IV. Character and Disposition

We now face a much more difficult task, one where our information is neither so objective nor so readily catalogued as our information about the social and economic status of revolutionists. This is the problem—psychological at bottom—of seeing how far these revolutionists belong to types which are normally viewed by John Jones as queer, eccentric, or downright mad. Now one might quite justifiably argue a priori that a wholly contented man could not possibly be a revolutionist. But the trouble is that there are so many ways of being discontented, as well as contented, on this earth. Indeed, the cruder Marxists, and the cruder classical economists, make an almost identical error: they both assume that economics deals exhaustively with whatever makes men happy or miserable. Men have many incentives to action which the economist, limited to the study of men’s rational actions, simply cannot include in his work. They observably do a great deal that simply makes no sense at all, if we assume them to be guided wholly by any conceivable rational economic motive: near-starving in the British Museum to write Das Kapital, for instance, or seizing deserts under the comforting illusion that trade follows the flag, or making the world quite safe for democracy. Yet clearly a man who takes part in a revolution before it is demonstrably successful—and after it is successful it may perhaps be said to have ceased to be a revolution anyway—is a discontented man, or at least a man shrewd enough to estimate that there are enough discontented men to be forged into a group that can make a revolution. We must make some effort to study the nature of such discontents as seen in individuals.

For here the method of statistical study of large groups of revolutionists, like the Jacobins, will not work. At most these rank and file are names, with profession and perhaps some other indication of social status. Modern interest in social history and the common man has indeed made available a certain number of old diaries and letters of common men, and the Russian revolution has done its best to keep alive the memory of worker this of the Putilov factory or sailor that of the Aurora. Trotsky himself is very eloquent about the role of these heroic workers, sailors, and peasants in his History of the Russian Revolution, yet he manages to spend as much of his time on the great names as if he were a mere bourgeois historian. We have, of course, the blanket denunciations—they are hardly descriptions—of one side by another. These are much too emotional as a rule to have any evidential value, except as to the intensity of emotions evoked during revolutions. Even in our own presumably mild revolution one notes a Tory who is reported to have said, “It would be a joy to ride through American blood to the hubs of my chariot wheels.” Of course these American Tories thought the revolutionists were wild radicals, scheming inferiors, jealous rabble. On the other hand, most of us who were brought up without benefit of the new history were taught in school to regard the Tories as just straight villains, traitors, morally reprehensible people without economic, social, or indeed any characteristics that separated them from such villains of fiction as Simon Legree. So in the French revolution, each side accused the other of all sorts of moral failings, but rarely got down to effective details of daily life.

If we cannot for these reasons do much with the political and social psychology of large groups of revolutionists, we can at least look over some of the leaders, hoping that the list we decide upon will not be too unrepresentative. Here at least we can count upon quite a bit of biographical information. Thanks to those admirable works, the Dictionary of National Biography and the Dictionary of American Biography, we can even sample some of the lesser leaders, the noncommissioned officers of revolutions. The French are now at work on their biographical dictionary, which promises to be even more scholarly than its Anglo-Saxon prototypes, but as it has only just conquered the letter “A” it is not of much use to us. Russia is very difficult indeed from this point of view; there are plenty of brilliant comments on Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, but they are also very contradictory. On the lesser figures there is not much trustworthy biographical writing available in the Western languages, nor for that matter in Russian. We may note here, however, that the extraordinary proliferation of assumed names in the Russian revolution probably does not stem with most of these pseudonymous heroes from any feelings of shame for a criminal or disgraceful past. Their crimes were no doubt many, but crimes only against Czarist oppression. Perhaps there was originally some mildly melodramatic notion that these aliases were useful against the Czarist police, but soon they became a mere fashion, a revolutionary fad.

At this point there is some danger of our falling into a dreary catalogue. At the risk of seeming to turn aside from strictly scientific systematizing, we shall have to group our facts as we go along under certain human types or characters. This is a process which has been done successfully by a great many shrewd observers of human behavior, from Theophrastus through Molière to Sainte-Beuve and Bagehot. It is perhaps in some respects a more useful way of classifying men than formal psychology or formal sociology has yet worked out. These are not, one hopes, imaginary characters. If they are one-tenth as real as Alceste or the Penurious Man they are more real than anyone the average sociologist ever dealt with.

