modernization.210 Because, as the 1920s wore on (and in part for diplomatic reasons we recited earlier) it became less and less likely that Russia could finance its industrialization drive through large-scale foreign commerce and credits, it seemed ever more necessary that the party look to indigenous, autochthonous sources for the capital accumulation that was a prerequisite for such industrialization. Given the lack of bourgeois accumulation of capital within Russia, this seemed to indicate a policy of “squeezing the peasantry” to obtain such funds – even if, conceivably, this might mean a potentially violent confrontation with the muzhiki of rural Russia. Although the conclusion derived in many informed circles in the mid-1920s from a debate between Evgenii Preobrazhensky and Bukharin on this subject was that nothing should be done to antagonize the peasantry and thus risk breaking the worker-peasant alliance (or smychka) that Lenin had certified as socially crucial for the NEP, others (including, most critically, General Secretary Stalin) were not so sure. Stalin by 1925 made it clear that industrialization (implicitly at any cost) was one of his highest priorities: indeed, on the eighth anniversary of the October Revolution, he compared the party’s recent decision to create a Five-Year Plan for an accelerated pace of industrialization with Lenin’s decision to vault ahead and seize state power in late 1917. Significantly, too, he was drawing in part on the optimism about the potential for rapid industrial development recently engendered in party caucuses by the impressive recent advances in productivity – an optimism that found one of its outlets in the increasingly ambitious economic/developmental plans devised by Gosplan and Vesenkha. When Stalin’s ex-comrade from civil war days, Felix Dzerzhinskii, now head of Vesenkha, waxed enthusiastic in 1925 about “these new tasks [of industrialization]” and claimed that the Soviets were moving rapidly from the realm of abstract theorizing to formulating the industrialization question “as a definite, concrete objective of all our present economic activity,” he was speaking a language soon to find its most famous articulation in the Stalinist doctrine of “Socialism in One Country.”211 209 210

211

Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 165–68. Two excellent sources on this subject are Alexander Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962); and James R. Millar and Alec Nove, “A Debate on Collectivization: Was Stalin Really Necessary?” in Problems of Communism 25 (1976): 49–62. Dzerzhinskii cited in Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 114. See also Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society, esp. pp. 179–80, for further discussion of the activities, at this time, of Gosplan and Vesenkha.

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At the same time, we must keep in mind the foreign/domestic dialectic that, as always, was at work in these days of momentous decision making in laterevolutionary Russia. Even as the NEP was, in its productive aspects, coming up against a domestic ceiling imposed by worn-out industrial infrastructure and outmoded technology dating from prewar times, the international horizon, to the discomfiture of Chicherin, Litvinov, and other Soviet leaders, seemed to be darkening: these were the days, we recall, of the British raid on the ARCOS offices at London, the assassination of a Soviet diplomat in Poland, the break-up of the Kuomintang-Chinese Communist Party alliance in China, and (perhaps most worrying) the subtle move of Weimar Germany away from its Schicksalgemeinschaft stance vis-`a-vis Russia. Given these shifting external realities, Stalin’s decision to “go it alone” in economic/modernizing terms made, for many Russians, a certain geopolitical and, hence, psychological, sense. “Leading Bolsheviks” may have “exaggerated and exploited the foreign danger,” but, as Arno Mayer has aptly insisted, they had been “profoundly marked by the Allied intervention in the civil war,” and were “acutely aware of the uncertainty of external relations; of the anti-Communist consensus omnium spanning the outside world; and of Russia’s military weakness.”212 That the Comintern’s activities in countries ranging from Britain to China helped to stoke the fires of anti-Russian sentiment in the world at large does not in itself invalidate those arguments stressing the interconnectedness of foreign and domestic factors pushing Soviet Russia down the road toward a forced tempo of industrialization and of collectivization in the countryside. Indeed, the Comintern’s “aggressive/defensive” psychology in some ways actually reflected that “interconnectedness” of foreign and domestic factors weighing on Soviet decision making. All of the aforementioned considerations have by no means produced a retrospective consensus on the inevitability of Soviet abandonment of the NEP in favor of breakneck industrialization and of a forcible collectivization of peasant lands and equipment in rural Russia. Moshe Lewin (for example) has insisted that some version of NEP might have been retained had the regime eased pressures on the muzhiki with a combination of imports of grain and industrial commodities, reductions of the glaring inequities between industrial and agricultural prices, and greater recurrence to artels, cooperatives, and other alternatives to the “sovietized” collective farms of the 1930s; and others have agreed with him.213 Still, a number of historians and economists of note have 212 213

Mayer, The Furies, p. 623. See, for example, these works by Lewin: Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, trans. Irene Nove (London: Allen and Unwin., 1968); Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974); and The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). For a similar viewpoint, see Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938, rev. ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980); and Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

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found fault with such revisionism, maintaining either that the NEP constituted in the final analysis an “economic blind alley” tout court, and as such was not capable of yielding any of the rapid industrialization Russia so urgently needed, or that (as Jon Jacobson has more nicely put it) “by 1926/27 . . . resource allocation and capital investment within the framework of NEP” could produce “a level of industrial growth equal to or better than 1909–13 levels, but not an expansion equal to that achieved by the mid-1930s.”214 Jacobson himself, with an eye to both the international context and the domestic implications of the crash industrialization of the 1930s, has summarized aptly enough what much of the most recent historiography has had to say about the prior achievements of the NEP: Viewed from a post-Soviet historical perspective, there are good reasons to doubt whether NEP in actuality ever constituted a viable option for agriculture and economic foreign relations. Close examination of these two sectors of the economy indicates that the NEP crisis did not begin in November 1927. Rather “a cumulative series of converging crises” plagued NEP from the time it was instituted. The foreign sector of the economy never recovered from the dislocations of the years 1914–1920; and only in 1923/24 and 1926/27 could grain be exported at a level sufficient to fulfill the trade plan for the year.215

The grain procurement crisis of 1927–28 to which Stalin and the rest of the party reacted so strongly may have been, Jacobson’s fellow specialist Siegelbaum has suggested, little more than the specific “catalyst, accelerating and sharpening all economic and political processes in the country.”216 These last observations remind us that the debate over the economics of the transition from the NEP of the 1920s to the Five-Year Plans and collectivization drive of the late 1920s and early 1930s must be situated ultimately in a larger context of factors making for the ultimate relegitimization of the Soviet regime. True, the economic historian will, appropriately enough, point out that what Stalin, Trotsky, Preobrazhensky, Bukharin, and the others debating public policy at this time were facing was in some ways but the latest version of that disjunction between the urban and rural economies, between worker and peasant needs, that (as we know so well) had plagued every government in Russia since the days of Sergei Witte. Again, the specialist fascinated by the role of personalities in history cannot help but view Stalin, as he emerged triumphantly from the factional infighting of the 1920s, as fusing “despotic rule and catch-up modernization” in a manner strikingly recalling Peter the Great 214

215 216

Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics, pp. 241–42. For the compromise view summarized on these pages, see, for example, R. W. Davies, The Industrialization of Soviet Russia: The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929–30 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics, pp. 259–60. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society, p. 190.

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and other “modernizing” tyrants of the Russian past.217 For the comparativist, however, the issue of a challenge to the legitimacy of this late-revolutionary regime (recalling, in certain respects, the crises of legitimacy in our earlier revolutions) requires above all that we acknowledge the sociocultural dimensions of the criticisms of the NEP that were mounting in the late 1920s. In his widely read synthesis on the Soviet regime of the 1920s, Lewis H. Siegelbaum has usefully argued that any “retrospective explanation” of why the party resorted so abruptly to the “extraordinary measures” that set the Stalin “revolution” in motion at the end of the decade must underscore, among other things, “the deep-seated mutual suspicion and antipathy between the party and the peasantry, the commitment of the communists to industrialization which derived from both ideological and national security considerations, the growing consumption needs of an expanding urban population, and the social and political tensions arising out of the NEP system itself.”218 Certainly, the mild economic recovery under NEP earlier in the decade, by altering the balance of power between town and countryside in favor of the former, made it all the easier for Communists weaned on simplistic notions about “kulaks,” “middle peasants,” and “poor peasants” to continue to think in such primitive sociological terms and to objectify kulaks (much as in civil war days) as “class enemies” of poor muzhiki as well as of workers in the expanding urban sector. Indeed, Soviet and party efforts to “uplift” “middle” and “poor” peasants (seredniaki and bedniaki) and to eliminate their “backward” ways unavoidably failed: as Helmut Altrichter has stressed, “many peasant actions and practices, institutions and customs, had their own internal, compelling logic and functionality. . . . the logic and functionality of a precapitalist peasant society, subsistence-oriented and averse to running risks, with the family as the basic unit of production and consumption, and with the village, the mir, a world in itself.”219 With the peasants’ “defensive conservatism” increasingly defying the “state pressures” brought to bear by Communist ideologues from Moscow, with the “political leadership committed to a misleading conception of rural society,” and with “its local representatives out of touch with the peasantry in nearly all contexts other than coercive administrative force,” it was probably a foregone conclusion that the Soviet state would achieve next to no legitimacy among those rural Russians who, after all, still constituted the vast majority of the population.220 217

218 219 220

A point made most recently by Arno Mayer, The Furies, pp. 616–18. See also, on this point, Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), esp. pp. 50–65 and 114–18. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society, p. 188. Helmut Altrichter, “Insoluble Conflicts: Village Life between Revolution and Collectivization,” in Fitzpatrick, Rabinowitch, and Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP, pp. 192–209. Shanin, The Awkward Class, pp. 198–99. For a similar take on the mutually antagonistic relationship between Communists and peasants, see Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, esp. pp. 415, 417–18, and 419–20; and Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society, pp. 143–44.

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It was really in the urban, proletarian milieu that the regime had to retain its legitimacy if it were to survive. Hence (at least in part) the campaign, underway even in the early 1920s, to “re-proletarianize” the party (the so-called “Lenin Levies”) by recruiting more than half a million workers into Bolshevik ranks. Such an initiative may also have reflected tensions in the party leadership; for sure, it helped restore the party’s proletarian identity – not to mention increasing the weight of the Communist presence in the factories just when “the necessity of raising productivity had become paramount.”221 Advanced workers could now play a crucial mediating role between party and working class: a “re-proletarianized” party meant, at the same time, a “Bolshevization” of the proletariat. Both Communist Party and Komsomol (Youth) cadres were thus in the course of the 1920s being transformed from within. By the advent of the First Five-Year Plan, Sheila Fitzpatrick has written, these were “mass organizations with predominantly working-class membership: in 1930, 56.3% of Communist Party members were of working-class origin and 46.3% were workers by current occupation.”222 There was also a demographic dynamic at work here, as male and female youths had increasingly to be reckoned with both in party circles and in the broader urban milieu of late-revolutionary Russia.223 These were, disproportionately, the “idealistic” workers whose needs, expectations, and sensibilities the new state leaders emerging under Stalin had ever more to accommodate as the NEP gave way to crash industrialization. Hiroaki Kuromiya has given us a fascinating, if rather complicated, group profile of these individuals: The shock workers and initiators of socialist competition were typical of those young committed workers. . . . they were mainly young urban males who had experienced the revolution and the civil war in their teens or younger, first entered industrial work

221

222

223

Scholarship over the past ten years lends further weight to this admittedly pessimistic conclusion. See, for example, James Heinzen, Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917–1929 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004); Tracy McDonald, Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside Under Soviet Rule, 1921–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); and Hugh D. Hudson, Peasants, Political Police, and the Early Soviet State: Surveillance and Accommodation Under the New Economic Policy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Yet see also Aaron B. Retish’s call for a more nuanced conclusion on this subject: American Historical Review 118 (2013): 283–84. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society, pp. 180–83. See also, on these issues, John Hatch, “The ‘Lenin Levy’ and the Social Origins of Stalinism: Workers and the Communist Party in Moscow, 1921–1928,” Slavic Review 48 (1989): 558–77; and Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 33–35. Ibid., p. 126. On the evolution of Communist Party membership, see esp. T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968). On this point, refer to Anne E. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia. Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

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shortly after the revolution, and therefore had had several years of work experience and some skills by the late 1920s. Predominantly Party and Komsomol members, they were thus in a position to be critical of both the work culture of older workers and the peasant culture of new arrivals from the countryside. They were new forces in the factories, who, impatient with the given rate of industrialization, pressed for ever higher tempos; who, free of the old “work culture,” promoted industrial modernization; who, intolerant of managerial bureaucratism, pressed for one-man management; who, eager to find “class aliens” in the apparatus, actively sought to be promoted into positions of responsibility; and who, hopeful of tomorrow’s gratification, endured today’s difficulties.224

Such, apparently, were the workers who, “dissatisfied with NEP ideologically, emotionally, and perhaps also materially,” would come into their own as the Rightists in party leadership ranks were vanquished, and as most of the defeated “Left Oppositionists” came to terms with Stalin and his acolytes. There were, in the late 1920s, myriad social and cultural manifestations of a shift from the NEP to the Stalinist “revolution from above” which, by catering to specific elements in urban and party ranks, effectively “re-legitimized” the regime even as it addressed urgent economic/developmental issues of huge military/strategic import. What Fitzpatrick has called a “switch to a classwar concept of cultural revolution” vilifying “bourgeois specialists,” technical intelligentsia, so-called “Nepmen,” and “kulaks” in the countryside, occurred rather suddenly a few months after the Fifteenth Party Congress – and in the wake of Stalin’s visit (in January 1928) to Siberia to review one site of the grain procurements crisis. One turning-point in this process may have been the show trial (alluded to earlier) of a large number of mining engineers and technicians from the Shakhty region of the Donbass on charges of sabotage and conspiracy. As a movement aimed at securing legitimacy for the regime on new developmental and social bases, the “Cultural Revolution,” so Fitzpatrick has written, had many aspects: “It was a worker-promotion movement linked to a political campaign to discredit the right opposition within the party. It was an iconoclastic youth movement directed against “bureaucratic” authority. It was a process whereby militant Communist groups in the professions established local dictatorships and attempted to revolutionize their disciplines. It was, finally, a heyday for revolutionary theorists and “hairbrained schemers.”225 As specialists such as Mark von Hagen, William Chase, and Anne Gorsuch have argued, this transition from one set of economic, cultural, and social policies to another served some very specific interests – for instance, those of junior Russian army men increasingly critical of senior officers, of workers besieged by chronic housing, health, and employment issues in Moscow, and of Komsomol youths wishing to cast off the constraints and compromises of the “bourgeois” 224 225

Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 113–15. Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, pp. 115–18.

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NEP.226 Beyond this, however, it is arguable that, by anathematizing “kulaks” in the countryside and Nepmen and “bourgeois intellectuals” in the towns, Stalin and his comrades also provided rank-and-file Communists, Komsomol members, and others with a way to redefine themselves, to establish their identities more securely in a world turned upside-down by the recent storms of war, revolution, and internal civil war.227 Up to a point, William Chase was right to argue that the Stalinist “revolution from above” and a societal “revolution from below” at this time “interacted, reinforced, and pushed each other along unforeseen lines.”228 Yet, in the final analysis, those emerging at the highest state levels from the power struggles of the 1920s had to take the initiative on economic/developmental and other matters so as to retain and secure the kind of basic legitimacy that had earlier slipped away from the protagonists in late-revolutionary England and France. As William Rosenberg has somberly observed: Any industrializing state . . . simply had to confront in some fashion the insularity of the village, its cultural base, its lack of “comprehension” of industrial values, its militant resistance to outside authority, and the relationship between attachment to cultural traditions and resistance to change. The same was true in towns and cities, insofar as attitudes toward work, the quality of production, or even productivity itself reflected cultural impediments to technological progress.

Soviet Russia’s transition to an economically (and, ultimately, militarily) modernized, socialist society required, that is, “the inculcation of more or less uniform values, recognized as legitimate and consequently reinforcing the legitimacy of the regime.”229 How the new leadership confronted and dealt with this challenge – clumsily, often very brutally, but in the end successfully – in the course of the 1930s lies for the most part beyond the purview of this study. Concluding Chapter 6 requires that we pose, and endeavor to answer, one final query. How was it that the legitimacy secured by the early Soviet regime in Russia ultimately eluded the English Protectorate and the French Directory? Social context may provide one explanatory key to this much-debated question. Both the English and French Revolutions, for all their sound and fury, left 226

227

228 229

On these points, refer again to von Hagen, “Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship,” esp. pp. 165–66; William Chase, Workers, Society, and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow, 1918–1929 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), esp. Chapters 3–5; and Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia, passim. A point made provocatively by Fitzpatrick, “The Problem of Class Identity in NEP Society,” in Fitzpatrick, Rabinowitch, and Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP, pp. 12–33. There is a related and ever-growing historiography on the surviving tensions, in the transitional Soviet society of the 1920s, between the concept of “estates” (sosloviia) inherited from the ancien regime and the Leninists’ conception of socioeconomic classes. ´ Chase, Workers, Society, and the Soviet State, pp. 299–300. William Rosenberg, “Conclusion,” in Fitzpatrick, Rabinowitch, and Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP, pp. 316 and 319–20.

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traditional upper and middle-class elites fundamentally in place, if altered in ´ some respects. In the case of England, Cromwell’s regime could not in the final analysis overcome the resistance of the “natural rulers” to its provocative mix of fiscally oppressive militarism and heterodox ecclesiology. (And there is very little reason to believe that, had he lived longer, the Protector could have satisfactorily resolved this dilemma.) In the case of France, the Directors and their partisans forfeited the support of what should have been their essential constituencies in the late-revolutionary “bourgeoisie.” In the former case, the “natural rulers” finally (if less than enthusiastically) threw in their lot with a Stuart Restoration; in the latter case, the middle classes (along with some chastened nobles) chanced a “leap in the dark” with the military (and politically ambitious) hero of the hour. In the case of Russia, however, the upheaval of 1917 (and thereafter) drastically simplified the social structure by largely obliterating the old social elites. The Bolsheviks, admittedly, had their tussles ´ in the 1920s with surviving Intelligentsia elements, with managerial/technical spetsialisty, and with small merchants, shopkeepers, and manufacturers. Still, Russia’s new rulers had above all to reckon with proletarians and peasants in these years; and both situational and ideological considerations impelled them (logically enough) to seek, and find, their bases of legitimacy among Soviet citizens in the former group, and then to employ the city, in effect, to “overwhelm” the countryside. It was, arguably, in this sense that the upheaval in Russia was especially novel in the fascinating history of great European revolutions – even though (tragically enough) novelty in this last case did not guarantee (at least until after the passage of six, often crisis-ridden decades) even a tentative and ever-precarious emancipation from the autocratic writ of the tsarist past.

