Chapter five THE RULE OF THE MODERATES

I. The Problem of the Moderates

In the summer of 1792 Lafayette, with some of his officers, left the French Army and passed over to the Austrian lines. He was promptly put in prison by the Austrians, to whom he was a dangerous firebrand of revolution. Lafayette was, however, a good deal more fortunate than many of his fellow-heroes of 1789 who elected to stay in France, and who were guillotined as dangerous reactionaries and counter-revolutionists. Fedor Linde, a moderate Socialist who in April, 1917, moved the Finnish Regiment to a mutinous demonstration against the pro-Ally and still more moderate Miliukov, was later sent to the front as a government commissar under Kerensky and there was lynched by mutinous soldiers who refused to obey his commands. In 1647 Denzil Holles, of whom we took note briefly back in 1629, as he was helping to hold down the Speaker in his chair, was with ten other Presbyterian members excluded from Parliament for “endeavoring to overthrow the rights and liberties of the subjects.” He did indeed return briefly to his seat again in 1648, but was soon forced to flee to France to save his life. A famous phrase from the French revolution puts the thing neatly: “The revolution, like Saturn, devours its children.”

The honeymoon was in these revolutions short; very soon after the old regime had fallen there began to be evident signs that the victors were not as unanimous about what was to be done to remake the country as had appeared in the first triumphant speeches and ceremonies. Those who had directly taken over the mechanism of government were in all four of our societies men of the kind usually called moderates. They represented the richer, better known and higher placed of the old opposition to the government, and it is only to be expected that they should take over from that government. Indeed, as we have seen, their assumption of responsibility is almost a spontaneous act. So strong is this feeling that the moderates should take over power that it prevailed even in Russia in February, 1917. It looks to us now as though a Socialist coalition of some kind—Social-Revolutionary and Menshevik groups, with possibly even Bolshevik adhesions—might just as well have assumed power right away in that month. The Kadets and other bourgeois groups clearly had few strong roots in the country. And yet Lvov and his well-meaning moderates had little difficulty in assuming at least nominal control.

The moderates, once in power, turned out to have less homogeneity and party discipline than they seemed to have when they were in opposition. They were faced with the difficult task of reforming existing institutions, or making a new constitution, and taking care at the same time of the ordinary work of governing. They were also confronted very soon with armed enemies, and found themselves engaged in a foreign or civil war, or in both together. They found against them an increasingly strong and intransigeant group of radicals and extremists who insisted that the moderates were trying to stop the revolution, that they had betrayed it, that they were as bad as the rulers of the old regime—indeed, much worse, since they were traitors as well as fools and scoundrels. After a period, brief in Russia, longer in France and England, there came a show of force between moderates and extremists, a show of force in many ways quite like that earlier one between the old government and the revolutionists, and the moderates were beaten. They fled into exile, they were put into prison ultimately to face the scaffold, guillotine, or firing-squad, or if they were lucky or obscure enough, they dropped out of sight and were forgotten. The extremists in their turn took power.

This process was not quite the same in the American revolution, where on the whole it may be said that extremists like the Independents, the Jacobins, and the Bolsheviks, did not attain undivided rule. Nevertheless, as we shall see, in America rather earlier in the revolutionary process a struggle between moderates and radicals had been fought out, and had ended with victory for the radicals. The fruit of that victory was the Declaration of Independence. We may say then that in all our revolutions there is a tendency for power to go from Right to Center to Left, from the conservatives of the old regime to the moderates to the radicals or extremists. As power moves along this line, it gets more and more concentrated, more and more narrows its base in the country and among the people, since at each important crisis the defeated group has to drop out of politics. To put it in another way: after each crisis the victors tend to split into a more conservative wing holding power and a more radical one in opposition. Up to a certain stage, each crisis sees the radical opposition triumphant. The details of this process vary naturally from revolution to revolution. Its stages are not identical in length or in their time-sequence. In America power never got as far Left as it did in the other countries.

Nevertheless this struggle between moderates and extremists is a stage in our revolutions as definite as those we have studied in previous chapters, and by its very existence provides us with a useful if somewhat simple uniformity. Before we attempt to make refinements in this observation, before we try to discern uniformities in the conduct of moderates and extremists, we must review briefly the course of events during the rule of the moderates.

II. Events During the Rule of the Moderates

With the outbreak of the Civil War in the summer of 1642, Royalists and Parliamentarians stood opposed in arms. By the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644, and certainly by that of Naseby in 1645, the Royalist cause had become, in a military sense, hopeless. But almost from the first clear break with Charles, the Parliamentarians had won their revolution. The Royalists did but play more effectively the role played in America by the Tories, in France by the Royalists and clericals in the provinces, the émigrés abroad, in Russia by the numerous White Armies which opposed the Bolsheviks until 1921. We are not here so much interested in the Royalists as in the Parliamentarians. Within these latter there is from 1642 on an increasingly evident division between groups which we may call roughly moderates and extremists.