We may begin with the gentleman-revolutionist, whom Mr. Lothrop Stoddard calls the “misguided superior,” the man born on top, but perversely unwilling to stay there. He is by no means a simple person, and indeed sometimes manages to combine an astonishing number of revolutionary traits. It must be admitted that with many of these misguided superiors in our four societies, dislike for the ways of their class is apparently partly motivated by their inability to succeed in certain activities honored in that class. You need not be a debunking historian to admit that Lafayette revolted against the Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette partly because he cut so awkward a figure there. Liberty, fortunately, did not need to be courted in a minuet. We must not seem to be cynical in these matters. Lafayette’s love of liberty was no doubt morally a far better thing than if he had loved place, pension, or mistress. But we must infer from his actions that he had very early realized that nothing short of a love of liberty would get him very far. And so today, when you find in one of our colleges a well-nurtured youth turned Communist, you can be almost certain that he is not captain of the football team nor secretary of Chi Phi Digamma. He may indeed be Phi Beta Kappa. This condition we need not here either applaud or condemn, but simply note.

It would, however, be cynical—and hence quite unscientific—to deny that many of these misguided superiors are also moved by what we shall have to call sincere idealism. Their own social group comes to seem to them dissolute, or dull, or cruel, or heartless. They see the possibilities of a better world. They are influenced by the writings of the intellectuals, who have begun their desertion of the established order. They come to struggle for God’s kingdom on this earth. They are usually, of course, uncomfortable on this earth, but for a whole lot of reasons, many of which cannot be simply dismissed as being in the province of the psychiatrist. Shelley, who never actually got a chance at revolution outside poetry, is a familiar example of this sensitive, and often neurotic, type. Dzerzhinsky, the Polish aristocrat who gave life to the terrible Cheka, was a delicate and sincere fanatic. The Marquis de St. Huruge, who figures disreputably in the disorders and street-fighting of the French revolution, was apparently pretty crazy, and not even a gentleman. Condorcet, also a marquis, was a gentleman and scholar, and if he had a good deal of the vanity that goes naturally enough with both, and very little of the sense that sometimes goes with either, was at heart a kind and sensitive man.

Others desert their class and join the revolution for the ignoble but sometimes socially very useful reason that they think the signs point to the victory of the revolution. Sometimes these men are like Mirabeau, rather shady characters who have for some time compromised themselves by irregular lives. Sometimes they are men like Talleyrand, careful, sensible men whose main desire is to keep in a position of honor and affluence, and who have no sense of loyalty to abstract notions of right and wrong. And, of course, in the early stages of our revolutions, even the Russian, plenty of rich and influential men of no extraordinary intelligence or stupidity joined the revolution because the revolution was fashionable, and an apparent success. Often these men, who had not been directly in political power, were flattered by the prospect of political power—men like the Duc d’Orléans or Bailly or Tereschenko or Konovalov. But they were essentially fairly ordinary human beings, no fitter subjects for hagiography—Christian, Freudian, or Marxist—than you or I.

If we leave the superiors, those who belong by birth or upbringing to the ruling classes, and who yet side with revolt, and turn to leaders who come from classes below the ruling one, we shall find the same very great variety of what we must tritely call human nature. We shall find fools, scoundrels, idealists, professional agitators, diplomatists, lunatics, cowards, and heroes.

Now it would be useless to deny that among those who come to the top in the troubled times of revolution are many who probably never would have been heard of in normal times. Some of these were certainly failures in the old society, men who were unable to attain the objects of their ambition. In spite of all that an able defender like Professor L. R. Gottschalk has written to prove Marat’s learning and respectability, it is still true that on the whole the Friend of the People was not a success before the revolution. Marat was a self-educated man of humble stock, with a habit of presenting himself with academic degrees and honorary distinctions his biographers—and even his contemporaries—were not always able to confirm. He tried very hard to storm the Parnassus of the philosophes, but was never admitted. Like most enlightened eighteenth-century men of letters, he dabbled in natural science, and emerged with a variant of the old phlogiston theory of combustion, the originality and truth of which were not properly appreciated by his jealous contemporaries. Lavoisier and the “new chemistry” were triumphing in the 1780’s, and Marat failed to recognize the meaning of the revolution in this science.