Conclusion “Revolutions from Below” and “Revolutions from Above”

Even if, in these concluding pages of our study, we can reaffirm that certain rough uniformities characterized the successive stages of our three revolutions, how then do we deal with the very different postrevolutionary trajectories in England, France, and Russia? After all, “Thermidor” gave way in the first case to a twenty-eight-year Stuart Restoration; in the second case, to a fifteen-year, hegemonic military dictatorship; and in the third case, to further spasms of Soviet coercion and terror. Crane Brinton, as we pointed out in our Introduction, responded to this conceptual challenge by postulating, for all three situations, “clear sequelae, a series of lesser revolutions in which the forces present in the initial one are worked out.”1 This solution may have worked fairly well in Brinton’s pathological schema, in which the patients (that is, the revolutionized regimes) do not emerge from their traumata with simple ´ and unconditional “cures.” Moreover, even without benefit of this Brintonian metaphor, we can concede readily enough that England, France, and Russia did not emerge from their “Thermidorian” years with all of their most pressing issues thoroughly resolved. But the question remains: how to discuss and analyze postrevolutionary developments without getting endlessly caught up in comparisons of what may seem to reasonable readers to be (in effect) apples, oranges, and (perhaps) cucumbers? One answer to this conundrum might be to abandon the notion of sequelae (or “aftershocks”) altogether, and argue instead that, in all three postrevolutionary countries, genuine “revolutions-from-above” supervened (either immediately or fairly soon) and made some genuinely basic readjustments to the situations left by the respective “popular” upheavals – “revolutions-frombelow” – whose stages we have attempted to analyze. Cromwellian Independents, Robespierrist Jacobins, and Leninist Bolsheviks, that is to say, made 1

Refer once again to Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution, p. 227.

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way for “Anglo/Dutch/Hanoverians,” Bonapartists, and Stalinists. Driving this point home may embroil us once again (at least briefly) in the persisting controversy over the applicability of “Thermidor” to Russia. Still, introducing the concept of “revolutions-from-above” may enable us in our accustomed roles as comparativists to make some sense of the aftermaths of these great upheavals – even that in Russia. Perhaps, with this challenge in mind, we should consider postrevolutionary Russia first, then move all the way back in time to postrevolutionary England, and finally move forward to the case of postrevolutionary France. Tackling this issue of revolutionary aftermaths may make it easier for us then to sum up our impressions of these historic upheavals in the theoretical and philosophical terms first introduced on the opening pages of our study. There can be no doubt about the monumental nature (in terms of both achievements and sheer human costs) of Stalin’s “revolution-from-above” during the 1930s. By 1929, one comparativist scholar has recently written, the Five-Year Plan endorsed in party sessions “projected a 230 percent increase of industrial production over the level of 1927–28 within five years, with the growth rate of heavy industry two and a half times that of consumer manufacture. The bulk of capital investment was earmarked for plants to produce iron and steel, machine tools, and tractors – plants of potential military value.” Yet even this projected breakneck pace of industrialization was apparently not enough, as, in 1930, “it was decided to meet the . . . production targets in four years, instead of five.” The Second Five-Year Plan, of 1933–37, “with an annual industrial growth rate of 17 percent, consolidated and built upon the achievements of the first.”2 During the 1930s, Russia, it is fair to conclude, “became a major industrial power, with gigantic metallurgical complexes, hydroelectric power stations, and tractor plants.” In quantitative (if not necessarily qualitative) terms, “heavy-industry production caught up with Germany, Great Britain, and France. The number of industrial workers jumped from less than 3 million to over 8 million, and the urban population rose by almost 30 million.” All of these developments, Arno Mayer has noted, were accompanied by significant educational reforms at all levels, reforms “fostering upward social mobility alongside advancement by geographic relocation and on-the-job training.” In addition, the concomitant and explosive growth of state and party bureaucracy helped to further “the expansion of technical and professional cadres drawn from more modest social origins than under the old regime.”3 There were also the more general cultural aspects of what Sheila Fitzpatrick has explicitly designated as this Stalinist “revolution from above.” Insofar 2

3

Mayer, The Furies, pp. 629–30. For further documentation, refer to R. W. Davies, The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929–30 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Mayer, The Furies, pp. 662–63.

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as Stalin’s campaign was (in Fitzpatrick’s words) a “mobilization strategy” intended to create an “atmosphere of crisis” and thus to “justify the regime’s demands for sacrifice and extraordinary efforts in the cause of industrialization,” it betrayed its e´ litist, “top-down” inspiration and nature. Its notorious shows trials associated so-called “wreckers and saboteurs” in the bourgeois intelligentsia (and by extension, certain unnamed “international capitalists”) with individuals in the party leadership like Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov, who had warned against the excesses of modernization in urban and rural Russia; the trials were plainly intended to discredit the latter as “obstructionists” on the path toward greater state and national security. At the same time, however, this “revolution from above,” interpreted in cultural terms, also suggested a leadership responding to genuine popular anxieties about the possibilities of war in the late 1920s, and to the very real frustrations of undersupplied urban consumers, youthful Communists, and other party “idealists” in the tense 1930s. Hence, the breakneck transformation of Russia during these years was a sociocultural as well as a bureaucratic and economic phenomenon, a response to tensions in the party and in Soviet society at large as much as to the internal contradictions and developmental inadequacies of the “New Economic Policy” (NEP).4 Such were the positive aspects of the Stalinist “revolution-from-above.” Yet, as probably was unavoidable, given the unprecedented nature of such a gigantic industrial leap forward, the costs were proportionately great. In part, of course, cost meant the kind of wastage and wreckage attendant on insufficient training of engineers and other skilled industrial personnel, and inadequate attention given to such matters as transport, coal production, hydroelectricity, and so on. But “cost” referred above all to the headlong pace of collectivization of agriculture. The Stalinists, dogged like all their late-tsarist and early-revolutionary predecessors in economic planning by the lack of a viable smychka between urban and rural citizens, between, that is, the needs of proletarian and military personnel, on the one hand, and peasants, on the other, and bedeviled by the “scissors” between industrial and agricultural prices, decided by the summer of 1929 to rush ahead with forced collectivization of peasant holdings, mandatory quotas for grain procurement, and the demonization (and eventual elimination) of the “kulaks” as a class. By the late 1930s, “Russia’s 25 million individual production units were regrouped in 240,000 collective farms,” and the peasantry’s political opposition to the Party’s dictates more or less vanquished; but this at the cost of mass famine, mass slaughter of livestock, and mass displacement of muzhiki in all regions of the country.5 Thus, the peasantry was finally 4 5

On all of this, see Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, esp. pp. 119–25. Mayer, The Furies, p. 663. On the collectivization campaign, see also Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power; and R. W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).

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“squeezed” in reality to support the financing of rapid industrialization – and this, at a time when the workers in the factories, mills, and mines of Soviet Russia were themselves still plagued with inadequate and unsanitary housing, exhausting work schedules, lagging wages and living standards, and a continuing scarcity of consumer goods. In its final years, the Stalinist “great leap forward” was also accompanied (and, in the judgment of most commentators today, grievously marred) by a truly horrific recrudescence of Terror. In a climactic internal “convulsion,” Sheila Fitzpatrick has tersely written, “the Great Purges of 1937–8 swept away many of the surviving Old Bolshevik revolutionaries, effected a wholesale turnover of personnel within the political, administrative, and military elites, and sent more than a million people to their deaths or imprisonment in [the] Gulag.”6 Scholarly debate over the origins of this phenomenon is likely to persist to the end of time.7 It is, at least, safe to say that a plethora of tributaries flowed into the incarnadined stream of the Stalinist Terror: the “terrorist” practices of tyrants in the Russian past like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great; the more recent persecutory and exclusionary tactics of Lenin during and after the “Red Terror” of 1918–21; the “state-dictated” arbitrariness that was part and parcel of industrialization and collectivization from 1929 on; the “conspiracy-mindedness” that so often feeds upon recent revolutionary experiences; the intensification of external (i.e., geopolitical and global-economic) pressures on Russia in the 1930s; Stalin’s specific idiosyncrasies; and on and on. The list of such contributing factors is (it must be said) all but endless! Yet, for our analytical purposes, only one question really matters: are we, or are we not, justified in viewing the developments of the 1930s (breakneck industrialization, collectivization, “cultural revolution,” and Stalinist Terror) as essentially postrevolutionary in the terms that we have carefully presented again and again throughout this book? On the one hand, a specialist such as Sheila Fitzpatrick has seen all of these events, together with those of the earlier 1917–28 period, as constituting “discrete episodes in a twenty-year process of revolution;” on the other hand, for Arno Mayer, Stalin “was neither a Thermidorean nor a Man on Horseback. He was, if not a revolutionary, a 6

7

Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 2. Fitzpatrick elaborates on the issue of the Great Terror of the late 1930s in ibid., pp. 163–70. On this subject, see also Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); and Oleg V. Khlevnyuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). For some additional thoughts on the subject, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian, 1958), esp. pp. 321–22; and J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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radical modernizer, as much by necessity as by choice.”8 With all due respect to Fitzpatrick, whose cultural inquiries have proven to be illuminating and, indeed, indispensable in the Russian case of revolution, our interpretation – especially, as will be fully seen below, in its comparative aspects – diverges more from hers than it does from that offered by Mayer. There are at least two reasons for regarding the developments of the 1930s in Russia as having been essentially postrevolutionary in nature. (1) The economic and cultural modernization finally compassed by Stalin and his cadres in this era represented a classic “working out” of problems that, as we saw in Chapter 6, had beleaguered and obsessed Russian policymakers during the NEP days. Not for nothing do so many historians refer to Stalin’s “revolution-from-above” – as if (implicitly) to distinguish it from the “revolution-from-below” marking the years from the collapse of tsardom in February 1917 to the twilight of NEP in the late 1920s. Only in the 1930s (this interpretation would suggest) did those wielding state power in Russia actually force a solution to historically based problems of an economic/developmental nature – and, in so doing, find ways to relegitimize the government and party in the eyes of their key supporters. (2) The Stalinist “revolution-from-above” of the 1930s also took on an urgency distinguishing it sharply from the “Thermidorian” 1920s due to a transformed international/domestic dialectic. By the mid to late 1930s, Russian fears of geostrategic encirclement by the fascist powers – Germany, Italy, and Japan – were reflected both in the accelerated military buildup of the Second Five-Year Plan and in the increasingly xenophobic, conspiratorial accusations leveled against Old Bolsheviks, generals, and others in the Great Terror.9 A “suspicion of enemies – in the pay of foreign powers” may have been, for a cultural historian like Fitzpatrick (as, indeed, it is for many other historians) a “standard feature of revolutionary mentality” in general; but citing it at this point was also (we suspect) her way of acknowledging the very time-specific deterioration of Russia’s security posture in this period.10 This depiction of Stalin’s campaign of crash modernization in the 1930s as a classic example of a “revolution-from-above” in “postrevolutionary” times may be all the more persuasive if we can present events in postrevolutionary England and France in a similar fashion. And, indeed, there are solid reasons to believe that we can do so – if, that is, we concentrate specifically on the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–89 in the case of England, and on Napoleon’s “revolution-from-above” in the case of France. In both of these situations, we find, in hindsight, much as we did in connection with the 1930s in Russia, successful attempts to address issues of critical importance left unresolved by earlier popular upheavals or “revolutions-from-below” – and this, in times of transformed interactions between foreign and domestic affairs. 8 9 10

Citations from Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 4; and Mayer, The Furies, p. 662. On these points, Mayer is especially suggestive. See ibid., esp. pp. 630–31 and 648–60. Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 166.

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There is, first, the question of postrevolutionary England. As Austin Woolrych pointedly noted in concluding his imposing conspectus on Britain in Revolution: “Large parts of the reigns of Charles II and James II were filled with bitter political and religious strife, and this was partly because the problems with which the Commonwealth and Protectorate had wrestled were real problems, and they had not been solved.”11 Indeed, this was the case: as historians from J. R. Jones to W. A. Speck have demonstrated, explosively interacting constitutional, religious, and strategic issues confronted the English during the nearly three decades following on the Stuart Restoration of 1660 – much as they had confronted them prior to 1660.12 Charles II attempted to secure “indulgence” for non-Anglicans at both ends of the “spectrum of faith” in ways that raised bedrock constitutional as well as religious questions; curried the favor of a surging Louis XIV in a manner that drew accusations of treason on his head; ruled for the last four years of his life without summoning Parliament at all; and died (in 1685) a Roman Catholic. His younger brother, James II, was, if anything, even more disastrous. In the same year that James acceded to power as the first declared English Catholic monarch since Mary Tudor’s succession in 1553, Louis XIV chose to revoke the Edict of Nantes and, with it, the religious liberties conceded to Protestants in France since 1598. James, even as he was recklessly promoting Catholics to influential positions in government, the military, and court society, and ruling for the most part without Parliament during 1685–88, proved even more obsequious and accommodating to an ever more aggressive Louis XIV than had his brother. For many increasingly anxious Englishmen and Englishwomen, the birth to James (and his Catholic wife) of a healthy son (June 10, 1688), seemingly securing the permanence of an overtly Catholic royal dynasty in the country, was the last straw – as far as the “natural rulers” were concerned, a signal, in effect, for a “safe,” relatively if not entirely nonviolent “revolution-from-above” in the British Isles. There can be little doubt that, for the English in the late 1680s, every bit as much as for fearful Russians in the 1930s, the horizons appeared to be darkening rapidly. After the Stuart Restoration of 1660, Jonathan Scott has noted, “the catholic superpower was Louis XIV’s France. It was much closer [than Spain and Austria], and more powerful (Louis’ standing army of 300,000 in the 1690s was three times the size of the largest armies deployed during the Thirty Years War). It was, by the 1670s, nakedly expansionist. At the same time it became an open force for intolerant confessional absolutism. It is hardly surprising that the English governing elite found this disturbing.”13 11 12

13

Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, p. 795. See J. R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972); and W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 167. For the broader, comparative/military perspective here, see Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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But the anti-papist, anti-French paranoia of those times also gripped English society as a whole. One contemporary distractedly recorded “a universall terrible alarme . . . all over London and Westminster . . . that they should have their throats cut by the French and by the Papists.” He went on to report in homely yet compelling language: The like . . . fears . . . circulated so generally throughout the Kingdome, that it is in vaine to name particular countyes, but in none was it greater then in Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, and especially Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire . . . they sate up most of the nights in this weeke, and the universall cry was that their throats should be cut. And that which . . . increased their fears, if that were possible . . . was a universall report, that the disbanded Irish . . . would joyne with the English Papists to cut all their throats.14

Hence, the “invitation” issued to William of Orange in the anxious summer of 1688 to invade England (though, in reality, Dutch military preparations had been in the making since April). Summing things up in a terse, comparative fashion, Scott has written: “In 1688 the Dutch occupied London with the co-operation of the king’s opponents. It was this collaboration of external and internal interests which was decisive in the imposition of a settlement. As a result, within five months events had traversed the entire passage from successful invasion (as in 1640) to restoration (1660), missing out most of the bloodshed and revolution between.”15 The fearful English (and Anglican) “natural rulers” had gotten what, in essence, they had desperately desired: a “revolution without tears,” without the regicide, the Levellers, the sectarian extremists, and the Cromwellian “many-headed monster” of the 1640s and 1650s. It is important to stress this last point, given the persisting “revisionist” tendency in English revolutionary historiography (a tendency already discussed in our Introduction) to minimize the significance of the mid-seventeenth-century “English Revolution” in relation to the revolutionary events of 1688–89 and beyond. Steve Pincus, for instance, has recently underscored the ephemeral nature of many of the changes supervening in English government and society during the 1640s and 1650s. At the same time, so he has contended, the Glorious Revolution – which he flatly dubs “the first modern revolution” – was not at all “the aristocratic, bloodless, and consensual affair described in establishment Whig historiography.” It not only “transformed English state and society,” he has maintained, “but also . . . like all modern revolutions . . . was popular, violent, and divisive.”16 Pincus’ 1688: The First Modern Revolution is a massive, 14 15

16

Citation (from Roger Morrice) in Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 219. Ibid., p. 216. For some valuable recent insights on the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–89, see the various selections in Jonathan Israel, ed., The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Refer once again to Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, esp. pp. 475–76 and 480–83. Pincus is also on shaky ground, it appears to me, when he attempts to differentiate between

Conclusion

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carefully researched, and very thoughtful work that requires the serious attention of all specialists in the field. Still, there are certain basic facts that it cannot alter. In 1688–89, unlike in the 1640s-1650s, no English monarch was executed as a traitor to his own people; the monarchy and the House of Lords were not abolished as institutions; nothing quite like the Putney debates so dialectically engaged English elitist and “popular” interests; no radical assembly ´ resembling the “Barebones Parliament” was even temporarily entrusted with a share of state authority; and nothing quite as novel as the “many-headed monster” of Cromwellian military “despotism” patrolled the land. In analytic terms: the revolutionary process that we have studied, stage by stage, for the mid-seventeenth-century revolution, a process that makes that upheaval comparable in at least some respects to the later upheavals in France and Russia, did not lie behind the otherwise dramatic events of 1688–89 in England. Nevertheless, no one would contest the claim that Pincus makes for the fundamental historical significance of the “Glorious Revolution.” Indeed, two of Pincus’ fellow revisionists, Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold, have contended resolutely that the events of 1688–89 “marked the origins of the modern British state – the financial, military, and bureaucratic product of England’s costly and incessant warfare against Louis XIV. The centrepiece of this settlement was the founding of the Bank of England.”17 Certainly, the geopolitical and bureaucratic aspects of what we would refer to as England’s “revolution-from-above” have long been appreciated by scholars. “After 1688,” John Brewer has written, “the scope of British military involvement changed radically. Britain was at war more frequently and for longer periods of time, deploying armies and navies of unprecedented size. . . . Public spending, fuelled by military costs, rose by leaps and bounds. The civilian administration supporting the military effort burgeoned; taxes and debts increased. Britain acquired a standing army and navy. She became, like her main rivals, a fiscalmilitary state, one dominated by the task of waging war.”18 The bureaucratic or administrative essence of this phenomenon has been just as aptly captured by Michael J. Braddick: In 1689, there was a substantial capacity for mobilisation which was once more dramatically increased. To a significant extent this rested on more direct forms of government

17

18

Charles I, on the one hand, and later monarchs such as England’s James II, France’s Louis XVI (and, by extension, Russia’s Nicholas II?) In all of these cases, there is abundant historical evidence to suggest monarchs (whether English, French, or Russian) being relentlessly pulled in opposing “modernizing” and “antimodernizing” (or “reactionary”) directions. In addition, it is almost as easy to point out “ephemeral” changes introduced in revolutionary France as it is to indicate them in connection with the England of the 1640s and 1650s. Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold, eds., The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–1689 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 10. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 27.