The division is not at first a simple one between two parties. At the extreme right of the Parliamentarians were a few moderate Episcopalians just touched with puritan notions, and usually also constitutional monarchists. Many of this group were on the whole indifferent to religious questions, felt that church matters would settle themselves decently if the political difficulties could be adjusted. Between these men and the moderate Royalists, who somewhat reluctantly chose to stand with their king, there was actually very little difference. Next came the great moderate party, Presbyterian in religion, puritan in ethics, monarchist at heart, but monarchist in what was to become the Whig tradition of the monarch who reigns but does not govern. The left wing of the Presbyterians, early disillusioned with the idea of monarchy by their hatred for Charles, merged easily with the main group of the extremists. These in the English revolution are called the Independents, extreme Calvinists who insisted upon the independence of each separate congregation. Their notions of church government were substantially those well known in this country as Congregationalism. With them for most political purposes were other groups that subsequently made up the English nonconformists or dissenters—notably the Baptists. The New Model Army, through which these radicals made themselves an effective force in the revolution, contained individuals espousing almost every conceivable kind of evangelical religious belief, and a good many varieties of economic and social beliefs. But the group did work as a group, and its core was certainly Independent. To the left were other groups, Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchy men, whom we shall consider in a later chapter.

Now the fact that Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents are in the English revolution respectively conservatives, moderates, and extremists, is a bit confusing to the modern reader. For the extreme idealists, these seventeenth-century Englishmen are fighting over religious matters, fighting for ideals, and he finds it absurd to equate them with Frenchmen fighting for worldly liberty, equality, and fraternity, and shocking to compare them with Russians fighting for crude economic interests. On the other hand, the modern convert to the economic interpretation of history is likely to regard these religious differences as mere “ideologies,” or pretexts for a quarrel which was really a simple economic one. To him, the Presbyterians were small gentry or bourgeois business men, the Independents petty bourgeois traders, artisans, and yeomen farmers who quarreled after they had disposed of the feudal upper classes. Both the idealist and the materialist are here clearly wrong. Politics, economics, church government, and theology are inextricably mingled in the minds and sentiments of seventeenth-century Englishmen. Their conflicts are conflicts between human beings, not between the abstractions of the philosopher, the economist, or the sociologist. We must here observe the ways in which these conflicts worked out. From many points of view, it is profitable to regard these conflicts as exhibiting the sequence of domination first by conservatives, then by moderates, then by extremists. Naturally these conservatives, moderates, and extremists were not identical with similar groups in later revolutions. As compared with the men of 1789 or of 1917, they read different books, disputed over different ideas, just as they wore different clothes. Yet the course of their revolution does display a striking identity with our other revolutions in the relation between political organization and human temperaments. The Presbyterian “compromisers” were pushed aside by more determined and extreme men, just as were the Feuillants and Girondins in France and the Kadets and compromisist Socialist groups in Russia.

Under the leadership of the Westminster Assembly, a Presbyterian synod which began its meetings in the summer of 1643, that part of England under parliamentary control was brought under the famed Scottish Covenant. Crosses, images, crucifixes were torn down, the stained glass removed from the churches, sermons lengthened, and liturgy simplified. Parliament became the supreme law of the land. But already there were signs that the Presbyterian rule was not to go unchallenged. Marston Moor was not a Presbyterian victory. It was won by Cromwell and his “Ironsides”; and these men were not good Presbyterians. They were Independents, and some were Anabaptists, Antinomians, Heaven knows what! It is said that someone complained to Cromwell because one of his officers was an Anabaptist, and received the reply, “Admit he be, shall that render him incapable to serve the public? Take heed of being too sharp ... against those to whom you can object little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning matters of religion.”

When the New Model Army was constructed from the nucleus of Cromwell’s Ironsides, and had won the Battle of Naseby, army and Parliament, Independent and Presbyterian, extremists and moderates, found themselves in opposition on various questions, notably on religious toleration and on what was to be done about Charles I. The Presbyterians wanted an established state church, built on their own notions of church government and theology, with a minimum of toleration towards papists and prelatists on the right and the sects on the left. And they most certainly wanted a king, even if that king were Charles Stuart. The Independents wanted what they called toleration. They certainly didn’t mean what a nineteenth-century Englishman or an American meant by religious toleration, and when they got into power they were very far from practicing toleration, even in the sense in which they had preached it. But at least while they were in opposition they agreed that religious belief was a personal matter and that the state should not seek to impose identical religious practices and organization on its citizens. As for the King, most of them by 1645 were sure Charles Stuart would never do. Cromwell was probably never a doctrinaire republican, but a great many of his men certainly were.

No single event marks exactly the transfer of power from the moderates to the extremists in England. The process had gone pretty far when Cornet Joyce of the army in June, 1646, seized the King at Holmby House as he was about to yield to the Parliament and consent for three years to govern as a Presbyterian king. It was almost completed when two months later Parliament at the dictation of the army reluctantly consented to the exclusion of eleven of its own members, conspicuous leaders of the Presbyterian group. Charles took the occasion of the quarrel to attempt to further his own interests. His complicated intrigues ended in nothing better than a brief war between the Scottish Presbyterians and the Cromwellians, in which for a moment the moderates could look up hopefully. Cromwell defeated the Scotch at Preston Pans in August, 1648, and the army was in undisputed control in Great Britain. After this the formal end of the moderates at Pride’s Purge in December was unimportant. Colonel Pride and a few soldiers were stationed at the door of the House of Commons to turn back the unsuitable members as they came. Ninety-six Presbyterians were thus excluded, leaving a group of fifty or sixty regular voting members on whom the extremists could rely. The Long Parliament had become the Rump.

