Introduction. Revolution from Below

The title of this book, The Third Revolution, is taken from what may seem an extraordinary historical coincidence. The demand for a “third revolution” was actually raised in two great revolutions: the French Revolution in the closing decade of the eighteenth century, and 120 years later in the Russian Revolution during the opening decades of the twentieth.

The revolutionary sans-culottes of Paris in 1793 raised the cry to replace the supposedly radical National Convention with a popular democracy—the Parisian sections—that they themselves had established during a series of insurrections, often against the wishes of the Convention’s Jacobin leaders who professed to speak in their name. In another place and another time, in 1921 in Russia, the revolutionary workers of Petrograd and the famous “red sailors” of Kronstadt, the capital’s nearby naval base, raised the identical cry. They, too, sought to overthrow an authoritarian, though seemingly radical regime—in their case, one led by Bolsheviks—with democratically elected councils or “soviets.”

In surveying the events of these two periods, it struck me as fascinating—and more than a mere coincidence—that this very same demand, word for word, was raised in both Paris and Petrograd toward the end of two historically crucial revolutions that were separated by such a great span of time.

The two peoples who raised the demand profoundly differed in their cultural and social conditions. Neither the Petrograd workers nor the Kronstadt sailors were schooled, as far as I can discern, in revolutionary history—certainly not in the details of 1793—and they could not have known much about the Parisian sans-culottes. Yet they directed the identical cry against a seemingly revolutionary regime that they had helped bring to power and by which they now felt betrayed.

What was it about the dynamics of these two great revolutions that caused such a demand to be raised twice? What brought these revolutionary populaces into open, even bloody, opposition to the leaders, organizations, and regimes that claimed to be radical to one degree or another?

In both cases a “first revolution” had been directed against a patently obsolete monarchy—the Bourbons in France and the Romanovs in Russia—because of the gross incompetence of the royal regime. A shapeless but earnest coalition of liberals, radicals, and even dissatisfied members of the courtly ruling class had taken over the reins of government in this “first revolution,” replacing the monarchy with a new and moderate but irresolute representative government. Accordingly, in both cases, a “second revolution” had followed the first one, in which a radical government that had the support of the most insurgent people proceeded to overthrow the moderate one. But once in power, the radical government, too, became discredited to a point where the revolutionary populace demanded still a “third revolution” to reclaim the power they had lost.

A number of writers on revolution, perhaps most popularly Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution, have advanced a “stages” theory of revolutions that accounts very well for the first two revolutions. According to Brinton’s approach, the English, French, and Russian Revolutions all underwent a series of fairly distinct steps that followed a rough schematic pattern, somewhat as follows:

Initially, the people are drawn into a more or less unified revolt against a monarchy, which leads to the establishment of a moderate regime—or what I (and they) in retrospect call the first revolution. After its initial success, the revolution moves in an increasingly radical direction, followed or accompanied by a civil war that awakens broad sectors of the lower classes, in which extremists engage in a struggle with their formerly moderate allies, thereby leading to the second revolution. In time, however, conflicts within the revolutionary camp are resolved by a military regime, which itself is supplanted by a restoration of the old regime. According to Brinton’s approach—and that of Marx, I should add—this counterrevolution is never entirely successful. The revolution, viewed as a whole, wins in the sense that its social conquests cannot be removed by the restored old regime and are thus institutionalized as a permanent historical advance, despite the nominal defeat of the revolution and its military sequelae.

Besides Brinton, theorists influenced by the “human ecology” ideas of the Chicago School of urban sociology have also advanced such a highly idealized pattern. So, too, have Marxist historians. Leon Trotsky contended to the end of his life that Stalins rule over the former Soviet Union constituted a“Thermidor” comparable to the counterrevolutionary rule of the Directory—the moderates who overthrew Robespierre and the Jacobins—in France.

In fact, the “stages” theory is not completely bereft of truth. Stages there surely were in the major revolutions, successful and unsuccessful alike. The extraordinary similarity, at least in the sequence of events, between the English, French, and Russian Revolutions raises fascinating questions, some of which bear on the nature of revolution itself.

To what extent did political factors outweigh economic ones? To what extent were the outcomes different from what revolutionary leaders had intended— and if greatly so, why? What emancipatory directions could the revolutions have followed, had certain specific events not altered their courses profoundly? In what ways and with what goals did the popular movements—more specifically, ordinary people themselves—affect these revolutions?

The fact is that the stages theory describes only the first and second revolutions. Remarkably, the insurgent people who called for a third revolution seem to have dropped out of the historical schema worked out by Brinton, Trotsky, and others. Yet they were an abiding presence throughout the revolutionary era, and, more than any of the revolutionary figures and parties that loom over most historical accounts of the great revolutions, they were the authentic radicals in the events in which they participated.

For the insurrectionary people, almost alone, were seeking to reclaim and expand highly democratic institutions that had been established during earlier phases of the revolutionary cycle and whose power had been subsequently reduced or usurped by the parties and factions that professed to speak in their name. The French sans-culottes sought to extend the authority of their neighborhood popular assemblies or “sections” at the expense of the increasingly powerful, centralized, essentially lacobin-controlled state apparatus. The Russian workers and sailors wanted to democratize and reinvigorate their grassroots councils or “soviets” as a substitute for the increasingly authoritarian Bolshevik-controlled state apparatus. In demanding a third revolution, they in effect articulated a popular desire for the establishment of a radical democracy, a demand that reached the point of outright insurgency. Ultimately, their uprisings were quelled when the self-styled revolutionary organizations of the second revolution turned against the popular movement and suppressed it with military force.

The failure of insurrectionary people to achieve a popular democracy has nonetheless profoundly affected the events of our own time. Indeed, seldom has the past been so integrally part of the present, for we live under the shadow of the failure of the French and Russian Revolutions to this very day, all recent claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Whether directly, as in the case of the Russian Revolution, or indirectly, as in the case of the French, they profoundly shaped the course of the twentieth century and of the century that is soon to follow—and we cannot afford to face the future without learning what they have to teach us.

It was not only in the French and Russian Revolutions that the demand for a third revolution arose: radical popular tendencies have emerged repeatedly in revolutionary movements of the past, essentially voicing the same demands as the French and Russian insurgents, albeit in different words and different ways. Nor have they been simple popular explosions that lacked direction, purpose, or leadership.

Revolutionary “mobs” or crowds seemed to erupt like elemental forces in major revolutions, yet they were hardly as formless or “chaotic” as many historical accounts and reminiscences would lead us to believe. Episodic crowd eruptions or “riots” should not be confused with the more lasting and underlying popular movements that slowly crystallized from small groups in neighborhoods, towns, and villages into increasingly larger ones during revolutionary periods. Before huge crowds surged around the Bastille on July 14, 1789, in Paris, or confronted czarist troops in the avenues of Petrograd on February 23 and 24, 1917, the people had already established vital political networks in the slums and working-class neighborhoods of both cities.

Such networks existed not only in urban but in village milieus. In the countryside, village life itself often fostered among its members, for all their internal status differences, highly intimate ties and a deep sense of collective mutual responsibility. Radical historians in particular tend to overstate the extent to which the European peasantry was dispersed and atomized and therefore incapable of joint action. They echo too closely Marx’s disparagement of the peasant world in general as mean-spirited, based on his perception of the egoism of the French peasantry of his own time. If all peasant societies resembled that of nineteenth-century France, it would be difficult to explain the peasant movements that fought so zealously and with such self-sacrifice in the Mexican Revolution of 1912, not to speak of the Vietnamese War against the Japanese, French, and American colonialists. The great jacqueries of Europe and Russia would remain mysteries to us if we did not understand that they were rooted in the strong and collectivist village ties of precapitalist agrarian communities.