When the Estates-General met in 1789 he was a disappointed intellectual, a man who had failed of acceptance by that little band of writers and talkers who in late eighteenth-century France perhaps enjoyed more unalloyed admiration from the public than such folk have ever enjoyed. No Frenchman could at that epoch have coined a term like “brain-trust”; but if he had it would have carried no such ironic overtones of scorn as it does in twentieth-century America. Marat, rejected by these admired leaders of opinion, was in 1789 full to the brim with envy and hatred of everything established and esteemed in France. Soon revolutionary journalism was to give him an ample outlet. He became the watch-dog of the revolution—a mad watch-dog, always in his l’Ami du Peuple at work scenting plots against the people, always hating those in power, even when they were of his own party, always crying for blood and revenge. A most unpleasant fellow, no doubt. Whether he was a more unpleasant one than certain journalists of normal and unrevolutionary twentieth-century America, it is hard to say. Journalism was very new in France in 1790, and people expected a good deal. Marat at least had one excuse. He was suffering from an incurable skin disease which gave to his life an almost unbearable nervous tension.

Yet the failures are by no means all of the relatively simple type of Marat. Sam Adams was certainly a failure when judged by the standards of thrifty, sober New England. He had no money sense whatever, ran through a small inheritance, was constantly in debt; let his wife and children get along as they could while he organized his famous caucus and committees of correspondence. He is by no means a figure for the copy-books. Yet Adams could do certain things extremely well, and if these things were not in the 1770’s as financially rewarding as they are now, Adams at least reaped less tangible rewards in his own time—and he did become governor of Massachusetts. Adams’s gifts, of course, as they are deftly analyzed in Mr. J. C. Miller’s recent study, are those of the expert propagandist and organizer. It is hard to believe that today the advertising business would leave a man of his parts undiscovered and unrewarded.

Thomas Paine, who managed to involve himself in two revolutions, the American and the French, is still another revolutionist who amounted to very little before the revolution. When he sailed for America in 1774 he was thirty-eight, certainly no longer a young man. He came from East-Anglian Quaker artisan stock, and had picked up an eighteenth-century education, chiefly in the sciences and in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, while pursuing half a dozen different occupations from privateering to stay-making and shopkeeping. He had made an unsuccessful marriage, been in and out of the excise service twice, acquired a reputation as the town “atheist” of Lewes in Sussex, and had led an unsuccessful and somewhat premature attempt at lobbying in the interest of his fellow-excisemen. This attempt, which resulted in his second and final dismissal from the service, also brought him to the attention of Benjamin Franklin, who encouraged him to emigrate. But Paine arrived in Philadelphia like many another European, an unsuccessful man looking for a new start. The revolution gave it to him, and Common Sense made him a distinguished publicist. Paine was the professional radical, the crusading journalist, the religious rationalist, a man who in quiet times could hardly have been more than another Bradlaugh, another Ingersoll.

On the other hand, revolution not infrequently brings to the top men of very practical abilities, men of the kind that even cautious and hard-headed conservatives must recognize as worthy of respect. Such men may have lived in obscurity simply because they had not been disturbed; or they may have been the victims of some such stoppage in the circulation of the élite, the career open to talents, as we noted in a previous chapter. Cromwell is a classic example of a man who might have remained a simple country gentleman with an undistinguished career in the House of Commons had it not been for the Puritan revolution. Of Washington himself a similar generalization can be made. We shall come back again to this question of the soundness of revolutionary leadership.

So far we have said nothing of the men of blood, of Carrier and the noyades of Nantes, of Collot d’Herbois and the mitraillades of Lyons, of those to us nameless agents of the Cheka whose work made the French Reign of Terror seem mild in comparison, or of those English agents of the so-called Cromwellian settlement of Ireland who for long-time effectiveness perhaps hold the record among Terrorists. We shall later come to the problem of terroristic methods during the crisis period of our revolutions. Here we are simply interested in pointing out that among the personnel of the revolutionists are a number of men who have been singled out by posterity as examples of the kind of monster that comes to the surface in revolutions. No one can deny the fact of such emergence, nor the fact that such men can hardly be understood save with the help of criminology and abnormal psychology.