In America the conflict never took quite such clear lines. We may say that the conservatives were those Tories who never really complained about the imperial government, the moderates those merchants and prosperous landowners who in a sense began the whole movement by their agitation against the Stamp Act, and the radicals that by no means united group which finally put through the Declaration of Independence. There was thus a kind of three-way struggle going on among these groups in the ten years preceding the outbreak of hostilities with the British Army. In this struggle the radicals exhibited an extraordinary technical skill in the practical politics of revolution. As John Adams later wrote of the organizations which, starting with local committees of correspondence and committees of safety, worked up to the continental congresses: “What an engine! France imitated it and produced a revolution.... And all Europe was inclined to imitate it for the same revolutionary purpose.”

The radicals really won their decisive victory by organizing as they did the first Continental Congress in 1774. Professor A. M. Schlesinger admirably summarizes the work of this Congress: “The radicals had achieved several important ends. They had reproduced on a national scale a type of organization and a species of tactics that in many parts of British America had enabled a determined minority to seize control of affairs ... they had snatched from the merchant class the weapons which the latter had fashioned to advance their own selfish interests in former years, and had now reversed the weapons on them, in an attempt to secure ends desired solely by the radicals. Finally, they had defined—nationalized—the issue at stake in such a manner as to afford prestige to radical groups, wherever they were to be found, and to weaken the hold of the moderate elements, on the ground that the latter were at variance with the Continental Congress.”

The taking of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, in France sealed the defeat of the most conservative group, the true Royalists. The victorious revolutionists did not long remain in harmony, and the process of transfer of power to the left began in a few months. In October of the same year the King and Queen were riotously brought back to Paris from Versailles in what are known as the October Days. These events sent into exile the leaders of the moderate conservatives, men like Mounier who greatly admired the English Constitution, and wished France to have a bicameral legislature with a House of Lords and a House of Commons, and a real king. For the next few years a group of moderates centering about men like Mirabeau, Lafayette and the Lameths, were opposed by a group of radicals centering around men—Pétion, Robespierre, Danton, Brissot—soon to be leaders of the rival republican groups of Gironde and Mountain, but at present united against the moderates. The moderates succeeded in making the Constitution, and starting the new regime off. But war between France and the Central European powers of Austria and Prussia broke out, certain provisions of the Constitution, notably those concerning religion and the monarchy, failed to work well, Louis himself was suspected of treason by many of his subjects, and in the general political turmoil the active and well-organized radicals overthrew the monarchy in the famous attack on the Tuileries Palace in Paris on August 10, 1792.

Avowed monarchists and such mild reformers and liberals as Lafayette were thus excluded from power, and France became a republic. But the final and critical defeat of the moderates in France is better placed on June 2, 1793. In matters of this sort, as in any splitting up of historical events into periods, there may be legitimate differences of interpretation. Conservatives, moderates, and radicals and extremists are not in any of our societies absolutely clear-cut and definite groups, nor is the transference of power from one to another very often a single event agreed upon by all to be such. You may feel that no moderate could have voted the end of the French monarchy. None the less it would seem that the right wing of the republicans, known to history as the Girondins, and to their contemporaries as the Brissotins, were really moderates upon whom circumstances forced actions to them disagreeably radical and extreme. Notably they did not wish the death of the King. They were mostly prosperous bourgeois, lawyers and intellectuals, and after the trial of the King in January, 1793, they became very sure that the revolution had gone far enough, that it ought to be stopped. Whatever their past, they had now become moderates. By the early months of 1793 they had lost control of the Paris Jacobin Club and with it most of the other revolutionary clubs and the whole network of organizations which had helped the radicals achieve their ends in the early days of the revolution. They could not command the support of the hesitating and more or less neutral mass of deputies in the Convention who were called the Plain. Their enemies were better organized, more aggressive, and perhaps more unscrupulous. They were certainly more successful.

Just as with the Presbyterians in England, there came the demand that these now moderate leaders be excluded from the Convention and brought under arrest. In a test of strength in the Convention on June 2, 1793, the extremists took care to surround the meeting-place of that body with sympathetic Parisian militiamen, back of whom assembled a large and hostile crowd. The Convention tried to stand on their representative dignity and to refuse to permit the arrest of the twenty-two members demanded by the Mountain. Headed by their president, they solemnly marched out to ensure that their position be respected as the embodiment of the will of the people. The deputies made the circuit of the gardens, finding an unyielding row of bayonets at every gate, and a “people” with a temporary will of its own. They returned indoors and voted the arrest of the twenty-two Girondins. The radical Montagnards were now in undisputed command.

Events moved rather faster in Russia, but their sequence is almost identical with those in England and in France. The first provisional government headed nominally by Prince Lvov, really by Miliukov, was made up mostly of Kadets, the left wing of middle-class groups in the old Duma, but no more than “progressives,” “liberals,” or “democrats” in Western political terminology. There were several representatives of more conservative groups, and only one Socialist, Kerensky. After a life of less than two months, this government broke down over the question of continuing an “imperialist” war on the side of the allies. Miliukov was forced out for too great compliance with the imperialism of the allies, and a number of Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries accepted positions in the new government. In July Kerensky took the formal leadership after a crisis, and in September the Kadets finally withdrew altogether, leaving Kerensky at the head of a very shaky moderate Socialist government.