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and more specialised agencies, much more recognisably ‘modern’ than their early Stuart predecessors. These new institutions were justified with reference to a more thoroughly developed sense of the autonomous needs of the state, while the nationalisation of military effort simultaneously increased the effect of such arguments. Meanwhile the transformation of a royal debt into a national one represented a significant depersonalisation of political authority. Growing effectiveness was associated in the long run with the development of specialised agencies of government. . . . In this sense, the state was more clearly differentiated.19

And all of this was made possible within a “safe” constitutional context of parliamentarianism. “Public finance” in Great Britain, John Bosher has written, “ceased to be royal and became parliamentary. . . . At the same time, the evolving right and responsibility to scrutinize the budget and to find ways and means to implement it . . . made every parliament face debt and deficit year after year.”20 It was only because parliament was now established permanently at the center of public life in the country that men with capital proved so willing to subsidize public policy by investing in the Bank of England – which latter institution (tellingly) traced its origins to the immediate aftermath of the “Glorious Revolution.” That the Bank could flourish, and before long assume management of a fully funded, long-term “national” debt, testified eloquently to e´ lite confidence in a postrevolutionary government held consistently to account for its policies and procedures. Yet, the substantive context of the “revolution-from-above” of 1688–89 was also religious and socioeconomic in nature. The so-called “Convention Parliament” of 1689–90 was explicit on the former point from the start. It resolved (among other things): “That it hath been found by Experience, to be inconsistent with the Safety and Welfare of this Protestant Kingdom, to be governed by a Popish Prince.” Within days, the Convention followed this up with the historic resolution (of February 6, 1689): “That no Popish successor shall be capable to inherit the Crown of England.”21 It is perfectly true that, for William of Orange, strategic issues – meaning, above all, the imperative need to oppose Louis XIV’s machinations on the Continent – were the paramount matters in 1688–89.22 But, as Scott has observed, “Popery and arbitrary government had always needed to be confronted on the European military stage.”23 Fighting the French abroad would, for the postrevolutionary English, help to secure their precious Protestantism at home: after all, how better to accomplish that 19 20 21

22 23

Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, p. 279. John F. Bosher, French Finances, 1770–1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 22, 23–25. Citations from Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 223. On the “religious factor” in the Glorious Revolution, refer also to Jones, The Revolution of 1688, esp. chapters 4 and 5; and Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries, esp. Chapter 8. On the Dutch element in all of this, see Jonathan Israel, “The Dutch Role in the Glorious Revolution,” in Israel, ed., The Anglo-Dutch Moment. Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 225.

Conclusion

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desirable objective than to defeat, in its own element, the regime that had just recently rescinded the Edict of Nantes, and unleashed its dread dragonnades on hapless continental Protestants? It only remained for Parliamentary Acts of 1689 and 1701 to formalize the religious implications of the Glorious Revolution in constitutional terms. As for the socioeconomic ramifications of that revolution: the profit-oriented agriculturalists of the English peerage and gentry were now securely ensconced in power, in the localities as well as at the center.24 Granted, Britain’s postrevolutionary monarchs signified to Parliament their determination to retain a royal initiative in the framing of foreign policy; still, they had no choice but to accommodate in that sphere the interests of the kingdom’s landed elite. ´ The English landlords, who wished to produce cereals and other crops for both domestic and international markets and to purchase sundry colonial and domestically processed goods (sugar, tobacco, spices, woolens and cottons, and so on) had something crucial in common with English merchants whose livelihood consisted in the domestic and foreign exchange of such raw and finished commodities. For both groups there was a transcendent need for a diplomatic policy that placed the acquisition and/or defense of colonies, trading posts, and commerce alongside dynastic and other “political” considerations. Starting in 1689, the gentlemen farmers and their confederates in trade were ideally situated, through their influence in the central and local organs of government, to press such a policy upon, first, William and Mary and Queen Anne, and then, their Hanoverian successors. As we noted earlier, Willliam may have in his own mind accorded a higher priority to humbling his detested foe Louis XIV than to fostering English commerce, and the Georgian kings seemed at times obsessed by the need to protect their Hanoverian homeland from predators one and all on the Continent; nonetheless, the logic of British politics dictated a foreign policy that was tailored almost as much to upper- and middle-class economic interests as to British security needs in the larger world’s geostrategic affairs. The comparisons – and contrasts – to be drawn on this last point between the Stalinist and the Orangist/Stuart/Hanoverian “revolutions-from-above” are alike striking. Both the Russians (during the late 1930s and early 1940s) and the British (from 1689 down to 1815) faced daunting challenges from continental adversaries. Both countries required economic development (of one variety or another) in “re-legitimized” political systems in order to face down those challenges. Here, of course, the two countries diverged radically. Stalin “squeezed the peasantry” ruthlessly to finance the costs of accelerated, heavy industrialization in a country whose traditional elites had already been obliter´ ated by revolution; Britain, at a more leisurely pace, allowed its rural elitists to ´ 24

On this point, refer again to Brewer, The Sinews of Power, pp. 21–22. For a cross-Channel comparison – that is, involving eighteenth-century England and France – see Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution, pp. 36–45.

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continue to expropriate peasants and other “small” landowners, employ them in “labor-intensive” and commercially oriented agriculture, and thus gradually build up a “primitive capitalist accumulation” for what later turned out to be the purposes of industrialization. Hence, the “revolutions-from-above” in the cases of Russia and England. In the case of France, it was Napoleon’s “revolution-from-above” in the years after 1799 that enduringly consolidated the unfinished work of the “revolution-from-below” of 1789–99 by rationalizing the state’s administration and bureaucracy, codifying the laws, settling the long-agitated church– state relationship, and guaranteeing the land settlement.25 The “July Revolution” of 1830 would, in a limited sense, reaffirm this achievement by removing from power the last of the reactionary Bourbon monarchs and by obliging his Orleanist successor to acknowledge the new, postrevolutionary order in ´ France.26 Nevertheless, the institutionalization of the Revolution’s most important reforms was wrought for the most part by Napoleon’s “technocratic” Council of State – and this, uniquely, at a time of French hegemony in the diplomatic affairs of Europe. Regarding state administration and bureaucracy, two points warrant special emphasis. Jacques Godechot has allowed that Napoleon “barely touched” the hierarchy of departments, districts, cantons, and communes set in place by the Constituent Assembly back in 1790: he sanctioned the creation of one new Department, reestablished the Districts (in smaller numbers, and larger size, and now called “arrondissements”) eliminated during the Directory, and left cantons and communes (parishes, in most places) pretty much as they were. Crucially, however, he established “prefects” (pr´efets) and subprefects at the departmental and arrondissement level, and subordinated them much more tightly to the government at Paris than had been the commissaires of the late 1790s.27 As for the bureaucracy discharging statist functions in this administrative system, its ongoing modernization under the Emperor has (not at all surprisingly) attracted the notice of Clive Church: The employee element in government was confirmed in its Weberian characteristics. It gained in continuity, permanence, and consistency because of improvements in career patterns and salaries. It became more impersonal, partly because of the introduction of the new class of fonctionnaires which prevented the exercise of initiative, and also 25

26 27

Three particularly useful surveys of basic reform in these areas are Robert Holtman, The Napoleonic Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Louis Bergeron, France Under Napoleon, trans. Robert R. Palmer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); and Jacques Godechot, Les Institutions de la France sous la R´evolution et l’Empire, 3rd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985). See David H. Pinckney, The French Revolution of 1830 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972) on the events of 1830 and their long-term significance. On this and associated points, see Godechot, “Sens et importance de la transformation des institutions revolutionnaires a` l’epoque napoleonienne,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Con´ ´ ´ temporaine 17 (1970): 795–813.

Conclusion

485

because of the excessive centralization, paperwork, size, and authority necessitated by the Grand Empire. At the same time it became more specialized, more hierarchical, more regimented, and a little more qualified.28

Although, Church has cautioned, there is “no absolute finality to the process” of bureaucratization in any postrevolutionary society, as countervailing administrative, political, and social forces come into play over the years, it remains no less true that, under the emperor, the bureaucracy became “a stable but subordinate part of a whole new streamlined structure of government, within which a clear-cut chain of command meant that it could be manipulated more easily and effectively than ever before.”29 When it came to legal codification, Napoleon’s achievement was, again, not so much one of original creation as one of synthesis and completion. As early as September 1791, in what was still the “honeymoon” stage of revolution in France, the National (Constituent) Assembly had initiated serious work on this portentous project. Succeeding legislatures had also labored at the task. “They decided above all,” in Godechot’s words, “to produce something very different from what was called a “code” in the Old Regime and instead to prepare a vast synthesis of all legislation – customary, written, or revolutionary – and the jurisprudence regulating society.” When he became First Consul in 1799, Napoleon “speeded up the completion of the job” by asking illustrious legal specialists – Tronchet, Bigot de Preameneu, Portalis, and others – to add ´ their efforts to the work of codification already begun during the 1790s by distinguished lawyers and jurisconsults such as Cambacer` ´ es, Merlin de Douet, Jacqueminot, and Treilhard. As is well known, the First Consul did not ordinarily intervene in the Council of State’s discussions of what was promulgated in 1804 as the Civil Code; yet (as seems equally incontrovertible) he did help to secure its stress on parental authority over children, husbands’ authority over wives, and the precedence of legitimate heirs’ rights over those of illegitimate children, and of employers over employees in the workplace. It may be reasonable to conclude in general terms, as Godechot does, that “by means of the Civil Code, Napoleon consecrated the great social conquests of the Revolution of 1789: abolition of the “feudal regime” and the privileged “orders;” equality before the law; and full and complete property holding in the Roman sense of the term.”30 That, in the matter of women’s unequal rights, the Code, paradoxically enough, “extended to all France disabilities previously known only in the Roman law provinces,”31 may remind us (as comparativists) of similar statutory developments under Stalin in the 1930s, and may suggest that, as 28 29 30

31

Church, Revolution and Red Tape, p. 282. Ibid., pp. 256–57 and 313. Refer again to relevant sections of Godechot, “Sens et importance de la transformation des institutions revolutionnaires,” pp. 795–813; and to Holtman, The Napoleonic Revolution, esp. ´ pp. 87–98. Ibid., p. 92.

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a rule, gender equality in postrevolutionary eras tends to be sacrificed on the altars of a perceived need to restabilize societies torn asunder by revolution.32 In no area was Napoleon’s intervention more prompt – and, for over a century, decisive – than in the still controversial realm of church–state relations. The upheaval of 1789–99, as noted earlier, had first placed a reformed French Catholicism within the framework of revolutionary institutions, and then disestablished the Church altogether by early 1795 – a situation which (as of 1799) satisfied neither the country’s still predominantly Catholic population nor Napoleon. Commentators as ideologically disparate as Jean Jaur`es and Andre´ Latreille subsequently acknowledged the inconceivability of such a situation for most Frenchmen and Frenchwomen in the early nineteenth century.33 The First Consul at the same time had his own reasons for desiring to renegotiate church–state relations with the new pope, Pius VII. On the foreign front, reestablishment of Catholicism as the state religion would help to disarm e´ migr´e and other opposition to the new regime in France; on the domestic front, as Jean-Marie Leflon has written, Catholicism was, in Napoleon’s eyes, “the most useful religion. It preached obedience to secular government, urged resignation to unavoidable inequities, and supported morality by the promise of rewards and the threat of eternal punishments. . . . Far from destroying national unity by arousing people’s consciences and by opposing the spiritual to the temporal power, the Church, when disciplined and controlled, would serve, according to Fourcroy’s remark, as ‘a powerful lever for directing men’.” It would also help to extinguish the fires of rebellion in the Vendee, ´ in Normandy, and elsewhere, hence further diluting the influence of royalist and aristocratic counterrevolution.34 The result – after more than a year of hard bargaining between Paris and Rome – was the Concordat of 1801. As Robert B. Holtman has suggested, the “immediate and practical” advantages Napoleon gained by this historic agreement with the Papacy may over the long run have been more than counterbalanced by the spur it provided to ultra-montane, pro-papal forces within France.35 Still, for the time being the Concordat, by integrating

32

33

34

35

For a discussion of women’s rights under the Civil Code, refer again to Garaud and Szramkiewicz, La R´evolution franc¸aise et la famille, pp. 167–76. For the larger picture, see Darlene G. Levy and Harriet B. Applewhite, “A Political Revolution for Women? The Case of Paris,” in Renate Bridenthal, Susan Mosher Stuard, and Merry E. Wiesner, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), pp. 266–91. See, on this point: Jean Jaur`es, Histoire socialiste, 1789–1900, 13 vols. (Paris: Rouff, 1901– 1908), I: 532–33, 535, 539, 541; and Andre´ Latreille and Rene´ Remond, Histoire du Catholi´ ´ cisme en France, 3 vols. (Paris: Editions Spes, 1957–62), III: 96. Citation from Jean-Marie Leflon, “La Paix Religieuse,” in Jean Mistler, ed., Napol´eon et l’Empire, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1968), I: 98–107. See also, on this subject, Margaret M. O’Dwyer, The Papacy in the Age of Napoleon and the Restoration: Pius VII, 1800–1823 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985). Holtman, The Napoleonic Revolution, esp. pp. 125–34. See also Godechot, “Sens et importance de la transformation des institutions revolutionnaires,” passim, on this subject. ´

Conclusion

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Catholic institutions into the postrevolutionary state, by ensuring the revolutionary transferral of church properties to their new owners, and by quenching the fires of religious civil war in the provinces, represented, even for a cautious scholar like Holtman, a “monumental achievement.”36 There is, finally, the question of the revolutionary land settlement. Here, Gordon Wright, while acknowledging the role of the “Code Napoleon” in ´ solidifying the tendency in France toward partibility of landed inheritances, was careful to situate it in a longue dur´ee of rural development. “The revolution,” he conceded, “had brought . . . a considerable redistribution of wealth through the sale of much large landed property. But legend has greatly exaggerated the extent of the social revolution involved. Land transfers did not change France overnight from a nation of large estates to one of small-owners. That process had been proceeding gradually for centuries; the revolution speeded it up, but left it still unfinished.”37 This judgment, interestingly enough, confirmed ideas articulated earlier by revisionist Alfred Cobban;38 it also strikes the comparativist today as offering a developmental scenario for postrevolutionary France radically at variance with those of postrevolutionary England, with its centuries-old enclosure movement on the land, and postrevolutionary Russia, with its breakneck collectivization in the countryside. What has remained debatable is Wright’s follow-up assertion that “large landowners in France offered much less vigorous leadership toward a modernization of [agricultural] techniques than was the case in England” in the nineteenth century, and his assumption that France similarly lagged behind its cross-Channel rival in large-scale industrialization.39 Yet despite the valiant efforts of some historians to present a more optimistic evaluation of the impact of political upheaval on the economic development of nineteenth-century France,40 many others seem inclined in recent years to agree with John V. C. Nye that, at the very least, “French economic growth was slower than that of Britain for most of the nineteenth century,” and with Philip T. Hoffman and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal that “France simply did not industrialize to the same extent England did.”41 36 37 38 39 40 41

Holtman, The Napoleonic Revolution, p. 132. Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times: From the Enlightenment to the Present, 4th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 96. Refer again to Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, esp. chapters VII and VIII. Wright, France in Modern Times, p. 172. See, for example, P. K. O’Brien, D. Heath, and C. Keyder, “Agricultural Efficiency in Britain and France, 1815–1914,” Journal of European Economic History 94 (1989): 1265–80. Citations from John Nye, “The Importance of Being Late: French Economic History, Cliometrics, and the New Institutional Economics,” French Historical Studies 23 (2000): 425; and Philip T. Hoffman and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “New Work in French Economic History,” ibid., p. 451. The linkages between rural conservatism and the relatively retarded pace of industrialization in postrevolutionary France have also been very recently stressed in Alice L. Conklin, Sarah Fishman, and Robert Zaretsky, France and Its Empire Since 1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 19–21.

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Although the subject remains controversial, there still appears to be substantial justification for regarding the Civil Code of 1804 as one of a number of factors contributing to the persistent influence of the “conservative, propertied, landowning classes, large and small” in postrevolutionary France, and contributing in a related fashion to the relative “economic backwardness of France” through much of the nineteenth century.42 Thus for the state-initiated “revolutions-from-above” in postrevolutionary Russia, England, and France. That they were, in a sense, needed to consolidate the accomplishments of prior “popular” upheavals (i.e., “revolutions-frombelow”) in these countries certainly does not mean that they would spare the Russian, English, and French people additional challenges in subsequent eras. We know today, for example, that in the Russian case, the “Great Patriotic Struggle” waged successfully (if bloodily) against Hitler’s invading forces in the early 1940s was to be followed by the revelations of Stalinist “crimes” in the 1950s, the vicissitudes and crises of “Cold War” competition with the United States, and, eventually, the implosion of the USSR in 1991. The revolutionary experiences in England were to be followed in later generations by periodic campaigns of agitation for basic parliamentary reform and by threats to British existence mounted, first, by revolutionary/Napoleonic France and then by Imperial and Nazi Germany. As for France, its citizens were in postNapoleonic times to be tested, first, by repeated bouts of (Paris-centered) revolution but, also, by challenges to their country’s prestige and very existence mounted by Bismarck’s Prussia, Imperial Germany, and the Third Reich. These latter-day developments remind us forcefully that, even if the original sociopolitical upheavals (“revolutions-from-below”) and more decisive “revolutionsfrom-above” bought these countries a certain amount of precious “time” in a competitive, historic sense, they could not permanently liberate them from the unremitting pressures of modern international and domestic politics. But this last observation takes us back, logically enough, to the theoretical assumptions about our three major “Eurocentric” revolutions that we first spelled out in our Introduction. We can reassert, at this point, that, at least in the cases of England, France, and Russia (to venture no farther afield) “an essentially structuralist approach” to revolutionary change seems to make a lot of sense. We can, in other words, agree with theorists of revolution ranging from John Dunn and Michael Kimmel to Charles Tilly, and with comparative historians such as Arno Mayer, Dan Edelstein, and Martin Malia, that (as Malia phrased it) “the framework of a unitary state to focus all political, 42

Relative, that is, to the explosive economic growth in contemporary England – and, perhaps, even in certain areas on the Continent as well. Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, p. 170. To be sure, a host of “revisionist” economic historians such as Philip T. Hoffman, George Grantham, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, David R. Weir, John Nye, and others would likely continue to challenge Cobban (and other, earlier “revisionists”) on this general point. The debate goes on, and likely always will.