Carrier himself is a perfectly good example of these men. However much Republican apologists may try to soften down the melodramatic accounts his enemies have left of his activities at Nantes, the fact remains that he did so speed up the revolutionary courts that it became much easier to drown convicted persons in batches in the river Loire than to wait for the slow-moving guillotine. Carrier was a provincial lawyer who had got himself elected to the Convention by joining his local club and repeating the stock phrases of the Enlightenment. He was sent as a representative on mission to Nantes, and there power seems to have gone to his head. Moreover, Nantes was on the edge of the always dangerous Vendée, and Carrier may well have been driven to cleaning up his enemies in a group by fear of conspiracy against his own life. He certainly put up a bold front, swaggered about town, gave entertainments, talked big, and left behind him festering hatreds that brought his downfall and condemnation to death after the Terror was over.

Carrier reminds one of Mr. James T. Farrell’s gangsters. There is the bravado, the consciousness of life lived at the level of melodrama, the new, crude sense of power, the constant haunting fear of reprisals, the childish immediacy of purpose. What one does not find in Carrier is a specific pathological love of bloodshed, a diseased mind of the sort linked with the name of the Marquis de Sade. Indeed, this latter kind of insanity is more often found among the jailers, thugs, and hangers-on of revolution than among its leaders, even leaders at the level of Carrier. And of course to many people the most revolting acts in general are the acts of revolutionary mobs—the September massacres at Paris in 1792, for instance, which are very closely paralleled by the history of lynching in America. Here there crop up some of the most shocking instances of human cruelty; but they are by no means specifically to be associated with revolutions. Pogroms and lynchings are at least as bad. Revolutions and mobs are not interchangeable terms; you can and usually do have one without the other. The kind of cruelty more properly associated with revolutions is the cruelty—to some people more revolting than the cruelty of mobs—of judicial murders done in cold blood, and on principle.

There is another type commonly, but erroneously, held to come to the top in revolutions. This is the crack-brained schemer, the fantastic doctrinaire, the man who has a crazy gadget which will bring Utopia. Briefly, perhaps, in the honeymoon stage the lunatic fringe has its innings, and in the English revolution rather more than its innings, at least in print. But revolutions are a serious business, not to be distracted by eccentricities. Once the line of revolutionary orthodoxy is established—and though as we shall see it is a grim and rigid line, it is not a crazy and aberrant one—once this orthodoxy is established the lunatics, mild or serious, are pretty well kept down. There are Marxist revolutions, natural rights revolutions, but none for the Single Tax, Social Credit, Theosophy or Extra Sensory Perception. It is only your very stable societies, like Victorian England, that can afford to turn a Hyde Park over to the lunatic fringe. Even if you think Cromwell, Washington, Robespierre, Napoleon, Lenin, and Stalin all belong to this lunatic fringe, you will have to admit that in their day of power they clamped down pretty hard on other and discordant lunatics.

Nor is it possible to isolate a revolutionary type labeled “criminal,” “degenerate,” and neatly conforming to some anthropometric standards. Attempts to do this sort of thing have certainly been made. There are probably those who hold that revolutionists have a fixed cephalic index, or that they are predominantly dark-haired. Certainly there are many revolutionists who, like Carrier, behave as criminals behave in stable societies; but the proportion of such revolutionists does not seem extraordinarily high.

A more characteristic revolutionary type is the disputatious, contrary-minded person who loves to stand out from the crowd of conformists. Indeed, one of our revolutionary groups, the English Puritans, was filled with this especially rugged anarchism. Not only do individuals stand out in this respect; the group as a whole sets itself off deliberately from the great and the fashionable. As a social historian has written: “Whatever was in fashion is what the Puritan would not wear. When ruffs were in vogue, he wore a large falling band; when pickadillies [ruffs] were out of request [1638], and wide falling bands of delicate lawn edged with fine lace came in, he wore a very small band. Fashionable shoes were wide at the toe; his were sharp. Fashionable stockings were, as a rule, of any color except black; his were black. His garters were short, and, before all, his hair was short. Even at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, short hair was a mark of Puritanism.”