The Socialists who thus consented to co-operate with bourgeois governments in the prosecution of the war were christened by the Bolsheviks “compromisist.” Such Socialists came from almost all the fractions into which this political faith had split in twentieth-century Russia, where the usual doctrinal differences within Marxism were complicated by those which looked back into Russian history for a peculiarly deep-seated Slavic village-communism. In the specific Russian situation, these Social-Revolutionaries, Trudoviks, Narodniks, Mensheviks, must be called moderates. They did not hope to introduce the dictatorship of the proletariat. They wanted to win the war, and they were willing to make use of parliamentary methods to secure social reforms. They had long been distrustful of the Kadets, but under the pressure of events they consented to co-operate with them. The Kadets themselves suffered the fate of the Puritan Episcopalians and the Feuillants; they were pushed out by their collaborators to the Left.

The Bolsheviks refused to take part in any of these governments. They insisted that the bourgeois revolution of February must sooner or later be followed by the proletarian revolution Marx had preached and predicted. Lenin, who returned from a Swiss exile in April to enjoy a few months of bourgeois freedom, decided that the proletarian revolution might be brought off in Russia. His party was by no means unanimously agreed, but his leadership kept the small band together, and the blunders of the compromisists, together with the heritage of defeat and disorganization, played into his hands. In July a premature rising of workers in Petrograd was apparently given local and reluctant leadership by some of the party, and its failure sent Lenin into hiding, and Trotsky and Lunacharsky to prison. The subsequent swing of the pendulum to the Right ended with the abortive attempt of General Kornilov to march on Petrograd, and in this whole process the Bolsheviks gradually acquired new courage and a new following. Lenin from hiding held a guiding hand. Trotsky was released, and elected president of a Petrograd soviet now in Bolshevik control. Lenin, back secretly in Petrograd, presided at a final meeting of the party Central Committee, and an insurrection was decided upon. In a masterly exhibition of revolutionary technique, a military revolution committee made sure of the Petrograd garrison, other groups contrived to hamstring the press and communications, and on the agreed day the Bolsheviks took over Petrograd with astonishingly little difficulty and almost no bloodshed. Even the siege of the Winter Palace, which forms the high point of the uprising, has a comic-opera touch. The October revolution in Petrograd was almost as bloodless as Pride’s Purge or June 2, 1793, the corresponding events in the English and French revolutions. In Moscow there was real fighting, but there, too, the Bolsheviks were successful within a week. Kerensky fled, and the rule of the moderates in Russia was over.

III. Dual Sovereignty

The Russian revolution affords the neatest example of a uniformity that lies beyond the somewhat superficial uniformity of sequence of power from conservatives to moderates to extremists, from Right to Center to Left. This is at once an institution and a process; or better, a process that works through a very similar set of institutions. Theorists and historians of the Russian revolution refer to it as the dvoevlastie, a word usually translated as dual power, but containing overtones that make it better translated, perhaps, as dual sovereignty. We must go briefly into the general situation to which this word refers.

The problem of sovereignty has long been in itself sufficient to keep hundreds of political philosophers busy and happy. Here once more, having other work to do, we must resign ourselves to abstention from these philosophical delights. In a normal Western society, it may well be difficult or impossible to locate any one person, or group of persons, who possesses the final, authoritative power to decide questions concerning what the society is to do. The pluralists would seem to be, from the point of view of description of social processes, quite right. Even the broader political policies of a modern state seem to be arrived at by so elaborately natural a process of adjusting the desires of conflicting groups, that to say that a single and identifiable “sovereign” determines these policies is nonsense. And yet in a normal society there is at least one co-ordinated chain of institutions through which conflicting groups do finally adjust their conflicts, for the moment at least, in action. That co-ordination may seem inefficient and irrational when academically analyzed, and it may well be so complicated that even the politicians who make it work do not understand it. For men are as often as not unaware of how they do things they do very successfully.

But it does work, and through it questions at issue are decided—or forgotten, which is also a kind of deciding. Those who do not like the decision may try to alter it by a very great variety of action, from agitation to conspiracy or sabotage. Socially powerful or numerous groups may under favoring conditions even go so far as to nullify a given decision: the example of the Eighteenth Amendment in the United States will occur to everyone. On the whole, however, the decisions become law, and overt disobedience becomes criminal.

When another and conflicting chain of institutions provides another and conflicting set of decisions, then you have a dual sovereignty. Within the same society, two sets of institutions, leaders, and laws demand obedience, not in one single respect, but in the whole interwoven series of actions which make up life for the average man. Thus the nullification of the Prohibition Amendment by many citizens over large areas of the United States did not in itself mean that there was in this country a revolutionary situation of dual sovereignty. Were a similar nullification extended by, let us say, a strengthened amalgamation of the American Federation of Labor and the Committee for Industrial Organization from the Fourteenth Amendment on through to the common law of property; were this amalgamation to enforce laws of its own on workers in factories; were it to take over many of the functions of local government in relation to markets, sanitation, police, and so on—we should clearly have dual sovereignty. We should, as a matter of fact, have a state of affairs something like that in Russia in the summer of 1917.

In all our revolutions, however, the legal government finds opposed to it, once the first steps in actual revolution have been taken, not merely hostile individuals and parties—this any government finds—but a rival government, better organized, better staffed, better obeyed. This rival government is of course illegal, but not all of its leaders and followers are from the beginning consciously aiming to supplant the legal government. Very often they think of themselves as merely supplementing it, perhaps also as preserving it in a revolutionary course. Yet a rival government they are, and no mere critics or opponents. At a given revolutionary crisis they step naturally and easily into the place of the defeated government.