From the largely medieval peasant wars of the sixteenth-century Reformation to the modern uprisings of industrial workers and peasants, oppressed peoples have created their own popular forms of community association—potentially, the popular infrastructure of a new society—to replace the oppressive states that ruled over them. Generally these popular associations shared the same goal: the de facto political empowerment of the people. In time, during the course of the revolutions, these associations took the institutional form of local assemblies, much like town meetings, or representative councils of mandated recallable deputies.

These networks were generally impervious not only to police surveillance but to subsequent historical investigation. With few exceptions and only in recent times have historians tried to look beyond the formal revolutionary institutions, such as revolutionary parliamentary bodies, and organizations, such as political parties, to discern how ordinary people, and particularly the anonymous militants among them, engaged in their own self-organization.

It is these subterranean popular movements, their various forms of organization such as committee networks and assemblies, and their often littleknown or neglected leaders that I explore in the pages that follow. My own success in this endeavor is necessarily limited, since this hidden area of activity is hardly replete with documentation and objective reminiscences.

Nonetheless, on the basis of what 1 have been able to gather, I have found that the process of popular self-organization often broadly follows a definite pattern. In the poorer neighborhoods—and in the countryside, in the villages of underprivileged peasants—people initially gather in local taverns, cafes, squares, and marketplaces; in industrial areas they gather in factory “hangouts,” in union halls, or in casas del pueblo (literally, “houses of the people,” or neighborhood centers). There they have access to newspapers, lectures, classes, and the like. Ultimately, these loose gatherings give rise to a distinctive neighborhood political culture, with educational, debating, even choral and literary groups. Such little-noticed and poorly explored cultures then undergo a process of structuration, influenced by an articulate, militant grassroots leadership, so that an organized popular movement begins to emerge. This occurs quite often without the help of any political parties. There is a very real sense, in fact, in which all the great revolutions of the past were civic or municipal revolutions at their base, whether it was a village, town, neighborhood, or city where the complex process of community structuration took place. Hence what often appears to the police, to higher authorities, and even to sympathetic journalists and historians as a “mob” in a period of social upheaval is frequently a remarkably articulated, communally definable, and well-led popular upsurge.

These communal processes of structuration not only nourish revolutions, but also explain why large masses of people persistently engage in recurring battles with well-armed troops. These popular political cultures and their networks sustain the revolutionary people and its leaders during periods of temporary defeat, which are often followed by vigorous and even more decisive upsurges. In February 1917, when ever-larger crowds from the working-class Vyborg district of Petrograd invaded the center of the city, they were able repeatedly to defy the clubs and pistols of police, the sabers of dragoons, and the gunfire of infantry regiments, until finally even the military garrison itself mutinied and helped to pull down the czarist monarchy. In a very real sense, then, movements of oppressed strata and classes were clearly civic movements, rooted in the communal life of villages, towns, cities, and neighborhoods, not only landed estates, small shops, and factories—a fact that has not received the recognition it deserves from historians of the great revolutions.

Initially, no political party led these people, least of all the principal parties of the Russian Left: the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, and the Social Revolutionaries. In fact, shortly before the Petrograd workers began their uprising, czarist police arrested the city committees of the revolutionary parties—perhaps fortunately, since their rather dogmatic ideologies, and their inhibiting notions of the “stages” through which they believed a revolution should go, could very well have impeded the insurrectionary upsurge that overthrew the monarchy.

But this upsurge was neither formless nor impulsive. The victory of the Petrograd people is testimony to the hidden structures that they had already created within their neighborhoods and factories, and to the little-known leaders—the class-conscious insurgents—who, as orators and catalysts, provided indispensable guidance to their neighbors and coworkers in fomenting the revolution. Thus, after temporary setbacks, the people consciously reconvened their forces and, in large part because of their local leaders, continued to attack the official institutions until they had completely demolished them. Like the Russian workers in 1917, the Parisian sans-culottes too were suppressed for a time, then rose up again until they succeeded in pushing the revolution in a more radical direction.

This first phase of a revolution, in which the people and their leaders initially confront the established authorities, may also be called its popular phase. Not only do the authorities of the old regimes seek to control this phase, but they seek to suppress the popular movement—and if they fail, parties, liberal or radical in complexion, try to move to the head of the popular movement. Nor do these parties hesitate to use the very slogans raised by the people and their leaders to gain control over it, as did Danton and Robespierre during the French Revolution and Lenin and Trotsky during the Russian Revolution.

Revolutions are profoundly educational processes, indeed veritable cauldrons in which all kinds of conflicting ideas and tendencies are sifted out in the minds of a revolutionary people. No sooner is the old regime overthrown than a veritable storm of pamphlets, manifestos, and resolutions appears, together with public meetings, demonstrations, clubs, and societies—in short, a war of written words and oratory from which we can begin to identify the conflicting factions and their goals within the revolutionary movement.

Individuals who enter into a revolutionary process are by no means the same after the revolution as they were before it began. Those who encounter a modicum of success in revolutionary times learn more within a span of a few weeks or months than they might have learned over their lifetime in nonrevolutionary times. Conventional ideas fall away with extraordinary rapidity; values and prejudices that were centuries in the making disappear almost overnight. Strikingly innovative ideas are quickly adopted, tested, and, where necessary, discarded. Even newer ideas, often flagrantly radical in character, are adopted with an dlan that frightens ruling elites—however radical the latter may profess to be—and they soon become deeply rooted in the popular consciousness. Authorities hallowed by age-old tradition are suddenly divested of their prestige, legitimacy, and power to govern, while the revolutionary people compels its own often unnerved and hesitant leaders to adapt themselves to radical changes in popular mood.

So tumultuous socially and psychologically are revolutions in general that they constitute a standing challenge to ideologues, including sociobiologists who assert that human behavior is fixed and human nature predetermined. Revolutionary changes reveal a remarkable flexibility in “human nature,” yet few psychologists have elected to study the social and psychological tumult of revolution as well as the institutional changes it so often produces. This much must be said with fervent emphasis: to continue to judge the behavior of a people during and after a revolution by the same standards one judged them by beforehand is completely myopic,

I wish to argue that the capacity of a revolution to produce far-reaching ideological and moral changes in a people stems primarily from the opportunity it affords ordinary, indeed oppressed, people to exercise popular selfmanagement—to enter directly, rapidly, and exhilaratingly into control over most aspects of their social and personal lives. To the extent that an insurrectionary people takes over the reins of power from the formerly hallowed elites who oppressed them and begins to restructure society along radically populist lines, individuals grow aware of latent powers within themselves that nourish their previously suppressed creativity, sense of self-worth, and solidarity. They learn that society is neither immutable nor sanctified, as inflexible custom had previously taught them; rather, it is malleable and subject, within certain limits, to change according to human will and desire.

At some point every revolutionary people must confront the issue of how to render permanent the changes it has made and the innovations it has introduced—that is, how to institutionalize people’s own participation in the management of social affairs in such a way that not even the revolutionary regime itself can exclude them. During the French Revolution the sans-culottes and their leaders solidified their sections and attempted to turn them into permanent institutions for a direct democracy throughout France. The Russian working class and peasantry, too, had to face the question of the sovereignty of their soviet or council form of social organization. In both cases, the popular movements found that political parties alternately appealed to and opposed their popular social aspirations, often obstructing the flow of events toward radical democratic ends.

What role, it is fair to ask, do revolutionary political parties play in this development? Normally, parties are not simply organizational structures that seek to mobilize popular support. Nor are they, given their structure and the mentality of their leadership, alternatives to the nation-state. Quite to the contrary: parties are products of the nation-state itself, whether they profess to be revolutionary, liberal, or reactionary, The principal difference that distinguishes one party from another is the kind of nation-state it wishes to establish.