Conclusion

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social, and other forms of protest in a single set of institutions” was a crucial prerequisite for each of our revolutions.43 Furthermore, in each case, the most immediate (if certainly not the only) issue was about power, and about the ways in which politicized individuals, and groups of individuals, competed for it so as to be able to define and control the state’s policies. Again, implicit in this notion of the “state” as such are Weberian ideas on the nature and functions of bureaucratic states – states that, in a basically structuralist perspective, must always be seen in dynamically interacting international and domestic contexts. Yet, as a follow-up point, we would also insist, as we did before, that a sophisticated approach to the English, French, and Russian Revolutions requires “a modified, carefully nuanced structuralism.” In other words: the old regime, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary states in all three cases responded not only to long-term exogenous imperatives of a geostrategic nature, but also to endogenous pressures reflecting the “objective” needs, anxieties, and cosmologies of “ordinary” men and women (as well as, admittedly, the demands of intra-´elite “special interests”). In this connection, it is well to note that the tradition of sociopolitical revolution in Europe has come, increasingly, to invoke the needs of ordinary people as well as those of the competitive “fiscalmilitary” state. In so doing, that tradition obliges us – and will always oblige us – to inquire as to whether modern revolutions actually ameliorate – as they unfailingly claim to ameliorate – the destinies of Everyman and Everywoman. Perhaps, in the end, they do not. Perhaps that is why Max Weber, writing in the tumultuous year 1918, and deeply disillusioned by the shortcomings of modern revolutionary politics, exhorted his readers to shun the excitement and the charisma of revolution and pursue instead careers in reformist politics and bureaucracy.44 And perhaps that is why an empathetic authority on the Russian Revolution such as Orlando Figes could conclude, regretfully but (possibly) realistically, that “the state, however big, cannot make people equal or better human beings. All it can do is to treat its citizens equally, and strive to ensure that their free activities are directed towards the general good.”45 It is, of course, always arguable that the historic political cultures, social structures, and geopolitical vulnerabilities of countries like Russia undergoing revolution in “modern” times make it increasingly difficult for such countries (despite populist rhetoric in the evolving tradition of sociopolitical revolution) to take up the roles recommended for them by sympathetic historians such as Orlando Figes. We can only hope that, in this comparative study, we have managed to some extent to acknowledge popular as well as statist concerns, the roles of human agency, ideas, and basic contingency as well as of traditionally conceived “high” politics, in the cases of revolutionary England, France, and Russia. 43 44 45

See again Malia, History’s Locomotives, p. 5. Refer again to Michael S. Kimmel’s analysis of Weber’s 1918 essay: Kimmel, Revolution, pp. 35–36. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 823–24.

Suggestions for Further Reading

It would obviously be impossible to provide here an exhaustive inventory of the scholarly literature on general revolutionary theory and on the more specific revolutionary historiographies of England, France, and Russia. Instead, my intention in this bibliographical essay is to point interested readers toward some of the classic (but, even more, most recent) works that have informed my analysis. These books and articles would seem to fall most naturally under the headings initially identified in this study’s Table of Contents. Those categories, in other words, are as follows: General Revolutionary Theory and Revolutionary Historiography; Anciens R´egimes; Transitions: Breakthroughs to Revolution; Revolutionary “Honeymoons?”; The “Revolutionizing” of the Revolutions; Revolutionary Climacterics; Thermidor?; and “Revolutions from Below” and “Revolutions from Above.” These are not necessarily hard-andfast categories: readers unable to locate a specific source under one heading may possibly find it under an immediately preceding or immediately following heading. Additional sources (both works of an older vintage and studies that have come out in just the past several years) appear in the extensive footnoting that accompanies each section of the book. General Revolutionary Theory and Revolutionary Historiography Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution, dating initially from 1938 (New York: Prentice-Hall), has inspired the general organization of my analysis, and it has proven to be the most frequently cited of a number of works emphasizing the “natural,” “life-cycle,” or “sequential-stages” interpretation of major revolutions. Other prominent works in this genre have ranged over the years from Lyford P. Edwards, The Natural History of Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928) and George S. Pettee, The Process of Revolution (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938) to (more recently) Jaroslav Krejci, Great 491

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Suggestions for Further Reading

Revolutions Compared: The Search for a Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). All such works, of course, have been subjected to an increasingly intensive critical scrutiny subsequently by an ever-burgeoning phalanx of political scientists, political sociologists, and comparativist historians. In the 1960s and 1970s, some of the most stimulating contributions to this literature appeared in article form: see, for example, Harry Eckstein, “On the Etiology of Internal War,” History and Theory 4 (1965): 133–63; Lawrence Stone, “Theories of Revolution,” World Politics 18 (1966): 159–76; and Perez Zagorin, “Theories of Revolution in Contemporary Historiography,” Political Science Quarterly 88 (1973): 23–52. The same years, however, also witnessed more substantial efforts to devise new explanations of transformative change that could be applied to sociopolitical upheavals in many (if not all) regions of the “early modern” and contemporary world. Chalmers Johnson, for example, developed a “systems/value consensus” sociological model stressing the importance of “multiple dysfunctions” in society and e´ lite intransigence in works such as Revolution and the Social System (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Studies, 1964) and Revolutionary Change (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966). On the other hand, Ted R. Gurr emphasized the psychological dimensions of revolutionary causation and process in Why Men Rebel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971) and Rogues, Rebels and Reformers (Beverly Hills, Calif.: SAGE, 1976). Even more imposing, in some respects, was the contemporaneous attempt by Immanuel Wallerstein to locate revolutionary change in an ever-evolving “capitalist world-system” in studies such as The Modern World–System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European WorldEconomy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), The Capitalist World Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), and The Politics of the World Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Yet again, Charles Tilly endeavored to combine stresses upon social structure, personal agency, war, and politics in his study of revolutionary mobilization, From Mobilization to Revolution (London: Addison-Wesley, 1978). Such efforts to provide all-encompassing models of comparative revolutionary analysis have, unsurprisingly, proven controversial, generating a barrage of critical responses. On a somewhat more positive note, however, some specialists have reacted to such criticisms by devising comparative analyses of more carefully circumscribed types and groups of revolutions. Perhaps the most influential of these subsequent studies has been Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Still, for all the debate over “structuralist” and “voluntarist” models of revolutionary change that has attended Skocpol’s landmark work, she certainly has not had the field to herself. Over the past three decades, works concentrating on specific groups and subgroups of revolutions have included the following: Elbaki Hermassi, Third World Revolutions

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Reassessed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); John Dunn, Modern Revolutions: An Introduction to the Analysis of a Political Phenomenon, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Misagh Parsa, States, Ideologies, and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of Iran, Nicaragua, and the Philippines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); John Foran, Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Terence Emmons (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006). Along the way, certain sociologists and political scientists have furnished especially valuable reviews of much (if not, inescapably, all) of this literature. Notable among these evaluations have been Michael S. Kimmel, Revolution: A Sociological Interpretation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), and Noel Parker, Revolutions and History: An Essay in Interpretation (Oxford: Polity Press, 1999). When one descends from the “social-scientific” heights of revolutionary theory into the valleys of specific commentary on the English, French, and Russian Revolutions, one very quickly discovers a terrain bestrewn with minefields of scholarly controversy. Here, it is possible only to refer, for each of these upheavals, to some of the primary examples of “classic revisionism,” linguistic or “postmodernist” analysis, and “structuralist” historical writing. In the French case, “classic revisionists” who initially cut their teeth on critiques of neo-Marxian explanations of the 1789 revolution included Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); George V. Taylor, “Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 72 (1967): 469–96; Denis Richet, “Autour des origines ideologiques lointaines de la Revolution ´ ´ franc¸aise: Elites et despotism,” Annales: E. S. C. 24 (1969): 1–23; and Colin Lucas, “Nobles, Bourgeois and the Origins of the French Revolution,” Past and Present 60 (1973): 84–126. In the case of England, the “revisionist” charge against the long-regnant Whig/Marxian narrative was led by Conrad Russell, in studies such as The Origins of the English Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1973); Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); and the provocatively entitled Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1990). Russell’s tendency to downplay long-term revolutionary causation in England was endorsed, directly or indirectly, by Kevin Sharpe, in Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); by Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (New York: New York University Press, 1981); and, indeed, by historians on both sides of the Atlantic such as Mark Kishlansky and Nicholas Tyacke. Revisionism (like much else in the purlieu of scholarship) came somewhat later to Russian historiography. Among the

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influential voices in this connection have been the following: Steve A. Smith, “Writing the History of the Russian Revolution after the Fall of Communism,” Europe-Asia Studies 46 (1994): 563–78; Ronald G. Suny, “Revisionism and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics,” Russian Review 53 (1994): 155–82; and Stephen Kotkin, “1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks,” Journal of Modern History 70 (1998): 384–425. In recent years, the “postmodernist” stress on linguistics and “political culture” has been all the rage in French revolutionary studies, and has been gradually taken up as well by experts in English and Russian history. It was led off in 1978 by Franc¸ois Furet’s Penser la R´evolution franc¸aise – a work rendered into English by Elborg Forster as Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). This political-cultural “turn” was reinforced in subsequent years by such works as Lynn Hunt’s Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Emmet Kennedy’s A Cultural History of the French Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989); Keith M. Baker’s Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Furet’s and Mona Ozouf’s anthology A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Baker’s co-edited anthology The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 4 vols. (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987–94). David Underdown took up the cudgels for revolutionary cultural studies in the English case: see, notably, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), and A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). Kevin Sharpe has enthusiastically endorsed the cause in such works as Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), and Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of SeventeenthCentury Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). So have Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky, eds., in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); and countless other authors. In the Russian case, readers should first of all consult the many works in this genre by Sheila Fitzpatrick, including The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), and then go on to Christopher Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Transition from Tsarism to Communism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California, 1990); and Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).

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Finally – as we saw in the Introduction – “postmodernism” has been increasingly challenged in recent times (in all three historiographies) by “structuralists” advocating a more “state-centered” conceptualization of revolutionary causation and processes. I have striven to apply a modified Skocpolian “structuralism” to French revolutionary studies in two works: The Genesis of the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A GlobalHistorical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Readers will find similar notions in two books by T. C. W. Blanning: The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London: Longman, 1986), and The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), and in Jeremy J. Whiteman, Reform, Revolution, and French Global Policy, 1787– 1791 (Burlington, Vt.: University Press of New England, 2003). In the case of England, “structuralism” (in one form or another) has found major advocates over the past fifteen years: see, above all, James S. Wheeler, The Making of a World Power: War and the Military Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Stroud, 1999); Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Finally, a classic example of the structuralist approach avant la lettre in Russian revolutionary studies has been (in successive editions) Theodore H. Von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? Why Gorbachev? The Rise and Fall of the Soviet System, 3rd ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). Elements of this rendering of events in Russia have been endorsed by a number of the contributors to the huge anthology co-edited by Edward Acton, Vladimir Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg, Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914–1921 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Ancien R´egimes My intention in this section is to suggest to readers some of the outstanding works on what Chapter 1 has identified as three particularly striking characteristics of the respective anciens r´egimes: namely, geopolitical stagnation and relative decline, domestic inadequacies of divine-right monarchy, and the three “prodromal crises” of 1628–29, 1771–74, and 1905. Jonathan Scott, in the aforementioned England’s Troubles, has had much to say concerning the inadequacies and vulnerabilities of English foreign policy under James I and Charles I. So, over recent decades, have the following specialists: Simon Adams, “Spain or the Netherlands? The Dilemmas of Early Stuart Foreign Policy,” in Howard Tomlinson, ed., Before the English Civil War: Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), pp. 79–101; Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 1981); and John Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Even Conrad Russell, for all his “revisionist” disparagement of long-term English revolutionary causation, dwells on the weak and self-contradictory nature of early Stuart foreign policy at points in his above-mentioned Parliaments and English Politics. The contradictions of eighteenth-century French foreign policy were summarized well over forty years ago by C. B. A. Behrens, The Ancien R´egime (London: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967). Since then, a more focused attention has been devoted to the subject by, among others: Orville T. Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes: French Diplomacy in the Age of Revolution, 1719–1787 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982); Derek McKay and H. M. Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers 1648–1815 (London: Longman, 1983); Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); and (by the same author) The Rise of the European Powers 1679–1793 (London: Arnold, 1990). This literature has superseded the older article by M. S. Anderson: “European Diplomatic Relations, 1763–90,” in The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VIII: The American and French Revolutions, 1763–93 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 252–78. For the issues involved in late Romanov Russia’s strategic decline, readers may initially want to go back to Roderick E. McGrew, “Some Imperatives of Russian Foreign Policy,” in George Stavrou, ed., Russia Under the Last Tsar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), pp. 202–29; then, they may wish to read Robert G. Wesson, The Russian Dilemma: A Political and Geopolitical View (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1974). Preeminent in this area, however, is Dominic Lieven. See, for example, his contribution (“Russia, Europe and World War I”) to the huge anthology co-edited by Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg as referenced earlier; and his larger study, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (London: Macmillan, 1983). Finally, Dietrich Geyer situates late imperial Russian foreign policy in multiple contexts in Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860–1914 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987). Any discussion of domestic weaknesses in Russia’s ancien r´egime must start with the ill-starred Nicholas II and Alexandra Fedorovna. Their political shortcomings are unsparingly exposed in (among other works): R. K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra (New York: Atheneum, 1968); Dominic Lieven, Nicholas II: Emperor of All the Russias (London: John Murray, 1993); and M. D. Steinberg and V. M. Khrustalev, The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1995). Problems of economic modernization are incisively summarized in Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution 1881–1917 (London: Longman, 1983); an important earlier analysis is that of Theodore H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). Problems afflicting the

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prerevolutionary noble elite are debated by Roberta T. Manning, The Crisis of ´ the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982) and Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985). On the troubled army in late imperial Russia, see above all Allen K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March–April 1917) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). On the intelligentsia and cultural issues in general, see (in addition to Christopher Read’s Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia, referenced previously) the valuable anthology edited by Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). Discussion of internal weaknesses in the English case should start with Charles I and Henrietta Maria. Two recent and revealing studies of the former are Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992) and Michael B. Young, Charles I (London: Macmillan, 1997). On the Queen, see Michelle White’s very recent work Henrietta-Maria and the English Civil Wars (London: Aldershot, 2006). On the administrative/fiscal antecedents to the 1628–29 crisis, see (in addition to Russell’s indispensable Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–29) Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–28 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) and the contributions to Cust and Ann Hughes, eds., Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642 (London: Longman, 1989). Larger economic issues are tackled in C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). On political-cultural issues in late prerevolutionary England, it is wise always to consult the early chapters of Scott’s England’s Troubles. Perhaps the best full-length study of the subject is still that of Caroline Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). A good overview of ecclesiastical problems is furnished by Leo F. Solt, Church and State in Early Modern England 1509–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Perhaps the finest work on Louis XV is still that of Michel Antoine, Le Conseil du Roi sous le r`egne de Louis XV (Geneva: Droz, 1970). But see also Jean Egret, Louis XV et l’opposition parlementaire, 1715–1774 (Paris: A. Colin, 1970) for the interaction between this long-lived monarch and his most important law courts. Flaws in the imposing edifice of eighteenthcentury French administrative arrangements are exposed in Maurice Bordes, L’Administration provinciale et municipale en France au XVIIIe si`ecle (Paris: Societ 1972). The strengths (and weak´ e´ d’Edition d’Enseignement Superieur, ´ nesses) of the Bourbon system are soberly reassessed by David Parker, The Making of French Absolutism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). Perhaps the best overall reappraisal of the (seriously flawed) fiscal system of old regime

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France is still that of John F. Bosher, French Finances, 1770–1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). On the noble elite in late Bourbon France, see especially Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, La ´ Noblesse au XVIIIe si`ecle. De la f´eodalit´e aux lumi`eres (Paris: Hachette, 1968), and (by the same author) “Aux Origines de la Revolution: Noblesse et Bour´ geoisie,” Annales: E. S. C. 30 (1975): 265–77. Problems in the French army are the province of Emile G. Leonard, “La Question sociale dans l’armee ´ ´ franc¸aise au XVIIIe si`ecle,” Annales: E. S. C. 3 (1948): 135–49, and of David D. Bien, “La Reaction aristocratique avant 1789: L’Example de l’armee,” Annales: E. S. C. ´ ´ 29 (1974): 23–48 and 505–34. On “political-cultural” questions, see (most recently) Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996); David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Edmond Dziembowski, “Un nouveau patriotisme franc¸ais, 1750–1770,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998). Finally, there were the three “prodromal crises” in our three anciens r´egimes. In the case of England, there is the exchange between John Guy, “The Origins of the Petition of Right Reconsidered,” Historical Journal 25 (1982): 289–312 and Mark Kishlansky, “Tyranny Denied: Charles I, Attorney General Heath, and the Five Knights Case,” Historical Journal 42 (1999): 53–83. Conrad Russell is very useful on the parliamentary aspects of the 1628–29 confrontation between crown and M.P.s: see Parliaments and English Politics, esp. pp. 323–416. The international ramifications of the crisis are accentuated by John Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, pp. 75–77, and by Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 110–12. On the domestic roots of the 1905 Revolution in Russia, see S. Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia 1900–1905 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973). The best in-depth study of the 1905 revolution is still Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2 vols. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988–1992). Nicholas II’s role in the 1905 insurrection is the focus of A. Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). John Bushnell anatomizes the weaknesses of the Russian Army at this juncture in Mutiny Amid Repression: Russian Soldiers in the Revolution of 1905–1906 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). On the international context of this crisis, consult Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001). A useful discussion of the crown–judiciary confrontation in France during 1771–74 is found in William O. Doyle, “The Parlements of France and the Breakdown of the Old Regime, 1771–1788,” in French Historical Studies 6 (1970), pp. 415–58. D. C. Hudson analyzes pro-government propaganda in the “Maupeou Revolution:” see “In Defense of Reform: French Government Propaganda during the Maupeou Crisis,” in French Historical Studies 8 (1973): 51–76. Also stressing the crown’s