The type is seen most clearly, however, in certain individuals. John Lilburne, the English Leveller, is virtue incarnate and uncomfortable. He seems to have come of a family of rugged individuals, for his father, a gentleman of Durham, is said to have been the last Englishman to have recourse to the feudal right to ask for judgment through ordeal by combat in a civil suit. John was steadily addicted to contention, and attacked Presbyterians and Independents as bitterly as he had earlier attacked the Court. Indeed, as an historian has written, “Lilburne was tried in almost every court in the kingdom, under varying conditions, during a period of some twenty years, for libels on the Government of the day, King, Parliament, Commonwealth, and Protector. One of the first duties that devolved upon the judges of the Commonwealth was to deal with this gentleman.” Yet he seems to have preserved a good deal of social pride along with that intellectual and spiritual pride which is one of the marks of the English Puritan. On trial in 1653, he told his judge, a self-made man of artisan background who had risen with Cromwell, that “it was fitter for him [the judge] to sell thimbles and bodkins than to sit in judgment on a person so much his superior.” Henry Marten, the regicide, who ought to have been a good judge of such matters, said that if the world were emptied of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John and John would quarrel with Lilburne. Lilburne’s pamphlets are full of the self-righteousness of those who fight always for the right, and who seem to take delight in the uncomfortable position to which the poet later assigned the right—

“Right forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.”

We are close to the martyrs.

Lilburne’s motives were no doubt of the highest. He believed in absolute democracy, and his platform of manhood suffrage, biennial parliaments, religious toleration, equality before the law, was one day to secure pretty complete acceptance in England. But in 1645 only a very doctrinaire person, only a fanatic, could have held this platform possible of immediate realization. Lilburne was not only a disputatious man, a courter of martyrdom; he was what the world commonly calls an idealist, and suggests a consideration of a type which occurs very frequently in these revolutions. It does not seem altogether wise to single out any one type as the perfect revolutionist, but if you must have such a type, then you will do well to consider, not the embittered failure, not the envious upstart, not the bloodthirsty lunatic, but the idealist. Idealists, of course, are in our own times the cement of a stable, normal society. It is good for us all that there should be men of noble aspirations, men who have put behind them the dross of this world for the pure word, for the idea and the ideal as the noblest philosophers have known them. But in normal times such idealists do not seem, at least in Western society, to occupy positions of power and responsibility. In normal times today we look up to our idealists, and occasionally give them prizes and honorary degrees, but we do not choose them to rule over us. We notably refuse to let them make our foreign policies.

Indeed, one of the distinguishing marks of a revolution is this: that in revolutionary times the idealist at last gets a chance to try and realize his ideals. Revolutions are full of men who hold very high standards of human conduct, the kind of standards which have for several thousand years been described by some word or phrase which has the overtones that “idealistic” has for us today. There is no need for us to worry over the metaphysical, nor even the semantic, implications of the term. We all know an idealist when we see one, and certainly when we hear one.

Robespierre would have been an idealist in any society. There is a familiar story of how the young Robespierre resigned a judgeship rather than inflict the death penalty, which ran counter to his humanitarian eighteenth-century upbringing. Historians have pretty well destroyed that story, as they have so many others from the cherry tree to Alfred and the cakes. But, except in the very narrowest and least useful senses of the word, such stories are in many important ways usually “true.” This story about Robespierre suggests that he was a good child of the Enlightenment. One need only read some of his speeches, full of the simplicities, the moral aphorisms, the aspirations of that innocent age, to realize that he was quite capable of resigning, or buying, a judgeship rather than abandon his ideals. He would, indeed, kill for his ideals.

