I. The Coup d’état

The struggle between the moderates and the extremists, which begins almost as soon as the dramatic overthrow of the old regime is effected, is marked by a series of exciting episodes: here street-fighting, there a forced seizure of property, almost everywhere heated debates, attempted repressions, a steady stream of violent propaganda. Tempers are strained to the breaking point over matters that in a stable society are capable of an almost automatic solution. There is an almost universal state of tension. The fever is working its way to a crisis. As with many fevers, its progress is in detail jerky, with now an apparent improvement and then a sudden jump ahead. But the cumulative effect is unmistakable. With the final overthrow of the moderates the revolution may be said to have entered its crisis stage.

Before we attempt to describe the behavior of men in societies in such a crisis, we shall have to go a bit further into the process by which the extremists acceded to power. In a sense, such an analysis will be but pointing out in reverse what we have already said of the moderates: the reasons why the extremists succeeded are but the other side of the reasons why the moderates failed. Where the moderates were weak, the extremists were strong. The actual steps by which the extremists rise to power are, however, too important to be left with this general statement. We must parallel our analysis of moderate weaknesses with an analysis of extremist strengths.

The extremists win out because they secure control of the illegal government and turn it in a decisive coup d’état against the legal government. The problem of the dual sovereignty is solved by the revolutionary acts in which the Independents, the Jacobins, and the Bolsheviks seized power. But the moderates had once shared with them the control of the organizations which they had turned against the government. The key to the success of the extremists lies in their monopoly of these organizations—New Model Army and Independent churches, Jacobin clubs, and soviets.

They obtain this monopoly by ousting, usually in a series of conflicts, any and all opponents from these organizations. The discipline, single-mindedness, and centralization of authority which mark the rule of the triumphant extremists are first developed and brought to perfection in the revolutionary groups. The characteristics which were formed in the growth of the illegal government remain those of the radicals after the illegal government becomes the legal. Indeed, many of these useful characteristics were first molded even further back in the days of the old regime, when the extremists were very small concentrated groups subject to the full “tyranny” of the government. The Independents gained discipline and devotion from a long series of persecutions which began under Elizabeth, whose famed love of tolerance was not extended to Catholics or Brownists. The French radicals were not as badly treated under the old regime as their descendants and historians like to think, but the censorship, the Bastille, and the lettres de cachet were real enough, even if they rarely fell to the lot of the rank and file of the enlightened. As for Russia, its extremists were molded in the most melodramatic traditions of oppression, were backed by almost a century of secret organization, plotting, oaths, and martyrdom.

What emerges from this longer past and from the recent conflict with the moderates is a fighting group with the newly acquired habit of winning. You cannot say exactly why a given football team succeeds in winning most of the time, let alone why an army or a revolutionary party wins. The variables are so many even in the simplest case that no sensible man would make predictions based wholly on the most apparent and perhaps most important variable of all—the quality of the human material. Gamblers know this, if historians and sociologists do not. That our revolutionists were successful and admirably organized groups we know, and we can make some attempt to point out in what ways they succeeded, what particular kinds of strength they exhibited. We cannot give any neat formula for success in building a revolutionary group, cannot measure exactly why these revolutionists succeeded and others failed.