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side in this confrontation is Lucien Laugier, Un Minist`ere r´eformateur sous Louis XV: Le Triumvirat (1770–1774) (Paris: La Pensee ´ Universelle, 1975). But the most thorough study of the “Maupeou Revolution” remains Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution: A Study in the History of Libertarianism, France, 1770–1774 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). Transitions: Breakthroughs to Revolution My objective in this section is to highlight some of the most significant recent historical writing in the three areas treated in Chapter 3: namely, the eleventhhour “winters of discontent” in prerevolutionary England, Russia, and France; the actual collapses of Romanov, Stuart, and Bourbon absolutism during 1916– 17, 1638–40, and 1787–89, respectively; and, finally, the politicization of, first, elitist, and then “popular” elements in these three transitional societies. ´ The enhanced vulnerability and contradictions of Stuart foreign policy during 1629–37 are accentuated in Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, esp. pp. 254–56 and 290–91, and throughout Adams, “Spain or the Netherlands? The Dilemmas of Early Stuart Foreign Policy.” For the constitutional implications of the Personal Rule, the reader should especially consult: Richard Cust, “News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 112 (1986): 60–90; and Esther Cope, Politics Without Parliaments (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987). State finances in this period are reexamined by David Thomas, “Financial and Administrative Developments,” in Tomlinson, ed., Before the English Civil War, pp. 103–22. The “political-cultural” commingling of religious and secular anxieties during these late prerevolutionary years are discussed, not only by Hibbard and Scott in the works referenced previously, but also by: Robin Clifton, “The Popular Fear of Catholics During the English Revolution,” Past and Present 52 (1971): 23–55; Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England, 1603–58 (London: Arnold, 1985); and Peter Lake, “Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Cust and Hughes, eds., Conflict in Early Stuart England, pp. 72–106. On the weaknesses in prewar Russian foreign policy, see (in addition to Lieven’s scholarship) the important monograph by David M. McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900–1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). The associated phenomenon of leadership failings in the late imperial Russian army is carefully assessed by Bruce W. Menning, Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). On Peter Stolypin and his controversial land reforms, consult D. Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905–1920 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983); Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and A. Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001). G. Hosking reviews constitutional matters in

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this era in The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907–14 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). On administrative issues in late prewar Russia, see Neil Weissman, Reform in Tsarist Russia: The State Bureaucracy and Local Government, 1900–1909 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1981). On political-cultural issues, refer again to the essays in Clowes, Kassow, and West, eds., Between Tsar and People, and to Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York: Penguin, 1996). Finally, for the late French ancien r´egime, the reader should start with Louis XVI. A solid recent biography is by John Hardman, Louis XVI (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). On Vergennes’ expensive (and ultimately flawed) foreign policy, see (in addition to Orville Murphy’s study) Jean-Franc¸ois Labourdette, “Vergennes ou la tentation du ‘ministeriat,’” Revue Historique 557 (1986): 89–90, and also Munro Price, ´ Preserving the Monarchy: the Comte de Vergennes, 1774–1787 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). The first Necker finance ministry has been rehabilitated recently: consult (in addition to Bosher’s study) Egret, Necker: Ministre de Louis XVI, 1776–1790 (Paris: Champion, 1975) and Robert D. Harris, Necker: Reform Statesman of the Ancien R´egime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). On administrative issues, Pierre Renouvin, Les Assembl´ees provinciales de 1787 (Paris: A. Picard, 1921) is dated but still useful. On political-cultural perspectives, consult again the above-cited works of Baker, Bell and Dziembowski, along with Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), and Murphy, The Diplomatic Retreat of France and Public Opinion on the Eve of the French Revolution, 1783–1789 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998). The implosion of tsarism under the impact of World War I has, of course, given rise to a voluminous literature. The Romanovs’ role in this is studied by Mark D. Steinberg, The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995) A classic account of the economic aspects of this collapse is Norman Stone, The Eastern Front 1914–1917 (London: Scribner, 1975); it should be supplemented with Lewis H. Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914–1917 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). On the dilemmas of Paul Miliukov and other “moderates” in 1914–17, see Thomas Riha, A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1969), and Raymond Pearson, The Russian Moderates and the Crisis of Tsarism, 1914–1917 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977). Army affairs are capably handled by Wildman in The End of the Russian Imperial Army (already referenced). The whole period is brought vividly to life in Figes’ A People’s Tragedy, as well as in W. Bruce Lincoln, Passage through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914– 1918 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986). In the meantime, the literature on the collapse of Stuart absolutism is no less imposing. Two works on Charles

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I’s tortuous relations with the Scots in the late 1630s are: Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Allan Macinness, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1991). Conrad Russell provides the larger, British context for the collapse of Charles I’s government in The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637– 1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). On the Bishops’ Wars and other military matters during these years, see Mark Charles Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s Campaigns against Scotland, 1638–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). A revisionist account of the parliamentary elections in 1640 is provided by Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Both Jonathan Scott (England’s Troubles) and Caroline Hibbard (Charles I and the Popish Plot) cover the political-cultural aspects of this state collapse. In the French case, the standard account of the 1787–88 “prerevolution” is still Jean Egret, The French Prerevolution, 1787–1788, trans. Wesley D. Camp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). An updated summary of the constitutional and ideological aspects of the 1787–88 crisis is Vivian R. Gruder, The Notables and the Nation: The Political Schooling of the French, 1787–1788 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). The problems faced by Necker in his second ministry (1788–90) are treated exhaustively in Robert D. Harris, Necker and the Revolution of 1789 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986). Two revisionist “takes” on the French government’s fiscal crisis are: Eugene N. White, “Was There a Solution to the Ancien Regime’s Financial Dilemma?” Journal of Economic History 49 (1989): ´ 545–68; and David Weir, “Tontines, Public Finance, and Revolution in France and England, 1688–1789,” Journal of Economic History 49 (1989): 95–124. On the tie-in between French geopolitics and conspiratorial political culture on the eve of 1789, see an article by Thomas E. Kaiser: “Who’s Afraid of MarieAntoinette? Diplomacy, Austrophobia and the Queen,” in French History 14 (2000): 241–71. The literature on the politicization of the elites and masses in the earliest ´ stages of revolution is also immense. In the French case, the awakening of elitist subjects is studied by Daniel L. Wick, A Conspiracy of Well-Intentioned ´ Men: The Society of Thirty and the French Revolution (New York: Garland, 1987) and by William H. Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abb´e Siey`es and “What is the Third Estate?” (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994). For the conservative “backlash” as led by the Paris Parlement, see: Dale Van Kley, “The Estates General as Ecumenical Council: The Constitutionalism of Corporate Consensus and the Parlement’s Ruling of September 25, 1788,” Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 1–52. Roger Chartier interrogates the cahiers de dol´eances in “Cultures, Lumi`eres, Doleances: Les ´ Cahiers de 1789,” Revue d’Histoire Modern et Contemporaine 28 (1981): 68–93. On the urban revolution in 1789, older classics by Georges Lefebvre,

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George Rude, ´ and Jacques Godechot are modernized, sociologically speaking, by Lynn Hunt, “Committees and Communes: Local Politics and National Revolution in 1789,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18 (1976): 321–46. Peasant issues, studied so remarkably by Lefebvre in The Great Fear of 1789, trans. Joan White (New York: Pantheon, 1973) are revisited revealingly by John Markoff, “Peasant Grievances and Peasant Insurrection: France in 1789,” Journal of Modern History 62 (1990): 445–76. The much more brutally sudden arousal of Nicholas II’s subjects in late 1916 and early 1917 is vividly portrayed in Figes’ A People’s Tragedy. The ambivalent attitudes of elitist “moderates” at this juncture are explored by Melissa K. Stockdale in ´ Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880–1918 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). (In many ways, this updates Pearson’s Russian Moderates, referenced earlier.) Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is indispensable on the Petrograd workers in the February Revolution: see “The Bolsheviks and the Formation of the Petrograd Soviet in the February Revolution,” Soviet Studies 29 (1977): 86–197; and The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981). The comparable agitation at Moscow (and elsewhere) is the subject of Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), and Koenker and Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolutions in Russia, 1917 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). On the peasants’ flagging performance in the war effort, see (in addition to Wildman’s essential The End of the Russian Imperial Army) David R. Jones, “Imperial Russia’s Forces at War,” in Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness I: The First World War (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1988), pp. 249–328. As far as England is concerned, readers can follow elitist developments in Peter Donald, “New Light on ´ the Anglo-Scottish Contacts of 1640,” Historical Research 62 (1989): 227–29, and David Scott, “ “Hannibal at our gates:” loyalists and fifth-columnists during the Bishops’ Wars – the case of Yorkshire,” Historical Research 70(1997): 269–93. On revolutionary events at all-important London, the classic study remains Valerie L. Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics, 1625–43 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); yet see also, in this connection, Robert Ashton, The City and the Court, 1603–43 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For countless examples of popular iconoclastic violence in 1639–40, see (in addition to the aforementioned works of Hibbard, Clifton, Cope, and Fissel) the recent work of David Cressy: “Revolutionary England, 1640–42,” Past and Present 181 (2003): 35–71, and – in detail – England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Revolutionary “Honeymoons?” In this section, I point readers toward (1) significant scholarship on the ameliorative public policies implemented by (or, in some cases, forced on) the

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early-stage revolutionaries; (2) literature on the dynamics of polarization and radicalization already at work in these fleeting “honeymoons;” and (3) recent studies dealing with three absolutely critical “points of transition” in revolutionary England, France, and Russia. The work done on the barrage of reforms enacted in France by the Constituent Assembly of 1789–91 is particularly impressive; only a few of the more recent monographs can be mentioned here. A logical point of departure would be Michael P. Fitzsimmons, The Remaking of France: The National Assembly, the Constitution of 1791 and the Reorganization of the French Polity, 1789– 1791 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). On administrative issues, see Clive H. Church, Revolution and Red Tape: The French Ministerial Bureaucracy 1770–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) and Ted W. Margadant, Urban Rivalries in the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). Electoral reform is the focus of Patrice Guennifey, Le Nombre et la raison: La R´evolution franc¸aise et les e´ lections (Paris: E. H. E. S. S., 1993) and Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy, 1789–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For ecclesiastical changes, see John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982) and Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Conflict in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986). For army reforms, see the following: Samuel F. Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Jean-Paul Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution: From CitizenSoldiers to Instrument of Power, trans. R. R. Palmer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Alan Forrest, The Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990). On naval reform, see William S. Cormack, Revolution and Political Conflict in the French Navy, 1789–1794 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). In the case of revolutionary Russia, the evanescent nature of the “honeymoon” period permitted no prolonged (and peacetime) deliberation on reforms comparable to that of France during 1789–91; thus, the corpus of works devoted exclusively to “early-stage” reforms is commensurately less imposing. Still, the reader can get a sense of the ameliorative measures hurriedly promulgated (voluntarily or involuntarily) by the Provisional Government during February–April 1917 by consulting the following sources: Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, esp. pp. 358–59; Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, esp. pp. 249–50; and especially Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon, pp. 373–79. Transportation infrastructural reform is studied in William G. Rosenberg, “The Democratization of Russia’s Railroads in 1917,” American Historical Review 92 (1987): 296–326. On worker mobilization for military as well as civilian purposes, consult Rex Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1984). Again, English parliamentary action during 1640–42 yielded no harvest of reformist measures

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comparable to that brought in by the Constituents in France. Still, for what was accomplished, see the lucid summary in Gerald E. Aylmer, A Short History of Seventeenth-Century England: 1603–1689 (New York: Mentor Books, 1963). The constitutional aspects of Strafford’s execution in May 1641 are taken up by J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 192. On judicial and ecclesiastical issues, see: Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, pp. 30, 91–107, and 111–24; Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 168–70 and 231–34; and John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993). Norah Carlin has analyzed all of this anew in The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 24–35. Simultaneously, retroactive analysis points up the political factors that were sapping the foundations of revolutionary “honeymoon” consensus in all three countries. For instance, in the English case readers can follow the intrigues of Charles I and Henrietta-Maria during the spring and summer of 1641 in Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, pp. 188–96, and Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, passim. On mounting challenges to Pym’s credibility in the Commons in late 1641, see Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I, p. 939. For a salutary reminder of the disconcerting social implications of ecclesiastical innovation for many Englishmen even this early in the Revolution, see David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Again, the religious issues set forth in the parliament’s Grand Remonstrance of late 1641 are situated in both domestic and international contexts by Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 94–96 and 146–47, and by Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, p. 26. For France, there is a substantial body of research on the divisive forces at work early on between monarch and Assembly – and within the Constituent Assembly itself. See Norman Hampson, The Constituent Assembly and the Failure of Consensus, 1789–1791 (New York: Blackwell, 1988); Harriet B. Applewhite, Political Alignment in the French National Assembly, 1789–1791 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); and Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). The importance of elitist “conspiracy-mindedness” is debated ´ by (among others) Timothy Tackett, in “Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French Elites and the Origins of the Terror, 1789–1792,” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 691–713, and Peter R. Campbell, Thomas E. Kaiser, and Marisa Linton, eds., Conspiracy in the French Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). On geopolitical antecedents to radicalization at this time in France, see Barry M. Rothaus, The Emergence of Legislative Control over Foreign Policy in the Constituent Assembly, 1789–91, Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1968. The intrigues of the royal couple throughout this period are revisited in Hardman, Louis XVI, Chapters 13 and 14. In the Russian case, Figes, Stockdale, and Rex

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Wade incisively discuss the early Provisional Government’s precarious situation: refer to Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 359–60; Stockdale, Paul Miliukov, pp. 242–43; and Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 53–54 and 57–61. An important biography of Irakli Tsereteli is W. H. Roobol, Tsereteli, A Democrat in the Russian Revolution: A Political Biography, trans. Philip Hyams and Lynne Richards (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976). On Tsereteli’s colleague Victor Chernov (instrumental in the overthrow of Miliukov in the April Crisis) see V. Chernov, The Great Russian Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1936). Perhaps the most informative commentary on the agonies of the shortlived, Miliukov-dominated Provisional Government is furnished by Nikolai N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917, trans. Joel Carmichael, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962). The three “critical turning-points” in the three upheavals, as we have seen, involved ill-starred initiatives taken by Charles I, Louis XVI, and Paul Miliukov, in January 1642, June 1791, and April 1917, respectively. In the English case, readers can consult Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, passim., and Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, passim., for especially satisfying accounts of the actual details (and larger context) of Charles’ attempt to arrest the Five Members. On the situation in revolutionized London at this time, see (in addition to Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, Chapter 4) Keith Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997). Superseding all earlier works on Louis XVI’s “flight to Varennes” is Tackett, When the King Took Flight (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). It should be read, however, along with Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The First Years (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), and with David Andress, Massacre at the Champ de Mars: Popular Dissent and Political Culture in the French Revolution (Suffolk, U.K. and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2000). The events in the “April Crisis” in revolutionary Russia are colorfully described in Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 381–84. However, readers should go on to the larger question of Miliukov’s position on the war. See, above all, Robert D. Warth, The Allies and the Russian Revolution: From the Fall of the Monarchy to the Peace of Brest-Litovsk (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954), and Wade, The Russian Search for Peace, February– October 1917 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969). The “Revolutionizing” of the Revolutions As we earlier noted in Chapter 4, two issues predominated in the dynamics of radicalization characterizing the three revolutions: (1) the dialectic between war (civil or foreign or both) and the struggles of elitist political factions for ´ state power; and (2) the often uneasy collaboration between elitist and non´ elitist factions and individuals in the domestic politics of 1642–49 (England), ´

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1791–93 (France), and May-October 1917 (Russia). In connection with both of these issues, there is a wealth of recent scholarship supplementing the historiography of somewhat earlier times. In the English case, readers interested in the “war/politics” dialectic should first review works situating the civil wars of the 1640s in their international context. In addition to studies already cited, the following stand out: John Adamson, “The Frightened Junto: Perceptions of Ireland and the Last Attempts at Settlement with Charles I,” in Jason Peacey, ed., The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 36–70; Barbara Donagan, “Codes and Conduct in the English Civil War,” Past and Present 118 (1988): 65–95; Ian Roy, “England Turned Germany? The Aftermath of the Civil War in Its European Context,” in Peter Gaunt, ed., The English Civil War: The Essential Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 249–67; Ronald Hutton, The Royalist War Effort 1642–46 (London: Longman, 1982); and (most recently) David Scott, “Rethinking Royalist Politics, 1642–9,” in Adamson, ed., The English Civil War, pp. 36–60. Parliamentary politics in the “first” Civil War are revisited in David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). This work follows up excellent older studies: refer, notably, to David Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971); Lawrence Kaplan, Politics and Religion during the English Revolution: The Scots and the Long Parliament, 1643–1645 (New York: New York University Press, 1976); and Robert Ashton, The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1978). Ashton has also engagingly retold the story of the “second” civil war, that of 1648: see Counter-Revolution: The Second Civil War and Its Origins, 1646–48 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). In the case of France, special attention should be devoted to books and articles anatomizing politics in the short-lived Legislative Assembly (1791– 92) and in the first, fateful year of its institutional successor, the National Convention. The former body has been studied (not altogether satisfactorily) by C. J. Mitchell: see “Political Divisions within the Legislative Assembly of 1791,” French Historical Studies 13 (1984): 356–89; and The French Legislative Assembly of 1791 (Leiden, the Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1988). The Girondist-Jacobin struggle for control of the Convention during 1792–93 has, unsurprisingly, attracted substantial scholarly attention. Full-length monographs on this subject (not to mention a host of germane articles) range from M. J. Sydenham, The Girondins (London: Athlone Press, 1961) to Alison Patrick, The Men of the First French Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972) to Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985). The famous journ´ees of May-June 1793 which sealed the fates of Brissot and his cohorts at Paris are especially well studied by Morris Slavin, The Making of an Insurrection: Parisian Sections and the Gironde (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

