II. Economic and Social Position: Rank and File

One of the most useful approaches to the problem of the personnel of revolutionary movements is from the relatively objective indications of the economic and social status of those who take part in the uprising. Now it is very difficult to find out much about the rank and file of the revolutionists. Like the private soldier in war, the ordinary revolutionist is inarticulate and nameless. For the French revolution, however, some such study is not impossible. In the surviving records of the Jacobin Clubs, which served as centers of revolutionary action, and resemble both the Russian soviets and the American corresponding committees, we have a large number of lists of members—imperfect, of course, but still lists. Some years ago the present writer made a study of these lists, and, aided by tax-rolls and other documents in French local archives, was able to arrive at certain rough statistical generalizations about these revolutionists. Some of these generalizations must be here summarized from the author’s The Jacobins: A Study in the New History.

In general, it is possible to arrive at some statistical approximation of the social and economic positions of these Jacobin revolutionists in pre-revolutionary France. There are tax-rolls extant for various years between 1785 and 1790, and on these many of the Jacobins can be found, with the sums they were assessed at. As these were direct taxes not too far out of proportion to income, it is possible thus to get a rough estimate of Jacobin wealth. Occupations are usually given, and this is a useful indication of social position. Finally, it is also possible to study certain clubs at specific moments in the revolution, so that a sample can be taken during the early or moderate period, and another during the later rule of the extremists. Here, briefly, are some of the results.

For twelve clubs, with a total membership of 5,405 over the whole course of the revolution, 1789-95, in both its moderate and its violent phases: 62 per cent of the members were middle class, 28 per cent working class, 10 per cent peasants. For twelve clubs in the moderate period, 1789-92, with a membership of 4,037: 66 per cent were middle class, 26 per cent working class, 8 per cent peasants. For forty-two clubs in the violent period, 1793-95, with a membership of 8,062: 57 per cent were middle class, 32 per cent working class, 11 per cent peasants. The tax-rolls confirm what occupational and social classification suggests. In eight clubs considered over the whole period of revolution, club members paid an average tax of 32.12 livres, where the average tax for all male citizens of the towns considered was 17.02 livres; in twenty-six clubs considered in the violent period only, club members paid 19.94 livres, male citizens 14.45 livres. Thus, though there was certainly a tendency for the clubs to be recruited in the violent period from social strata a bit lower, on the whole one is forced to the conclusion that “the Jacobin was neither a nobleman nor a beggar, but almost anything in between. The Jacobins represent a complete cross-section of their communities.”

Other relatively objective indices help us a bit. It was often possible to list the ages of members of the clubs during the revolution. As far as the rank and file of these clubs went, the notion that revolutionists are recruited from the young and irresponsible was not borne out. For ten clubs the average age varied from 38.3 years to 45.4 years, and for all ten together came to 41.8 years. These were clearly not foolhardy youngsters. Nor were they footloose itinerants, shock troops imported from revolutionary urban centers like Paris. Out of 2,949 members of fifteen clubs, only 378, or 13 per cent, had moved into the towns since the outbreak of trouble in 1789. The actual membership of the clubs varied as the revolutionary movement grew more and more extreme—or in modern terms, went more and more to the Left. Many moderates emigrated or were guillotined, many disreputable extremists, often though by no means always from the lower classes, only “made” the clubs later on. Yet in six clubs with a total membership from 1789 to 1795 of 3,028, something over 31 per cent managed to stay on the books for the whole period, to have been successively good monarchists, good Girondists, good Montagnards. It is not true that the personality of these clubs became dominantly lower or working class after the fall of the monarchy in 1792, nor even that their newer recruits were largely from the proletariat. And it is quite clear that these people are not on the whole failures in their earlier environment; rather they represent the abler, more ambitious and successful of the inhabitants of a given town. It is as if our Rotarians today were revolutionists.

A similar statistical study could probably not be made for the English revolution since lists corresponding to the Jacobin membership lists are not available. The material certainly exists for such a study of the actual membership of the soviets in, say, the crucial year 1917, but it would have to be put together from scattered sources available only in Russia. We know a good deal about the membership of our own American revolutionary groups, from merchants’ committees and corresponding committees to continental congresses. Even for the English revolution we have enough scattered material to permit some generalizations about the personnel of the movement.