In Europe the nation-state began to replace feudalistic sovereignties as recently as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The nation-states that emerged in England, France, and later Russia were the products of vigorous centralizing monarchs who, particularly in the cases of France and Russia, succeeded in establishing huge bureaucracies to manage their specific territories and empires. In contrast to the relative chaos of the feudal world, the more successful nationstates created strong, stable centralized bureaucracies that ruling classes elsewhere in Europe tried to emulate.

The political party, in turn, emulated the nation-state, even when it opposed its more tyrannical operations. Emerging after an initial historical lag, political parties paralleled the nation-state organizationally and politically; in time they became more or less inseparable from it. They were and are today consciously structured to resemble nation-states, like nation-states-in-waiting that seek to take power, whether by peaceful means, as a loyal opposition, or by force of arms, as a revolutionary organization. Like monarchies and republics, parties become centralized entities in varying degrees, with bureaucratic or quasibureaucratic infrastructures where authority characteristically flows from the center to the base.

Not only are parties organized like nation-states, but they are usually national in scale, knit together by systems of command and obedience, with their center far removed from control by their base. The tautness of their infrastructures, to be sure, varies considerably from loose systems of command in republican nation-states to stringent ones in highly authoritarian states. But they remain centralized nonetheless. In this respect, many revolutionary parties in the past came to resemble the very state structures they professed to oppose. Designed to take power—or, in Leninist language, to “seize power”—they knowingly or unknowingly became small nation-states themselves, both in their mentality and in their functioning, irrespective of their size and degree of popular support.

It should not be surprising, then, that revolutionary political parties— however idealistic their leadership and members, normally looked askance at the popular structures that the masses and their leaders created, especially in revolutionary situations when “the seizure of power” was on the agenda of the day. This raised the historical question: what kind of “power” would replace the existing structures that were to be “seized”? Often submerged in the initial sweep of the popular revolution, parties emerged in its aftermath with the distinct goal of using the mass movement to gain power for themselves and the interests they represented, not of demolishing the state and its bureaucratic machinery.

Ultimately, these parties came into head-on collision with the popular institutions that the revolutionary people and their leaders had established, such as their town and neighborhood assemblies or factory councils, giving rise to the cry for a third revolution. Histories that emphasize the rivalries between liberal, radical, and revolutionary parties for control of the state all too easily overlook the clash between professedly revolutionary parties and the new, often directly democratic institutions created by an insurgent people.

Even more confusing for historians: as the people became increasingly radical with the unfolding of a revolution, the leaders of the more revolutionary parties needed to gain their support, particularly in interparty conflicts. This necessity temporarily compelled them to adopt the popular movement’s democratic aims. But this nod in the direction of democracy was just that—a gesture—and usually did not last. In France, when the highly ccntralistic Jacobins were locked in a bitter struggle with the moderate Girondins and required popular support to dislodge their opponents from leading governmental positions, they adopted a highly revolutionary and democratic rhetoric that seemed to have no other purpose than to gain mass support. Similarly, the essentially authoritarian Bolsheviks sounded virtually like anarchists in their conflicts with the bourgeoisoriented Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries, and their liberal rivals.

Once established in power, however, iacobins and Bolsheviks alike did everything they could to neutralize the power of the sections and the soviets, respectively, accelerating the transformation of France and Russia into increasingly authoritarian nation-states. The parties and the people came into armed conflict, and wherever the people were vanquished the revolutionary process came to an end, despite the social and economic changes the revolution may have produced.

We shall follow this drama in all the classical revolutions of the modern era and examine the institutional forms that the people and their leaders created, the roles that the parties played in suppressing them, and the ideas that evolved among both the people and the parties—and finally the material and political conditions that could have led to the success of the popular movement in a third revolution.

Given this perspective, the major revolutions of the modern era are not reducible exclusively to conflicts between clearly definable economic classes. Broadly speaking, they always encompassed conflicts between the exploited and their exploiters, the rich and the poor, the well-to-do and the materially denied. But knowingly or not, these revolutions were also conflicts between opposing visions of political life. Workers, peasants, and radical intellectuals tended to favor the groupings they had formed in their own communities, often pitting their decentralized institutions of popular rule and face-to-face democracy in sharp opposition to statist forms of rule based on nationhood, top-down control, centralism, and bureaucracy. When the sans-culottes and the Petrograd working-class leaders called for a third revolution, they were concerned not only with bettering their economic position but, to take their own declarations and demands at their word, with expanding their revolutionary institutions as the principal means of conducting a democratic public life. Revolution in their eyes meant the institutionalization of direct action: namely, engaging in selfadministration as a normal form of politics. The organization of the revolution as a permanent condition of life, through popular assemblies, shop committees, soviets, and popular societies, constituted direct action in its most advanced form—ultimately far more significant than other, more sporadic types of direct action, be they the temporary occupation of factories or the raising of theatrical but militarily useless barricades. In revolution, direct action meant a special form of political action: the institutionalization of self-management and the creation of an organized form of participatory democracy.

What often impeded the success of the popular movement was its failure to form a vanguard organization in the best sense of the term: that is to say, an accountable, recallable, confederal leadership group that explicitly challenged all statist organizations as such.[1] The failure, in France and Russia, of such an organization to emerge and mount a serious challenge to the Jacobin and Bolshevik states profoundly shaped the history of the past two centuries and will possibly continue to shape events, however indirectly, for generations to come. The popular leaders were often too irresolute, too disorganized, and too uninformed to deal effectively with the highly maneuverable centralized parties, radical or otherwise, that they confronted.

Another factor that impeded the success of the revolutionary people was the material limits that circumscribed the lives of people in their movements. It should be emphasized quite frankly that for most of human history ordinary people have lacked sufficient means and free time to engage fully in the management of social affairs. As long as they are obliged to devote most of their time to acquiring the means of everyday subsistence, political life will usually fall into the hands of the privileged few. This compelling fact has been clearly recognized since Aristotle’s day in ancient Athens, where a low level of technology, slavery, patriarchy, and warfare profoundly affected the life and future of the polis.

The question of whether the scope of the democracy demanded by a revolutionary movement must be pared to meet the material limits of the time in which it arises has understandably occupied serious radical theorists for generations. In the eighteenth and to a much greater extent the nineteenth century, revolutionary parties tended to emphasize the importance of meeting the material needs of the people rather than the attainment of democratic ends. When the Jacobins tried to restrict the meetings of the Parisian sections, ostensibly to allow people to get enough sleep to go to work the next day, Robespierre justified this policy at the revolutionary Convention by asking, “Who were the people, in fact, who could sacrifice their time to go to meetings? ... Artisans and honest working people cannot spend all their time at meetings [assemblies].”[2] However shrewd his reply, the question was not at all meaningless. Nor is it meaningless even today.

Nevertheless, the fervor of the popular movement in revolutionary situations often overrode economic considerations, at least for a time. The truth of Robespierre’s assessment is difficult for historians today to establish. Section meetings that addressed very important issues generally attracted huge crowds, especially during periods of heightened radical fervor and activity. Otherwise they tended to be very small, probably in large part because of the long working hours that prevailed at the time.

Nor were the sans-culotte leaders who pushed the revolution in a democratic direction certain that the rest of France was behind them. In fact, the radical demands of the Parisian revolutionaries increasingly alienated the peasantry in the countryside and the more well-to-do sectors of French society. So, too, did the Bolsheviks in revolutionary Petrograd have cause to doubt that Russia was behind them, although they gained a considerable edge over their political opponents by their willingness to address peasant land hunger and the war weariness of the soldiers. Ip the end, however, only the prospect of a materially comfortable life with minimal toil for the people at large could ultimately have laid the lasting basis for a free, democratic, and rational society.