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University Press, 1986). For some of the very latest findings regarding counterrevolutionary machinations at Court up to 1792, see Thomas E. Kaiser, “From the Austrian Committee to the Foreign Plot: Marie-Antoinette, Austrophobia, and the Terror,” French Historical Studies 26 (2003): 579–617. Studies of Louis XVI’s trial range from David P. Jordan, The King’s Trial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) to Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). In the case of Russia, the politics of radicalization were, of course, dominated to an unparalleled extent by the implications of “total war.” After revisiting the earlier-cited diplomatic studies of Warth and Wade, readers should consult two recent accounts of international/domestic dynamics in revolutionary Russia: Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation. Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). On the specific travails of the Russian Army in 1917, see Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Road to Soviet Power and Peace (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Louise E. Heenan, Russian Democracy’s Fateful Blunder: The Summer Offensive of 1917 (New York: Praeger, 1987). A pioneering effort on the July Days is: Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968). Earlier articles on the Kornilov affair by Abraham Ascher and James D. White (among others) have been superseded by George Katkov, Russia 1917: The Kornilov Affair: Kerensky and the Break-Up of the Russian Army (London: Longman, 1980). On the actual Bolshevik seizure of power in October/November 1917, readers should commence with Robert V. Daniels, Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (New York: Scribners, 1967), and Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), and go on from there. The literature on the sociopolitical implications of elitist politics in England ´ in 1642–49 is, predictably, very rich, concerning as it does the New Model Army and the Leveller movement. For landmarks in the long-running debate between Mark Kishlansky and Ian Gentles over ideological dynamics within the New Model, see the following: Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Scotland and Ireland 1645–1653 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); and, most recently, Gentles, “The Politics of Fairfax’s Army, 1645–9,” in Adamson, ed., The English Civil War. Perhaps the best monograph on the Putney Debates remains Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and Its Debates, 1647–48 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987). But see also, in this connection: Samuel D. Glover, “The Putney Debates: Popular Versus Elite Republicanism,” Past and Present 164 (1999): 47–80; and the

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essays by Austin Woolrych, John Morrill and Philip Baker, and Ian Gentles, in Michael Mendel, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers, and the English State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). The Levellers were treated rather uncritically in H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961); they (and many other radicals) have also received a sympathetic hearing in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1972). Their ideas are somewhat more objectively evaluated by C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); by G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Levellers in the English Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975); and, most recently, by Gentles, “The Politics of Fairfax’s Army, 1645–9,” in Adamson, ed., The English Civil War. Works on religious radicals in the English revolutionary era are referenced later on. The implications of the “politics of war” for the “politics of social advocacy” in the French case were vital in a wide variety of contexts. On the impact of radicalization in military ranks, see (in addition to the army studies cited earlier) John A. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivations and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France, 1791–1794 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984). On the travails of the nobility in this stage of deepening revolution, see Patrice Higonnet, Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981). John McManners deals with the contemporaneous dilemmas of French clerics in The French Revolution and the Church (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982). Egalitarian tendencies in the Jacobin clubs of Paris and the provinces are documented in Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The Middle Years (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988). For the growing involvement of the Parisian masses in revolutionary politics during 1791–93, see George Rude, ´ The Crowd in the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959); and Marc Bouloiseau, The Jacobin Republic, 1792– 1794 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). There is also a growing body of scholarship on peasants and rural issues in this phase of the revolution. For a pronouncedly Marxist “take” on such matters, the reader may desire to consult Albert Soboul’s collected essays in Probl`emes paysans de la R´evolution (1789–1848) (Paris: Maspero, 1976). More recent, however – and much more sophisticated – is the work of contemporaries such as Peter M. Jones and John Markoff. See Jones’ synthesis The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Most detailed for this period, however, is John Markoff. See: “Violence, Emancipation, and Democracy: The Countryside and the French Revolution,” in American Historical Review 100 (1995): 360–86, and especially The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).

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Finally, the dynamics of radicalization in Russia have called forth a burgeoning literature on soldiers, sailors, workers, and peasants. Whereas Allan K. Wildman’s The End of the Russian Imperial Army is the indispensable point de d´epart for conditions within the army, Evan Mawdsley has tackled naval issues: see The Russian Revolution and the Baltic Fleet: War and Politics, February 1917–April 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1978). On soldiers’ involvement in the soviets in 1917, consult: Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers’ Councils, 1905–21, trans. Ruth Hein (New York: Pantheon, 1974), and Michael Melancon, “Soldiers, Peasant-Soldiers, Peasant-Workers and Their Organizations in Petrograd,” in Soviet and PostSoviet Review 23 (1996): 161–90. On the radicalization of workers in the course of 1917, two articles loom large: William G. Rosenberg and Diane Koenker, “The Limits of Formal Protest: Workers’ Activism and Social Polarization in Petrograd and Moscow, March to October, 1917,” American Historical Review 92 (1987): 296–326; and Rosenberg, “The Problem of Market Relations and the State in Revolutionary Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (1994): 356–86. Diane Koenker focuses on workers’ issues in Russia’s second city: Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981). Two solid studies of workers’ actions on the eve (and on the morrow) of Lenin’s October coup d’´etat are: Steve A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1984). Work on the peasantry in 1917 progressed during the 1970s with John L. H. Keep’s The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), but had already been featured in sociologist Teodor Shanin’s The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia 1910–1925 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). Valuable subsequent contributions to this field include Donald J. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Seratov (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); the essays by Orlando Figes and others in Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter, eds., Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Revolutionary Climacterics In seeking out specific studies on the most extreme phases of our three revolutions, readers might be well advised to keep three key topics in mind: (1) the roots, procedures, and consequences of coercive state “terror;” (2) the reconsolidation of state power by victorious extremists; and (3) the disillusionment of “ultra-leftist” idealists/ideologues over the concrete trajectories and results

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of revolution. There is, of course, abundant work to cite here in all three of these areas. First, readers might wish to approach the issue of “terror” in France and Russia through the comparativist eyes of Arno J. Mayer: see The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). Even after all these years, the standard statistical work on the Jacobin Terror remains Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935). A pertinent sociological critique of Greer is to be found in Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, “The Incidence of the Terror: Some Lessons for Quantitative History,” Journal of Social History 9 (1975): 193–218. See also Patrice Gueniffey, La Politique de la Terreur: Essai sur la Violence R´evolutionnaire (Paris: Fayard, 2000). An updated (if somewhat popularized) view of the Terror is David Andress, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005). Recent work striving to place this Parisian-anchored phenomenon in a broader, national context includes: Bill Edmonds, “Federalism and Urban Revolt in France in 1793,” in Journal of Modern History 55 (1983): 22–53; Jean-Clement Martin, La Vend´ee ´ et la France (Paris: Seuil, 1987); and Paul Hanson, The Jacobin Republic Under Fire: The Federalist Revolt in the French Revolution (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003). Although, in the nature of things, there could be no close counterpart to Greer’s analysis in the case of Russia, readers can gain a sense of the Red Terror’s scope and operations by consulting work on the Cheka. See, in this connection, George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); and Alter Litvin, “The Cheka,” in Edward Acton, Vladimir Cherniaev, and William Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914–1921 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 314–22. Studies that place the Red Terror in its broader national (and international) context include Richard K. Debo, Revolution and Survival: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1917–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987); W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989); and Geoff Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War (London: Longman, 1995). On outbreaks of what we might retrospectively call “terror” in the English case, see Paul Hardacre, The Royalists during the Puritan Revolution (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1956) and (more usefully) David Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649–1660 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960). The application of terrorist methods in contemporary Ireland and Scotland is most recently treated in Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652 (London: Pearson, 2007). State reconsolidation, not surprisingly, has given rise to an especially plenteous historiography in the case of Russia. Many of the pertinent works, inevitably, underscore the crucial role in this process played by the triumphant

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Bolshevik Party. See, especially, Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1970); Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organizational Change 1917–1923 (London: Macmillan, 1973); and Richard Sakwa, Soviet Communists in Power: A Study of Moscow during the Civil War 1918–1921 (London: Macmillan, 1988). On the Sovnarkom and executive Soviet institutions in general, see T. H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom, 1917–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Important works on issues of ethnicity and nationalism in these early years of state reconstruction are Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (New York: Atheneum, 1968); and Hel`ene Carr`ere d’Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State, 1917–1930, trans. Nancy Festinger (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1991). On the nature of the new Soviet bureaucracy (and Lenin’s efforts to curb its influence), see the articles by Daniel T. Orlovsky and Thomas F. Remington in Diane Koenker, William Rosenberg, and Ronald Suny, eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Exploration in Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Readers interested in the early years of the Red Army should consult two works in particular: Francesco Benvenuti, The Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 1918–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). On the retrospectively dubbed “war communism” of those years, see Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918– 1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and T. F. Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia: Ideology and Industrial Organization, 1917–1921 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984). The best overall account of the analogous phase of the French Revolution is still, after all these years, Robert R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941). On the Jacobins’ role in revolutionary governance, see (in addition to Michael L. Kennedy’s The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The Middle Years, earlier referenced), Patrice Higonnet’s elegant (if somewhat idealistic) essay Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). A shrewd comparative analysis of Bolsheviks and Jacobins in the crisis years of revolution appears in Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, pp. 190–93. The daily implications of Jacobin rule for provincial France have been most recently studied by Jean-Pierre Gross, Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Michel Biard, Missionnaires de la R´epublique: Les repr´esentants du peuple en mission (Paris: Editions du CTHS, 2002). On that most notorious of Jacobins, Maximilien Robespierre, of course, the historiography is vast: it ranges from J. M. Thompson’s classic biography Robespierre, 2 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1935), to John Hardman, Robespierre (London:

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Longman, 1999), and the essays in C. Haydon and W. Doyle, eds., Robespierre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Indispensable for the bureaucracy of the Terror is Clive H. Church, Revolution and Red Tape: The French Ministerial Bureaucracy 1770–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). There is, logically, a voluminous literature on the military affairs of the Terror: consult (in addition to the aforementioned works by Bertaud, Scott, and John Lynn) Alan Forrest, The Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), and William S. Cormack, Revolution and Political Conflict in the French Navy, 1789–1794 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). That state reconsolidation never progressed as far in revolutionary England as it was to in the two later revolutionary situations has by no means diverted scholarly attention from the years 1649–53. Parliamentary politics in this most advanced phase of the English upheaval can boast an able historian in Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). More recent work has in “structuralist” fashion dealt with the military/fiscal aspects of statebuilding in this era: see, above all, Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and James S. Wheeler, The Making of a World Power: War and the Military Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Stroud, 1999). Both Braddick and Wheeler inevitably owe much to G. E. Aylmer’s The State’s Servants: The Civil Service of the English Republic, 1649– 1660 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). But see also, in the area of envisioned (if not consummated) legal reform: Stuart E. Prall, The Agitation for Law Reform in the Puritan Revolution (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966), and Donald Veall, The Popular Movement for Law Reform 1640–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). On military affairs in this era, refer again to Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and to Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Disillusionment with the course of radical but, still, essentially, “mainstream” revolution in ultra-leftist ranks in England, France, and Russia has attracted a flourishing scholarship in recent years. In the case of England, readers may want to start with the Levellers’ falling-out with Cromwell in the postregicide period: instructive in this connection are Norah Carlin, “The Levellers and the Conquest of Ireland in 1649,” Historical Journal 30 (1987): 269–88; and Philip Baker, “Rhetoric, Reality and the Varieties of Civil-War Radicalism,” in Adamson, ed., The English Civil War, pp. 202–24. The standard work on the Barebones Parliament of late 1653 is Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). On religious millenarianism in this epoch, consult: Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber and Faber, 1972); Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); the various essays in J. F. McGregor and Barry Reay, eds., Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984);

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and, by J. C. Davis, “Fear, Myth, and Furore: Reappraising the Ranters,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 79–103; “Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution,” Historical Journal 35 (1992): 507–30; and (by Davis et al.) “Debate: Fear, Myth and Furore,” Past and Present 141 (1993): 155– 210. A sympathetic view of women’s activities in the radical groups of the era is put forth by Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, esp. pp. 306–23. But see also these much more recent studies in the genre: Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Stevie Davies, Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution, 1640–1660 (London: Women’s Press, 1998); and Teresa Feroli, Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006). Discussion of “ultra-radicals” in the case of France has trended along largely secular lines. See, on the enrag´es, R. B. Rose, The Enrag´es: Socialists of the French Revolution? (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1965); and Marc Allan Goldstein, ed., Social and Political Thought of the French Revolution, 1788– 1797 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), esp. pp. 362–70, 456–69, and 474–88. The Hebertist movement has been methodically studied by Morris Slavin, The ´ H´ebertistes to the Guillotine: Anatomy of a ‘Conspiracy’ in Revolutionary France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994). The classic work on the sans-culottes will likely always be Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government, 1793–1794, trans. Remy ´ Inglis Hall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). For a stimulating methodological critique of Soboul, however, see Richard Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), esp. pp. 87–90 and 120–27. Refer also to Cobb’s own chef d’oeuvre in this genre: The People’s Armies: The Arm´ees R´evolutionnaires, Instruments of the Terror (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987). On women’s roles in the revolution, there is much to consult, including Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789–1795 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979); Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); Sara Melzer and Leslie Rabine, eds., Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Shirley E. Roessler, Out of the Shadows: Women and Politics in the French Revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 1996); Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution, trans. Katherine Streip (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and, doubtless, more studies coming off the presses every year! In the Russia of 1917–21, ultra-leftist opposition to Lenin and his closest allies assumed many forms. On the “left opposition” within Bolshevik ranks, the following are essential: Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960); Leonard B. Schapiro, The Origins of the

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Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase, 1917–1922 (London: Macmillan, 1977); and R. J. Kowalski, The Bolshevik Party in Conflict (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991). On ultraleftist turmoil within Socialist Revolutionary ranks, see: Oliver H. Radkey, The Sickle Under the Hammer: The Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the Early Months of Soviet Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); and Michael Melancon, The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian AntiWar Movement, 1914–1917 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990). Readers can consult two careful studies of the Kronstadt rebellion of March 1921: Paul H. Avrich, Kronstadt 1921 (New York: Norton, 1971), and Israel Getzler, Kronstadt, 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). On workers’ agitation in this period, see (in addition to the earlier-cited studies by Oskar Anweiler, T. F. Remington, Steve A. Smith, and David Mandel) these works: William G. Rosenberg, “Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power After October,” Slavic Review 44 (1985); and Vladimir Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). Valuable perspectives on growing peasant agitation during this early phase of Soviet rule are furnished by Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution 1917–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), and by Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917– 1922 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). Last but surely not least are the (increasingly numerous) studies of feminism and women’s roles generally in these years. Here, readers may start with Barbara E. Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), and Beatrice Farnsworth, Alexandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism and the Bolshevik Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980), and then go on to Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), and Barbara Clements, Bolshevik Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Thermidor? Readers particularly interested in consulting the latest scholarship on the Thermidorian era in each of these three revolutions can do so most profitably, perhaps, by seeking it under the three following headings: (1) the complexities and contradictions of Thermidor; (2) the geopolitics of Thermidor; and (3) the crises of revolutionary legitimacy faced by the Thermidorian governments. Exploring the tensions between the relaxation of emergency controls and the persistence of statist reconsolidation in post-Terroristist France invites referral to these recent works: Denis Woronoff, The Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 1794–1799, trans. Julian Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 1984); Bronislaw Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre, trans. Michael Petheram (New York: Cambridge ´ University Press, 1994); Franc¸ois Gendron, La Jeunesse dor´ee. Episodes de la R´evolution franc¸aise (Quebec: Presses de l’Universite´ de Quebec, 1979); ´ ´ Gwynne Lewis, The Second Vend´ee: The Continuity of Counter-Revolution in the Department of the Gard, 1789–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); the essays in Colin Lucas, ed., Beyond the Terror: Essays on French Regional and Social History, 1794–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994); and Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). On the political and social contradictions in postTerrorist Russia, the reader should start with Lewis H. Siegelbaum’s excellent synthesis Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 1918–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Insights on a host of social, economic, cultural, and military issues in this era are to be garnered in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). On the contradictions in Soviet women’s status, see Wendy Z. Goldman, “Freedom and Its Consequences: The Debate on the Soviet Family Code of 1926,” Russian History 11 (1984): 362–88. On the conflictual elements in NEP planning, consult Esther Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); R. W. Davies, The Soviet Collective Farm, 1919–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); and Alan Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921–29 (Berkeley: University of California, 1988). Two bedrock works on ethnicity and state reconstruction in the early Soviet years are Adam Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (London: Secker and Warburg, 1966), and Ronald G. Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972). For a recent overview of the situation in “Thermidorian” England, consult Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. Part V. See also the essays on the Protectorate in these anthologies: G .E. Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement (New York: Macmillan, 1973); Colin Jones, Malyn Newitt, and Stephen Roberts, eds., Politics and People in Revolutionary England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); and John S. Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1990). There is much work to consult as well on the international aspects of Thermidor – most notably with regard to the French expansionism of 1794– 99. A pathbreaking effort in this area was Sydney Biro, The German Policy of Revolutionary France: A Study of French Diplomacy during the War of the First Coalition, 1792–1797, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

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University Press, 1957). Steven T. Ross has since provided a useful study of French military planning in Quest for Victory: French Military Strategy, 1792– 1799 (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1973). More recent ruminations on French foreign policy appear in Linda Frey and Marsha Frey, “‘The Reign of the Charlatans is Over’: The French Revolutionary Attack on Diplomatic Practice,” Journal of Modern History 65 (1993): 706–44; Peter H. Sahlins, “Natural Frontiers Revisited: France’s Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century,” American Historical Review 95 (1990): 1423–51; and T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars 1787–1802 (London: Arnold, 1996). The administrative/fiscal bases for French expansionism in the late 1790s are reviewed by Howard G. Brown in War, Revolution, and the Bureaucratic State: Politics and Army Administration in France, 1791–1799 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). The British perspective in all of this is explored in these works: A. B. Rodger, The War of the Second Coalition, 1798–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); Edward Ingram, Commitment to Empire: Prophecies of the Great Game in Asia, 1797–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); and Piers Mackesy, War without Victory: The Downfall of Pitt, 1799–1802 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). For the Austrian perspective, consult Karl A. Roider, Jr., Baron Thugut and Austria’s Response to the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Paul W. Schroeder, “The Collapse of the Second Coalition,” Journal of Modern History 59 (1987): 244–90. The Thermidorian foreign policies of England and Russia were, if astute, much less aggressive than that of late-revolutionary France, and have attracted a commensurately less extensive scholarly notice. Where England was concerned, much of the “bad press” Lord Protector Cromwell had received ever since his death in 1658 was reaffirmed by Menna Prestwich in “Diplomacy and Trade in the Protectorate,” Journal of Modern History 22 (1950): 103–21. Subsequent research on Protectoral foreign policy has been easier on Oliver: see, for instance, Roger Crabtree, “The Idea of a Protestant Foreign Policy,” in Ivan Roots, ed., Cromwell: A Profile (New York: Macmillan, 1973): 160– 89; Charles P. Korr, Cromwell and the New Model Foreign Policy: England’s Policy Toward France, 1649–1658 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); and Timothy Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). The commercial aspects of the Anglo-Dutch rivalry in this period were underscored in Charles H. Wilson, Profit and Power: A Study of England and the Dutch Wars (London: Longman, 1957); the ideological aspects of this rivalry receive unparalleled treatment in Stephen C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Bernard Capp’s aforementioned Cromwell’s Navy, of course, remains indispensable in this domain. So does Michael Robert’s Essays in Swedish History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), esp. chapter 6 on “Cromwell and the Baltic:” neither Crabtree nor Venning, in their subsequent work, could cite a better source on the Baltic dimensions of Cromwellian foreign policy.