Those ideals, as they got formed by 1793, may seem to us somewhat less than heroic, and they were certainly bolstered by a good deal of personal ambition and sheer vanity in Robespierre. But there they were: Robespierre wanted a France where there should be neither rich nor poor, where men should not gamble, nor get drunk, nor commit adultery, nor cheat, nor rob, nor kill—where, in short, there would be neither petty nor grand vices—a France ruled by upright and intelligent men elected by the universal suffrage of the people, men wholly without greed or love of office, and delightedly stepping down at yearly intervals to give place to their successors, a France at peace with herself and the world—but surely this is enough? Robespierre’s personal rectitude is now hardly questioned even by historians hostile to what he stood for; in his own day, and especially immediately after his fall, he was accused of almost every possible crime and moral delinquency. He seems actually not even to have had any of the fashionable vices—no drink, no gaming, no women. Modern historians claim to have evidence that for a brief time in Paris he kept a mistress. If he did, one supposes it must have been out of motives of fancied hygiene; or possibly for a few weeks the country lawyer had ideas of living as did the fashionable Parisians. The Robespierre of the Terror, however, had certainly put such ideas behind him, and was, as the Incorruptible, a living symbol of the Republic of Virtue in his public and private life.

Now this idealist type is by no means simple. Cromwell should clearly not be listed primarily under this category, and yet there is something of the puritanical “seeker” in Cromwell, something that makes his tortuous policy—indeed his double-dealing—very hard to understand if you insist on seeing human beings as logically consistent wholes. Both Lenin and Trotsky are strange compounds of idealism and realism. This coupling of idealism and realism does not mean simply that they both on occasion could use realistic methods to attain ends dictated by their ideals. Robespierre, Cromwell, Gladstone, or Woodrow Wilson could do that. It means that they were also capable of pursuing realistic immediate ends. Lenin, of course, was a very skillful propagandist and organizer, with a great deal of what we shall have to call executive ability. But, at least in 1917, he seems to have thought that world-wide revolution was just around the corner, and that absolute economic equality could be introduced immediately in Russia. The New Economic Policy of 1921 is a clear indication that Lenin would not pursue his ideals to the bitter end of defeat and martyrdom.

Trotsky has one of the best critical minds of any Marxist, is even capable, at moments, of a kind of skepticism about his own aims. The Civil War of 1917-21 in Russia gave convincing proof of his abilities both as an orator and as an executive under pressure. Yet the Trotsky of the exile years seems to be howling for the moon, which is one definition, perhaps too unkind, of idealism. Had Trotsky remained in power he might indeed have made his peace with bureaucracy, inequality, socialism-in-one-country, Thermidorean decadence and all the other evils he now associates with the name of Stalin. And yet it seems not unlikely that this intransigeance of Trotsky’s, this insistence on bringing heaven immediately to earth, this unwillingness to accommodate his aims to human weakness, or if you like, to human nature, help to explain why he did not last in post-revolutionary Russia.

Sentimental idealism was of course distinctly out of fashion in the Russia of 1917. The harsh realities, or at any rate the harsh formulas, of Marxist Socialism had replaced the naïve hopes with which the French revolution had set out to make this a better world. In both Lenin and Trotsky you can trace this desire to seem to be hard-boiled, and it will not do to imply that they did not in some ways succeed. There is one pure idealist among the Russian leaders, however, one who presents us with still another variant of the type. That is Lunacharsky, long Commissar for Education, the artist and man of culture of the movement. Lunacharsky, in spite of his past as a revolutionary agitator, was unquestionably a softie. He possessed the ability to talk movingly about life and education and art, and carried over into a century where it seemed a little strange something of Rousseau or of Paul and Virginia. The world should be grateful to him, however, for he helped greatly to prevent the wholesale destruction of works of art identified offhand with a dissolute capitalistic past.

There is, finally, the man almost wholly of words, the man who can hold crowds spellbound, the revolutionary orator. He may be listed as an idealist, because although part of his role is to egg the crowd on to acts of violence, he is even more typically the soother, the preacher, the ritual-maker, the man who holds the crowd together. In this role his words need hardly have any meaning at all, but commonly they can be analyzed out into pleasant aspirations and utterances. Much of Robespierre comes under this head, as do Patrick Henry, Vergniaud, Tseretelli. The type, of course, exists in all normal societies, and is usually esteemed. Zinoviev seems in the Russian revolution to have borne some such role. Lenin realized how useful Zinoviev was as an orator and even as a kind of Petrograd boss, but he seems to have had a pretty complete contempt for his sense and intelligence.