This process does indeed work itself out in the old regimes before the first steps in revolution are taken. Puritans in England, Whigs in America, Third Estate in France, the Kadets and compromisist Socialists in Russia, all had organizations that demanded their allegiance and that enabled them to fight the old regime with revolution at least in the back of their minds. But the process is much more clear, more sharply edged—except perhaps in America—at the stage we have now reached.

Once the first stage in revolution is over, the struggle that arises between moderates and extremists comes to be a struggle between two rival governmental machines. That of the moderates, the legal government, bar inherited some of the prestige that goes with being established, some of the financial resources—actual or potential—of the old government, most of its liabilities, all of its institutions. Try to alter these latter as it may, it finds them annoyingly persistent, extremely difficult to blot out. The legal government is unpopular with many just because it is an obvious and responsible government, because it has to shoulder some of the unpopularity of the government of the old regime.

The illegal government of the extremists, however, has to face no such difficulties. It has the prestige which recent events have given to attackers, to those who can claim to be in the forefront of the revolution. It has, as governments go, relatively few responsibilities. It does not have to try to use, if only temporarily, the worn-out machinery, the institutions of the old regime. It has, on the contrary, for the moment the great advantage of using the efficient machinery gradually constructed by the revolutionists, both moderates and extremists, from the time when they began under the old regime to emerge as a pressure group. Indeed, the final capture of this machinery—or this organization, if you prefer—seems to be what really determines the final victory of the extremists over the moderates, long before that final victory is apparent in events. Why the moderates do not keep control of the organization they have done so much to initiate and to mold is a question that permits of no simple answer. We may hope that some answer will emerge from a more detailed study of the fate of the moderates. We must first, however, see how well the foregoing analysis fits the facts in our four revolutions.

Charles and the Long Parliament were clearly dual sovereigns from the actual outbreak of hostilities in 1642 if not from the very first session of 1640. Once the Civil War was decided against Charles, Parliament, under the control of the moderates, found itself the legal government. But almost immediately it was confronted by the radical New Model Army, which very soon began to take the kind of action that in this world only a government can take. The fact that Charles was still on the scene and the existence of the Scotch Army complicated the situation in the three or four years before the execution of Charles in 1649, but the broad lines of the duel between the newly legal government of the Presbyterian moderates in Parliament and the illegal government of the extremist Independents in the New Model Army are clear.

In America this dual sovereignty is most obvious in the years before the final break in 1776. The lines between the legal and the illegal government were obscured, especially in a colony like Massachusetts, by the fact that town meetings and colonial legislatures were part of the legal government, but were often controlled by men active in the illegal government. None the less, the machinery which culminated in the continental congresses—in themselves illegal bodies—was clearly used by revolutionists against constituted authority.

While the moderates in France, the Feuillants, or constitutional monarchists, still controlled the legislative body and the formal machinery of the centralized state, their increasingly republican opponents controlled the network of Jacobin societies which made up the frame of the other, or illegal, government. Through their control of these societies they worked into the control of many of the units of local government, and from this position of vantage were able to expel the Feuillant moderates and destroy the monarchy. The process was then repeated with the Girondin moderates controlling the legislative body and the Montagnard extremists controlling the important units of the Jacobin network and at least one exceedingly important local governmental unit—the Paris Commune. In the crisis of June 2, 1793, the illegal government again won out over the legal.

In Russia the dvoevlastie is plain. The provisional government which emerged from the February revolution had through its connection with the Duma some claim to legitimacy. Though it absorbed more and more Socialists of various stripes in the next six months, thus exhibiting the leftward movement we have found in all our societies, it remained moderate and quite conscious of its legality. On the other side the Bolsheviks and a few allied radical groups had by late summer obtained control of the network of soviets and stood as an illegal government facing the legal one. Soviet means no more than “council” and had originally in Russia no more connotations than its English equivalent has for us. The soviets were local councils of trade-unionists, soldiers, sailors, peasants, and suitable intellectuals. They sprang up naturally enough with the dissolution of the Czarist power in 1917, all the more since memories of the abortive revolution of 1905, which had also made use of the soviet form, were fresh in the minds of everyone. The Bolsheviks, wisely concentrating on the soviets while the attention of the compromisists was increasingly taken by participation in the legal government, were able to wrest control of key soviets in Petrograd, Moscow, and major industrial towns from the compromisists. There is here a curious detailed parallel with the French revolution. The final insurrectionary victory of the Bolsheviks was achieved without complete control of the general network of soviets, just as that of the Montagnards was achieved without control of the whole network of Jacobin clubs. In each case control of the most important units of the illegal government was sufficient.

IV. Weaknesses of the Moderates

At this stage in revolution, then, the moderates in control of the formal machinery of government are confronted by the extremists in control of machinery devised for propaganda, pressure-group work, even insurrection, but now increasingly used as machinery of government. This stage ends with the triumph of the extremists and the merging of the dual sovereignty into a single one. We must now inquire into the reasons for the failure of the moderates in these revolutions to hold power.

There is first the paradox we have previously noted, that in the early stages of revolution the control of the machinery of government is in itself a source of weakness for those who hold such control. Little by little the moderates find themselves losing the credit they had gained as opponents of the old regime, and taking on more and more of the discredit innocently associated by the hopeful many with the status of heir to the old regime. Forced on the defensive, they make mistake after mistake, partly because they are so little used to being on the defensive. They are in a position from which only a superhuman wisdom could extricate them; and the moderates are among the most human of revolutionaries.