Owing to the limited extent to which movements in the classical revolutions addressed radical economic issues, they were not in fact majoritarian revolutions. The heady changes that initiated most of the great revolutions initially resulted from a spirit of rejection rather than affirmation. However eager the popular movement was to establish democracy, its ideas of precisely how society would function economically were very ambiguous. That highly disparate elements in society could unite around the abolition of an arbitrary monarchy in France or czarist despotism in Russia should not be surprising. But as soon as other issues were raised—such as the redistribution of land, challenges to wealth and profiteering, and the material needs of the underprivileged—the revolutionary process began to diverge in many directions. Needless to emphasize, as increasingly radical demands, particularly with respect to property, began to command public attention, various privileged layers of society turned against the revolutionary process.

As this juncture was reached, the revolutionary nation-state and its parties conflicted increasingly with the communal structures of the people. Such junctures have a long historical pedigree, in which the propertyless are pitted against the propertied, the poor against the wealthy, and popular democracy against bureaucratic control. This drama was played out in the peasant war in Germany during Luther’s time, in the English and American revolutions, and during the Great French Revolution, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution of 1917–21, and the Spanish Revolution of 1936–39. All of these revolutions in their later stages (except the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871) were pushed forward by volatile if uncertain minorities, both those within the popular movement itself and seemingly revolutionary advocates of increased state power such as Oliver Cromwell, Alexander Hamilton, Maximilien Robespierre, and V. I. Lenin.

There are, to be sure, notable exceptions to this development. The Kronstadt sailors who rose up in 1921 against the increasing authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks probably spoke for most of the people in Russia when they established a revolutionary “commune” at their naval base in the Gulf of Finland. But by then, the Russian people had become exhausted and paralyzed politically by three years of bloody civil war, famine, and widespread disillusionment.

In what sense can the great revolutions of the past be seen as “bourgeois democratic” revolutions? Karl Marx’s approach on this score has gained such widespread acceptance among radical and even liberal historians that it may seem heretical to take exception to his view that largely economic—and notably bourgeois—interests were the guiding factors. Historians generally tend to describe the English, American, and French Revolutions as “bourgeoisdemocratic,” as if they were the work of the capitalist class. As I have already indicated in my preface, I plan to take the popular participants of the great revolutions at their word rather than retrospectively dealing with them from a present-day perspective.

I shall have occasion to examine the extent to which the classical revolutions can be regarded as bourgeois when I deal with each revolution individually. In general, Marx’s view tends to render the historical revolutionary process highly fatalistic, obliging us to assume that in all the great movements for freedom over the past four centuries, there was never an alternative to the ultimate triumph of capitalism—in my view, an unacceptable case of historical teleology. We would be obliged to assume that the German peasants who revolted in the 1520s were “reactionaries” because they were trying to retain their archaic village life; that the Roundhead yeomanry who formed Cromwell’s New Model Army were historically “doomed” as a social stratum by industrial inventions and forms of production that had yet to be developed; that the radical Minutemen farmers in the American colonies inevitably had to disappear like their English yeoman cousins; that the sans-culottes who established the first French republic were declasst riffraff or mere “consumers,” as more than one historian has called them—and so on, up to fairly recent times.

In the Marxist and liberal view of these revolutions, it was the bankers, merchants, manufacturers, and other entrepreneurs—the predatory men who were amassing enormous wealth in the eighteenth century—who formed the class vanguard of the great revolutions, presumably in spite of themselves. Let us agree, from the outset, that the bourgeoisie benefited from most of these revolutions. Certainly, the bourgeoisie wanted “free” trade, “free” workers, and the “free” play of egotism, which can easily be mutated into a cry for “liberte, egalitt, fraternity.” But if it is true that capitalism is globally supreme today, no class in history has been more craven, cowardly, and fearful of social change (especially change involving the “dark people,” as they called the underprivileged) than the entrepreneurs who peopled the commercial centers of Europe and America during the eighteenth century. As a class, the bourgeoisie has never been politically revolutionary, let alone insurgent. Indeed, until recent times it was understandably the object of disdain by nobles, intellectuals, and clerics. It was long imbued with a sense of social inferiority and political ineffectuality—and deservedly so.

If not the bourgeoisie, what social strata carried through these revolutions? Societies undergoing institutional and economic transition are by definition unstable, not only politically and economically but also culturally, psychologically, and intellectually. From the sixteenth century onward, Europeans lived in a state of chronic change and upheaval in all these respects—especially peasants, independent farmers, artisans, laborers, and, later, factory workers. From the English Revolution of the 1640s to the Spanish Revolution of the mid1930s, what stands out very strikingly in revolutionary upsurges is that they occurred during periods of sweeping social transition from agrarian to industrial culture. Men and women from small villages suddenly found themselves living in urban and later large industrial communities, far removed from the natural rhythms, extended families, communal support systems, and timehonored traditions of rural life.

But even when an emerging capitalist economy began to assail their values, people still felt themselves part of a traditional community. As they moved into cities, villagers brought with them their old communal networks and attitudes based on the intimacies of village life, while among city-dwelling artisans the traditional networks of the medieval guilds had not yet disappeared completely. The chronic riots and small-scale insurrections that exploded repeatedly throughout the seventeenth century were more redolent of the limited peasant jacqueries of the late Middle Ages—albeit now carried by new migrants from the countryside into towns, neighborhoods, and cities—than of the great revolutions into which these uprisings eventually flowed. Even before the great revolutions, in effect, there existed a spirit of rebellion, a culture of radical political life, and an ongoing process of exercising direct action that eventually led to sweeping revolutionary change. Insurrectionary tocsins, or alarm bells, sounded repeatedly over several generations of restless slum-dwellers before they gave rise to great social upheavals such as the French Revolution.

Most of the working people of the revolutionary era were peasant in origin or were removed by only one generation from village society. Caught in an increasingly atomized and synthetic world, ruthlessly exploited and lacking the basic means of life, these people were confronted daily by stark cultural contrasts. Culturally dislocated and psychologically at odds with industrial forms of life, they were highly susceptible to rebellion—and ultimately revolution. Capitalism, in effect, had not fully penetrated into their lives or undermined their sense of independence. It was this kind of “proletariat,” a class with one foot in the countryside and another in the city, that turned to revolution, if only to recover a sense of social rootedness, coherence, and meaning that was increasingly denied to them in the dismal shops and congested neighborhoods of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The workers who found themselves caught up in the transition between a basically rural economy, an urban economy, and later a growing industrial one were imbued with exceptional qualities. Those following the traditional timehonored crafts, such as printers, blacksmiths, jewelers, wheelwrights, and independent farmers, were often expressive individuals with strongly etched personalities. They were filled with a deep sense of their own competence and self-worth. Daily readings of the Bible in the traditional family gave artisans and yeomen farmers a remarkable degree of literacy. The letters of a yeoman farmer such as the American abolitionist John Brown reveal how eloquent and knowledgeable the artisan-farmer and the artisan generally in precapitalist societies could be.