In the early stages of the English revolution there can be no doubt about the respectability and economic prosperity of the men who backed Parliament. Baxter, somewhat exaggeratedly, but with a kernel of truth, writes that when the Great Rebellion broke out “it was the moderate Conformists and Episcopal Protestants who had long been crying of Innovations, Arminianism, Popery, Monopolies, illegal taxes and the danger of arbitrary government, who raised the war.” The merchants of London, Bristol and other towns, great lords, small landowning gentry, all rose in sedition against their king. Even in what we may call the extremist or crisis period of the English revolution, which begins in 1646 or 1647 when the tension between the New Model Army and the Presbyterians becomes acute, your revolutionists are very far from riffraff. Even Baxter reports of that army—which was to the English revolution what the Jacobins were to the French and the Bolsheviks to the Russian revolutions—that “abundance of the common troopers and many of the officers I found to be honest, sober, orthodox men, and others tractable, ready to hear the truth, and of upright intentions.” An historian has estimated that when the New Model “took the field in 1645, of its thirty-seven chief officers, nine were of noble, twenty-one of gentle birth, and only seven not gentlemen by birth.” The English lower classes, or at least the more proletarian elements as opposed to independent artisans, on the whole stood aloof from the conflict. Even the wilder sectarians seem to have been recruited from humble, but by no means poverty-stricken people, men who had taught themselves to follow the theological disputes, men on the whole representing the more active and ambitious of their class. The poorer peasants, especially in the North and West, actually sided with the King and against the revolutionists.

In America we have already pointed out the well-known fact that it was the merchants who first organized opposition to the Crown. This opposition was echoed by many planters in the southern coastal plain, and by many very respectable yeoman farmers of the Piedmont. It is quite true that there are numerous signs of the pretty active participation of what a good conservative would regard as the dregs of the population. The Boston Sons of Liberty, who performed most of the actual work of violence there, were recruited from workingmen and actually met habitually in the counting-room of a distillery. The Tories, whom it is now more fashionable to call Loyalists, naturally saw their opponents as a pretty shabby lot. Hutchinson writes of the Boston town meeting that it is “constituted of the lowest class of the people under the influence of a few of the higher class, but of intemperate and furious dispositions and of desperate fortunes. Men of property and the best character have deserted these meetings, where they are sure of being affronted.”

Actually the line between Tory and Whig is a very irregular one, depending on much besides economic status, as can be seen from the late J. F. Jameson’s The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement. If the rich gentlemen of “Tory Row” in Cambridge sided with the Crown, there were plenty of sober, respectable farmers, merchants, and lawyers, who turned revolutionist. Such men were likely to be shocked at the doings of wild young apprentices in the Sons of Liberty, but this did not necessarily turn them to the British side, though it made them critical of the Congress. A good sign of the respectability of revolution is the adhesion of the clergy, which save for the Episcopalians was in most colonies general. As a disgruntled Tory put it, “The high sons of liberty include the ministers of the gospel, who instead of preaching to their flocks meekness, sobriety, attention to their different employments, and a steady obedience to the laws of Britain, belch from the pulpits liberty, independence, and a steady perseverance in endeavoring to shake off their allegiance to the mother country. The independent ministers have ever been ... the instigators and abettors of every persecution and conspiracy.”

To sum up we shall have to agree with Jameson that the strength of the revolutionary movement in the long run lay with the plain people—not with the mob or “rabble,” for American society was rural and not urban—but with country artisans, small farmers, and frontiersmen. But we shall also have to agree with Alexander Graydon that “the opposition to the claims of Britain originated with the better sort: it was truly aristocratical in its commencement.”

The February revolution in Russia seems to have been welcomed by all classes save the most conservative of conservatives—a few army officers, a few members of the Court and the old nobility. No one knows who made the February revolution, but there can be no doubt as to its popularity. Almost everyone, liberal noble, banker, industrialist, lawyer, doctor, civil servant, kulak, and workingman, was glad to co-operate in giving the Czarist regime its final blow. Even the Bolsheviks, whose sudden victory in the October revolution of 1917 makes the time-scheme of the Russian revolution so very different from those of the English and French revolutions, were by no means what confirmed haters of revolution call riffraff, rabble, “the masses.” They seem to have been recruited chiefly from the more enterprising, able, and skilled workingmen in the factories of Petrograd, Moscow, and specialized industrial centers like Ivanovo-Vosnessensk or the Don basin. Their most important leaders were largely drawn from the middle class. One might perhaps argue that the Kadets, led by Miliukov, were so early discouraged that they may not be counted as a revolutionary party. But the Mensheviks and S-R (Socialist-Revolutionary) party, later scorned as “Compromisists” by triumphant Bolshevik historians, are most certainly revolutionary elements. The Mensheviks may have been mostly intellectuals, but the S-R were also recruited from the prosperous peasants, from the people who ran the co-operatives, from small shopkeepers and the like.