Faced with the opposition of more radical groups organized in the network we have called the illegal government, the moderates have broadly but three choices: they may try to suppress the illegal government; they may try to get control of it themselves; or they may let it alone. Actually their policy shifts around among these three policies, combining one with another; in these circumstances, the net effect is to produce a fourth policy, which amounts to a positive encouragement of their enemies in the illegal government.

In the revolutions we are studying the moderates are particularly handicapped in their efforts to suppress these enemy organizations. The revolutions were all made in the name of freedom, were all associated with what the Marxists call a bourgeois individualistic ideology. The moderates found themselves obliged to observe certain “rights” of their enemies—notably those of freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly. What is more, many if not most of the moderates sincerely believed in such rights, held that truth is great and will prevail. Had it not just prevailed against the tyranny of the old regime? Even when under pressure the moderate begins to try to suppress an extremist newspaper, forbid an extremist meeting, jail a few extremist leaders, his conscience troubles him. More important, any unsuppressed extremists raise a mighty howl. The moderates are betraying the revolution; they are using exactly the same methods the villainous tyrants of the old regime had used.

The Russian revolution is here an excellent example. The Kadets and compromisists between February and October could not conveniently suppress Bolshevik propaganda, nor indeed any form of Bolshevik political activity. When they tried to do so after a premature Bolshevik rising, the street troubles in Petrograd known as the “July Days,” they were met by protests from all sorts of people, including notably the Bolsheviks. This was despotism, this was Czarism of the worst sort. Had not the February revolution brought political freedom, freedom of the press and association, to Russia forever? Kerensky mustn’t make use of the kind of weapons the Czars had used. In 1938 Stalin of course can use methods worthy of Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible, but that is only to say that the Russian revolution is over. In 1917, however, even had Kerensky been the sort of man who could successfully organize repressive measures—and he plainly was not that sort of man—what we are bound to call public opinion would not in those days have permitted the execution of such measures. Much the same situation is to be found in France, where the Jacobins were permitted free speech and free association, and firmly and publicly insisted on their rights as free men to get ready for a dictatorship.

Nor are the moderates more successful in their attempts to get—or rather to retain—control of the machinery which they and the extremists had jointly built up as a means of overthrowing the old regime. For this there seems to be no single preponderant reason. The moderates are, of course, occupied with a good deal of the work of actual governing, and they have less time for army committees or Jacobin clubs or soviet meetings. They feel themselves perhaps a trifle superior to such activity. They are temperamentally unfitted for the rougher and dirtier work of the politics of direct action. They have moral scruples. They are not quite the noble souls historical legend makes out the Girondin moderates in the French revolution to have been; indeed many of them, like Brissot and Kerensky, have a good many of the gifts of the political manipulator. But they are in power, and they seem to set about quite naturally cultivating the sober virtues that go with power. Such virtues, however, make them inadequate leaders of militant revolutionary societies.

Whatever the explanation, the fact of the uniformity is clear. This particular failure of the moderates is well shown in the French revolution. The Jacobin network of societies of “Friends of the Constitution” was in its inception hardly to the Left of Lafayette and his friends. When, however, it began to move further to the Left the Fayettists made a few feeble efforts to retain control, and then went off and founded their own society, the Feuillants. The Feuillants, however, could not spread beyond narrow upper-class and intellectual Parisian circles. Later groups founded here and there throughout the country as “Friends of the Monarchy,” or “Friends of Peace,” tried to compete with the Jacobins, but with very little luck. If they gave bread to the poor, the Jacobins cried out that they were attempting bribery. If they did nothing, the Jacobins complained that they lacked social conscience. Finally the Jacobins worked out a fairly systematic procedure. They would hire a few hoodlums—sometimes it was not necessary to hire them—to break up a meeting of the rival Friends of Peace, and would then send a deputation to the municipal authorities asking that the Friends of Peace be closed as a public nuisance. The authorities were either Jacobins themselves, or more afraid of the Jacobins than of the Friends of Peace, so that the matter received a suitable revolutionary solution.

Similarly the Presbyterians found themselves powerless to control the spread of Independency, not only in the army, but in local parishes. And in Russia the compromisists found the Bolsheviks formidable in all the important soviets. A detailed study of the Petrograd soviet from February to October will show how cleverly the party of Lenin took advantage of every mistake of its opponents, how successfully it burrowed from within, spreading its control from factory soviets on up until finally the city soviet was captured. Such a study will also show the compromisists gradually losing ground, in spite of the great oratorical gifts of leaders like Tseretelli, Chkheidze and Kerensky.

There is, indeed, an almost organic weakness in the position of the moderates. They are placed between two groups, the disgruntled but not yet silenced conservatives and the confident, aggressive extremists. There are still freedom of speech and the other political rights, so that even conservatives have a voice. Now the moderates seem in all these revolutions to be following the slogan used so conspicuously for French politics of the Cartel des Gauches in 1924: no enemies to the Left. They still distrust the conservatives, against whom they have so recently risen; and they are reluctant to admit that the extremists, with whom they so recently stood united, can actually be their enemies. All the force of the ideas and sentiments with which the moderates entered the revolution give them a sort of twist toward the Left. Emotionally they cannot bear to think of themselves as falling behind in the revolutionary process. Moreover, many of them hope to outbid the extremists for popular support, to beat them at their own game. But only in normal times can you trust in the nice smooth clichés of politics like “beat them at their own game.” The moderates fail by this policy of “no enemies to the Left” to reconcile these enemies to the Left; and they make it quite impossible to rally to their support any of the not yet quite negligible conservatives. Then, after the moderates get thoroughly frightened about the threatening attitude of the extremists, they turn for help to the conservatives, and find there just aren’t any. They have emigrated, or retired to the country, hopeless and martyred in spirit. Needless to say, a martyred conservative is no longer a conservative, but only another maladjusted soul. This last turn of theirs towards the conservatives, however, finishes the moderates. Alone, unsupported in control of a government as yet by no means in assured and habitual control of a personnel, civil or military, they succumb easily to insurrection. It is significant that Pride’s Purge, the French crisis of June 2, 1793, and the Petrograd October revolution were all hardly more than coups d’état.