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Two studies of early Soviet foreign policy dating from the 1950s can still be read with profit: E. H. Carr, German-Soviet Relations Between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1951); and Louis Fischer, The Soviets in World Affairs: A History of Relations between the Soviet Union and the Rest of the World, 1917–1929 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951). On the “community of fate” (schicksalgemeinschaft) supposedly binding Germany and Russia together in the 1920s, refer to Kurt Rosenbaum, Community of Fate: German-Soviet Diplomatic Relations, 1922–1928 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1965); and Gordon H. Mueller, “Rapallo Reexamined: A New Look at Germany’s Secret Military Collaboration with Russia in 1922,” Military Affairs 40 (1976): 109– 17. Chicherin’s diplomacy in the “late-revolutionary” era can be pursued in Teddy J. Uldricks, Diplomacy and Ideology: The Origins of Soviet Foreign Relations, 1917–1930 (London and Beverly Hills, Calif.: SAGE, 1979), and in Timothy Edward O’Connor, Diplomacy and Revolution: G. V. Chicherin and Soviet Foreign Affairs, 1918–1930 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988). The Soviet “war scare” of the late 1920s is carefully reappraised in John P. Sontag, “The Soviet War Scare of 1926–27,” Russian Review 34 (1975): 66–77. Two more recent analyses of early Soviet foreign policy are Richard K. Debo, Survival and Consolidation: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1918–1921 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992); and Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). The Protectorate’s efforts to legitimize itself at home have fascinated English historians down to the present day. Readers might start here with the “exchange” between H. R. Trevor-Roper and his erstwhile student Roger Howell, Jr.: Trevor-Roper, “Oliver Cromwell and His Parliaments,” in Roots, ed., Cromwell: A Profile, pp. 91–135; and Howell, “Cromwell and His Parliaments: The Trevor-Roper Thesis Revisited,” in R. C. Richardson, ed., Images of Oliver Cromwell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), chapter 8. Austin Woolrych pertinently inquired as to whether or not the Protectorate constituted a military dictatorship, and responded (primarily) in the negative: see Woolrych, “The Cromwellian Protectorate: A Military Dictatorship?” in History 75 (1990): 207–31. The contentious issue of the major-generals was suggestively discussed by Ivan Roots in “Swordsmen and Decimators,” in R. H. Parry, ed., The English Civil War and After (London: Macmillan, 1970); but this – and all other commentaries on the subject – have been superseded by Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government During the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Since the turn of the century, the whole question of Cromwell’s relationship with the First and Second Protectorate Parliaments (reexamined in some detail from a legislative point of view in earlier articles by Ivan Roots and Peter Gaunt, among others) has given rise to a rejuvenated literature: see (for example) Barry Coward, The Cromwellian Protectorate (New York: Palgrave, 2002);

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David L. Smith, ed., Cromwell and the Interregnum: The Essential Readings (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003); and, above all, David L. Smith and Patrick Little, Parliaments and Politics During the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). The discussion goes on! The constitutional viability of the French Directory of 1795–99 remains, at the very least, problematic in scholarly eyes today. Here, to be entirely fair, readers may want to start all the way back with Albert Goodwin’s stout defense of this regime: “The French Executive Directory – A Revaluation,” History 22 (1937): 201–18. J. R. Suratteau updates the germane historiography considerably in his “Le Directoire d’apr`es des travaux recents,” Annales Historiques ´ de la R´evolution Franc¸aise 224 (1976): 181–214. A judicious review of the strengths and weaknesses of the Directory is offered in Martyn Lyons, France Under the Directory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Attempts by the Directory to legitimize itself in religious terms loom centrally in Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). (For a more negative assessment, however, refer back to McManners, The French Revolution and the Church, passim.) The seminal volume on the Jacobin revival in the late 1790s remains Isser Woloch, Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement Under the Directory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970). Articles that criticize the Directory from a provincial (and political-cultural) perspective include: Colin Lucas, “The First Directory and the Rule of Law,” French Historical Studies 10 (1977): 231–60; Lynn Hunt, David Lansky, and Paul Hanson, “The Failure of the Liberal Republic in France, 1795–1799: The Road to Brumaire,” Journal of Modern History 51 (1979): 734–59; and Lucas, “The Rules of the Game in Local Politics Under the Directory,” French Historical Studies 16 (1989): 345–71. Clive H. Church, while stressing the ongoing progress toward a more modern, Weberian-style state bureaucracy in Directorial France, has also questioned the extent to which this regime was securely anchored in contemporaneous French society: see, on this point, Church, “In Search of the Directory,” in J. F. Bosher, ed., French Government and Society, 1500–1850, esp. pp. 274–76, 279–80, and 288–89. Even in military ranks, it appears, the government generated opposition by excessively waging war: on this point, see Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: the Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Howard G. Brown has recently added his voice to the chorus of those scholars seeing the Directory as weakened from the start by its lack of legitimacy in the eyes of crucially situated groups in French society: refer to Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). In the case of “Thermidorian” Russia, legitimization of the new regime turned on the fierce debate raging in Communist Party circles over the nature and pace of economic development. The reader can start here with Alexander Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928 (Cambridge, Mass.:

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Harvard University Press, 1962), and James R. Millar and Alec Nove, “A Debate on Collectivization: Was Stalin Really Necessary?” in Problems of Communism 25 (1976): 49–62. Moshe Lewin and Stephen F. Cohen have carried the water for a highly critical revisionism on the subject. See, by Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, trans. Irene Nove (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968); Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974); and The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). Cohen’s contributions to the debate include: Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938, rev. ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980); and Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Something of a middle ground between such revisionism and retrospective Stalinist apologetics is occupied well by R. W. Davies, The Industrialization of Soviet Russia: The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929–30 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). On the evolution of Communist Party membership during this period, the classic work is T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968). The interactions between Party and proletariat are traced by Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); but see also, along these lines, William Chase, Workers, Society, and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow, 1918–1929 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). The new Soviet state’s ongoing attempts to retain (or establish) a basic acceptance, or legitimacy, in other than strictly proletarian ranks are studied in works such as Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992); Anne E. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia. Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and the many superb essays in Fitzpatrick, Rabinowitch, and Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP. “Revolutions from Below” and “Revolutions from Above” For insatiable readers avid to pursue developments in England, France, and Russia beyond what this study has designated as the “Thermidorian” phases in the three revolutions, there is a wealth of recent historiography to consult. Some of this historiography is touched on in the paragraphs that follow, though obviously they by no means exhaust the possibilities here! In the case of Russia, important recent works on the modernization campaign of the 1930s (in addition to those studies already mentioned) include R. W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), and Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley:

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University of California Press, 1995). On the Stalinist Terror of the late 1930s, see (among other works) J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); and Oleg V. Khlevnyuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). An updated, relatively positive reappraisal of modernization under Stalin is provided by Robert C. Allen, Farm and Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). A gendered treatment of these dynamics is found in Wendy Z. Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Readers can pursue some of the latest reflections on the cultural aspects of Stalin’s “revolution from above” by consulting such works as David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1936 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). Any reader knowing little of the “revolution from above” introduced in England under William and Mary and their successors should approach the subject initially through such studies as: J. R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), and W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). The 1990s saw the publication of a wealth of new monographs and anthologies dealing not only with the domestic implications of the “Glorious Revolution” but also with its international impact. See, among the most outstanding of these works: John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Jonathan Israel, ed., The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold, eds., The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–1689 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Michael S. Braddick, The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558–1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); and David A. Smith, A History of the Modern British Isles 1603–1707: The Double Crown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). A major book of the past decade on the “Glorious Revolution” is by Stephen C. A. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Finally, readers who have French may want to approach the enormous subject of Napoleon’s “revolution from above” through an essay by Jacques

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Godechot that has become something of a classic: “Sens et importance de la transformation des institutions revolutionnaires a` l’epoque napoleonienne,” in ´ ´ ´ Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 17 (1970): 795–813. Several useful subsequent syntheses in this field are: Robert Holtman, The Napoleonic Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Louis Bergeron, France Under Napoleon, trans. Robert R. Palmer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); and, by the indefatigable Godechot, Les Institutions de la France sous la R´evolution et l’Empire, 3rd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985). There are, of course, more specialized monographs on specific subjects in this domain. On Napoleon’s religious policies, for example, see Margaret M. O’Dwyer, The Papacy in the Age of Napoleon and the Restoration: Pius VII, 1800–1823 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985). On women’s rights under the Civil Code of 1804 – and in the revolutionary/Napoleonic era in general – see (in addition to the earlier-cited works of Garaud and Szramkiewicz and Suzanne Desan) Darlene G. Levy and Harriet B. Applewhite, “A Political Revolution for Women? The Case of Paris,” in Renate Bridenthal, Susan M. Stuard, and Merry E. Wiesner, Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998): 266–91. On the implications of rural conservatism in nineteenth-century France for industrialization and other forms of economic modernization in this country, consult studies ranging from Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times: From the Enlightenment to the Present, 4th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987) to (much more recently) Alice L. Conklin, Sarah Fishman, and Robert Zaretsky, France and Its Empire since 1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Index

Acton, Edward, 38, 40 Adamson, John, 25 Agitators: in New Model Army, 292–97 Agreement of the People: See electoral reforms: debated at Putney Church; Levellers; Lilburne, John Alexandra Fedorovna, tsarina of Russia, 65, 66, 125, 143, 147–49. See also Nicholas II, tsar of Russia American War (1778–83), 112, 158 Amussen, Susan, 33 Anderson, Perry, 7 April Crisis (1917), 248–52 Assembly of Notables (in 1787), 160–62; (in 1788), 169 Astrov, Nikolai, 103 Austrian Succession, War of the, 56 Baker, Keith, 27, 39 Barber, Sarah, 33 Barebones Parliament (1653), 376–78 Bastwick, John, 116, 211 Bien, David D., 30 Bishops’ Wars (1639–40), 149–56, 183–84, 270 Blanning, T. C. W., 31 Bolsheviks. See Intelligentsia: in Russia; Lenin, Vladimir I.: issues “April Theses” on return from exile in April 1917; Red (Bolshevik) Terror: cultural elements of Bonaparte, Napoleon, 424, 427, 456 Braddick, Michael J., 14, 26, 35–36 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918), 332–33, 353

Brinton, Crane: defines attributes of “Reigns of Terror and Virtue,” 318; defines “honeymoon” phases of revolutions, 186–87; postulates the sequelae of these revolutions, 2, 474; revolutionary theory of, 1–2; scholarly criticisms of, 3–5 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre: political role of in Legislative Assembly, 273–76; role of in Convention, 276–78 Brusilov, Alexei, 141, 147, 178, 282–83 Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of, 49, 51, 75, 77, 79, 95, 98 Bukharin, Nikolai, 405, 410, 446, 476 bureaucratization: in revolutionary England, 367–68, 421; in revolutionary France, 191–92, 362–63, 400–01; in revolutionary Russia, 351–52. See also Rabkrin Burton, Henry, 116, 211 Cabarrus, Ther` ´ ese, 398, 417 cahiers de dol´eances (1789): content analyses of, 169–70, 172–73. See also Estates-General (1789) Calonne, Charles-Alexandre de: ill-fated financial ministry of, 158–61 Champ de Mars massacre, 246–47 Charles I, king of England: constitutional ideas of, 75–76; definitively embraces Arminian ecclesiology of Archbishop Laud, 118–20; execution of, 257, 271–72; foreign policy of, 49–51, 112–17; Personal Rule of, 112–21; role of in Civil War, 263–68; seeks Five Members in January 1642, 237–38, 240

523

524 Cheka: origins and functions of, 330–31, 349; sociological analysis of, 351–52. See also Dzerzhinskii, Felix; Red (Bolshevik) Terror Chernov, Victor, 236, 249, 260 Chicherin, Georgi V.: foreign ministry of, 439–47, 467 Christianson, Paul, 25 Civil Code (1804), 485–86 Civil Constitution of Clergy, 193–94, 224–25 Cobban, Alfred, 24 Collins, Randall, 7 Comintern, 405, 410, 446 Committee of Both Kingdoms, 268 Committee of General Security, 356, 396 Committee of Public Safety: roles of in Jacobin Terror, 356; powers of reduced radically in Thermidor, 396. See also Jacobin Terror Concordat of 1801, 486–87 Constituent Assembly: mobilizes for war during Varennes crisis, 244–45; structural reforms passed by in 1789–91, 188–99 Convention: changing political dynamics of in Thermidor, 396–97; struggle for power in during 1792–93, 276–80 Council of People’s Commissars. See Sovnarkom Council of State (England), 364–65, 371, 418 court versus country: employed as analytical theme by Perez Zagorin, Lawrence Stone, and other historians of late Tudor, early Stuart England, 80–81 Cressy, David, 11, 34 Crimean War, 59, 65, 69 Cromwell, Oliver: ambitions of still debated by historians, 449–51; crushes Levellers in 1650s, 372–75; crushes Rump (April 20, 1653), 375; dissolves Barebones Parliament in December 1653, 377; opposes Charles I during civil wars of 1640s, 255–57; resolved, finally, to support Charles I’s execution, 264, 271–72; serves as Lord Protector during late 1650s, 419–21; steers British foreign policy during 1650s, 432–39; tries to find points of reconciliation at Putney Debates, 295–96 Daniels, Robert V., 39–40 Davies, James, 6 Davis, J. C., 33 Democratic Centralism, 387 Derrida, Jacques, 15

Index Desan, Suzanne, 15 Diggers, 374 Directory: administrative reforms of, 398–401; constitutional weaknesses of, 456–58; fiscal reforms of, 401–03; foreign policy of, 423–31; military reforms of, 403–05 Duma, Imperial. See Miliukov, Paul: opposes tsarist regime in 1916–17 Dumouriez, Charles-Franc¸ois, 259 Dunes, Battle of the, 437 Dunn, John, 11–12, 18, 19 Durnovo, P. N., 73 Dzerzhinskii, Felix, 331, 337–38, 342, 349, 351, 385–86, 466. See also Cheka; Red (Bolshevik) Terror Eastern Crisis of 1876–78, 60 Eckstein, Harry, 4, 5 Edwards, Lyford P., 4, 8, 43 Eisenstadt, S. N.: modernization theories of, 6 electoral reforms: debated in England at Putney Church, 295; implemented in revolutionary France, 189–91, 302, 456–57; implemented in revolutionary Russia, 202 Eleven Years’ Tyranny. See Charles I, king of England: Personal Rule of Eliot, John, 96–97 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 48–49 e´ migr´es: increasingly persecuted in the course of 1792–93, 300–02 Engagement of 1649, 366, 416 Enlightenment: ideology of in ancien r´egime France, 93, 137–39 Enrag´es, 378–81. See also Leclerc, Theophile; ´ Roux, Jacques; Varlet, Jean Estates-General: historic role of, 84–89; in 1789, 169–72 Figes, Orlando, 38, 40, 41 First Balkan Crisis (1908–09), 122 First Protectorate Parliament, 451–52 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 38, 40 Fleurus, battle of, 423 Foran, John, 7, 22 Foucault, Michel, 15 French royal army: divided condition of in old regime, 91–92; reformed in 1787–88, 163–64; reformed in 1789–91, 197–99; revolutionized more thoroughly in the course of late 1790s, 298–300, 362–63

Index Furet, Franc¸ois, 25, 27–30, 39 Gallicanism. See Jansenism: as ideology subverting crown in old regime France Geertz, Clifford, 15 gentry: scholarly debate over the economic vitality of in old regime Russia, 68–69, 126–27; swept away by peasantry in Russian upheaval of 1917–18, 312–15 Glorious Revolution of 1688–89: compared with Stalin’s revolution of 1930s, 483–84; consequences of, 480–83; historiographical debate over, 26 Goldman, Emma, 408 Goldstone, Jack, 3, 13, 15, 22, 29–30 Golitsyn, V. M., 102 Gorky, Maksim, 251 Gosplan, 465–66. See also Industrialization debate in USSR; Vesenkha (Supreme Economic Council) Grand Remonstrance, 217, 220, 238 Guchkov, Alexander: is challenged in his capacity as War Minister by Petrograd Soviet in March 1917, 206–07 Gurr, Ted Robert, 6–7 Hammer, Armand, 407–08 Hampden, John, 116, 209, 268 Heads of Proposals. See electoral reforms: debated at Putney Church Hebert, Jacques-Rene, ´ ´ 381 Hebertism, 381–83. See also enrag´es; ´ sans-culottes Henrietta-Maria, queen of England, 75–76, 151, 154–55, 240, 342, 434. See also Charles I, king of England Hexter, Jack, 24 High Courts of Justice: in Independent/ Cromwellian Terror of 1649–53, 342–43 Hoffman, Philip T., 18 Holles, Denzil, 96, 268, 269 Hunt, Lynn, 10, 20, 22, 27, 28–30 Huntington, Samuel: modernization theories of, 6, 19 Independent/Cromwellian Terror: British aspects of, 345; cultural elements of, 345–46; domestic and foreign circumstances of, 339–42; statistical analysis of, 339–46. See also Charles I, king of England: execution of; High Courts of Justice Industrialization Debate in USSR, 466–68