The Parisians who raised barricades in the series of revolutions up to the Commune of 1871—what has loosely been called the “Parisian proletariat”— were primarily craft workers who, however urbanized, still retained these personal qualities. Indeed, it was precisely this kind of working class and the leaders it produced that made the French capital the center of European revolutions for the greater part of a century. If the Parisian artisan had one foot in a traditional, largely small-town past and the other in a highly urban future, the Russian worker on the eve of 1917 had one foot in the peasant village and the other in an industrial present. A very large number of the Petrograd workers were newly arrived from the countryside and even retained land allotments, to which they could return and become peasants again if the need arose. Indeed, they did return to their villages in large numbers during the near-famine conditions of the Russian Civil War between 1918 and 1921. Not fully captive to industrial routines and possessed of strong agrarian support systems upon which they could rely in periods of crisis, they were militant in ways that hereditary proletarians fully immersed in modern bourgeois society are less likely to be. In neither Paris nor Petrograd did workers take capitalist society for granted as a “natural” or predetermined social order; indeed, the sharp contrasts between precapitalist and capitalist cultures exacerbated deep-seated class and social differences to a point where explosive hatred of the emerging industrial society reached revolutionary proportions.

Revolution is created not by a nondescript body of people called “the masses,” however much I am obliged to use this term. Certainly, the fuel that stoked fires into blazes was a minority of militants who came from suppressed strata and, very significantly, a radical intelligentsia. A time-honored stratum that dates back to the peripatetic Greek philosophers, the intelligentsia were organizers of various dissident groups and circles, social critics, sowers of doubt, publicists, and occasionally powerful theorists. They furnished the revolutions with invaluable theoretical insights, a sense of direction, a critical thrust, and considerable creativity. By an “intelligentsia”—a Russian word, let it be noted— I am speaking not of what we call “intellectuals” today who are well ensconced in universities, but a footloose network of writers, artists, poets, and professionals of all sorts, even actors (who formed an exceptionally close and visible community in cities such as Paris during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). Their absorption in recent years into the modern university system, with its many emoluments, has been one of the most costly blows to the development of present-day revolutionary movements.

Revolution also needs a visible target, a social enemy, whose behavior in some sense provokes popular action. Most revolutions, in fact, begin as defensive actions against attempts by ruling elites to suppress an emerging popular movement. Parisians attacked the Bastille on July 14, 1789, because they believed the king was collecting troops near Paris to seize the capital and suppress social unrest. In the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks initially dispossessed the liberal Kerensky regime in Petrograd because the government fatuously closed their press, although, as was evident to everyone in the Russian capital, they had already been carefully planning an insurrection against the provisional government.

There is no doubt that the various ruling elites whom the popular revolutions overthrew and replaced were highly visible to the populace. But they were visible in a very special way. As the people moved toward revolution, often after a series of aborted local uprisings, the ruling elites made it very clear that their regimes were in a deep-seated crisis. It was not only the populace that lost confidence in the existing order; their own masters exhibited a visible failure of nerve. While the incipient revolutionary forces became more and more united, the ruling elites became more and more divided. That the established order was breaking down became apparent to all, both above and below, and only the most inflexible elements of the old society opposed the transparent need for change. Indeed, in France, many elements of the nobility patronized the great Enlighteners who created the intellectual and moral atmosphere of the French Revolution, while in turn-of-the-century Russia, individual nobles and merchants often gave large sums of money to revolutionary organizations.

It was the extent to which the elites resisted change that often determined how far-reaching a revolution would be, how radical the popular movement would become, and how long it would last. Since certain ruling strata who favored the status quo put up intense, often unthinking, resistance to even minimal reforms, many of the great revolutions went on for years, if one includes not only the insurrections or jourrties (“days”), as they were called in the French Revolution, but the civil wars that followed them. Indeed, it is questionable whether the French Revolution really ended with the overthrow of Jacobin rule in 1794. Many of the same social forces existed and clashed with each other persistently in repeated insurrections up to 1871, so that we can speak of a uniquely French revolutionary era that existed for nearly a century. The English Revolution spanned a period of at least four years and continued for nearly two decades if we include Cromwell’s Protectorate. The American Revolution lasted almost three decades if we date the revolutionary period as starting with the beginnings of dissent in the early 1760s and ending with the adoption of the Constitution by the states in 1789. Even if we choose to date the start of the Russian Revolution at 1917 rather than the aborted revolution of 1905, the revolution continued for four years before it was suppressed with the crushing of the Kronstadt commune of 1921. All of these revolutions, if they were not crushed at the outset, were marked by an internal logic of events that slowly worked its way through precarious periods of uncertainty, partial victories for the masses, and eventually defeats of the popular movements to one degree or another. Although each of these developments was different in many specifics, most of them were astonishingly similar in their general outlines.

It is very much my task, if possible, to account for this similarity in the general outlines of certain major revolutions, even as I examine remarkable forms of freedom that the specific popular movements created throughout the revolutions. As I have already suggested, after the fall of the jacobins in 1794 the French Revolution became the “model” on which other revolutions based their visions of social change. The sequence of events of the Russian Revolution closely resembles that of the French, albeit in a telescoped form. That leaders of all Russian revolutionary tendencies, from Marxists like Lenin to anarchists like Peter Kropotkin, were steeped in the history of the French Revolution, however, does not in itself explain these similarities; nor does the existence of economic commonalities like the peasant majorities in both countries, the highly radicalized urban populations, and the emergence of resolute, centralized vanguard parties.

My point in saying this is that both revolutions were guided not only by similar economic conditions, but also by a compelling political goal—namely, a popular desire for freedom. These revolutions contained an eminently moral, not only economic, dimension. As well as being motivated by the very real economic interests, such as land hunger, that played so decisive a role in both revolutions, the French and Russian peasantries were possessed by a passionate, almost millenarian, desire for a new, just, and free way of life. The marvel, and the tragedy, of the classical revolutions during the 1640s in England and the 1930s in Spain is that they were fueled by a deep-seated desire for popular sovereignty which the revolutionary leaders and their nation-state type of organizations systematically undermined.

I have omitted from this book any account of the “Third World” revolutions that have occurred since the Second World War. Although space limitations alone would necessarily restrict me to revolutions in Europe (and North America) the “Third World” revolutions have been and still are different in significant respects from the European revolutions. For one thing, the European revolutions, even the American, emerged from already formed nation-states, often absolutist monarchies; the “Third World” revolutions are attempts to form nation-states, to gain a sense of national identity after long periods of colonial rule. Moreover, the European revolutions, despite their indispensable agrarian upswells, were primarily centered in cities, such as London, Boston, Paris, Petrograd, and Barcelona. The “Third World” revolutions, by contrast, have been fought out primarily in the countryside (although China in the 1920s forms an interesting exception).

The European revolutions, in fact, spoke for oppressed humanity as a whole, and the breadth of their goals has been unequaled by revolutions in other parts of the world. They not only raised major political issues such as republicanism and democracy, but had very powerful international and ideological effects upon the development of European civilization for over three centuries. Indeed, they were important ideological, cultural, and economic turning points in world history generally. Their great declarations, charters, and manifestos appealed to all of humanity in support of universal human rights and freedom, often transcending national considerations.

The “Third World” revolutions, by contrast, understandably tended to be deeply self-oriented, and their ideological impact upon the world has been very limited. A thrust toward democracy and popular demands for local rights at the expense of the nation-state are not conspicuous features of these upsurges. They are largely national struggles against imperialism in which colonized peoples seek to define their identity and achieve national independence. Despite the popularity of Maoist doctrines in the 1960s, the Chinese Communist revolution was an insurrectionary variant of Leninism, and after Mao’s death it began to lose its hold even in China itself. Neither Castro’s revolution in Cuba nor the Sandinistas’ in Nicaragua produced major ideological changes in the world, despite the impact their uprisings had on Latin America. Indeed, their eclipse by movements like the Shining Path in Peru and their increasing clientage to Euro-American powers reveal that their impact on social development generally is more limited than 1960s radicals in the West could have anticipated in their day.