In the English, French, and Russian revolutions it is possible to distinguish one critical measure around which all these currents converge, a measure which, espoused by the moderates, cuts them off from support on the Right and leaves the radicals in a position to use this very measure against its authors. Such are the Root-and-Branch Bill in the English, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in the French, and Order Number One in the Russian, revolutions.

The Root-and-Branch Bill originated in a petition with 15,000 signatures presented to the House of Commons late in 1640, asking for the abolition of Episcopacy “with all its roots and branches.” Naturally the moderate Episcopalians, from Hyde and Falkland to Digby, were against a measure which destroyed their Church; and just as naturally the Presbyterians were inclined to favor it. It is possible that politically minded moderates like Pym might have left the bill alone, but the refusal of the bishops to give up their seats in the House of Lords seems to have determined Pym to support the bill. This espousal made almost every Episcopalian a Royalist, and when the Civil War broke out in 1642 the Presbyterians were stranded on the extreme Right of the party groupings within the region controlled by the Parliamentarians. They could find no possible allies except to the Left. The Independents—and Cromwell had first actually introduced the Root-and-Branch Bill to the House—could now argue that presbyters were no better than bishops, that the reasons which held for the abolition of one held incontrovertibly for the abolition of the other. Later, when the moderates proved incapable of carrying the war to a successful conclusion, measures like the Self-Denying Ordinance and the creation of the New Model Army had to be accepted by a Presbyterian majority which yet was not by any means a commanding majority, and which had left itself with no possibility of conservative support.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy emerged after months of discussion in the National Assembly as a charter for renewed Christianity in France. The moderates who put it through seem mostly to have been sincere men, bad Catholics in some ways, perhaps, but rather because they had absorbed some of the practical worldly spirit of the age than because they were outright anti-clericals. Yet their measure alienated the good Catholics and merely encouraged the violent anti-clericals to try to root out the “vile superstitions” of Christianity altogether. The Civil Constitution in all innocence provided for the election of parish priests by the same local electoral bodies that chose lay officials for the new government positions, and for the election of bishops by the same departmental body that elected representatives to the Legislative Assembly. It scrapped all the historic dioceses of old France, and substituted nice, nearly uniform dioceses identical with the new départements into which France was governmentally divided. It did consent to “notify” the Pope of such elections.

Since the property of the Church as a corporation had been taken over to serve as security for the new paper money of the revolution, the assignats, the State was to support the expenses of the clergy under the new constitution. The election of priests and bishops by bodies to which Protestants, Jews, and avowed atheists were eligible was so completely uncanonical that no Pope could for a moment have considered accepting it. Although there was the usual diplomatic delay, the break between the Pope and the revolutionary government was inevitable, and with it the powerful and conservative group of Catholics was forced irreconcilably into opposition. A schism began which extended to every village in the land. But the new Constitutional Church was hardly more acceptable to the real radicals than the old Orthodox Church, and as the critical days of the Terror drew nearer the moderates found themselves saddled with the protection of a church which returned them no important support.

Order Number One emerged from no such long debate as did the Root-and-Branch Bill and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Indeed, it is not quite fair to list it as a definite measure sponsored by the moderates, though the soviet leader most prominent in the group which prepared it was the moderate N. D. Sokolov, and the compromisists energetically promulgated it. The Order emerged in the very last days of the February revolution from the headquarters of the Petrograd soviet. It was addressed to the army, and in addition to the usual revolutionary measures towards a standing army of the old regime—abolition of salutes, social and political equality of privates with officers, and so on—it provided for elected company and battalion committees which were to have entire charge of arms, above all of those of officers; and it ordered that every military unit obey the soviets in political matters. The military committee of the Duma might be obeyed in military matters, provided the soviet did not object in a specific case. The Order was devised primarily with the Petrograd garrison in mind, but its main provisions were rapidly taken up at the front. This order at once convinced the conservatives that there was nothing to be hoped for from the revolution, and put even the more liberal officers in a state of mind to welcome later attempts at a conservative coup d’état. It made the subsequent task of the moderates in bringing Russia back to military efficiency for the war on Germany more difficult than ever. And it by no means served to reconcile the soldiers themselves with the continuation of the war. Most of the popularity of Order Number One eventually redounded to the credit of the Bolsheviks; most of its unpopularity came back on the compromisists. This is the typical fate of the moderates in these revolutions.