525 Intelligentsia: in Russia, 70–72 Ireton, Henry: debates Levellers at Putney Church in 1647, 295; moves for execution of Charles I after civil wars, 271–72 Irish Rebellion (1641), 219–20, 238–40 Izvolski, Alexander, 122 Jacobin Terror: cultural components of, 326–27; domestic and international circumstances of, 321–24; provincial aspects of, 325–26; relaxed sharply in Thermidor, 396–98; statistical analysis of, 320–29. See also Jacobins: during Terror Jacobins: compared to Bolsheviks, 357; during Constituent Assembly, 221–29; during Terror, 356–58; during Varennes crisis, at Paris and in provinces, 245–47. See also Jacobin Terror James I, king of England: constitutional ideas of, 75; foreign policy of, 47–49 Jansenism: as ideology subverting crown in old regime France, 93–94 Jemappes, battle of, 258 jeunesse dor´ee, 397–98, 417 Johnson, Chalmers, 3, 5, 10 Jourdan Law (1798), 404–05, 462 June Offensive (1917), 282–84 Kadets. See Intelligentsia: in Russia; Miliukov, Paul: opposes tsarist regime in 1916–17 Kaiser, Thomas E., 29, 31–32 Kamkov, Boris, 334, 386 Kelsey, Sean, 33 Kerensky, Alexander, 200, 231, 235, 250; as prime minister, 261–63, 285–89; as war minister, 260–61; leads abortive “June Offensive”, 282–84; survives (as of 1970) in upstate New York, 338 Kimmel, Michael, 4, 10, 17, 19, 22, 43 Kishlansky, Mark, 25, 33 Kokovtzov, V. N., 122–23 Kollontai, Aleksandra, 387, 392 Kolonitskii, Boris, 39 Konovalov, Alexander: as Minister of Trade and Industry in 1917, 204 Kornilov, Lavr, 261, 285–87 Kotkin, Stephen, 39 Kronstadt Rebellion (March 1921), 385, 388, 390–91. See also proletariat: rises up in many areas against new Soviet regime in 1918 Labrousse, C.-E., 159, 170

526 Lacombe, Claire, 378–79. See also enrag´es Lafayette, Marie-Joseph-Paul-Gilbert du Motier, marquis de, 138, 161, 166, 247, 273, 306 Lambert, John, 377, 416 Laud, William, 82, 99; as Archbishop of Canterbury, 112, 117–18, 156, 184; imprisoned (1641), tried (1644) and, eventually, executed (January 1645), 210, 221; properties of threatened by London mobs in 1639–40, 181–84 La Revelli` ere-Lepeaux, Louis-Marie, 458 ´ ´ Leclerc, Theophile, 378–81. See also enrag´es ´ Left SRs: challenge Lenin’s new Soviet regime in 1918 and after, 334, 385 Legislative Assembly: internal political dynamics of during 1791–92, 272–76 Lenin, Vladimir I.: calls for seizing power in September 1917, 262; contributes to Stalin’s rise to power, 411–12; differs with Stalin on class and ethnic issues, 412–13; ideas of on foreign policy of revolutionary Russia in Great War era, 439–41; issues “April Theses” on return from exile in April 1917, 233; leads the efforts to consolidate powers of new Soviet regime in 1917–18, 347–49, 351, 352–54, 362; reveals some ambivalence regarding the future trajectory of the NEP (New Economic Policy), 406–07 Lenin Levies, 470 Leon, Pauline, 378, 379. See also enrag´es ´ lev´ee en masse (1793), 299, 323 Levellers: crushed by Cromwell in 1650s, 372–75; ideas of during height of their influence in late 1640s, 294–97 Le Chapelier Law (1791), 196–97 Lilburne, John, 181, 211, 294, 296. See also Cromwell, Oliver: crushes Levellers in 1650s; Independent/Cromwellian Terror: domestic and foreign circumstances of; Levellers: ideas of during height of their influence in late 1640s Litvinov, Maxim, 440, 443, 446, 467. See also Chicherin, Georgi V.: foreign policy of Lomenie de Brienne, Etienne-Charles, ´ 160–65 Long Parliament: elections to in 1640, 153; political dynamics of during civil wars, 267–72; reforms implemented by during 1640–42, 209–12 Louis XIV, king of France: grandiose foreign policy of, 51–54

Index Louis XV, king of France: constitutional philosophy of, 84–85; over-extended foreign policy of, 51–58 Louis XVI, king of France: constitutional philosophy of, 134; duplicitous acts of during early years of revolution, 228–29; execution of in January 1793, 258, 279; flees kingdom in June of 1791, 242–47; geopolitical ideas of, 130; social ideas of, 136 Lucas, Colin, 25 Lvov, Georgii, 144–45, 174–76, 186, 200–03, 249–50, 316 McPhee, Peter, 29 Major-Generals (1655–57), 452–54 Malesherbes, Chretien Guillaume de ´ Lamoignon de, 93, 107, 134 Malia, Martin, 3, 12–13, 43 Mally, Lynn, 40 Manuilov, Alexander, as Minister of Education in 1917, 206 Marie-Antoinette, queen of France, 139, 157; growing political influence of at Versailles in late 1780s, 164–65; intensifying opposition of to reforms of Constituent Assembly, 226–29; intrigues for royal escape from France (1791), 240–47. See also Louis XVI, king of France Markoff, John, 29 Marston Moor, battle of, 256 Mary, Queen of Scots, 48, 83 Maupeou, Rene-Nicolas-Charles-Augustin de, ´ 104–08. See also Maupeou Revolution Maupeou Revolution, 104–09 Maximum G´en´eral, 359–60 Mazauric, Claude, 24 Mensheviks. See Intelligentsia: in Russia Migulin, P., 63 Mirabeau, Honore´ Gabriel Victor Riqueti, comte de, 138, 166, 168 Military Opposition (1918), 387. See also Trotsky, Leon Militia Committee (1640s), 239–40. See also Long Parliament: political dynamics of during civil wars Miliukov, Paul: opposes tsarist regime in 1916–17, 144–45, 148, 174, 175–76; serves as Foreign Minister in early 1917, 200, 203, 208, 229–36, 248–52; thinks back upon Russian Revolution from his exile in the West, 259

Index Moore, Barrington, 7, 19 Morrill, John S., 25 Napoleon. See Bonaparte, Napoleon Napoleonic revolution-from-above: specific aspects and historical results of, 484–88 Narkomindel (NKID), 440–41. See also Chicherin Georgi V.; Litvinov, Maxim Naseby, battle of, 256, 270, 276 Naval reforms in revolutions: analyzed in comparative fashion, 369–71 Necker, Jacques, 131, 135, 158, 163, 169 Nekrasov, Nicholas: as popular Minister of Transport in 1917, 204–05 New Economic Policy (NEP): aspects of, 405–09; is increasingly challenged in late 1920s, 465–66; strengths and weaknesses of debated by later historians, 467–69 New Model Army, 256; as catalyst for a radical revolution in late 1640s, 290–96; triumphs of in civil wars of 1640s, 269–71; victories of in 1650s, 368–69 Nicholas II, tsar of Russia: fails to support ministers such as Sergei Witte and Peter Stolypin in prewar years, 121–27; opposes basic reforms during Great War, 140–49; relinquishes power in February 1917, 175–180; reprehensible tendencies of in prerevolutionary Russia, 64–66; sentenced to be immediately shot, along with other family members, in July 1918, at behest of leading Bolsheviks, 393 (n. 188) Nikolayevich, Konstantin, 45, 59 Norbrook, David, 33 Nye, John V. C., 18 October Manifesto (1905), 100–01 Okhrana, 177, 179, 346, 351 Order No. 1 (1917), 206–07 Orgburo, 350 Osinskii-Obolenskii, Valerian, 386, 387 Paris Parlement: historic role of, 84, 88–89, 136; political role of in 1787–88, 160–69 Parker, Noel, 12, 13, 16, 20, 22 Parliament: historic role of in English political and foreign affairs, 77–79 peasants: analyzed, comparatively, in English, French, and Russian Revolutions, 297–98, 315–16 Pepys, Samuel, 439 Petition of Right Controversy, 95–100

527 Petrograd Soviet: watches over the reformist ministers of Provisional Government in 1917, 199–208 Pettee, George, 8 Pincus, Stephen C. A., 26, 30 Pipes, Richard, 39 Plehve, V. K., 103 Politburo, 350 Politique de bascule in French Directory, 461–64 proletariat: helps to overthrow tsarist regime in February Days (1917), 176–80; increasingly radicalized during summer of 1917, 310–12; rises up in many areas against new Soviet regime in 1918, 388–91 Protectorate: British policy of, 421–22; constitution of, 415–16; foreign policy of, 432–39; structural weaknesses of, 448–49 Provisional Government (1917): foreign policy of, 281–89; reforms of in early 1917, 199–208. See also Petrograd Soviet Prynne, William, 116, 211 Putney Debates (1647), 257, 295–96. See also Cromwell, Oliver; Ireton, Henry; Levellers; Lilburne, John Pym, John, role of in Long Parliament, 152, 209, 213–20, 264, 268–70; role of in Short Parliament, 152. See also Long Parliament: political dynamics of during civil wars Rabaut Saint-Etienne, Jean-Paul: famously criticizes privil`ege for impeding efforts at reform in prerevolutionary France, 137 Rabkrin, 349, 351, 361 Rapallo Treaty, 442–44 Rasputin, Grigorii, 143, 147–48, 179 Red Army: established under Trotsky’s leadership, 352–54; overhauled during 1920s, 413–14 Red (Bolshevik) Terror: chronology of, 330; cultural elements of, 337–38; domestic and foreign circumstances of, 332–37; social incidence of, 336–37; statistical analysis of, 330–39 religion: opposing conspiracy theories of held by Puritans, Catholics, and others in ancien r´egime and early revolutionary England, 80–84, 118–21, 180–84 Revolution of 1905, 100–04. See also Russo-Japanese War Richet, Denis, 25

528 Robespierre, Maximilien: calls for need to expropriate Gallican Church, 192–93; champions popular cause in early days of revolution, 222; champions role in foreign affairs for Constituent Assembly in 1790–91, 225; debates Brissot over geostrategic issues at Jacobin Club, 275; demands execution of Louis XVI in late 1792, 279; falls from power in Thermidor, Year II, 382–83; functions as a leader of Jacobin Terror in 1793–94, 328; splits with Feuillant faction after Champ de Mars Massacre, 246–47; wishes to deny judicial procedure to Louis XVI during his trial in 1792–93, 279 (n. 52), 393 (n. 188) Rosenberg, William G., 16, 41 Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent, 18 Rossbach, battle of, 57 Roux, Jacques, 378–81. See also enrag´es Rupert, Prince, 264–65, 290, 342 Russell, Conrad, 25, 26, 34 Russian (Imperial) Army: serves as a catalyst for urban and rural upheaval in 1917, 308–10; state of in spring and summer of 1917, 282–84; weakened condition of in late 1916 and early 1917, 145–47 Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), 349 Russo-Japanese War (1904–06), 61–62, 69, 100–04, 121, 126. See also Revolution of 1905 Saint-Just, Louis Antoine: does not see dictatorship as permanent solution to constitutional problems in Jacobin France, 382; wishes to deny Louis XVI judicial procedure altogether during his trial in 1792–93, 279 (n. 52), 393 (n. 188) sans-culottes: analyzed by Albert Soboul, 383–85. See also enrag´es; Hebertism ´ Scott, Jonathan, 34, 35 Second Balkan Crisis (1912–13), 122 Second Protectorate Parliament, 454–56. See also Protectorate: structural weaknesses of seigneurialism: abolished tentatively and then altogether in France during 1792–93, 305–07; curtailed but not abolished altogether by Constituent Assembly in early August 1789, 194–96 Servan, Antoine Marie Joseph de: links fiscal crisis in prerevolutionary France directly to historic French belligerence, 138–39

Index Seven Years’ War, 56–58, 87, 94, 104 Sewell, William H., 21–22, 39 Sharpe, Kevin, 25, 32–33 Shingarev, Andrei: as Agriculture Minister in early 1917, 203–04 Ship Money, 116–17, 150, 211 Short Parliament: elections to in 1640, 153; ultimately dismissed by Charles I after brief session, 181–82 Siey`es, Abbe´ Emmanuel-Joseph, 167, 169 Skocpol, Theda: compares French and Russian peasant upheavals, 315–16; compares Montagnard and Bolshevik dictatorships, 357–58; revolutionary theory of, 7–10; scholarly criticisms of, 10–22; sees French peasants as ready, psychologically, for a revolutionary role in summer of 1789, 173 Smith, Nigel, 33 Smith, Steve A., 16, 36–37, 39 Soboul, Albert, 24 Solemn League and Covenant, 256, 268, 270. See also Long Parliament: political dynamics of during civil wars Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars): plays crucial role in consolidation of Soviet state, 347–50, 356, 364 Spiridonova, Maria, 334, 385, 386. See also Left SRs: challenge Lenin’s new Soviet regime in 1918 and after Stalin, Joseph: ambivalence regarding so-called “war scare” in 1927, 446–47; articulates “Socialism in One Country” slogan during 1920s, 466–68; begins to implement a crash “modernization” drive in 1929 and thereafter, 475–78; orchestrates “Great Terror” in late 1930s, 477–78 Stavka (Supreme Military Headquarters), 178 Stolypin, P. A., 123, 125–28 Stolypin Reforms: implications of for Russian peasants debated by scholars today, 126–27; provide limited degree of economic progress for peasants during Great War, 177 Stone, Lawrence, 4, 5, 23, 24, 34 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, earl of, 96, 117, 154, 184; execution of (1641), 210, 221 Strode, William, 45, 51, 58, 99, 209 Sukhanov, Nikolai, 200–01, 230, 232–33, 248, 251 Suny, Ronald, 39 Sverdlov, Iakov, 335, 347, 349. See also Sovnarkom; VTsIK

Index Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles-Maurice de, 428 ´ Tawney, R. H., 24 Taylor, George V., 24–25 Tenth Bolshevik Party Congress (March 1921), 410–12 Tereshchenko, Mikhail Ivanovich: attitudes of on Russian foreign policy issues evolve in course of 1917, 287–89; serves as finance minister in 1917, 231; serves as foreign minister in Second and Third Coalition Governments in 1917, 260 Terray, Abbe´ Joseph Marie, 104 Thermidor: conception of as a stage in revolution poses difficulties for many scholars, 394–95; stimulates debates among Lenin’s successors after Lenin’s death in January 1924, 465 Thirty Years’ War, 48–51, 77, 81–82, 99, 113, 118 Tilly, Charles, 12, 18, 20, 22, 43 Trevor-Roper, Hugh R., 24 Trimberger, Ellen Kay, 7 Trotsky, Leon: commands the new Soviet Red Army, 352–54; finds his “no war, no peace” formula for negotiations with Imperial Germany rejected by fellow-Bolsheviks in March 1918, 348; sanctions (along with Lenin) the murder of Nicholas II and other members of his family in July 1918, 393 (n. 188); warns of Bolshevik Terror-tocome in address of November 1917, 330 Trubetskoi, Sergei, 67, 101 Tsereteli, Irakli: promotes “revolutionary defensism” as a unifying concept for the Provisional Government’s foreign policy, 232–33, 236, 248–50, 260–61, 281–82 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, baron de l’Aulne, 131 Tyacke, Nicholas, 25 Underdown, David, 32 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR): debated as ethnic issue by Bolsheviks, 412–13. See also Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) Valentine, Benjamin, 96 Valmy, battle of, 258 Van Kley, Dale K., 28, 29 Varennes, Flight to, 242–46

529 Varlet, Jean, 378–81. See also enrag´es Vergennes, Charles-Gravier, comte de: compares basic French and English constitutional development, 45, 135; foreign policy of during 1774–87, 130–34 Verona, Declaration of (1795), 458, 463 Vesenkha (Supreme Economic Council), 465–66. See also Gosplan; Industrialization debate in USSR Von Laue, Theodore H., 41 VTsIK (All-Russian Congress of Soviets Executive): role of in consolidation of new Soviet regime, 347–49, 356, 364 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 17–18 War Communism, 354–55, 360, 363, 366 War Scare of 1927, 444–46 Wardship: abolished in 1646, 297–98 Weber, Max, 14, 16, 17, 347, 368, 489 Weir, David, 18 Western Design, 436–37. See also Cromwell, Oliver: steers British foreign policy during 1650s Wheeler, James S., 26, 35 Whiteman, Jeremy J., 31 Winstanley, Gerrard, 374 Witte, Sergei: orchestrates Russia’s industrialization program under Tsar Nicholas II, 63, 72–74, 93, 104; skillfully handles negotiations in the aftermath of Russo-Japanese War, 100; warns about Imperial Russia’s unpreparedness for war during the lead-up to World War I, 123, 125 Woloch, Isser, 30 Women: diversified roles of in the English, French, and Russian Revolutions, 391–92; insecure status of in postTerrorist France, 398; insecure status of in Soviet Russia, 409–10; score (temporary) gains in status in revolutionary France during 1792–93, 303–04; secure full suffrage in revolutionary Russia (July, 1917), 202; still experience unequal rights in Napoleonic France, 485–86 Workers’ Opposition, 387. See also Democratic Centralism Zagorin, Perez, 24 Zaret, David, 33 zemstvos, 66, 68, 69, 89, 127