The possible charge that I am “Eurocentric’Teaves me singularly untroubled. The fact is that the authentic center of the revolutionary era was the European continent, including Russia, and the United States (whose revolution belongs very much in the European tradition). To the extent that revolutions in the “Third World” had certain universal features and sought or professed to establish a radically new social dispensation for humanity as a whole, they emulated the great European revolutions discussed in this book. Their nationalistic and anti-imperialistic aspects may be understandable in the context in which they occurred; but these revolutions should not be mystified, nor should their justifiable claims to freedom from imperialism be viewed as comparable to the universal appeals to humanity that marked the great revolutions that occurred in Europe.

Significantly, each of the classical revolutions followed the others toward a more radically sophisticated historical level in which an almost utopian internationalist outlook and a broader definition of freedom superseded any earlier nationalistic or “patriotic” claims. Indeed, the Spanish Revolution of 1936–39 challenged even domestic hierarchies as well as classes, often assuming an explicitly libertarian form. By contrast, either the “Third World” revolutions devolved into established nation-states oriented toward industrialization, or their ideologies lingered on mainly as echoes of the older European revolutions. The revolutions that helped form new nation-states in India, China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central America have little of the internationalist character that marked the French and Russian revolutions. Even the American Revolution saw itself as a utopian beacon to an oppressed world, despite attempts by many radical historians to reduce it to a mere “war for independence.”

It is my hope that this book will revive the flagging interest in the great revolutions that so profoundly shaped modern history and encourage the reader to examine the dynamics of the classical Western revolutions from the standpoint of movements from below: the institutional forms that revolutionary peoples and their leaders developed to manage society and their interaction with the revolutionary parties that professed to lead the people or certain oppressed strata. I wish to explore the problems that this interaction produced, the lessons we can learn, and the various theories that cluster around the nature and trajectory of the great revolutions themselves. Theory will closely intermingle with narrative, and generalizations with specific facts.

I would like not only to evoke the era of the great revolutions in an admittedly interpretive way—their limits and possibilities—but to convey the esprit r&volutiotmaire that existed not only during the high points of the revolutions themselves but throughout the revolutionary era, even in periods of relative quiescence. I will ask what it means to be a revolutionary, not merely a “radical” or a “progressive,” to use words very much in vogue today. In view of the fact that, in 1989, the bicentennial of the Great French Revolution was celebrated more as a patriotic exercise than as an evocation of the great world-inspiring revolution it was, this task seems particularly necessary today. I wish to lift, as best I can, the chauvinistic clouds that obscure the hopes that the great revolutions produced in the hearts of all enlightened human beings, and the ideologies that have influenced them over the greater part of two centuries.

At this time of writing an eerie counter-Enlightenment is percolating through Western culture, one that celebrates egocentricity at the expense of social commitment, mysticism at the expense of naturalism, intuitionism at the expense of rationalism, atavism at the expense of civilization, a passive-receptive mentality at the expense of a militant, activist one, and an enervating religiosity at the expense of a critical secularity. As capitalism expands to global proportions, a media-orchestrated barbarism is pushing the modern human spirit back into an absurd caricature of medievalism—almost centuries removed in spirit and outlook from the revolutionary era that gave birth to modern ideals of freedom. Whether this marks a definitive end of the revolutionary era and the Enlightenment that nourished it, I do not know. What I do know is that I, for one, do not want to be part of a historical period that lacks a revolutionary spirit to give meaning to life. This book is intended to evoke that spirit and, if possible, to make it relevant to our time.

Nevertheless, the fervor of the popular movement in revolutionary situations often overrode economic considerations, at least for a time. The truth of Robespierre’s assessment is difficult for historians today to establish. Section meetings that addressed very important issues generally attracted huge crowds, especially during periods of heightened radical fervor and activity. Otherwise they tended to be very small, probably in large part because of the long working hours that prevailed at the time.

Nor were the sans-culotte leaders who pushed the revolution in a democratic direction certain that the rest of France was behind them. In fact, the radical demands of the Parisian revolutionaries increasingly alienated the peasantry in the countryside and the more well-to-do sectors of French society. So, too, did the Bolsheviks in revolutionary Petrograd have cause to doubt that Russia was behind them, although they gained a considerable edge over their political opponents by their willingness to address peasant land hunger and the war weariness of the soldiers. Ip the end, however, only the prospect of a materially comfortable life with minimal toil for the people at large could ultimately have laid the lasting basis for a free, democratic, and rational society.

Owing to the limited extent to which movements in the classical revolutions addressed radical economic issues, they were not in fact majoritarian revolutions. The heady changes that initiated most of the great revolutions initially resulted from a spirit of rejection rather than affirmation. However eager the popular movement was to establish democracy, its ideas of precisely how society would function economically were very ambiguous. That highly disparate elements in society could unite around the abolition of an arbitrary monarchy in France or czarist despotism in Russia should not be surprising. But as soon as other issues were raised—such as the redistribution of land, challenges to wealth and profiteering, and the material needs of the underprivileged—the revolutionary process began to diverge in many directions. Needless to emphasize, as increasingly radical demands, particularly with respect to property, began to command public attention, various privileged layers of society turned against the revolutionary process.

As this juncture was reached, the revolutionary nation-state and its parties conflicted increasingly with the communal structures of the people. Such junctures have a long historical pedigree, in which the propertyless are pitted against the propertied, the poor against the wealthy, and popular democracy against bureaucratic control. This drama was played out in the peasant war in Germany during Luther’s time, in the English and American revolutions, and during the Great French Revolution, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution of 1917–21, and the Spanish Revolution of 1936–39. All of these revolutions in their later stages (except the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871) were pushed forward by volatile if uncertain minorities, both those within the popular movement itself and seemingly revolutionary advocates of increased state power such as Oliver Cromwell, Alexander Hamilton, Maximilien Robespierre, and V. I. Lenin.

There are, to be sure, notable exceptions to this development. The Kronstadt sailors who rose up in 1921 against the increasing authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks probably spoke for most of the people in Russia when they established a revolutionary “commune” at their naval base in the Gulf of Finland. But by then, the Russian people had become exhausted and paralyzed politically by three years of bloody civil war, famine, and widespread disillusionment.

In what sense can the great revolutions of the past be seen as “bourgeois democratic” revolutions? Karl Marx’s approach on this score has gained such widespread acceptance among radical and even liberal historians that it may seem heretical to take exception to his view that largely economic—and notably bourgeois—interests were the guiding factors. Historians generally tend to describe the English, American, and French Revolutions as “bourgeoisdemocratic,” as if they were the work of the capitalist class. As I have already indicated in my preface, I plan to take the popular participants of the great revolutions at their word rather than retrospectively dealing with them from a present-day perspective.

I shall have occasion to examine the extent to which the classical revolutions can be regarded as bourgeois when I deal with each revolution individually. In general, Marx’s view tends to render the historical revolutionary process highly fatalistic, obliging us to assume that in all the great movements for freedom over the past four centuries, there was never an alternative to the ultimate triumph of capitalism—in my view, an unacceptable case of historical teleology. We would be obliged to assume that the German peasants who revolted in the 1520s were “reactionaries” because they were trying to retain their archaic village life; that the Roundhead yeomanry who formed Cromwell’s New Model Army were historically “doomed” as a social stratum by industrial inventions and forms of production that had yet to be developed; that the radical Minutemen farmers in the American colonies inevitably had to disappear like their English yeoman cousins; that the sans-culottes who established the first French republic were declasst riffraff or mere “consumers,” as more than one historian has called them—and so on, up to fairly recent times.