Again, the moderates are in all our societies confronted sooner or later with the task of fighting a war; and they prove poor war leaders. In England the fighting broke out in 1642, and before the first Civil War was over Cromwell and the Independents had made themselves indispensable, and were on the threshold of power. Foreign war in France broke out in the spring of 1792, and a few months later the monarchy had fallen; the war went very badly in the spring of 1793, and in June the moderate Girondins, who had on the French side been the most eager for war, were turned out by the Montagnards. The Russian revolution was born in the midst of a disastrous war, and the Russian moderates never had a chance at peaceful administration. The fact is clear. The moderates cannot seem to succeed in war. The reasons why are less clear. No doubt the commitment of the moderates to protect the liberties of the individual is a factor. You cannot organize an army if you take Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity at all seriously.

Modern wars seem to carry with them the necessity for organizing civil government along military lines, for the exercise of strong, centralized governmental authority in which the liberty of the individual is far from a matter of first concern, in which there is very little debate, very little of the government by discussion so prized by the moderates, very little compromise and moderation. War, said Madison, is the mother of executive aggrandizement, and even here in America our wars have borne him out. But in the midst of a revolution the executive that gets aggrandized is not the moderate executive. The Reigns of Terror in France and in Russia are in part explicable as the concentration of power in a government of national defense made necessary by the fact of war. This is by no means a complete explanation of the Reigns of Terror. But certainly the necessity for a strong centralized government to run the war is one of the reasons why the moderates failed. They simply could not provide the discipline, the enthusiasm, the unpondered loyalty necessary to fight a war, and they went out.

V. The Failure of the Moderates

To the kindly souls who for the most part wrote the history from which we get our notions of modern revolutions, this failure of the moderates was a great tragedy. The moderates appear as good men worsted by circumstances and unscrupulous opponents. They seem to be idealists crushed by a harsh world, but thereby sure of the resurrection history holds out to the just. The gentle Falkland and the scholarly Condorcet smile down upon us from the only heaven to which mere mortals hold the key; and if historians have not yet admitted Kerensky into their heaven, the reason may be no more than that the poor man is still inescapably here on earth.

Perhaps most of the moderates would be better or at least more normal men than their extremist opponents. Yet, leaders and led together, they make a motley lot, by no means easily catalogued by Marxist or by psychologist. And the traditional notion that they were idealists and that they failed because in the rough give-and-take the idealist must always fail is here peculiarly misleading. It is more accurate to risk the paradox: they failed because they were in so many respects what is usually called realists; that is, some of them were reasonably well adapted to a common-sense world.

Pym and Mirabeau, who died peacefully before the defeat of the moderates was evident, still enjoy reputations as skilled politicians, as sensible moderates. Over most of the others there hangs something of the kind of reputation most definite and clear with Kerensky. The eloquent compromisist leader seems to us a man of words, an orator who could move crowds but could not guide them, an impractical and incompetent person in the field of action. The Gironde seems much the same, as also the lesser Presbyterian leaders like Holles. It seems emptily paradoxical to list these people as realists. Yet realists of a kind they were. They used grand words and phrases grandly, as a consolation and a joy to their listeners and to themselves. But they did not believe in them as the radicals believed in them; they did not intend to try to pursue them to their logical conclusions in action. They were, in short, using words in the way most men in normal societies, including such realistic politicians as Gladstone, use them. They would not seem realists to a hard-headed horse-trader. But within the limits which tradition and ritual have set for the work of such people as they—part priest, part administrator, part actor, part teacher—they were good quiet practitioners.

But the times were turned topsy-turvy, and as the crisis of the revolution approached, only the man with a touch—or more—of fanatic idealism in him, or at least with the ability to act the part of such a fanatic, could attain to leadership. The normal social roles of realism and idealism are reversed in the acute phases of a revolution. We shall return to this topic in our next chapter. Here we need only note that the outward evidences of the approach of this kind of crisis appear as a heightened form of class antagonism. The moderates by definition are not great haters, are not endowed with the effective blindness which keeps men like Robespierre and Lenin undistracted in their rise to power. In normal times, ordinary men are not capable of feeling for groups of their fellow-men hatred as intense, continuous, and uncomfortable as that preached by the extremists in revolution. Hatred is a heroic emotion, and heroic emotions are exhausting. The poor may hate the rich, the Protestant the Catholic, the bourgeois the noble, the Southerner the Yankee, and so on endlessly. But this hate is normally in human beings a routine and consoling hate, a part of life, like food, drink, and loving, integrated with an existence as alien to the possibility of revolution as that of a vegetable.

The moderates, then, do not really believe in the big words they have to use. They do not really believe a heavenly perfection is suddenly coming to men on earth. They are all for compromise, common sense, toleration, comfort. In a normal society, these desires are part of their strength and give them their hold over their fellows, who share at least their desire for comfort. But in these three revolutions large numbers of men were for the moment lifted by desire and emotion to a point where they seemed to despise even comfort. The moderates could not deal politically with such men; they could not take the first steps which are necessary if such men are to be understood. The moderates were cut off from the immoderates by a gap neither philosophy nor common sense could fill. There is an adage that in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king. In one of his subtler short stories, The Kingdom of the Blind, Mr. H. G. Wells has exposed the weakness of this apothegm. In the heat of a violent revolution, its weakness is perhaps even more apparent than in the imaginary Andean valley of Mr. Wells’s tale. The moderates we have been dealing with were all very human and very fallible; but even had they been as wise as the heroes of Plutarch, as wise as Washington, it would seem that they must have failed. For we are here in a land fabulous, but real, where the wisdom and common sense of the moderate are not wisdom and common sense, but folly.