In the Marxist and liberal view of these revolutions, it was the bankers, merchants, manufacturers, and other entrepreneurs—the predatory men who were amassing enormous wealth in the eighteenth century—who formed the class vanguard of the great revolutions, presumably in spite of themselves. Let us agree, from the outset, that the bourgeoisie benefited from most of these revolutions. Certainly, the bourgeoisie wanted “free” trade, “free” workers, and the “free” play of egotism, which can easily be mutated into a cry for “liberte, egalitt, fraternity.” But if it is true that capitalism is globally supreme today, no class in history has been more craven, cowardly, and fearful of social change (especially change involving the “dark people,” as they called the underprivileged) than the entrepreneurs who peopled the commercial centers of Europe and America during the eighteenth century. As a class, the bourgeoisie has never been politically revolutionary, let alone insurgent. Indeed, until recent times it was understandably the object of disdain by nobles, intellectuals, and clerics. It was long imbued with a sense of social inferiority and political ineffectuality—and deservedly so.

If not the bourgeoisie, what social strata carried through these revolutions? Societies undergoing institutional and economic transition are by definition unstable, not only politically and economically but also culturally, psychologically, and intellectually. From the sixteenth century onward, Europeans lived in a state of chronic change and upheaval in all these respects—especially peasants, independent farmers, artisans, laborers, and, later, factory workers. From the English Revolution of the 1640s to the Spanish Revolution of the mid1930s, what stands out very strikingly in revolutionary upsurges is that they occurred during periods of sweeping social transition from agrarian to industrial culture. Men and women from small villages suddenly found themselves living in urban and later large industrial communities, far removed from the natural rhythms, extended families, communal support systems, and timehonored traditions of rural life.

But even when an emerging capitalist economy began to assail their values, people still felt themselves part of a traditional community. As they moved into cities, villagers brought with them their old communal networks and attitudes based on the intimacies of village life, while among city-dwelling artisans the traditional networks of the medieval guilds had not yet disappeared completely. The chronic riots and small-scale insurrections that exploded repeatedly throughout the seventeenth century were more redolent of the limited peasant jacqueries of the late Middle Ages—albeit now carried by new migrants from the countryside into towns, neighborhoods, and cities—than of the great revolutions into which these uprisings eventually flowed. Even before the great revolutions, in effect, there existed a spirit of rebellion, a culture of radical political life, and an ongoing process of exercising direct action that eventually led to sweeping revolutionary change. Insurrectionary tocsins, or alarm bells, sounded repeatedly over several generations of restless slum-dwellers before they gave rise to great social upheavals such as the French Revolution.

Most of the working people of the revolutionary era were peasant in origin or were removed by only one generation from village society. Caught in an increasingly atomized and synthetic world, ruthlessly exploited and lacking the basic means of life, these people were confronted daily by stark cultural contrasts. Culturally dislocated and psychologically at odds with industrial forms of life, they were highly susceptible to rebellion—and ultimately revolution. Capitalism, in effect, had not fully penetrated into their lives or undermined their sense of independence. It was this kind of “proletariat,” a class with one foot in the countryside and another in the city, that turned to revolution, if only to recover a sense of social rootedness, coherence, and meaning that was increasingly denied to them in the dismal shops and congested neighborhoods of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The workers who found themselves caught up in the transition between a basically rural economy, an urban economy, and later a growing industrial one were imbued with exceptional qualities. Those following the traditional timehonored crafts, such as printers, blacksmiths, jewelers, wheelwrights, and independent farmers, were often expressive individuals with strongly etched personalities. They were filled with a deep sense of their own competence and self-worth. Daily readings of the Bible in the traditional family gave artisans and yeomen farmers a remarkable degree of literacy. The letters of a yeoman farmer such as the American abolitionist John Brown reveal how eloquent and knowledgeable the artisan-farmer and the artisan generally in precapitalist societies could be.

The Parisians who raised barricades in the series of revolutions up to the Commune of 1871—what has loosely been called the “Parisian proletariat”— were primarily craft workers who, however urbanized, still retained these personal qualities. Indeed, it was precisely this kind of working class and the leaders it produced that made the French capital the center of European revolutions for the greater part of a century. If the Parisian artisan had one foot in a traditional, largely small-town past and the other in a highly urban future, the Russian worker on the eve of 1917 had one foot in the peasant village and the other in an industrial present. A very large number of the Petrograd workers were newly arrived from the countryside and even retained land allotments, to which they could return and become peasants again if the need arose. Indeed, they did return to their villages in large numbers during the near-famine conditions of the Russian Civil War between 1918 and 1921. Not fully captive to industrial routines and possessed of strong agrarian support systems upon which they could rely in periods of crisis, they were militant in ways that hereditary proletarians fully immersed in modern bourgeois society are less likely to be. In neither Paris nor Petrograd did workers take capitalist society for granted as a “natural” or predetermined social order; indeed, the sharp contrasts between precapitalist and capitalist cultures exacerbated deep-seated class and social differences to a point where explosive hatred of the emerging industrial society reached revolutionary proportions.

Revolution is created not by a nondescript body of people called “the masses,” however much I am obliged to use this term. Certainly, the fuel that stoked fires into blazes was a minority of militants who came from suppressed strata and, very significantly, a radical intelligentsia. A time-honored stratum that dates back to the peripatetic Greek philosophers, the intelligentsia were organizers of various dissident groups and circles, social critics, sowers of doubt, publicists, and occasionally powerful theorists. They furnished the revolutions with invaluable theoretical insights, a sense of direction, a critical thrust, and considerable creativity. By an “intelligentsia”—a Russian word, let it be noted— I am speaking not of what we call “intellectuals” today who are well ensconced in universities, but a footloose network of writers, artists, poets, and professionals of all sorts, even actors (who formed an exceptionally close and visible community in cities such as Paris during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). Their absorption in recent years into the modern university system, with its many emoluments, has been one of the most costly blows to the development of present-day revolutionary movements.

Revolution also needs a visible target, a social enemy, whose behavior in some sense provokes popular action. Most revolutions, in fact, begin as defensive actions against attempts by ruling elites to suppress an emerging popular movement. Parisians attacked the Bastille on July 14, 1789, because they believed the king was collecting troops near Paris to seize the capital and suppress social unrest. In the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks initially dispossessed the liberal Kerensky regime in Petrograd because the government fatuously closed their press, although, as was evident to everyone in the Russian capital, they had already been carefully planning an insurrection against the provisional government.

There is no doubt that the various ruling elites whom the popular revolutions overthrew and replaced were highly visible to the populace. But they were visible in a very special way. As the people moved toward revolution, often after a series of aborted local uprisings, the ruling elites made it very clear that their regimes were in a deep-seated crisis. It was not only the populace that lost confidence in the existing order; their own masters exhibited a visible failure of nerve. While the incipient revolutionary forces became more and more united, the ruling elites became more and more divided. That the established order was breaking down became apparent to all, both above and below, and only the most inflexible elements of the old society opposed the transparent need for change. Indeed, in France, many elements of the nobility patronized the great Enlighteners who created the intellectual and moral atmosphere of the French Revolution, while in turn-of-the-century Russia, individual nobles and merchants often gave large sums of money to revolutionary organizations.

It was the extent to which the elites resisted change that often determined how far-reaching a revolution would be, how radical the popular movement would become, and how long it would last. Since certain ruling strata who favored the status quo put up intense, often unthinking, resistance to even minimal reforms, many of the great revolutions went on for years, if one includes not only the insurrections or jourrties (“days”), as they were called in the French Revolution, but the civil wars that followed them. Indeed, it is questionable whether the French Revolution really ended with the overthrow of Jacobin rule in 1794. Many of the same social forces existed and clashed with each other persistently in repeated insurrections up to 1871, so that we can speak of a uniquely French revolutionary era that existed for nearly a century. The English Revolution spanned a period of at least four years and continued for nearly two decades if we include Cromwell’s Protectorate. The American Revolution lasted almost three decades if we date the revolutionary period as starting with the beginnings of dissent in the early 1760s and ending with the adoption of the Constitution by the states in 1789. Even if we choose to date the start of the Russian Revolution at 1917 rather than the aborted revolution of 1905, the revolution continued for four years before it was suppressed with the crushing of the Kronstadt commune of 1921. All of these revolutions, if they were not crushed at the outset, were marked by an internal logic of events that slowly worked its way through precarious periods of uncertainty, partial victories for the masses, and eventually defeats of the popular movements to one degree or another. Although each of these developments was different in many specifics, most of them were astonishingly similar in their general outlines.

It is very much my task, if possible, to account for this similarity in the general outlines of certain major revolutions, even as I examine remarkable forms of freedom that the specific popular movements created throughout the revolutions. As I have already suggested, after the fall of the jacobins in 1794 the French Revolution became the “model” on which other revolutions based their visions of social change. The sequence of events of the Russian Revolution closely resembles that of the French, albeit in a telescoped form. That leaders of all Russian revolutionary tendencies, from Marxists like Lenin to anarchists like Peter Kropotkin, were steeped in the history of the French Revolution, however, does not in itself explain these similarities; nor does the existence of economic commonalities like the peasant majorities in both countries, the highly radicalized urban populations, and the emergence of resolute, centralized vanguard parties.

My point in saying this is that both revolutions were guided not only by similar economic conditions, but also by a compelling political goal—namely, a popular desire for freedom. These revolutions contained an eminently moral, not only economic, dimension. As well as being motivated by the very real economic interests, such as land hunger, that played so decisive a role in both revolutions, the French and Russian peasantries were possessed by a passionate, almost millenarian, desire for a new, just, and free way of life. The marvel, and the tragedy, of the classical revolutions during the 1640s in England and the 1930s in Spain is that they were fueled by a deep-seated desire for popular sovereignty which the revolutionary leaders and their nation-state type of organizations systematically undermined.

I have omitted from this book any account of the “Third World” revolutions that have occurred since the Second World War. Although space limitations alone would necessarily restrict me to revolutions in Europe (and North America) the “Third World” revolutions have been and still are different in significant respects from the European revolutions. For one thing, the European revolutions, even the American, emerged from already formed nation-states, often absolutist monarchies; the “Third World” revolutions are attempts to form nation-states, to gain a sense of national identity after long periods of colonial rule. Moreover, the European revolutions, despite their indispensable agrarian upswells, were primarily centered in cities, such as London, Boston, Paris, Petrograd, and Barcelona. The “Third World” revolutions, by contrast, have been fought out primarily in the countryside (although China in the 1920s forms an interesting exception).

The European revolutions, in fact, spoke for oppressed humanity as a whole, and the breadth of their goals has been unequaled by revolutions in other parts of the world. They not only raised major political issues such as republicanism and democracy, but had very powerful international and ideological effects upon the development of European civilization for over three centuries. Indeed, they were important ideological, cultural, and economic turning points in world history generally. Their great declarations, charters, and manifestos appealed to all of humanity in support of universal human rights and freedom, often transcending national considerations.

The “Third World” revolutions, by contrast, understandably tended to be deeply self-oriented, and their ideological impact upon the world has been very limited. A thrust toward democracy and popular demands for local rights at the expense of the nation-state are not conspicuous features of these upsurges. They are largely national struggles against imperialism in which colonized peoples seek to define their identity and achieve national independence. Despite the popularity of Maoist doctrines in the 1960s, the Chinese Communist revolution was an insurrectionary variant of Leninism, and after Mao’s death it began to lose its hold even in China itself. Neither Castro’s revolution in Cuba nor the Sandinistas’ in Nicaragua produced major ideological changes in the world, despite the impact their uprisings had on Latin America. Indeed, their eclipse by movements like the Shining Path in Peru and their increasing clientage to Euro-American powers reveal that their impact on social development generally is more limited than 1960s radicals in the West could have anticipated in their day.

The possible charge that I am “Eurocentric’Teaves me singularly untroubled. The fact is that the authentic center of the revolutionary era was the European continent, including Russia, and the United States (whose revolution belongs very much in the European tradition). To the extent that revolutions in the “Third World” had certain universal features and sought or professed to establish a radically new social dispensation for humanity as a whole, they emulated the great European revolutions discussed in this book. Their nationalistic and anti-imperialistic aspects may be understandable in the context in which they occurred; but these revolutions should not be mystified, nor should their justifiable claims to freedom from imperialism be viewed as comparable to the universal appeals to humanity that marked the great revolutions that occurred in Europe.

Significantly, each of the classical revolutions followed the others toward a more radically sophisticated historical level in which an almost utopian internationalist outlook and a broader definition of freedom superseded any earlier nationalistic or “patriotic” claims. Indeed, the Spanish Revolution of 1936–39 challenged even domestic hierarchies as well as classes, often assuming an explicitly libertarian form. By contrast, either the “Third World” revolutions devolved into established nation-states oriented toward industrialization, or their ideologies lingered on mainly as echoes of the older European revolutions. The revolutions that helped form new nation-states in India, China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central America have little of the internationalist character that marked the French and Russian revolutions. Even the American Revolution saw itself as a utopian beacon to an oppressed world, despite attempts by many radical historians to reduce it to a mere “war for independence.”

It is my hope that this book will revive the flagging interest in the great revolutions that so profoundly shaped modern history and encourage the reader to examine the dynamics of the classical Western revolutions from the standpoint of movements from below: the institutional forms that revolutionary peoples and their leaders developed to manage society and their interaction with the revolutionary parties that professed to lead the people or certain oppressed strata. I wish to explore the problems that this interaction produced, the lessons we can learn, and the various theories that cluster around the nature and trajectory of the great revolutions themselves. Theory will closely intermingle with narrative, and generalizations with specific facts.

I would like not only to evoke the era of the great revolutions in an admittedly interpretive way—their limits and possibilities—but to convey the ésprit révolutionnaire that existed not only during the high points of the revolutions themselves but throughout the revolutionary era, even in periods of relative quiescence. I will ask what it means to be a revolutionary, not merely a “radical” or a “progressive,” to use words very much in vogue today. In view of the fact that, in 1989, the bicentennial of the Great French Revolution was celebrated more as a patriotic exercise than as an evocation of the great world-inspiring revolution it was, this task seems particularly necessary today. I wish to lift, as best I can, the chauvinistic clouds that obscure the hopes that the great revolutions produced in the hearts of all enlightened human beings, and the ideologies that have influenced them over the greater part of two centuries.

At this time of writing an eerie counter-Enlightenment is percolating through Western culture, one that celebrates egocentricity at the expense of social commitment, mysticism at the expense of naturalism, intuitionism at the expense of rationalism, atavism at the expense of civilization, a passive-receptive mentality at the expense of a militant, activist one, and an enervating religiosity at the expense of a critical secularity. As capitalism expands to global proportions, a media-orchestrated barbarism is pushing the modern human spirit back into an absurd caricature of medievalism—almost centuries removed in spirit and outlook from the revolutionary era that gave birth to modern ideals of freedom. Whether this marks a definitive end of the revolutionary era and the Enlightenment that nourished it, I do not know. What I do know is that I, for one, do not want to be part of a historical period that lacks a revolutionary spirit to give meaning to life. This book is intended to evoke that spirit and, if possible, to make it relevant to our time.